#309
Sep 1, 2024
Books
This week I read:
The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
An amateur astronomer spots a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth, sending the solar system into panic. An aging ship is sent out to divert the asteroid, but all is nearly lost due to religious nutjobs waiting for the apocalypse…
It’s not just a good story, it’s a cautionary tale: the first part of the book also talks about two previous asteroid impacts (the extinction of the dinosaurs (very new science at the time it was written) and the Tunguska event) and one near-impact (the 1972 Great Daylight Fireball).
Humanity has been lucky so far, but that luck will run out eventually.
Roleplaying Games
Around a year ago I shared one of my pre-rolled random encounters for Dolmenwood on the OSE Discord server, and last week someone reached out to ask if I could share more. So I wrote a post for the blog: Dolmenwood Random Encounters.
The Halls of Arden Vul
I realised this week that we’ve been playing for over a week straight: 58 sessions of 3 hours each is 7 days and 6 hours.
The players communed with some gods for the first time: the cleric PC tried out the Commune spell, which is powerful but only gets you three yes / no questions a week; another sat in Thoth’s magic oracle chair, which lets you ask anything once per month, but they asked a vague question and so got a vague answer.
They slew an intelligent ghoul, finally avenging some fallen comrades, and looted his treasure. They got some rumours. They nearly gave the goblin king a heart attack by talking about attacking the Cult of Set. And, finally, they climbed up a staircase into a new sublevel.
It feels like we only actually do exploration every other session or so now, with the rest of the time being taken up interacting with factions or following up on unfinished business in already-explored territory. But it’s fine. One thing I do need to curb though is the players going to NPCs every time they have lore questions: some things just aren’t known any more, and they’ll have to go exploring to find out!
The One Ring
I was really pleased with this week’s session.
The players had heard that Weathertop was haunted: according to the book that’s a rumour the Rangers give out to discourage people from using their watch-tower, but I felt that since they were determined to check it out it would be more fun if it had a grain of truth to it. So I decided that Weathertop gives people disturbing dreams of the past, but is otherwise harmless (and the Rangers play up the danger to keep people away, as written).
I prepared a different dream for each PC:
The dwarf dreamed of being in a small party of dwarves rushing through Moria to warn Queen Nyi of West Moria about the balrog. So they saw parts of Moria in its glory days, and also witnessed the blackest betrayal in the history of Durin’s folk: when Queen Nyi shut the gate to keep out the balrog, dooming hundreds of fleeing dwarves to their deaths. I also used this to seed some hints about Moria’s ring-smiths.
The elf dreamed of the Battle of Fornost, taking part in the cavalry unit that chased down the Witch-king of Angmar and witnessed his battle with Glorfindel. Since elves are special, and elves who have seen Valinor especially so, at the end of the dream I had Glorfindel notice the PC and say “you shouldn’t be here”, and then they woke up. Having direct knowledge of the Battle of Fornost could be useful if the players go to Fornost, as there’s a published adventure I’m going to drop in.
The human, who took Damrod’s dagger from Fort Arlas, had a different dream. The spirit of Gnarsh, the great-orc slain by the dagger, came to attack them: inflicting shadow damage rather than endurance damage (as this is a dream). When the other PCs woke her up, Gnarsh appeared and fought them all; they managed to drive him off, but not to defeat him. He’ll be back.
After the dreams, the company moved on to Bree to rest and recover, and to then try to enact their plan to have the road patrolled for the safety of all.
We had a fun interaction here where the elf noticed Barnabus Butturbur, proprietor of the Prancing Pony, staring at them. It turned out to be because Barnabas’s grandfather had once hosted an elf travelling to the west, and he asked our elf PC what was out there, across the sea.
Finally, the company went to see the Reeve of Bree to talk about getting the Bree Wardens patrolling the road, at least as far as Weathertop. I had decided this was doomed to fail, and had set up a Theoden / Wormtongue type situation between the Reeve and his southerner secretary. Now the players have to get involved with local politics, to convince the town council to oust the Reeve so someone uncorrupted can step in. I’ve come up with a list of councillors and have a task in mind for each which would win them over, something they need doing which would endear them enough to the PCs to listen to what they have to say.
Though of course the players could come up with something different.
Miscellaneous
Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of the deadlocked state and try again.
This weekend I resurrected King James Programming, a website that posts the output of a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
It’s had, by far, the most impact of any project I’ve ever done:
- The original source code has 455 stars and 70 forks on github.
- It’s quoted extensively in Unsong, a long piece of online fiction (that I’ll read one day…)
- Most recently, 8 years after I stopped posting, I saw it inspired an article on whether Markov chains are funner than LLMs
That’s only a few, but there have been so many little references to it over the years. I wish I’d kept track of them.
Anyway, at the time I shut it down because I was burned out. I was trying to post twice a day, and there’s only so much random gibberish you can sift through before you start to go mad. But now it’s back, with a major improvement to the generator—the output is coloured by which corpus it comes from:
This single change makes it so much easier to identify cross-over points, which is what I want. Sifting through the output is no longer a sanity-bending task, and with a few hours of work I got enough funny quotes to queue up posts until mid-December!
I’ve also made some algorithmic improvements: introducing a “thesaurus”, to make certain tokens “the same” when it comes to training (but different when generating output), such “thine” and “your”, to increase crossovers; and also adding an increasing chance of switching corpus if it picks too many tokens from the same one in a row.
This time I’m hoping to avoid burnout by keeping a large buffer of posts topped up.