#312
Sep 22, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Hounancier and Ibenus by Seth Skorkowsky, in his Valducan series
The Valducan series is about modern-day demon hunters armed with holy weapons: these are the second and third books. Each book focusses on a different holy weapon and its wielder. They’re pretty quick reads, about 300 pages and pretty fast-paced. I find them hard to put down once the action starts, and read both of these in a single sitting.
It’s also a cool setting, “secret society of modern-day demon hunters armed with artefacts” is definitely now on the future campaign wishlist.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week I thought we might have a TPK. The party stumbled into the lair of a demon and his cult of debased monks. But, thanks to a good plan which gave them a one-round advantage vs the demon and a two-round advantage vs the cult, and some poor initiative rolls on my part, the party crushed the demon before it could down any of them!
The time advantage was the real killer I think:
- In the first round, the party’s heavy hitter crept up to the demon (invisible, in a sphere of silence, and flying: it had no way of telling anything was coming) and got in a strong hit.
- In the second, the heavy-hitter got another blow in, the demon dealt a non-lethal amount of damage in return while calling its cult to action, and the rest of the party ran up into missile & spell range.
- In the third, the party decided to focus fire on the demon, and then won initiative, so they managed to pummel the demon into oblivion before it or the cult got to act.
Side-based initiative is great, but does lead to very swingy outcomes.
If the enemies had won the initiative in the third round, the demon was going to teleport to the other end of the hall, ~100ft away, and spend the next couple of turns while the party ran over to it pelting them with spells and summoning in other demons, with the comparatively weak cultists harrassing them from behind. That would have gone really badly for the players.
The One Ring
This week we had a short session, after doing session 0 for the Troika campaign that will be starting next month.
I had plans to come up with some cohesive third arc for the campaign, but it was a busy week so I ended up not really having time to prepare anything. So instead I managed to spin out the Summer Smoke Ring Festival to about an hour of play, with the party split between trying to catch some young troublemakers (who were getting up to hijinks such as stopping up the pipes with gum, or dumping water into the pipeweed so it won’t burn properly) and actually competing. One PC won! The other PCs managed to stop the troublemakers!
But I needed to start some sort of adventure, so there’s something to do next week, and I began the Kings of Little Kingdoms scenario from the Tales from the Lone Lands supplement: also at the festival was a hobbit woman looking for Gandalf, or anyone who knows Gandalf, as he has taken her son away on an adventure. In actuality, it’s a crook masquerading as Gandalf by wearing a fake beard and taking care to avoid Gandalf’s usual haunts; so it works well with a party who have Gandalf as their patron, as they immediately pick up on how uncharacteristic this woman’s description of his behaviour is.
Next week we’ll continue that adventure, which then has hooks to things happening elsewhere in Eriador, and after they’re done with all that, the players have a couple of reasons to go visit Fornost, where I plan to drop another few adventures. So instead of a unified third arc, it looks like we’ll actually just have a series of disconnected adventures; but that’s fine too.
Akkadian
I’ve decided to add a recurring section to the weeknote template for my progress in learning Akkadian, the main language of Mesopotamia from around 2500BC to 500BC (though it continued to be used as a scholarly language until around 100 AD).
This week the books I ordered started to come in, Worthington’s Complete Babylonian among them, which I’ve started working through; though it’s been a busy week so I’ve not had much chance so far. Initial impression of the book is that it presents the material in a sensible way and explains it well, with lots of short, focussed, chapters and sections, with plenty of translation exercises. It primarily teaches translating from transliterated text, but also has material on transliterating cuneiform which I’ll dive into later.
I’ll give more of an opinion on the Complete Babylonian next week, once I’m further into it. I have other textbooks on the way too, so if I get stuck in one book I should hopefully be able to use the different presentation in another to unblock myself.
I want to actually make a good attempt at this—reading attentively, working through the exercises—so I’ve blocked out some study time in my calendar: a little in Monday and Wednesday evenings, and a slightly longer period in Saturday afternoons.
Miscellaneous
I made a small change to bookdb, now that I’m buying more reference books (like RPG rulebooks, or Akkadian dictionaries) that you don’t really read cover-to-cover. In addition to “read” and “unread” books I’ve added a “not applicable” / “reference book” category, and taken away the percentage of how many books have been read.
It’s a little change, but having an ever-growing collection of “unread” books made me feel bad.