#313
Sep 29, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Redemptor by Seth Skorkowsky, in his Valducan series
What is hidden-magic-world fiction without a secret force of holy warriors based in the Vatican? No hidden-magic-world fiction I want to be a part of, that’s for sure!
Roleplaying Games
The Wind Wraith kickstarter arrived this week, bringing its bounty of zines:
I have a grand vision of one day combining all these OSR materials I’ve got into a huge mega-setting, where the tone gradually shifts as you move across the world: a kind of generic-European-fantasy western continent, with pockets of fairytale whimsy; fantasy China across a great ocean to the east; a wintery fantasy-Scandinavia in the far north…
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week a new player joined the group. They listened in last time to get a feel for it, and decided to stick around. They’re mute, which will take a bit of getting used to; I’ll need to make sure I’m giving enough time for them to contribute in fast-paced situations.
Other than that, the session was… a little dull. The players decided to track down a hidden tomb they knew the rough location of, and then spent a significant amount of time looking everywhere but where the secret door actually was. They even had a Wand of Secret Door Detection, and used it in the room that held the door! But the player said “well, it’s probably not going to be on that wall, so let’s use it over here so we get a bit of this corridor in as well”.
It was indeed on that wall.
Ah well, next time we’ll be able to get right to the action, as the session ended with them finding the door.
The One Ring
This week the players succeeded in tracking down and capturing this crook masquerading as Gandalf, smearing his… well, not so good name, actually. The reason this guy was able to take some people in is partly because the good folk of Bree don’t think too highly of Gandalf. He’s basically a tramp who wanders in with wild stories from far off lands, and is known to associate with shady folk like those Rangers.
But all’s well that ends well.
Along the way the players defeated a newly-awakened wight that was digging its way out of the grave, and took a very fancy elven bow from its tomb: made in the First Age, dont you know, enchanted to be especially efficacious against all of the creations of Morgoth.
Next week: Fornost.
We have three sessions left before the campaign ends, and while adventure-of-the-week is fun, I’d like to come up with some short multi-session arc to round out the campaign. Something that lets the players solve a sizeable problem, but which leaves hints that there are greater evils still to overcome. I need to rethink what I originally had in mind for Fornost, to make it the start of another journey.
Akkadian
This week I worked through the first few chapters of Worthington’s Complete Babylonian, covering nouns and adjectives in the singular and plural, masculine and feminine, and the case system. The book is quite well put together: each chapter is very short, explains a single topic and explains it well, and ends with a bunch of exercises taken from original Old, Middle, and Standard Babylonian texts.
It’s quite cool to realise part-way through an exercise that it’s actually a line from Gilgamesh or the Flood!
I scheduled 1.5 hours on Monday and Wednesday, and 2 hours on Saturday, but I need to adjust that as it’s currently taking me 2 or more hours to work through a chapter and its exercises. I should get faster as I internalise more of the grammar and vocabulary (which is already starting to happen), but in these first few weeks particularly it’s clear that I’ll be spending a lot of time flipping around the dictionary.
My goal for next week is to complete chapters 10 (the construct state) and 11 (possessive suffixes), and make a start on the first big reading: the epithets of Assurnaṣirpal II.