#314
Oct 6, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Volume 10 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
This continues the story of the previous volume, where a demon turned a city and all of its inhabitants into solid gold, as the culmination of a years-long endeavour to understand human emotions. I feel that the sense of elapsed time has faded away a bit in this arc, perhaps because it’s about things within the span of human memory. That said, it’s still a good story; I just preferred earlier arcs.
All of Girls’ Last Tour by Tsukumizu
There’s not much to say about this, there isn’t really a story. It’s just about the long journey of two girls through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, always striving to reach the top of the tiered mega-city / arcology that is their world. Other than two people they briefly spend time with, they’re the only living humans we see. In their memories, we see them fleeing an attack on their town, but never learn if anyone else survived. Eventually, they do reach the top, but it costs them their vehicle, their fuel, and their food.
I guess they die shortly afterwards. There are no happy endings after a global war that poisons the seas and destroys the foundations of industrialised civilisation.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
Big happenings this week, the players:
Looted the tomb of Thoth’s great prophet, Ptoh-Ristus, and the party’s poor porter (who was carrying the loot) received a divine visitation that night as he slept. Thoth cursed him with blindness, unless someone take up the mantle of Thoth’s new prophet and work devoutly to glorify his name.
The party cleric cured the blindness the following morning and they decided to return the stolen grave goods pronto (if they hadn’t, the blindness would have returned the next day). But one player has said their next character just might be a Paladin of Thoth…
Found an incredibly useful magic item: a pair of linked rugs, which allow instantaneous teleportation from one to the other. They left one in their house in Gosterwick, and one in their room in the Goblin Halls. So now if they want to conduct some business in town (like getting some magical loot identified at the Arcane Practitioner’s Club), it’s no longer a 2-day thing.
Agreed to take Triv-Lok, the ancient Rudishva who the party freed from cryogenic containment some weeks ago, and who has now recovered from her amnesia, to the Varumani. Unbeknownst to the party, Triv-Lok intends to seize control of the Varumani (who are genetically susceptible to Rudishva authority) and use them to escape from this planet.
There could be Varumani roaming the Halls actively hunting for the keys to the Obsidian Gates in a matter of weeks!
Any one of those could kick off a major shift in the campaign, so to have all three come up at once… things are going to change a lot, and they’re going to change quickly.
The One Ring
In retrospect, it was a very funny session this week.
I knew we had three sessions left (including this week’s) and yet I had a few disjoint story threads. I decided a cool way to end the campaign would be to have a three-session arc which brings together those disparate threads, and reaches a climax which provides some resolution but clearly points to a larger, unresolved, issue in the background. I also wanted this arc to be very dwarf-focussed as we’ve had Bree adventures and elf adventures but no dwarf adventures.
I came up with this grand plan, a combination of pre-written adventure sites and a fair bit of homebrew to weave it all into a seamless whole.
Then due to a botched combat encounter with some wraiths the whole party was killed an hour into the session.
Ah well.
We took a short break, and then reconvened to make an all-dwarf party for the final two-and-a-half sessions. I gave them a bunch of bonus skill points and was very transparent about what sort of skills and callings (backgrounds) would be most relevant. We’re going to wrap up the campaign having a fun time crushing orc skulls beneath our axes… but what the players don’t know is that I’m still going to tie the ending into what came before. It’s not quite what I planned, but the campaign-spanning story arc is still there!
Akkadian
Great progress this week, I finished part 2 of Worthington’s Complete Babylonian, which is more than I had hoped to get done.
Next week I’m going to switch to another highly recommended textbook I picked up, Huehnergard’s A Grammar of Akkadian. I’ve heard that the two books are complementary, they each have a different focus and style. In particular, the exercises in Complete Babylonian get you translating actual historical sentences from the very beginning, with the author providing translations of grammatical constructs the book hasn’t covered yet; whereas A Grammar of Akkadian uses synthetic exercises in the early chapters, which only need what you’ve learned so far. This then affects the order the books cover the material, with A Grammar of Akkadian introducing the more common verb forms very near the beginning.
I’ve also started on my own translations of Nanni’s complaint letter to Ea-Nasir, and the poem The Descent of Ishtar into the Netherworld. It’s slow going, but very satisfying to see familiar lines (like Nanni’s exasperated “what / who do you take me for?”) emerge from the gibberish.
I’ll publish them on my website when they’re done.
Miscellaneous
Speaking of my website, I’ve changed a lot of things around this week.
I had a kind of mental block in place where I felt that only good, finished, professional stuff should go on there. It’s been a place to download my CV from, and little else, for so long that I’d forgotten the true meaning of a “personal website”. A website can be “personal” in that it’s about the owner, but it can also be “personal” in that it doesn’t need to be “professional”.
It still has my CV, now tucked away on a page entitled “The Boring Stuff”, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually been contacted via my website for a job. I added a blogroll. I expanded the section of things I do for fun. And in a few weeks—I hope—it’ll also have some crappy inaccurate Akkadian translations too!
I’m considering going really old school with it and having different styling on different pages. I’m not a frontend developer, why should I pretend to be one with this clean, uniform, website? Maybe I’ll have a big tiling cuneiform background image on the Akkadian pages.