#325
Dec 22, 2024
Books
This week I read:
John Carter of Mars: Adventures on the Dying World of Barsoom from Modiphius Publishing
I picked this up after tearing through the first three Barsoom novels last week and it sounds like a lot of fun! I’ve heard of Modiphius’s 2d20 system before, and I’ve also heard that while it’s very good at pulp it’s kind of clunky, so I was glad to see that this game is using a simplified version of the system. It does seem like it’s got the right amount of mechanical crunch to it: enough to sink your teeth into, but not so much it gets in the way of fast-paced hijinks. I’m going to run the included adventure as a one-shot for my Sunday group some time.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
The players wanted to check out the Transit Shaft this week, so in my session prep I put together a Tube-style map of the rudishva domain: teleporters, the Transit Shaft, the Great Pillar, and direct foot routes between those stops. Here’s the draw.io source.1
Between sessions we ran some downtime over Discord, which we’ve not done before but which worked out great as the party had several zero-risk admin things they wanted to get done that could have easily eaten up half a session. So when game time arrived we were ready to get straight to adventuring.
This week the players focussed on the rudishva areas. Last time they found a Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, a very potent magic item, and they decided to go check out the Residential Pod of the Beacon, using a summoned water elemental to clear out the malignant slimes. So they were able to get through that easily enough and find some good loot (including a few—almost totally depleted—laser weapons!), then they went off to the Transit Shaft to try to find a way beyond the Obsidian Gates.
We ended the session with them stumbling upon an intense three-way magical battle in the Engine Pod of the Beacon. I’ve run the battle now and know who wins, but is it the faction the players wanted to win? I guess we’ll see…
Akkadian
I wrote a blog post about Advent of Ištar, and after the Christmas break I’ll put together a line-by-line annotated translation, similar to what I did for the Ea-Nāṣir translation.
Miscellaneous
Finger
It’s nearly recovered now. The scab is all gone, the cut is fully closed. There is a bit of a scar at the moment but I’m not sure how visible it will be, as the skin is still healing. I was having some issues with not being able to curl it as tightly as the rest of my fingers, but as the skin has healed more flexibility has come back, and it’s got almost full movement back now so I expect that to totally recover.
There’s been no change to the loss of sensitivity this week, so that doesn’t seem likely to heal any time soon. I might have permanently numbed it, though that’s much less severe than the other potential complications.
Caves of Qud
I picked up Caves of Qud and it’s a lot of fun, go check it out! I am very bad at it.
I was a bit surprised I couldn’t find some sort of transit-map-as-code tool that didn’t need me to specify the exact positions of everything. I expected there to be something that let me specify the graph of points and routes, along with some basic grouping logic, and it would figure out a good map for me. Maybe a future project…↩︎