#329

Jan 19, 2025

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

Last week I said I would give the players some consequences for spending weeks hauling statues out of the dungeon and neglecting their other projects, but I decided not to do that. The only consequence now is that the Set Cult, which the party are enemies with, has hired assassins to hunt them down; all the factions they’re friendly with are just as friendly as they were before the party ditched them for the best part of a month.

I have a bit of difficulty balancing faction stuff with dungeoneering stuff, but try to skew towards whatever the players are more interested in at the time—since that’s why we’re playing—so while the players are off dungeoneering, factions can just fade into the background. I don’t want them to feel like going to the effort to befriend a faction then forces them to spend time appeasing the faction to keep their good will.

So, this week, the players did some exploring, found some loot, and were 1HP off losing the party’s strongest fighter with no way to recover the body. But they managed to flee. I’ll get them next time!

We did some downtime over Discord before the session, this is the second time we’ve done it now and I like it. It lets us get a lot of procedural stuff (talking to NPCs, shopping, using divination spells to gather information, etc) out of the way beforehand, so we can get straight to the action when the game starts. I’m going to suggest we keep doing it.

Akkadian

This week I’ve been learning about business contracts (despite deciding last week to stop doing the exercises, I did some this week as they were from actual texts). I’ve dialled my dedicated study time down to just Monday evenings, since I can always do more if I feel like it: today I did some on Tuesday as well.

Miscellaneous

I’ve decided to upgrade azathoth. I built it in 2020 using hardware that would have been cutting edge a few years previously—the graphics card, specifically, is of the 2016 generation—and I’ve recently hit a couple of issues due to its age. The motherboard is from just before TPMs became commonplace, and so I can’t upgrade to the latest version of Windows 11, and the graphics card couldn’t handle a blog post I tried to read about WebGL shaders. I could upgrade the motherboard (or get a separate TPM) and graphics card, but if I’m doing that why not do the whole thing?

I’m going to order the new GeForce GTX 5090 when that releases at the end of the month, but the rest of the hardware is all on the way. I’ll take a few days off in February when everything’s here to set it up and play around with having a brand new cutting-edge machine for the first time ever.