#330
Jan 26, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Ur of the Chaldees by Sir Leonard Woolley
An account of the excavations at Ur in the ’20s; Ur being the city that Abraham—yes, that Abraham—supposedly came from. It’s pretty dry reading if you’re not into Mesopotamian history, but if you are this book is gold. I knew how archaeology worked in the abstract, but reading about all the little details really made me appreciate how difficult it is. Things like pouring molten wax over artefacts they’ve uncovered, so they can lift the whole thing out of the ground and then clean away the dirt (and wax) without disturbing the relative arrangement of all the components: much harder work (the author says) than just documenting what you see, taking all the pieces out, and putting them back together; but it gets you the exact thing and not merely a reconstruction.
I also found it interesting how people back then just built on top of old buildings: filling the ground level up with dirt and using the old walls as new foundations. It sounds like harder work to me than just flattening the building you want to replace, but maybe I’m just biassed by modern construction tools and techniques.
They found evidence of the Flood, too. Excellent.
Beyond the Pale by Yochai Gal
A Jewish folklore-inspired old-school D&D adventure (written for Cairn but these things are all pretty inter-convertable) in which a malevolent spirit gets summoned and weird stuff starts happening. I’m not familiar at all with Jewish folklore so I really enjoyed this, but I think it’d be a pretty hard adventure to just drop into an existing campaign; unless you’re playing with a bunch of Jews.
There are a bunch of unfamiliar mythological creatures (including three totally different sorts of disembodied spirit), and the adventure is on a tight timeline: catastrophe looms in a few days, so if the players come into this not even knowing what a dybbuk is or what its tell-tale signs are, they’d probably spend so much time trying to figure out what’s going on that they wouldn’t be able to solve anything.
I don’t think this this adventure would work in your typical pseudo-Western-Europe-with-Christian-elements D&D campaign setting. It would be jarring. I really do think you’d need to run a much more Jewish campaign setting.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
An incredibly impactful session this week, which is going to change the whole campaign going forward. This is truly one of the great turning points, like allying with the goblins and handing them control over the main entrances into Arden Vul was.
The players got over their teleporter-phobia and found the Cloister. In the Cloister they found the body of Captain Leil-Jor, and on her corpse a yellow keycard. The yellow keycard opens everything. They then travelled down the Transit Shaft to the officer’s quarters, and looted the place: finding the Keys to the Obsidian Gates in the process.
At a stroke, they’ve become the most valuable individuals in the dungeon. Everyone wants what they have, and will kill for it if they find out.
Next week is going to be crazy.
Akkadian
I’ve decided to drop the regular study time for now—I’m not really feeling it—and just go back to having a casual interest in Mesopotamian history. I’ll be back some time, I still want to translate a cuneiform text, after all.
Miscellaneous
New-azathoth is nearly done, I just need to buy the new graphics card when it’s released next week (or so I hope, it occurred to me the other day that if the AI scalpers are still going after graphics cards that might be tricky). Using the onboard graphics I was able to install Windows and configure everything, but I’m too used to multiple monitors to start using it before I have a proper GPU.