#331
Feb 2, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Kane of Old Mars by Michael Moorcock
Which contains the stories Warriors of Mars, Blades of Mars, and Barbarians of Mars. I was due to read this earlier, but decided to put it off for a bit after reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom stories rather than read two Martian trilogies back-to-back. Well, these stories could almost be stories of Barsoom, if you just changed some names and details around: they’re very much in the same sword-and-planet pulp style. Even the framing device is the same: a man ends up on Mars through strange circumstances, has wild adventures, and comes back to tell his tale to a surprisingly credulous confidant. The first story even significantly involves overcoming unfamiliar customs to win the heart of a princess.
Michael Moorcock is very clear that these stories are a homage to Barsoom—his take on the same premise—and they’re very fun.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
A very exposition-heavy session this week, with the players learning the dark secret of the varumani, opening the Obsidian Gates, and setting foot onto the Midnight Road: where they found the corpses of their companions from half a campaign ago!
We ended with them hiding out in the Troll Pits from the kaliyani, who have extended their control over a few more rooms since last we saw them. They want to escape to tell Triv-Lok and the thegn that the Troll Pits are intact, but first they’ve promised to Ashoka, the court sorcerer, that they would seek out and remove evidence of Rudiga’s betrayal, to avoid collapsing the balance between the four clans… Will they succeed before they’re forced to retreat? Find out next time, in the Halls of Arden Vul!
Miscellaneous
Well, I failed to get an nvidia 5090 on release day for new-azathoth. I was ready at 2pm, but all the retailers I was checking immediately went down under the load, and when things came back up several minutes later, everything was sold out.
I really dislike this artificial limiting of stock to drive hype. There’s nothing stopping them from just making more cards, but that doesn’t instil the same urgency to purchase in consumers, or lead to the same “sold out in 5 minutes!” news stories.
So now I’m on waitlists with a few stores. I don’t imagine I’ll be able to get the Founders Edition card, which is the one I really wanted as it’s only a 2-slot design whereas all the third-party ones are 4-slot designs and (for some reason) cost hundreds of pounds more, so I’m currently hoping to get the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim 32GB.
In other news, I spent almost all of my free time this week playing Caves of Qud. I think I’m getting the hang of it! But it may be becoming something of an obsession…