#333
Feb 16, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Volume 2 and 3 of the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou Deluxe Edition by Hitoshi Ashinano (chapters 25–82)
I thought I’d read YKK before, but now I’m sure I haven’t. Or at least, not all of it, as there’s so much that’s new to me in these books. Since it’s never before had an official English translation, the fan translation I read must have just been very incomplete.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
An action-packed session this week, as the players joined the varumani in their crusade to reclaim the ancestral halls!
Since last time I’d decided the conquest would go like this:
- Confraternity of Hunters clears out the secret route (there’s a basilisk den) and scouts the branching caves for any immediate threats. This would take about 2 hours.
- Ashoka (the court sorcerer) along with half of the Thegn’s housecarls would go to secure the ancestral halls.
- Once secure, they dispatch a runner to fetch the Thegn, Triv-Lok, Glif (Ashoka’s apprentice), and the other half of the housecarls.
- Triv-Lok, Ashoka, and the Thegn start growing new varumani in vats.
- The hunters go to pursue the nearby kaliyani, while the housecarls scout out the Midnight Road.
And this is all happening right now whether the players join in or not. This isn’t a video game where the quests stick around for the players to be ready: sometimes that happens, but this is core to the varumani’s goals and it wouldn’t make any sense for them to delay.
The players decided to go deal with some personal stuff while the hunters dealt with the basilisks, and got back in time to join the trip to secure the ancestral halls. From there it was a pretty combat-heavy session: an explanation of the Troll Pits was interrupted by half-formed rancid burbling blobs emerging when Triv-Lok tried to purge the pits, and then after dealing with that they went after the kaliyani and found themselves the victims of their mental attacks.
I came up with a totally custom kaliyani statblock, as the one in the book references AD&D psionics which I don’t have. My kaliyani are basically mindflayers, but with some tweaks to compensate for not having the whole “devour your brain, instantly killling you” thing.
In both combats the players ran both their characters and their varumani allies, which was a great way to keep them engaged and stop it being me running 8+ characters at the same time.
Next week we pursue the two kaliyani who managed to flee!
Miscellaneous
Had an emergency root canal treatment this week, then spent three days feeling like rubbish recovering: having the wisdom tooth out wasn’t this bad! An infection hit me out of nowhere on Monday and by the end of the day I was in so much pain I couldn’t even sleep. I had the treatment on Tuesday, but had to go back on Wednesday as there was a lot of swelling. The dentist prescribed me some antibiotics, and things have recovered since. I’ll be back next week for some follow-up treatment.
Not very fun, as I thought all my dental problems had been worked out when I had all the work done in November / December.
In more positive news, my computer upgrade is done! I decided to go for a GTX 5080, rather than holding out for a 5090, due to pricing and availability. It’s still a massive upgrade on the 1060 I had previously.
Here’s the final part list:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
- Cooler: Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 EVO
- Motherboard: ASRock X870E Taichi
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance 2x48GB
- Storage: WD Black 4TB M.2 SSD
- Graphics: Gigabyte AORUS MASTER ICE GeForce RTX 5080
- Case: Fractal Design Torrent
- Power: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13
