#359
Aug 17, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill
Compared to the other two Adam Nevill books I’ve read, this was rather straightforward. It also didn’t have a sudden tonal shift towards the end, which could be a good thing or a bad thing: I’ve not minded it but I know it’s a point a lot of people criticise him for. The book was enjoyable, but if this had been my first Adam Nevill story I probably wouldn’t have felt as compelled to check out the rest of his bibliography.
Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems by Rambaud et al
I’d had my eye on this for a while, as it’s the book that gets recommended if you’re into mathematical treatments of accounting, but personally I felt it was a bit of a let-down. The book was interesting but not insightful. For example, after defining an algebraic model of an accounting system, the authors show how the standard algebraic notion of a quotient system can be used to derive standard accounting reports. That’s interesting! But then they go on to point out that the number of quotient systems increases exponentially with the number of accounts, so any nontrivial accounting system will have a lot of quotient systems, the vast majority of which will not correspond to any useful accounting ideas.
What I had hoped to get from this book was “here’s how we can model accounting systems with abstract algebra, and having done that we can now derive interesting results about accounting.” The book had the first part, but had nothing for the second part.
Clans of the Aslan (preorder PDF) from Mongoose Publishing
I love the Aslan, my favourite alien race in Traveller. This book goes into a lot more detail about how their society works, gives an overview of some important Aslan worlds, provides adventure hooks and suggested campaign outlines, and gives expanded rules on creating Aslan characters. The only thing I really felt was missing was any discussion of what typical Aslan city looks like, which is something I’ve complained about in other Traveller supplements dealing with the Aslan.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
Due to illness and unavailability, it was only me and one other player this week. Thankfully it was the player of the cleric who’s now in charge of the Forum of Set, so we just spent the session doing admin: going through all the rooms and gathering up loot, hiring staff, bringing in merchants to start to offload some of the loot, unconsecrating the Temple of Set, and so on.
After this second pass for loot a bunch of characters levelled up again. They’ve gained a lot of XP in the last few sessions: the party is something like 200,000gp richer, and they also earned bonus XP from my house rules for destroying a faction, establishing a safe haven, and exploring a bunch of territory.