#362

Sep 7, 2025

Books

This week I read:

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson

I’ve had my eye on this since reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad back in April. It’s a very different sort of story, but I enjoyed it a lot. It does refer to some of the things I was surprised weren’t in the Iliad, like the Trojan Horse and the death of Achilles; references to the lost epics that would have been common knowledge at the time of the Odyssey’s composition, I suppose. The poem repeatedly mentions the wrath of Athena against the Greeks for defiling her temple in Troy, which must also be from one of the lost epics.

I had to laugh at this part where Poseidon saves Ajax, but then immediately changes his mind and kills him for his boast:

Ajax was drowned; his ships were sunk. Poseidon
first drove him to the rocks of Gyrae, then
rescued him from the sea; he would have lived,
despite Athena’s hatred, but he made
a crazy boast—that he survived the waves
against the wishes of the gods. Poseidon
heard his rash words. At once, he seized his trident
in mighty hands, and struck the Gyran rock.
One half remained; the other, on which Ajax
sat as he boasted, cracked right off and fell
into the sea, and carried him deep down. The boundless waves washed over him; he drank
the salty brine, and died.

So many times in the poem we see people attributing things to the gods, it seems the default explanation for anything unexpected. The Greeks must have seen their world as a chaotic place ruled by the whims of powerful and capricious immortals.

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

The players saved Isocorax! They managed to rig up a rope to get him out unseen, and then acted as if nothing unusual had happened when they left in the morning. The players got a bit of a lore dump as thanks, and have received a strong hint that Melok-Ri, the other rudishva vampire, is still alive and still running the Sun-Scarred Knights, when their own Sun-Scarred Knight, Sir Sixth, saw Isocorax and briefly looked as if he’d seen a ghost (Isocorax and Melok-Ri look pretty similar, being the only two rudishva vampires on the planet).

I’d previously rolled a die to determine when Thegan would realise Isocorax was missing, and got the following day. I had decided that Thegan would immediately flee, as he knows the jig is up and Isocorax would be out for revenge. I hadn’t expected the players to let Isocorax go so quickly. So now I need to decide if Isocorax went to kill Thegan immediately, or if there’s a chance he escaped.

Then the players decided to go visit the fishmen in an attempt to make friends, and got a bit overconfident. Once the fishmen realised they were understood (thanks to a Tongues spell) they just kept urging the party to come with them. The two who had magical means of waterbreathing (one PC and one retainer) did, followed them all the way to their home base, and got jumped by 20 fishmen. The retainer got paralysed by their poison in the first round of combat, and then beaten to unconsciousness (nonlethal damage). The PC has been holding on, barely: they have really high AC, but no way to attack more than one enemy in a round, so it’s a battle of attrition as they try to pull the retainer out.

We’ve played out the first few rounds of combat over Discord, and I have no idea which way this’ll go! Half the fishmen failed a morale check after the PC killed a bunch of them, but if the PC pursues into the coral tunnels to save the retainer, I think those panicking fishmen will recover in a few rounds and then even if the PC manages to save the retainer they’ll have to fight their way through a wall of fishmen.

I’ve decided that if the PC just decides to leave the retainer and run the fishmen will let them go—they’ve proven themselves a threat, and the fishmen have a captive already.

Will the player sacrifice a valued retainer to save their character?

Miscellaneous

This week the replacement frame for a picture that fell off the wall and cracked a few weeks ago arrived, so now everything I had planned up front for the interior of the house is done.