#364
Sep 21, 2025
Work
I took this week off.
Books
This week I read:
Volume 3 of the Rozen Maiden anniversary edition by Peach-Pit
We’ve now crossed the point where the anime adaptation diverges from the manga, though the remake addresses some of it. I remember the ending of the anime being fairly rushed and confusing so I’m interested to see where the manga goes.
The Borderland from Mongoose Publishing
Most of the Traveller setting books cover a whole sector, or at least a substantial portion of one, which is a vast region of space. You get a short section about each system, but by necessity it can’t really go into much detail. They tend to focus on cross-system concerns like politics. The Borderland isn’t like that, it covers just 16 systems in the “borderland” region of the Trojan Reach, and it goes into a lot more detail. Each system gets a star map, with information about all the bodies of note—not just the mainworld! We get multiple adventure hooks for each system and ideas about how to tie them all together, there’s even an included adventure that has the players caught up in a natural disaster. It’s everything you’d need to run a very local sandbox campaign.
Roleplaying Games
It seems now is the time long-delayed kickstarters finally come to fruition. This week I received the Tome of Worldbuilding and the Nomicon (supposed to arrive in June), got the dispatch notification for Yoon-Suin (supposed to arrive in September… 2023), and (if the distributor is to be believed) next week my Dolmenwood package (now a year overdue) will be posted.
The Halls of Arden Vul
Hit a bit of technical difficulty this week with my aging headset (a HyperX Cloud Alpha Pro) finally giving up the ghost, and the left audio channel died. Not ideal but we powered through and I’ve ordered a new headset (a Beyerdynamic MMX 330 Pro) which should be here tomorrow.
Putting that aside, the big news from this session is that the players met Ravatorus, the insane rudishva survivor and progenitor of the fishmen! The players realised that his lair, that they’d followed clues to, was in fishman territory so they made a hasty retreat and decided to pass along a message. The fishmen are kind of idiots, but with a bit of coaxing and lots of mention of “the master”, the players managed to get them to deliver a clay tablet upon which they’d inscribed a message in the rudishva language.
Now, Ravatorus isn’t totally disinterested in non-fishmen, the module notes that if anyone manages to make it to his lair he’ll likely talk to them, but with a 50/50 chance every turn of deciding they need to be turned into fishmen. So how would he react to the message? I figured he’d most likely ignore it, but I gave a 1-in-6 chance of him being intrigued enough to come see what was going on: and I hit it. After an hour and a half of waiting, the players about to give up, a strange mutated form emerged from the water…
He was, predictably, totally uninterested in leaving the planet. But he did make sure to offer, several times, to turn people into fishmen if they’d like.
Miscellaneous
This week I picked up Timberborn, a city-builder game where you manage a colony of intelligent beavers on post-apocalyptic Earth. I’d had my eye on it for a while. It’s honestly pretty cool, the devs really leaned into the beaver theme by making water management a very core aspect of the game, with frequent droughts (and floods of polluted water) that you need to deal with: so what do your beavers do? They build a dam of course!
Another interesting aspect is that there are two factions of beavers, with different buildings and playstyles. You start with the nature-friendly faction first, and unlock the more industry-focussed one when you get a colony to 15 happiness, which isn’t too tricky once you’ve got the basics down.
It’s still in early access, and has been since 2021, but it gets a major update every so often, so they are still working on it.