#367
Oct 12, 2025
Books
This week I read:
The Dolmenwood Player’s Book from Necrotic Gnome
I ran a Dolmenwood campaign a few years ago and it was a lot of fun, but that was back before there was a Dolmenwood system, it was still OSE with some house rules and new classes. This is the first time I’ve really looked into the new (well, not so new, the draft version was released ages ago) system itself. I like it a lot, it’s very similar to OSE, just incorporating a lot of nice little tweaks from the previous Dolmenwood material and from the Carcass Crawler zines. I could see using it as a base for non-Dolmenwood OSR games, too.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
Total deviation from the Trials of Arden this week: the players looted a tomb, and then cleared out some earth-spirit things in the vicinity of where one player wanted to set up a dwarven colony. Now they’re talking about going to find a lost dwarven forge. What happened to the trials!
We’re still on track to the endgame, but my confidence in them completing the trials this month is shaken. Ah well, that just gives me more time to read up on Ars Magica.
Miscellaneous
I’ve been looking into Uiua, an array-oriented programming language, this weekend. It’s kind of interesting, but it’s very heavy on unicode which set me on the path of a yak in need of shaving… you see, I run Windows on my desktop machine, and have a permanent SSH session open to my home server for all my Linux needs (for instance, I’m typing this weeknote right now via emacs running on the server).
I used the venerable PuTTY for SSH, but upon trying Uiua I hit a snag: my default font didn’t have all the required unicode characters. No problem, I thought, Uiua provides a font. I’ll just install and use that. Well, for whatever reason, PuTTY wouldn’t let me choose it. The font selection in Putty is very abbreviated in fact, with only a fraction of my installed fonts available.
So that, plus PuTTY’s general clunkiness, led me to finally look for an alternative Windows SSH tool. After some (very little) research, I settled on Tabby, which does work with all my fonts and is quite nice to use. I keep falling afoul of keybindings that clash with my emacs ones, but it’s getting there, and it does feel a lot nicer than PuTTY ever did.