#370
Nov 2, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Solaris by Stanislaw Len
Which I last read over 10 years ago! I overheard a conversation about how bad the film adaptation was, and it got me wanting to read the book again. It sets out to tell a first contact story without falling into the trap of anthropocentrism and it succeeds 100%, I’d forgotten just how unresolved the book left everything. Contact had been made, kind of, if of a very one-way sort, but was anything actually communicated? Was this even an attempt at contact, or were the manifestations just the equivalent of poking these strange new things (human brains) in the environment with a stick?
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players helped Vingalok find the lost base of the Order of Planar Explorers and rescue the other members from their thousand-year overdue mission into the astral plane to loot the god-corpse of Horus.
I 100% expected the players to totally miss that whole sublevel, it’s incredibly hard to find; but they had to go meet Vingalok. Ah well…
The entrance to it has a light & colour based puzzle, and I wasn’t sure whether it’d be fun or frustrating. But to my surprise the players got quite into it (one in particular) and didn’t exactly figure it out, but managed to manipulate things into being better for them. When they finally got to the Order of Planar Explorer guys and pulled them out of the astral plane I had them act like total bros: lots of high fives, back slapping, friendly joking; comments like “it’s been a thousand years!” “oh no! do you think my bar tab’s still on file” and “the near-astral around here’s a mess, lotta demiplanes, you’ve got a bit of a lich problem don’t you? best sort that out”, it was a good time.
Next week we’re playing our one-shot of Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades!
Miscellaneous
My garden is ready for Phase Two: sowing yellow rattle, to keep the grass from coming back and choking out other wildflowers.
This week I cleared away some of the woodchips and found that the grass beneath (which has been buried since July) is very dead, and the bottom layer of woodchips has rotted and been incorporated into the soil somewhat. I’ve taken a few days off work next week, so I’ll clear away all the unrotted chips (I’ll just pile them up in the paved area at the back of the garden until I get a compost bin) to expose the soil and then sow the seeds. They’ll sprout in spring, when I’ll sow the rest of the flowers.