#371
Nov 9, 2025
Books
This week I read:
The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe
This is the tale of an American teenager somehow transported into a world that’s an interesting mixture of Christian and Norse cosmology, and is magically aged to adulthood. Gene Wolfe manages to pull off the combo, making it feel like a cohesive whole.
I really enjoyed this one. The story is told from a first-person perspective and he’s not an unreliable narrator, but he does approach things as a teenager who suddenly gained a much more powerful body would, e.g. he sometimes describes helping people or solving some problem in a way that’s clear to the reader he just used his powerful stature to intimidate people into doing what he wanted. He sometimes tries to tell people the truth, saying that he’s just a boy in a man’s body, which invariably results in people thinking he’s talking metaphorically and says “yeah, me too”, which is kind of a moral for the reader (we all feel like that at times), but very frustrating for the protagonist for whom it’s literally true.
Roleplaying Games
Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades
This weekend we played The Obsidian Bat, the scenario included in the Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades rulebook, instead of our usual Arden Vul game. It was fun, though all the NPC abilities were a bit much to keep track of as a GM. We probably won’t return to this for a campaign.
Delta Green
I had some friends visit this weekend, and we played the Convergence scenario for Delta Green, which was actually the first scenario ever published for it! This took us about 8 hours over 2 days and ultimately resulted in the PCs dying: one killed by a mi-go lightning gun, the other burned to death after setting the car she was in on fire in order to take out another mi-go. The botched attempt to deal with the mi-go resulted in a lot of people dying, too.
But since the mi-go abandoned their experiments and all the alien matter was rendered inert, that’s case closed as far as Delta Green’s concerned. Hooray!
Ars Magica
I shared my campaign pitch with the player visiting me this weekend and they were into it, I then shared it with another online and they were less certain. But Arden Vul’s not done yet so I have time to work on them.
Miscellaneous
On Thursday I cleared most of the woodchips away in the garden so I could sow the yellow rattle seeds. I left them heaped up where I’m going to have a bed of sunflowers (no need to put yellow rattle there) and behind the garage where I’m going to put the compost bin. It was tiring work, about 5 hours of shovelling; by the end of the day my shoulders were sore, but that wore off overnight and the next day it was my legs that were killing me. But it’s done now. There’s supposed to be light rain basically all next week, which will hopefully help the seeds get started.
Now we wait until spring, when I’ll sow the rest of the seeds.