#376
Dec 14, 2025
Books
This week I read:
The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies a collection of short stories by John Langan
The first story in this collection was pretty weak—a poor first impression—but the rest made up for it. My favourites were Technicolor and Mother of Stone. Langan experiments with writing style: one story is written like a play, one as a collection of scenes, and Mother of Stone is written in second-person present which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
I thought John Langan’s name was familiar, and it turns out he wrote one of my favourite stories from volume 2 of Black Wings of Cthulhu, which I read back in 2021.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players returned to the Trials of Arden and completed the 9th trial, which if you just try to brute-force it requires killing 1,234 ghasts and a banshee. The actual solution is to find some way to distract the ghasts and make your way over to the banshee to defeat it in a musical duel. The players prepared pretty well for this, they spent a month of downtime learning various musical instruments, and in the trial itself had a loud fight drawing the attention of the undead while another character was turned invisible and hurried off to deal with the banshee.
After that they briefly considered going straight into the 10th trial, but opted for a bit of exploration instead. Evidently with a taste for undead meat, they went to the Necropolis of Set. We ended the session with them confronting Meskenit, the Greater Mummy, and his servitors: a horde of ghasts and ghouls, with a wight and a regular mummy in the mix as well.
Right off the bat, four of the retainers got paralysed with fear, and Meskenit has a collection of spells and magic items at his disposal. We’ll pick it up next time and see what happens.