#380

Jan 11, 2026

Books

This week I read:

Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

KSR is more known for his Mars trilogy, which I’ve read and greatly enjoyed, so I was interested to check this book out but I’d say Shaman was just ok. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it had been by a different author. It was entertaining enough I suppose, it had action and excitement, I read the book fairly quickly, but it just wasn’t up to the same standard really.

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

This week the players decided to go after Kel Bormol’s lair, to try to find the password for his secret stash. This led them into the Tower of Scrutiny, which is one of the first locations it’s possible to enter in Arden Vul (you can get there from the surface) but which they’d never been in before. Well, they decided not to spend much time there after seeing several wraiths descend, screaming, through a cloud of magical darkness above them.

After that, they went in search of Marius Tricotor’s outpost at the base of the chasm, which led to meeting the vampire Cinna Minnux. He knew he was outclassed and bluffed a bit by acting all-knowing and “allowing” the PCs to leave his domain which worked, the players left and tried another route. We ended the session with them at the base of the chasm.

I wasn’t expecting them to head down there so I was improvising a lot of it, I’ll be better prepared for next week. There’s plenty of interesting stuff down there, nasty too.

Miscellaneous

I played some Disco Elysium this week for the first time. I went in almost totally blind, all I knew about the game was that you play a detective who has lost their memory and that people think this is one of the greatest RPGs ever made. It’s certainly unconventional, and interesting. I made it about an hour and a half before my character had a mental breakdown and quit his job to go live under a bridge. I’m going to have to give it another shot.