#389

Mar 15, 2026

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

Not much in terms of action this week, but pretty big in terms of consequences. The players scouted out much of the cavern of the Ziggurat of Kauket, including the route back to the chasm floor, without being discovered. They now have a map of the area and know where to march their army. Simultaneously, they had their army moving massive amounts of treasure (via the pair of linked teleporters they set up) between the Tomb of Isadora and their secure vault. This culminated in over 3 million XP, which levelled up all the PCs and brought their entire army (over 200 guys) up from 1st to 3rd level.

Discussion between the players after the session basically came down to “we’ve got two things left: destroy the ziggurat, then take down the dragon”.

So the end is nigh.

We’ve decided not to use mass combat rules when they go for the ziggurat. We did for the war on the Cult of Set but it was slow and also felt a bit anticlimactic, as the only Setite leader we fought in a personal-scale combat was Stephania. So for the ziggurat, we’re going to abstract the larger battle into the background (I’ll have a look at the relative strength of the heqeti and the players’ troops and make something up), and the players will instead switch between controlling their characters, a group of 8 Sun-Scarred Knights who will be accompanying them, and 4 Varumani Hunters. These three groups will be going after the heqeti leaders and securing strategic locations, but also the Sun-Scarred Knights and the Varumani have their own objectives which I’ve included to foster some interesting roleplaying.

Still working them out, but broadly what I have for the Knights is:

  1. Survive, as the loss of even a single knight is a diffficult cost to bear
  2. Weaken the varumani if we can do so without being caught, they’re getting too powerful
  3. Avoid using our most powerful weapons as recharging them is difficult

And for the Varumani:

  1. Win glory, go out with a bang if death is inevitable
  2. Find our comrade Bedara, or her remains
  3. Survive

Very different priorities on survival! Possible secret betrayal from the Knights! Fun times and excitement ahead.

The next campaign?

I was going to run Ars Magica. It’s a game I’ve wanted to play for a long time, and the new Definitive Edition got me very excited for it. But… that was a while ago, Arden Vul has gone on for so much longer that the excitement has cooled. And so I’ve been looking at OSR things again.

Hot Springs Island is a strong contender for the next game. It’s a very dense island hexcrawl with a lot of faction play and weirdness. It’s much more “5e” than “OSR” in tone I think, but still doable (you’d just need to use a system with slightly more powerful characters than, say, OSE). The lore is cool. It comes with a player-facing book, presented as an in-world document from the local Adventurers’ Guild. I think it could be a lot of fun.

But there’s some not so great aspects too.

Firstly, it’s system neutral, and not in the hepful way that a lot of OSR products are (providing minimal stats), it provides no stats and just describes everything through prose. What’s the relative power level of any two creatures in the bestiary? No way of telling. I’d need to stat out all the creatures, magic items, and anything else that interacts with game mechanics myself.

Secondly, the dungeons kind of suck, they’re somewhat linear as each one basically exists to tell a story, and they’re not really keyed, you’re supposed to roll to determine what’s going on in each room every time the players visit. Also they have maps but no scales, so it’s hard to tell how big anything is. So I would probably want to substantially change the dungeons, maybe even replace some of them entirely.

Thirdly, the author clearly has some sort of sex-thing going on, as the ancient elves are obsessed with pregnancy and have orgy contests where teams would compete to have the most orgasms in a certain time, the efreet faction has sex slaves, and the ogre faction (who are former slaves (workers, not sex) who rebelled and broke away from the efreet faction) kidnap strong female adventurers and transform them into ogres to produce lots of ogre babies. The only faction which doesn’t have a sex-thing going on is the nereids, who are all… beautiful women… oh dear.

Overall I’d say the major weakness of Hot Springs Island is that the book is very high-concept, but for actual at-the-table use you need detail, which it doesn’t give you much of. It’s usable, but will take work. It reminds me of Veins of the Earth in that way, which I complained about a couple of weeks ago.