#393

Apr 12, 2026

Books

No books this week!

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

We had our debrief session this week: three hours of answering questions, explaining lore, and pointing out the paths not taken. It still feels weird that it’s all over.

Next week: Call of Cthulhu for our first one-shot!

Hot Springs Island

I started preparation in earnest this week, converting a bunch of monsters, coming up with character backgrounds (species, vocation, and affiliation groups) and working out the necessary house rules (basically just the Dolmenwood rules for hexcrawling, camping, fishing, foraging, and hunting).

I’m putting together a couple of little booklets, which I’m doing with LaTeX and it’s a lot of fun to make something nice looking:

A selection of pages from both books.

I’ve still got about two thirds of the monsters to convert, but I think I’ve got into the swing of things now so I intend to finish those next week. I still need to figure out some setting details (like how much it costs to get to the island and how frequent ships are, which will affect how long the players need to camp out) but it’s all coming together.

Miscellaneous

Things are going poorly in the garden.

For the past several weeks mushrooms had been popping up all over the place, especially along my woodchip path so it was looking like I’d have a mushroom-lined path which would be quite nice, but they all died off at the start of this week. Also, a lot of weeds have started to pop up. I’m pretty sure they’re weeds, as they don’t look like the flowers I’ve planted—in fact there’s no sign of the flowers yet.