#398
May 17, 2026
Books
This week I read:
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
This is a hard book to describe. I stumbled upon it in a Reddit thread which mentioned it as a major influence on C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, but even more allegorical if possible. On the face of it, things just seem to happen to our protagonist: he is taken to an alien world and just kind of bumbles around, meeting people one at a time (and always conveniently finding the next companion after the last departs, often by dying), travelling with them for a while, and being driven entirely by circumstance with little free will of his own. He kills a man for no good reason. He falls deeply in love with, and then greatly mourns the death of, a woman who he barely knows. He’s even mocked for this (“you spent all night mourning a woman you knew for six hours”) by another character.
But looking a little deeper, each of his companions is a kind of puppet figure exhibiting a concept. Emotion. Reason. Action. Duty. Spiritual oneness between Man and Woman. Spiritual oneness between Man and God. Love. Pain. At the climax of the story is a very gnostic scene: the God that everyone on this alien world worships is depicted as a great cloud surrounding Creation, with life streaming in and through this “creator” from the greater spiritual world beyond, trapped within the cloud yet every striving to return to the source. God is the Demiurge and the character who had been cast as the Devil is the True God.
It feels like a book that would benefit from a careful re-read.
Roleplaying Games
Hot Springs Island
No game this week, so I took the time to work some more on my Hot Springs Island prep. I had an outline of everything for Whitehack, but as one player didn’t like Whitehack and wanted something more like OSE I chose to use Dolmenwood, which is basically just OSE + some more rules for overland exploration, if you’re not using the Dolmenwood setting.
To summarise, it’s a human-only setting with a bespoke set of classes, and a slightly simplified hexcrawling procedure (since the entire island is basically one terrain type). I’m also bringing back bonus XP for exploration and milestones as that worked well in Arden Vul, though I’m simplifying it to a flat 5% bonus for every achievement (rather than having tiers of 2%, 5%, and 10% depending on the size of the milestone).
The classes are:
- Druid: a combo of the OSE Druid and Dolmenwood Friar.
- Elementalist: the OSE Kineticist (kinetic powers reflavoured as elemental powers) plus the ability to speak the elemental language (giving a positive reaction modifier) and (when 9th level) conjure powerful elementals to fight for them.
- Explorer: the Dolmenwood Hunter.
- Marine: the Dolmenwood Fighter.
- Treasure Hunter: the Dolmenwood Thief, except that they can use all types of weapon and armour (though they can’t sneak in heavy armour) and can accurately appraise treasure (whereas other characters will just get a ballpark value).
- Wizard: the Dolmenwood Magician, but with all the spells from Dolmenwood, OSE, and OSRIC available.
All that’s left is converting the monsters—but that should be fairly easy as I think for most of them there’ll be an existing OSE or Dolmenwood monster I can just use with minor tweaks.
Miscellaneous
So many birds have discovered my garden I think I’m going to be financially ruined by the cost of birdseed. They’re emptying the feeder every two days now whereas once it would last the better part of a fortnight!