#401
Jun 7, 2026
Books
No books this week!
Roleplaying Games
Hot Springs Island
This week the players kept working their way around the coast to the city (after spending a few more hours with Trouble the salamander and realising than an elemental’s idea of “soon” might not be the same as theirs). They eventually made it to the city and explored around there a bit, before catching the boat back to the mainland and banking their treasure.
I had planned a few things out to teach them some more lore: Ruston, the thief NPC tagging along with the party, was going to spark up a conversation about the division of the loot when they next camped, and in so doing discover that the nereid portrait had changed (revealing that it was magic); and then the following day, I’d fudge the first random encounter and kill him off quickly with an unconventional creature (maybe a predatory plant) to get the players scared, and to make them more excited when they finally found the Field Guide (which I planned to happen next session). But things didn’t go according to plan, with the players encountering and disturbing a snake, and really the only reasonable target was one of the PCs—who died, and that player took over Ruston.
I shuffled things around a little to adjust. The snake proved to be a good teaching encounter as they discovered that the snake meat is good eating for a few days, and also the scales are made of actual copper which can be sold. So now they know there’s reason to hunt and fight the creatures on the island, at least in some cases. The portrait I had them discover when they were selling their loot, and they decided to keep it to investigate further, which is what I had hoped for.
They also made it to the city a bit faster than I expected, so I gave them the Field Guide this week as I wanted them to have it before they left the island. My concern was the players going to join the local adventurers’ guild now that they’ve got a bit of experience, and the Field Guide is given out to all guild members. I did want them to find the Field Guide out in the wilds in a dangerous place, as getting it for free wouldn’t be as satisfying. But they didn’t engage with the guild at all, they just sold their treasure and went straight back to the island, so I could have left it to next week. Oh well.
The city itself was another good teaching moment, as it’s both a source of great wealth and infested with highly aggressive lizardmen who set traps, and I made sure that they saw both of these things.
I think they have now been exposed to a lot of the basics of the setting (especially if they take the time to read the Field Guide), which should lead to more exciting and focussed adventuring going forward; while “go to a dangerous place and find treasure” is fun, it’s more fun if the players are also consciously engaging with factions and weird things and have more of a goal than just get as rich as possible.
This will be a much shorter campaign than Arden Vul. The island isn’t that big, and there’s only so much for a group of highly active PCs to do. If they’re diligent about treasure they’ll level up every two or three sessions, and once they’re all level 10 they’ll be a serious force on the island that only entire factions can threaten. There are a few individuals that could give a group of 3 level 10s a run for their money, but not many.
Still, a ~30 session campaign is a good amount of time—that would mean finishing in late December if we never miss a week—so I’m ok with that.
Miscellaneous
This week I participated in a really intense multiplayer Stardew Valley game with 10 other people, using a mod called Archipelago that adopts a really interesting approach.
It locks elements of your game (like an item recipe, or the key for a door, or the season of Spring, or an item at the shop, and so on) behind another player doing something in their game. Each player also has their own win condition, and when you hit that it unlocks everything that others are depending on you for.
For example, in my game I couldn’t increase my friendship level with the NPCs. Instead, other people had to do things (like harvest a particular crop) to increase them. My goal was to get married and have two children, so who I’d marry was essentially totally up to the other players: I’d just take whoever I first got to 10 hearts with. The marriage I could do as soon as I got to the required hearts, but the babies are also locked in other people’s games. Right now I have one child, but to get the other another player needs to kill 60 Void Spirits in their mines; but they can’t get to their mines yet because another thing the mod does is randomise the connections between doors and interiors, and they’ve not found their mines yet! We’re pretty confident where it is (after 6 days there’s not many doors left to try), but to get there a third player needs to brew some vodka in their game, which will remove the landslide to the railway station in the second player’s game, which is where we think their mine entrance is, which will let them go into the mines and kill void spirits to get me a second baby.
And the really cool thing is that Archipelago supports more than just Stardew Valley. You could have, say, one player in Stardew Valley, and another in Dark Souls III, and another in Factorio, and another in Hollow Knight, and another in … you get the picture. And it works across games, everyone will have things in their games locked behind others doing things in their games, even when those are completely different games. It’s a really impressive piece of work, and also super interesting from a graph theory / constraint satisfaction problem, as it must be pretty difficult to ensure you don’t generate an unwinnable game, where there’s a cycle in the dependencies locking someone out from their goal.
It’s been a lot of fun, but also very intense. I’ve played 40 hours of Stardew Valley this week.