#410

Books

This week I read:

• HELLPIERCERS

  A roleplaying game set after humanity has cast down the demiurge and reclaimed its inherent divinity, only to turn around and make war on Hell for the liberation of the dead. This game oozes flavour. It’s a tactical skirmish game which divides the game up into three modes of play: RECON, which is what I would consider normal RPG play; TACCOM, which is the tactical combat mode; and STRATCOM, which is kind of a planning and base-building mode in which both the players and the forces of Hell will modify the map and unlock units and powers for upcoming RECON and TACCOM phases.

  Players are powerful. Most demonic minions go down easily, but there are a lot of them. Minibosses, boss monsters, video-gane-like puzzles, and interesting map design (the GM section on TACCOM explicitly calls out raids in MMOs as inspiration) is how you keep it from being just a boring slog of mowing down grunts.

  It’s very different to anything I’ve played or run before, and I am looking forward to getting it to the table.

Roleplaying Games

We’re alternating Hot Springs Island and the megadungeon campaign by another player now, so it was megadungeon week again. It’s pretty interesting, we’ve found that the crypt-dungeon by home base has a connection to the world of the dead, which in turn has connections to various afterlives. This week we got to this central hub city which looks like a good place to adventure from going forward. We need treasure though, after three sessions all the PCs still only have a few hundred experience points, far from reaching level 2. And level 1 PCs are squishy.

Miscellaneous

I’ve seen a hedgehog out in the garden at night a couple of times recently, so I got a hedgehog house and some food from the RSPB. I put the house under some bushes and made a little path to it, as I’ve noticed the hedgehog likes the paths (makes sense, when you’re so small, the plants are very big):

I’m going to put food out in the evenings and see how it goes. I also have a ground-level bird bath I might move over to be next to the house so it doesn’t have to walk quite so far for water, as the birds prefer the elevated one and don’t use it much.