#411
Aug 16, 2026
Books
No books this week! I thought I’d finish The Return of the King last night, but then it turned out those pesky appendices have a smaller font size…
Roleplaying Games
Hot Springs Island
This week I gave my players the run-down on the rest of the Swordfish Islands, as I had finally read Shipwrecked. They can go explore Marlo’s Mire and chat with the wizard if they want—I said there’s a weekly ship to / from Swordfish Port—though I have decided my version of Marlo’s Mire doesn’t have the airship, but that should be a fairly minor adjustment; and I’ve said that there will be adventures on the other islands, but likely not full hexcrawls.
I’m going to set Scenic Dunnsmouth on the creepy spiderweb island (I’ll replace the spider-people with the spider cultists from the adventure), and I’m going to scatter 10 of the nereid paintings around the rest.
Anyway, this week was spent mostly exploring the Lapis Observatory. The players found a magic sword, killed a giant snake, were imprinted upon by a tall naked golem, befriended a lizardman, and made off with thousands of gold worth of gaudy decorations. A pretty successful time really.
Miscellaneous
The hedgehog hasn’t come by all week. The food sits untouched in its little house.
In other news, I’ve switched away from Trello for my to-do list. Atlassian haven’t done anything terrible to it yet but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before some AI nonsense gets forced in there. I’ve set up donetick for my chores, as it does a list of repeating tasks very well, and vikunja for the rest of the to-do list, as it has a kanban-style interface which is what I like.
I’m pretty happy with them so far, and going through everything in my Trello board as I manually copied data across prompted me to rethink or remove some things that had been there for a while. I need to get better at pruning old tasks, I think.