I am off this week. This was the most continuous time off I've taken since July, so it was very refreshing to take some time off.
Again, my financial dependence on my employer makes me very sad.
Books
This week, there were no books. I think I need to acquire some new reading material The majority of the unread books I've left are RPG rulebooks and non-fiction and I read those when I'm feeling inspired.
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Gaming
Ars Magica
This week, I ran the first session of my brand new Ars Magica campaign. The players were recruited to help find the missing village children, whom no one had seen in some hours. It was the vernal hour and a night of magical and folklore. The children had fallen under the spell of a kelpie determined to tell their story of drowning unwary victims.
There was not much to do. The characters were required to (1) locate the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk straight through a forest of fairy tales which would attempt to confuse their sense of direction, (3) drive away the kelpie. It was easy to manage and the players had few options. I created a deliberately simple plot so that we'd be able to get comfortable with the system. This turned out to be a great idea considering that even with this, we had to look up the rules for creating spells a bunch (which I was expecting). What I didn't expect was that at first they saw this large Faerie horse and thought "well we don't have any magic to protect ourselves from the fey, so we have to physically defeat it". However, after one of them almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a solution that was magical I hope they'll be more likely to try magic first next time.
I certainly didn't know how long it would take. I had a whole second adventure (visiting and making a favorable impression on the abbot from a nearby monastery) planned that we didn't have time to explore at all.
Inscryption
This week I tried Inscryption. It's a bizarre deck-building/escape-room game that makes you feel as if you're in a cave with a mad game master who is composing rules as the game goes.
The first part is. Based on what I have seen, there is a second part that seems quite different. I'm not sure whether I'll give it a lot of my time but it was the weird atmosphere that attracted me initially. Perhaps the strangeness is back? I'm not sure if I want to put in the effort to find out.
We've received a release date set for Minecraft 1.18, the 30th!
I'm not a huge Minecraft player nowadays, and I'm prone to becoming bored once I've got a self-sufficient base up and running (which isn't a long time at all), as building big things doesn't interest me at all. I am not the target audience for the game.
However, I do enjoy trying it out every now and again, and playing with friends, and 1.18 introduces some fundamental changes to world generation I'm looking forward to testing.
Miscellaneous
This week, I watched a bit of television I watched The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were great and had many cool visuals, such as this FTL jump in the first episode of Foundation00. In fact, it's the most awesome FTL jump I've ever seen. If this series had been released before I began my Traveller game, I would have been very likely to change the standard deckplans of ships to incorporate a large rotating black hole-powered jump drive.
). I am looking forward to reading more.
If I had to draw a line of criticism I'm finding the Empire storyline of Foundation more captivating than the Foundation storyline of Foundation. This is a reflection of the stories that I like. The Empire storyline is about massive cosmic events, as well as the fall of an era. It's more about the events than the people. The Foundation storyline is more about the people and the events are smaller in size. But I prefer large-scale events!
