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[levinmccoy55]

Maybe the Weirdness Resurfaces?

This week, I was off from work. This was the longest period I've taken off since July. It was great to take time off.

My financial dependence on my employer is making me very sad. https://wolfscript.net/

Books

This week, I have no books. I'm thinking I should find some new reading material. Most of the books I've got are RPG rulebooks or nonfiction. I only read these when I feel the need.

Gaming

Ars Magica

This week, I conducted the first session in my new Ars Magica campaign. The players were asked to take part in the search for missing children from the village. They hadn't seen them for hours. It was the vernal hour, a night of magical and folklore. The children had fallen in love with the charm of a kelpie who was determined to tell their story of drowning innocent victims.

There was nothing much to do, the characters just had to (1) locate the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk in an unidirectional line through a forest of fairy tales that tried to confuse their sense of direction, and (3) take off the kelpie somehow. It was a breeze to manage and the players had a few options. I thought of a simple plot in order to be able to ease into the system. This proved to be a good idea considering that even with this, we needed to go through the spell creation rules several times (which I'd expected). I was astonished to discover that they initially were awed by the massive horse faerie and decided to take on it physically. But after one of them almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a magical solution, I hope they'll be more likely to attempt magic the next time.

Although I wasn't aware of how the duration would be, I had another adventure (visiting and making an impression on the abbot of the nearby monastery) which I had in mind but didn't have time for.

Inscryption

This week I played Inscryption. It's a strange deck-building/escape-room game that makes you feel like you're in a cave with a mad game master who is inventing rules as he goes.

At least, the first part is. Based on what I have seen, there's a second part that seems quite different. I'm not sure if I'll give it much of my time but it was the weird atmosphere that attracted me initially. Perhaps the strangeness is back? I'm not sure if want to spend the time to find out.

We've received a release date set for Minecraft 1.18 on the 30th of September!

I'm not a huge Minecraft player nowadays, and I'm prone to becoming bored once I have a self-sufficient base up and running (which doesn't take very long at all), as building big things isn't my thing at all. I'm not the target audience for the game.

It's something I enjoy doing from time to time, and playing with friends on servers. 1.18 brings some fundamental changes to the world generation, which I'm excited to test out.

Miscellaneous

I was capable of catching up on television this week, and I watched The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were pretty great, lots of very cool visuals (like this FTL jump from the first episode of Foundation00). In actuality, I think this is the most amazing version of FTL jumps I've come across. If this series had been released before I began my Traveller game I would have been convinced to redesign all the deckplans for ships to include a huge rotating black hole-powered jump drive.

). I look forward to more.

If I had to criticize the Foundation storyline, it would be that I find the Empire storyline from Foundation more compelling than the Foundation storyline. This is an expression of the stories that I like. The Empire storyline is about large, galaxy-shaking events and the demise of an era. It's more about the events rather than the people. Whereas the Foundation storyline is much more about individuals, and the events themselves are smaller in size. But I do prefer the larger-scale things!