Stormbringer #16

Ran the 16th Stormbringer session yesterday afternoon. It'd been forever since we played, due to some weird combination of various people being busy. I think it was our first SB session in a month or more, with just an Arkham Horror in between.

I'm still running "Four Seasons", which is the the second adventure in the Fate of Fools book. In the previous adventure, players had received one of the three quest objects, a lute, and now they were heading on to the Weeping Wastes in search of someone who might know the second quest object, a song.

It turned out to be subplot week.

On the way south, as deserts turned into plains, the players were attacked by the soldiers of the other rival for this quest, Sevik. The players got stampeded, then strafed with arrows, but gave as good as they got, and later on addressed their shortcomings in the archery department, which will be greatly useful when the soldiers try the same tactic next time. In any case, this little interlude went well.

In the city of Karlaak, which lay behind point A and point B I decided to introduce an old plot thread, about a fled rival who was surprised to see the players in his new home town and thought they were hunting him. The players had to deal with a few demons as a result, but seemed pretty uninterested who might be targeting them, which I found somewhat frustrating. I didn't mind the players not extending the plot by trying to hunt this fellow down, but having that dangling, unanswered plot thread will probably be troublesome if I ever return to this issue.

Ah well.

When the players arrived at the edge of the Weeping Waste around 5.30p I decided to call it quits for the day, and we played a game of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers afterward.

By the by, I'm now discussing this campaign in somewhat greater detail over at RPGnet as part of their new actual play forum.

Reading & Writing

I made a surprise stop by the library the other week. I was heading up to the Skotos machine room to fix a machine, and I'd decided to try out the bus route that runs up there, because I didn't want to bike through the rain. But the bus route is really inefficient, so when I realized that I had almost 20 full minutes to wait, I ducked over to the Downtown Berkeley Public Library which was on the opposite corner from my bus stop.

I've been thinking about the BPL since I started watching The Daily Show because there's so many good-sounding political non-fiction books that go by. So I browsed through the political section, but most of the BPL seemed to be a few years old, so nothing from the show caught my eye. But I did find a few of interesting, including The Perfect Tie and Bush v. Gore, both on the 2000 election.

The Perfect Tie was an interesting analysis of the 2000 election, from the primaries, through the disputed vote. Rather, I should say it was three-quarters of an interesting book, because the last quarter became increasingly partisan, and even more frustrating it continued to pretend it was unbiased. Fair and Balanced you could even say. I finished it and returned it today.

Bush v. Gore meanwhile contains a lot of the court decisions and a lot of period commentary, some from each side of the aisle. I'm enjoying it quite a bit thus far.

Today, while returning The Perfect Tie I also browsed the library a bit more and found The Game Makers, a book on the history of Parker Brothers that I've been meaning to read for a while, and a few graphic novels that I wanted to read but weren't on my buy list.

Go me and go library!

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I also did quite a bit of writing today.

I polished up a number of Gone Gaming articles and now have the next three weeks done. This includes two articles reviewing my top 10 Essen picks and my fourth Carcassonne article (which'll be my last for now). I have an article on Italy that I didn't get around to editing, but is getting close to done. (I did spend some time earlier this weekend preparing a fun graphic for it).

I also did quite a bit of work on the elf article for World of Glorantha. It's now got 3,800 of its 3,000-5,000 words done. I've got all the main points, minus a few random encounters, and thus need to start thinking about what I want to offer additional detail to.

I'd hoped to finish it this weekend, but it's actually due on the 31st. I should just try and make sure it's in good shape by week's end so that I can do a final edit next weekend with no stress.