2025 review

 So that was 2025 then. Already.

Gaming

From looking back at the blog  seems I ran 15 sessions of D&D and 5 sessions of Brindlewood Bay.

In my two gaming groups I played lots of D&D, a few sessions of Dr Who, quite a bit of Pathfinder 1e and a couple of sessions of Starfinder. Also a session of Troika. At the start of the year, we also got to a pause in the ongoing Space 1889 saga with us planning to take out several  war-of-the-worlds-type Martian bases.

I also managed to get play through one scenario of the Arkham Horror Card Game and one game of Gloom of Kilforth. 

On the video game side of things I managed to finish The Excavation of Hobs Barrow. Good folk-horrory, cosmic-horrory game. 

Visual Media

I managed to go to the cinema once this year (actually the first time this decade) to see Weapons, which was… well it’s a fine line between clever and stupid (RIP Rob Reiner). Anyway Weapons was highly enjoyable. 

I can’t remember if I watched anything on streaming that was new this year apart from the new Knives Out film which was quite good.

It wasn’t a great year for TV really. Severance series 2 had some good bits (goats, ORTBO). Adolescence was technically brilliant but as I don’t have kids I kind of didn’t get the same emotional punch that other people got. The new series of Stranger Things is… well just more Stranger Things but has at least continued the Derek renaissance started by Shrinking.

So my actual favourite TV show of the year was Dept Q, the dark Scottish crime show based upon a dark Scandi-noir book but also quite funny and with MVP Akram, the ‘civilian’ assistant.

I’ve also had a subscription to National Theatre At Home this year as we’re stuck inside for… reasons.  I’ve watched some good stuff on too - a sweary play about the Bronte sisters starring Gemma Whelan, one about Nicola Walker teaching Welsh Miners and London Tides, based on Dickens with some epic music by PJ Harvey’s.

Audio media

This year I have almost exclusively listened to 80s bands - Propaganda, The Cardiacs, Half Man Half Biscuit, Swans, Nine Inch Nails (they count just) - and Doom Folk (Lankum, John Francis Flynn)

I’ve listened to a fair few podcasts too. I noticed that my backlog was up to 324 hours so I’ve made an effort to get through them. And now it’s only… 377 hours.

Anyway, I’ve listened tti lots of good stuff - actual plays of The Between and Brindlewood Bay, Grizzly Peaks Radio (Cthulhu) plus the usual monthly smart party/grognard files/Jackson Elias. 

However, I think the best thing I listened to this year was… The Silt Verses (which finished a year ago I know). Truly excellent nasty horror satire. The river rises!

Books

I’ve managed to read quite a lot this year. I’ve already blogged about Tana French. 

I managed to read a variety of stuff - some of the British Library tales of the weird series. Some Alan Moore and M John Harrison weirdness.  

Also, more conventionally, the children of time books by Adrian Tchaikovsky and some books by Emma Newman (who also do a rather interesting podcast together about books and things they like).

Bargain of the year was probably the Raymond Chandler book I got from poor dead WH Smiths for £1. Look out for this guy - he can write. 

I’ve also picked up a few graphic novels/comics this year. The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen was pretty good as was In the trees where nobody sees. I also liked Helen of Wyndhorn and Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Everly.

Other stuff

 I signed up for another OU module on Statistics. Sort of wish I hadn’t now but slowly working my way through it.

I ought to have compared what I blogged with predictions for the year ahead with what actually happened I suppose. Maybe next time but that’s probably enough for now.

Ars Magica - review, retrospective ?

 Imagine a medieval Europe where everything that people believed then existed or could exist. Magic is real, Dragons are real…

No wait… come back… this isn’t Game of Bloody Thrones.

This is your actual Europe with France and popes and all that too. Welcome to Mythic Europe.

I heard Adrian Tchaikovsky (off of books) talking about Ars Magica the other day and, with the imminent release of the definitive edition, thought to myself, why not spew forth a load of pixel words on the subject.

So Ars Magica (which as we all know is Latin for Anus Sorcery) is commonly held to have the best magic system of any TTRPG. The deceptively simple combination of 5 verbs and 10 nouns that allows you to define pretty much any spell you could think of.

But there is much more to it than that.

Much like Traveller, it has a fairly simple dice mechanic that is then used to power a range of sub-systems adding complexity to the game, from researching spells to improving your covenant (i.e. base).

And you are in for the long run. Pendragon may have campaigns that run for generations but your wizard can live for 300 years. Typically the game will start in the early 13th century but I am aware of campaigns where the mages had relocated to the new world.

The setting does pretty much cover everything that people thought was real in Medieval. So your wizards will have to deal with petty nobles, malevolent faeries and the church. And yes, God is definitely real here but similarly so are demons. And both are likely to be bad news for mages. 

There is a wealth of setting material covering Iceland down to Africa and from Iberia to the Middle East (albeit some books are nominally for earlier editions).

Another thing that makes the game out is that it pretty much invented the idea of troupe style play, where each player has multiple characters to play - a mage, a competent non-mage companion or one of a shared group of red-shirted soldiers and servants called grogs.

So why play these non-magical characters? Well Ars Magica is a fairly unique RPG in you don’t really get more powerful from doing adventures. You get more powerful from doing research. In fact, going off on adventures just wastes valuable experimentation time.

In most scenarios I played, much of the first session would be the mages bickering about who would have to go and do the adventure. Once that bit was settled, the unlucky mage plus the other players companions and a bunch of grogs would head off to do the adventure.

Furthermore, nobody likes mages much - this is an effect of the magical ‘gift’. So you tend to need companions and the like to help with interactions  with normal people.

When I played we took the troupe style play to its extreme and rotated the GM role too. This had the advantage that everybody got to play all the roles but the downside was that… well I was pretty terrible at GMing it.

So what about the downsides. Well some of these may turn people off.

Well it is quite a daunting game. There’s a lot of setting (albeit one you are likely to have some idea about) and there’s a lot of maths involved - some dice can double and there’s a lot of point buying with numbers that can get quite high. I think the latest edition (5th) is slightly less complex than the 4th edition I played but it’s still likely to be an issue for any maths-phobes.

It’s also fairly easy to make yourself a Magus who is a load of crap. Particularly, if you are a new player. I think the 5th edition character creation helps with this and indeed many disadvantages you pick up can drive the story forward.

There’s a lot of Lore too. The 5th edition is “complete” covering almost the entirety of the setting in 40-odd books (with any exceptions covered in earlier lore books). However, I found a lot of these to be fairly dry reads. On the other hand you can ignore it - we played for over two years using only a core rulebook, an AA roadmap, a couple of errata printed from the internet and what we knew about the Middle Ages.

The game is designed for campaign play so a one-shot is unlikely to show it off in its best light. 

None of those issues were big problems for us. In fact, Ars Magica gave me many of my favourite gaming moments.

So in summary, should you meddle in the affairs of wizards and play Ars Magica? Well yes… if you have the time to play a campaign.  The new revised rules are pretty pricey but there’s a lot of game there if you want.

As for me… well,  it would be good to GM it properly. Maybe I’ll play around with the rules a bit.

Hey, if you’ve got any questions or comments get in touch.

2024 Retrospective

As is traditional (well not on this blog yet because it’s the first time but anyway) it’s time to look back at the year and reflect on what we’ve done. CW: there’s quite a bit of personal stuff and mentions of mental health and death and general ramblings of a grumpy middle-aged man.

So this year:

On a personal side, the year started with my father’s funeral. Then the cat died at the end of February.  Unfortunately, I’m at the age where a lot of people I know have also lost love ones through the year.

On a brighter note, 3 kittens arrived in May bringing total madness and 1 dead bird (so far). Also, 3 people I roleplay with have got married.

I have been suffering with depression for a while now but a number of things have helped me this year.  I attended a number of sessions with a mental health nurse and talking through things has helped.

I started collecting and painting miniatures. I’m not very good but it’s quite relaxing. This really started with the gnome blood-bowl team but I’ve painted loads of things for my D&D game.

My partner requires carers but we had funding problems at the start of the year. When this got resolved, I was able to go into office for a couple of days a week, which has made me more productive at work

I started this blog back in January, which has been a good outlet for my terrible puns of nothing else.

So onto roleplaying games:

My Monday group passed 15 years of playing together - online since 2020. I’ve played numerous sessions of Space 1887 using Hero system rules and also Dr Who..

I ran one session of Call of Cthulhu for them, which seemed to work out ok. No-one died.

On Fridays, I was a player with my face-to-face group as we finished off Strahd (5e). My monk-librarian decided to become a Lich.

I then ran 24 sessions (including session 0) of Night’s Dark Terror (also 5e). This has run even longer than I thought it would - it’s amazing how much content some of those old modules had. However, there were several memorable bits that emerged from play or I added in: the dual between the half-elf and a goblin king, Droop the snake-worshipping goblin and of course, the goose hydra.

I’m really enjoying being a DM again despite getting more and more disenchanted with the 5e rules. 

On my blog I also wrote one review and one rant about D&D.

I think my favourite rpg book that I got this year was the WFRP 4e Imperial Zoo, which was fun to read.

I bought a number of good minis, including a massive pathfinder Gold Dragon, the goose hydra (obviously), the warhammer darkoath marauders especially the chief’s New Romantic horse and a number of weird 3D prints by Vae Victis. Special mention must go to the gnome blood bowl team that started all 

Other stuff from this year: 

I managed to read quite a few books this year - I started trying to read in the evenings before bed. Highlights included Anna Smith Sparks grim-dark Empires of Dust books, a couple of Tana French’s Dublin Murders books, The Boys in the Valley - horror novel by Philip Fracassi and also Kim Newman’s Guineveve warhammer stories (some of which I hadn’t read before).

I think the best tv show was Shrinking on Apple.  There were quite a few other things I watched that weren’t as good as previous series.

Podcasts I’ve enjoyed this year include: what would the smart party do, how we roll, grizzly peaks radio and Hell or high rollers.

I didn’t play many video games of note. The Arkham Horror video game with props Road to Innsmouth and my colleague’s game PrinterSim are the only ones that spring to mind.

I didn’t manage to go to the theatre or cinema as my partner is a bit housebound at the moment. I think the only album I bought was the final Shellac one.

I was going to look ahead to next year but I’ve already gone on too long so I’ll do that later.

So with that, 2024: off you pop. Happy new year.

NDT session 14: Babushka, Babushka, ya, ya

A battle with a shadow.

 Wolfskull Lair.

Present: Namfoodle, Bait and Glimmer.

The party finished exploring the lair and found some treasure including magic arrows.

Then they took Babushka back to Sukiskyn. Along the way she explained some of the plot and revealed the hobgoblins were looking for a ‘great map’ and there was someone known as ‘ole skinny legs’ at Xitaqa.

The residents of Sukiskyn didn’t know anything about Xitaqa but Stellios and Kuzma suggested they ask the Horse Lord in the hills. He could be summoned near some ancient tombs by standing on one leg and whistling at midnight for 3 nights running.

The party travelled to the tombs with the intention of travelling in to see the gnomes. The tombs turned out to be 3 burial mounds of scorched barren earth. The camped out and at midnight Glimmer did as suggested. The next day the party decided to explore the ruins. After losing a race to the bottom of the mound, Glimmer had to go and lead the party into the first tomb.

 As soon as she stepped onto the mound darkness surrounded her. This was not apparent to those still outside the mound. 

Worse was to follow as 5 shadows emerged and attacked Glimmer draining strength as well as causing significant wounds. A desperate battle followed as the shadows wrecked havoc on the part. However the battle finally started to go the way of the party when Bait turned the undead.

To be continued…

DM notes: I let the party level up after finishing the wolf skull lair, which probably saved them from a near TPK by the shadows, which are nasty.

NDT Session 11: More Goblins

A Petrified Forest within the Dymrak Forest

Present: Rurik and Glimmer (plus Droop)

The group had arrived at a petrified forest, presumably caused by some ancient curse, that was said to be the home of the Wolfskull goblins.

After travelling along a creepy trail they heard a group of goblins and wolves approaching. The party successfully hid themselves and ambushed the patrol.

The party gained some unexpected assistance from another goblin, who seemed quite handy with a whip. The Wolgskull’s were quickly dispatched. 

The newcomer turned out to be a renegade Wolfskull called Bait who was seeking revenge on Kloss the King of the Wolfskulls. He decided to join forces with the party.

Bait led the group to the Wolfskull lair which was formerly a copse of tree surrounded by a black stream. 

The party crossed the bridge into the lair where they were attacked some goblin guards and a wolf. A couple of the guards ran off deeper into the lair.

The remaining wolf and goblins were quickly despatched, mainly by a moonbeam spell from Rurik but more wolves kept arriving from deeper in the lair. The guards had obviously started releasing them from pens within.

To be continued.

2023 and the Year Ahead

A somewhat late retrospective

2023 saw the continuation of our long-running Space 1889 campaign using the Hero rule system. Our plans continue to thwart the evil masters of Mars from invading Earth by… erm... invading Mars plus various shenanigans involving nuclear reactors in Africa. This campaign has been running since 2015 but moved online when COVID struck.

I also play Doctor Who with this group – the continuing adventures through the time streams of The Custodian, his Office, a cat and a bunch of motley companions.

For the first half of the year, I also played with another group online. We played though the The One Ring Starter set and some of The Children of Fear for Call of Cthulhu. Both are highly recommended by me.

Sadly, circumstances meant that I had to stop playing with that group but on the upside, I was able to rejoin another group where we play face-to-face.  So, I’m currently playing a monk in the Curse of Strahd.

Plans for the year ahead

Doctor Who and Space 1889 continue. That group is going o try playing D&D face-to-face as well (we are spread across the south coast now) but unfortunately, I won’t be able to join them for now.

Hopefully, we should deal with Strahd soon (or he’ll deal with us) so we will move onto something else. There was not much enthusiasm for anything too different, so I have offered to run a 5e campaign. However, I would be converting the old Basic/Expert adventure Night’s Dark Terror. I intend to post more about this. Alternatively, someone else has offered to run Pathfinder.