Bjørn Røyrvik's page

"The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer" is less than 200 pages and an easy read. One aspect which somewhat lessens the horror is how BOB also writes in the diary. Still an unpleassant story which sheds light on the linchpin character of Twin Peaks (dare I say 'lynchpin'?).

Anyway, Lee is still on hold as I go for something a little brighter: The Oath and the Measure by Michael Williams, a Dragonlance book starring Sturm Brightblade.

The giant crab dealt with and partially eaten, the party thanked the Immortals that they are on dry land again. The Necklace of Adaptation that most of the party uses to survive underwater makes no mention of whether it prevents prune-skin and general waterlogging of the body, but regardless, feeling dry was pleasant for everyone, even Tibor who is generally happy being in the water.

The party decides to head up the small mountain - little more than a hill, really - in the middle of the island to get a better idea of the lay of the land. Sharp-eyed Sylvia recognizes some blood lilies and steers the party well away from them as they make their way through the jungle. The party soon comes across a pit of highly caustic liquid with signs of something big in the area. Tibor spots the giant serpent-thing before it attacks and manages to tank the blow. The combat is over quickly as a Lightning Bolt from Vår, a full attack from Tibor and a charge from Bo-bi take care of the beastie without any damage taken by the party. Sylvia had recognized the creature and warned about its acidic blood but Bo-bi had promptly forgotten that when given an opportunity to charge, and damaged his nice lance in the process of killing the seps.

Shortly after the creature’s demise another strange being appears, one that looks like a big cat made of bushes and leaves. Our druid again shows her skills and identifies this as a form of nature spirit that typically acts as a guardian for the ecosystem of an area. Sylvia and Tibor can speak with it and introduce themselves and their purpose. Vår feels left out so she casts Tongues and takes over the conversation. The guardian is pleased that we took care of the seps but warns of another creature to the south that has caused great devastation. The party inform the guardian that they have already killed the big crab, which also pleases it. The party then asks if there are any tombs or temples on the island. The guardian does not understand the concept so the party has to try to explain. ‘Tomb’ was explained as “a bunch of rocks piled on a humanoid corpse to prevent it from being recycled” and ‘temple’ was described as “a bunch of rocks piled on each other where humanoids like to spend some time”. The guardian, luckily, understands these explanations and knows where these buildings are, and warns of spirit naga and some humans that have recently taken up residence there. What the party knows of spirit nagas gives the impression of emo-goths - they aren’t conformist like the rest of us squares, and they like to hang around graveyards because it’s all spooky and reflects the darkness in their soul and stuff. They probably drink absinthe and smoke clove cigarettes, too. Worse, as the party later finds out, they make modern art. For some reason Vår wants to pet the guardian. She approaches and tries to touch it. Like a cat not wanting to be petted it evades. Not taking a hint, Vår asks if she can touch the guardian. It seems puzzled but allows Vår to do so. It feels like a bush, not a cat.

The party is guided to the tomb and they quickly disable the gaunt, raggedy humans on guard outside. Tibor had hoped one of the casters had prepared a Silence spell as well as Invisibility so they could take out the guards quietly but no such luck, so the spirit naga are aware of the party’s presence when they enter. These guards are surprisingly stabby, Tibor’s AC is high enough that they cannot crit him but other party members are not so lucky. Tibor insists on trying to take them alive but the spellcasters have few non-lethal spells and just blast away. In spite of this they are taken alive and bound, under the watchful eye of the guardian while the party investigates the tomb.
Tibor takes point and spots a few traps, which the party bypasses without issue. The battle against the spirit naga is dangerous and Tibor only gets off two hits against them because of having to move in to attack. The rest of the party are pretty good, and most people make their saves against the charm gaze, though Lucius is convinced this is all a big misunderstanding and tries to get everyone to just get along. The party takes quite a bit of damage but ultimately prevail. The tomb is full of statues that have been broken apart and rearranged in weird ways, like a couple of young non-conformists making a statement about everyone just doing the same old thing with representational art. The sarcophagus reveals a skeleton and a visibly magic lance, which Lucius identifies as a perfectly mundane weapon with Nystul’s Magic Aura cast on it. He briefly considers letting the prankster in him come to the fore and just let everyone think it was really a powerful magic weapon, but then considers the consequences if they say the mission is done and return to Talasantri with a dud. The party is slightly perturbed at this reveal and briefly wonder if the legendary magic weapon was a Kung Fu Panda type thing - the true strength was in you all along, not the weapon - but a little more rummaging around (which I think the DM just told us we did rather than it being the result of the players’ actions) reveals a lever under the corpse. When pulled, a large winding staircase leads down into the depths of the island. The party heads down and comes to a clam-shell shaped room which contains a sarcophagus and yet another naga. This naga dies easily, being alone and the target of a challenge and charge from Bo-bi. Along with remains of creatures used to decorate the room (it is unclear if this is some form of magic or merely very edgy art) there is a bucket with an octopus in it. It escapes the bucket and tries to run but Sylvia manages to convince it that they will help it back to the sea and returns it to the bucket. Tibor considers naming it “Calamari”.

As the party is catching their breath a ghost manifests. This is presumably the ghost of the hero that saved Talasantri a while back. Tibor attempts to make peaceful contact with it but it complains that it wants us to stop doing something to it and casts Confusion on the group and attacks. Josephine gives everyone Ghost Touch and Tibor smacks the ghost a few times and it dissipates, but now we have Aidu, Vår and Sylvia all confused and a fair amount of blue on blue violence occurs. The first victim is the poor octopus, who Vår casts Magic Missile on, turning it into octopus soup (Nothing with that many tentacles is safe, to Vår’s way of thinking). Seeing where this is headed, Tibor steps up and full attacks Vår into unconsciousness, then does the same to Sylvia, eating a Magic Missile on the way (to Sylvia it looked like Tibor had gone mad and attacked Vår for no reason). He then puts himself between the downed PCs and Aidu (Aidu saw Tibor attacking the rest of the party and wanted in on the fun). Tibor smacks Aidu into unconsciousness as well and watches over everyone for a long time before he allows Josephine to heal them up. Everyone looks a bit sheepish afterwards.

Looting the tomb reveals the proper lance* they came for and a few other items on the Wavewanderer's body. The lance is taken, the naga looted and Tibor insists that they spend a few hours removing the corpses of the naga and washing the tomb in general. He also convinces the party to leave the other items on the Wavewanderer. They also leave a note in a few different tongues explaining why they took the lance, with a promise to return and try to lay him to rest for good. He reasons that this is the tomb of an honored dead and looting and leaving it full of rotting corpses (other than the intended occupant’s) is just unacceptable.
The rest of the party agree, though Tibor ends up doing most of the work.

The human guards outside are in much better shape now and seem to have recovered from their charm. They are castaways from Minrothad, washed up on shore and charmed by the naga. Some of their companions were taken by something in the temple on the other side of the island. They have no more information to share, so Vår shows off her Teleport spell and takes them to Thincol’s Jewel, with the promise of trying to help their compatriots (if they are still alive) and get everyone back to Minrothad. Back in the colony, Ramona is glad for the update and promises to help the sailors. They are very grateful for their deliverance and swear to stay on land from now on.
We end the session there.

*This ‘lance’ is short enough to wield in one hand even in normal combat; that makes it a spear, not a lance.

The DM casually mentioned that her other group did the entire island in a single session, subtly telling us that we are slo-o-o-ow. No great arguments about rules this time. This was Tibor’s day with many many strikes actually hitting and several crits. It just takes someone giving him at least +3 to hit for him to be effective. I don’t know how to feel about the fact that his hands down most effective combat encounter was against his comrades.
His saves also kept him un-charmed, Tongue of the Sun and Moon has proved useful, and immunity to poison is very nice.

What really bugged us was how a bunch of random sailors have 12 heroic levels. Why aren’t these folks at least captains of their own ships instead of deck hands? Yes, the reason is that the writer of the adventure needed level appropriate encounters but it just doesn't make sense from a world-building perspective. Maybe this ship full of 12th level Fighter/Rogues had some secret purpose that is not readily apparent.

We all have Necklaces of Adaptation, bar Vår who has a Pearl of the Sirines. And pressure changes do bad things to water-breathers as well - just look at what happens to certain deep sea fish that get pulled up.

The would-be assassin and his pile of ‘obvious surface-dweller clues’, such as a boot and a waterskin, are taken into custody and moved out of the house. The guests hurry home and Anemora again expresses gratitude to her supermarine guests. She gracefully leaves out the bit where she probably wouldn’t have been targeted if the desiccated dust-huffers hadn’t been her guests in the first place.
The next morning the party again meets with Rillkimatai (sp?) who informs them of an ancient hero of Talasantri, a surface-dweller who aided the city in defeating a terrible foe and lost his life in the process. With word that said foe is stirring again, he bargains with the party: he will give them all the information he has about aboleths if they retrieve the powerful weapon said hero wielded to defeat the plankta (not to be confused with ‘plankton’). Slightly annoyed at yet another delay but understanding his position, the party agrees. On cue, yet another disturbance is heard outside. When the PCs and Rilli investigate, and see a giant bristleworm charging towards the party. Bo-bi jumps on Aidu and charges the thing and tears it apart before it can do much of anything. The inhabitants of Talasantri seem very impressed and cheer and crowd the party and do all sorts of cheering and touching. The very observant among the party notice someone trying to slip something into Bo-bi’s pockets and when it falls out someone in the crowd shouts “It was the surface-dwellers who disturbed the bristleworm - I saw them plant the explosives.”

Sylvia asks how it is possible that the party could have done it when they have been in the company of several witnesses of good standing for the past day or so. Vår bemoans the fact that they have done nothing but help people here and horrid accusations are all the thanks they get, and Tibor darts out and grabs the merrow who cast aspersions at the party. The merrow protests loudly but Tibor says these are serious accusations and fortunately for the merrow the head of the city is right over here and can hear the accusations. The merrow is dragged over and quickly admits that he was paid to blame the party for this event. No good description of the person who paid the culprit off was gained, though the party did get a name from the would-be assassin, which they intend to follow up on.

The party, being fully rested, thinks there is no time to waste and packs their bags to set out. On their way out of town, a cecilia approaches them and says that Jurix wishes to speak with them. Though briefly considered, the party rejects the idea of an ambush meant to soothe a wounded pride at their previous refusal to do as she asked, and go to meet the self-styled queen of the undersea. Jurix gets straight to the point and says she knows of the party’s mission and asks if they would be willing to take a little side-quest and loot an abandoned temple for a specific item. After some discussion the party decides to add the quest to their Quest Log, with the option of never finishing it. In other words, they say they will keep the quest in mind when they reach the surface but make no promises to fulfill the task. They will, if they decide to loot the temple, return with the desired item and not just steal everything for themselves. Privately they decide that if they do go after the side quest, they will see if the object in question is too dangerous to hand over.
Tibor is a bit uneasy about any form of deal with criminals but hopes that a polite and non-committal answer will serve them better than a flat denial.

After this the party finally heads off. A brief encounter with some sharkfolk and a dire shark - which swallows Bo-bi and Aidu and instantly regrets it as it is torn in half from the inside. The rules for being swallowed need to be nastier, is my take on the subject.

More seriously is the ascent. Aquatic Adventures has some rules for pressure changes but they are terrible rules which end up meaning that the longer you spend acclimatizing to pressure changes, the worse it is for you. There was a long, long b***# session which ends up with the GM caving in to pressure just to get the noise to stop and the show on the road again. This pleases the party because now they can ascend and descend safely so long as they spend a little time doing so, and this means game time will be saved because we don’t have to roll a lot of saves. Seriously, the original rules mean that IRL the vast majority of people would die trying to go deeper than 100 feet, no matter how careful they try to be.

The party then makes it to their destination and are quickly beset by a gargantuan crab. It grabs and nearly kills Aidu, and Tibor finally manages to hit on every attack in a round (thanks to +8 to hit from various bonuses) and do nearly as much damage with six attacks as Bo-bi can do with one.

The session ends here.

Though the GM got annoyed at the time spent on complaining about bad rules, for me it was As Things Should Be, considering the amount of time we spent discussing bad or lacking rules back when I started gaming. The GM’s other group is far more likely to shrug and get on with the game rather than try to fix bad rules.

I read about a third of "The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee" before I could put it away in favor of re-reading The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch.

This was actually my first direct encoutner with Twin Peaks when I read it the first time soon after it was published. My friends all got to stay up late watching TP but I wasn't allowed. As one might expect it's a pretty depressing and scary book.

Double Huzzah!!!!!

Ah Dallas, the perfect late evening soap opera.

It was on early afternoone here, just after we got home from school. My sister got off before I did so would always get to hog the TV, and she would watch this. Because I was an idiot and had to watch TV rather than doing something sensible like read more books, I watched whatever was on even if I didn't like it.

"The Greatest Show on Earth" was well-written and entertaining. I could mostly forget my opinion of the author while reading it. I skimmed over a few bits that were familiar, and read the bits which were new.

A couple months ago I was browsing the webstore of one of Norway's largest book stores, and as usual I searched for Tanith Lee in the vain hope she will appear. I've done this regularly for years, with no luck. This time I got a hit: The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee. I must have experienced a moment of dissociation because one moment I was looking at the hit and the next there was a "Thank you for your order" sign on screen with no perceptible time in between.
I did not think to check if these were stories I already had and rationalized the purchase with "If I show any interest it will hopefully help get her other stuff back in print, and if I should happen to already have these I will gift the book to someone to spread the joy of Lee".
Fortunately for me, I only have a few of the couple dozen stories in here. It's a collection of the short stories Lee wrote for Weird Tales over the years, spanning most of her career. I will probably only read a few stories at a time before putting it aside to read something else, just to spread out the joy.

'A Voyage To Arcturus', by David Lindsey. Very strange, and something I will need to re-read (again).

I read that last year (?) and liked it, but as you say, it is strange and will need to be re-read at some point.

It's been fun, best of luck...

That sounds ominous. Are you leaving us?

Which is fair. I just hope I gave an accurate impression of the film.

or
is it because i dont heal anything with my ability by itself no healing is awarded.

This is how I interpret it.

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

Incoherent ramblings done, I can say this: go see it if you are at all interested in it

I'm finding it hard to vision a review that would make me LESS likely to go see this movie :-). I was slightly interested in this movie until I read this review :-)

*clears throat*

Ohmigod, you guys, this was such a, like, the best movie everrrr. It get's everything just, right, you know.

Better?
Give it a try when it gets out on a streaming service, at least.

Possible take of the various encounters like the giants is that they look fantastical but are actually explainable by being humans or natural events(Such as the giants are just the responding forces who killed Odysseus' men)

Yeah, this is very heavily implied. Everything supernatural is almost certainly Odysseus' own interpretation and processing of his trauma and guilt rather than actual supernatural stuff.

The wife and I watched it yesterday and enjoyed it.

It's not a perfect movie by any means, but it was good on the whole.
My thoughts, incomplete and in no particular order:

The length
For being nearly 3 hours it was well paced. I was never bored or felt it dragged.

The cast.
Obligatory complaints about unlikely ethnicities aside, everyone did a good job, though some were a bit harder to take seriously than others: Jon Berenthal's Menelaus looked like Andrew Tate only manly, and behaved somewhat like that, though one may excuse some of that based on PTSD. Damon did a good job. Not who I would choose for a more straight adaptation of the story but he did a good job for this take on the character and story.

The visuals.
The movie was rather dark and colorless and lots of the places seem weird. There was the very strange look and variety of the armor and ships. I don't imagine Troy being located in the middle of a barren sandy beach, there were no signs of ten years of camps outside the walls, there were tigers in the Mediterranean, etc. etc. more seriously, the action was very blurry. Dark scenes, flashing lights, shaky cam and cuts every second or two. Seriously, I had to look away in certain scenes to avoid triggering a migraine.
There were some standout scenes, like the design of Polyphemus and Circe turning the crew into swine.

The sound
Fine, if excessively, painfully loud. I don't know if it was an artifact of the theater I was in but I wished I had brought ear plugs.

Changes from the poem.
Hoo boy, there were many, but most of it is there and treated mostly faithfully. There are the obvious and expected changes like making Odysseus more likable, making him and Penelope a loving couple. Some OK changes, trying to keep Telemachus' hands clean at the slaughter of the suitors rather than having a bonding moment with his dad in killing people, leaving out a few encounters like Hippotes, changing the cyclops encounter a bit, etc.
Some were pretty interesting, like Circe's motivation.

More seriously, this story focuses on weighty themes like betrayal, honor, how war ruins people and places, and the end of an era. I was fine with the implication that the supernatural elements were Odysseus' way of interpreting and processing his feelings rather than things that actually happened. This also makes sense for many of the visual choices, such as Agamemnon's armor being so strange compared to everyone else's and why the terrain around Troy is so featureless - everything else was irrelevant to his memories and mental issues. Tying him and his crew into the Bronze Age Collapse by making them the Sea People was an interesting choice, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Ignore for a moment the problems of scale and time, and the horrible lines about "This is the end of the Bronze Age" and only songs being sung of his age "No one will be able to read after this".

Incoherent ramblings done, I can say this: go see it if you are at all interested in it.

We spent one and a half sessions on levelling up and divvying loot. Efficient, we are not. Among the freed prisoners of the aboleth was an aquarendi called Nieran who was reluctantly grateful for his rescue. Despite his ordeal he was superior and slightly unpleasant to interact with but he did give the party their next Clue for continuing the AP: upon hearing of a second aboleth and something called a veiled master (which he doubted danced the seven veils), he suggested we visit the sages of his home city which was not far off. He swam home, and the party said farewell to the woodies and took the rescuees home.
After this, lots of time after this was spent on talking to Ramona about what we had uncovered and what we were going to do, going back to the observatory we had ignored when hunting for the colonists and looting that place, Sylvia indulging in a bit of crafting while we catch our breaths and help reintegrate the new and old recovered colonists in the town, etc. etc. Tibor, accompanied by Aidu, also took some time to visit Whiskas (sp?) the water naga and inform her of their recent archeological findings. Once the shop talk is concluded they whinge a bit about how icky mammals are.

Then the party sets off to find this underwater city that Nieran spoke of. Obviously they almost immediately get caught by sargasso. As befits a D&D adventure, this sargasso was not just a pile of seaweed but had big seaweed monsters. Almost everyone fell under the spell, and those who didn’t were still carried towards the monsters by the charmed hippocampi. The fight gave some damage and some resources were spent. Then we dived deep and had to acclimatize to the pressure, because Necklace of Adaptation does not allow you to adapt to pressure, despite saying it works in vacuum. Go figure.

Going down and down, the party eventually reaches the sea floor and heads towards Talasantri. On the way the see a group of sharkkin hanging around a small cave. Tibor heads over and asks where the city is, to make sure the party is heading the right way. The ruffians make an optimistic claim about turtle for dinner and attack. They are quickly and thoroughly defeated, and a cute little merrow girl emerges from the cave and gushes her thanks to us weird surface dwellers. Surprising exactly no one, Drecissa the little mermaid is from Talasantri and escorts us in and takes us home to her mom. Drecissa is young and bubbly and Bo-bi finds himself somewhat enamored of the teen, leading to very, very many Disney Little Mermaid jokes.

Her mother, Anemora, is regal and very grateful that her daughter was saved by total strangers, and is more impressed that the party declines any reward for their good deed. She does insist that the party remain as her guests and will use her connections to facilitate purchases (which she intimates would see substantial mark-ups for weird surface people). The party gratefully accepts and tells her of their purpose down here. Anemora conveniently knows the leader Talasantri and promises to get the PCs in to see him on short notice. The next day she is as good as her word and takes the party, minus Aidu, Lucius and Josephine. On the way the party sees a distraught kna, and knowing an obvious flag event when they see one, they interact. The poor kna had recently been robbed after having finally gathered enough money to repay a loan to a certain Jurix, the queen of the undersea. Vår correctly identifies a Test of Generosity and offers to spot the poor fishperson the 5000 gp needed. Debebedi (Debbie) is overcome with emotion and Vår also offers to escort her to repay the loan, just to avoid any other unpleasantness on the way home. Before this sidequest, the PCs go to meet Rillkimatai, an ancient sea elf who supposedly knows a lot. He does seem concerned with the news that aboleths are stirring and doing stuff in the area but wants to know a bit more about the surface dwellers’ character before committing to help them. Anemora gives her favorable impression of the PCs and we seem to pass the test. Before the party gets any actual information they hear some hullabaloo outside.

Outside there are some deeper-sea dwellers that are rabble rousing about some new threats arising, and they blame it on the party!
Vår speaks up in their defence, claiming that everything is the fault of the common enemy: the aboleths! She may be making a few assumptions but Tibor at least thinks she is probably right. In any case, both he and Bo-bi ask how they, as surface dwellers who have just barely come down to this depth, can be the cause of whatever nastiness is going on even deeper in the ocean. The rabblerousers have no answer to this but are spared having to defend their position by the surprise appearance of a bloodtide, red algae that poison everything the the city. The PCs obviously rush out and try to herd those too terror stricken to move.
This is easily done and the PCs try to aid those who got poisoned. Some poor rolls mean that Rill takes care of most of the poisoning. The rest of the visit is cut short as Rill has some administrative stuff to do in the wake of the mass poisoning. Anemora is even more impressed by the selfless heroics of the PCs and decides to throw them a fancy dinner the next day. The party then decides to take Debbie to repay her debt.

On the way they meet a cecaelia (which the DM insists is pronounced kekahlia and I insist on pronouncing Cecilia) who claims that it would bring her a lot of clout to be the one to show us newcomers around the undersea. Most of the party thinks this sounds really suspicious and decline the offer. Debbie takes us to the innocuous-looking building that is the entrance to the hive of scum and villainy. Just inside the party is ambushed by the cecilia that tried to lead us into this ambush in the first place.

The fight was rather brutal, since these anthroctopodes were all rogues and were good enough to hit Tibor’s 34 AC on a few occasions. Bo-bi and Debbie both go down and Tibor spends two rounds tossing them outside the building and plugging the hole. The casters spent most of the combat being pretty useless. Granted, having to make concentration checks does hamper them somewhat, but even so. The best spell cast was Haste, followed by Mage Armor on Tibor, which again brings his AC to “only a nat 20”. Tibor’s Stunning Fist does a good job in taking out the enemy (when I remember to use it), and by the time there are three enemies left, they try to talk their way out of things. “Let’s just agree to go our separate ways, OK?” Tibor initially agrees, so long as the two mooks kill their boss. They hesitate, and the party charges in and cleans things up. One of them manages to escape while the last two die. They decide to let the last one flee, not wanting to rush headlong into another trap. After licking their wounds and using basically all their healing in the process, the party heads into the underworld and try to make contact with Jurix. This proves to be rather easy since Jurix sends a messenger with a large black pearl and a written apology for her minions’ idiotic attempt at murder. The PCs conclude that the attack was probably done without Jurix knowledge or permission so accept the apology and arrange a meeting.

Jurix meets the PCs and accept Debbie’s repayment, though the cecilia laughs at Vår’s request for a receipt. The Queen of Crime does ask if the PCs are willing to do a small job for her, willing to pay well and offer access to the black market, which would be a lot cheaper than the xenophobic oversea dwellers’ market. Since the PCs are already guests at Anemora’s place, Jurix would like them to pass on a message because the merrow ‘needs to be reminded of her place’. The party declines, excusing themselves that it would be extremely rude and violate guest rules if they were to do anything to insult or trouble their host. Jurix graciously grants that objection, and wonders if they would instead play ‘a little prank’ on Koramalis, a sea elf artist that the PCs encountered and are friendly with. The PCs again decline, claiming that it would be a bad look for them to get involved in local politics, especially since that might endanger their current mission. Jurix accepts but frostily informs the PCs that the meeting is over. The party quickly makes their way back to the more lawful parts of town, happy that they did not have to fight again.

Once they return to Anemora they discretely inform her of Jurix’ attempt to hire them and assure her that they turned the criminal down. Anemora is grateful for the warning and increases security for dinner.

Dinner is a lavish affair with a variety of undersea foods and a few surface ingredients. Tibor loves the various jellyfish dishes, though the rest of the party are a bit bemused by the idea of onions and mushrooms being exotic foreign food. After dinner the guests and PCs drift away in small groups to talk. Tibor stays with Rill and indulges in picking the elder’s brain on a variety of historical subjects. Bo-bi and Drecissa retire to her room and get to know each other a bit better. Despite the player’s jokes, nothing really happens other than some light kissing. There is some serious discussion about how merrow procreate. They do not have mammalian genitals, so the discussion turns to which of the variety of piscine fertilization and incubation strategies would be most appropriate. There is also some discussion about what would happen if Drecissa cast Fins to Feet: would she get the appropriate plumbing as well as the locomotory appendages of a surface ape.

These questions are put aside when Sylvia hears a strange sound from the floor above, and goes to check it out. She spies an intruder floating next to a bleeding servant and discretely informs both Anemora and the rest of the party. Bo-bi is not found and though he eventually hears the commotion above, he elects to stay and become better acquainted with Drecissa. The fight goes well enough otherwise and the intruder is captured alive for interrogation.

Amazingly enough, the rest of the party guests don’t even notice the fight. Anemora has the intruder bound and woken and they begin questioning. Vår makes the mistake of threatening his life to make him talk, which proves to be something he does not care about. Tibor, as wise as he is, suggests they take the would-be assassin out into town and make it very clear that he is an utterly useless assassin who couldn’t even kill a helpless servant before being noticed and defeated. This proved to be the better threat and he confesses he was hired by someone called Naqualia. Anemora decides she will hand him over to the local authorities since the normal FSB procedure of people falling out of windows doesn’t work very well underwater.

We end the session there.

So this is actually three sessions worth of update in one post, for a variety of uninteresting reasons.

Just becasue this show mimics Shirows style doesn't automatically make it better or make people who basically grew up on the films or the SAC series or ARISE idiots.

I saw the movie first, and I love it and SAC and even ARISE. I just think that people whining that the new show is bad because it isn't like other adaptations when the new adaptation is explicitly trying to be more faithful the the source material are being silly.

And I'd argue that most fans of GITS are familiar with those two over the course of the last 30 years or so.

I agree. I saw the movie first and, as I said, love it and SAC and even ARISE. I just think that people whining that something that is true to the source material is bad because it isn't like other adaptations that are less true are being silly.

I love anime Lupin III, but he is a very different beast than the original manga. I probably prefer animeLupin to manga Lupon. I would not whine that a hypothetical new anime that adapts the original material more faithfully was doing that very thing.

Snuff and Raising Steam seem to get a wide variety of responses, so interesting to see how I feel about them.

I have Snuff in my To Read pile, so I'll get around to it at some point. Never mind that I said I don't want to read any newer Discworld books. I cannot make up my mind, apparently.

"Dragonstar" was good and our heroes were victorious, though at some cost. I will be picking up more of Hambly's work.

I started on Richard Dawkin*'s The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a brief introduction to evolution, mostly aimed at people who don't believe in it. I'm pretty sure this must be a gift because I don't think I would have gotten it for myself. In any case, I cannot remember how it ended up in my To Read pile. So far there isn't really anything I didn't already know. A few details, obviously, but the general thrust of things is familiar.

* even ignoring his increasingly unhinged anti-Muslim fearmongering which drives him into the arms of right-wing nutjob Christians and his falling in love with AI chatbots, it's hard to take anyone who dresses up little dogs and wheels around them in prams seriously.

The first episode of Ghost in the Shell was excellent. The art is pure Shirow Masamune, the animation is very good, and it was a great start all around. I gather there are some idiots online that are complaining that the show is not like the movie and SAC, that the major shows emotion, that there's humor, etc. IOW, they are complaining that the new show is too much like the source material. I can only assume they are not familiar with Shirow's work in general.

Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia

This probably won't be for everyone but it is gorgeous to watch. Personally, it's got me hooked and I'm looking forward to more of it.

I'll probably give this one a shot.

I watched the first episode of Girls don't play fighting games. Pretty meh but it did remind me of my wife, who was pretty decent at Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive at one time. I have fond memories of her wiping the floor with everyone at the local gaming club one summer, to the point where no one wanted to play anyhting other than Tekken against her because she was not as dangerous in that game. I have slightly less fond memories of her wiping the floor with me on a near daily basis for a time.

Yeah, GITS is the big one this season. My wife is gone until tomorrow evning so I'll hold off on watching the first episode until she gets home. Unlike what I assume to be the majority of fans of GITS, she read the manga first and holds it to be superior to the film and SAC.

This morning I tried Kaiju Girl Caramelise* and found it surprisingly entertaining. I'll be watching more episodes, barring a drastic drop in quality.

I also watched the first episode of "Oh boy was I wrong about her", a SOL high school romantic comedy. Seems entertaining enough at first glance.

The wife and I are slowly rewatching Lucky Star between other shows and it mostly holds up after all this time. Some of our enjoyment of it is nostalgia, most of it is due to the quality of the show.

* What is it about Japanese authors that they have a perfectly sensible title in Japanese for whatever they are writing, and insist on slapping on a random English word that makes everything gibberish?

My condolences.

Bloodguard initially struck me as a pretty generic, almost familiar, romantasy, though a tad more gritty than what few romantasies I've read so far. Then two scenes happen which illuminated why this felt so familiar: it's a standard Japanese fantasy world, complete with the dude going all Lucky Pervert and faceplanting into Love Interest-chan's bosom, and the two hiding in a cupboard and pressing up against each other in very intimate ways.
The world needed more explanations and descriptions to shake the very anime image I have of it now. Unlike most crappy fantasy anime, the two actually hook up quickly and they do bang (it's a romantasy, after all), but the whole thing just feels very generic anime.

On to Barbara Hambly's Dragonstar, the fourth and final (?) Winterlands novel. Let's hope it's the RotJ to "Knight of the Demon Queen" 's TESB.

I only watched Dorohedoro 2, Witch Hat Atelier and Fist of the North Star of airing anime last season, though I am slowly making my way through Armored Trooper VOTOMS (though at this point it's moving into sunk costs territory).
I tried a couple others but gave up after an episode or two and cannot even remember which ones they were.

I haven't really looked at what's coming this season. The only things that popped out are the second season of FOTNS: Elegy for the Henchmen which follows an unlucky recruit into one of the many mohawked gangs of intellectually challenged goons in the FOTN world, and I do indeed like big girls. I did not know it was getting an adaptation until yesterday. I will probably be watching it without my wife.

The weekend was spent with an aunt and cousin from across the pond who I haven't seen in 14 years. It was wonderful to catch up for two days before they rushed off to the west coast for two days in Bergen with my sister, then up to our cabin for a few days before rushing home. They have nine days, and there's a lot of traveling involved.

I liked how the space visuals looked and all the different aliens and such. Some folks didn't like the color filters but I thought they were a clever way to keep you aware of what kind of sun the characters were under at the moment. Soundtrack was good.

Forgot to mention these points. Yeah, we really liked the Star Wars Cantina feel of the universe, the color filters make sense: if you have different color suns you'll have different color sunlight, which means everything will look different than it does on Earth.

I liked the ghostpocalypse and the basic plot was OK but I disliked everything else about that movie.

Unseen Academicals was when I realized I didn't want to read any of the newer Discworld books.

"Jenny Waynest's son took poison on the night of winter's first snowfall. He was thirteen."

This is how "Knight of the Demon Queen" starts, and while the protagonists do see a few minor wins, things generally go down hill from there. The first two books were self-contained stories but KotDQ stops at what is probably the nadir of the story that is concluded in the next book, "Dragonstar". These are books that manage to portray demons as truly dangerous and abhorrant, not just strangely shaped opponents to stick your sword in.
But next up Bloodguard by Cecy Robson.

Never mind this bit:

There were a number of instances where I wondered

The dangers of not going over my post before posting and the limited edit window.

We're lazy and buy the storemade version and fry them up ourselves. With properly prepared vegetables, homemade mashed potatoes and Toro cream sauce, it's pretty good.

Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it. Not as good as Superman but still fun.
The action was a bit iffy for my getting-old eyes - a bit too much quick editing and things hidden in the dark and whatnot. Power levels were all over the place and the story was utterly predictable and uninspired, the flow of time was a bit weird, and a number of hand-waved situations to clean up the resolution; so all in all, very comic book-y.
Alcock did a good job in the role. I know very little of the source material so I cannot speak to how true it is to that, but the character and story as presented in the film worked. There were a number of instances where I wondered

Most importantly, they did the Main Man dirty, by which I mean they did him right. He's nasty, brutal, rude and a ton of fun to watch. I was afraid they would make him too nice, and while they did tone him down a bit from his most over the top portrayals (he's a supporting character, after all) Momoa's Lobo was a blast to watch.

Not as good as the He-Man film, but still worth the trip to the movies.

"Knights of the Rose" was pretty average all the way through. The final fight was kinda disjointed and the epilogue stuff was ratehr hasty and perfunctory. A few weird issues like some girl being more excited about marrying The Hunk than exhausted and grief-stricken after a big fight in which both her parents died.

Then I read The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch, yet another Rivers of london story, though this is a novella and is strictly speaking a Rivers of Germany story. New country, new magical traditions, new characters. Like the rest of the series, it's very readable but, frankly, it's getting a bit same-y. New protag is less nerdy and less inclined to making smart remarks than Peter, but everything else feels very much the same. I still have a couple in my To Read pile, but we'll see how many more of the series I'll buy.

Next up is Barbaray Hambly's Knight of the Demon-Queen, third in the Winterlands series. I'm looking forward to it but also a bit apprehensive, considering how much of an emotional wringer the deuteragonists were put through last book and what the title of this one promises.

I'm excited.

With soggy vegetables and crappy Swedish meatballs forever....the horror!

OTOH, decent cinnamon buns...

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

I thought I had checked rather carefully when buying it that it was not in a series, so I looked again. There was absolutely nothing on the cover or the outermost pages that indicated this book was anything but a standalone story. I looked online and found out that it was indeed the fourth in a series. I cursed the people who decided to not put the novel's status as part of a larger series in an easily accessibly place...

Yeah. And even when a book DOES make it clear that it's part of a series - for example, by throwing a blurb on the cover like "A Such-And-Such Novel" - it often fails to tell us which number of the series it is. And even when some page towards the beginning lists a bunch of novels in the series, that list is often incomplete and out of order. It strikes me as an odd way to try to sell books.

Ugh. That's another thing that gets my goat. I must have had quite a large herd of goats, considering how many have been gotten by various people and the things they do.

To be absolutely accurate, "Mother of Winter" did have a line of "Doom comes to Darwaith", or something like that, which does actually indicate it is part of a series ... if you have already read the previous books.

I started on Barbara Hambly's "Mother of winter" and got a few a few pages in before I got the feeling this was part of a series. I thought I had checked rather carefully when buying it that it was not in a series, so I looked again. There was absolutely nothing on the cover or the outermost pages that indicated this book was anything but a standalone story. I looked online and found out that it was indeed the fourth in a series. I cursed the people who decided to not put the novel's status as part of a larger series in an easily accessibly place, then put it aside. I'll probably pick up the first three books at some point.

Then I started on Roland Green's Knights of the Rose, a Dragonlance novel I picked up at the used book store, and realized that it too had preceding stories. I sighed and kept on reading it. It's a pretty average D&D story of the era.

I had indeed read "Assassin's Orbit" before. It was still fun. And I also managed to misspell the author's name: Appel, not Apple.
I've also been reading a fan made Creature Crucible for aranea (the monstrous spellcasting spiders in Mystara) and a Thothia gazetteer (again, for Mystara). Darn good stuff. I may be biased but I think the Mystaran fan community has some of the best game material you can find.
Also, the most recent issue of Wildspace magazine, the Spelljammer fanzine. More good stuff, and it has articles by Roger E. Moore (yes, that Roger E Moore) and Eric Boyd (yes, that Eric L. Boyd).

"Humble pi" was fun. Lots of interesting errors. One little detail about it I loved was that it listed pages in the reverse order, showing how many pages you had left to rather than how many you had read thus far. For someone like me, this was perfect and I wish more books would do this.

I found Assassin's orbit by John Apple in my To Read pile and started it on the bus to work this morning. Only a few pages in I thought to myself "hey, haven't I read this already?"
I'm slowly getting more convinced I have but since I don't remember much about it, I'll keep reading it.

They were fine, better than expected, but not something I need to watch again any time soon.
Sure, they beat the heck out of that other attempt at a Ghostbusters remake but they were not better than 2, IMO.

An author that has been on my "I really should try at some point" list for many years. Maybe this will be the kick in the pants I need.
RIP

"The Starmen of Llyrdis" was OK. It was from the Golden Age but if I were to get all review-y I'd say you can see hints of the New Wave, with advanced science being a thing but the main points of the story being about genetic engineering and the social classes it could create. You could say a New Wave idea written in a Golden Age style and format.

On to Matt Parker's Humble Pi, about math and how getting it wrong can be funny and scary. The actual introduction to big numbers and whatnot is something I've read before, primarily from one of Asimov's many intro to X books, but the examples are more up to date, and the humor is good.

After defeating the mutated colonists, the party is momentarily blinded by the light as the entire room ‘powers up’, and this for some reason gives the PCs a level. Some time is spent leveling up before we get to actual adventuring. After recovering from the daze of becoming more powerful, the party sees two areas walled off with some sort of force effect, with prisoners inside, one in one cell, two in the other. The PCs release them. Tibor and Vår enter the cell with the two prisoners, Sylvia and Lucius enter the other. The two seem distant and out of it while the one informs Sylvia that he has been trapped for a long time, and has seen his fellow captives been taken by the giant fish thing and experimented on. Most recently his neighbors had come back ‘not quite right’. At this point the two ‘distant’ captives start convulsing and spewing out horrible gooey stuff. The fight is fortunately short and easy. The remaining captive is escorted up to Aidu and the woodies. The PCs return down to explore the rest of the floor.

There are two ways to go, a large set of double doors near the stairs and a really big octagonal vault door. The party agrees that the BBEG is probably in the vault and they do not want to waste more time on minions before getting to it. They cannot figure out how to open the vault door, however, and try the double doors. Inside is a giant clockwork computer that they try to use to gain information from. The computer has no information on aboleths and soon after the question is asked the vague but definitely humanoid face of the computer is replaced by an aboleth’s, which gives a brief villain speech about pitiful monkeys, time to die, or something. Tibor wasn’t paying much attention to the rantings of something he was intent on killing. The water is filled with the sound of a loud clanging, which they interpret to be the vault door opening, and the computer activated drones that looked like a WH40k ork mekboy had gotten hold of and ‘improved’ Wheatley from Portal 2. The drones attack with their “‘urty syringes” and everyone makes their save except Sylvia, who grows an extra tentacle arm. She manages to keep her head and they safely remove the growth despite the ick factor.

The party then heads into the vault to face the big fish, casting Good Hope and Haste before they go in. They see it floating ahead of them. It attempts to distract the party by venting about how awesome it is, how foolish the humans are, they don’t know what they’re meddling with, its big brother was going to dance the Dance of Seven Veils, etc. Or something like that; Tibor wasn’t listening because he assumed this was generic villain talk to try to distract the party. He charged ahead and smacked the nasty thing with a Stunning Fist, only to find out it was an illusion. The illusion cast spells, however, which was annoying.

Much of the combat was spent trying to find the bastard behind the illusions it had seeded the vault with, and make him sit still for pummeling. Vår was Dominated early and spent a few rounds making things more difficult. The first thing she was ordered to do was close the vault door, presumably to prevent us from escaping. This was fine with us, as it meant the BBEG couldn’t easily escape either, and put Vår out of the fight until she was ordered to open things up again. Then she was ordered to try to kill us, which did not sit well with her and she made her save against the Dominate on the second roll.

Tibor found the nasty thing fairly quickly and after calling on the rest of the party to come and kill, and started smacking it. Its AC is high enough that Tibor really only hits with his touch attack ability, and over the course of the battle he spends all his Stunning Fist attempts. It worked twice out of eight or nine attempts, but that was two rounds the monster didn’t do anything. Tibor’s saves keep him safe from the mucus of the aboleth until the very end of the battle and his AC prevents him from being hit by attacks of opportunity as he charges in. He also tanked 20d6 points of psychic damage to the brain, and this reduced him significantly to the point.

Bo-bi was Dominated soon after Vår and spent most of the combat trying to kill Sylvia, who in turn spent most of the combat running away and hiding. Josephine and Lucius had few offensive abilities left after the rest of the dungeon, which meant Josephine was mostly using Bardic Performance to help Tibor hit a bit better, and Lucius. Tibor did the lion’s share of killing the thing but Vår got in a few spells, including the killing blow. Tibor swam over to pound the fish to paste to make sure it was dead, and suffered Constitution damage from a failed save against one of the aboleth’s effects and went to negatives. Vår then spends her last spell slots casting Protection From Evil on Bo-bi until he recovers from Dominate. The GM was rather nice, and Bo-bi had only been ordered to kill Sylvia with no mention of the rest of the party. Once everyone has recovered and Tibor has been brought back up to positive HP, the party looks behind them and sees more prison cells filled with raggedy people staring intently at us.

We end the session there since it was rather late.

I couldn't find a thread for this one so apologies if there is one and I missed it.

In short, I liked it.

Very slight spoilers.

Slightly longer: I was never the biggest He-Man fan. I had a few toys and watched the show but it was below many other shows on my list of favorite. I suspect that most people who liked He-Man more than me will still like this one, though. Unless they are the kind to take exception to the casting of Idris Elba as Man-at-Arms or something.

First, it looked good. The set designs, the characters, and the action were all extremely faithful to the source material. They looked cheesy and good in all the best ways. The only costume I thought looked a bit lame was the Sorceress (it looked almost like it should have been in the old MotU movie), but she barely shows up so it wasn't a big deal.
I never liked shaky-cam and quick cuts, and my dislike has grown as I've gotten older, so some of the action was a bit too blurry for my taste, but on the whole it was good.

Second the characters.
Yes, they fiddled a bit with some personalities but if you are going to make a full-length movie you have to take some liberties. I thought it was fine. The important bits are there, like Skeletor being snarky, silly, scary and competent, and a whiny coward when he's about to lose. I gather some people didn't like Leto Skeletor but I thought he was enjoyable.

Third, the humor.
This is the point where it didn't quite do what I wanted. There was a bit too much cringey humor, and I'm not particularly fond of that type of humor. But while it dragged the end result down a bit, it was not bad enough to ruin the experience, and there were plenty of jokes I did like.

Fourth, the music.
Good choice of songs, great 80s sound to the original score, lots of power chords (by Brian May, no less) and they gave us the actual goddamn He-Man Theme song at the end, which made me very, very happy.

All in all, I had fun and I am actually considering watching it in the theaters again.

As someone who has extensively rewritten APs I can say this: you have to know your players and their characters. This isn't even
Basically, if you know the most likely outcome to any situation you throw their way, you can plan around that. This often comes at the expense of the AP as written so you have to either write a lot of things in advance or be very good at winging it.

The most time-consuming way of adapting APs to the group, and the one that IME gives the best results, is to sit down with the AP when preparing it and pretend to run it. Read the scenes, imagine what your players are likely to do. Make a short list of likely outcomes and then make some notes about how this will impact things later. It's a slog but it serves to reinforce the adage that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.

It's been a while since I read Shattered Star, but how important are the Gray Maidens? Could you replace them with some other group? Could you just reskin them? Could they be Gray Maidens who were not part of the 'most' that your previous PCs restored? Does this have to be the same timeline that your own version of CotCT was in?

As for being experienced at rewriting, there is only one way to get that experience, and that is to write. Mistakes will be made. Unfortunate outcomes will happen. Accept it and get on with it. Back in the day DMs did all the adventure writing themselves and things still managed to be fun.
Some times you mess up so badly everyone remembers it for years, some times you come up with amazing stuff that people will remember fondly for years. Some times the mistakes make for more enjoyable memories down the line than the successes.
In short, it's a game and the objective is to have fun. If people have fun, you are Doing It Right.

I'm no expert on mid 19th century Danish but the Danish in "Journey to the Center of the Earth" had some very odd elements. Some of it was perfectly fine, other things were weird. I suspect Verne rather hastily used a dictionary rather than relying on anyone with actual knowledge of the language.
Apart from that, it was fine. An important piece of early SF but rather unremarkable by the current state of lost world fiction. I know that in SF the 'fiction' aspect generally overshadows the 'science' but the bit that really put me off was not the subterranean world but how the protagonists ride a semi-wooden raft and take a volcano to the surface again and only feel a bit singed rather than being nigh-instantly reduced to ash.

Anyway, on to Leigh Brackett's The Starmen of Llyrdis. I've read only a alittle Brackett previously, a collection of her work titled "The Sea-kings of Mars and othe stories", in Gollancz' Fantasy Masterworks series but I remember exactly nothing of it, which means I need to re-read that too at some point.

John Blanche, the artist behind much of the iconic look of Warhammer and WH40k, passed away June 1.

We watched the first episode yesterday, and chose B&W, which worked without issue. It was entertaining enough that we'll watch a few more episodes at least, quite possibly the whole thing.

Most of the session was spent on combat, so a very short update this time.

Before heading down into the water, the party asks the newly re-limbed Aoinse about the electricity room and the clockwork constructs. The reply is pretty much what Tibor expected: the constructs could be useful but the power would need to be turned on and repairing everything would take far longer than Tibor thinks is reasonable given the circumstances. Without any way to know how powerful a combatant Aoinse is without their spells, and to ease the DM’s burden of running many characters and monsters, Aoinse remains behind to try to repair and restore power to the temple.

In the water the party is almost immediately set upon by a bunch of skum, which are not particularly dangerous, even if they are tougher opposition than the skum they encountered earlier in the AP. The mummies that the party had previously tried to ignore enter the frey and attack both sides. They are pretty nasty, and their DR makes things difficult for the party, until Sylvia’s apprentice Lucius tries out his new feat and spell: Fireball modified by Steam Spell. The mummies all fail their saves and are easily finished off with a subsequent round of attacks.

Tibor again pushes the party to quickly clear rooms and ignore looting, until they come to another room with more skum, including one that the DM labeled as an herbalist on the VTT. Sylvia’s attempts to distract with shop talk as one herbalist to another fails, and combat is engaged. It was a slog of a fight, with Tibor missing a lot and movement being really slow and difficult for everyone but Tibor because no one else has a swim speed. Things got a lot better when Sylvia remembered she had the Aquatic Cavalry spell. The PCs are now far more mobile and Bo-bi able to charge with his lance, combat is swiftly ended.
Pressing on the party finds yet another room full of skum, but with everyone more mobile combat is fairly uneventful. Josephine exhausts her Wand of Cure Light Wounds and there are not many potions left from Sylvia’s once great stock of them. Hopefully the party will be able to find and free the missing colonists, and destroy the rest of the enemies here without needing too much more healing.

Once the skum are defeated the party clears out the rest of this floor, stealing a magic ring off the finger of a statue of Ka the Preserver. For once the rest of the party exhibits some reluctance to loot something, not wanting to incur the ire of an actual god. Tibor intones a holy prayer along the lines of “O great Father Earth, if you do not want me to loot this ring, give me a sign”. No signs are shown, and no divine wrath is evident when he gingerly slides the ring off the statue’s finger.

A statue of a hero beheading a giant snake is found and the party fails to easily remove the sword. Tibor, a bit testily, pushes the party on after a few tugs fail to free the sword, bulldozing over Vår’s timid attempts to try again. Heading downstairs into another part of the temple, the party is immediately set upon by horrible crusty monstrosities wearing scraps of fabric. Could these be the missing colonists?
Either way, the mutants instantly attack and despite their DR and decent HP, they are defeated. Our single Haste spell is used in the combat and Bo-bi takes a fair amount of damage, causing Vår to spend her last 3rd level slot on healing him.

The enemies are defeated and the session ends. Hopefully the next session will see the last of this temple.

The DM has expressed some annoyance at Tibor’s AC of “only on a 20” (which technically only applies to mooks) but agrees that he built into it at the expense of being less effective at dealing damage. Mediocre attack rolls and poor damage rolls this session did not help.

When the description of Saveth defeating Ydersius came up I was puzzled at the description, which did not fit with what I had told the players of the event when I ran Serpent’s Skull. Then I became depressed when I realized that was because no one remembered much of anything about that AP. It turns out that the DM remembered well and decided to keep this bit of the AP unchanged because it looked cool with the justification that just because someone put up a statue of an event doesn’t mean the event took place as depicted. So I’m mollified that someone remembered it, at least, and am now left to wonder at how the Azcans learned of Ydersius and his defeat by the Carnifex many thousand years before their rise. Perhaps they got some stories from serpentfolk and edited them for their own purposes.

"A thousand steps into the night" was good. I'll keep an eye out for more of Chee's stuff.

On to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Early on there are a number of issues that bug me. It claims that Heimskringal was written in runes, which it wasn't. It claims that the author's patronymic was Tarlesson when it's actually Sturlason.
It invents 'Norse' names like Saknussemm, which do not sound at all like Northern Germanic except, perhaps, to an 18th century Frenchman, and has some weird Frenchified spellings of real places.

Some time is spent discussing whether or not the party has time to invite the woodies to the fight or if they should press on right now, concluding with “yes, we do have time”. Sylvia is sent to contact them since she can move fastest. The woodies are not familiar with her but she was given enough information to more or less prove her non-faceless stalker nature, and the woodies quickly make ready to fight. Fortunately the woodies do not get tired so they can hustle and be fresh for fight upon arrival, which ends up being at night.

The initial assault on the complex is cut-scened because of overwhelming force and surprise, and everyone enters the ruined temple. The woodies end up protecting the entrance, both to stop any reinforcements from coming from outside and to stop anyone escaping from this direction.

The PCs make their way down the stairs from the entrance hall and immediately face some people who look human and blame us for their kidnapping, and a destrachan. There is some discussion about the quality of the ‘ch’ in the monster. The DM wants it to be a hard ‘k’ sound, I lean towards a velar fricative, but despite our best efforts it ends up being destra-chan. The fight inflicts some damage and the stunning roar actually does stun a couple PCs but no one is in real danger. Of more concern is the nature of the opponents. Remembering the attack on Thincol’s Jewel, the PCs mostly assume that these are faceless stalkers, though Tibor has a nagging feeling that some of them might be dominated colonists. Some of the opposition turns to faceless stalkers upon being felled but some do not. Not wanting to accidentally kill more friends, the party starts dealing non-lethal damage and ties up unconscious ‘humans’.

Tibor then presses the party fast through the complex, ignoring anything that smacks of wasting time on looting or otherwise interesting things like reading or fiddling with the crafting stations. He is partially successful in this. A room with clockwork constructs standing inactive is ignored, and so is the room that appears to give power to the entire structure. Yes, the party might be able to turn things on and have a bunch of construct allies against the baddies, but these constructs might also turn out to be hostile, and we have no idea how much time turning things on would take, so Tibor insists that the party leaves things as they are. The first interesting thing they bother to interact with is a broken construct which they activate. It turns out to be a sentient cleric of Ka* the Preserver, but one that has been inactive for 4000 years and seems to have lost his clerical mojo. They are lacking a leg and Josephine stays behind to help repair them.

The party presses on and sees a broken vault with lots of shinies on the floor. For some reason no one wonders why it hasn’t been looted yet, but even so Tibor insists that they leave it and move on. Vår, who should have been called ‘Magpie’, is utterly incapable of not trying to loot something and casts Detect Magic and picks up some shiny magic pearls. This is obviously a trap and the party is subject to Murderous Command. Fortunately some people make their save, and those who do not make their save fail to do much damage. The party beats a hasty retreat, taking nothing with them. With some restraint, Tibor again reminds people that he said looting could wait until later, and everyone agrees again. This agreement lasts precisely until the next opportunity to loot, at which point Tibor gives up.

When investigating a room that turns out to be tombs of Ka’s clergy, the floor gives way and sends Vår and Tibor down into the flood room below, which is another tomb. Surprising exactly no one, there are undead down here: three of the sarcophagi open to reveal mummies. Tibor rolls his second natural 1 on a save this session, making it two of three saves rolled. Being paralyzed with fear at the mercy of mummies is not a fun prospect. Bo-bi and Aidu heroically leap down to save their frozen friends, and Bo-bi also fails the save. The GM is nice and declares that the mummies attack Aidu, who is the only active combatant. Aidu has a lot of attacks but DR 5/- reduces most of his damage to negligible amounts. Fortunately he survives being pummeled for three rounds until the paralysis wears off. At this point Vår shows off her new 4th level spell: Dimension Door. She grabs Bo-bi and Tibor and teleports up to Sylvia and his apprentice, while Aidu flies away. Since we do not hear any sounds of the mummies attempting to follow us, we decide to leave well enough alone and just ignore them. If we survive the rest of the dungeon and manage to save the colonists, we can come back and grant them rest. Until then they are not worth tangling with.
A crueler (i.e. more tactical) DM might have reasoned that the mummies would focus on taking out the helpless ones first before taking out the lone active opponent, trusting their DR to keep them standing while they do so. A kind, wonderful, very forgiving DM sighs and keeps the kid gloves on.

With the above-water bits of the dungeon cleared, we end the session.

*The original AP apparently had the construct be a cleric of some god that died in the years between Earthfall and the AP. This doesn’t work with the Azcan pantheon as established by the DM, so many jokes were made about the poor cleric’s spell subscription being canceled, them running on outdated software and in need of an update, needing to contact customer servie to reset their password and similar excuses for why they could not cast spells.
More seriously, it was explained that whatever magic had been stored in their mind had ‘leaked’ away over the years and Ka had not gotten any response from them for so long He wrote them off as dead. The poor construct cleric will need to pray and reconnect to their patron for a while before getting spells again.