Bjørn Røyrvik's page

"From bureaucrat to villainess: Dad's been reincarnated."

I enjoyed this so much.
I'm 50+ myself and I relate to so many of Kozaburou's inner monologue. The bit about switching to short and long distance without having to change glasses hit me hard

I also really liked the bit about how the world looked mostly European but had a lot of Japanese elements.

I want to escape from princess lessons has a wonderful protagonist and a super creepy prince. I honestly hope he gets run over by a carriage and she doesn't eventually fall for him. I know that's not going to happen but I want it to.

Momentary Lily CGDCT robot invasion with superpowers. Entirely forgettable.

Burnout sucks but it's nice to know it doesn't have to be permanent.

"Queen of the Wolves" was good, though not as good as the first two. A bit too brief in its revelations and resolutions. To be expected of books for younger readers but I felt it could have done with a bit more time spent on developing characters and subjects. That's mostly quibbles though and on the whole I enjoyed the series and will ordering the fourth book soon.

On to Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton's Night and Morning. So far plenty readable, taking the dated way of writing into account. A few terms I've had to look up, like 'lumber room' (not a place where you keep lumber, mostly) and a sprinkle of wit.
You may remember Lord Lytton as the source of the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night"

A Kingly Pattern - Jonathan George (about Hnefatafl, aka "Viking Chess"

It's been years since I played that game. I will have to dig it out at some point.

My current 'to read' list, as in the ones I actually will read rather than the ones I want to read or reread at some point and the ones I merely think I should, contains among other things:

Tanith Lee: "Elephantasm", "The Birthgrave", "Vazkor, son of Vazkor", "Quest for the White Witch"

Mercedes Lackey's Magewind trilogy

Melanie Rawn's "The Ruins of Ambrai"

Ben Arronovitch: Rivers of London/Peter Grant series books 4-8

Brent Weeks: something I cannot remember

ERB: "Tarzan and the Foreign Legion", "Carson of Venus"

Tara Sim: "City of Dusk"

A bunch more books by various authors unknown to me and whose name sI have forgotten, bought on sale at flea markets, used bookstores or discounted at the FLGS.

"Wolf Star Rises" was good, even better than Law of the Wolf Tower. Now on to Queen of the Wolves (or "Wolf Queen", if you have the American edition, which I do). So far so good. I am getting a bit of 'your prince is in another castle' feeling to the plots of these stories but I am enjoying it and will order the last book in the series once I get home from work.

Just over a year since my last post and I'm still running through the penultimate adventure for the last-but-one'th PC's Path to Immortality. This adventure kind of grew in scope and got a bit out of hand, turning into its own little campaign instead of just another adventure.

This PC's final adventure will be a lot shorter, little more than a single encounter.

Then there are the last four or five mini adventures for the last PC.

I'm determined to wrap things up this year.

He also looks so happy when he finally does get to kill Nazis.

I liked it. Superman got a happy ending. He got to be Clark in his home town, surrounded by friends who loved him for being Clark first and Superman second. He got to be human.

Sounds like my vacation just after Christmas.

MMO style tanking, as others have mentioned, doesn't really exist in D&D. You tank by having a high AC and lots of hit points and getting into the thick of melee and keeping people occupied by being a big enough threat that they cannot afford to ignore you. MMO-style taunting is difficult/impossible.

If the DM is kind the player might be allowed to use a house ruled variant of the Call Out combat feat that we use. Instead of challenging a target to a duel, the target considers you a big enough threat they focus on you for the duration. Since it's fear based it doesn't work on everyone but with a decent Intimidate score it will allow the tank to taunt a number of things.

Damn.

"[Law of the] Wolf Tower" was good and I immediately started on Wolf Star [Rise], which seems equally good so far.

Season 4 finally showed up on MAX a few days ago,

Huh. On my version of MAX it came out at least a month ago.

Anyway, on the whole I enjoyed the series. Hoechlin was an excellent Superman.

There were some interesting takes on characters, which is fine by me: the more adaptations of characters you have the more I am fine with them playing around with the formula and characterizations. Lois and Clark being an item from the beginning, before she even knew his secret identity was a nice touch, for instance. This version of Luthor is more biker-thug than the excellent DCAU version but I thought it was an interesting take.

On this season specifically:
The death and immediate resurrection annoyed me a bit even if it was obvious he wouldn't stay down long. Him getting weaker does pay off for the finale, which I think was an excellent end to the show.

"Whispers Underground" was good and I have the next five books in the series on the way - my FLGS had a January sale so I caved in and bought even more books.

Currently reading Tanith Lee's Wolf Tower, the first of the Claidi Journals. These are more of Lee's children's books, though these days they might be considered 'young adult'. It seems to be for older readers than the Piratica stories, but I've never been particularly good at judging intended age for books and I don't read things based on such categories. Either way, so far so good. Lee is out of print so I was quite thrilled when I got a stack of her stuff for Christmas from my SO. One of the books was even a DAW edition, which is my absolute favorite format of book. Is it weird to have a favorite physical edition of book?

So a Rivers of Londopn RPG using BRP?
Another similarity with the Laundry Files.
BRP is popular for modern 'masquereaded magic in the government' type stories, it seems.

I may check it out, but I'll prioritize the upcoming second edition of the Laundry Files RPG, which has a new system. BRP is not exactly my favorite system and while it worked well enough for mundane skills, things got wonky fast when it tried to do LF magic.

Christmas break over and an extra week off to recover from the flu and we're back.

The PCs rested and buff themselves before heading into the lion's den. They are struck with a confusion aura which Thorg falls victim to and a good half hour is spent trying to not die to his attacks. Some healing later and they actually get to encounter the enemy. Most of the opponents are pretty easily dispatched and though they had some nasty attacks the PCs coasted by on some good planning, Thorg's Deathless armor and decent saves and a ton of critical hits. The BBEG only got dangerous after the minions were dead and I switched from using the new dice I got for Christmas to some old ones and could actually roll some decent numbers.*

The monster managed to make Almithra and Thorg do an impression of the TV version of the Doom Patrol's Rita Farr losing control and reduced them to negatives a couple times but the PCs prevailed, healed up and looted the Mathen manor. The rest of the session went to dividing loot and leveling up to Name level.

*The d20 I gave to Aurora's player rolled an excessive amount of 19s and 20s while the one she gave me had rolled no fewer than nine 1s to one 20 and had a hard time getting any double digit result.

It really depends on how you want this to go. If you want the players to follow the rails, tell them so before next session and hope they agree. If you want them to have complete freedom - especially if they go burning down everything they come across - published adventures are going to be hard to run. In that case you will have to jump in the deep end with your DM improv and react to whatever the PCs do, and say goodby to the plans of the adventure.

One thing I have learned about GMing is the maxim that 'plans are useless but planning is indispensible'. No plan survives contact with the enemy PCs but you can have a good idea of what sort of things to do in any given situation. Know the situation the PCs will encounter, make plans for what the NPCs will do in a variety of likely situation (arson, in this case) and you will be far better able to handle the players' actions.

Happy belated birthday.

I haven't.

Currently working on Ben Aaronovitch's Whispers Underground, the third of his Rivers of London series. So far so good.

I'll likely give it a miss. The first movie was OK, the second bored me and the third I dropped after 10 minutes.

The difference being Norway likes to pride itself on being a winter country.

Work tomorrow, then the first gaming night of the year on Sunday. Last week was canceled because two of us got the flu.

Regarding snow, incoming rant:

How is it that every bloody year the Oslo area forgets we live in Norway and snow is fairly common (even taking global warming into consideration)? Every year they wake up and go all shocked Pikachu at the first snowfall and people who haven't put on their winter tires go off the road or get stuck. Then the new electric buses they bought a couple years back aren't rated for cold and they don't work half the time during winter, yet they haven't managed to fix that over two years. How they didn't think to get good enough machines the first time around is beyond my understanding.
Even better, this year plowing was worse than normal and all the snow on the roads and sidewalks has gotten compacted to ice. Everything has been covered in ice for a week, yet they can't seem to scrape it off or gravel it. Delays are constant and extremely annoying. I head out the door an hour early just to make sure I get to work on time, and even then it's a near thing.

How can they have forgotten how to handle winter?

*seethe*

I enjoyed Mashle well enough until we got the tournament arc and then I got extremely bored. Tournament arcs are almost invariably incredibly boring

IME religion in most D&D settings is interpreted a bit too much in light of modern Abrahamic religion, especially the focus on faith. When the gods actually do exist and can directly contact people and give them producible, testable miracles (even if not to absolutely everyone who asks), blind faith and absolute heartfelt submission/worship is less the order of the day than acknowledgement of those with more power and responsibiilty than you.
Faith in this context is more transactional than modern monotheistic religions. A cleric might wholeheartedly love and worship a certain god but they might also think of it as a job - you give me power and I work for you on this planet.

I'm not too familiar with Golarion gods but off hand I can't see why most of them wouldn't accept a competent follower who may be a bit mouthy but generally does what they are supposed to. Obviously a god would prefer someone who has drunk the kool-aid but maybe they keep a less than ideal servant around in case they have use for them. Maybe they want to reform the cleric, maybe they just need someone in their employ for a job right then and there, maybe they will use the cleric as an upcoming example to others about how they should do the right thing.

At the end of the day, this character concept requires the cleric to go along with the patron's wishes in most cases. Someone who absolutely refuses to do what they are told will not make it as a servant of the god. The cleric might not be an ideal employee but they should do the job well enough to not get fired if you want this concept to work.

Most importantly, I don't see why someone whould be expected to smite someone for mouthing off against the gods. They really do have bigger things to worry about than harming one mewling mortal who doesn't know what they're on about. Toss them out of the club (congregation) at worst.

FYI, Serpent's Skull is one of those that is a fun concept but suffers in execution.

I'd say Mummy's Mask was the one I had to do least work to convert to my needs, which makes it pretty good in my book.

So far I've tried:
Medaka Kuroiwa is impervious to my charms, a dumb little romcom about the school's hottest girl who tries to charm a dude sworn to chastity. It's one of those stories that is entertaining enough that I like it in spite of myself. Later on it tries to get some of that harem goodness with other girls intruding but that just detracts from the main story, IMO. Still going to watch it.

I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class, another romcom with the same basic premise as Nisekoi. We'll see if it turns out as good as that one.

Okitsura: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Know What She's Saying is yet another romcom (I'm beginning to sense a pattern here...). I think I would appreciate it more if I actually knew Japanese so I could pick up on the dialectal issues. As it is I cannot even tell that the accent is different than standard anime-ese.

I'll be checking out Tasokare Hotel when I get home, and I'm super hyped for the second season of Apothecary Diaries. I'm also bummed that Ranma only got 12 episodes for its first season. At least we will get a second season.

"Windows for the Crown Prince" was quite interesting. Not exciting but a fascinating look at that time and place.

Currently on Doc Smith's The Vortex Blaster, a collection of three stories set in the Lensman universe. Very dated, still entertaining.

You might also want to check out Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari/War on Geminar, a Tenchi Muyo spin off with giant mechs in an otherwise pretty basic fantasy setting.

There was also a product called "d20 Mecha". It's been ages since I looked at it so I don't remember how good it is, but it might be useful.

I have some reservations about messing with perfection. They should remake bad movies into something better rather than trying to remake something great and usually getting something worse than the original.

I'll still watch it.

I've never really understood the point of colorizing B&W productions. I'll still watch it if/when I find it.

Five days of hanging out with my niece and nephew from across the country over, for better and worse. The eldest at 5 is the sweetest, most agreeable kid you could hope to meet. The younger at three is a bit of a handful. Kind of Jeckyll and Hyde kid. Very sweet and pleasant, then, um, a bit of a handful. His parents have slept through the night maybe a dozen times since he came along.

Now chilling until my GF's birthday on Monday. Much plastic was gifted over Christmas so I'll try to find something a bit different for that.

11 year necro.

I prefer Tinker gnomes or Mystaran sky gnomes (Tinker with less innovation but competent) or Dark Sun gnomes.

Finished them and was generally pleased. Looking forward to more episodes.

I'm not disparaging people for liking it; goodness knows I like some dumb/bad stuff. D&W just wasn't my kind of dumb/bad.

The TVA is supposed to be a multiversal entity that for some reason looks and acts like a 50s/60s American government organization. The showrunners had the opportunity to go wild with their imagination but what they manage to produce is boring humans with a very overused aesthetic which makes no sense for the setting (unless there was something in their history I missed/forgot).

They are supposedly very competent but get tripped up by the dumbest stuff, and as time wardens go they fail slightly worse than most such organizations I've come across. The only thing they managed was to show that with a lot of time and pratice, Owen Wilson actually managed to be funny.

That's because usually such effects state the target 'die' without explaining\care for how much damage it took (if any), and breath of life return one to life by fixing the damage (so with no damage value to fix it's ineffective).

As such while not as 'per written' it's reasonable to allow it to fix death caused by damaged caused by a death effect.

In 3.5 maybe but most death effects in PF1 were reduced from SoD to mere damage. There is no point in the restriction of BoL or Raise Dead on not being effective on creatures killed by death effects if you say they can work on death effects. I mean, you can house rule it however you wish but the intention and balance considerations are clear.

The PCs head down the stairs and find themselves in a tunnel which they believe to be recently created, certainly within the last decade or so. After a short walk they find a large room with an obelisk made of strange rock that looks a bit like black granite with green specks. An eeire yellow light suffuses the obelisk and it fires off a bolt of energy at the PCs when they get too close. They decide to run through the room. On the way one of the elves notices a secret door. She decides to investigate, trusting her formidable AC to protect her from the energy bolts. This turns out to work but she cannot find a way to open said door. The PCs continue down the other tunnel for more than an hour before reaching another cave. Here they easily dispatch some carrion crawlers, with only Marianya getting paralyzed. Soon after the fight a secret door opens and a collection of nasties emerges to fight. The worst of the lot is carrion moths, horrible beasties that looks like someone took the tentacles from carron crawlers and transplanted them on to giant moths. The
paralysis is not as bad as their wings, which Confuse those who hear it. Marianya and Thorg are confused and start killing each other while Aurora and Almithra try to take on the cariron moths, a chuul and a psurlon. Aurora is quickly paralyzed, leaving Almithra to face everything alone. Her exceptional AC prevents most damage and unlike last session she makes every save but one this encounter, ignoring the psurlons attempts to kill her with strange mental powers. Almithra exhausts her spells killing the chuul and nearly killing the psurlon before Thorg and Marianya recover ennough to take out the last carrion moths.
Almithra fails her last save and collapses dying on the ground just as Thorg comes, saving her from a coup de grâce. Marianya, casts a healing spell on Almithra and the three PCs manage to hunt down and kill the psurlon and its final minion.

They decide to go back to the manor and resting there but the GM did his best Gygax impersonation and asked if they really wanted to do that. They then recalled that only one of the people at the Mathens was encountered and the rest were unaccounted for, and they instead decide to exit the caves here and rest in the forest.

No new sessions until the new year.

If we are speaking of the RPG, the spell, at most, deals 200 hp of damage. A character killed by it can be brought back by Breath of Life

Breath of Life cannot help creatures killed by death effects, and WotB is a death effect.

Saturday evening I ended up playing a bit of Space Marine II (Her Furry Highness having graciously given up the lap for an hour) that my GF got me for our 20th anniversary.

I give her flowers, which are about as boring, impermanent and cliche as you can get, she gets me SM2.

I got about a third of the way through and gave up. I was never the biggest Deadpool fan and the writing was bad enough that even Renolds' passion couldn't keep it afloat. The TVA was s%$~ and dumb in Loki (it was a big reason I didn't bother with season 2) and it was worse now.

Work. Then home to spend the rest of the evening with the cat on my lap.

"Heltene i Hungerholtet" ('Starvation' or 'famine' might be a better translation than 'hunger') was OK as a slice of life to a time and place not too long ago and not too far off, but was frankly rather poorly written. Not so much the minimalist writing but the constant use of full stops where convention would put a comma or a conjunction. Like "He was big. And angry." Not that this is a bad thing in itself. Because it gives a slightly interesting emphasis. But the author would do this multiple times. Per page.

Like that.

I'm not sure I want to pass it on because frankly I don't think kids these days will find it particularly interesting.

Harrison's writing undoubtedly improves as the Viriconium stories progressed even if I tend to prefer the older stuff. The city is less a distinct fictional world than it is a collection of familiar names to write different types of fiction around. Much like Terry Pratchett used the Discworld as a soapbox to poke fun at different things, Viriconium is a backdrop to write different types of fiction around.

And now for something completely different, Vidar Sandbeck's Heltene i Hungerholtet (The Heroes in Hunger Grove), a kids story with strong autobiographical elements. It's been languishing in my parent's shed for years, and I haven't read it since I was gifted it for my eighth birthday. I'm rereading it because I can't remember anything except the cover, and in a few years I will pass it on to my niece and nephew.

After that I will start on Elizabeth Gray Vining's Windows for the Crown Prince, an account of the author's time spent as a private tutor for Japan's crown prince in the wake of WWII.

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! is getting a movie. I don't see how they could continue or beat what they already did, but I didn't see how season two could top season one and it mostly did. Time to get my totally-not-yaoi on.

I'll probably watch it at some point. If they turn it into something more like I Am Legend and have some infected have greater self-preservation instincts that most of the ones that died, it could work.

I suspect the success of Space Marine II may have influenced this. I would have loved if we got old school WH40K/Rogue Trader stuff with the obvious humerous satire instead of the super-serious stuff we have now, but I suspect that isn't happening. Failing that I would like them to lean into just how miserable, dystopian and hopeless everything is but I suspect that won't happen either. I also doubt we'll get anything showing my religious extremist nutjob best boys the Black Templars purging xenos, witches and heretics (or suspected heretics, or anyone who knew a heretic, anyone who looks like a heretic, or just some passing world that caught their eye because they were bored).

As long as they can resist the temptation to make organizations heroic and show the futility of actual heroism I guess I'll be pleased.

I greatly enjoyed the first three episodes, especially the Aelstrom (Ahnold) episode. So far it seems exactly like Prime's version of Love, Death and Robots. More episodes tonight.

I would have a larger map showing the town and general disposition of forces and if necessary use a smaller local map for individual encounters.

Like any big unwieldy issue, chop it up into smaller bits. Make sure you have a rough idea of the tactics and goals of the NPCs and figure out how the battle will proceed without the PCs' involvement. Make a rough time table with events and if necessary make a list or flow chart or something similar. It's been a while since I read the AP but IIRC it should be possible to divide it into a number of smaller encounters which you can run individually.

If the party splits, run one encounter at a time and just say the PCs cannot interact with each other until that encounter is over.

The PCs do not push the issue with the coin as Milo Mathen makes an appearance and questions them about the mines. Again he seems absolutely sincere and trustworthy. He offers the PCs a quick bite and a couple of rooms for the night. The PCs accept and immediately start poking around, finding a number of secret doors and hidden passageways in the house. They poke around the place, finding a secret laboratory of horrors on the top floor. Some lucky rolls and good builds and positioning by the PCs mean that apart from a lucky roll by the mad scientist wizard hurting Almithra and Aurora being paralyzed the whole fight everything went smoothly. The laboratory was a bigger, fancier version of what they found in the mines, dedicated to warping poor victims into horrible monstrosities. The players are somewhat pleased to have finally found an actual example of 'a wizard did it' as an explanation for all the horrible monsters in D&D.

They examine the rest of the house and find none of the family, but they do find the cold storage, where a bunch of humans, halflings and orcs are hanging, gutted. They find some pickled offal, salted meat, and promptly vomit up the remains of dinner. Marianya does comment that at least it wasn't cannibalism since she hadn't eaten an elf.

They get ready to descend the hidden stairs they find behind an idol in the family chapel. The idol depicts a large worm-like tentacled creature. None of them are familiar with it and have no idea what Immortal this could represent.

"Hiero's Journey" was good and now I want to find the rest of the books because the story is definitely not finished. Perhaps Thriftbooks has them. I'll wait until after Christmas because my 'unread' pile is too big as it is and will increase come Christmas, and I keep interspersing with rereads.

Speaking of rereads, I will finish off the Viriconium stories with In Viriconium and A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium. It's interesting to see how the nature of the titular city changes over time, from a distant and vaguely described but very definite existance to more and more probably modern time but vaguer existance.

I still think I prefer the less 'artsy' and more story-focus stories to the more personality-focused stories.

Saturday was a belated Thanksgiving dinner, and Sunday was game night. The players and PCs were appropriately disgusted when they found the meat locker in the house they are staying at.
*grin*