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Treasure of Chimera Cove continues (loosely) the story begun in Tower of the Last Baron. To be honest, the connection is very loose; this is a totally separate standalone adventure by a different author (Anson Caralya), with some plot hooks included to make connecting the two modules together easy(ish).

This was a slight disappointment after Tower, but perhaps that is because that module was just so good. This is more normal fare, in the form of maritime exploration and some dungeon crawl. Assuming the PCs are continuing from Tower, they will arrive at the tiny old pirate port of Chimera Cove trying to trace down a “weapon” that is supposed to be hidden there. What that weapon actually is proves to be a nice surprise, and there are some nice locations and scenes here.

While this does pale in comparison with the first part, it’s still a solid enough piraty adventure thing. If you want to put some “yarr!” into your game, you could do worse than this. As noted, the connections with the “first part” are so loose that running this standalone should be no problem – all you need is some motivation for the PCs to arrive at Chimera Cove, armed with some clues. Perhaps the ever-dependable mysterious stranger at the inn, if you’re feeling really old-school…

Children of the Void (written by Mike McArtor) is the second part of the “Second Darkness” adventure path. In it, the PCs are expected to launch an exploration expedition to the site of a recent meteor crash (an island some ways off), based on recent evens and some clues encountered in the first installment. This might take some railroading… but probably not. Convincing players to run after treasure is usually not all that hard.

Needless to say, there are complications. In addition to pirates (yarr!), the PCs will also encounter some alien creatures which may or may not be related to the meteor. There are people to save, some treasure to be found, and an island to explore… and of course, some clues that will point PCs toward the next adventure.

The book(let) also contains some info about the solar system Paizo’s game world of Golarion exists in. Interesting stuff, and a bit unusual for a D&D game.

I have mixed feeling on this adventure path, so far. The first part was pretty interesting, as is this one – but they feel very loosely connected. I have the feeling that the continuation story may have problems with players going “why should we do that?”. The players are expected to run off again after this, while they may well feel that they’d rather stay put and keep their collective noses out of other races’ businesses. So… some railroading may be needed. I guess that’s my problem with the “adventure path” concept in general: they tend to be very linear, with sometimes quite minimal support for players doing Something Totally Different.

While I did like this installment, it did contain one real “wtf?” moment: a spacefaring race (one that lives in vacuum, to boot) which communicates partly by smell. Anyone see problems with this? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

A couple of things, first off: It’s no accident that I read this right after The Walker in the Wastes; one of my reasons for buying this book was the fact that the basic plot centers around the same subject. Secondly, The Terror is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I might class it as a “historical horror story”. In a way it’s a Cthulhu story without actually being a Cthulhu story, in the sense that the best tales of “Lovecraftian horror” tend to center around the theme of man versus as hostile and totally uncaring universe. That theme is very strong here.

The book takes the story of the lost Franklin Expedition, keeping quite close to known historical details, and then continues with what might have happened out on the ice after the known facts stop. There is a supernatual menace involved, but much of the horror comes from the (extremely) hostile environment: after getting trapped in the ice due to bad command decisions, the crew are harassed by poisonous food supplies, inadaquate equipment, crushing ice, and the constant freezing cold. Add in a… thing that (also) wants to kill them, and things become grim, fast.

It’s an extensively researched book, the amount of period detail is impressive. Told in unlinear fashion, the tale jumps from an “in medias res” beginning where the crew is already trapped to earlier times when the expedition is still in the process of starting off, then back again. In the hands of a lesser author things might have become confusing, but here the tale flows along and gains solidity despite jumping back and forth in time while switching the narrator voice with each jump. The characters are well-realized – I have no idea how well they correspond to the actual historical people in the personality department, but it doesn’t really matter; this is a work of fiction, not a history book. Franklin himself is portrayed as being hopelessly incompetent for the task assigned to him, though he is shown in somewhat positive light in past flashbacks. Sadly, this “leaders are incompetent and arrogant fools” theme seems to have been a real-life reality for much of the history of British arctic exploration (with some notable exceptions).

This is a thick book, both in page count and in content. It’s also quite brutal and dark. With those disclaimers, I can easily recommend this one. As noted, it was one of the best books of 2008 for me.

So this is the new year
and I don’t feel any different
The clanking of crystal
explosions off in the distance

so everybody put your best suit or dress on
let’s make believe that we are wealthy for just this once
lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn
as thirty dialogues bleed into one

– Death Cab for Cutie, ”The New Year”

Well
still
pretty good year

– Tori Amos, ”Pretty Good Year”

We don’t stay out late all that often nowadays, but thanks to a very good New Year’s party it was close to 6am when we finally staggered home. People, fireworks, bubblies… and a white chocolate fountain. Stayed in bed until 3pm or so, yesterday was a lost cause.

It’s been a pretty good year. Nothing major has happened, but we’ve slowly settled into our new house, traveled a bit, been more or less happy. No formal new year’s promises here, but (like most people) I do intend to exercise more and improve small things here and there. We’ll see how it goes.

Well, let’s see. Ate tons. Drank quite a bit. Admired my new hypnotic lava lamp. Watched Flight of the Conchords and 4th season of Prison Break. Read a book a jQuery and did some Rails and Javascript coding & testing. Started reading A Storm of Swords, which is proving worthy of all the praise heaped upon it. Played with the cats. Watched some Hal Hartley movies. Ate some more.

Tomorrow: more laziness.

It’s official: I’m not young anymore. T’was a time when I could party until the morning, and then just keep on going the next day. Now, doing the same results in the next day being spent in something akin to a coma. Still fun, though. First we went to Janne’s “big round years” birthday bash at Dante’s Highlight, which was a lot of fun (much due to the guests being a random assortment of people from various different social groups). The drinks and snacks helped too, of course… and Ahma was pretty good on stage, the guys have actually learned how to play at some point, and they have nice stage presence. After that we hopped into a taxi and went to a friend’s pre-Christmas party, where we mingled until.. 5am or so. Then a (long) taxi line and home.

So, yesterday was mostly spend in iguana mode (lie around in a random position, roll eyes). Watched some TV, read a bit… nothing all that constructive. I had intended to do some weekend coding and/or play some EVE, but that proved too demanding.

My dad was nice enough to drop by with a Christmas tree for us (from our summer place), so now we have a tree thingy. The cats eye it with suspicion.

Spent Sunday at the salle, Ilkka held a seminar on Bolognese sidesword and dagger techniques. Was a lot of fun, once again, and it’s really nice to be back to normal health (if not good shape, yet). I had a really long-term flu / throat infection thingy, and since that carries a small but non-zero danger of heart injury it you exert yourself too much, that meant a month+ of no exercise for me. Which was doubly nasty because the flu wore me down and the lack of exercise did the same. Finally felt well enough to come to the salle last Monday, but a month’s pause in training shows. Oh well. It’ll come back, it always does.

The training, I mean. The flu can stay away, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m also slowly waking up to the fact that Christmas will soon be here. I’ve only begun to think about presents, and only have a few taken care of so far. So… some shopping this week.

Work has been really interesting (if very busy) during the last month or so, since I’ve managed to convince my bos(ses) that doing a certain new app with Rails, with a REST datasource in our Java/JBoss main server end, is a good idea (and I honestly do think it is a good idea). This means that I’ve been coding Ruby/Rails a lot, and also tinkering with some lesser-known aspects of it like ActiveResource. It took a while to puzzle out the HTTP/XML format Rails expects and to duplicate that on the Java side, but once it’s in place it’s pretty impressive: the Rails app can now get a data feed from our server with just a few lines of code, and that feed behaves in many respects like a normal ActiveRecord database object. Cool stuff. I’ve also dived into testing with rSpec, with heavy use of mock objects and dynamic fixtures (since I want to keep the tests independent of server data). Figuring out HttpMock took a while, but now that also works.

Rails rocks, it’s by far my favorite wep app framework nowadays. Nothing else comes even close.

Added later: …though I do have to say that some of the lesser-used facets of Rails (like ActiveResource, especially with nested resources) can be pretty poorly documented, or not at all. I’ve quite often had to resort to hacking the Rails core code to figure out what the hell is going on. Today has mostly been spent in figuring out how the hell I can actually create nested REST resources. Finally figured it out, but it wasn’t exactly documented anywhere I could find. Today’s headaches also include puzzling out the exact XML format for server-side validation errors (no, it’s not what the docs claim it is) and in working around the fact that the XML formatter wants to turn all underscores into dashes in element names. Sigh.

Rails still rocks. But prepare to enter “Here There By Tygers” territory if you use some of the more bleeding-edge facets of it.

Walker in the Wastes is the first big Cthulhu campaign published by Pagan, and it can be quite difficult to find nowadays. I hunted eBay for quite a while before finding my copy, and it wasn’t exactly cheap. I do wish Pagan would do a reprint of this one…

Besides “rare”, what, then, is it? Well, it’s a huge “classic era” (1928 to be exact) campaign for Call of Cthulhu, kicking off with an expedition to the same area where the legendary lost Franklin Expedition vanished in the ice and the wind, 80 years previously. While extensive historical research points to the expedition having perished to a combination of starvation, scurvy, exposure and lead poisoning, this scenario posits that there may have been something more to that list of horrors. What starts off as a fairly mundane scientific expedition slowly becomes more sinister in true Cthulhu fashion. Something dangerous and non-human stalks the icy wastes, and the native “Eskimo” tribes on the ice aren’t talking much and aren’t necessarily all that friendly either.

The first expedition to the ice is intended to kick off a series of escalating events, some of which require the players to go globetrotting in search of clues. Clues to what? Why, a cult that wants to awaken an ancient god, of course! This is Cthulhu, after all, gotta have those cultists! I do have to say that the cult here is quite intelligently portrayed, and is quite far from the stereotypical “bunch of morons in robes” scene. I’d expect the body count on the PC side to rise fast, unless they are very careful.

This campaign will require a lot of GM prep to run. While it’s interesting and contains a lot of stuff (it’s over 200 pages long), the scope of this one is just so huge that those 200 pages are nowhere enough. Don’t expect to just pick this one up and run it… the author (John H. Crowe III) says that about four years of research went into writing this thing, and while you won’t need four years of GM prep in addition to that, you will need to do some amount of work. The campaign says it’s intended for “experienced Keepers and players”, and that’s a fair enough warning. I think this would be a really cool game to run or to play in, though, so I think that prepwork will probably be very much worth it.

After a fairly linear start the campaign becomes extremely freeform. At times I had trouble figuring out why exactly the PCs would go to a given remote corner of the globe – but to the author’s credit, the campaign doesn’t assume all the leads will be uncovered or followed. The end will be less likely to result in a total party kill if most leads are followed – but I can see this one branching in lots of different directions. Most of them deadly to the PCs, of course.

In sum… a huge, complex and demanding campaign, but one which probably rewards effort put into it. This and Beyond the Mountains of Madness are the two big arctic-focused Cthulhu campaigns that exist… and both are justly famous.

Oh, and this one has zeppelins in it. Can’t go wrong with those.

A discussion on the Delta Green mailing list led me to read about chlorine trifluoride. Impressively scary stuff, one is not used to chemicals which can cause rocks to ignite. Very suitable for placing into roleplaying scenarios as a very nasty trap or “toxic chemical”. In real life, if encountered you need to run. Fast. In opposite direction.

Oh, and as it’s burning up that rock and sand it also releases lethal byproducts. Charming.

As the last comment on that blog entry says:

“Suitable extinguishing media: None.” Says it all, really,

It’s an older indie game from 2002, but partly because of that age it’s also apparently been an inspiration to many Forge-style game writers… so when I heard that Matt Snyder’s Dust Devils was going out of print in the near future, I decided to pick up a copy.

It’s an interesting, compact game. Like most modern(ish) indie games, it’s focused on telling one specific type of story; in this case, a Western. The rules mechanics are very light but have the fun twist of using poker hands to resolve conflicts – something that fits thematically quite well with the theme. It’s a not a campaign game; the story is intended to have a very specific end, you’re expected to bring your character’s story to a Western-appropriate conclusion. Maybe you need to kill the man why killed your sister, and you do it while dying yourself in the attempt. Stuff like that. I can see why this game has been an influence, it’s very compact but still manages to do what it sets out to do.

The current “reloaded” edition also contains a short appendix with variant games the same mechanics could also be used with. We’re given the frameworks for an agent/spy game, a samurai tale, and a “film noir” setting. Sure, they are just quick sketches, but they are still fun ideas.