Friday, January 03, 2025

Forbidden Lands

It was Stillday, the 38th of Summerise and we started the day with training and foraging and preparations to strike out into the wilderness once more. We set off following the track along the lake side, but Boldo’s attempt to lead the way ended up in us getting bogged down in the marshy ground and then attacked by a tentacle monster from the depths. Fortunately we killed it without too many problems but both Tarua and Larian ran out of arrows which might be an issue.



Heading into the forest we made a bit more progress, although we all ended up getting chilled by the cold. On the first watch we heard the sounds of singing which turned out to be three jolly goblin grave diggers who, after some initial suspicion, shared our campfire and seemed interested in perhaps working at our stronghold. 

The next morning we came in sight of our destination - the Fortress of the Eye of the Rose!



Amnesiac by Radiohead

Releasing an album of lost tracks and offcuts just seven months after the previous hit Kid-A was a risky move. However this album of experimental electronica and down tempo lo-fi beats just about pulls it off. I’m still not the greatest fan of Thom Yorke’s voice, but it works better here than on some of their rockier tracks. The highlight is Life in a Glasshouse featuring the trumpet of the late, great Humphrey Littleton. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue-tastic!

https://album.link/i/1097864180



Rooster

 Atop the hen house
The proud rooster greets the dawn
Nature's alarm cock

Thursday, January 02, 2025

Dragonbane - The Riddermound

I treated myself to the Dragonbane Core set courtesy of All Rolled Up and it really is a satisfyingly chonky box of delights. As well as the rules, there are character sheets (both blank and pre-gen), official dice, gorgeously illustrated cardboard minis and stands, cards for treasure, initiative and adventure hooks, a fabulous map of the Misty Vale and fully featured campaign series with 11 scenarios and plenty of scope for adventuring beyond. 

I ran the opening scenario The Riddermound for the family, and much mirth and mayhem ensued, with critical hits and misses, spooky shenanigans and a gruesome fate for poor NPC goblin Grub who was only trying to be helpful. A definite hit! 

New Year

How many days in
Does the new year cease being new
And is just a year?

Scott 4 by Scott Walker

Scott Walker was better known as one of the Walker Brothers (who weren’t brothers or called Walker), so when he released Scott 4 (actually his 5th album) under his own name of Scott Engel it didn’t trouble the charts, which is a shame because it’s really rather good. The songs range from the opening about the film The Seventh Seal as a Morriconesque western theme, to a song about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, all sung in a gorgeous baritone. 

https://album.link/i/1443533039



Wednesday, January 01, 2025

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

This is an interesting novella, written in 1894, with the first chapter initially written as a standalone short story in a magazine, followed by what would later be the third chapter, with the pieces being linked together and expanded into a full novella in one furious writing session.

The book opens with a classic mad scientist performing experimental brain surgery on a young woman with the intention of opening her mind to experience the hitherto unseen dimensions of the spirit world, something he calls ‘seeing the great god Pan’. Of course, the experiment has ghastly unforeseen consequences.

The story picks up with an account of a young orphan girl, sent to live in a small Welsh town by relatives and the disturbing nature of her activities. The final strand concerns a rash of unexplained suicides of well to do gentlemen in London, being linked by a mysterious woman with a scandalous reputation. All of the elements of the story are bought together in the end towards a shocking conclusion.

Unusually for the time, this story contains allusions to the occult and sexual behaviour, which although not explicitly set out are pretty obvious. This led to the book being criticised for being degenerate and horrific, especially for the final section which verges on what we would now describe as body horror. However, it’s clear to see the influence that this book has had on authors from HP Lovecraft to Stephen King and it is very much worth reading now.

It’s available from Project Gutenberg and also as a two part reading by Jim Moon from the Hypnogoria podcast here: Part 1 Part 2


Beginning

 Loose your paper chains
Rise up and prepare to make
A new beginning

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx by Raewkon

Gangsta rap as a genre is a relentless assault on the senses, more for the lyrical content than the music. This album from Wu Tang Clan alumnus Raekwon has some good points - the track Rainy Day featuring vocals by Candi Lindsay (aka Blue Raspberry) is gorgeous and the John Wu samples are always fun. However, the between track recordings of (apparently unscripted) conversations are hard to listen to. It’s a grim lifestyle with only one way out.

https://album.link/i/258634938



Tuesday, December 31, 2024

2024 in blogging

It's been nice to get back to writing more on a regular basis this year, so I'm going to do a bit more of it. The majority of my posts have been about roleplaying games, followed by books and video games. I'm now writing daily haikus which I will post here and I'll also include my 1001 Album reviews as well. I will also include personal posts about games cons and possibly my iaido practice - we will see.

Onward to 2025!

Some stats! No idea how many of these views are just bots or what was so interesting about a random post on DCC in August.





2024 in Music

This year I have been listening to one album a day (on weekdays) from the book 1001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die. I rate the album out of five stars and write a short review which I post to Mastodon and Albumwhale. There's a handy website that gives you your daily listen, and if anyone would like to join in, you are welcome to join our group here

There are lots of stats that you can pull out of this! This year, I've listened to 253 albums with an average rating of 3.4. There were 4 that I skipped that featured Eric Clapton, Kanye West and Morrissey. My standard deviation from the global rating was 0.94.

My favourite decade was the 1950s and least favourite, the 2000s:

DecadeAlbumsRatingGlobal Rating
1950114.183.52
2010103.63.38
1970673.513.51
1960453.443.5
1990453.363.32
1980433.193.3
2000323.163.34

My favourite genres were:

GenreRating
Musica-tradicional-cubana5 (3 albums)
Latin-jazz4.75 (4)
Jazz-trumpet4.67 (3)
World4.67 (3)
Jazz-blues4.4 (5)
Downtempo4.33 (3)
Hard-bop4.33 (3)
Cool-jazz4.25 (4)
Trip-hop4.2 (5)
Merseybeat4.17 (6)

and least favourites:

GenreRating
Yacht-rock2.75 (4)
Baroque-pop2.67 (6)
Bubblegum-pop2.67 (3)
Jazz-rock2.67 (3)
Classic-canadian-rock2.67 (3)
Stomp-and-holler2.5 (4)
Alternative-metal2.44 (9)
Industrial2 (4)
Industrial-rock2 (4)
Industrial-metal1.67 (3)

I think I'm going to be cross posting my reviews here as well under the #music tag




Dagonbane

This game was a home brewed mashup of Dragonbane and Cthulhu by Gaslight, and was a whole lot of squamous fun. Our cast of characters bore an uncanny resemblance to the cast of Carry on Screaming with the addition of Sherlock Holmes for good measure. I was playing Valeria Watt, so I put on my best Fenella Fielding husky voice and prepared to get smoking.

We were invited to a rather fine steak house to meet Miss Erwin Caulfield, an heiress with a problem. Her grandfather, the family patriarch, had died recently and she suspected that her half brother Sutton was trying to steal her inheritance. We were promised a handsome reward of fifty pounds if we could retrieve the will and associated documents from the safe in the Manor House of Strangers Keep before they could be tampered with. 

After making the most of our free food and drink, we set off in the Christmas Day snow, pausing only to bribe the policemen on the gate with a crate of whiskey and the ample charms of Clare "Busty" Danes. The trek through the grounds was surprisingly arduous as the winter chill started to bite, and we started to suspect that we were being watched by the gargoyles along the way as well as being spooked by a bank of snow.

We reached the courtyard, where we saw a little match girl shivering in the snow. As we approached, she threw back her head with an unearthly scream to reveal a set of needle sharp teeth. More match girls (or whatever these inhuman creatures were) appeared, and a desperate battle ensued with gunfire and the judicious use of Valeria's magic to keep them at bay until the original fiend was despatched.

We then found Sutton's carriage with a disturbing display of broken rat bones in eldritch patterns. He had evidently arrived before us, so we had best hurry. In the interests of crude humour, we elected to use the rear entrance (fnarr, fnarr) and found ourselves in a freezing cold kitchen with signs of a struggle - someone had evidently tried to claw their way out of the window!

Upstairs to the study, where we found the safe hidden behind a portrait of a stern looking December Caulfield, but the papers had already been taken. A search revealed some journals with a disturbing series of references to tunnels beneath the manor and evidence of a dark family secret, along with a receipt for some dynamite purchased by Sutton.

As if on cue, the manor was rocked by a sudden explosion - to be continued!







Thursday, December 26, 2024

2024 in Books

The final tally for this year was 29 books with 6 of those being re-reads. They had an average page count of 323 pages each. There were a couple of monster books in there (Shogun, Dune and Wolf Hall) but that seems like a reasonable average on the whole.

Being part of the regular Grognard Files bookclub definitely pushed me into reading some things this year that I wouldn't have otherwise read - notably The Sorcerer of Pyongyang and Roadside Picnic. I'm looking forward to the Horror & Spies series starting in January.

Number one author was Ben Aaronovitch with the Rivers of London Series which I am now caught up with (except for the graphic novels).

TitleAuthorDatePages
Lies SleepingBen Aaronovitch07/01/2024416
Tales From the FollyBen Aaronovitch12/01/2024240
Slayers : A Buffyverse StoryChristopher Golden17/01/2024200
The Far ReachesVarious22/01/2024227
ForwardVarious04/02/2024321
WarmerVarious11/02/2024112
Swords Against DeathFritz Leiber25/02/2024208
BibliomaniacRobin Ince26/02/2024330
Ms MarvelSana Amanat02/03/2024120
The Internet ConCory Doctorow04/03/2024235
Mythago WoodRobert Holdstock16/03/2024338
ShogunJames Clavell28/04/20241140
The Sorcerer of PyongyangMarcel Theroux05/05/2024238
DuneFrank Herbert25/05/2024609
The October ManBen Aaronovitch06/06/2024157
The Grand IllusionSyd Moore09/06/2024339
Old Man's WarJohn Scalzi15/06/2024321
RingworldLarry Niven02/07/2024351
False ValueBen Aaronovitch10/07/2024349
Attack Warning RedJulie McDowall03/08/2024247
Dead LionsMick Herron26/08/2024372
The Left Hand of DarknessUrsula K Le Guin28/08/2024290
Amongst Our WeaponsBen Aaronovitch16/09/2024404
Roadside PicnicArkady and Boris Strugatsky19/09/2024210
High-RiseJG Ballard08/11/2024258
Wolf Hall : The Mirror and the LightHilary Mantel19/12/2024879
Moominland MidwinterTove Jansson22/12/2024144
The Moomins and the Great FloodTove Jansson26/12/202493
UncleJ.P. Martin26/12/2024208

2024 in games

This was the first year that I've properly tracked the games that I've played, but I'm pretty sure that this has marked an increase over previous years with 68 game sessions in total, roughly split between 75% online and 25% at in person cons, namely Furnace, Seven Hills, Northstar and Owlbear. 

The standout hit this year has been Dragonbane which is just plain good fun with a great group of players. It's a simple D20 system and features some very nasty monsters with the twist that they are always going to hit and do something randomly nasty to you. Beating them takes teamwork (or just knowing when to run away) but the rules let this happen without too much crunch. I've played this both online and on the table, and the physical quality of the books, maps and table bling is of Free League's typical high quality.

In second place is Dungeon Crawl Classics which is more of a traditional Old School style dungeoneering game with some interesting quirks of gameplay - fortunately the dice roller on Discord copes with the weird and wonderful dice. The adventures are wild and we are playing on an adventure path that goes up to tenth level which I think will be enough to cross this one off the RPG bucket list.

Tied for third place are the hilariously gruesome Cy_borg and the hex crawling Forbidden Lands, which are both interesting uses of mechanics to tell emergent stories. I particularly like the rhythm of travelling in Forbidden Lands where you roll for daily weather and share the duties of keeping watch, hunting and setting up camp, and add to the feel of exploring an untamed wilderness.

The rest of the games were a mixture of one shots of various descriptions, with the standout being the intense and emotional Alice is Missing which was a unique experience to play an in person game with all interaction happening through text messages. 


The game I am most look forward to next year is Tales of the Old West, a Wild West take on the Year Zero engine rule set. I ran the quickdraw set at Furnace and had a blast with it. There is also Grogmeet 2025 to look forward to in January!

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

This was the first of the Moomin books to be published, but it's more of a prelude to the main series of stories that start with Comet in Moominland. The artwork is somewhat different, but equally charming, and the story is a simpler narrative tale of Moomintroll and his Moomninmamma searching for the wayward Moominpappa through a series of strange and slightly surreal adventures before ending up in the place that would later be better known as Moominvalley.

I hadn't previously read this book, and was delighted to receive this lovely 80th anniversary edition as a Christmas present. It's a short read but a satisfying one, and it also includes an introductory foreword from Frank Cottrell-Boyce and some of Tove Jansson's original character notes. 






Uncle by J.P. Martin

The Uncle books were written by an elderly Methodist minister called J.P. Martin in the 1960s and for many years occupied a sort of liminal fever dream space where you would half remember having read them when you were small but never see them in book shops or even know anyone else who recalled them. The first two books were reprinted in paperback, but the series seemed destined to languish in half forgotten obscurity (and ruinous second hand eBay prices) until 2013 when a kickstarter was organised to reprint the whole series in one volume and they were finally bring them back properly.

The titular Uncle is an enormously wealthy elephant in a purple dressing gown, living in a vast, rambling house called Homeward who is in constant conflict with the rough sorts who live in the derelict Badfort nearby. He has a vaguely patrician air of generosity towards the many inhabitants of his domain, but is also capable of being rather capricious and takes to kicking his enemies up into the sky. Whenever I go back to them, I always enjoy the surreal and rambling nature of the stories with bizarre new locations seemingly being discovered in every chapter or long lost relatives suddenly turning up. Hugely enjoyable, especially the fabulous illustrations by Quentin Blake.



Sunday, December 22, 2024

Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson

This is a childhood favourite and a book that I regularly re-visit this time of year. Moomins usually sleep through the long winter night, but in this book Moomintroll wakes up and finds himself unable to get back to sleep. The Moominhouse is buried in snow and when manages to dig himself out the valley is transformed by snowdrifts into a strange and unrecognisable landscape. He does find that he is not quite alone though - there is the enigmatic Too Ticky who is now living in the bath house down by the frozen sea, the irrepressible Little My who takes to the snowy slopes with devil may care aplomb, the dweller under the sink, the ancestor and others who are never seen during the warm summer months. My favourite section is about the solstice fire to bring the sun back and Moomintroll's disappointment and anger when it only appears for a brief moment the next day. 

Eventually the house starts to fill with refugees from the cold as well as an annoyingly enthusiastic Hemulin who tries to jolly the rest of the winter folk into enjoying the delights of fresh air and skiing, to the point where Moomintroll wishes again for the peace and quiet of being alone in the house. Eventually the snow starts to thaw and there is one last winter storm before Spring arrives and Mama wakes up, and Moomintroll realises that he is the first Moomin to be awake through a whole year. 

An absolute delight of a book!



Thursday, December 19, 2024

Wolf Hall - The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Apparently Hilary Mantel put off completing this final book of the Wolf Hall trilogy because she was understandably reluctant to write the final scenes leading up to the execution of Thomas Cromwell. However, even though we know how the story will end, there is much enjoyment to be had with the journey of how we get there.

This book (and the TV adaptation which I have been watching at the same time as reading) opens as the previous one concluded, with the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell watches this, knowing that he is complicit in this dreadful scene by having orchestrated the Queen's downfall at Henry's behest and that forces that will shake the story of England to its core are at play.

Cromwell’s power as the eminence gris behind the throne grows as he becomes the Lord Privy Seal in place of Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father. He is charged with dissolving the monasteries and forging a new direction for England as it diverges from the Catholic faith and the authority of the Pope. This is a dangerous path to walk and accusations of heresy will come back to haunt him, and he must also face down a looming rebellion in the north and protect the interests of the king’s daughter Mary who could easily become a figurehead for the rebels.

He is also responsible for the negotiations to secure King Henry a fourth wife after the untimely death of Jane Seymour shortly after giving birth to Edward, the prince that the king had so desperately wanted. This led to the marriage of Henry to Anne of Cleves, a union that was doomed from the start for reasons that verge on the tragic and comical.

The machinations of the Tudor court are superbly detailed as Cromwell tries to placate an ever more mercurial monarch who is suffering from a morbid leg wound and gross obesity, and he is faced with an array of enemies looking for any opportunity to bring him down. The end, when it comes, is shocking but inevitable.

How much Mantel has invented is something for history scholars to argue, but many of the words are clearly drawn from letters and contemporary accounts. Cromwell’s inner life is of necessity, a work of imagination, but it feels believable as an account of someone with consummate political nous living through some of the most turbulent times in English history.