Now - 9/24

Between Two Fires

I've been on a kick of reading of medieval fiction lately, having just finished Joe Abercrombie's The Devils earlier this year. Where that book was basically Suicide Squad in a world with a ten year old pope and werewolves, Between Two Fires is very much an upsetting horror novel set during The Black Death and I could not put it down during my read.

It's been a minute since I had a good novel just consume my time, and for once this was a physical read vs an audiobook. Unfortunately the local library doesn't have a copy of Christopher Buehlman's more recent stuff, but what a good excuse to kick a few dollars that man's way.

The imagery of the book was so insane: In one scene the group of protagonists are holed up in a house while something knocks on the other side hard enough to shake the whole house. When someone finally opens the door to see what the thing outside is, I am not exaggerating when I say I gasped loud enough that my wife thought I was choking. There are so many beautiful and horrifying moments like that in this book and I definitely put it on a recommendation list.

Fire Emblem - Fortune's Weave

My wife rolled credits on Zero Company just as my Switch 2 dinged to let me know Fire Emblem was ready to play, so it's been a great time for turn based strategy lovers in my house.

This tweet has been going around and it is actually not crazy enough. I had real moments in that first hour where I had to make sure I had actually loaded Fire Emblem and not like, Xenoblade. Once it finally settled and let me terminator back into the past, however, it snapped into place that if Three Houses was them flirting with Persona, Fortune's Weave is full calendar simulator.

I picked Leda, the bard who has revenge murder on the brain, and now the lead up to my arena battles is spent trying to figure out how to butter up spellcasters to join my team while going on pilgrimages to villages so I can do my side gig as a flamenco dancer, which gives me money to train my troops and helps me come even closer to continuing the revenge murder. Every now and again I get jumpscared by turn based battles in dungeons, which give me new loot, which then give me another exit back on the huge map and I have to calculate the most effective route to get back to the major capital city before the week rolls over so I can do my prayers and lift my weights.

It's involved. I'm about to make a spreadsheet.

I wanna take a moment to talk about how much I love that over 90% of the cast has brown skin and the very North Africa/Arabic Empire inspired setting. I never expect to get outside of Fantasy Europe with an RPG, let alone a fire emblem, so seeing SO many characters with a healthy dose of melanin has been a treat. It's to the point now that if I see a character with fair skin and closed toe shoes I can safely assume they're from outta town. Let's get more of that in our RPGs, thanks.

Digimon Card Game Store Regional

It was the Store regional for Digimon TCG this week in my town, which means we hosted players in the greater North Carolina/South Carolina/Georgia area. We had a fairly large turn out: 30 players showed up and slapped cardboard and despite a few technical hiccups I think it was overall a success.

It does bring to mind two things: One-- I think I'm a better announcer/judge than I am a player in these sorts of things. Having a person who can float from table to table and clarify is real important and it's even more important that the person doing so isn't distracted because they're also in the tournament. I plan on taking a proper judge test in the near future to facilitate.

Two -- I think what I really enjoy about these events is meeting the people. I don't really intend on placing first or going to a Nationals if I get an invite (I really do not want to go to Florida), but it has been so nice getting the contact info of people who show up and helping connect communities into one like, super tribe of people who like the Digimon Card Game. A tournament with 30 people is a win in my eyes, and if we can hit 64 that's an even bigger win.¹

Really, we've come a long way from a year ago when we sometimes had 4 man tournaments. Here's to another year, I hope.

Gracemaria Updates

Finally, Gracemaria.²

We've been continuing our Daggerheart campaign and the players have dove deep into a giant hole in the ground simply known as The Pit, in search of a lost castle of an ancient dwarven king.

Well, they found the castle, and it's plugging another giant hole in the ground where evil zombie making mist is pouring out.

A thing I have been doing with Gracemaria is putting a bunch of single session one shots that give the players equipment/tools/abilities/etc in preparation for what I've been calling Kilodungeons -- dungeons big enough to take multiple sessions to clear, but not big enough to set a full campaign in. In a way it's very much stealing from the Zelda design ethos, but I haven't really cracked the whole "get this equipment to do the puzzles inside"

The Underking's Castle is Kilodungeon number 2: a sort of dwarven necropolis sitting over a pit of something. One of the big tests is gonna be setting how I can tax the player's resources; they have a way to simply warp out of the dungeon, but if they leave the mist reanimates everything they've killed and it effectively resets. Pushing forward as far as they can will yield the best results, and a rest inside the dungeon will keep the current status but risk poisoning them.

The first session of TUC is this sunday, so I hopefully will have results to share soon along with a general update on my Daggerheart thoughts and this campaign.