Games and eye tests

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. It was a new venue as he’s moved recently, and he cooked an Indian style beef curry with rice for dinner for us. I arrived in the middle of a game of Last Message.

This is a game where someone has been murdered and one player has to give the solvers clues as to who it was, by drawing their clues on a small erasable whiteboard. Then another player, who is trying to prevent the others from solving the murder gets to erase parts of the clue before anyone else sees it. The whiteboard is divided into 9 squares, and in the first round the obfuscater can erase I think 5 of the squares, leaving the other 4. Then the solvers have to try to interpret what’s left of the clue to identify the killer… from a large Where’s Wally-like drawing containing hundreds of slightly different characters! So it ain’t easy!

If they fail, they get another clue, and this time the obfuscater gets to erase one less square. You continue for four rounds, and if the solvers haven’t identified the killer with four guesses, they lose and the obfuscater wins. We played a few games and it was tricky, but we always managed to identify the killer in time.

After that we split into two groups since there were a lot of people, and I played a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers while the other group played Heat: Pedal to the Metal. I’d played this game once before and liked it, so it was good to give it another go, even if I came equal last of 4 players. Then we played a game of Through the Desert while the others finished Heat. We finished those two games almost simultaneously, so everyone joined together for a game of Codenames. I was a spymaster, but despite valiant cluing and guessing we lost by just one card.

Today, Saturday, I did a 5k run in the morning. The weather being cooler meant I could go a bit faster, and I recorded my third fastest time: 26:33.

Mid-morning I went with my wife to get our annual eye checkup at the optometrist, to see if our glasses prescriptions need updating. The optometrist also took fundus photos and optical coherence tomography (OCT) cross sections of our retinas to check for any abnormalities. We came out with a clean bill of eye health, which is good.

After this we grabbed some lunch from the nearby shops (I got sushi) and sat in the park and let Scully run around a bit, before heading home. This afternoon I worked on writing several new Darths & Droids strips.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki. We ran out of seaweed flakes last time and I tried to find more in the Asian grocery store, but I couldn’t find it pre-flaked, so I bought a small pack of seaweed sheets, thinking they’re brittle enough that I could quite easily crush them into small flakes. But they turned out to be tougher than I expected, so we had rather large flakes. Oh well.

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Sending kilos of Magic cards

I did something today that I haven’t done in a very long time.

I licked a postage stamp.

I filled out forms to get a refund for the credit on my and my wife’s Opal cards, the stored value cards used on Sydney’s public transport system. We no longer need them because they’ve updated the scanners to work with any debit/credit card, and it’s more convenient to do that (in fact using Apple Pay) rather than carry an extra card around all the time. To get our stored value back, we need to physically mail the cards in, which means using an actual envelope and postage stamps. I dug out our antique postage stamps that we last used maybe 10 years ago, and looked up the current cost to mail a standard letter, which turned out to be $1.20. And lo! We had a few $1 stamps and some 20 cent stamps still sitting in our drawer. The $1 stamps were self-adhesive, but the 20 cent ones were old fashioned lick-em-and-stick-em.

Today I also spent time packing almost 3 kilos of Magic: the Gathering cards to send overseas to people who bought them from me. Here’s one kilogram of cards (minus enough to add packaging and keep the total just under 1kg):

1kg of Magic cards

And here’s two kilograms of cards:

2kg of Magic cards

And I learnt a thing. If you’re sending Magic cards from Australia to the USA, you can streamline things by filling out an online customs form. There’s a field asking you to enter the type of item so it can determine the HS Tariff Code. You can start typing “card game”, and it pops up a drop-down list and you can select from:

  • card game
  • collectible card game
  • game cards
  • and a few other less relevant things

Whatever you do, you should NOT select “collectible card game”. Because it gets flagged as some sort of restricted item, and the Post Office refuses to send it. I redid the form on my phone while the staff member was on the phone to the head office (fruitlessly), and all I changed was my selection on that drop down, and I asked them to reprocess it, and it went through without a hitch. I mentioned this to my friends when I got home, and one found that “Collectibles” is one of the restricted categories in Australia Post’s list of Bad Stuff You Can’t Mail. We surmised probably because of money laundering or something. Anyway, lesson learnt!

Finally, the solution to yesterday’s puzzle! I can proudly announce that nobody—none of the commenters here in the blog, nor any of my friends who I also quizzed on our Discord chat—managed to guess the correct word. Incorrect guesses include:

  • Beuer
  • Fever
  • Leven
  • Gwen
  • Zeuen
  • Leuen
  • Tavern
  • Eleven
  • Forever
  • Tower
  • 7even

The correct answer is … “Even”.

Yeah.

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Playing games and packing games

Friday was 4 ethics classes, followed by online board games night. I also went out to the local pizza place for dinner with my wife and Scully. They have a new pizza on the menu—peri peri chicken—and I decided to try it this time. It was pretty good! The owner chatted with us during our meal and he said that many customers had been asking for a peri peri chicken pizza, so he had decided to listen to them and add it. He was pleased that I liked it.

So I was a bit late joining in on the games. We played Just One, and Can’t Stop Express, and then the others started getting tired and left early.

This morning I did a 5k run, my first one since last Saturday since I’ve been nursing the pulled muscle in my side. But it’s better now and I was keen to hit the road again. Also, the weather has turned and the string of hot and humid days has finally broken. Yesterday and today were much more pleasant at around 25°C. And it was a cool 18°C in the morning when I went for my run, which was a nice change and made it significantly less exhausting.

I cleaned the house while my wife took Scully to the local farmer’s market. She returned with a couple of scones, big heavy ones from a local baker. We had some a few weeks ago and they are very filling. I lamented then that we only had jam and no cream (since we don’t normally have cream in the fridge). But this week I had cream! Because of Thursday’s grocery shopping dilemma when I was under the minimum online order total and had to add some more items, and I added ingredients to make a decadent dessert.

So I whipped up the cream and had my scone with apricot jam (we don’t have a jar of the regulation strawberry at the moment, but apricot is fine) and whipped cream. Not quite the same as clotted cream, but decent enough. It was delicious, and so filling that it was essentially my lunch.

Then I used the remainder of the whipped cream, folded in some mascarpone and chocolate liqueur, and layered it with Arnott’s Choc Ripple biscuits to make my own variation on the classic choc ripple cake recipe.

This afternoon I spent much of the time pulling out Magic: the Gathering cards from various storage boxes to make a couple of collections to send to buyers. Two people want to get an assortment of common and cheap cards. We negotiated details during the week and now I went through and collated cards to make up two packages, one being 1kg of cards, the other 2kg of cards – less some for the weight of packaging to keep the total weight under those postage limits. I won’t make a lot of money from these sales, but it’s worth it to get rid of some of these bulk cards and regain some storage space!

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An intense game of Root

Yesterday was board games night at a friend’s place. We started with a game of Codenames, which my team lost when my partner and I guessed the assassin word. Always a terrible way to lose.

Then we split into a game of 4 people playing Root, and 3 people who played some Jump Drive and possibly other things. I was in the Root game, playing the Eyrie. The game progressed steadily until we were all about 15 points, halfway to the wining score of 30. Then the Woodland Alliance player suddenly made a big series of gains in one turn, putting him within striking distance of victory. Then the Vagabond player did the same, also scoring over 10 points in his very next turn, setting up potential victory next turn too. And then the Marquisate player played a Dominance card, removing his point score and setting an alternate win condition of controlling two clearings in opposite corners of the board. And then he moved 8 cat warriors into one clearing and 10 into the clearing in the opposite corner!!! This would easily win him the game at the start of his next turn, and it would be basically impossible for the rest of us to stop him.

I took my turn, meekly doing pretty much nothing, as I didn’t have the potential to do anything dramatic on this turn. And then the Woodland Alliance scored the final few points to hit 30 and win. Basically, just a turn ahead of the Vagabond, who could have won next turn, and the Marquisate, who would have won right after that. So all three of my opponents had victory in sight within a turn of each other, while I was stuck languishing in very obvious last place.

Just look at all the cats in the two corners of the board!

Root end game

Also yesterday I walked past the construction site that is a few blocks from our place, where a slew of apartments are replacing the old houses that were there. It’s making progress, although still in the digging and moving earth around phase.

Construction progress

This morning I went for a 5k run, but I noticed as I ran that I had a bit of a pain in my side. I completed the 5k, then had my shower and also cleaned the bathroom and shower while doing that. Then sat down for a while, and a few hours later my side had tensed up terribly. It’s a muscle strain, and quite painful I’ve been putting an icepack on it to reduce inflammation but I suspect it’ll take a few days to calm down. Which means probably no running tomorrow.

For dinner tonight my wife and I took Scully for a long walk over to the Flat Rock Brew Cafe, which is a really nice place for a late afternoon drink and meal. It has shady outdoor seating. I had a dark ale and a pulled pork burger, which was really good.

Back home this evening we watched the Australian movie The Dry. Excellent film – highly recommended for anyone who likes mystery/crime investigation. I won’t say any more – just see it.

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Another close game of Root

Not too much of interest to report today – it was mostly a melange of usual activities. I did a 5k run in the morning, which was cooler and easier than yesterday, thank goodness. Made a sourdough loaf for use for lunch sandwiches tomorrow. I did a new Darths & Droids comic strip. Three ethics classes in the evening.

The most interesting thing was that I played another game of Root with my wife this afternoon. This time instead of using the robotic Marquisate (cats) to provide a third faction, we went with the robotic Eyrie (birds), and I played the cats. I raced to a quick lead as the cats are wont to do, but flagged late in the game and my wife’s Woodland Alliance caught up and passed me to within 3 points of victory. But I managed to scrape together 4 points on my next turn and beat the Alliance by one single turn. The robotic Eyrie was a big chaotic and didn’t do very much, so again I think the default difficulty level is a bit too easy (like the robotic Marquisate). Next time we’ll add some of the options to make it a tougher opponent.

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Titardinal’s Tower, session 1

Friday was a very busy day! I did final preparations for the evening’s Dungeons & Dragons session. A full play report is below!

I also drove over to Loreto Kirribilli, dropping Scully off at my wife’s work on the way, to give my talk to the students there. The day was very hot, reaching 38°C, and humid, so I really didn’t fancy walking all that way. I was worried about finding parking near the school, so gave myself plenty of time. But I found a spot right in front of the school gate, just three or four metres from where I could walk in! Most of the parking around Kirribilli is restricted to 2 hours parking, but this spot right in front of the school was unrestricted between 10:00 and 14:30 – but was no parking during the school drop-off and pick-up times.

The teacher in charge of my visit met me and took me into the lovely cool air conditioned room where I’d give the talk to the kids. This was in the junior school, so kids about 8-10 years old. I gave my talk on the overlaps between astronomy, photography, and human vision, to a group of about 40 kids. They looked pretty rapt, and several asked interesting questions. A very articulate girl named Alice gave a short thank you speech at the end, several kids hung around to ask me more questions, and then they all ran off to their classes at the end of lunch. It was really good, and the teacher was very happy and asked me to come back as often as I could manage.

In the evening I ran D&D with my friends. Saturday morning I went for a 5k run – my first for nearly 2 weeks since I skipped last weekend to let my ankle recover. It was cool and rainy, and I did a reasonable time. And then most of today I was typing up the following D&D play log…


Tidying up and Training: Brandonstead to Neensford

After the vanquishing of the Wyrm of Brandonstead, the heroes returned to Brandonstead with their treasure. The villagers were united in thanking them for slaying the dragon. Having found the bodies of the dwarven brothers Grimni and Kedri, it seems that the third brother Brol was somehow cursed into turning into the dragon.

Garamond had claimed the magical Sword of Sir Brandon and Plate Mail of Sir Brandon, but the villagers insisted politely that these historical relics belonged in the village. Garamond gracefully gave them up.

The party returned home to Neensford, three days march south. Here they cashed in much of the treasure, using it to pay their mentors for training. Notgandalf’s mentor Jessica the Mindstoker gifted him a new spell for his spellbook: Levitation. Garamond returned from his time training with the elves of the forest with the new spell Wizard Lock.

Swirling Rumours: Neensford to Benton

Towards the end of their training period, with the weather turning from summer into early autumn, a travelling merchant arrived from the east, bearing news of import: The great wizard Titardinal had died! Titardinal was known for having a secluded tower a week’s ride to the east, past the village of Benton. The party gathered to share what rumours they’d previously heard about Titardinal. They augmented this by asking around the village for anything that anyone else knew.

  • Titardinal? Crazy old coot. They say he went off the deep end and built that tower all by his lonesome up by the lake.
  • They say the lake spirit cursed the wizard for his arrogance, twisting his tower into a maze of madness. Those who enter never return the same.
  • They say the undines imprisoned within the tower’s fountain are not as innocent as they seem. Some claim they hold the key to unlocking the tower’s secrets, while others warn of their vengeful nature.
  • Rumours swirl of a secret chamber hidden beneath the lake’s surface, accessible only to those who know the right incantations. But tread carefully, for the spirits of the deep do not take kindly to intruders.
  • There are those who claim the wizard’s tower holds the key to great power, but it’s guarded by creatures of nightmare. Only the bravest—or the most foolish—would dare to enter.
  • There are rumours of a secret entrance to the tower, accessible only during the full moon when the barriers between worlds are weakest. But those who seek it must first navigate the treacherous cliffs surrounding the lake.
  • I’ve heard tales of a hidden library within the tower, filled with ancient tomes and forbidden knowledge. But beware, for the books themselves are said to be cursed, driving those who read them to madness.

Questioning the merchant revealed that the news had travelled slowly. Titardinal seemed to have vanished several months ago, but nobody had carried the news to Neensford before now. The party decided that a recently deceased powerful wizard’s tower should contain many treasures and potentially magic items, and was worth investigating.

They equipped themselves with two wagons for transporting the party (Brigette, Drashi, Garamond, Nogge, Notgandalf) and their retainers (Fingers, Tarlan, and 5 other journeymen adventurers), plus four horses to draw them. Nogge bought a riding horse for himself, not wanting to ride in a wagon. They journeyed six days to the east, up into the foothills of the Black Peak Mountains, to the village of Benton. Here they paused to refresh themselves from time on the road, and approached the innkeeper to ask about Titardinal:

  • Rumour has it Titardinal was head over heels for the Spirit of the Lake. Built his tower smack dab by the water just to catch her eye, they say.

Titardinal’s Tower still lay a day’s travel to the north-east, up into the Black Peak Mountains. They travelled up the narrow track and made camp near the pass that gave access to a valley with a beautiful blue mountain lake, surrounded by slopes covered in pine, cedar, and fir trees.

Approaching Titardinal’s Tower

The next morning dawned clear and sunny. From the pass, the party spied out the land below. On a small tied island attached to the near shore of the lake rose a circular stone tower, narrow, about seven storeys tall. No door was visible from the pass, but four floors of widely spaced windows could be seen making up the upper four floors of the tower, above a smooth section below with no windows. The battlement on the roof was partly crumbled in places. As they watched, a large white pelican flew from the lake up to one of the lowest windows, perched, and ducked inside. Another pelican emerged from a different window at that level and flew off to forage.

Also visible from the pass was a small encampment on the shore, about half a mile from the tower, by a stream emptying into the lake. A dozen or so small humanoid figures could be seen occasionally, scurrying under a large sky-blue tarpaulin set up as a shelter. Goblins! The party deliberated dealing with the encampment first, to ensure no surprise attacks from behind while exploring the tower, but decided to tackle the tower first.

Nogge: All I’m saying is it could come back to bite us in the butt.
DM: So you’re setting up an “I told you so” for Nogge?
Nogge: Right.

Rather than take all the retainers and the wagons down to the lake, where they might be seen by the goblins, they instructed the retainers to set up camp in the pass and wait there.

Drashi: Equals sign the wagons.
All: Huh?
Drashi: You can’t circle them. There’s only two.
Nogge: You’d need an infinite number to make a circle. We need three or more to even make make a polyhedron.
Brigette: Polyhedron? Just how mountainous is this region?

They approached carefully in the brush, avoiding making themselves obvious to the goblins. Fingers scouted around the base of the tower, reporting that there was a large double door on the far side, facing the lake. He also said the lock had evidently been broken.

The party pushed open the doors carefully, revealing a “welcoming” hall decorated with iron gibbets hanging from chains, containing skeletons. They carefully probed the skeletons with poles to make sure they weren’t undead, then ratcheted the chains down to examine them more closely. They found a silvery ring on the bony finger of one skeleton. A search of the room also turned up a pewter scroll case which contained an old sheet of parchment with a letter:

Most Esteemed Titardinal,

I beg of you to reconsider this mad project of yours and return to my side as my most trusted advisor.

(Signed) Duke Trayko of Verge.

The Madness of Titardinal’s Tower

As they stood in the reception hall, tiny motes of sparkling light appeared and attached themselves to each party member, circling above their heads. These appeared harmless, and not bright enough to explore by, so the group lit torches and lanterns and progressed into the tower.

First they tried a passage to the south, which led to a square room with floor length tapestries on each wall. The passage they emerged from was hidden behind a blue tapestry showing the lake. Other walls contained a red tapestry showing a mountain scene, a yellow one depicting a desert scene, and a green one with a scene deep in a deciduous forest. Notgandalf, drawing a map, expressed confusion as, according to the pacing out of room sizes, this tapestry room should be outside the southern wall of the tower. Brigette suggested it was some wizard shenanigans and the tapestries actually transported people who stepped past them to different locations. So the tapestry room itself was not within the tower, but somewhere else, and if one were to step from the room past the blue tapestry they would be transported into the tower.

They decided not to pass beyond the blue tapestry, but retreated to the entrance hall and tried the other exit, an arched doorway with a wooden door that had fallen off its hinges. This led into a dismal cell, with manacles and shackles.

This Titardinal really didn’t like visitors, did he?

In the cell, a second spark of light joined the first around each adventurer’s head. And they noticed a brass symbol inset in the floor, a number “2”. Quickly they went back and checked the floor of the welcome hall more carefully, finding a long, straight strip of brass set into the floor, which they now recognised as a numeral “1”. This prompted some experimentation.

Nogge, accompanied by two sparks, went to look at the tapestry room again. Pulling the blue tapestry aside, he spotted a brass number “18” on the floor. He decided to enter the room, pushing past the tapestry. When he set foot inside the room, the two sparks around his head vanished. One returned when he re-entered the welcome hall, and a second when he went back into the cell. The party surmised that sparks would accumulate as they traversed rooms in numerical order, but would reset to zero if they ever entered a room out of sequence.

Now they continued exploring. An open passage from the cell led to a north-south corridor with five other openings on the sides. They tried the south-east one first, revealing a cell numbered “23”. This cell contained windows, and they could see that they were no longer on the ground floor! Going in to check, they saw the eastern window was on the 5th floor of the tower (with one window below them and two above). There were also heavy, rusty chains dangling down from the window above, and down from the sill to the window below. The other window, in the north wall of the same room, appeared to be looking south from the 7th floor!

Now the party realised what madness Titardinal’s Tower held.

Deeper Exploration

The group quickly checked the other cells along the corridor. The south-west was labelled “6”, and had another passage leading west. The central west cell was “5”, with no exits. The north-west cell was “4”, and had a window in the north wall, which appeared to look west on level 5.

Next they tried along the corridor to the north. This opened into a large room covered in muck and guano, inhabited by giant pelicans, taller than a human. Nogge carefully took a step into the room to see if he would attract a third spark, but the two around his head vanished. He concluded this was not room number 3, but a pelican took unkindly to his intrusion and attacked! Nogge beat off the giant probing beak and smote the pelican with his magical two-handed sword, driving it back into the foetid rookery.

The final cell, in the north-east, turned out to be room “3”. People collected a third spark as expected, and Nogge returned to the welcome hall to reassemble his as well. Cell 3 also had a window in the north wall, looking west from level 6. As this was directly above the window in cell 4 directly across the corridor, they tried stationing one person at each window at the same time to see if they could see each other by looking up/down, and they could. The group concluded that at least it was only spatial weirdness going on, and not time shenanigans as well.

Then they traversed rooms 4, 5, and 6 to accumulate 6 sparks each. The other passage from cell 6 led them north-west up a set of stairs to a circular room with exit passages north and south, a window north-west, a brass “7” in the floor, and a large fountain in the middle. Could this be the rumoured fountain of the undines?

As Brigette approached the fountain, ghostly shapes like young children appeared in the water. They saw the sparks about Brigette’s head and merged into a serpent-like shape that stretched from the water to attack her! Brigette yelled to stop attacking, that they were here to help them. The undines paused, and asked why they had the sparks; they were doing the evil wizard’s work! Brigette conversed, trying to convince the undines that the party meant no harm. The undines revealed that Titardinal had trapped them in the fountain to power a devastating spell to “destroy everything”, and the sparks were part of it. They begged the party to “destroy the altar” so that the spell could never be completed.

The group discussed ways to free the undines, including siphoning the water out the window and smashing the fountain to spill the water. But the undines said they were trapped here magically and the only way to free them was to destroy the altar. They asked the party to swear a solemn oath that they would do it. When Brigette swore, they presented her with a sword from the fountain water, saying it was the sword of the Lake Spirit.

What Madness is This?

The group decided the right thing to do was to return the sword to the Lake Spirit as soon as possible. They retreated out through the cells and the entrance hall to the front door of the tower, seeking to gaze out on the lake. They pulled the doors open warily, half-expecting the camp of goblins to be waiting for them. But there were no goblins.

And there was no lake.

The beautiful blue mountain lake had vanished. All they could see was mountain slopes lined with green trees. Everyone stood dumbstruck for a minute.

Nogge: That…. is the last thing I expected.

Brigette walked forward carefully, probing the ground with a pole. After several steps the pole indicated the edge of the lake and Brigette walked forward, getting her feet wet. The lake seemed to be there, but none of them could see it. Brigette placed the sword in the (unseen) water and called to the Lake Spirit to accept their offering. But after several minutes, nothing happened and the sword was still there – Brigette feeling for it in the unseen water.

She decided to strip off her armour and swim out into deeper water. Others suggested tying a rope to her, since nobody could actually see the lake, to avoid her getting lost. This done, Brigette swam out and dived with the sword, attempting to offer it to the Lake Spirit. But after some minutes of this to no avail, she gave up.

As she dried off on the shore of the lake they could not see, they discussed the mysterious illusion before them. How did this happen? Why was the lake hidden from them? What time was it? They looked at the sky.

They couldn’t see the sky.

They saw stars in inky blackness. But the sun was up – it was dazzlingly bright in the sky, they could feel its warmth, and see the shadows on the ground around them. It was daylight, but the stars were out.

They concluded that if the Lake Spirit was too distant or too busy to take the sword, they would just have to go back into the tower and try to find and destroy the altar.

Drashi: Good thing it’s still daynight.

But first they wanted to check the tapestry room again, as they suspected that maybe there was some strange teleportation going on. They wanted to check if they were still in the tower behind the blue lake tapestry. But when they walked down the corridor from the reception hall to the tapestry, it wasn’t there – the corridor ended at a blank stone wall! Nogge felt the wall… and found he could feel a tapestry. He pulled it aside, revealing the tapestry room beyond, with the red, yellow, and green tapestries. But entering the room, the tapestry behind could not be seen, and it looked like a stone wall, though he could still feel the tapestry and pull it aside to re-enter the corridor. Curiouser and curiouser…

Finding the Altar

The group returned to the fountain room, not bothering to collect sparks by traversing rooms 3-5. They told the undines what happened as Fingers scouted the corridor to the south. He returned and said it led to a dining room with a couple of giants, twice the height of a person, sitting on the floor, grumbling and playing cards at the dining table. The window here looked north (as determined by the sun) from level 7.

The passage north led down a stair to a square room with exits in all four walls and the number “8” on the floor. Old paintings were hung on the narrow walls between the exits. A window in the west wall revealed the view from the level 7 northern window. They determined the passage east led downstairs to the pelican room. Nogge feared the pelican room would be room 9, but the number was hidden under the muck and guano and it would be impossible to find without killing all the pelicans. He did an experiment collecting sparks to test this idea. He returned from the entry hall with 8 sparks and stepped carefully into the pelican room, timing it when none of the pelicans was looking his way, and collected a ninth spark.

Having proven this, they proceeded north from the art gallery room, descending into a landing before a wide staircase leading back upwards. Large alcoves in the east and west walls housed evil looking human statues. A brass number “13” was set into the floor. The party climbed the steps to an intermediate landing, with more steps leading up to the north to a similar looking landing with statues. But here in the middle landing there were narrow passages leading east and west.

They chose the eastern passage, emerging in a crypt containing a stone sarcophagus, engraved with a magical looking sigil, and a brass number “14” in the floor. Stairs led up to the north and down to the east. The eastern stairs led down to an L-shaped room “15”, which appeared to be the bottom of a cess pit, with a mound of rotting food refuse, filth, and dung, below a shaft that ascended from the ceiling. Two giant flies that were buzzing around the muck attacked them but the party took care of them with some swift sword blows. The group didn’t fancy trying to climb up the reeking shaft to reach what they expected would be room 16, so they retreated to 14 and took the stairs north.

This led to Titardinal’s study, with a desk and bookshelves, in disarray and clearly partly searched through by someone. The floor was labelled with a brass “22”. Notgandalf perused the books, looking for anything magical. Fingers hushed everyone and said he could hear voices and shushing noises. He indicated a corner where the noise was coming from, and said he recognised goblin language. He translated, “Shhh, stay quite and they won’t notice us.”

Notgandalf cast Detect Magic, but this didn’t reveal anything, except a couple of the books still on the shelf, which he grabbed quickly, and the ring that had been taken from the skeleton in the entry hall. Nogge and Brigette advanced on the corner of the room and poked ahead of them with the sword blades. Suddenly one noticed resistance and a voice cried out in pain! Goblin voices called out and disembodied arms wielding swords appeared out of nowhere, charging the party!

The goblins fought bravely, perhaps thinking they had the advantage, but three were cut down by swords and Notgandalf’s Magic Missile, and Drashi, wielding the Silver Axe of Sir Wylt, sliced clean through the arm of the fourth, dropping the arm and sword to the floor. Tarlan located the screaming invisible goblin and pulled an invisible cloak off it, revealing the now armless creature. He applied some bandages while others found the other bodies and removed invisible cloaks from them as well.

They questioned the goblin, who claimed to be from the Rikalu tribe, the “best goblins, better than the dirty Fivarin tribe”. He said the goblins in the camp would make short work of the party, for not only did they have warriors but also a mighty shaman. The party debated, and decided they couldn’t let the goblin flee to inform his comrades, so they put him out of his misery.

Brigette tried on one of the “invisibility cloaks” and discovered to her dismay that she couldn’t see anything while under it. “What use is a cloak of invisibility that you can’t see through?!” They also realised that the cloaks had not detected as magical to Notgandalf’s spell. Nevertheless, they bundled the invisible cloths up and took them.

Among the mess in the study they found several architectural drawings, showing apparent alternative layouts for the tower rooms. They all showed numbered rooms, and described the final room 24 as being the altar room. Furthermore, the window in this room looked east from level 6, directly above a window in the cell room 23 they had already visited. They surmised they were meant to climb down the chain from 22 to 23, and then out the other window from 23 to reach the altar in room 24.

Notgandalf actually wanted to climb down the chain directly to 23, but the others decided to just walk back the way they’d come through the rooms. They reached cell 23 to find Notgandalf waiting for them. Looking out the other window, on level 7 looking south, they noticed it not only had a chain dangling down to whatever unknown room had the window on level 6, but there was also a chain leading up to the rooftop. This seemed intriguing enough that they despatched Fingers to climb up. He secured a rope at the top to tie to people to avoid falling, and the rest of the party clambered onto the rooftop.

Here they found an 8-foot square stone altar placed on the crumbling roof, with carved magical sigils on the sides. Set into the stones of the rooftop was the brass number 24. This was the altar the undines wanted them to destroy!

Brigette: I gently stab the altar with the undine sword.

That did nothing. They tried chipping away at the magical sigils to deface them. Brigette and Drashi, using their dwarven stonecunnning, determined that the altar was not attached to the roof, and could probably be dragged or pushed if enough people were available. They estimated about ten people would be needed to shift it. And perhaps they could push it off the roof and let it smash on the ground below. They considered using ropes or levers, but there was no simple way to arrange this to gain a mechanical advantage.

The seven of them weren’t strong enough together to shift the altar. But they had five retainers waiting for them back at their camp in the mountain pass. The group sat to consider their options…

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A new vanilla slice

My Snot Block & Roll food review blog has languished a bit since the COVID pandemic, but today I finally managed to find a new vanilla slice from a bakery I haven’t visited before. We felt like going out for a bit of a drive for afternoon tea today, since it was hot and humid and not good weather for taking Scully for a walk. I checked Google Maps and found a bakery not too far away and we headed over.

Biga Artisan Bakery

When we got there, they had vanilla slices and they looked decent, so I decided to get one. It was pretty good, though with one caveat. You can read the full review here.

After we got home, I played another game of Root with my wife. This time we used one of the automated “robot” factions to add a third opponent to the mix. We used the Mechanical Marquise, I played the Eyrie, and my wife played Woodland Alliance for the first time. The robot factions have variable difficulty levels, and we used the default, which is the second highest from (easy, default, difficult, nightmare). It didn’t pose much of a problem for us, though I suspect part of that was caused by some bad luck with the robot Marquise drawing three mouse cards in a row, which really limited its ability to attack and damage us. My wife won in the end, running away with spreading sympathy throughout the robot player’s territory without much opposition.

Root with Mechanical Marquise

I spent much of the morning doing house chores. I vacuumed and then emptied water from all the moisture absorbers in all the closets and storage areas, including the cabinets in the garage, and refilled them with dry calcium chloride crystals. It’s astonishing the amount of water these things have been sucking out of the air in the recent high humidity. Definitely better doing this than getting mould.

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Double gaming: Root and D&D

No update on Friday because it was face-to-face board gaming night with my friends. I had four ethics classes, leading into departing to drive over to my friend’s place for the gaming. I was keen to try Root with more players, and with one of the regulars sidelined due to potential whooping cough exposure, I surveyed the likely attendees and found we had 4, the perfect number of players.

Then, a few minutes before I left, another friend said he was going to come too. So now we had 5, which wouldn’t work (without adding one of the optional expansions that allow more players, which I didn’t want to do as I haven’t read any of the rules of those yet). And then when I arrived, that last guy was just getting out of his car too. It turned out he brought a copy of Root as well! He said he’d bought it a while ago and had also been looking for a chance to play it with others.

We toyed with the idea of splitting into groups of 3 and 2 and playing two games, but I was the only one who knew all the rules. The guy who brought his own copy of the game said he’d be happy to watch and learn while the other four of us played a game, so that’s what we ended up doing. Our host made home-made pizzas for dinner and then we played.

The Cats raced to an early lead, as it seems they are wont to do. I was playing the Vagabond for the first time, after just having read its rules the day before. So I didn’t have a good grasp on my strategy, and I was helping the others with their moves to remind them of things they could do. The Eyrie crept up on the Cats and got to a point where they would have won the very next turn, but the rest of us managed to get them to go into Turmoil and the Eyrie lost 5 points, keeping them short of victory. Still, they would almost certainly win next turn. And then the Woodland Alliance stepped up. The player made some moves, said he couldn’t do much else, and then questioned what he could possibly craft from the cards in his hand. It turned out he had Sympathy in three mouse clearings, and had a “Favour of the Mice” card, which requires three mice to craft… and it removes all enemy pieces from all mouse clearings! This destroyed some 6 buildings, giving him 6 points, and victory in the game!

We finished the night with a game of For Sale, so the observer could play a game of 5 with us.

In other news, we had some work done in our garage on Friday. It’s in the basement of the apartment block, which is lit in the common areas, but the inside of our car space was very dark. Every time I wanted to go in there and store stuff or find stuff, I had to use a torch to see anything. It was really annoying. But a while back I noticed one of the other car spaces seemed to have a nice new light inside, motion controlled. So I wrote to the strata administrator and asked if we could have one of those installed as well, and they said yes. We have to pay a small installation cost, but the power comes from the communal fund. I was happy to pay the installation, and the work was done on Friday. So now we have a wonderful new light in our car space, and it’s great!

Saturday, I got up early and went straight for a 5k run, because my wife was taking Scully for a walk before heading out to the gym for a new dance class a bit later in the morning. I had my run completed and done my stretches before 08:00.

I used the rest of the morning for housework, cleaning the bathroom and shower, and then got stuck into prep work for tonight’s Dungeons & Dragons game at the local science shop. I had a one-shot dungeon to run, and wanted to make a bunch of pregenerated 3rd level characters. Last time I had 2nd level, so I just boosted their level by 1. Last time I’d printed out blank character sheets and written everything by hand. Of course some sheets ended up with player notes and doodles all over the, so I couldn’t really reuse those.

I thought I’d save myself some time in the long term by making Photoshop files of character sheets, with different layers representing the same character at different levels, so I can just switch them on and off and print out a version at any of a number of different levels, ready for play. It took me a bit of time to do this.

And then when I printed them I ran into a weird and annoying quirk of Photoshop. It saves the “number of copies” to print as part of the document. You save a new copy of the file to work on, do stuff, print it…. and it remembered that last time I printed 6 copies of the blank character sheet, so now I’d accidentally queued up to print 6 copies of each character when I only wanted 1 copy of each. I had to go into the print queue and delete all the jobs when I noticed (after 18 sheets came out of the printer).

The game went fairly well, with 4 players. But some of them were young and had to leave early, so we finished well before the shop closing time of 10pm, and didn’t get through as much of the dungeon as I hoped. Nevertheless, I shortcutted to the climax and they got to meet the God of Swords and ended up getting a super cool magical sword… with a horrible curse. And that was a suitable end to the evening.

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New content today:

Asking Why?

I did the first three classes on the new “Why?” topic this evening. They went well, but I think it’s a bit of a brain-bender for some of the kids. It’s clear some of these concepts are things they’ve really never thought about or considered before. I had mostly kids on the high end of my age range tonight. I may need to simplify things a bit when I have classes with kids on the low age end.

Today I played another solo game of Root, with the same three factions as yesterday. This time I made sure to harry the Eyrie a bit more, with both the Cats and the Woodland Alliance, and that prevented the birds from winning, allowing the Cats to claim victory. The Alliance did a bit worse than yesterday, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of their tactics.

Root game

Not much else today. I took Scully on a long walk past the harbour shore in the morning. I made red curry broccoli and carrot with rice for dinner. Oh, I got some rye flour for sourdough – I ran out ages ago and haven’t done a rye loaf for a long time. I’m baking one right now as I type.

New content today:

A solo game of Root

It rained heavily overnight and cooled things down so today was much more pleasant than the past couple of days, although still a bit humid. I managed to go for a 5k run in the evening after my wife got home.

In the morning I worked on my ethics class material for this week, finishing off the lesson plan for the “Why?” topic.

And in the afternoon I played a game of Root. I’ve been keen to try it with three factions as I continue learning the game, so I decided to do a solo game where I play the Marquisate de Cat, the Eyrie Dynasties, and the Woodland Alliance, trying to compartmentalise my brain so I can play all three in sequence. I took photos of the game at setup, and then after each round of one turn for each faction.

Game of Root

I’ve marked the Cat movements in orange, Eyrie in blue, and I’ve added green circles to show clearings with sympathy for the Woodland Alliance. THere was some very interesting back and forth, and the game ended very tight, with the Eyrie winning, but both the Alliance and the Cats poised to reach the required 30 points on their next turns. In hindsight I think I played the Cats a bit too passive and they should have attacked more. And the Eyrie managed to make it to the end without suffering Turmoil at all, probably because the Cats and Alliance were busy antagonising each other and neither made much effort to check the growth of the Eyrie.

It was pretty fun doing this! I’m inclined to try it again, although it would be great to get this to one of our in-person board game nights and get a proper competitive game with my friends.

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