dungeons & dragons – dangermouse.net

No water supply; D&D artwork

I’m sitting here wondering when our water supply will come back on.

Roadworks began out the front of our place yesterday—to replace the dangerously ineffectual speed bumps and pedestrian island, which I’ve commented on twice before. They carefully spray painted markings all over the road and footpaths to indicate buried phone lines, water pipes, drains, gas pipes, and so on. And then today they dug things up and promptly broke a water main.

I’ve had no water since at least midday, possibly earlier because that was when I tried using a tap and nothing came out. And it’s now just gone 8pm, so it’s been out at least eight hours. And with no notice before the outage, our supply of water is limited to what was in the kettle, and in the cold water jug in the fridge.

When I came back from walking Scully at lunch time I wanted to wash my hands, and squeezed some liquid soap onto my hands before realising there was no water to wash it off with. So I had to use paper towels to wipe the soap off. And I’ve wanted to wash my hands several times since, but have had to make do with some COVID-era hand sanitiser.

Ah…. as I write this the water just came back on! I could tell because the toilet cistern started filling up. Phew, that’s good. My wife did indicate when she came home from work that there were workers from Sydney Water outside trying to fix things.

In other news, one of my friends playing in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign drew this:

This is the entrance to the latest dungeon adventure. We play theatre of the mind – no pre-drawn maps or props. So my friend did the whole thing based on just my verbal description of the landscape during the game. I thought it was so cool I had to share.

More D&D and more election results

Today I continued writing up a log of the action from Friday night’s Dungeons & Dragons game. I finished it off, which is a nice achievement so soon after the game. Usually in the past I’ve neglected writing up the adventure until just before the next session, by which time I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and have to reconstruct events by questioning my players and trying to weave a coherent narrative out of their disparate recollections.

And this morning we had a much better picture of yesterday’s election results. The incumbent Labor Party have been returned with a greatly increased majority, in what several news outlets have called a “landslide” result. The conservative opposition has been decimated, losing several seats in the major cities, resulting in them having virtually no presence anywhere except rural seats. It was an unexpectedly strong repudiation of conservative Australian politics by the voters, and a welcome result for those fearing any potential Trump-like policies in this country.

This morning I did another 5k run, taking it a bit easier than yesterday. The weather has improved this weekend, with the week-long run of heavy showers finally giving way to sunny skies, but cool autumn temperatures.

My wife and I took advantage this afternoon by driving over tho Balmoral Beach to walk Scully along the beach front in the pleasant weather. In the way back we stopped off at a good-looking deli that my wife found online and checked out their products. It had a lot of European things. I ended up buying a chunk of Austrian cheese and a slice of apple strudel for dessert tonight.

The weather has definitely taken a turn away from summer and towards winter in the past couple of weeks. Leaves on some of the trees are changing colour and it definitely feels like autumn now. Although the previously forecast 26°C for mid-week has been increased to 27°C now!

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.

D&D session: dealing with the curse

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. One of our players had to miss out due to COVID, and another had a daughter’s birthday, but we had 4 players (plus me as the GM), so went ahead. Firstly, here’s a map of the campaign locations so far:

Neensford is their home village. The first adventure took place in an old tomb not far away. Then they travelled north to Brandonstead to deal with rumours of a “dragon” terrorising the area. Then back to Neensford before striking east to Benton, the nearest base village to Titardinal’s Tower. After dealing with that they travelled to Sable Ridge to investigate a Spider Temple, and then to Edgewater, near the location of the Temple of Swords, where we last left our intrepid band. They’d just met Spathio, the God of Swords, and ended up getting cursed by him. Now they need to kill 9 people with 9 different swords, in 9 days, or die!

The first thing they did however was loot valuables from the temple that they’d spied on their way in and hadn’t yet carried out. At one point they triggered a trap that they hadn’t triggered before: a huge stone block lowered from the ceiling, blocking the only exit door. This produced the following exchange:

Player: Can I tell with my Dwarven Stonecunning if we can fit our fingers underneath and lift the block?
Me: You can tell with your Dwarven Stonecunning that the block weighs roughly 40 tons.

After dealing with this setback and exiting the temple, they had to decide how to find 9 people they felt morally comfortable with killing. They asked around Edgewater for any leads on “maybe bandits in the area”? Edgewater is a small village, and the residents advised them to head west to the town of Thistlebrook, which sometimes had bandits attack merchant caravans.

When they got to Thistlebrook, I presented them with the town noticeboard:

I made this using some very nice free art assets I found on this Patreon page. As you might be able to see, several of these notices are potential leads to situations where the PCs would have a chance to kill people, more or less justifiably. And some others are just fun flavour. I left it up to them to decide what avenues to investigate.

The result was they spent the rent of the session chasing leads all over Thistlebrook. They thought hunting down the bandit gang was a good likely solution, but decided first to check out the executioner job. The magistrate had three of the bandits in custody and needed an executioner, since he said nobody in town wanted blood on their hands. They at first thought this was a good start on their curse, but then they talked to the innkeeper at the place where they were lodging, who revealed that the bandits were actually heroes to the poor of the the town, standing up against persecution and taxation by the nobles (i.e. they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men). This threw the players for a moral loop and they had to reevaluate their plans. At one point they made a plan to contact the bandit leader and get him to agree to have some of his men pretend to be captured, so the PCs could turn them in for the rewards, and then they’d break them all out of prison!

They checked various other leads and eventually stumbled across an old sage who was looking to hire some adventurers for an expedition to a nearby ancient vault where ancient wizards had done magical research. He said it had recently been found by snake people. Now this was something that they could investigate and hopefully kill some snake people, who they’ve tangled with twice before. But by now it was late and we ended the session before any further adventuring.

We had essentially zero combats (although they did kill a few “sword fish”—fish literally made of swords—by standing on the edge of a pool and stabbing them while in no danger of the fish hitting them), and there were only about three dice rolls in the whole evening. 95% of it was pure roleplay and discussing decisions, and it was great fun!

Today I got up and went for a 5k run. It was warm and very humid and so I again went fairly slowly. It’ll be nice when autumn hits and the weather cools down a bit. I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids comic writing and planning.

For dinner, my wife and I walked up to a new restaurant we haven’t tried before: Dozo, a Japanese place. It was pretty good, and for what we had (mostly vegetarian) not very expensive.

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D&D prep and a Italian treat

Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?

So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.

It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.

At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.

This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳

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Hotness, classes, and D&D logging

Today was very warm. Much of Australia is enduring an heatwave, with the highest temperatures we’ve seen in five years (the past four summers have been cooler and wetter thanks to La Niña). Some towns in western New South Wales today were expected to potentially break their highest ever recorded temperatures, around 47°C. Inland suburbs of Sydney got into the high 30s, but fortunately the coastal strip was significantly cooler, reaching only 29°C in the city. But the humidity remains stupidly high, so it felt oppressive being out there.

After two morning ethics classes, I walked with Scully up to the fish & chip shop, and grabbed an Express Post envelope from the adjacent post office for mailing some documents. I didn’t want to walk back with the large envelope, and a box of fish & chips, and have to carry Scully over the parts of the road and footpaths that were baking in the sun and would have burnt her feet, so I ordered my lunch to eat in at the outdoor tables. Although these are shaded, it was so hot and humid sitting there that the sweat was just rolling down my face and body.

I got back home in time for my afternoon classes. After those I completed writing up a log of the previous Dungeons & Dragons session that we played back in October, which I hadn’t yet written up. Thankfully I’m now fully up to date with the campaign logs, all 12 sessions played so far. Next time we meet we should be starting a new adventure, which will be nice. Although the party has to contend with a curse placed on them by the God of Swords: to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die! My players are a fairly moralistic group, so this presents them with a significant ethical dilemma. They’re not just going to go around and slaughter the next 9 people they come across. It will be very interesting to see how they deal with this.

For dinner I made a cool falafel salad. I tried boiling two eggs to add to the salads, but I think I must have set the stove too low to simmer them, and the first one I tried to peel was too soft-boiled. I boiled the second egg for another 5 minutes and it came out fine, so we ended up with half an egg each instead of a whole one in our salads.

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Dungeons & Dragons and hot weather

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and then in the evening I hosted our intermittent Dungeons & Dragons game with my friends. Our last session was in October, and we picked up where we left off.

The party were attempting to collect a series of magical swords. They found one being wielded by a giant octopus and engaged in combat. One of them severed the tentacle that was holding the sword, and two of the others tried to catch it before it fell into the deep pool of water, but both failed, so they had to do some diving into the water after the octopus had been dispatched, and incidentally obscured the water with ink and blood.

But the highlight of the evening was when they encountered a somewhat crazy mermaid queen, who challenged individuals to defeat her in combat, and promised to marry any who could do so. Well, the human fighter of the group managed this (after the elf failed), and was quickly married in a ceremony, and even crowned with a crown made of coral.

Later they encountered a vampire who was immobile, staked to the wall by one of the magic swords they were intent on retrieving. They had to work out how to gain the sword without letting the vampire loose to attack them. Overall it was a great fun game, with lots of amusing events and much fun had by all.

This morning I did my 5k run in warm and humid conditions. I fear it’s going to be like this until summer ends in a few months. The weather bureau has warned that the next few days are going to be the hottest days in five years for much of Australia.

In the heat of the day we drove over to my wife’s mother’s place to help her get out all the Christmas decorations, to ready the place for the Christmas Day lunch. Traffic was bad heading out towards the coast as lots of people were heading to the beaches. And on the water were lots of boats full of people enjoying the sunny weather.

We came home and I made pizza for dinner. And afterwards we walked Scully in the cooler evening air, after sunset. Although it was still 24°C. It’s probably not going to get much cooler than that overnight.

For dessert we had a mango. This time we had a Kensington Pride variety, which is no doubt the most “mango-ey” variety in flavour. It’s the fourth different type of mango we’ve had so far this summer. As the season progresses other varieties will ripen and become available, so it’s an interesting progression in flavours and textures.

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Games on Friday and Saturday

The weather has turned from hot and humid to warm, rainy, and very humid. At least it’s not as hot as Monday to Thursday. Friday was cooler, but very wet. There was a huge thunderstorm around midday, and I had to warn students in my ethics Zoom class that if I disappeared it might be because of a power blackout. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but there some very loud cracks of thunder during the class.

Today has been ridiculously humid. It dropped as low as 87% in the mid-afternoon during a break in the rain, but it’s back up in the high 90s where it’s been most of the day. It was 99% and 21°C when I did my 5k run at 9am this morning. Which made it really draining as breathing deeply while running was like in a sauna.

Friday night was games night at a friend’s place. I took Arcs and we played a four player game, with three of the same players as last time when we all learnt it, and one new player. He picked up the idea quickly and actually ended up winning.

The game took a while to play, and by the time we were done the host was tired, so we didn’t play anything else.

Today, I played a game of Root with my wife. She tried the Marquise de Cat this time, after having played Alliance for the past several games. We used the clockwork expansion bots to fill it out to four players, and it’s the first time we’ve used the Alliance bot player. I played the Vagabond, so we also had a bot Eyrie. The bots started very strong and quickly raced to the lead two places in points. I was really afraid the Alliance bot would win the game. But my wife played a timely Dominance card and secured three mouse clearings with about six cat warriors each and managed to win just before the Alliance could get enough points.

For dinner we went up to Organica and had some pizza tonight. It was sprinkling lightly when we went there, and also on the way home. At least it was better than heavy rain.

In other news: I saw today that Elon Musk has threatened to buy Hasbro and hence Dungeons & Dragons, after his recent unhinged anti-woke rant about D&D. I honestly cannot think of a worse thing for the game. But I rest easy knowing that there are so many roleplaying games out there that people will continue enjoying them in wholesome ways no matter what Musk does.

But I just wanted to point out that I predicted this over 8 months ago! Irregular Webcomic! #5157:

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