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:

Campaign map

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:

Thistlebrook 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.

New content today:

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! 😳

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

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.

Arcs game

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.

Mouse Dominance

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:

Irregular Webcomic! #5157

New content today:

New content today:

Hot and busy time passing

Today was very warm, close to 30°C. But I spent most of it inside doing my Monday classes online, ending the topic of “Time Passing”. I started work on planning for the next topic, which is “Copying Things”, covering aspects of copyright, intellectual property, and so on.

The weather tomorrow is set to be much cooler, with a forecast maximum of only 19°C. It may be another day like we had a week or two ago, where the maximum temperature was set at midnight.

In the afternoon I went for a walk with my wife (who was home from work for the Labour Day public holiday) and Scully. And then I made listings on eBay for some more of my 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons books that I don’t want any more. If you’re interested and in Australia, these may be a bargain for you to pick up (if you’re overseas the postage will probably be prohibitive):

My last class tonight started at 9pm, but because of daylight saving starting here it’s an hour earlier for all the students, including one in the USA who had it move from 7am to 6am. He was dedicated enough to get up early for it, but was yawning a bit. All my other classes I made an hour later (for me), to keep them at the same time for the students, but this one I really didn’t want to move to a 10pm start – I’d be turning into a pumpkin before it ended at 11pm. Unfortunately it’s going to get even worse for this kid in November when the US goes off daylight saving, and the class becomes a 5am start for him. I suspect he won’t keep doing it after that.

Finally, a weird thing I noticed taking photos of my D&D books for eBay. I’m using my brand new iPhone 16 and taking photos saved in HEIF format. Some of the photos when I open them in Photoshop, I hit save and it allows me to save them as a JPEG. But some of the photos I hit save and it has a restricted set of save formats available, excluding JPEG. I have to use “Save a copy” to create a copy of the image before I can save it as JPEG. I suspected it might be because the iPhone camera was automatically using HDR mode for some photos and saving them in a higher bit-depth or a different colour space or something, but examining the HEIC files shows no such differences – they’re all 8-bit colour in Display P3 colour space. I examined the EXIF tags of the images and I don’t see any salient differences at all.

So I have no idea why some of these images Photoshop will allow me to save as JPEGs and some it won’t. I tried searching briefly for an answer online, but my search terms couldn’t locate anything relevant.

New content today:

The Temple of Swords and a big day out

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. During the day I had my usual ethics classes to teach, and in between I had to clean up the house ready for friends to come over. I did vacuum cleaning and had to clean off all the Magic cards off the dining table, so we had space to play.

We continued our adventure from last time, with the PCs exploring the Temple of Spathio, a local god of swords. They’d found a nest of snake men last time, and now explored cautiously, reaching a few new rooms which presented interesting problems. They’ve been finding magically glowing swords that have numerical runes engraved on them, and are trying to assemble a collection of all the numbers 1 to 9. One sword was spotted glowing near the top of a huge 20-foot high precarious conical tower of swords They considered playing sword Jenga, but decided they had to collapse the tower to reach the glowing sword, and did so with ropes, to avoid being on the bottom of a pile of falling swords. The collapse created a huge noise, which attracted more snake men from another room to attack them.

Last time they found two of the numbered swords, and this time I think they added three more. I won’t go into more details right now, but it was a lot of fun and the players did some incredibly clever and fun puzzle solving to get those swords. I think this is a great way to design an adventure: create a goal that the players can’t help but wanting, and place that goal inside a difficult situation that presents as a puzzle for them to work out how to get the thing. The watch them get creative with the resources and skills they have.

Today I got up and did a 5k run early, then had a shower to get ready for a day out. My wife dropped Scully off at the doggy day care place and then we headed into the city for a day of exploring together.

There’s been a lot of new development in parts of the city and my wife hadn’t seen some of it yet. We started at Central Station and walked around the University of Technology, so I could show her where I do my lecture classes, and where I’ve been eating lunches and dinners on the days when I’m in there. Then we walked through part of Chinatown and towards Darling Harbour. We stopped for a snack at Harajuku Gyoza Beer Stadium, a Japanese brewery and gyoza place that has some good food.

Gyozas

Then we walked through Darling Harbour and all the new development there, past the new convention centre, which replaced the old one that they tore down a few years ago. It was pretty busy with people, and mostly locals, with not too many obvious tourists, which was nice. A bit further on we hit the real tourist areas, around Cockle Bay Wharf. We continued around the Aquarium to Barangaroo – this is a new walkway that was inaccessible previously, as the area was formerly a wasteland of industrial docks. But with the recent redevelopment the area is pretty nice now.

Barangaroo buildings

We continued north to the new park at Barangaroo Reserve, and then cut across inland to The Rocks, where we walked through The Rocks Market. This was extremely busy, with many tourists in the area. We stopped at The Rocks Discovery Museum, a small historical museum about the neighbourhood, which we had never been in before. This is a small museum which has some displays and artefacts describing the history of The Rocks from before European arrival in 1788 to the 20th century. We were almost playing tourists in our own city, really.

From here we walked back into the heart of the city and stopped for another snack at a cafe near Wynyard. They did full lunch dishes, but I just chose a four-cheese toastie (toasted sandwich), which was amazingly good.

Four cheese toastie

Then we continued south to the shopping areas, where we split up briefly -my wife went o buy some clothing while I checked out the game shop. We met in Kinokuniya book shop and after browsing around a bit we headed to Town Hall to catch a train home.

After picking up Scully from day care we were a bit exhausted. I didn’t fancy cooking dinner so suggested we go get Thai food for dinner. We drove over to Castle Cove where there’s a nice suburban Thai place with an outdoor table where we can sit with Scully. The food was good – a great way to round off a very busy day. And Scully is super tired because she’s been playing with other dogs all day.

New content today:

New content today:

D&D prep time

I’m running Dungeons & Dragons again on Friday evening, and I have some prep work to do. I haven’t written up the adventure log from last session yet! So I started working on that today. It’s important because not all players attend every session – I schedule a date and if someone can’t make it, then they just skip the game that week and pick up next time. So a log is useful for players returning to find out what they missed.

I also did some comics making, and sent some more cards off in the mail to a buyer. I stopped at Moon Phase to try another one of their pastries, this time the wildflower honey croissant, which was pretty nice. And after lunch I walked down to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, who she’d taken to work this morning.

For dinner I made pea and cauliflower soup, which could be kept warm on the stove while I had my three ethics classes in a row. I just had a big bowl to warm up after the classes. I’ve been feeling really cold today. I think the winter chill has returned again.

But there are plenty of flowers out! Magnolias, flowering plums, and cherry blossoms, all the early ones heralding the imminent arrival of spring. The other day I spotted some rainbow lorikeets in (what I think is) a plum tree:

Lorikeet with spring flowers

Lorikeet with spring flowers

These were just taken with my phone. I got to within about 30 cm of the birds with my phone held up at arm’s length.

New content today:

Missed shopping, a day out, cold winter, and thouls

Yesterday was board games night online, so I didn’t write up my blog post. The day was pretty ordinary, starting with the usual morning pick-up of the groceries that I’d ordered online. I always grab fruit and vegetables manually before collecting the reminder of the pick-up order. My wife requested a loaf of bread to got into the freezer to replace our backup loaf that gets used when we run out of home made sourdough. I grabbed a loaf and took it to the checkout with the fruit and veg, but not wanting to squash it on the bottom of the shopping bag I set it aside and scanned all the fruit and veg first. And then forgot about the bread! I only realised today that the bread wasn’t here, and remembered that I must have left it at the self-serve checkout in the supermarket. Oh well.

We had an epic online board games night. Because the Olympic Games are currently on in Paris, we had a medal tally board, listing everyone who came first, second, or third in all of the games, and we played a series of short games to get in as many “events” as possible. We also each represented a country, chosen by rolling randomly on a table and following some amusing directions. For example, one of the table entries was “find the top-leftmost item in your fridge, and what country it is most associated with”. If I’d rolled this, the item was cheddar cheese, and my country would have been Great Britain. As it happened, I rolled “What Olympic sport have you played the most? What country has won the most medals in that sport?” it wasn’t entirely clear, but I chose tennis, and it turns out that Great Britain has won the most medals in that, so that was indeed my country for the night. Others got France, Costa Rica, Georgia, Sweden, and Australia. We played a total of eight different games, and won one gold, one silver, and two bronze medals, coming 4th in the tally out of 6 countries.

Today I found an article in the news that began:

The word on the street seems unanimous — it feels like one of the coldest winters in living memory.

It’s true… I’ve been commenting about how cold it’s been this winter, and everyone I know has been saying the same thing. We’re all freezing here in Sydney and saying how unusually cold it is.

Only this news article points out that Australia has experienced a June and July 0.7°C above the long-term average baseline. And Sydney in particular has recorded a June/July 0.9°C above average. However, this is the second coldest winter in the last ten years. The problem is the baseline has shifted and we’ve become used to warm winters. Last year, for example, we had a winter 1.7°C above average. Climate change, huh.

Today my wife and I went to her mother’s place to pick her up and take her to the nursing home where her mother (my wife’s grandmother) has moved into. She’s 101 years old and only moved out of her own home a couple of months ago, after having a fall. We didn’t visit since it required COVID tests and my mother-in-law only wanted to stay an hour or so. So in the meantime we drove a short distance to a new bakery we’d found, called Flour Shop, where we had some lunch. They had truly amazing sausage rolls, with pork, fennel, and apple. And we got a loaf of sourdough fruit loaf to bring home.

And tonight I learnt something fascinating about an old Dungeons & Dragons monster: the thoul. I knew that the thoul is a classic monster from the 1981 (Tom Moldvay) Basic Dungeons & Dragons rules, described as:

A thoul is a magical combination of a ghoul, a hobgoblin, and a troll. Except when very close, thouls look exactly like hobgoblins, and they are sometimes found as part of the bodyguard of a hobgoblin king. The touch of a thoul will paralyze (in the same way as that of a ghoul). If it is damaged, a thoul will regenerate 1 hit point per round as long as it is alive. [like a troll]

But today I learnt that the thoul began life as a typo in a table of monsters in the Original 1974 D&D rules. It was intended to be a Toad, as listed in the first printing, but was listed on the line before “Ghoul” and somehow in a later printing became “Thoul”. In subsequent printings the publishers at TSR decided, instead of correcting the typo, to double down on the typo and invent a creature to fit the name. This is documented on this blog. I always wondered about this wacky monster that made no sense!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

D&D and a big walk

Friday night was Dungeons & Dragons night! During the day I had my usual ethics classes, and in between I prepared by cleaning up the house. It needed a thorough vacuum, and cleaning the bathroom, so that took a bit of time. I also did some last minute prep work for the game, running through the adventure quickly and printing out some new character sheets for characters who had levelled up since last time.

We had a new player join us, an old friend of mine who I played with many years ago. She was the player of the original Alvissa in the fantasy game that I based Irregular Webcomic! on, and also Paris in the science fiction game that I based that them on. One of my other regular players was Draak and Spanners, and it was the first time the two players had seen each other for a few years, so that was a nice reunion.

Our new player rolled up a character using random rolls, and decided to be a magic-user. Notgandalf the usual magic-user wasn’t present (because his player is on an overseas trip), so extra spellpower was useful. They started a new adventure, investigating an old temple hidden behind a waterfall, dedicated to an old god of swords. They didn’t get very far into it, spending a lot of time dealing with some interesting traps, some serpent people, and a nasty gelatinous cube.

Today my wife got up early because she had a special Open Day event at her work, and had to be there to set up by 8am. I spent the morning working on a report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography meeting that I attended. I need to do one of these for each international meeting, before our follow-up Australian meeting, which is scheduled for this coming Friday.

At lunch timeI walked up to my wife’s work with Scully to meet her there. They had a sausage sizzle going, and I had a sausage sandwich as part of lunch. They also had people baking fresh scones, served with jam and cream, and we got a pair of those to eat as well together after my wife had finished her shift.

Then we walked from there up to Cammeray so she could get a coffee. I grabbed another small snack from Maggio’s Italian bakery to complete a piecemeal lunch. And then from there we walked home. Bu the time we got home, Scully and I had covered 6 km of walking.

After we walked all the way home, I rested for a bit before heading out for a 5k run. It’s the first run I’ve done in 2 weeks, since last weekend was so wet and cold and miserable. I took it a bit easy. But I overtook a man and woman jogging together on one street in the same direction as me. Then when I was doing the loop around the end of the peninsula, I passed them again, going the opposite away around the loop. And then coming back from the peninsula, I overtook them again. They must have taken a shorter route around the loop, because I was definitely running faster than them, but they got ahead of me somehow. And then I turned off the ain street into some backstreets that zig and zag a bit, and when I was further along, they appeared from another side street and I overtook them for a fourth time! By now they were laughing and chatting to me as I went past, and I exchanged a few friendly words, saying that I was nearly finished my 5k for the day.

This evening my wife and I went up to the local shops for dinner at an Indian restaurant. I also dropped off a couple of D&D 5e adventure books that I’m never going to use with some of the D&D players at Professor Plums. I’d organised to sell some at cheap prices to some of the other DMs there.

New content yesterday:

New content today: