In 2020 I read a lot of comics - it was a lockdown thing. Also a Humble Bundle thing, they’ve done some great packs from Image and Humanoids (as you’ll see). Due to this, the comics have mostly in eBook form on a tablet, although I did starting buying physical editions of the ones I liked. Here’s the comics I’ve read that I really liked, in order, starting with my favourite.

So, I’ve covered the prep, now, how did we get on?

:musical_notes: * swelling chords * :musical_notes:

My wife and I don’t binge-watch much. I just don’t quite have the patience and she’s not going to sit on her own and mainline TV for a day. But Lord of the Rings is special.

The films came out for a set of Christmases lets-not-discuss-how-long-ago, and we associate them forever with nice festive times. These days I try to actively avoid watching them as I don’t want to see them too much and spoil them for myself somehow.

But, we all know what 2020 has been like. And, despite being pretty well-avoided by the rigours of 2020, it still meant we couldn’t see family and friends, with plans getting cancelled pretty late. And earlier this year I discovered There and Snack Again from listening to the Desert Island Discworld podcast. And we normally watch LotR at this 🎄 time of year.

Well, now.

To be clear, the idea, in Nate’s words:

to watch all three Lord of the Rings films (extended editions, of course), while attempting to eat everything that got eaten on screen

This is clearly a noble goal, and considering there’s very few things we can do in Tier 4 right now, why not match this quest?

Never written up the few technical projects I’ve done on here, so here’s an old project, a clock to show the next sea tides. I got it on hackaday, which I’m very pleased with.

There’s a set of journal posts on the project page for it and source code.

Time to start The Evils of Illmire!

I got this via its kickstarter earlier this year as it looked nice, and more importantly, it was cheap for digital. It’s the sign of a good one that I wish I had it in print as well now! Handily, it also has a D&D 5th Edition conversion, that came a little later than the main booklet.

It is a sandbox set around the town of Illmire. As the title hints, shenanigans are afoot…

So, I, uh, bought another giant Toblerone. Now I have 4.5kg of chocolate to use up.

Yes, they come as a single bar of giant one-pound triangles 🔺🔺🔺. It looks awesome but is a very impractical way of eating them. Each triangle is about the size of a “normal large” bar. Normally I just chop it up and we eat it like popcorn (i.e. in quantity).

However, every now and again, I’ll try doing something with it

STAAHHN THE CROWS, IT’S AAHNLY THE BLEEDIN’ TOWAAHH OF LAAAHNDAAAN

This is an actual line from the video game of ‘Vampire: the Masquerade’. It has always stuck with me as an ARPG that wasn’t that bad, but with some cracking voice acting.

So for Grant Howitt to make one of his monthly one-page games actually called STONE THE CROWS, and then actually have to raid the bleedin’ Tower of London - well, I was sold pretty quickly.

Also it’s based on Guy Richie’s ouevre of Cockney gangster films, which is certainly a fresh change from eurofantasy or scifi, where I typically end up.

And finally, I bought FoundryVTT to move from roll20 and self-host. Helps get my nerd-cred up, I’ve always wanted to run a NodeJS server. So a nice light game to start with, why not?

Hypertellurians is beautiful. It’s a lovely book, with wonderful evocative art, and a bunch of really interesting “features” to stack on top of “archetypes” (like classes but more thematic and less capability-based). I won’t go through the book because other people have done it better.

Having prepped and run a single game, though, how was it?

Finally, finally, I pulled the trigger and tried running a Hypertellurians game. This was done in Discord, with three players. It took about three hours, including us all learning the game. We used Avrae for rolls and I made a Google sheet character keeper but we ended up using the provided pre-gens on the Mottokrosh website.

Unfortunately, this means no pictures.

I like a spooky Halloween game.

Now unfortunately, I have not found a good way of actually setting a creepy tone over the Internet. I normally use something like Dread or Ten Candles to do that for me, but both are very physical games. The former uses an actual Jenga™️ tower and the latter uses ten actual candles as your strength against the metaphorical as well as physical darkness.

Well, COVID has fucked that. 😷

So, instead, here’s the next best thing, a pumpkin-themed 1st-level one-shot. As usual all arts and assets are from 2 minute tabletop. Ironically not the adventure they’ve published this year, 2020, but from a few years back (I think).

Pumpkins because of course.