Spent a month or more reading up on the game system for Trail of Cthulhu, by Ken (princeofcairo) Hite and Robin D. (robin_d_laws) Laws (Pelgrane Press). (Not that it's so hard it would take most people over a month to read, I'm just moving slow these days.) When I first heard about the system a couple years back, mostly I'd just heard "It's Call of Cthulhu but they give ( Read more... )

Grann, David. The Lost City of Z: a tale of obsession in the Amazon / read by Mark Deakins. (Random House Audio, 2009 ( Read more... )

Some yardwork this afternoon (yesterday was too wet), mostly trying my turn with the new, more powerful weedwhacker: getting the jump on second growth where D cleared beside the driveway a couple weeks ago, back by the AC, and more round where the woods are trying to encroach on the edges of the lawn. Hacking through this jungle made think of the ( Read more... )

Yesterday did indeed see the conclusion to our playing-through of the epic CoC campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Some people enjoyed the experience more than others did, but everyone enjoyed something in it, and everyone stayed in it till the end. Took us just over 13 months, but then many of those months went by with only one play ( Read more... )

Saturday: Went to see The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, so I have now read all three books and seen all three movies in the Millenium Trilogy (until the American movies start coming out, which is so redundant and unnecessary). Somehow it didn't impress me as much as did Dragon Tattoo or Played with Fire, I'm not quite sure why. There's more ( Read more... )

Gaming today Beyond the Mountains of Madness, the crucial, climactic scene in the Tower. A surprising number of 99's and 00's got rolled; somewhere out there exists a game system wherein that represents lots of critical successes, but Call of Cthulhu is not that system, quite the reverse. Much slapstick ensued. Even without the critical failures ( Read more... )

Saturday was gaming at the Mountains of Madness: the big grand guignol set-piece reveal went over well, the Dyer MS has been handed over and the players' reading homework assigned; sometimes it is amusing, sometimes just mind-boggling how different my players' approach to the scenarios is from what the writers anticipated. D watched The Madness of ( Read more... )

First snow-covered morning of the season. Not necessarily the first snow of the season--although really, that thing back in October shouldn't count as "of the season"--but it was the first morning to wake up and see bright sun shining on bright clean snow, and all the little branches with their white lines on top, and being the first time it ( Read more... )

You remember, there's a scene in Noises Off, I think it must be in Act 2, where Brooke is still sticking absolutely to her lines as scripted while everyone else has gotten derailed around her, and there's a shot of Poppy flipping wildly through the book trying to find where they "should" be, and she gives up and slams the book shut and throws up ( Read more... )

Sunday was gaming, first real chapter of the Antarctic Cthulhu campaign. A fun time was had by all, seemingly, and not entirely at AYK's expense; I think we've got a good mix of characters (though with one useful skill conspicuously missing--if they live long enough for it even to come up). But I came home utterly exhausted and wrung out; was it ( Read more... )