In any case, they didn’t see Archibald at all. This session involved a bunch of investigations into the rumours that the cult was infiltrating Greyhawk. Martin’s rogue was contacted by the Thieves’ Guild with reports of a few of their junior members being killed and there were other reports around the city. Unfortunately, this group is particularly clueless when it comes to the use of the Streetwise skill, so their investigations were not all that they could be. 🙂

However, they were rarely stymied – the game continued to move – and we had a pretty enjoyable session. Nathaniel mishearing something I said led to the invention of a new drink – it has a rat’s head in it, and you use the tail as a swizzel stick, so I don’t think it will catch on except in the campaign. Nate describes it as a hangover-cure. I’m not sure of that… a cure for alcoholism? Perhaps.

The session ended with the “heroes” killing a group of the Greyhawk City Watch. Oops. They burst into a house that they’d learnt from an informant contained the cult, all spells firing. When they actually paid attention to who was there, they suddenly realised what a mistake they’d made. They’re keeping very low at present; next session should be fun.

Given this session was played at the end of a week of very high temperatures (four days of above 40 degrees centigrade), I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

On Sunday, my other regular D&D session was cancelled due to Nate needing to be at Aimee’s birthday. Instead, Rich and Josh came over to my place to play a few games: BattleTech, Through the Ages, Notre Dame, The Princes of Florence, Ra and Ticket To Ride: Europe. (I chose BT and TTA, the other games were Rich’s choice). 

BattleTech is going pretty well. I was hoping to be playing it with Rich, Josh & Randy on Saturday, but my brother is going to be visiting us that day for dinner, so I’m not going to be able to make the BGD. Argh! Star Wars on Friday also looks like being cancelled, so I’m going to try to slot in some more BattleTech for Friday afternoon/evening. Rich & Josh completed their third mission as Sorenson’s Sabres and are ready now for another Supply Run to set themselves up for some of the bigger missions.

I’ve been rewriting a few of the Sword & Dragon campaign rules so that they all work better. Not quite sure about the advancement rules yet; does point buy really work? It might be too quick – but the XP system in the Introductory rules may be too slow for the campaign. I’ll keep fiddling.

I won Through the Ages, Notre Dame and Ticket To Ride: Europe. Rich won Ra, Josh won Princes of Florence. I really don’t have a feel for that last game; it probably would be better with 4 players, but I did lots of really stupid plays in our game. We finished up Sunday evening close to 1 am, so close on 12 hours of boardgaming.

I also did a small amount of reading on the weekend. Mostly it was too hot, so I just listened to Commentary: the Musical a lot. However, I did read all of Brent Week’s second book, Shadow’s Edge – I read the first book earlier in the week. It has a problem that a lot of modern books suffer from: too many darn characters and (especially) points of view. What makes it worse is that it is shifting between them all the time, even in the middle of the quite short chapters. The book would be a lot tighter if it concentrated on only two or three of the characters rather than the ten or twelve it seems to be using. It’s only about 350 pages – there isn’t room for that many POVs.

There’s a bunch of good ideas in the book, but it’s a bit too scattered to have the proper impact. Pity. It’s still good enough to read book 3, but Brent Weeks will need to tighten up his writing style a tad before he becomes one of my “must read” fantasy authors.