Work
This week felt fairly relaxed. Last week we launched the Digital Identity integration, which had caused a flurry of activity and some last-minute fixes, whereas this week was a bit more calm: monitoring, fixing things, making improvements, switching the old things off.
We’ve also been working on bringing notifications into the account, and hope to launch that next week.
Books
This week I read:
The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis
This was a fun trilogy. The stories are overtly Christian in theme, with the protagonist meeting the planetary angel of Mars in book 1, averting a second Fall of Man on Venus in book 2, and leading the charge against Satan’s human agents in book 3; but it manages to be so without also being dry and difficult to read.
For example, the struggle between the protagonist and the agent of temptation in book 2 lasted pages upon pages, and could easily have been incredibly dry theology: but it wasn’t! In fact, it ends with the protagonist realising “maybe the fight against evil can be a literal fight!”, and he beats up the embodiment of evil.
I was surprised to see that this was written years before Narnia. It’s been a while since I’ve read Narnia, but I remember bits of it being a bit of a slog, whereas the Space Trilogy had many of the same Christian themes and was fun all the way through.
Gaming
This week the Traveller campaign I’m a player in (as opposed to the Traveller campaign I’m running) ended. We were all killed horribly in some unpleasant hole in the ground, and decided to end it there rather than make fresh characters.
In its place, I’ve volunteered to run a short campaign of Ars Magica for the group. It’s a game I’ve really wanted to play for years, and a short campaign (10 or so sessions) is a good way to try it out. If we all like it and want to continue we can… but my condition will be that at least one other person steps up to run the game with me, so I can play as well. Having multiple GMs who run different parts of the story is the traditional way to play Ars Magica, after all.
So I’ve spent the last few days studying the rulebook, making some personal cheatsheets, and before the first session on Tuesday I’ll run through character creation a few times.
Link Roundup
Kickstarters
- Traveller RPG: The Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society II
- Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG 1st Edition Boxed Set