I’ve read a few GM guides (including for D&D and Tales of the Valient) and this one was the one that gelled most with the way my mind works. While it is strongly tied to Starfinder 2e, it has quite a few universal lessons to teach. Along with the others I’ve read, I think this is a good book to revisit now and again as I gain more experience.

Our Game

How did things go?

The Trio was contacted once again to do a job for the city. This time they had to go to Theology Channel for the parade of all the religions. Nitpick was given the task of setting up speakers, Vorza had to setup security bollards, and Jadeana had to do some of the organizing of the event. Vorza was suspicious and set up one of his bombs hidden in a jackfruit at a certain location. A little after the parade started, some mechanizers started shooting into the crowd and at the party. The group was unable to successfully disperse the crowd so they panicked and fled, trampling Jadaena during their escape. Eventually they were able to kill the attackers and, a short while later, anacite protectors arrived - having been sent to the wrong location. Investigations of the mechanizer comms paired with this information from the anacite protectors made the party much more suspicious.

This summary sounds a bit different than my usual summaries. The intro to last session explains why. I believe only 2 more will be written this way before we get back to my usual writeups. (although the audio is not returning)

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 98 days

Summary

Session Recap: The Ashen Claw Heist

Party: Storm, Valerie, and Beatrice (with a scorpion friend along for the ride) — GM’d by Eric

This summary sounds a bit different than my usual summaries. The intro to last session explains why. I believe only 2 more will be written this way before we get back to my usual writeups. (although the audio is not returning)

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 97 days

Summary

Session Recap: The Ghost Ship of Velder’s Rest

Party: Storm, Valery, and Beatrice (with a scorpion friend along for the ride) — GM’d by Eric

OK, for the next few sessions worth of blog posts on sessions of Valery and The Other Two, I want to confess what the blog posts are going to consist of. When we started playing this second Tales of the Valiant adventure my oldest, Scarlett, asked if we could record ourselves playing. She had been having trouble remembering from session to session what was going on. We did so and it was fun for a time, but then a few things happened:

There’s a lot about the current AI situation to be upset about.

• Data center buildup is insane and, certainly at a higher rate than we will need when the market settles. While they’re running now they’re causing issues with loud noise, electricity usage, and water usage. The ones that are extra when all is said and done might end up being blights on the towns without any other potential uses.
• The AI stock trade is sucking lots of capital out of the market that could be going to other uses. And when the bubble bursts it is almost certainly plunging the US (and maybe world) into a recession
• Some companies are forcing AI usage on employees (see Doctorow’s Reverse Centaur book) and/or firing people without understanding how much work can actually be automated.
• Many (all?) of the AI models were trained on copyrighted material without compensation and now they want to charge for access to the models
• There’s lots of creative work (slop) like books and songs that are flooding the market with non-human created work.

However, I don’t think there’s any way this toothpaste is going to be put back in the tube. Even if we somehow got all of the world to agree that we would not do anymore AI training (getting rid of lots of the bad stuff above related to data centers, the environment, and the stock market), AI at its current level is here to stay. After all, there is not crazy innovation going on in the word processor space or spreadsheet space, but they didn’t go away.

A little less than six years ago, I started looking at moving from Doggcatcher to Podcast Republic. 24 Hours later I was pretty happy with my choice. Time and technology march on and, while looking at some software on Flathub, I discovered there was a not-quite-1.0 bit of podcasting software out there called Pinepods. It seems to bring together a few things that could lead it to becoming my new way to listen to podcasts. However, it isn’t currently without issues.

I can’t say for certain that this will be my last AI post for a bit, but last night just before bed Stella asked me to ask the AIs about boba tea. I decided to indulge her and was surprised to see that, after doing such a horrible job on summarizing the Percy Jackson book or Snow Crash, it did a great job with boba tea. Based on what I know the models got little-to-none of the answer wrong. ALSO, I actually got an answer from Qwen! Now, I don’t know how long it took because after it was running for an hour I had to go to bed myself and didn’t check the output until the next day, but not only did it get past its reasoning phase, but it gave an answer!

After spending 2 posts talking about how badly these local AI models are doing on my machine (here and here ), I did want to show a example of the model performing surprisingly well. Using qwen 3.5 I asked it to describe the following image:

Here is the description that qwen wrote after about a few minutes:

A few days ago I mentioned playing around with local AI models, despite having low strength hardware for the task. Yesterday I was trying our some new models - tinyllama and smollm2 - and I asked each model the same question to compare the answers. After doing this for a few questions, I had the same feeling I always have when I’m doing a repetitious task: computers would excel at this!