The Innocent Sleep by Seanan McGuire

3 of 5 stars

I had a feeling I would like this more than the previous book (which covers the same events from Toby’s point of view) and I was right. A large portion of book 17 took place in a world without consequence. Meanwhile, this book, told from Tybalt’s point of view, has him working actively the entire time to fix things.

I’m finally caught up with the main novels. Just have to finish the final novella and a few short stories while I wait for the next book this fall.

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Maybe you read Marvel’s What If back in the day or saw the recent series. Maybe you’re familiar with DC Comics’ Elseworlds. This book was mostly like reading one of those. It’s not a spoiler since the last chapter of the previous book revealed what revenge on Toby looked like. That made this book less interesting to me.

Because Toby was either dreaming or in The Matrix or somehow else experiencing a fake world, none of the consequences of her actions felt like they had any stakes. Very late in the book it was revealed that there were SOME consequences - mostly mental/emotional. Near the end I felt that perhaps there was some interesting emotional work that McGuire did via this book. (And the last 7 or so chapters did resolve the conflict from the previous book and get things back to a clean slate as well as revealing a little more about the world)

It’s time once again for my annual podcast list. The formatting has changed a little from last year: Podcast Republic (the podcatcher I use) no longer provides the podcast’s official description. In lieu of that, I have the “My Thoughts” section which is part description and part opinion. If you click on the podcast’s title - that is the link for the podcast’s feed. If you click on the link for the Podcast website, that should take you to whatever website the podcast lists as their official website.

I was a backer for Kobold Press’s Monster Vault 2. Here’s what I thought about it:

For most (if not all) of the past 20 years I’ve had the same tagline on the blog: “Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics”. It is still TECHNICALLY accurate, but it doesn’t really reflect the balance of posts for the past few years. I’ll be changing it soon and just wanted to document it here since it’s been the tagline for so long.

A while ago I wrote about the need to spend money for each publishing type of a TTRPG “book”. My opinion at the time was that the PDFs should come for free with the physical books and I was annoyed, but somewhat understanding of the need to charge extra for a VTT version of the book. My thoughts have evolved somewhat, so I wanted to write an updated post on the different ways a book could be published and what I thought about it.

The Adventure

Before the group sets out Appeluna’s patron tells her that she’s doing a good job and grants her access to more power (meta: attains lvl 6).

It’s a 3 day journey to Reywald. The first two days and nights were uneventful. On the third night Ariana’s on watch. She falls asleep for a second and when she awakens just a few minutes later the package from Aalthic Bellin, the sorcerer, is stolen. She wakes up the rest of the party and tells them what happened.

As I mentioned back in my May 2025 Kickstarter update, I backed the Kobold Press Tales of the Valiant Labyrinth kickstarter. I got my materials recently and made the following videos to review the final product.

This is about the content of the Beadle and Grimm’s GM Vault:

This one is about the FoundryVTT Modules:

The Adventure

Scrabble spends the next week doing some tinkering. He also offers up repair skills and fixes clocks for caravan. Finally, Scrabble spent the week teaching Seno how to use smithing tools.

Seno used the travel time to study a new cantrip and also joins the caravan as a guard. Ghada researched Goblins (meta: gains advantage one time in a future encounter)

A week later, the caravan arrived at the town of Fernhaven. The party helpe dto unload supplies at The Pierced Hart Inn. They are offered a room at the inn. Scrabble negotiated to play bagpipes or lute for the guests later.

The Adventure

The team took a week in Wollerton to recover from their efforts to free the area from the machinations of the Servants of Nidhogg. The local Baron gave them each 100GP and a plot of farmland. At first they thought to set up a base in Wollerton, but it was deemed too remote. They decided to lease the farmland for a rent of 10cp per month. Gratiosa’s parents also sent them a reward of 600GP for freeing her and also said they would put in a good word with Appeluna’s parents.