Review: Forbid the Sea
Forbid the Sea by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another short story about Tybalt’s past. It picks up a while after the last short story. We learn yet another bit about what things were like for him and why he acts the way he does with October Daye. It also builds on what we’ve learned about Selkies in both mainline book One Salt Sea and short story In Sea-Salt Tears. So, definitely read those first if you want to get the most out of this short story.
Koboldcon 2025: A Brief Review
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
Firefox and Zen
Firefox
Firefox has been hemorrhaging users for quite a few years now. There are many reasons:
- lack of innovation in the browser space
- a corporate “Attention Deficit Disorder” that seems to have the Mozilla Foundation chasing everything but web browsing
- C-Suite “scandals” like the amount of pay the CEO is getting while laying off Firefox employees or taking political stances that alienate some users
- Chrome, Edge, and Safari being defaults on computers and phones
Recently they pooped the bed again with their terms of service scandal.
Tales of the Valiant Campaign 01 - Session 02: Dealing with Dib
The Adventure
The adventurers had been working with Kylana for the past month to try and figure out how the mycaloid water source was poisoned. A gnome arrived with a wedding invitation for Ariana from her college friend, a gnome named Favienne Northcord. The wedding is in a town called Moonbright. It’s far enough away that they decide they will take a scrawler to get to the town.
As they are waiting at the ticket booth to purchase a ride on the scrawler, two dwarves show up looking beaten up. They tell the townsfolk that there are some goblins attacking all wagons headed into the town. The mayor tells the adventurers that if they help eradicate the goblins, their tickets on the scrawler will be covered. The team agrees to deal with the goblins.
Humblewood: the Loper Recap
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
Review: Dungeon in a Box Q2
I covered the first 3 boxes from Dungeon in a Box back in October. I don’t want to repeat too much from that review, but here are some quick highlights:
- I get the physical subscription. It also comes with digital assets for each box as well as access to their Wonderous One-Shot digital assets.
- The digital assets include a Pathfinder 2e conversion
- each box comes with a gridded map for the dungeon portion of the adventure, skinny minis, and 1 or 2 3D printed minis.
This post is intended for dungeon masters. There are story spoilers below.
Civilization VII First Impressions
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
Tales of the Valiant: The Pyros - Session 01: Forming the Pyros
I’m the forever-GM for our house. The kids prefer for me to GM and I don’t know anyone in person who can match my schedule for a regular game and who wants to take on the GM responsibilities. When one of my players from last week’s New Gamemaster Month game wanted to host their own game, I jumped at the chance to be a player. Also, I wanted to repay their kindness for being in my game.
Review: Chimes at Midnight
Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The previous entry in the series introduced us to the dangers of Goblin Fruit. It’s an intoxicant that blisses out purebloods, but leaves changelings and humans dangerously addicted (even after only one taste) until they die. This book is about October dealing with that threat to the non-pureblooded community in the San Francisco area. It quickly spirals out from there because, of course it does when October Daye is involved.
Review: Ashes of Honor
Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
McGuire makes use of all we’ve learned about the fae and all the characters we’ve met to produce a great bit of detective fiction here. We also get some character growth for October. That’s always a great thing in a long-running series to keep it from getting boring.
I don’t want to ruin the plot so I’ll keep this short, but a couple little random notes: