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:

In Sea-Salt Tears by by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a reason Seanan McGuire has stated that their preference for the reading order is published order. This story takes place before any of the other mainline books thus far, but it would be a spoiler for book 5 to read it before then.

McGuire knows how to write tragedy - it’s evident in the October Daye books and the Wayward children series. The world is an unforgiving place and the same is true in her books. They aren’t good books to escape the brutality of the world. But they ARE good books to empathize and sympathize with others who may be going through similar problems as you are. She writes universal themes through a fantasy lens and really brings the emotional response out of the reader.

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The latest Wayward Children book gives us Nadya’s backstory. She was mostly a secondary character in the main series, but since she did get an ending in a prior book, it was nice to see her backstory. Well, I say “nice”, but as usual these stories are emotional roller coasters. Most kids don’t find a door if everything is perfectly awesome in their lives. As usual McGuire has cutting insight into the ways that adults can be cruel to children, often without realizing it.

Gamemaster Month Lessons

January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).

When I first started really playing D&D with the kids, the starter kit came with a flyer advertising dndbeyond. At the time they had the encounter builder and the character creation; maps didn’t exist yet. I made use of the encounter builder (which was free at the time - and I think remains free with some limits) and character creator. Around the time that Humblewood was released for dndbeyond, maps started its alpha, available only to Master Tier subscribers. It was quite useful to set up encounters so that the players could visualize where they were relative to the enemy. Since then we’ve continued using dndbeyond (with my Master Tier subscription). Mostly I’ve made use of the maps when playing one-shots with my brother on the other side of the country and occasionally with the kids for the map. I was happy and I was constantly wishing more creators would get their content onto dndbeyond so that I could make use of all the stat blocks without having to “homebrew” anything to add it to the system. Then Brandon Sanderson launched the Cosmere RPG kickstarter. I looked around at the various virtual tabletops that would be supported. I wanted something I could pay for once and own vs a subscription. I ended up choosing FoundryVTT. This eventually led me down a decision matrix that led to the writing of this blog post.

The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)

Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.

The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)

New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.

After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.