The recording process took longer than I intended, but I’ve now finished recording my latest short story, Waters of R’lyeh. I will be posting it in two parts.
In this first part, you meet Sgt. Rose, who discovers something unusual while handling a routine graffiti case. Meanwhile, there’s some unusual weather brewing on the other side of the planet.
Enjoy.
We’ve been playing board games somewhat more often than usual at work these days (at lunch, of course), and I’ve found it a bit surprising which games work and which don’t. Ingenious was predictably a hit, and Arman and Ben both like Dvonn. What surprised me was how much my coworkers liked Kingdoms.
Don’t get me wrong – Kingdoms is a good game, but I’ve never seen a group enjoy it as much as my coworkers before. I think I may have made a mistake when I was teaching them the game:
“It’s not about winning so much as it is about losing the least.”
Brian definitely took this to heart, channeling all of his creativity into an entirely new strategy: avoid placing castles for as long as possible, and spite your opponents at every opportunity. Kingdoms can be a nasty game, but I’ve never seen it like this.
Amazingly, this strategy sometimes works well for him sometimes (he wins at least as often as the rest of us), and at other times it works poorly (if he doesn’t win, he’s usually dead last). But we all have fun with it, especially when the Dragon is played. The Gold Mine can be annoying, but there’s nothing worse than seeing an entire row of big point tiles wiped out by the Dragon, especially if you have your 4-point castle there as well.
Sadly, it’s also come to be a tradition to do a truly horrible dragon impression when you play the dragon (I think I might have started that too). I’m sure our other coworkers think we’re weird (okay, weirder), but it does generate a lot of laughs, and that’s what counts.
Shortly after I bought Descent and the first two expansions, I found myself wanting to write my own Quest for the game. The Altar of Despair added a number of new elements to the game that really clicked with me, and I had the formative ideas for the quest very quickly.
The biggest obstacle was definitely putting the map together. There is only one option for a Descent editor for the Mac at present, and it doesn’t support the Altar of Despair expansion. I’ve got a half-baked idea to write my own editor (and I’ve done enough software development on the Mac that I’m sure I could pull it off), but that seems too much like what I do for a living, so I’m hesitant.
Once I had the opening idea, I first constructed the map using the actual tiles from the game (which took a couple of hours) just to get a feel for it. Then I took a photo using my digital camera to record it and ponder it for a while. After tweaking a few things, I set about recreating it in Photoshop Elements using a Descent tile set I ran across via BoardGameGeek. I then wrote the text and produced a very small amount of additional graphics in NeoOffice/J, and now I’ve posted the quest to Fantasy Flight‘s quest database for play testing (and also posted it here).
A taste:
A falcon arrived at your window, bearing a letter:
Trenloe,
The mages in Frostgate warned me the magics I sought were powerful, but I thought I could master them. I was wrong. I have been imprisoned by a demon which I raised and lost control of. Please Help. Elvin will guide you to the cave where I am being held, but he will be of no help once you enter. The road is treacherous; bring only one other.
– Landrec
Full download (PDF: 630KB).
It was time for a spring tune-up, so I took the bike into the shop, and got it back today. As I was picking up the bike, it started to snow.
This wouldn’t be remarkable, except the exact same thing happened last year. I picked up the bike, and had to ride home in the snow. Though last year the snow was heavier than this year.
At least this isn’t as spooky as the whole Thrice Three thing that happened to me two years ago when I flew to Fort Myers, FL. I guess we’ll see next year…
On Saturday, Jason, Suzy, and I gave Vikings a try. Jason picked it up a couple of weeks ago, but this was our first time playing the game.
I’ll have to play it again before I can really give an opinion on it. I enjoyed the first game, but there’s a lot going on under the covers in that game that I still don’t fully understand. I managed to win, though I think luck had a large part in that. We played with 3, and while I think it would be fun with 4, I don’t know if I would like it as much with 2. I guess we’ll have to try it and see.
After Vikings, we played a game of Tongiaki. Up until this point, Tongiaki and I have had a love-hate relationship. I love playing the game, and it hates to see me win. I was very happy to finally win Tongiaki for the first time ever last night. I’m sure luck played a part in that win too, but I think I played the game fairly well. Certainly I did better through the mid-game than usual, although my start felt a little sluggish. Maybe it doesn’t hate me after all.
Jeremiah Wittevrongel lives in Calgary, Canada. Though he works as a software developer and loves what he does, this blog isn't about that. It's about the rest of his life, which tends to revolve around music, board gaming, hiking, travelling, and cooking.
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