Quietly reading and playing

One of the joys of having no posting schedule and, let’s be honest, a very small audience, is that I don’t feel any pressure to post. Usually when Yore is quiet I’m up to a bunch of stuff and just don’t have anything to say. How about a quick round-up of the Yore-adjacent stuff?

Reading Appendix N

• The Stealer of Souls, by Michael Moorcock. This is the beginning of Moorcock’s Elric series. I’ve read one Elric book before, but it wasn’t listed in Appendix N; this one is, and it’s superb.
• Hiero’s Journey, by Sterling E. Lanier. More Appendix N, but this one is post-apocalyptic and rather long. I like it but I’ve been enjoying the “quick hit” of banging out pulps, so it’s been on hold for a bit.
• I just finished Escape Across the Cosmos, by Gardner Fox. It was a fun pulp SF story, and makes me optimistic about Fox’s two Appendix N series, Kyrik and Kothar.

Playing AD&D and Public Access

• An AD&D 2nd Edition Al-Qadim oceancrawl, the second installment in our ongoing Basement Game. We just rolled a storm as a random encounter and I’m pretty sure our next session has at least a 25% chance of a TPK. I haven’t played AD&D 2e in decades. It’s a hoot.
• My online group is twenty-two sessions into Public Access, which we’ve been playing for two years. This RPG is tough to describe, and the core (only) book is basically all spoilers, but it’s Carved from Brindlewood + creepypasta and the introduction is a solid elevator pitch.
  • “Public Access is a tabletop roleplaying game about a group of people in 2004—the Deep Lake Latchkeys—who find themselves investigating strange mysteries in and around the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Deep Lake was the home of a notorious public access television station called TV Odyssey, the history and fate of which—the station literally disappeared—is the source of much speculation in certain corners of the internet. As the Latchkeys conduct their investigations in Deep Lake, they will become increasingly aware of the central role TV Odyssey plays in everything that’s going on, and will have to face whatever terrible truth lies at the heart of the infamous station.”
• My Traveller group (below) just wrapped up a two-session Fiasco game. We used the Boomtown play set, which continues the tradition of every single first-party play set I’ve tried being absolutely fabulous. This was one of my favorite Fiasco games.

Running Traveller

• My second in-person group recently started Mongoose Traveller 2e, a sandbox set in the Cidrogal Subsector (itself part of the Foreven Sector, a “GM’s preserve” largely left alone in Trav canon). I’ve played way less Traveller than I’d like, and never run it before, so this is a learning experience. I did what is for me a huge amount of campaign prep (at least twelve hours, maybe fifteen or more), but if all goes well I’ll continue to need to do zero session prep. Tons of random generators; the random encounters at the heart of Traveller; two of my favorite oracles, Tarot cards and Rory’s Story Cubes; faction mechanics borrowed from Mausritter, at my friend Pete’s suggestion; and more.
  • Shit, there’s a proper blog post in here — but it’s one I’m not quite ready to write. I want a couple more sessions under my belt so I can not only say “I’m doing X” but also “and here’s how it’s going.” Having been blogging for twenty years…there’s like a 40% chance I’ll forget to write that post.
  • Much of my prep time involved making the subsector map, including the spreadsheet of planetary data and notes and all the campaign underpinnings that go along with it (factions, etc.). Eagle-eyed Yore readers will note that I named one of the pocket empires after my current favorite mechanical pencil.

Playing wargames

• This year I’ve been playing a ton of wargames, mainly in-person but also on Vassal. I don’t get many chances to play board games at home these days and my local MTG nights are usually a bad fit for my schedule, but late last year I joined a tabletop gaming club. My Traveller group plays there, but the club is also full of folks who love wargames and euros. I’ve played more wargames in the past six months than I have in years, and it’s been grand.
  • I’m about 2/3 of the way to my wargaming goal for 2025, with just six games left to try this year: ASL, Fields of Despair, Necromolds, Panzer, Ambush!, and Fields of Fire. I’ve got ASL and Panzer underway, Fields of Despair is next up with a friend at the club, Necromolds is a quick game, and Ambush! and Fields of Fire are solitaire games. Barring unusual circumstances, I should hit that goal.

Playing Switch games

• I’ve got four games on the go on the Switch: Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Blasphemous 2. For the past couple weeks I’ve been playing Persona 5 at bedtime and loving it. I’ve never played an RPG like it before. Having always wanted to go to Japan, I love that it feels like a little tour of Tokyo.

I’ve got other stuff going on too, of course, but that’s about it for Yore-related activities. Hope your summer is going well. Happy gaming!