Random Thoughts and Links for 2/3/2023

Random stuff for the week.

- Not to pat ourselves on our own backs, but we've played 179 sessions of DF in one campaign. That's pretty long. It's probably one of the longest GURPS DF campaigns, and probably a relatively long-running campaign in gaming terms. Aug 2011 - Jan 2023 and continuing, 179 full-day sessions - probably a good 1500 hours of gaming, or close to. Not bad, I think. Clearly, for all of my tinkering, I don't get too bored with a basic central concept. Good stuff. Just really kind of hit me that it's been a fair bit of gaming while I was writing up some notes on Session 179. I think I was prompted for this because of how much fun that session was. I don't know that my previous game was that fun 179 sessions in.

- I want all of my weird old books to feel and sound like this in my games:

"The sleekly leather-bound gold-stamped books turned out to contain scripts stranger far than that in the books he had flipped outside - scripts that looked like skeletal beasts, cloud swirls, and twisty-branched bushes and trees [. . .] The books dealt in the fullest detail with such matters as the private life of devils, the secret histories of murderous cults, and - these were illustrated - the proper dueling techniques to employ against sword-armed demons and the erotic tricks of lamias, succubi, bacchantes, and hamadryads."

- Fritz Leiber, "The Bazaar of the Bizzare"

That combo of seriousness and humor fits my current game well.

- This post of Erol Otus pictures is old but brings up a question - why isn't there an Erol Otus art collection book? I'm sure WOTC owns a lot of them, but there must be some way to do an Otus art book with all of his weirdness pulled in from multiple sources. I don't have the know-how or infrastructure to do it. If someone does, this seems like such a nice thing to have.

Lazy Blog Post - Erol Otus!

- These ACOUP posts really entertain me. I don't really mind the technological bs in a series like this. I don't expect any knowledge of weapons, tactics, etc. What did let me down about it was that there were big causal gaps. A lot of "You can't get to plot development B from plot development A but here we are anyway." That really got me. So did the occasional nonsensical explanation - people doing things that couldn't possibly result in the ends they sought. I don't love that every fight is a wuxia fight - you can't beat anyone without a flying spinning running wall-climbing reverse strike. But still, it's part of the genre of modern fantasy at this point, just like everyone wears brown everything was an 80s fantasy thing. Still, I look forward to these posts, and they're a good way to learn about actual historical armor, ships, weaponry, tactics, forging, etc.