This past week has been bad as I've been depressed and feel like I misspent my time. A lot of this week was spent scrolling social media and going back to bed.
Read
I planned to play a game of the tabletop roleplaying game Monster of the Week this week so I got a hold of the rules and gave them a read. The conceit of the game is that you are a group of monster hunters, similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that you take part in a mystery to find and kill a supernatural monster.
The rules are simpler than Dungeons and Dragons and kind of seem to have more of a roleplaying element where it is very open in what you can do. The setting is modern fantasy where conspiracy theories about monsters and the existence of secret organisations to hunt them are real. You can play as members of a secret organisation, members of the public who discovered monsters are real or even as friendly monsters themselves.
The rulebook had quite a lot about running games and the kind of tempo that the game was meant to have in that it should be an action horror setting where the monsters are dangerous and people get wounded and die very easily. While magic can be used it is very common for it to have drawbacks or misfire.
Watched
A large part of the week was taken up watching the rest of Linkus' streams of the Ocarina of Time remake. I do tend to get locked into watching things like playthroughs of games until they are over and because he was doing a 100% completion run this took quite a lot of time. In the end he spent 22 hours on the game, impressive for a remake of such an old game.
The structure of the game really does still hold up and what has been added doesn't take away from what was already there so I think I'd say this new version is the better version for someone who is coming to the game for the first time to play. The enemy AI is improved so that combat feels better and more challenging and there are tweaks to the dungeons to make them flow better.
Of course once I finished with Linkus' playthrough I then got onto looking at how people were speedrunning the game. There were already techniques discovered in the game for gaining infinite height when jumping and ways to skip dungeons. The original Ocarina of Time had some truly massive glitches, I believe the fastest completion time was about 4 minutes, so it will be interesting to see if a modern version can be broken that much.
Played
I ended up playing a game of Cartographers with my family at the weekend which is a nice relaxing game where each person creates their own map of a fantasy land and tries to score points by having combos of land types.
Cards get drawn to tell you what shapes and types of terrain to draw and then you decide where to place it on your piece of paper. There are forests, fields, water and towns. Sometimes monster cards are played which means you get to draw monster tiles on another person's map. There are also heroes to defeat monsters.
We have quite a lot of different expansions for the game and the one we played this week had you building out the terrain in the underground. One of the nicest things about the game is that it is open to you how you draw the terrain so I had underground mushrooms for fields and subterranean burrows for murlocks. I even took the time to make a heraldic crest for the land with a rat on it.
Points get tallied up at the end and I only did averagely, still it was nice to draw and play.
Main thing I played this week was the session of Monster of the Week which I had been reading the rules for. As it was the first session we spent a very long time choosing and making characters. The Game Master had brought along a huge folder full of all the classes from all the expansions and we had a read through of them.
I decided on playing as a knight who had magically been sent forwards through time to the modern day. I was experienced in fighting monsters and had arms and armour befitting of a knight. The other players went for a rogue, changeling and a divine being taking mortal form.
The start of the mystery was a bit slow as we had to meet up at the place which had reported monster activity and one of the party got stuck hiding in a guard's breakroom and we very clumsily distracted the guard. After knocking out that guard we came across another that had been clawed and burned to death. My knight character immediately suspected a dragon and lo and behold on getting to the next room we found what looked like a dragon made of stone.
Sadly we had to stop the session right before we started combat.
Written
My writing for this month hasn't been going well the past week as I haven't done any writing towards this text adventure and some days I hardly wrote anything in my journal either. At least I did get past 50K words so technically I've written enough for a NaNoWriMo.
I think part of what ate into my time to write, other than lying in bed, was having to spend so much time to read through what I had already written. I took two days to finish it although I was taking notes as I went.
I'm afraid that I've built up a field of avoidance around the act of writing now and that I won't manage to get any work towards it done for the rest of the month. This happens so often when I set myself some large goal. I suppose the only thing to be done is to be kind to myself and just write when I feel able.
Other
Ludum Dare results came out this week and mine were unremarkable. There were about 200 entries.
I did say I would write a post mortem on the competition but I've been feeling uninspired to write that either. Maybe I'll get around to it but I'm making no promises. I also have yet to look at the winning entries.
I hope that next week isn't so bad but at the moment all I seem to be feeling like doing is going back to bed all the time.
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