Matthew Hunter

I don’t have much to say about this one. It was better than the first season, but had too much focus on the criminals. There was significant moral ambiguity, particularly towards the end, which could either be a bad thing or a deliberate storytelling choice that will be redeemed next season. This season, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The cameo appearance by Iron Fist was good, but did not mesh well with Iron Fist Season 2 as a whole. (I’m not sure of the chronology). An improvement over the first season, not least because it was shorter and thus had less time to waste. If they had cut it down to 6 episodes instead of ten, it might have worked.

L1: The Secret of Bone Hill

Chris (Tiberium), Coby (Warin), Matt (Barron), Brian (Pyrzifal), Dean (Thic Duc), and Mariel (Leah) are returning cast members.

As we left the party, they were trying to figure out how to escape the comfortable room with food delivery and a vast selection of casual reading materials. Oh, and an animated skeleton. Meanwhile, in Restenford, Leah was drinking herself into a stupor after the baby incident, and Malag woke up in the Adventure Capitalist’s safe room with a really bad feeling about his friends. Malag was joined shortly by a portly priest asking whether he knew Tiberium. Apparently, the paladin had been asking about the Keep at Bone Hill, and the acolyte (whose previous answers had been miserable) had done more research and talked to his superiors about the matter. They had given him a scroll with spells to help out, including Speak with Dead, Remove Curse, and Exorcism. The scroll contained the instructions “Speak with the undead master of the keep first. Redeem him if you can. Destroy him if he cannot be redeemed.” It also contained, in a different hand, a confusing note about pushups.

L1: The Secret of Bone Hill

Chris (Tiberium), Coby (Warin), Matt (Barron), Brian (Pyrzifal), Dean (Thic Duc), and Jeff (Amathar) are returning cast members. Erica (Theodora) is a special guest.

As we left the party, they were exchanging shocked looks as Thic Duc ate Thic Duc’s heart.

Interlude: Theodora’s Story

Dainty maiden Theodora was having a grand time at her best friends’ bachelorette party. She drank, she swore, she smashed things, she danced on tabletops (before and after smashing them), and she got smashed (clubs and drinks both). For a young half-orc, it was a really good party. So she was a little confused when she woke up in a bed that wasn’t hers, in a room that wasn’t hers, wearing (what was left of) her party dress over her armor, and using her battleaxe for a pillow. Admittedly, she had started the evening wearing the dress over her armor. That was only prudent at a good party. And the axe helped with the smashing part. But normally, Theodora would wake up in an alley, or sometimes her own bed if she didn’t get quite drunk enough. (Never someone else’s bed; it was too much fun kicking them out of her in the morning).

Elliot Kay’s new book Run Like Hell asks and answers the question: “What is it like to be the monsters when an adventuring party kicks down your front door?”

Although the book is technically game-related literature, it doesn’t have the usual hallmarks of character sheets or explicit rules elements. It’s just set very solidly in the generic fantasy game setting, with the perspective reversed. Gaming fans will have a lot to recognize while finding quite a lot of new and interesting elements from the perspective shift. It’s definitely light reading, and quick at just under 200 pages.

Session Map

L1: The Secret of Bone Hill

Chris (Tiberium/Malag), Coby (Gunnar/Warin), Matt (Barron/Lenny), Brian (Pyrzifal/Norsk), Dean (Thic Duc/Thic Duc), and Jeff (Amathar) are returning cast members.

As we left the party, they were still split into two groups – one at the top of Bone Hill, and the other having just rescued (well, mostly) a kidnapped baby from a nest of wererats the night before. We begin with the Band of Heroes. Tiberium and Pyrzival found a local temple of Pelor and inquired about local legends concerning Bone Hill, wererats, and possible human sacrifices. The young priest minding the temple there was unable to help them with anything specific, beyond a lecture on the undead that he probably still had memorized from passing his seminary exams. He was able to get them 3 vials of holy water each.

Brandon Sanderson has had a series of stories featuring a character named Legion (real name, Stephen Leeds) whose “superpower” (in a thinly defined world mostly similar to our own, but with science fiction elements) is a form of multiple personality disorder. In essence, he hears voices and sees things, specifically, other people. These “aspects” encapsulate and represent the information and expertise that his own own mind cannot itself contain and represent. Think of them as a coping mechanism for a supergenius.

Port of Shadows occupies a strange place in the chronology of the Black Company; it predates almost all of the history we know, picking the story up after the first book and before the second. The author appears to be numbering it 1.5. Thank god for decimals.

This is not a good place to start the series. Read The Black Company (the first book of the series by the same name) for that.

Session Map

L1: The Secret of Bone Hill

Chris (Tiberium), Coby (Gunnar), Matt (Barron), Mariel (Leah), Brian (Pyrzifal), and Jeff (Amathar) are returning cast members. Kayli (Ganymede) is a new player.

As we left the party, they had split into two groups – one at the top of Bone Hill, and the other just arriving in Restenford after a vivid dream about wererats and undead followed by a fight with pirates on the high seas. As they arrived, they were met by a woman shouting in panic about her infant son who had been abducted by a giant rat. This was something that had happened in Tiberium’s dream as well, and he felt it was similar enough to consider the possibility that the dream had been divine guidance to enable him to prepare. Instead of rushing after the woman, he convinced the party to question her a little, and invest some of their silver into coating their weapons in case of lycanthropes (as he had found hints of in his dream). Barron spent some of that time contemplating a note he had found in Thic Duc’s pocket.

Legion is a TV-form production licensed from Marvel, set in the X-Men side of the universe. Unless you are familiar with the character from the source material, it’s not going to feature any well known characters. The first season is very odd, as you might expect from a series revolving around a main character whose defining characteristic is his paranoid schizophrenia. Or, in other words, he hears voices. And occasionally sees things. And occasionally blows up his kitchen with his mind, and then forgets about it.

The 7th book in Evan Currie’s Odyssey One series, this book adds a few new elements to the series that are less than ideal. Still, the writing is good, and the story remains entertaining. There are still space battles, but less exploration.

If you’ve enjoyed the series up to this point, there’s no reason not to continue reading, but I can’t give the series a full thumbs up because of the unnecessary and intrusive virtue signaling. If that continues, and gets more intrusive, I might have to give up on the series; but it’s not there yet. I’m just baffled as to why the author thinks that has any place in the story.