Also Space Exploration Day, although that’s become decreasingly cool over the past few years. Nazis ruin everything.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant:In search of the fourth volume of the three-volume set of texts, On Ethereal Matters, Reshelving Squad Upsilon makes a journey through Bibliospace that will definitely have been harrowing when they tell this story later. In due course, they come to room or demiplane with many warning signs, and ghostly apparitions swarming over a labyrinth of shelves packed with books on the transmigration of spirits and similar matters. Flying over the labyrinth to shortcut it is obviously a bad plan, but it turns out that ground level is not much better, what with the possessing ghosts and haunted library carts and shifting paths and Dewey Decimal shelving. Also there’s somebody further back in the stacks carrying on, which probably doesn’t mean anything good. Despite Thaïs getting the life sucked out of her, Lilli and Flint getting possessed multiple times, and everyone getting run over by haunted library carts, they eventually make it almost halfway into the room, at which point the ankylosaur librarian shows up to scold them for making so much noise. The librarian is also upset about the noise caused by the How To Get Published seminar being run in the back, though, so Lilli agrees to shut them in exchange for not getting slapped around any more. And there’s the book! Victory! They quickly return to Renwick, who says he now understands how Walter got out of the previous trap and how to keep him imprisoned forever.

Looks like we have two or maybe three sessions left. No progress on finding new gamers.

Read (manga): Ghost Talker’s Daydream vol 1 (Okuse Saki, Meguro Sankichi): One of the series I put back into the TBR pile before taking to the used bookstore. Still raunchy and sordid and morbid, because people who die peacefully in bed don’t need ghost talkers to get them sorted.

Written (game design): 354:

I thought we could establish a couple of rules for magic based on what we’ve already established, but I’m not sure they hold up, except for “no plusses”. Magic can’t change an action rating, but it can provide tools, knowledge, and maybe even time to reduce the difficulty. A spell might be a really good tool that makes everything faster and has a larger effect, but if you don’t have the background, or do have adverse circumstances, you can be at 1D or more and still have to roll. This mostly applies to buff and environmental reshaping magic, I guess. Okay, let’s look at the six types of magic mentioned before.

• Buff – As just mentioned, a lot of buff magic provides faster/more powerful tools for actions. Could also increase non-action stats like HP, damage, and movement, where plusses are not as objectionable.
• Debuff – Absolutely something magic should be able to do, but any details have to wait for combat rules to be finished.
• Environmental reshaping – Mostly similar to buff, but for the Craft an Object action, since it’s all about making new things or destroying old things, so this is fine.
• Healing – Again, needs the rules for getting beat up and/or cursed to exist before we can say anything concrete.
• Transportation – Immediate stuff is buffs for Get Over There, but larger-scale stuff like flying ships and teleportation gateways is probably just things you build?
• Divination – I forgot about this one before, possibly because it’s messy. Historically divination is very common and very diverse, because everybody wants to know things, but it’s a pain in a game. Needs more attention later.
• Attack – Again, fine for magic to do this, but most attack magic would be ranged, rather than melee, so we need those combat mechanics before we can go anywhere with this.

But just because we can put in magic to do all these things, doesn’t mean we should.