Last day of vacation. I took four bags of books to the used bookstore and only had half a bag rejected, got my medication sorted out so hopefully I can both not die and not poop until I want to die, and did some additional shopping that I failed at yesterday. It was a reasonable fake Sunday, but I had no sundae.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Everett is at work, leaving the rest of the crew at loose ends. Siddy declares she needs a walking stick, so everyone goes to ask Troll if he knows where to get one, and he shows them how to use BART tickets to get to the Goblin Market. Poor Siddy has some PTSD flashbacks from having once been sold at a goblin market herself, but manages to buy a walking stick without getting trapped into any unwanted bargains. Thessaly does not put the moves on the stick vendor dryad, although she clearly wants to. Theophania checks out the book stall, but it seems a little sketchy so she decides to maybe come back later when she knows more about this, and comes up with a clever plan to get materials for Siddy to make her some new shoes. Nobody is sure exactly what Longfingers has been doing.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 1 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): An office lady works herself to death and gets reincarnated as an immortal witch who can just chillax in her extremely low-risk corner of the LitRPG world. Unfortunately for her, the XP adds up, and eventually somebody realizes she is the most powerful ever. Now she can’t chillax because cute girls (or monsters in the form of cute girls) keep coming to kill/serve/challenge/entreat her and she has to adopt them all and also fight dragons.

Written (game design): 307:

In OG D&D, one of the main paths for advancement was famously More Stuff, by
which we mean magic items. Equally famously, a lot of that was to get
More Plusses: +1 longsword, +3 plate mail, +6 headband of intellect. (I
like the way 5E does this better: a headband of intellect doesn’t give
bonuses to stack on top of the different-colored bonuses you already
have to Int, it just makes your Int 19. This is an approach I want to
use heavily when we need bigger numbers.) To be fair, there are a lot of
additional abilities as well: necklace of fireballs, lyre of building,
vorpal sword. These days, those are mostly spells that use a dedicated
pool of charges to be tracked separately, but whatever.

If spending magic points is wearing away your own soul, how do magic
items work? Do they have domesticated spirits inside them to do the work
of magic on the user’s behalf? That works with the 5E thing of magic
items possibly breaking if you use the last charge, although working a
spirit to death is a lot darker than just wearing out a tool. It could
also be that the magic item only provides the pattern, and you have to
do the magic yourself to stamp it into the fabric of reality. That’s not
as good for items that just do their thing, like the vorpal sword, but
it does remind me of my idea from long ago where spells were astral
tools that you had to equip, so a powerful mage would look like a
many-armed idol with a different symbol in every hand.