Our good friends at Goodreads just sent me the annual overview. There’s not much interesting there, but I tend to post it every year, so here we go.

#GoodreadsYearInBooks

The blog has been laying low for quite a while now. Things in the real world have required my energy, or rather, I have focused on other things.

The dark months have hit the northern hemisphere, and will only get worse for the next three months, so hopefully I can get more stuff on the blog. It seems like the winter thing to do.

Lately, I have been less in Dragolance than usual. Probably because I feel the urge to spend my cognitive energy on something new as opposed to rehashing already known stuff. Despite this, I did manage do start a couple of writing projects that are based on Dragonlance.

I have been working on Tarsis write up, to be used post War of the Lance, as well as a piece called Dark Citadel: The Legacy of Fistandantilus. The idea is to take some of the older elements of the setting, and making them usable again, but with a twist.

The Fistandantilus piece lets the players research the Dark One’s background while exploring some of his old lairs including Skullcap. I was inspired by Castle Greyhawk in the sense that it is possible to explore the dwellings of a long lost wizard, essentially asking the question “What did he leave behind”?.

As always, I am far from done, and I will most likely never finish any of these projects, but hopefully the work will turn into a couple og mildy interesting blog posts that someone out there might find useful.

Now, off to watch Lord of the Rings.

In my younger days, I was an avid comic book reader. I had a subscription to Marvel, as well as a comicbook called Trumf. Not affiliated with the orange terror who will destroy the world.

Anyway, when I got married I made the unforgivable mistake of throwing those things out. Can you imagine my horror all these years later. However, since I am not longer a poor student, I have been rebuilding over the past three years or so.

I am no longer a Marvel fan, so I don’t purchase any of those comics. I am a big fan of the French and Belgian comic books like Asterix and Blueberry. My Asterix collection is now complete, although I should probably replace the more worn out ones. Therefore, I have turned my attention towards Blueberry.

These comics are works of pure art. Coincidentially, they were one of the reasons why, as a kid, got so into the american history and culture, which later brought me there as a graduate student.

My local book pusher sells these collections of three comics, making it super easy to collection the entire series. They didn’t have the first set, but it turns out that the second one contains my absolute favorite comic, so who can complain.

I have been sick more or less since late October. This means that I haven’t been able to run like I wanted to, but I have had the ability to go for some nice walks around where I live.

Climate change has meant that we don’t get the same winters around here, like we used to. This means that whenever we do get snow, I have to go for a long walk and enjoy what could be the last snow I will ever experience.

Yesterday we got some snow. Not a lot, but enough to merit a nice walk. I took some photos to preserve the memory.

I feel like I have cheated since there are some comic books on the list. However, the Cleric Quintet counts as one book even though it is five, so I do feel a little vindicated.

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped off the face of the social media earth. I finally kicked the habit of endless doom scrolling, which killed my ability to think fairly straight.

A benefit has been that I have started writing my Fistandantilus campaign again. So far, I have covered Skullcap and I have started on Ulgaard. Hopefully, I will be able to run this in my gaming group at one point in a not too distant future.

I am giving a slight 5E flavor, not beacuse Wizards of the Coast are worth supporting, but simply because it is the system we use in our group. If I end up putting it online, I will probably remove any 5E references so people can use whatever system they like.

I was messing around with ChatGPT because I needed som epictures for a moduæe I am writing. Instead of stealing the usual art works from internet, I figured I would see what AI could do for me.

Now, I use the free version, so I don’t get a lot quesries, but I think if I could ask the AI to make specific changes, such as skin color, facial hair etc it could generate some pretty good content.

Here are the images the AI generated. I think they are ok, but I would have liked to be able to modify them quite a bit, so they would better represent the intenden charaters.

Because the this will be the last Christmas before the apocalypse, we will start a little early.