Quite good. I learned so much about the founding of New France.

(read Aug 20 - Oct 25)

"Frustrated but not bored" certainly matches how I was feeling during the exploration phase of that session. But I think it's reasonable for D&D rules, and on-the-fly DM decisions, to sometimes produce those emotions in the players. We committed ourselves, at least temporarily, to doggedly attempting something that we knew would be difficult given our characters' current capabilities. Alexis can't make us tramp up and down Hungarian hillsides all day in real life, but the game has been tuned so that attempting that action during play will make us feel a lot like how we'd feel in real life after a day of hard tramping with nothing (yet) gained. I appreciate that.

I'm glad that The Dangerous Summer is more novella than novel: it's just as long as it needs to be and no longer. (James Michener's introduction tells us that Hemingway originally wrote some 120,000 words, which were cut to 70,000 for publication in Life magazine in 1960; the published version which I read is 45,000 words. ) Michener's introduction is interesting in its own right. Among other things, he makes it clear that we should go into the book expecting Hemingway to be partial to Antonio Ordóñez over his brother-in-law and rival, Luis Miguel Dominguín. It's possible to read the book against that interpretation, but I think Michener's reading holds up.

New Features

• The Ability Scores section of the character sheet now contains an attack roll calculator. If you enter an adjusted attack roll, the calculator displays what AC you hit given your current THAC0. (#195)
• In the Identity section of the character sheet, next to your current XP and the XP required for your next level, you now also see the difference of those values, i.e. remaining XP to the next level. (#199)

User Interface

• Tables and other wide UI elements no longer run off-screen at narrow screen widths. (#34, #201)
• Text labels in the Identity section of the site are shorter to better suit narrow screens.

Anchorwick is written in a deliberately old-fashioned style (that of the early 20th century, perhaps) and it feels very English, as in England. The best compliment I can pay the author is that, despite the book having been published in 2007, the writing feels authentically old throughout. Unfortunately, he also imitates the wordiness of his inspirations: the narrator goes on a few too many paragraph-long digressions about the contents of a room, or the way someone dresses or behaves.

The plot is interesting but not intriguing, and it's too thin for the length of the book and for the slowness with which new information drips out between the cracks of overwritten sentences.