Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. During the day I had my usual ethics classes to teach, and in between I had to clean up the house ready for friends to come over. I did vacuum cleaning and had to clean off all the Magic cards off the dining table, so we had space to play.
We continued our adventure from last time, with the PCs exploring the Temple of Spathio, a local god of swords. They’d found a nest of snake men last time, and now explored cautiously, reaching a few new rooms which presented interesting problems. They’ve been finding magically glowing swords that have numerical runes engraved on them, and are trying to assemble a collection of all the numbers 1 to 9. One sword was spotted glowing near the top of a huge 20-foot high precarious conical tower of swords They considered playing sword Jenga, but decided they had to collapse the tower to reach the glowing sword, and did so with ropes, to avoid being on the bottom of a pile of falling swords. The collapse created a huge noise, which attracted more snake men from another room to attack them.
Last time they found two of the numbered swords, and this time I think they added three more. I won’t go into more details right now, but it was a lot of fun and the players did some incredibly clever and fun puzzle solving to get those swords. I think this is a great way to design an adventure: create a goal that the players can’t help but wanting, and place that goal inside a difficult situation that presents as a puzzle for them to work out how to get the thing. The watch them get creative with the resources and skills they have.
Today I got up and did a 5k run early, then had a shower to get ready for a day out. My wife dropped Scully off at the doggy day care place and then we headed into the city for a day of exploring together.
There’s been a lot of new development in parts of the city and my wife hadn’t seen some of it yet. We started at Central Station and walked around the University of Technology, so I could show her where I do my lecture classes, and where I’ve been eating lunches and dinners on the days when I’m in there. Then we walked through part of Chinatown and towards Darling Harbour. We stopped for a snack at Harajuku Gyoza Beer Stadium, a Japanese brewery and gyoza place that has some good food.
Then we walked through Darling Harbour and all the new development there, past the new convention centre, which replaced the old one that they tore down a few years ago. It was pretty busy with people, and mostly locals, with not too many obvious tourists, which was nice. A bit further on we hit the real tourist areas, around Cockle Bay Wharf. We continued around the Aquarium to Barangaroo – this is a new walkway that was inaccessible previously, as the area was formerly a wasteland of industrial docks. But with the recent redevelopment the area is pretty nice now.
We continued north to the new park at Barangaroo Reserve, and then cut across inland to The Rocks, where we walked through The Rocks Market. This was extremely busy, with many tourists in the area. We stopped at The Rocks Discovery Museum, a small historical museum about the neighbourhood, which we had never been in before. This is a small museum which has some displays and artefacts describing the history of The Rocks from before European arrival in 1788 to the 20th century. We were almost playing tourists in our own city, really.
From here we walked back into the heart of the city and stopped for another snack at a cafe near Wynyard. They did full lunch dishes, but I just chose a four-cheese toastie (toasted sandwich), which was amazingly good.
Then we continued south to the shopping areas, where we split up briefly -my wife went o buy some clothing while I checked out the game shop. We met in Kinokuniya book shop and after browsing around a bit we headed to Town Hall to catch a train home.
After picking up Scully from day care we were a bit exhausted. I didn’t fancy cooking dinner so suggested we go get Thai food for dinner. We drove over to Castle Cove where there’s a nice suburban Thai place with an outdoor table where we can sit with Scully. The food was good – a great way to round off a very busy day. And Scully is super tired because she’s been playing with other dogs all day.
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New content today: