Life continues to be busy, chaotic, and of course, a ton of fun. The last few days here in Saskatchewan have been non-stop rain which has left me and the kids trapped inside over the Labour Day long weekend.
That was good, in that I think I needed a relaxed bit of recharging (such as it was, more on that later), more than I knew. Compared to usual, we had a pretty restful bit of downtime. That wasn't the plan, of course, but it's what happened and it turned out to be a good thing.
We did make a trip into the city on Saturday, intending to go visit my mom. She's dealing with some chronic pain and illness, so we got a last-minute request to bump the visit to next weekend. We always are prepared for something like that when it comes to visits with her, so it wasn't a huge change of plans for us - we just opted to take in our cans to the recycling depot instead and drop by a local game shop to use up a birthday gift card I'd had sitting around for almost a year.
I took them a few copies of my book as well, and dropped them off for the owner to give away. Worldbuilding books are exactly the right kind of vibe for a tabletop game store, and they were appreciative and interested in giving them away. I suspect the owner might give himself the first copy - cool by me if so! haha
But, anyhow, as we wandered and the kids picked out some stuff they wanted to buy, I went hunting for the shelf of indie tabletop games... and I found something I really didn't expect to!
Shadowdark!
https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark
Now, Shadowdark is a game that's been on my radar since it came out. I follow, and chat with, a bunch of folks interested in the OSR/NSR sphere, and almost all of them talk about THIS game. It's also an $80 CAD hardcover before shipping and import fees and all that absolute nonsense. Which is to say, it's hard to justify the ~$100 bucks I'd spend on it to get it into my hands.
And, wouldn't ya know it? It's just sitting there on a shelf for $94.55 and I've got an $80 gift card in my pocket.
So, we walked out of there with a new set of dice for my wife, a new set of dice for my eldest, and a K-pop Demon Hunters version of Spot It! for my middle kid. (The toddler was just happy to steal her sibling's things and throw them about).
Did I overspend? Yeah, probably. Do I feel bad about it? Hell naw. This was an unexpected and absolute joy to snag.
Back at home the next day, while it continued to dump rain on us, my son and I pulled out a Spy Kit that he'd received for his birthday. He's big into spies and ninjas right now, so we spent a couple of hours going through his kit learning about cyphers, secret messages, how locks work, and fun stuff like that. We also made some fun Spy Kit things like a little vault to stash Super Secret Stuff and an alarm system that triggers a loud tone when you say... open a door.
A very necessary piece of gear for any aspiring young spy!
Finally, I also got my Kickstarter rewards for the last half of the Cosmere RPG, which is all of the Mistborn content.
This is, honestly, probably a game that won't get a ton of run-time at my table. There's a lot of rules to learn when not everyone is going to be invested in the setting... but it sure is a cool reference book and has some amazing art. It will definitely inspire me to steal from it for the other games my players are interested in, and that makes it worth it for me.
Plus, in another year or two... there's always the kids! They'll be old enough mostly by then to join some tabletop gaming fun, and for them, learning new rules isn't a big hurdle. They don't have to worry about nonsense like jobs or the 10,000,000 items on the ever-growing to-do list. And thus, they're the perfect test subjects for new games!
