2025 - My Year in Reading

My objective for this year was to read 20 books: not much compared to how I used to read but a good step up from the measly handful I read in 2024. I ended the year with 25 books completed. Additionally, I wanted to and did make an entry in my book log for every book, causing me to finish filling up my first book log which I had started in 2017 and had been making only occasional entries into.

I joined a book club this year, which both kept me on pace and took up a lot of my reading. It’s been fun, and we ended up reading a bunch of books which I’d previously read but not developed a real understanding of. In fact, eight of the books I read this year were rereads.

My goals for this year are to read at least as many books again, and I’d like to dabble with waking up early to read for an hour, which I’ve done at different times in my life. Makes it easier to take notes compared to my usual reading in bed or on the subway.

Below are my book log entries for the year. Mostly just scribbles.

1. Difficult Loves
2. District and Circle
3. The Crying of Lot 49
4. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
5. Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Way of the Clans
6. Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Bloodname
7. Kalki
8. Invisible Cities
9. The Golden Apple
10. Duino Elegies
11. Night Palace
12. Continuous Creation: Last Poems
13. Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction
14. Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
15. UBIK
16. Hour of the Wolf
17. Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Falcon Guard
18. Patternmaster
19. Vasko Popa: Selected Poems
20. Fidelity
21. The Dispossessed
22. Redemption Rites
23. Salvage the Bones
24. The Master and Margarita
25. Moby Dick

Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino, finished 2025-01-19

This was a book of my mother’s mother’s. It has her name written on the inside of the front cover. I thought she might not have read it because of how pristine the book is but I found a page from a magazine in it and one page had a damaged corner.

I felt, for a lot of this book, like I couldn’t predict what would happen in each story. But then, in the second to last story - The Adventure of a Near-Sighted Man - it kind of clicked and I knew what would happen. It was the same sort of ironic logic as Invisible Cities. Looking back, the surprise of each story was such a pleasure.

District and Circle

by Seamus Heaney, finished 2025-01-22

I liked reading these poems aloud to myself, the words felt great to speak. None of them is my favorite of Heaney’s but there were some real gems, especially toward the beginning of the book. I do feel like, since I’ve started reading Heaney, I’m more attentive to the coincidences of sound in my own speech and writing.

One thing I appreciate about the early poems in this book, like the one about the aerodrome, is how surprising are Heaney’s descriptions of physical objects. There’s the one about the helmet, the one about the harrow-pin. I hope to write some poems like them this year.

The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon, finished 2025-02-18

This is my third of fourth time reading this book and I feel, finally, like I kind of get it. I found this passage underlined at the end of the book:

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

This terminates a passage on meaning - either there is meaning beyond the veil of the mundane or not. The answer, as we all know, is that there is none. Pynchon tells us as much through Randolph Driblette early in the book:

You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words, and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it.

All of our interpretation comes to nothing. All the attempt to understand symmetries comes to nothing. There is only the appearance of meaning.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

by Yukio Mishima, finished 2025-03-06

Another book club book. This was my second time reading it - back in high school or early college this was my first Mishima, and in the rereading there’s a memory of what it meant to me back then. When I had a deeper and more complex emptional life this book made a lot of sense to me, and Mishima’s commitment to beauty made a lot of sense. Now it’s hard not to see it all as foolish. Of course, of the two perspectives, I’d rather reclaim the former.

I should probably be drugged and murdered like Ryuji. Happiness and pills have dulled what was once a fine attunement to beauty. It’s hard to know what the point of all this is if I’ll never again be moved to delusion by the mattering of things as used to happen all the time.

Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Way of the Clans

by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-03-06

This took me forever to finish cause it was long-winded and boring. Not really what you expect from this kind of thing. At the end of the day, I’m glad I finished it and might read the rest of the trilogy; it’s nice to gave something to read on my phone.

Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Bloodname

by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-04-14

This one was a lot more engaging than the last. More action, more interesting character development. Not the best book ever, but I’m likely to read the next and final book.

It’s funny, I don’t remember much of anything of these books. I’m pretty sure I had a big anthologized edition of the trilogy that got beat to hell.

Kalki

by Gore Vidal, finished 2025-05-02

Another book club book. It reminded me of a bunch of books: The Crying of Lot 49, Love in the Ruins, a passage probably from Hindu scripture reminded me of the bit before the last chapter of UBIK.

After the end of the world the book continues for a good 40 pages at least. I was confused - there wasn’t much left the plot could do - but I ended up enjoying it. Fun to see the world wind down.

Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino, finished 2025-05-09

This is what? My fourth time reading this book? I think the first time I read this was with Coleman back in 2013. More than ten years ago. And never enough to read, even then.

The history of cities is the history of civilization. So what do these stories reveal? A logic of human consciousness and narrative? Something about how we make complex systems comprehensible. Something about what meaning is.

Kublai keeps Polo around to entertain him, first of all, but also because something about Polo’s cities teaches him about his unknowable empire, allowing him to possess it in a new way. “If we can describe the space of possible symbols, every member can be understood.”

The Golden Apple

by Vasko Popa, finished 2025-05-13

I don’t think there are many relevant books for me to find left related to Popa. I’ve still got that second of criticism to read, and I’m sure there are more Simic translations to find.

The fairy tales, perhaps predictably, were my favorite part of this book. Strange and frightening. In general, the tone and language of the book matched Popa’s poetry - to whom is this attributable? I wonder more and more how much of the poetry I love is Anne Pennington’s work.

Duino Elegies

by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow, finished 2025-05-22

I guess I never actually finished this before. It’s certainly hard to follow. I read the preface? Introduction? and it predisposed me against it - Rilke comes off as too caught up in the importance of his feelings. And i guess that’s true of his writing as well, it’s very flowery and attentive to his internal life, but disconnected from the world. I guess I ought to ask what the difference is to other poets I like more. Just how interesting is one person’s internal life?

Night Palace

by Phil Elverum, finished 2025-05-23

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would - turns out it’s just lyrics to some songs off the album of the same name. There was some political commentary that wasn’t as cringey as it might have been. There were some nice moments of peace amid nature. Elverum does a good job of expressing the experience of such things as breeze or the smell of woodfire.

Continuous Creation: Last Poems

by Les Murray, finished 2025-06-05

I’d read about this poem in Coetzee last year. An Australian. Maybe my first Australian? These were, as the the title implies, the poet’s last poems, selected by his editor. There are some bangers in here, and I’ll need to return to it - lots of confusing stuff too though. Poems I flatly did not understand or bounced off stylistically.

Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction

by Virginia Woolf, finished 2025-06-17

Really great stuff. Woolf is becoming one of my favorites. There are so many memorable moments in these stories: the bug in the title story, the two older, single ladies in the final two stories. Woolf’s prose makes me feel like I’m losing my mind, but it’s so beautiful. Her sensual descriptions so evocative. It works well in these short formats.

Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005

by J.M. Coetzee, finished 2025-07-03

A third collection of these essays. I really enjoyed it, of course, but don’t really think I was so seduced to read the works discussed as I was with the other collections. The introduction was informative - Coetzee’s interest in the first half of the book is in authors who lived through both world wars and saw the end of Habsburg rule. Many of these authors describe characters who cannot move on from the loss of their home and cling to the values or memory of the collapsed empire. How does it relate to Coetzee? Someone who also left behind - in history as well as practically - the country of his birth? I don’t think Coetzee longs for the days of apartheid, but it would be hard to believe he doesn’t experience some melancholy thinking back to a world which no longer exists.

The last essay is a review of a novel by Naipaul: Half a Life. It’s hard to tell here if the harsh attitude toward Indian culture belongs to Naipaul or Coetzee. Unusual for these essays, that confusion of perspective. Coetzee criticized the Indian tendency toward self-denial as related to complacency, a lack of ambition.

In the person of Chandran Senior, Naipaul has diagnosed self-denial as the road of weakness taken by loveless spirits, and essentially magic way of winning victories in the natural dialectic between a desiring self and a resistant world by suppressing desire itself.

Coetzee also shows an interest in the blending of real history with fiction: autofiction, memoir, and so on. I’m generally ignorant of these genres and haven’t really been interested in them. I think I don’t really understand what’s going on there and these essays have prompted some more interest at least in e.g. the blending of real experience with fiction as in Naipaul’s writing.

UBIK

by Philip Dick, finished 2025-07-17

I’ll try to get what feels like a coherent interpretation out. Both the group of intertials AND Runciter are dead. This isn’t fully necessary to explain the coin with Joe Chip’s face - there’s something about life-strength being able to affect reality that maybe bears on “true” reality in the novel, but it makes even more sense if they’re all in half-life.

The ads for UBIK are merely artifacts of different time-concepual iterations of the product: it was created just like Ella described and takes the form of a commercial product because in the “true” reality Ella and her colleagues come from there is a high degree of commercialization.

It is telling or at least interesting that 1939, the start of the war, and the involvement of the U.S. in the war, are inflection points in both UBIK (where time cannot revert further than 1939) and The Man in the High Castle, where U.S. involvement, besides the assassination of FDR, is what determines the split in realities.

Hour of the Wolf

by Blaine Lee Pardoe, finished 2025-07-29

I basically enjoyed this book, definitely more than the first two Jade Phoenix books I read earlier this year. It has a lot of the same problems, namely being pretty boring - boring characterization, boring prose, often repetitive content. I think I kind of need to make my peace with that. I’m not going to get into this stuff like I did when I was a kid, but they’re a nice way to dive into the BattleTech universe and get a sense of how things work. And I think they’re a good way to be more invested in e.g. the historical dimension of the game.

The most complex character in the book is Devlin Stone, even if his behavior doesn’t quite make sense a lot of the time. I wanted more there in terms of his psychology, rather than so much being reduced to his ego. The revelations he gives at the the end of the book, particularly with regard to his own past, point the way to what might have been an opportunity to make him more complex. Missed opportunity I guess.

Also there were a few typos which happens but there were more than there should have been.

Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Falcon Guard

by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-08-06

Much more fun than the first two books. More action, more character development, more interesting relationships. The ending felt a little rushed, where Aiden was defending the Falcon Guard retreat. Thurston started jumping forward for some reason? Really took some of the wind out of the sails of a scene that should have been dramatic.

I’ll read more of these books. I’d like to know more about Kael Pershaw and Marthe. There are so many of these novels, it’s a great source of easy reading.

Patternmaster

by Octavia Butler, finished 2025-08-12

Another book club book, this one selected by Carlos cause he wanted to read something other than a book by an “old white man.” Pretty bad book. Read like young adult fiction - explaining to the reader how they ought to interpret the event described. Poor characterization, incoherent events. What can you do?

Vasko Popa: Selected Poems

by Vasko Popa, trans. Charles Simic, finished 2025-09-01

Nice to have more Popa to read. Got this book on sale from the NYRB. Sad that Simic is dead, not least because he’ll never translate all of Popa’s writing. I do prefer the Pennington though. Oddly, Simic’s introduction does not mention her work. The book is dedicated to Morton Marcus, whose translation of Popa I realize I own.

Fidelity

by Mary Oliver, finished 2025-09-06

On the one hand, I greatly admire these poems for their simplicity. On the other, they often feel like poems for children or worse, Instagram. They’re a little corny and a little touching. Not bad on the whole.

The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin, finished 2025-09-19

I read The Left Hand of Darkness twice, the second time to see if it would be as borking as I remembered. Nevertheless I loved this book. It waas a little boring, without much action for the majority. But the characters were great - Shevek and Takver’s relationship in particular - and Le Guin’s descriptions were immersive and pleasurable. The desert planet of Anarres particularly, was made to seem a place worth visiting.

As for the politics, the author takes some shortcuts. While there is a lot of discussion of ideology, there isn’t much in the way of actual politics. Things simply happen, as though spontaneously. A real shortcoming for a book that takes as its interest, at least in part, the impact of the political on the individual.

Redemption Rites

by Jason Schmetzer, finished 2025-10-14

Another BattleTech book, set just after Hour of the Wolf and following Wolf’s Dragoons in the aftermath of the ilClan trial. A little boring like all these BattleTech books I’ve been reading. It felt perfunctory, like they had to write it, despite the characters being mostly uninteresting and written with what feels like a lack of enthusiasm.

I do wish Star Colonel Othar was explored more. Disappointment and failure are interesting themes in the context of war and leadership. He seems a good leader - sometimes being good is not enough. This lesson was hardly explired but is ripe for development.

Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward, finished 2025-10-30

Another book club book. Really disliked this one. As I’ve been joking, it averages more than one simile a page, but it’s no joke: that’s probably an underestimation. The metaphorical language doesn’t really contribute to the book, and interferes with some descriptions that otherwise be interesting.

Generally, the book is more than forgiving of the abysmal behavior of its characters. They embody some terrible stereotypes of poor black people. And their behavior, particularly Skeet’s, seems inhuman at times. Rather than exploring evil acts with compassion, this book doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with dogfighting and theft.

The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov, finished 2025-12-16

I read this for the book club: my second time reading it. What a special book it is! There are so many themes to pull together, it’s a hard book to understand. How do we understand, for example, how the book thinks about truth? At the end, the “true” story of the devil’s visit to Moscow is replaced with the police’s version. At the same tie, “manuscripts don’t burn.” So what are we to make of truth? Likewise, what is the truth of the master’s account of Pontius Pilate? It is more believable than the Gospels, and more human. A really hard book to understand.

Moby Dick

by Herman Melville, finished 2025-12-29

This book took me all year to read. I really enjoyed it, especially for the prose, but I got in the habit of only reading a chapter here or there with breaks in between. This past week or so, I read the final 100 pages. Without the distraction of other reading obligations it went quick.

I thought the ending was quite sudden. Three shortish chapters. Each making it increasingly obvious where things are going. Brief epilogue. The end reminds me of how I felt at the end of V. Maybe it even alludes to Moby Dick, hard to remember enough detail to figure it out.

2025 - My Year in Writing

I set a goal for myself, at the beginning of the year, of writing two entries in my writing diary per week over 2025, so 104 entries. At the moment, the count stands at 82. I didn’t quite make it, but this year was still one of my most productive, and I had a lot of fun with my writing, especially with my poetry. This post will discuss how I keep track of my writing, followed by reflections on my output for the year.

I use Obsidian for all of my note taking and drafting. For my writing diary, I have a directory, writing/diary, divided into directories by year. For each year, I include a summary.md file, which I write code in using dataview.js, a plugin for Obsidian that allows you to programmatically access the document API Obsidian uses. I take advantage of Obsidian’s YAML frontmatter support to put all sorts of data into my diary entries:

By default I parse my titles, which are in the format YYYY-MM-DD title for easy sorting alphabetically, to figure out the day of the entry. If there is a sessions list attribute in a file’s frontmatter, that is used instead, taking advantage of moment which Obsidian itself seems to depend on. I then aggregate entries by date and category, e.g. give me all files marked with form: sonnet and sort them by date, then title. dataview.js thinks in terms of queries, even if you’re not using it’s SQL-like syntax. Makes a lot of sense to me.

I also put together this year a simple chart showing progress throughout the year.

Integrating dataview with a chart layout plugin made this quite easy. As you can see, I was pretty inconsistent, at least after February. I had a period of high productivity starting at the end of July and running through August. During that period I wrote a few short chapters of a novel set in the BattleTech universe. I’d still like to continue with that, but I think I’d better write a short story set in the same universe first. I read a handful of BattleTech books this year, and while I mostly find them boring, I think I could do something fun with all the giant robots and so on. There was fairly little poetry being written during this time, which makes it even more anomalous seeing how strongly my output tended toward poetry over the year.

My interest in sonnets continued this year, but less strongly than last year. I wrote 26 haiku, a small handful of sonnets, including a pair of sonnets called On Grossbeerenstrasse, and a bunch of other miscellany. In all I wrote about 22000 words this year. Doesn’t feel like enough, and a little behind last year, but nevertheless a good year for me. Next year, I will likely keep the target of 104 entries in my diary, and add a word count of 30k words. Seems achievable.

Writing is a tough and lonely activity. You get very little encouragement, and it’s hard to find readers. Still, the chance of reaching someone, communicating something beyond what can be communicated in, say, conversation, is really exciting to me. I’m looking forward to another year of scribbling.

Two Sonnets

Insect Population Decline

Let’s clear the air; silent nights and clean windshields  
Evenings without citronella candles burning  
And hear I sit, yearning  
For an evening full of life

As the bug zapper zips and pizzes  
And the whiskey in my brain fizzes  
and pops. My missus calls me inside  
and the night comes to a close

All across the world we can feel things settling  
Into silence  
A quiet interrupted only by the humming  
Of internal combustion engines

Soon there will be dead earth
Beneath my feet; dead sky above

Riverside, 2008

In gathering darkness I sit, and wait for the night
Sip on a joint as the sunlight fails
The bench and the trees lit by the streetlight
I watch the park and the sky as it pales

Then turns darker, with the sun behind the earth
Night arrives and the street quiets down
Traffic clears out, the night gives birth
To silence, and stillness is its crown

I finish the joint and my body shivers
In the late fall night, less from cold than from premonition:
Something lives in the night beyond the park and the river's
Slow approach to its manumission

In the open ocean. Something waits for me in the gloom
I cough, spit on the ground, return to my room

Return to Hitherland

I’m preparing for the eighth session of my second campaign set in Hitherland, a setting I started working on immediately after getting interested in the OSR in 2020. Things have been going quite well from my end, and I’ve been enjoying both the prep and the play. There have been two character deaths and we just got our first second level character, a thief named Vich. An unnamed torchbearer has also died.

We’re still working on our second dungeon, which is at least intended to be quite large. Right now they are only about halfway through the first quadrant of the first floor. Downtime activities have been pretty substantial, but most of our time has been spent in the dungeons. Travel back and forth has been dramatic with many random encounters, but these are few in comparison to the density of stuff underground. I aim to talk about my experience building the first dungeon we played in in this post.

The Church of St. Éla, the Dreamer is located in hex 1105 in the East Town district of the fallen city of Inverness. It cuts a dramatic profile, with the sanctuary built extending from a hill and the offices and living quarters of several servants of the cult living deeper, in stone-hewn halls. It also holds a secret: a demon-minotaur slave ran amok during the chaos of the coming of the forest, killing every human it could lay its hands on. It is still deep within the church, dragging heavy chains behind it as it wanders without hunger or thirst.

Setup

We are playing online on Owlbear Rodeo. For the first session, I gave my players two characters each, a torchbearer, a porter, and a written hook:

The Church of St. Éla is the only authority that remains in the last human stronghold in the ruins of Inverness. They have contracted you to venture into the forest-overrun city to a chapel built into the side of a hill, there to recover a cache of magic items. The instructions from the robe-bearer were as follows: In the office of the abbot is a passage beyond the walls of the chapel, which will take you to a place where demons once dwelled. There you will find a coffer marked with the sign of Éla. You are to return this to us. In return for this act of devotion, the Church is prepared to give you 1000 gold pieces and it’s thanks. Go with the blessings of the saints.

The coffer contains rods that deal automatic damage to minotaurs, causing them great pain. The minotaurs, of which there were many hidden away in church holdings throughout Inverness, are in fact totally evil demons. They were used to power magical devices - great wheels of pain as in Conan - which in turn provided magical energies to the civil authorities of the city.

With all that explanation out of the way, and with my notes linked here, it’s time to describe the process I used for creating dungeons.

Creating the Dungeon

To start with, I use a ton of random tables. The sheer amount of coming up with cool ideas for a dungeon I find to be a lot of work, and offloading some of that work to tables saves me time and energy. I also enjoy the constraints this enforces on me: I might disregard what the rolls say, but they often encourage me to think outside the box. I usually start with an idea of dungeon level and size, as well as some thoughts about what’s generally going on, then I often generate a map using donjon or some other tool. I very often redraw these dungeons in Dungeon Scrawl. I produce both player facing, and DM facing maps.

Once I have a map, its time to key. This is the most time-consuming part of creating a dungeon for me and can be fun or exhausting depending on how easily the ideas come to me. For this dungeon, I used the stocking chart from the 1E DMG. This went alright, but gave me too many empty rooms, and moving forward I’ve adjusted the table to have more monsters and treasure. I roll once on my stocking table to get a sense of what sort of interactivity might be in the room, and I roll once on Courtney Campbell’s table from his empty rooms PDF (now included in a really great book) to get a sense of what the room is or might have been. This second roll is discarded more often than that on the stocking table - sometimes I just don’t need another oubliette.

Once I have a general breakdown of what’s in the dungeon - how many empty rooms, monsters, traps, and so on - I start brainstorming, broadly following advice from this video. I mark each idea with the kind of room it might fit into and start placing things.

At this point we have usually something like half of the rooms populated. Now I start looking at the map and what’s placed. I use what’s already in place to inspire more ideas: should this whole region be populated by the monsters I have from this room? The intention is that by this point there should be enough to bootstrap finishing the dungeon or dungeon floor. I then go through and fill in things like HP per monster, NPC stats and personalities, and other mechanical stuff like treasure.

Treasure I usually generate on the first pass. At the moment I’m working on the assumption of something like 100GP per level per room, not including magic items. If there’s too much or too little treasure in aggregate, I adjust, but I also don’t particularly mind it being pretty out of wack as long as I’m not handing out 100K GP on the first level. I use Courtney Campbell’s excellent treasure PDF to help think about this, favoring handing out bulky art objects and such instead of just coins.

A last crossing of t’s is determining how the doors and walls of the dungeon work and look. Now the dungeon is basically done. Obviously I fiddle with it, write some nice read-aloud text maybe. But it’s more than usable at this point and my time is probably better served doing something else.

1105 - Church of St.Éla, the Dreamer

Notes

33 Rooms about 100 GP per room = 3300 GP Located in a church Simple enough, a church of St. Éla Let’s make it inhabited by gnolls

Area 1: 5 rooms, 1 large - church

Transition: short corridor, 20 ft wide, excavated, well-finished

Area 2: 15 rooms, 3 large - clergy area

Area 3: 10 rooms, 3 large

The item could be a rod that hurts minotaurs, maybe even causes them to flee

Potential Hooks

• Alchemist’s laboratory
  • Probably should be a teleportation chamber in there
• flesh zombies
  • The back of the dungeon should be overrun, fleshy nodes everywhere
• Minotaur area
  • This needs more interactivity, especially for the event where they kill the minotaur

Monsters

Stat Blocks

Chosen of Roth

AC 13, HD 4 (18hp), Att 2 x claws 1d6 To Hit +2, MV 90’ (30’), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (2), ML 9, AL Chaotic, XP 75

Flesh Zombie

AC 11, HD 2 (9hp), Att 1 × weapon (1d8 or by weapon), THAC0 18 [+1], MV 60’ (20’), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (1), ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 20, NA 1d6 (4d6), TT None

Gnoll

AC 13, HD 2 (9hp), Att 1 × weapon (2d4 or by weapon + 1), To Hit +1, MV 90’ (30’), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (2), ML 8, AL Chaotic, XP 20

Gnoll Leader

AC 13, HD 3 (13hp), Att 1 x weapon, To Hit +2, MV 90’ (30’), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (3), ML 9, AL Chaotic, XP 35

Chained Minotaur

AC 13, HD 6 (27hp), Att 1 × gore (1d6), 1 × bite (1d6)] or 1 × weapon (1d6 +2 or by weapon + 2), To Hit +5, MV 30’ (10’), SV D10 W11 P12 B13 S14 (6), ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 275, NA 1d6 (1d8), TT C

By Room

Room	Monsters	Total Hit Dice	Total Hit Points
3	2 Gnolls	4	17
6	3 Gnolls	6	33
7	Chosen of Roth	4	24
13	1 Gnoll	2	7
16	Gnoll Leader and 2 Gnolls	7	32
18	3 Flesh Zombies	3	11
20	1 Flesh Zombie	1	8
21	Minotaur	6	31
31	1 Gnoll	2	6

Treasure

Room	Contents	Total Value (GP)
3	Onyx-buttoned vest	280GP
6	8 Gems	1400GP
7	81GP and scroll with 2 level 3 spells	81GP
16	4k EP and 1 Quartz Gem	2010GP
23	Coffer of Rods	0 GP
31	3 potions	0 GP
Total		3771 GP = ~ 3300GP

Random Encounters

Main Area

d4	Encounter
1	2 gnolls chased by 6 flesh zombies
2	1 Chosen of Roth eating the corpse of a flesh zombie
3	1 Gnoll Leader and 4 gnolls, carrying an urn containing 1k EP toward the exit from room 17
4	The relics of a saint, chained to the ceiling, fall to the ground. 2-in-6 chance of hitting a random character, save vs breath to avoid 1d4 damage. The skull can be found mostly intact, with gold medallions melted into its eyes. The medallions are worth 25GP each but if presented to a person affiliated with the church while still attached to bone it will cause offense (having obviously been looted from the relics of a saint).

Rumors

d??	Rumor
1	The Church’s wealth for the past centuries apparently comes from their provision of the magical energies that powered Inverness. The source of which must have been the worship of their dwindling flock.
2	Dogfolk are all over the ruins of the city. They’ve been killing their way throughout, even fighting amongst themselves
3	Even before humans came, there had once been civilization on the peninsula. In the heyday of the city, earlier ruins regularly turned up.
??

Rooms

Room Number	Summary	Interactive?	Needs Work?
1	Entrance hall, empty	False
2	Robing room, empty	False
3	sanctuary, 2 gnolls and treasure	True
4	Hidden one way door here, can’t open but useful info	True
5	Hall, empty	False	Could use some better description
6	Well room, 3 gnolls and treasure	True	Where is the treasure? Anything else interesting?
7	Oubliette, chosen of Roth and trapped treasure	True
8	Bestiary, empty	False	Yes, something going on here, not empty
9	Zoo, empty	False
10	Bedroom, empty	False
11	Bedroom, empty	False
12	Bedroom, empty
13	Bedroom, sleeping gnoll	True
14	Office, other side of teleporter to Minotaur land	True	What is the form of the teleporter, would be nice if there were a puzzle
15	Saints chained to ceiling, flowering moss hangs in strands from the skeletons	False
16	Kennel, gnoll leader and gnolls and treasure	True	Set dressing
17	Antechamber, empty	False	Set dressing
18	Flesh zombies	True	Could use new set dressing, room type, flesh room
19	Study, hidden room with secret book/treasure	True	Flesh room
20	Pool, bathing room, zombie	True	flesh room,
21	Minotaur starting location	True
22	Well Room	False
23	Treasure in a bathroom, but not yet defined	True	Decide on treasure and room theme, 100 PP
24	Possible location of coffer	True
25	Empty cell	False
26	Other side of teleporter	True	work on set dressing for this room
27	Empty, possibly where minotaurs were kept	False
28	Wheel of pain	True	read aloud text?
29	empty office	False	think of way to make this interesting
30	empty barracks	False
31	Gnoll and two potions	True	Lab area
32	Ruined laboratory	False	Lab area
33	Teleportation chamber	True	Lab area
34	empty hallway	False
35	Exit from minotaur domain	True	figure out how one-way door works

Room 1

Empty Entrance Hall

Windows line the upper part of the walls of this room. At the far end are a set of curtains.

Room 2

Empty Square 30x30 Robing room or something?

Similar to the last room, windows line the upper part of the walls of this room. Pegs, some still holding what look like ragged robes, are placed at regular intervals along the walls below the windows.

Room 3

Monster and Treasure 2 Gnolls: 1 battle axe - 6 hp 1 spear - 11 hp

10 hp

600 SP, 20 GP, 4 gems Vest, 4 onyx for buttons, made from soft fabric. Each gem worth 50GP, vest in total worth 280GP

Worship Room

Two dog-headed creatures, covered in what looks like blood, stand on a dais hacking at a wooden statue, now totally unrecognizable.

Room 4

Empty

Antechamber

You step down into shallow water. 1/2 inch of standing water here.

Room 5

Empty

Office

Transition to stone construction. There’s the tattered remains of a rug, and some chairs lining the wall.

Room 6

Special

Well Room

Let’s treat this as a pool as per ADnD DMG Appendix A Table VIIIA Monster, Treasure, and Pool

3 Gnolls, 10,11,12 hp two handed sword, short bow, short bow, both with only 4 arrows Occupied with drinking water 8 gems (1400GP total): * 500GP * 50GP * 50GP * 100GP * 500GP * 100GP * 50GP * 50GP

Room 7

Monster and Treasure

Oubliette

Chosen of Roth, 24 hp 81GP Scroll with 2 third level spells, Fly and Infravision Both contained in a chest (650 coin capacity) hidden under bones Chest is trapped. Opening the chest meets with some resistance, forcing it open tears open a wax-sealed paper bag of poison gas. Save vs breath to run, save vs poison or die, success is 1d6 damage. Cut the leather attaching the bag to either top or bottom to disarm, 1d4 turns to dissipate Listening at door - crunching of bones

Room 8

Empty

Bestiary

Room 9

Empty

Zoo

Room 10

Empty

Bedroom

Room 11

Empty

Bedroom

Room 12

Empty

Bedroom

Room 13

Monster Only

Bedroom

1 gnoll, spear, 7 hp

Room 14

Empty

Office

This was clearly once an office, but it has been ransacked. There is an overturned desk, objects that once lined the walls are pushed into the center of the room. Against the far wall is an unblemished mirror.

Room 15

Special, plants, wondrous or strange appearance

Oubliette

Moss hangs in strands from rafters lining the ceiling of this room. The moss has bright yellow flowers growing from it. Chained to the rafters are skeletons - the remains of forgotten saints. It is difficult to see across the room

Room 16

Monster and Treasure Kennel

Gnoll Leader, 17 hp, spear Gnoll 1, 7 hp, morning star Gnoll 2, 8 hp, battle axe

4k EP, 1 gem contained in urns 4 urns each containing 1k EP, 4th one containing a quartz gem worth 10 GP

Room 17

Empty

Antechamber

Room 18

Monster Only

Zoo

3 Flesh Zombies, 4, 3, 9 hp

Room 19

Trick/Trap

Study

Decaying books line the East and West walls of this room, the far wall is blank. A small crystal chandelier has fallen from the ceiling and lies broken on the floor.

Secret Door, 2k CP treasure. Let’s make it a book sitting on a pedestal describing a secret of the cult of Éla. Valuable artifact for the church

A cult of Éla attempting to popularize knowledge of the Church’s secrets will pay 5x for such texts The book describes Éla’s dreams as regarding her dead friends. “Solemn, her Dreams.”

Room 20

Monster and Treasure

Pool/Water Room

Flesh Zombie, 8hp, no treasure

Well in South-east corner

Room 21

Monster Only

Library

Minotaur? 31hp?, battle axe, 1d8+2 dmg, weighed down by chains so it moves MV 90’ (30’)

Room 22

Empty

Well Room

Water was drawn from a cistern here that was fed by a spring. The wall of the cistern has been broken, flooding the rest of the area.

Room 23

Treasure Only

Bathroom 100PP?

Room 24

Empty

Foyer 2k SP, probably the coffer, in the hands of a dead man who has one of the rods in his hands

Room 25

Empty

Cell

Room 26

Special

Pool/Water Room Other side of the teleporter Ruined skeletons of priests

Room 27

Empty

Gymnasium

Fragments of bone and decaying clothing are littered around the floor here. Some weapons can be found sitting in the shallow water but all seem to be in an advanced state of rust

Room 28

Special

Solar

A device previously powered by minotaurs that generates magical energy. Used to provide the substantial magical energies that ran Inverness?? It would make sense but not for the church who have been losing influence? Maybe they did it anyway for the money. And it was the payment from the city to the church for this energy that kept the church afloat and wealthy even as its congregation shrank, nevertheless maintaining significant political influence.

Wheel of pain

A large pillar of stone sits in the center of this room, with a wooden wheel around it at about head height. Spokes come out from the wheel.

Room 29

Empty

Office

Rotten furniture collapses into the water here.

Describe bookshelves and books as having a lot of water damage

Room 30

Empty

Barracks

Room 31

This room is clearly hewn from dirt and rock, burrowed through the raw earth

Monster and Treasure

Arena

1 Gnoll, spear, 6 hp wooden box with three potions * growth - semi-opaque, watery appearance. greasy smell * treasure finding - opalescent, peach colored, herbal smell * clairvoyance - cloudy, opalescent, muted brown color, fishy/rotten meat smell

The gnoll in this room is likely to hear any combat in room 3.

Room 32

This room has quite low ceilings (6 ft), and is composed of perfectly hewn, flagstones of pitch black rock. Empty

Laboratory

Room 33

This room has quite low ceilings (6 ft), and is composed of perfectly hewn, flagstones of pitch black rock.

The walls of the room describe a ritual in magical script etched into the stone to activate the portal. Studying takes 1d4 days.

Empty

Teleportation chamber, roll for this

Room 34

Hallway Empty

Room 35

Stagnant water

exit from minotaur domain, one way door activated by pushing, takes variable number of rounds? strength check, stuck

Three Poems from 2024

Dream of Cold Water

Every year there is an awakening into life
Every day there is an awakening into life
Every moment there is an awakening into life
If I awaken into life
With breathing or beloved sight
By the way a rain drop surprises me or
When the light falls on my face in the morning

In the fall of 2020 I was in Vermont, hiking
With friends in the woods for a number of days
Swimming with friends for a couple of days
In a cold, clear, little pond
Trees lined the water there, there were trees reflected on it
And as the cold shook me I saw
Myself reflected too

As if to remind me
As if I needed to be reminded
With pond water sticking my hair to me and dripping from me
And tasting good as i sucked on my mustache
And feeling good and cold

So when I, in the morning, dream
I dream of cold water
And the sunlight upon it
And my reflection there, among the light

Waxing Love

My love for you is like the moon
First waxing, then waning, but coming back 'round
Sometimes hidden in the heat of the sun, but soon
To dominate again. Passing without sound
Through the sky of our lives, over and over
Seeming at times, like a scorned lover
Kept alive by a light in the bedroom
Or a glance snuck while pushing a broom
But in the moment of that glance, reigniting
As when I see you lying besides me in the morning
Or even just by the memory of the sun's rising
And hardly a moment goes by without something
Bringing to my mind my love for you
Calling me back to where I can be with you

Inman to Alewife

After a run, I lay on the roof
Covered in sweat, with sweat on my face
And tears in my eyes, looking for proof
In the sky, in the clouds, some lingering trace
Of your passage through my wandering life.
It was a long one today, tracing a disoriented line
Past Inman, up Mass, all the way around Alewife,
And the pain and fatigue did a fine
Job of distracting my mind from thoughts of you
But now, on the roof, with my back plastered to the tar
I have nothing left to distract me, save the view
Of open air and clouds. I ran so far
That I thought I had left you behind.
Sunblind, I still see you in the light.

2024-12-29 2024 Book Log

I’ve kept a log where I write about some of the books I read since some time in 2017. I present here my entries in my book log for 2024, unedited, and with some additional errors from transcription.

1. Stranger Shores Literary Essays 1986-1999
2. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
3. Zama
4. The Quest for Roots The Poetry of Vasko Popa
5. Shadow of Heroes
6. The Nick Adams Stories
7. My Brilliant Friend
8. Midaq Alley

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999

by J.M. Coetzee, finished 2024-02-05

I really enjoyed these essays, and found them inspirational, though I don’t think I’d have found them as interesting had they not been written by Coetzee. He’s really well read, and it makes me want to read more. Partly, I found his writing intimidating. I’d like to write this sort of thing but it feels like I’de have to read so much…

One thing I found interesting is that, although there are a number of essays on white South African authors, there are none on black South African authors. I was initially confused by this, but I think there’s a good reason. I believe Coetzee is working out in this writing what it means to be a white African, and, particularly, a white African writer. I don’t know what conclusion he comes to, if any. He’s very critical of these writers, and I wonder how he feels about his own writing.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Peter Handke, finished 2024-02-12

Read this in two days, it’s quite short - only 70 pages. The book is a biography of Handke’s mother who killed herself in her 50’s. I’m not sure if this is framed as autofiction or memoir. I guess I’m not sure what the difference is.

I’ve never read any Handke before, and this book doesn’t reccommend him. He does this thing that feels like apologia for his intentions. I’m not sure why he does this exactly, but it drives me crazy

Zama

by Antonio Benedetto, finished 2024-06-21

This was a book Coetzee reviewed in one of the two collections of literary essays I read earlier this year. I didn’t really enjoy this book, but I powered through. It was quite short but still took me a few weeks to finish.

The book follows the inner life of the titular Zama as he tries to get a nut off. In the end, he volunteers to help capture a bandit who tortures Zma before the novels end.

The novel was too navel-gazing for my taste, and the reactions and behavior of the characteres was too dreamlike. The whole thing was very strange. I don;t think I get the point of this book, but it definitely has a vice similar to L’Étranger.

The Quest for Roots: The Poetry of Vasko Popa

by Anita Lekić, finished 2024-07-10

Took me a while to finish this, but I’m glad I did. My copy of Popa’s Complete Works is still in Berlin so I couldn’t reference it, but a lot of the quoted poems were familiar to me. My feelings about the author’s analysis of Popa’s early work is mixed: on the one hand we’re in agreement on the subject being the confrontation between the inner self and a hostile external world. On the other, Lekić fails to understand the driving irony of Far WIthin Us and the implied failure to conquer that hostile external world. In my opinion this gives added depth to Popa’s relationship with the violence around him.

I was happy for some of the historical context given for his middle works which are somewhat mysterious to me. Still Lekić’s analysis is a little suspect.

Shadow of Heroes

by Robert Ardrey, finished 2024-09-03

This play is about László Raijk and Janos Kadar, the Hungarian communists, and about Julia Rajk, László’s wife. It is also about the failed social democratic revolution of 1956. I read this after having seen it mentioned on Wikipedia while I was riding the bus up to Ithaca to hang with Scott and boys on the Finger Lakes. I spent a bunch of time that ride reading about Kadar and the history of Communist Hungary.

It’s all pretty sad. At the end of the play Julia is back in prison, and was still there when the play was produced in 1958. The play really tells the story of man’s imperfection, our inability to govern justly or to act on our own principles.

I thought it did a good job of humanizing the history it portrays. The voice of the author thing was a little weird but what can you do?

The Nick Adams Stories

by Ernest Hemingway, finished 2024-09-10

I’d read a bunch of these before, probably in Mom’s book of his collected stories. But there were new ones like “The Last Good Place” which I loved. Reading these stories brought me back to when I was seventeen, reading those other stories. The wistfulness and meaning, and how much I love Hemingway’s prose.

Some of the Nick Adams stories are about writing and I’d like to take something away from them but I don’t know what. Confidence, maybe, which I never really had. I’m 34 - Nick is 38 in the last story - twice again as old as I was when I started really reading and thinking about life and the world. What really has changed?

My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante, finished ~2024-09-25

I really enjoyed this book, not least because I’m reading it with Lauren and Manan. I think the psychology of the involved characters was so real and well-communicated, and the very mundane drama of the story nevertheless managed to maintain interest. Really well-executed story.

One aspect I found interesting was the spectre of the second world war. Like so much in the book, it is consigned to an ambiguous time before the narrative, but its impact is seen now and then.

Lauren: “There’s a lot of grudges, people still remember whose side everybody took, what they did, even though they don’t seem to talk about it.”

Midaq Alley

by Naguib Mahfouz, finished 2024-11-25

Mostly a boring book so it took me a while to finish. Coetzee wrote about Mahfouz in one of those books of his I read earlier this year is what inspired me to pick this up. Having read this just after My Brilliant friend - another book in which not much happens - I found myself comparing them quite a but much to this novel’s disadvantage. Whereas Ferrante made me invested in Lila and Lènu’s lives so that the mundane drama is more immediate and gripping, I didn’t care at all for any of the characters in this novel, not least because there are many of them and none takes center stage.