bunn

Walked along the coast path from Tenby to Waterwynch Bay : up past the hotels and grand apartment blocks of The Croft, a name that echoes a farm that must have vanished over two hundred years ago from the magnificent Victorianness of the current road, which quickly dwindles to a narrow footpath, much beset with storm-fallen foliage.

After twenty minutes or so I reached a path that led to the sea, and randomly followed it to Waterwynch Bay, a beautiful stretch of yellow sand overlooked by a single monstrous holiday home.

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Last week, we were roleplaying in an actual physical group for the first time since 2019! Which was very nice, though slightly overwhelming as well because PEOPLE. :-D

We started a new D&D 5e campaign, which involved a lot of puzzles and mysteries, which I'm not going to even try to write down, because we had a PIN BOARD for clues, complete with pins and notes and mad string:

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The Milkman seems to have given up on delivering me the nice malty seedy bread I like, though he still brought dull white sliced for Pp. Perhaps nice malty wholemeal is not considered essential. I responded by making my own bread, which is white, but much nicer than the white sliced. It was delicious. I must get my act together and make some more.

Pp has painted a rather excellent unwinged dragon miniature, and I entertained myself photographing it in various possible dragon-habitats:

This is actually a picture from yesterday, but depicts the status quo for the week: Rosie wrapped in her blanket enjoying the sunshine. Today, alas, it is colder and once our officially-sanctioned one walk a day was done, Rosie decided to enjoy the sunbeams from the sofa.

It's taken me a while to complete this: arrival of puppy proved timeconsuming.

After part 1...

Pan out from the quest for the Numenorean Prince Irimon to a wider scale:the great unknown lands in the East of Middle-earth, for there are many forces moving as Sauron's plans begin to fruit and grow, in Raku, across the great grassy Plains of Alcar, in the great Harad desert and as far south as Ibavi. We moved to a Huge Map, where we could see the many forces moving.

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But the people in them come and go, and since this year was the fifth and final year of Akallabutts the Roleplaying Game, our part has now ended at last, and we have now fallen out of the tale. So, with luck, this account of our journeyings should be shorter than the previous years... (she says, hope triumphing over experience again. Though, it better had be because it's taken me ages to write it on this laptop because the screen keeps turning itself off. Possibly this is a Hint. If so, I'm not taking it.

All the photos below are clickable to expand, but I'm putting them in small because there are a shedload of them. )

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That will do for now. There is more! I knew this wouldn't be as short as I had hoped...

33 degrees C today in Cornwall, and that is WAY too hot. We are not accustomed!

I refused to walk Rosie this morning, because it was already baking when I woke up. I'll take her for a late evening walk instead. By a stream, probably.

Did try doing a bit of outdoor painting on walk on Sunday, but had to give up because Rosie got bored and also there was a horsefly. I do hate horseflies!

Tried to finish it off later, but I didn't have a camera with me and so had to work from memory: I don't think I got the light quite right. Still, it's all practice.

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The Dancers
I don’t know who they are, or whether the dance is about to tip over into battle. Huge thank to Marcus Ranum of ranum.com for stock photos I referenced for the poses.

We were doing Dancing & Motion in art class this week. Colin the Art did a painting of the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss (the blue ribbon one) but I had forgotten what the subject was so didn't have a chance to pick reference material specifically for this, and I didn't want to just do a copy of his, so I decided that I would do my own thing from a couple of reference images that I had previously saved. I'm pleased by the sense of movement that comes from the streaks, I shall use this technique again! This is the sort of movement I wanted to be able to paint when I started the classes, and now I can!

( Three more assorted arts here... )

So, having saved Kibil-Tarag and won the victory for the Stiff-beard Dwarves, we spent some time asking around after Fankil, Demon of the North Wind and one of Morgoth's greatest servants, who was also, we think, responsible for the terrible White Blight, which was bringing famine to the Southern Lands, who we had been given the task of trying to defeat at the Council of Celeborn.

An ancient Stiff-beard king, King Horn son of Thulin had come up with a way to bind Fankil for several Ages of the world using an ancient Dwarven Spell. How exactly it worked, we didn't know, but there were some details. If they were right, we were hopeful we might get it to work with a bit of tinkering.

So, we set off by boat to the Whale's Graveyard, where somehow or other we had worked out we needed to contact Uin, King of Whales, for information. Possibly Angruin was absent at this point, or possibly he was failing to pay attention because Tinglin Redcap was playing the flute or something.

Anyway, we got there, after a brief encounter with menacing Nabkrok tribesmen in boats, and Sirithglor summoned Uin, who came... up.

He was a whale of considerable size.

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And that was the end of the adventure for this year.

Previously...
We marched into the fort of Bosvik, a well-defended spot occupying the only pass through the mountains to the Stiff-beard capital. There were two sets of gates, and all traffic travelling through the pass must travel through both of them.
Here we are, just arrived at Bosvik. You can just see the southern gate in the background, and the Dwarves who have come with us lined up in rows behind the tables in the main courtyard. The Northern gate is defended by the square tower and portcullis.

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.... and I still have a great deal more but this will have to do for now!

Previously...
So, after the Council of Celeborn, we set off to Mordor to find out if anything was going on there. Erestor, who had been at the council as Elrond's representative, came with us to see the Tower Kings. That's him in the brown robes next to the very spotty horse.

The Tower Kings are local kings who were given impressive Numenorean towers along the borders of Mordor, to live in after the War of the Elves with Sauron, by Ciryatur. This was so they could keep an eye on Mordor in cause Sauron came back to visit his own Tower, Barad Dur.

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AND THERE IS MORE...

Previously... in our now 4-year roleplaying campaign set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, we were sent into the Mysterious East by King Gil-galad to try to find Sauron. There we met a lot of different Elves and Men, set up a new Land populated by Elves, Men, Bear-men, and basically anyone not too evil to be invited, and in our last adventure, we managed to capture one of the Nine Rings, and were faced with what on earth to do with it next.

So, last week, we re-convened. In the real world, a year and a half had passed, but in Middle-earth, fifteen years had flown by. Also, we had some changes of player characters, so the Dramatis Personae for this week were as follows:

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So, we convened after 15 years at Edhellond, at the Council of Celeborn, convened to discuss our findings and work out what to do with the Ninth Ring. There were a lot of VIPs there apart from us and I ran out of energy drawing everyone, but here from left to right are Hidek, Thorofin, Glorfindel, Celeborn, Galadriel, Thrandin and Sirithglor.

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Full length below cut:
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In 2012 we went on an Adventure from the Keep on the Borderlands, to the Land of Basic D&D from 1981. Clearly it was a traumatic experience, because although I think all the characters survived, we did not return to the Keep on the Borderlands until this year, when at least part of the party reconvened with some extra characters to clear out goblins and kobolds from the Caves of Chaos. I can report we were quite successful and the Caves of Chaos now have considerably fewer zombies, skellingtons and weird cultists, and coincidentally, also quite a lot fewer jewels and gold pieces.

Photo above: the Party (level one) about to bravely leave The Road and set off towards the Caves.

Photo below: The Party entering the Caves to tackle some Goblins.
( with many hastily-drawn scribbles. PRACTICE. )

Phonecall from Pp: the convention he has taken his Shop on the Borderlands to is going well.

And by the way, that collection of old roleplaying games he mentioned he might be buying there? The one where he wasn't sure if he'd take my car, because he might not buy it?

The one he said was in 8 boxes?

Well, he bought it. And it's in 15 boxes, and would I mind going and clearing out the guest bedroom so the guest 15 boxes have somewhere to stay...?

.... I have just moved all the things out of the guest bedroom. Fortunately, my shoulder seems entirely recovered now, so providing hospitality for unexpected boxes in this way should not be a huge problem.

Continued from...

We headed up towards the Forge of Mount Tinang at last, pursuing Finculin, Ren the Unclean, and possibly even Sauron himself. The Numenorean siege outside had so far distracted the orcs of the mountain, but now we came under attack. We were climbing up the long winding stairs that went round and round the outside of a huge wide shaft, when we came under attack. Goblins had come out onto a walkway high above us and were firing arrows down at us.

One of the arrows hit Thrandin, our elderly Diplomatic Dwarf. He was knocked off the steps into the shaft, and plummeted down out of sight! Angruin ran back down the steps after him, and bless him, Prince Irimon did the same. Everyone else went up, after the goblins. But not all of them continued to go up. As we ran down, a body fell past us. Thingolodh had fallen too. Other bodies fell after him, like a rain of goblins!
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And here is the last painting of the campaign.

* I wish we'd thought of a clever way to do this, but I fear what actually happened was that we all got hungry and decided to just vote the wraiths banished so we could stop for dinner.

We continued through the winding mine-tunnels from Mount Maal towards Mount Tinang, home of Ren the Unclean, and possibly home of worse things too. Mount Tinang was not the most pleasant of places. It was hot and damp and smelly.

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We hauled him out of the well with a rope, set his legs, and popped him in the library to look after the prisoner, while we went off to the forge!

So we had won the help of a mighty Numenorean army, and the time had come to attack Angren!

Here are the mightly forces of Prince Fealasse rallying against the mighty cliff-fortress that is the only entrance to the mountain-fenced land of Angren. We had been repeatedly told how useless, ugly and generally incompetent Fealasse was, but if he really is that useless, then he has some pretty good subordinates. Either that, or Prince Fealasse is in fact one of these secretly-very-competent people who go around looking useless until the crisis comes, when suddenly they show their true talents.

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TO BE CONTINUED.

So, there we were in the Numenorean colony of Ciryatanore.

Prince Irimon, the second in line to the Numenorean throne, looked a bit like his ancestor Elros (I'd met him, of course). He invited us to a banquet, which was excellent, and then we attended the Council of Ciryatanore. There were concerns expressed about the kingdom of Ibavi, which had suddenly decided to develop territorial ambitions and a professional army. Irimon wanted to respond to this by creating a voluntary League of Ciryatanore against them. Numenor seems to be getting a bit military in its approach to the rest of Middle-earth. Better Numenor than Sauron, I suppose.

Irimon then decided to take us to his tower where he likes to greet the sun. He has a palantir there, a huge one, one of the early Feanorian prototypes.

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So there we were, all ready to carry out a secret back-door invasion of Ren the Unclean's fortress through the Mines of Mount Maan, while the Numenorean armies kept Ren busy by pelting him with trebuchets. Which I shall detail in the Next Part.

Previously on... we went on holiday to Second Age Middle-earth. Last week was the third of our weeks of adventure in Middle Earth.

Dramatis Personae for this week:
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( Mastodons! Orcs! Whales! The River Kingdom of Ralia! And some inelegantly-slain trolls. )

TO BE CONTINUED

Here. It asks things like 'choose a statement: I hate technology | I love technology'

THAT IS AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE. I both loathe and love technology. It is the yin-yang of my life. What kind of insanely simplistic reality forces a choice like that?

Also 'It is better to : be yourself | be polite'. Well, that would depend how much of an arsehole you habitually are. If you are the kind of lovely person who is overly polite and nobody can work out whether you actually want a biscuit or a cup of tea, then for god's sake stop being so damn polite and just tell us what your biscuit choice is. We really would prefer that.

However, if like me you are the kind of person where everyone you know is already bored with your opinions and there is visible wincing when you open your mouth, sit down, shut up and work on the 'polite' thing.

I was a Neutral Good Human Ranger, which is,frankly, a very dull outcome, so I'm not posting the whole thing as I am sulking about it.

In other news, I heard a noise this morning that I did not recognise at first, a sort of slightly resonant rhythmic thud with a sort of slight crunch to it. After a moment's confused listening, I worked out that it was a thrush hitting a snail on a stone. That was once an utterly familiar, normal and domestic kind of sound, and I am somewhat shocked that things have now reached the stage where I hear woodpeckers and owls far more often than a thrush.

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Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:51 pm

Entries tagged with roleplaying

A December Day in Tenby

Dungeons Llandragons

In which there is baking of bread

War in the East of Middle-earth

The great tales never end...

OOF

A selection of Arty Stuffs

To battle on the mountain

The Siege of Bosvik

In which we simply walk into Mordor

Adventuring in the Terrible North

Prince Irimon of Ciryatanore

Easter in the Caves of Chaos

Even better than that!

' He would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen'

The Conquest of Mount Tinang

The War with Angren

No, you don't, we said. Yes, I do! he said.

On the trail of River Kings, Rings and Things

That what D&D character? quiz

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June 2025

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