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I've had almost no luck getting players to express their interest, even when I restricted their votes to "yes I want to play this" or "no I don't" (so people couldn't wishy-washy say "sounds OK" for everything). Indeed it made the options paralysis worse. So, I run what I want to run, and only...

76 We take the fragment of blessed leather from one of our magical pockets and "rub it on the palm of our left hand" [oh dear] while we recite this phrase in High Elvish: "Mibra dogi, mibra hade; Koton feernar chopis lade." We're surrounded by a soft green dweomer that causes our skin to feel...

I did this just for the Abandon Hope painting, which is the DMG to me. (He labels it as the DM's screen, but it was also used on the cover the DMG 1983 edition.)

[Back to our main timeline.] 157, redux [...] Rufyl thinks that somewhere up ahead is a “great intelligence” that already knows about us and is planning to stop us. The psuedodragon thinks it would be wise to prepare for an attack or better yet, to leave. Dalris tightens her grip on her...

Commentary: To whom are we speaking? “MY NAME IS ARIOCH, SIMPLETON!” Arioch is a fun shout-out to Michael Moorcock's Elric series. Also, Arioch accurately determines that OUR Carr Delling is a simpleton. Our mind fills with a rush of words [...] in one great flash of awareness. … “YOU HEARD...

[Alternate timeline in which we use Contact Other Plane from our traveling spellbook.] On a success (at 123) we find ourselves in a darkness so intense we are afraid to move. Our mind fills with a rush of words. “They don’t appear one by one, as if they were occurring in a sentence; instead...

Commentary: …we haven’t translated our father’s notes on the planes of existence, which are “advanced magical topics”... On a failure (at 8), we realize we don’t know enough about the other planes of existence to control the spell. What, exactly, has OUR Carr Delling been learning for the last...

On a failure (at 8), we realize we don’t know enough about the other planes of existence to control the spell. A cold sweat springs out on our forehead but we keep reading, bumbling past words and names we can barely pronounce and past concepts about Outer and Inner planes we don’t understand...

We catch a glimpse of Dalris being lifted into the air by a giant humanoid hand! (170) to attack the hand with our poisoned darts, or (188) to save our darts and instead use our enchanted quarterstaff. I will leave off this alternate timeline here because "Dalris gets grabbed by a giant hand"...

Huh. That raises an interesting question: if you somehow acquired a scroll of Enchant an Item, would the scroll obviate the material component (the item being enchanted), meaning you would enchant... nothing? I need to go back in time and ask Skip Williams. 100% factual. It's pretty bad...

Commentary: We remove the “stiff spike” from “the top pocket of our jerkin”... Thanks to WIS 3, we are foolish enough to store a very ouchy manticore quill-spike in our jerkin rather than in our belt pouch or in one of our extradimensional Deeppockets. …open our traveling spellbook to the...

[Alternate timeline in which we use Enchant an Item from our traveling spellbook.] 167 We remember the manticore “quill” we gathered and decide that now is our chance to use Enchant an Item on our already poisoned darts. We remove the “stiff spike” from “the top pocket of our jerkin” and open...

True. I guess I just don't like rolling dice more than I have to, even out of combat. :)

[Alternate timeline in which we use one of the spells from the traveling spellbook.] 61 You’re not entirely sure of the effects of the four [sic] spells in your traveling spellbook. We “fumble” inside our cloak and pull out our most precious possession: our spellbook. [What did YOU think Carr...

Right?! The possibilities are endless. Honestly an apparently perfectly invisible (despite the by-the-book 80% concealed) telepathic creature is such a perfect spy that it renders all information gathering trivial. Which is one reason why Rufyl never does any of this — precisely because it...

Commentary: A swamp that’s considered dangerous by our archmage dad must therefore be the safest route into Saven. This type of nonsensical statement is frequently trotted out in genre fiction: that the super dangerous route is also the safest. No. That is logically contradictory. The super...

157 A swamp that’s considered dangerous by our archmage dad must therefore be the safest route into Saven. So saying, we “head into the forest.” Even the ancient oaks on the western boundary of Wealwood seem to recognize the ominous quality of the adjacent marsh, which is shrouded in yellow...