I know it’s a bit late, but merry Christmas to all! I hope everyone had an excellent time with friends and family, and had plenty of good food and drink. I did intend to have this and the next part of Cooking the Cosmos posted before Christmas, but unfortunately I ran out of time, what with preparations for the shutdown period at work, and needing to travel to visit my family. Still, on the plus side, since this is now a post-Christmas update, I can say thank you to everyone for the awesome loot I received. All of my gifts were thoughtful and much appreciated, but I’d like to give special thanks to the following people for presents that were extra special to me:

• Nell, who baked me delicious white chocolate and raspberry cookies. Nell runs the food blog I Need a Feed, which can be found at http://ineedafeed.wordpress.com/, and she’s an excellent cook.
• Elena, who gave me a set of green and black d10s that will be perfect for our weekly World of Darkness game. Elena also helps keep me fit by dragging my lazy rear up Mount Ainslie every Saturday, so a big thank you for that.
• My housemate, Graham, for a Netgear wireless adapter that can actually make use of the ac protocol capabilities on my new router, as well as a couple of custom t-shirts based on Gravity Falls and Ugly Americans.
• My Parental Units, for a new queen-sized bed and mattress, as well as helping me buy a new washing machine.
• My brother, for giving me some money to buy some Pathfinder source books that I’ve had my eye on for a while now.

My new World of Darkness dice. Thanks Elena!

I’m also rather excited, because my Christmas present to myself arrived on Christmas Eve. I’ve had a copy of the Rise of the Runelords Deluxe Collectors Edition that Paizo made as part of their tenth year celebrations on preorder for some time now, and it finally arrived just in time for Christmas. For anyone unfamiliar with Paizo, they used to publish the official D&D magazines, Dragon (aimed at all players) and Dungeon (aimed specifically at people running games). When the magazines were cancelled by Wizards of the Coast, Paizo began publishing their Adventure Paths. Rise of the Runelords was the first of these campaigns, released when Paizo were still writing for D&D 3.5. The campaign has now been updated to use the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game rules, and re-released as the anniversary Edition. Since Pathfinder is such a large part of my life, I couldn’t stop myself from buying the deluxe version. It comes in a leatherette and metal presentation case (designed to look like the grimoire used by the primary antagonist), and inside has the book itself (also bound in a leatherette material), plus 15 prints of character and cover artwork by Wayne Reynolds packaged in vellum envelopes (I could only get 12 of the prints in the photo).

Behold the Grimoire of Karzoug!

A book within a book… bookception…

I can’t wait to finally get to run this game for a group of unsuspecting victims… I mean friends… yes, friends…

As an aside, if anyone is interested in pirate themed role-playing games, I highly recommend checking out the Razor Coast Kickstarter project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/froggodgames/razor-coast?ref=category). Razor Coast is a mega-campaign originally designed by Nicholas Logue, who wrote Rise of the Runelords Part 3: Hook Mountain Massacre. He’s a master when it comes to writing twisted adventures, so throw him and pirates together and it should be a grand ol’ time. I’m fairly keen to give it a look myself, just trying to work out if I can justify it as a birthday present for myself or not. I can certainly attest to the quality of the work Frog God Games put out, since I have hard cover copies of The Complete Tome of Horrors and The Slumbering Tsar Saga.

Well, that’s enough from me for now. I should hopefully have Part 3 of Cooking the Cosmos up by New Years Eve, I’ve been working on it for the last day or so, just dealing with some writers block. After that’s up, I’ll be taking a break from writing about world building to talk about some other aspects of role-playing. Once again, if there’s anything you’d like to see covered, just let me know and I’ll do my best to oblige. Fare thee well for now though, and I hope you all have an excellent New Year.

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Written while listening to the album Regret, by Evereve. Highly recommend them to anyone who likes Gothic/Industrial music. Regret also contains one of my favourite covers of House of the Rising Sun. Go on, have a listen, you know you want to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcIdCfrmNKQ