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Let's try again, shall we? A couple of days ago I tried posting an entry only to have about 85% disappear into a bag of holding never to be seen again. Grrr!

Alliance at Nefelus is finally done. Overall, it was a dull grind only relieved by the fragment of a letter which had, somehow, come into the possession of a gargoyle. As for the rest, the sahuagin were too bestial to be interesting; the behir ate Kingdom, who made the creature sick; the beholder became a carving set in the wall; Nara of the Wastes couldn't be bothered fighting; the gargoyles were sleeping; and Chillreaver fought himself to death, thus gainsaying the old adage about two heads being better than one. Don't think so.

Anyway, Throne of the Stone-Skinned King is looking much more interesting. For the sake of reality I've

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Finale recap of Lost Mines of Karak.  Was a bit surprised by just how good this last fight really was. 

scalesrevisited.blogspot.com/2012/05/don...

Even though we started this adventure path years ago, things got a bit sidetracked (kids, etc), and we've just recently picked it up again.  One of the big things I've also started doing with it is updating the various monsters to use the MM3 damage expressions, and other combat tweaks in order to try and streamline things a bit.  

I'm keeping a blog about it all here -

scalesrevisited.blogspot.com 

Once again the tedium of marking exams which contain dull, unimaginative and heavily clichéd English has spurred me to resume writing. In fact, it wasn't the tedium of exams which prompted me in the first place, but rather the absence of anything much to do in study classes. The ghastliness of the exams has urged me onwards.

It's time for a recap, though, which is more for my benefit than for yours. Chapter 4 has grown slowly but to a monstrous size, accounting for nearly a third of the enture tale. I'm not surprised that Haven of the Bitter Glass has got so long. It's a big story.

Chapter 4 commenced with some shopping because Glory wasn't going to have the company turning up at Telicanthus' party looking like tramps or dressed for battle. (As I may have mentioned, this was to

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The loss of Internet access for three days provoked me into doing some more writing at long last. I rounded the meeting of the Platinum Shield Coalition (or whatever they call themselves) with lunch after which Glory ordered the boys to go and buy some nice clothes for the tea party at Telicanthus' mansion.

I thought that the githyanki had a glass factory in Sayre and had the carriages which ferried the adventurers to his home deliberately pass by a rather Art Nouveau factory. It was later that I found that Telicanthus smuggles glassware in from Tu'narath (with its pointless apostrophe). This seems rather risky and rather pointless because Sayre is a centre of glass manufacturing. In fact, Telicanthus could not just further the githyanki cause, but also generate significant amounts of

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I haven't wholly neglected writing a little more of the Scales of War while I've been on holiday, but I've been busy with Skyrim and Need for Speed: The Run, which are the first two new games I've bought in a year, and the previous one, NFS: Hot Pursuit, was runnable on my old machine, but barely.

Anyway, the heroes are in Sayre and the leaders of the coalition have just held their meeting amid lax security. It struck me that Amyria and Odos were wandering around the streets as if they were out for a stroll, and no one seemed to care. Lord Torrance, who governs the town, seemed not to worry too much about assigning members of the city guard to protect these supposedly important leaders. I'd also assume that they'd attend with their own minders.

I took the outcomes of the skill challenge

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I begin this entry with some trepidation because my long entry on 5e got truncated and then a shorter entry about part of that entry also got truncated. The only common factor I can think of was editing the entry afterwards.

I've finally got to the end of Chapter 2 of Haven of the Bitter Glass after rather a lot of fighting, first against Thaggriel and his dragon, Xirakis, and then against Captain Iquel and the Sacrifice. The party is so well known that even the githyanki know who they are because their exploits have been being published in The Astral Sea Gazette.

The second of these two battles had me wondering how airships would engage in battle. Neither ship is really properly designed for aerial combat because they're too much like sea-going vessels and to spare me a lot of bother

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I'd forgotten that I'd reached the end of the first chapter of Haven of the Bitter Glass. The story begins with the PCs complaining to Thorfinn (a sergeant in the Overlook City Watch) about the local paparazzi when a messenger turns up with news about the world's slowest flying ship approaching the city.

The githzerai, Tokk'it (and the apostrophe serves what function?), hauls the company off with him with minimal delay which I allowed because, according to my calculations, it's going to take about 17+ hours to reach Akma'ad because the ship, the Conqueror, can only do a pitiful 8mph. (I say pitiful because I'm over twice as far on my bike.)

As an aside, I've just been doing some research on sailing ships. The Conqueror is similar in size to an East Indiaman, which had a speed of 4-5 knots

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