Recent Reading - Apr 2021

I'm on a Patricia Briggs re-reading kick, recently consumed:

The Alpha and Omega series:

Alpha and Omega (Novella)
Cry Wolf
Hunting Ground
Fair Game
Dead Heat

And just started on the Mercy Thompson books

Moon Called

Currently Playing:

I'm still playing Valheim. I just took out the second level boss, 'The Elder', who is basically an Ent. I spent a couple of hours preparing the ground for the battle, and probably helped him more than I helped me. It turns out he has an attack with a wide horizontal fan of effect, so taking out things to hide behind (trees!) in the name of freedom of movement was probably a bad idea - though even the stones I did end up cowering behind were punched through after a couple of hits. I only won (and that after dying twice) because there was a randomly placed burial chamber about 100m from where you summon him, and I ended up using that as a bunker because he couldn't hit anything below ground level - pop out, pepper him with fire arrows, dive back into the bunker to heal damage. So now I have the master key to all the dungeons in the swamp, which should let me progress on to the iron tier. (Building dungeons in the swamp strikes me as an inherently gooey idea, and getting iron from them seems counter-intuitive - rust yes, iron no).

I've spent the past couple of days fortifying my main bases. The more recent one I had to fortify because I wanted to be able to dock my long ship without any of the evil dwarfs who roam the forest getting to it, the original one I spent last night fortifying after a raid by two trolls (which are blue, carry tree-trunks as a weapon, and stand about 25'), which smashed in its front and caused a whole heap of mess. I'd only popped back for five minutes to do something and ended up spending a couple of hours rebuilding.

It's not a game I would have accused of subtlety, but I've twice now spotted a shadowy figure with a staff lurking in the woods, who disappears in a poof of smoke if you try to get close to him. I suspect it's Odin. The first time I spotted him seriously creeped me out as it was immediately after defeating the Elder and I was left asking if I'd really seen it, so seeing it a second time was a relief