Telephone manner: null point

Me (on phone): Hi, can I order a repeat prescription.

Chemists: No.

She did eventually explain they aren't taking repeats over the phone anymore, and I now have to email my GPs surgery to get it sent to them instead. Well, initially she just said "you need to email", it took a surprising amount of prodding to find out who I have to email.

 

Here's hoping the surgery is up to speed on this. I know some of the GP apps can do this, but the one my GP was signed up to wouldn't do it for a controlled drug, which was why I started ringing the chemists for repeats in the first place.

Recent Reading - Nov 21

Recent Reading

Penric & Desdemona Series - Lois McMaster Bujold

There's a new one out, Knot of Shadows, and reading it prompted me to re-read the complete series. They hang together well, though there are still a couple of gaps of five or six years in Pen's timeline that could be usefully delved into. I'd really like to see more from the year Pen spent studying with the Wealdean Royal Shamans, and being drinking buddies with Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. And Pen at Seminary has many possibiiities - he's mentioned stabbings over library books often enough.

Knot of Shadows picks up the narrative about six months after the end of The Assassins of Thasalon, with Pen now a father for the second time. He's hoping for a nice quiet day in his study and out of the winter rain, but as usual he has the Bastard's own luck. This time its another possession, but the weirder kind, where someone's Death Magic/Miracle has left a body available to be possessed. But death magic victims come in twos, the caster and the person they were desperate for justice over, so where's the other body? It's up to Pen and Des, now backed up by trainee sorcerer Alixtra and her demon Arra, to figure it out. This is a bit grimmer than most of the other Pen and Des taies, to the point I went back and checked whether it was published on Halloween - the answer is not quite, it was out on the 21st. ( (Content Warning/Spoiler) )

One thing I particularly liked here was that even after he's solved the mystery, Pen keeps pushing at it because he doesn't quite understand the theology behind why Death Miracles work for some and not for others. He does work it out, and it does absolutely fit within the theology of the Bastard's role within the Five Gods, though I must admit to being slightly uncomfortable with it wrt my own views on morality.

Recent Gaming Reading
 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - Games Workshop/Cubicle 7

I picked up the WFRP Humble Bundle last month, which dropped almost 50 books into my account for only £22, and I've been slowly working my way through them. (I never bought any WFRP stuff back in the day, but I was familiar with it from reading White Dwarf magazine). The bundle was essentially the Cubicle 7 reprint PDFs of the WFRP 1st Edition Rulebook, and almost everything ever published for Second Edition, plus a big chunk of Cubicle 7's new 4th edition stuff (3rd Edition apparently went off at a tangent). I've concentrated on reading 2nd Edition for now, and I'm actually tremendously impressed, it's some of the best games writing I've seen. Which I suspect is because they sat down and planned all of the supplements as an integrated whole in advance. I think there's still some holes in it, none of the editions really seem  to have gone into the Elves and Dwarfs in as much detail as they deserve - if you randomly roll a character there's only a 2% chance it's a Dwarf and a 1% chance it's a Wood Elf, which are probably overdoing it on a demographic basis, but the Dwarfs, particularly, and the High and Wood Elves to a lesser degree, are significant forces in the world of the Empire. And when I say Empire, that's an expy of the Holy Roman Empire, WFRP isn't your traditional high fantasy medieval setting, its early Renaissance in setting.

But I do have a problem with the setting, which a little vignette in the Nights Dark Shadows vampire sourcebook sums up for me:

"You can’t throw a rock in a crowded platz without it bouncing off two Vampires. And three Daemons.” —Mad Henrik, vagabond"

Make that one vampire and four demon cultists and you've nailed the setting. Pretty much every adventure has a chaos cult in it somewhere, and the overwhelming majority revolve around one. And GDW's chaos gods and demons just don't work for me. I will say that even Tome of Chaos, the chaos sourcebook, had tons of stuff I thought was interesting and extremely well written setting development, but their main thrust leaves me meh. (Imagine it as the Burning Times, with the Inquisition turned up to 11).

4th Edition has exactly the same setting, but somewhat revised rules - I think I prefer 2nd Edition, though I haven't gone into the playability of either in detail, 2nd just seems to have more of a clue about making characters fit the setting. Other than that the bundle dumped a whole heap of small adventures on me - Cubicle 7 have been releasing lots of £2.50 - 3.50 15-30 page adventures, most fitting in the campaign setting they released alongside the rules, which has the characters based in the unsettled frontier town/city of Ubersreik. At a quick skim it's an excellent basis for a campaign, with lots of factions vying for power and looking for a few deniable assets to hire. The other thing they've been releasing is an epic campaign - Death on the Reik. if you buy everything for it, then I think it'll run to about 1,300 pages and cost you over £100 (and that's for the PDFs, not print!). They made sure to give you the first installment in the bundle just to lure you in....

OTOH any RPG that announces its main themes and declares one of them to be "The class struggle" can't be all bad.