It's dry around here.

I'm keenly aware that I haven't been posting as much lately.
Up until now, I've been posting a lot of theory and not practice, and opportunities to practice have been rare.
Without practice, I don't get much stimulation to consider theory in turn.

In the Stormtrooper scenario; I am using the D20 system with my 2d10 proposal. So far it has been alright, except for the one guy who dual-wields. dual wielders get the shaft in the d20 system, and need that flat probability curve to roll high enough to even get a hit. the 2d10 system makes this much more difficult, even with AC and Difficulty adjustment.

In the Dungeon Purgatory game, we found that 2 of the party don't even have waterskins in their inventory, and nobody bothered to account for how they were keeping hydrated. Drinking water became one of those things like having bathroom breaks; not of sufficient narrative value to include in game. We are clearly approaching this with varying levels of focus. People's interest seems to be flagging. The structure of the campaign itself deviates from the threat-of-death/experience-to-advance paradigm that works so well in the standard D&D game. And perhaps the novelty only lasts so logn without this formula.

Then, stormtroopers didn't happen this week. The difficulties inherent in getting five adults in the same place at the same time for something upon which their livelihoods do not depend have been manifesting themselves.

So your Crystal Fortress Wizard has been holed-up with his books. I'm in the middle of a few right now;
The most interesting is Fingerprints of the Gods, by my hero, the heterodox archaeologist, Graham Hancock. Fingerprints makes compelling arguments to the existence of lost civilizations- advanced cultures predating Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture. It's great campaign fodder, and I often get the notion that the author is making an effort to not sound like he is writing for game.

I'm still getting through Empire of the Summer Moon. Which I picked up after reading about it on FalseMachine.

I'm well into Children of Dune. Dune stands alone as a narrative, but the sequels are no less interesting.
There is a trope; an archetype of a person who can manifest other identities in him or her self, basically the ability to remember other lives from a first-person perspective. This in a nutshell is the super-power of the Kwisatz Haderach. the First Dune is about the man who attains this state. The subsequent works deal with the consequences of such power.

At the moment, I am reading to a loved-one from a children's book about the Buddha, so this things are all tumbling together. The Buddha is said to have been able to see his past incarnations, and in this way he gained an understanding of the nature of suffering.
I realized over dinner last might , that a similar theme was described in shocking, visceral detail in Gene Wolfe's Book Of the New Sun series.

A lot of people just don't know that science fiction tends to be obsesses with questions which have traditionally been the domain of religious thought. It has been commented that sci-fi protagonists wind up as either Jesus or Adam.
Apparently, they are also the Buddha sometimes. And almost as frequently, it is the future, but people are using swords again for some reason.