This is a write up of the second session of By Endurance We Conquer, a Carved from Brindlewood scenario written by Harald Eckmüller. The players were Ian (Willem), Gemma (Tove) and George (Isaac). We completed the scenario, though there were thoughts we could have carried on.

We catch up with the rescue party. Willem (boatswain and now in charge) has taken charge; Redwell (first mate) is unconscious and tied up, and De Lanvier (Physician) is badly injured after a gunshot wound. Tookoolito (local guide), Tove (photographer), Issac (musher), Lars (ice master), Norlund (scientist) and Samuels (crew) complete the party

Willem decides that making for the Supply Depot is paramount, even though it is late and with snow and wind visibility is poor. Tookoolito scouts ahead; they see her framed against the whiteness, a dark silhouette. The wind brings snow, scattering across the ground; when it clears, Tookoolito has gone.

If you are looking for episodic wisdom, you’ve come to the right place. Individual scenes have strong emotional impacts, rather than an overarching plot or story.

I found The Summer Book one of those books I admired more than I loved. Tove Jansson has an extraordinary ability to capture a moment or an image, a summer storm, a conversation between a grandmother and her granddaughter, the quiet presence of a small island, all with remarkable precision. There is wisdom here, particularly about childhood, ageing, grief and the shifting relationships between generations. Individual chapters often linger long after you've finished them.

At the same time, I found the book oddly disjointed. Rather than building towards something larger, it feels like a collection of observations and vignettes, each complete in itself but only loosely connected to those around it. It reminded me in some ways of Douglas Coupland's Life After God: both books contain flashes of insight and beautifully observed moments, yet I “felt” Coupland’s book more; it was more aligned with my life at the time. I appreciated what each chapter had to say, but I rarely felt the momentum of a novel with a stronger narrative arc.

The camera pans across the town of Steaming Rock, snow is falling, and not many folks are on the streets. A light shines from The Homestead Inn, and we enter the doors, seeing a tired and worried Winston Pye sitting at a table, poring over bills.

Winston

Winston is in desperate need of money, which means filling rooms at his inn, but having people in rooms means he also needs staff, and most of his staff have left.

This is a write up of the first session of By Endurance We Conquer, a Carved from Brindlewood scenario written by Harald Eckmüller. The players were Ian (Willem), Gemma (Tove) and George (Isaac). We are aiming to complete the scenario in session two, hopefully in the next few weeks.

In the early 20th century, we are aboard a three-masted barquentine, The Fang, on an unsanctioned expedition, but now trapped in the Arctic Ice.

Enter Willem McPherson, the boatswain, hair tucked under his cap, burn scars across his arms and a worn-out naval jacket, covered in frost. He harbours a dark deed, not necessarily a regret, but something he’s yet to fully come to terms with. During a previous voyage, he pushed a troublemaking crew member over the side. He was investigated, and when the evidence pointed to him, it was Thomas Redwell who bailed him out. They’ve never spoken of it, and now Redwell is first mate on The Fang.

Going way, way back to 1896, 130 years ago, for this classic Gothic Horror/Sci-Fi.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those books that you are bound to know, or have heard of. The central idea has become part of popular culture, making it difficult to approach the story without already knowing where it is heading. Who can forget the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, Hyde and Hare?

Re-reading this, what stood out most to me was the Gothic atmosphere, possibly tainted by trying to write something for an up-and-coming Raspy Raven Gothic writing season. Stevenson presents London as a place of fog, darkness and hidden lives. Much of the story takes place behind closed doors, with characters trying to make sense of events that never neatly align.

Back to the main campaign, and Cody’s Faith is seen in blood red reality; Live by the gun, die by the gun.

The group gathered at the Homestead Inn to discuss Mungo Lachlan. Cody was under pressure to settle a debt and believed killing Mungo would clear it. Webster and Winter, the bounty hunters currently searching for Mungo, wanted him alive.

After listening to the discussion, Winston carefully revealed that he believed Mungo was staying in Room 7 of his inn.

I bumped this book up the list as I was looking for a change of tone, and I thought a schlocky horror would do it. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I was a bit put off that the translation, from Dutch, moved the location of the novel from the town of Beek in the Netherlands to a town outside of New York. I guess this is a commercial decision, especially as the book has had its rights sold for a movie or TV series. Disappointing, as I feel it would have had a vastly different feel.

So, these may be spoilers, but I’ll try to keep them low-key, but you do find out in the first chapter or so that the town of Black Spring, aka Beek has a witch, a five hundred or so year old witch. This witch, Katherine, has her mouth and eyes sewn shut. She appears and disappears around the town. Appearing in the town square. Gone. Appearing in someone’s wardrobe. Gone. Next to you in the queue for some meat loaf. Gone.

There are post-apocalyptic novels about survival. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars is a dreamy, internal monologue about love fading and reigniting.

Nine years after a flu pandemic wipes out most of humanity, Hig lives at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper and a heavily armed survivalist named Bangley. They hunt, patrol, and occasionally kill anyone who gets too close. Yet despite the setup, this is not really an action-driven apocalypse novel; it could have easily turned into Mad Max, but it goes in a different direction.

The author fills the novel with empty skies, glistening rivers, dense forests, and abandoned fragments of civilisation slowly being reclaimed by nature. There is a strange, beautiful and at times cringy poetry running through the book. Hig's fragmented narration gradually becomes the novel's greatest strength, capturing loneliness, memory and grief in a way that feels painfully intimate, like thoughts half-lost in radio static. It’s at odds with Bangley and Pop’s pragmatic live-or-let-die attitude.

As we are two players down I created a short encounter. A missing stagecoach. On it, the monthly wages for Steaming Rock workers. Bandits. Bears. Oh my.

Snow has come to Steaming Rock, winter is here, a raging storm and low temperatures has kept most folks in doors. But not Sheriff Fletcher.

Deputy Cody, Winston and Dutch are having drinks and a chat at The Homestead Inn. Sheriff Fletcher enters, brushing off his thick winter coat and fluttering snow around as he shakes his hat.

As part of an RPG kickstarter, Cörk Børd, I’d been watching and reading a few Scandi Noir classics, first was The Bat, and now on to what some would suggest is patient zero…

I think I may have caught a couple of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander episodes, so I dismissed this as a bit of a Danish version of Bergerac. Wallander is nothing like that and is also Swedish, not Danish.

Kurt Wallander has problems; he’s going through a divorce, his daughter tried to commit suicide and is estranged from him, and his father may have dementia. So, it’s a welcome distraction to have a triple homicide land on his doorstep.

I am running By Endurance We Conquer, it’s a Carved from Brindlewood game from The Gauntlet, written by Harald Eckmüller. As preparation for this, I picked up Alfred Lansing’s book on Shackleton and settled down.

The book reads as a “Boy’s Own” adventure. An amazing feat of human achievement; many actions and events that have not been bested in over a hundred years. Ultimately, Shackleton’s objective, to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic and the South Pole, was met with failure. It must, though, be remembered that Shackleton and his men’s feats to survive are in many ways even more significant.

We start as the Endurance is caught in pack ice, slowly disintegrating as the men plan for its eventual evacuation and an uncertain future. Lansing uses some evocative prose and interleaves diary and interviews with the crew to add a real sense of how incredibly frightening and unpleasant this period was.

The final session of No Love Between Friends, adventure three in Steaming Rock. Cody is badly injured and possibly losing his leg, but with Danny and Diago, they are back in town with their suspect in the murder of Howard Ross, Peyton, slung over the back of a horse. Meanwhile, Winston keeps low, as the Ross boys look for a scapegoat, and Dutch helps Sheriff Fletcher keep order.

As the posse enters town, Winston watches from the shadows, and Dutch backs up Sheriff Fletcher as the crowd grows restless. Night is here, and the Ross boys from the New Mexico Mercantile Corp are threatening to burn down the town unless the Sheriff gets them the killer of Howard Ross.

The Sheriff rushes up to Deputy Cody, Cody says Peyton’s their man and then collapses, they call for the Doc, Dr Innes. Cody is sent to the medical emporium along with Danny, Diago, and Dutch; all of them have a little bit of first aid experience to support the Doc.

As part of The Grognard Files Book Club, I’d re-jigged my schedule to line up this book with that meeting. If you’re interested, you can join too. Click the link; it takes place on the first Sunday of each month and is currently a mix of sci-fi and detective novels. It’s relaxed and friendly, and always has a strong bent to how to leverage a book and its ideas for TTRPG purposes.

The Big Sleep is set in a decaying, rain-slick, humid Los Angeles of the 1930s, populated by the desperate, damaged and beautiful. It is more of a series of characters pinballing against each other than a strictly plot-driven story. There is a plot, it is labyrinthine and seemingly unknowable, but then that’s because we are alongside Marlowe, down in the dirt, rifling through it and picking out a single nugget of information amongst the detritus. Oh, for a lovely, clean birds-eye view of what is going on, but life doesn’t work that way.

As Kenneth Hite would have it, this is an Ocean of Clues mystery structure. The Big Sleep functions as an ocean of clues because its investigative progress does not depend on any single clue and is instead driven by overlapping, redundant, and often ambiguous information.

Sheriff Fletcher bursts into the clearing, “We got trouble! Them Ross boys are armed and ready to burn Steaming Rock to the ground unless someone's swinging by sundown!”

Cody promises to take up Peyton’s trail and bring him to justice, he may not have done it but he was involved. Dutch volunteers to go back to town with Fletcher.

The others follow Peyton, he’s up on a ridge, Diago struggles to keep Boots, his horse, moving and almost falls. The others eat up the distance to Peyton, spotting him coming down on the other side of the ridge they follow. Diago reaches the ridge and plunges over the other side, a dangerous path but he's got a chance to cut off Peyton.

After missing the inaugural DotB in 2024, I made up for it in 2025 and vowed to return in 2026.

To summarise, it’s rolling dice in a real castle, Chepstow Castle and the weather is ALWAYS guaranteed to be sunny with blue skies, don’t listen to what the amazing organiser Cris Bonhomie says, it’s definitely always sunny in Wales.

It’s a compact & bijou affair, limited to only seven tables, 30-40 attendees, but that is part of its charm, as is the location and Chepstow itself. A variety of games this year across three sessions, including:

• Call of Cthulhu

• Daggerheart

• Dragonbane

• Dungeons and Dragons 5e & 5.1

• Ecochurs

• Liminal

• Pathfinder

• Romance of the Perilous Land

• Shiver

• Starfinder

• The Black Hack

• The Code of Class and Catastrophe

• Trophy Gold

• Vaesen

I got to Graham Greene’s book via Tim Butcher’s Blood River; he’d mentioned it as inspiration, and I’d been so immersed in Blood River that I picked it up almost immediately. That was a good few years ago; ten, fifteen? Better late than never.

I didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew it was a 1938 travelogue and that it was commissioned to find out the effect of the Catholic persecution by the Mexican government in the 1920s.

As part of another book club, I’d enjoyed Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, feeling he inhabited the emotions and turmoil of his characters. This was a very different beast. Greene is a moaner, but one of life’s best moaners. His complaints were eloquent, witty, and, at times, cruel. Take this example of his conversation with a retired US Police Commissioner, “The old gentleman talked at breakfast about his bowels. He said, ‘When I kept you waiting, I thought I only had to do one, but I found I had to do both. It’s eating cereals. They keep your bowels good.’ He ran happily on; it might have been a dog speaking.”

The investigation into the death of Howard Ross continues. Given a last minute switch meant that Pinkie and Silas went to meet Ross and that these boys work for Ellis Rockcliffe, then the majority of the posse head to Ellis’ ranch.

Meanwhile Winston, keeping a low profile due to previous fall outs with Ross, heads to The Homestead Inn to talk business with his partner William Moyer.

Dutch, Daan, Cody and Diago

I’m a big fan of The Windup Girl and Paolo’s short stories in the same universe.

The Water Knife is mightily prescient; at its heart, desperate misfits try to secure the rights to water across Arizona and Nevada for their masters. The wider background is that the world has a water shortage, and companies will do anything to secure the rights to water.

Most of the action centres on the Colorado River as various actors secure it, divert it, block it and do anything to keep it flowing for their needs. Angel is the main protagonist, an ex-gang member turned Water Knife. A Water Knife is an agent who secures and protects water rights by any means necessary; legal, covert, or violent. Angel is good at this, working for the ruthless Catherine Case, shutting down small communities, disproving their claims and not adverse to intimidation and murder.

Sheriff Fletcher calls Cody in; he needs Cody to take a lead on this missing person. He needs an answer to where Howard Ross has gone. Fletcher passes over an itinerary of the sites, mines and a logging camp that Ross had planned to visit. He tells Cody that Ross went with a couple of his men, but no one has seen head nor tail of them.

Cody gathers together the group, his informal posse, to help with the investigation. They head up into the Elk Mountains to check off the first mine on the itinerary, and they realise with a shock that it is Daan Solo’s mine. Ross has already tried to buy Daan’s mine. Why is he visiting it?

At first glance, when they reach the mine, nothing has changed. Daan hasn’t had the time or money to work on it, but closer inspection shows the boarded-up entrance has been disturbed. Planks have been removed, and there are traces of blood on the floor. Winston and Dutch head inside, lighting a lantern, and move deeper into the mine. They see a body at the bottom of a shaft. Climbing down, they find a dead Howard Ross, that fall would have been enough to kill him, but there are other marks on his head, scratched knuckles and his gun beside him. Could this be foul play?

We join our party as they look to get paid after delivering the body of a dead bounty hunter to Ellis Rockcliffe. But paid by whom? Actually, Hubb McGraw, on behalf of Philem Quinlivan, is their paymaster, given they have double-crossed Ellis. A deed for the rights of Apache land to the north of Steaming Rock was taken from the body and is in the hands of the party.

The Dead Gunslinger

We begin with a stormy confrontation with Ellis as Dutch, Cody, Winston and Diago present the body of bounty hunter Thomas Vance and his belongings. Ellis gets his men to crowbar off the coffin lid, brushes aside the flies and picks up the saddlebag. Rooting through it, Ellis flings it to the ground in front of the group, “Where is it!?”