1. Right now, I’m polishing the last D&D idea I have in the pipeline: “Gnarlfang’s Goblin Casino: An Evening of Bad Decisions for Low-Level Characters.”

2. Longer term, I’m working on a game about Tolkien-style orcs after the fall of the Evil Overlord–figuring out how to make a society for themselves and survive in a world without a place for them. Working title: “Orcs of the Broken Tower.” (I started out trying to tweak Dogs In The Vineyard around the edges and fell down a rabbit-hole where I ended up hacking it into a game about something else entirely.)

Aha. I guess it’s just that. So if I want to interact with the stuff that’s already there when I subscribe, I’m out of luck?

For one-on-one dueling, using a weapon you can wear as a sidearm, the rapier has the advantage; that’s what it’s optimized for. If small group combat is a possibility, other swords might be useful: an estoc if you might encounter armor, or a curved sword if you need to move quickly between multiple opponents.

I would rule out the epee and small sword. They are basically rapiers that sacrifice effectiveness in order to be less cumbersome as fashion accessories.

My party was hurrying through some caverns to rescue some prisoners. While taking a shortcut they encountered a roper, dangling from the ceiling among the stalactites.

Several of the party spent most of the fight hanging upside-down, being pulled upwards toward the roper.

After they’d defeated the roper and moved on to where one of the prisoners was being held, he asked them why they hadn’t come sooner.

The sorcerer replied, “We got held up.”