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Sticky: Reading List - 2026“This disdain for robots is not new—especially in America. In 2014-15 HitchBOT, a full-body robot, successfully hitchhiked across Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. Two weeks into its American trek, however, it was found stripped, dismembered and decapitated in Philadelphia.”
One of the things I’m playing with in my current Werewolf game is the inverse of an old saying: “Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.”
Here, we’re using “Never attribute to stupidly what can be attributed to malice.” The idea is that in this version of the world, conspiracies abound. Conspiracies whose point is the end of the world.
This should help one problem with running Werewolf - the “ok, what now” issue. The thing is, is stupidity is rampant, you get rid of the stupidity and then you ... still have the world ending, still have banes baning. It’s too easy to have players get lost, with no real sense of “what now”, beyond “well, I guess we... burn the whole thing down? Or become reformers?” And let me tell you, the story of six werewolves who all become politicians is.. not super interesting.
So we’ll try this, and see where it goes.
Here’s some of the sloppiest thinking I’ve seen in a long time. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/canada/americas-allies-should-go-nuclear
Seriously. The US should let GERMANY and JAPAN, probably the two least likely countries to want the bomb ever to exist, develop nukes? Germany is struggling to find money to keep Russia out of Ukraine, they’re gonna do that AND fund nukes?
Meanwhile, we’ll keep South Korea from getting nukes by promising them our military support - the withdrawal of which is the primary justification for allowing Japan to have nukes? And, of course, North Korea will just sort of.. do nothing while this happens?
Just … breathtakingly poorly reasoned. Some drunken 2am conversation between undergraduate international relations majors somehow makes its way to Foreign Affairs.
Its fall. Which means that the weather is changing and getting colder. Apparently by leaping its way off a cliff, to judge by the weather here.
Anyways, October brought much of the same. I continue to run two games - Epic D&D at a local game store for actual money, and a Werewolf, 5th edition game at home. 5th edition is actually really good; I’ve been enjoying the new rage system, and the Umbra feels a lot more terrifying than it ever has before.
Work continues at pace. Leading teams is hard. Probably I’ll be in charge of different product areas next year, but I don’t know if it will change what I’m doing much. I continue to hate how fast companies outsource development to other countries, and probably will dislike it until I retire.
Reading-wise I’ve been concentrating more on some books I already owned and wanted to get through, spending time with Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon, Mercedes Lackey’s Winds of Fate, a couple of David Weber novels. Probably next month I’ll pick up the next Stormlight Archive book. That will take a while since each of these are behemoths.
I made it to the Makerspace once, and spent time milling down wood for a topper-block box I want to make. I need to make an effort to get there more often in November.
Other than that, it’s getting towards winter and I’m mostly hoping to have an easier winter this year than last.
The Smeeters made their way into Southfork Keep, intending to find the horn they were looking for. They immediately decided to go down and check out the areas they had been in before, which included the dungeon. After some lip from Frankie’s familiar, he scouted and found that there were zombies. Knowing they were a match for zombies, they charged. Only to find that the zombies were actually controlled by a Death Tyrant, who was upset to find they were murdering its children.
A long battle ensued, which ended with the zombies and Death Tyrant dead. They found the Death Tyrant’s layer, in the catacombs below the Keep. It apparently had made its way upwards after the collapse of the town. They found its treasure, but no sign of the horn.
They realized the Horn was likely in the remaining tower of the Keep and went there. As they entered the ground began to shift underneath them again, making the stairs to the tower dangerous and threatening a complete collapse.
At the top, they found the quarters that Inquisitor-General Raynor had been using. This included a vault with some form of magic lock. They started to puzzle it out, but then Pulsar realized he could just fly outside the keep and use stone mason tools to get into the vault. This succeeded, though it sped up the total collapse of the Keep.
Successful, the characters flew away, intending to return to the warehouse filled with survivors and plan their next moves.
Velocity Weapon is very much a thriller space opera, and one whose impact is predicated on several surprises that are revealed over the course of the book. That makes it tricky to write about since giving those twists away would, to a certain extent, ruin the first read experience.
The basics are simple, though. In the future, humanity has expanded to the universe using Casimir Gates. The technology and manner of building these is kept secret amongst an organization called “Keepers”. These Keepers all have chips in their head which hold that information; chips that cannot be removed without killing them.
In one system, another government has developed - the Icarions. They want access to the gates without paying transit fees, and are willing to go to war to get it. Sergeant Sanda Greeve is sent out as part of a fleet to confront the problem. Icarian attacks, her ship is destroyed, and she ends up in an escape pod.
Meanwhile, somewhere else, Jules Valentine leads her small street crew in a Shadowrun-esque raid. What they find will upend their lives entirely.
Velocity Weapon is very well-written and paced. This isn’t a book of huge space battles, but one of a building mystery that only gets deeper the further you get in it. The characters are extremely well-developed and carry the weaknesses of their strengths throughout the story. All the plot threads come together in a series of reveals that changes much of what you previously thought of as the status quo.
All in all - highly recommend. Will likely purchase the next in the series.
Having decided to go after the horn, the Smeeters worked on figuring out how to do it. The best plan they had was to have Frankie Jr Jr’s familiar scout out ahead of them. This was made complicated by the familiar (who Frankie named “Dumbass”) developing a personality, that included a momentary demand for payment for his labour. Re-asserting his magical right to the Imp’s services, he sent it out.
The Imp showed them a town that had been almost enveloped in vines, which had infested the streets and wrapped around some buildings. Also a town that had also just experienced a geological disaster as some buildings had collapsed from the recent earthquakes. He also showed them goblins and some sort of winged flower creature attempting to break into a home.
The Smeeters decided to stop this. A battle ensued where they easily dealt with the goblins, but were unable to keep their bosses from escaping. Though they brought the winged creature to the ground after it cast a Fireball at them, they could not prevent it from using Dimension Door to escape. Worse Truffles was taken down by the attacks, though they were able to heal the mushroom druid before he died.
The battle completed, the characters discovered Lady Beatrice McMahon. Beatrice had been the wife of the Lord Mayor of Southfork. Until the Inquisitor General Raynor took over the city, and ordered him hanged. An elderly woman, she was quite taken with Frankie Jr Jr. And the party was taken with her cloak, which contained silver spun so fine to appear like string and which also appeared to be magical. They negotiated with her - if they got rid of the fae and the Ardent Inquisition, she would give them her cloak. She agreed, though they were disappointed when they learned the magic was merely to keep the elements away from the wearer.
Having resolved to do the thing they had planned to do, they continued on their passage to the Keep. They found the park that had been a social gathering place for the town ruined, filled with more of the vines. Worse, the vines were hostile; Truffles learned that they had developed a taste for the flesh of the living. This was less of a problem for the War-Forged Pulsar, but their orders also required them to at least hold him in place. The Smeeters decided to deal with the problem using a combination of Wall of Flame and Blight, which enabled them to get past and to the front gate of the Keep itself.
Which, it would appear, they would attempt to enter next session.
The weekend finally arrived for our young werewolves. Moe woke first and began to do the mundane things that any young man finds himself doing on a Saturday. The mundane was interrupted when Olivia Chen (Failstate), the leader of Silicon Howl, buzzed his intercom. She wanted to speak to the fellow RIT graduate. Part of it was to insist that he knew very well that the ambition spirits that plagued RIT were necessary to push engineering students as far as they could possibly go; thus it was important for Silicon Howl to let them roam, even if they seemed to be Wyrm spirits. Things became even more contentious when she argued that his work within the city’s engineering office would never lead to victory against the Wyrm; his best hope was to abandon the city and join them. Moe very quickly showed her the door and she left, her purpose unfulfilled.
Russel, meanwhile, finally had lunch with his sister. He told her of the new “friends” he had made (aka, the pack), and how they were a stabilizing influence on his life. Part of concealing his werewolf nature to her involved telling her they were friends he had made at the Station; which made her worry about whether he was surrounding himself with bad influences. He also told her he wasn’t working at the Station currently, due to some trouble.
Sciel woke up to find the building next to hers in the city quickly being torn down. The county had offered tax breaks demolishing homes that had been turned into multi-family housing; apparently they were moving quickly. She also used her contact on the police to learn about the group making trouble at the Station. It was, apparently, a biker gang that had a long history in the city. The Ragers had been around for decades, occasionally doing something that would get them noticed and disappearing again. Their leader was Rafe Caldez, though the police had never been able to pin any actual crimes against him. Now that they had taken The Station as their own, though, it was clear the Pack would need to deal with them.
Joy, meanwhile, heard back from her student, Chloe, who had put up what seemed to be a spiritually important graffiti in the city before the police caught her. Chloe’s mother, it seemed, had told the neighborhoods rent-a-cops that she wasn’t allowed to leave, which was preventing her from sneaking out. Joy’s mom, meanwhile, called her to invite her to dinner that weekend, saying that she had some news. Joy managed to get her to admit that her parents were planning to sell their childhood home, moving out of the city and into the suburbs.
Frustrated, Joy went out to spray some graffiti of her own in the old subway station. When she got there, she found it had been entirely cleared out of homeless. As she began, further, a man dressed in a suit approached her and told her that she needed to stop what she was doing, or he would call the police. He then attempted to use.. something .. to cause her to leave of her own volition, but whatever it was didn’t work. Joy laughed into his face, until he called the police and they actually came. Realizing this, she left the scene quickly. Trying to see if she was being followed, however, she got the wrong idea about a patrolman who was just walking down the street, hitting him with an elbow. A quick bribe took care of that.
The pack finally got together and went over what they knew. They knew they also had three possessed televisions they needed to take care of, and decided to handle the one in Irondequoit, owned by a retired used car salesman. When they got there they resolved to approach into the Umbra, ducking into the nearby Durand Eastman Park so that Sciel could conduct the Rite of Shadow Passage to enter the Umbra. Their combined Rage and inexperience made it difficult, though. Unable to maintain the serenity needed for such a difficult crossing, Gaia’s Howl ripped into their flesh as they passed through.
The Rite completed, the characters then learned that Durand Eastman Park in the Umbra was a thick, impenetrable forest. Within moments, Joy and Moe saw a glowing deer in the distance, and resolved to hunt it. Joy’s hunt was successful, and she felt her resolve flowing back into her body as her jaws clamped down on its throat. However, Joy, Moe, and Russel and Sciel were all split apart. Using her knowledge of the Umbra, Joy realized that they were in a sort of mini-realm dedicated to the hunt. In order to escape, they each must succeed in a hunt. The natural targets, after all, turned out to be each other. And as they hunted each other, they each felt the dangerous, forbidden instinct to bit down on their prey’s throat, though they resisted it.
Having escaped, they found themselves on the side of a busy road, car-struck deer lining it in all directions. In hispo and lupus forms, they each took turns dodging cars to get across, though Sciel took a dangerous fall that required her to be rescued.
Finally through, they arrived at the Umbra reflection of Irondequoit, ready to finally get to their destination.
The Smeeters returned to Southfork, their business concluded. They found the town much changed. The river that flew southwards had disappeared in the previous two weeks. As they got closer, they saw the cliff face was crumbling and breaking around them. Worse, a wall of vines had surrounded the town itself.
Eschewing climbing a two hundred foot cliff face, the characters went around to find the Ardent Inquistion camp. They gained entry by posing as a mercenary company there to solve their problems. The Captain at the gate, Kael Thornback, was loath the allow them entry, until he realized that he had an unparalleled source of entertainment before him.
Bringing them through the camp, they were alarmed to see Brindle Tealeaf in a gibbet. He was apparently jailed after running through Southfork Keep screaming “Catastophe” before the ground began collapsing. Realizing that he would recognize them, the Smeeters tried to sneak past. This was less successful for some, and completely unsuccessful for Mow when she did not attempt to sneak. A quick, non-verbal threat by Jad convinced Brindle to hold his mouth, for the moment.
Arriving at the wall, they began to study it. They quickly learned that being close to it, they would hear a soft chiming sound that threatened to charm them. Worse, the vines were as poisonous as poison ivy. After Jad discovered both of these facts in quick succession, the party decided flying over the wall was their best option. Captain Thornback, meanwhile, had brought his friends over, and was having a grand time watching their fumbles. Frankie Jr Jr tried to negotiate with the dwarf for a piece of his beard, but no dwarf would give up such a thing for such a paltry wager. Finally, they settled on free beer if they were to come back within two days.
Their method of getting over the wall involved flying, something they were well able to do. They then encountered goblin guards who were not willing to let them passed. A battle ensued, which the Smeeters quickly won.
In the wake of their victory they were greeted by Sylwena, the fae elf who had originally sold Jad the magical tulip. She confesses that she had intended to use the tulips to turn Tsuran into her new fae realm, since she disliked the realm that Lady Vaelora had created. Jad demanded his investment money back, but she told him that she would have to find it first. And, also, that there were survivors in the town nearby.
So the characters found the survivors of the town, including Mow’s family. As well, they found Faelar Mossheart, who had previously been in the dungeons with an iron mask around his face. He told them that the horn he had been carrying was a powerful primal artifact that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the fae. It was, unfortunately, located in Southfork Keep, where the Inquisitor General had held him for a decade. Southfork Keep was a victim of the collapsing town; one tower had already collapsed and the entire building was in danger of following it.
Still, the characters decided to go after it.
The Smeeters travel to a remote region of Monax’len, there to find the ancient ruins that Qest has kept his laboratory in. They, along with the other parties hired by the Uyanis, are there to find and destroy several foci that will allow Qest to wipe the memories of everyone in the floating city of Tsuran.
Entering through an underground river, the characters quickly found the a cavern where a hydra rested guarding the first foci. After a fairly brief battle involving Truffles turning into a shark, they defeated it and moved on.
The ruins opened to them, they proceeded inside to immediately encounter a group of flame and smoke mephits. These were easily dealt with when Pulsar cast Hypnotic Lights, leaving them unable to do anything at all.
Having finished off that room, they headed to Qest’s alchemical laboratory. There, they were confronted with a puzzle - a bubbling cauldron of acid, with a foci immersed at the bottom. The key was mixing together other reagents so that the acid would be neutralized. The group quickly got to work puzzling it out, and were joined by another group of adventures who happened onto the room. Things were made more tense by the release of some great monster that Aegon, their handler, insisted they needed to not face.
The parties put together their guess. Just before pouring it in, Pulsar realized that they were one potion off. Re-assessing, they swapped out the right bottle. The acid neutralized, they destroyed the last foci and escaped certain doom.
As they were leaving, though, Jad received a Sending that was basically 25 curse words. Then another. Sylwena, the elf that had offered to go into business with him selling a form of enchanted tulip she had cultivated, had followed them to Southfork as instructed. The characters had failed to mention, due to not knowing, that Southfork was sitting on a primal leyline. This had certain unexpected interactions with the tulips that the characters will need to deal with next session.
The term “Technical Manual” has a History within Star Trek fandom. The original series technical manual not only gave in-universe details about the Enterprise, it attempted to flesh out the Federation and Starfleet in ways no other piece of in-game fiction had done. The TNG manual was a classic written by the people who put together starship models used on the show. It went deep into in-universe explanations for how the technology “worked”, such that it was used as a resource for script writers and novelists writing in that universe.
The STA Technical Manual does not succeed as well. It is somewhat short at 132 pages. While it does escape the trap of just being a cool catalog of things PCs can attain (like the gun catalogs of Shadowrun yore), it also doesn’t really go that in-depth into any topic.
The book covers use of technology from a diplomatic, scientific, medical, engineering, and starship standpoint. None of it goes into details; you won’t find explanations of millicochrans or warp speed tables here. You will find histories of devices and how they would evolve.
The art is also kind of a miss. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, and I still applaud Modiphius for adding artist names to each. I would have expected a technical manual to have more depictions of technology, though, such as schematics and other kinds of drawings.
Probably the best part of the book are the complication tables, written for most types of technology. Some of the entries are prosaic. Others are delightful, including the possibility of creating your game’s own Tuvix.
In the end, this is not an essential sourcebook for the line. Only get if you want the additional complication tables, or are a completionist.
The Smeeters travel to a remote region of Monax’len, there to find the ancient ruins that Qest has kept his laboratory in. They, along with the other parties hired by the Uyanis, are there to find and destroy several foci that will allow Qest to wipe the memories of everyone in the floating city of Tsuran.
Entering through an underground river, the characters quickly found the a cavern where a hydra rested guarding the first foci. After a fairly brief battle involving Truffles turning into a shark, they defeated it and moved on.
The ruins opened to them, they proceeded inside to immediately encounter a group of flame and smoke mephits. These were easily dealt with when Pulsar cast Hypnotic Lights, leaving them unable to do anything at all.
Having finished off that room, they headed to Qest’s alchemical laboratory. There, they were confronted with a puzzle - a bubbling cauldron of acid, with a foci immersed at the bottom. The key was mixing together other reagents so that the acid would be neutralized. The group quickly got to work puzzling it out, and were joined by another group of adventures who happened onto the room. Things were made more tense by the release of some great monster that Aegon, their handler, insisted they needed to not face.
The parties put together their guess. Just before pouring it in, Pulsar realized that they were one potion off. Re-assessing, they swapped out the right bottle. The acid neutralized, they destroyed the last foci and escaped certain doom.
As they were leaving, though, Jad received a Sending that was basically 25 curse words. Then another. Sylwena, the elf that had offered to go into business with him selling a form of enchanted tulip she had cultivated, had followed them to Southfork as instructed. The characters had failed to mention, due to not knowing, that Southfork was sitting on a primal leyline. This had certain unexpected interactions with the tulips that the characters will need to deal with next session.
Had an absolutely amazing time hosting people for board games. Socialized. Drank beer. Cooked a bunch of meat on the gas grill. Played Betrayal Legacy and Terraforming Mars. People have left now and it’s rest time.
I finished reading The Moonlit Path, the latest sourcebook for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, 5th edition. This one goes over the Umbra and spirits. This is a good thing, since the core book gives only a very short treatment of that. As such this ought to be considered a “core book”, along with Shattered Nation and Wyrmtide.
Moonlit Path has probably the most ground to cover. In prior editions, the Umbra was covered in Umbra: The Velvet Shadow, Axis Mundi, and Rage Across the Heavens. It mostly succeeds. The book is filled with information about how to write stories that use the Umbra and ways to portray spirits. There’s page count devoted to what sort of things can constitute chiminage (something prior editions did not do well) and to how spirit courts work. Additional information is added on each of the tribes’ Patron Spirits, as well as those of the Black Spiral Dancers, the Cult of Fenris, and the ex-patron spirit of the Stargazers. There’s also a lot about Moon Cults, which was surprising since they didn’t get that much about them in previous books.
There’s also a few quotes of Jonas Albrecht being a bitter old man, which is one of my favorite things about the new edition.
The book does not include, however, much about the Deep Umbra. The old Umbral Realms are basically gone. The 5th edition Umbra is uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect back to the real world, or to the immediate Apocalypse. The Umbra as a whole is much less friendly to the Garou - no more stepping sideways outside of a Rite, and staying in the Umbra risks death.
That is a reflection of what 5th edition Werewolf is - there is no greater Garou culture. Big political fights to steer the Nation are gone, since there’s no Nation. Deep fantasy-like spirit quests to far-off, wondrous Umbra Realms are no longer possible. Basically, anything that isn’t involved in Garou surviving the Apocalypse in the real-world has been surgically cut away. If you want those elements, the 20th Anniversary Edition is still out there. (Though I’m not sure I would ever play that again without taking the same cultural scalpel to it as 5th edition did.)
The adventure in the book is fine. It mostly involves breaking people out of an ICE detention facility, with lots of spiritual corruption involved. I’m not sure I would have put such a contemporarily topical piece here, as opposed to another book or released adventure. But it does the job, and could be fine if a group wants to run it. And, really, I just don’t think you run 5th edition if you are the kind of person who objects to a story portraying ICE detention facilities as bad. The game made it clear what kind of story it’s telling when the developer reminded you that just because they can’t call real-life corporations as Wyrm-tainted without getting sued, doesn’t mean you can’t.
Overall, a good edition to a very different Werewolf game.
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