Week 27 of 2026: yacht rock

Yet another week where the most exciting things where just the “normal” RPGs. I really like this hobby and I love that I get to play as much as I do. Also happy the weather is “good” again, in the new definition where +30ºC is not good and a light rain at 20ºC feels very nice. The title refers to the music genre I’ve been listening a lot to lately.

Read

• continued In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens

I have also been reading in the Blades in the Dark rulebook. I don’t always include the RPGs that I read in this list, but I guess I want to mention this one because I own a physical copy and I started on page one and read it one page after another like a real book. Still feels different though.

Played

On Tuesday I played the second session of Wanderhome at the Queer RPG Nights. Like two weeks ago, we spend over half the session on the creation of characters and the Place, despite me trying to optimize this process a bit by creating the place with the three players who already had a character. It was a cool session and interesting perspectives emerged, and I love how the system does that, but I also decided against running it any further at this location. It’s an open table and we just can’t risk throwing away half of the session any time a new person joins in (because I really value the table being open and beginner friendly too!) I can completely recommend the game for groups with returning players though!

On Wednesday I played in a session of Blades in the Dark. This was a bit harder for me, as I read so many RPGs these days, and am quite opinionated on how I want my RPGs to be run. I had this really weird experience where I on one hand really appreciated the mechanical aspect of the game – this game has really interesting rules, that create a story almost like a machine – and on the other hand I really yearned for a bit more narrative – it was very much action packed and roll-heavy. I think this was in part also because most of the people at the table – myself included – were new to the game. It’s just easier to try to obey the rules if you don’t hide them behind a narrative veil. My fingers itched to run it myself sometimes though.

On Friday I played the fifth episode of our Pasión de las Pasiones campaign. This was really also an action packed episode, but because of the nature of the game, that means packed with narrative and drama. Three of the four characters went in meltdown, including mine. I found it interesting that I had such trouble with the romance part of this game, the other characters being mostly female, but that I now feel so much more relaxed about it after having this meltdown in the arms of a male character. I guess I am really gay. We decided that next episode will be our finale, as we can’t really find other dates in July and we don’t want to have it fizzle out due to holidays and people moving away. This fifth session, however, felt like a finale in many ways. Curious to see what happens next week.

On Thursday I also played the board game Harmonies with my brother and his partner. Would recommend! (And I heard they ordered the game for themselves as well...)

Ran

On Thursday I ran 11.6km to the office. That’s the nice thing about this weather: my full office outfit fits in my trail-run backpack. This was just an easy run, but also quite a wet one: it started raining when I just left and midway I was soaked. Luckily the rain slowed down a bit near the end, so I arrived mere wet – and was very grateful for the fact we have a shower.

I also ran 11.6km back, because I had skipped the interval run earlier in the week. So I did run the 2km warm up, and then the two sets of 5 times 400 meter at 4:15/km, and then ran the 2km cool down and the rest of the way home (still quite a bit). I did not hit the required pace, as I didn’t want to push myself too much after the run in the morning and to be honest, I think this was actually a bit too much.

On Saturday I wanted to join Proud Strides again for 5km, followed by 14km at the N70 trail route in Nijmegen, but no, I was just not recovered, so I skipped running all together.

On Sunday I ran 6km easy around the ArenA where a lot of people where gathering for a Bruno Mars concert. It was interesting to see how the logistics of it worked, which crowds moved to which lines. I usually only see the part at the train station.

I feel fine now, so I am confident the upcoming week will go well.