Sassy Snowperson

The plan this time is a gimp yarn that I hope leans more toward a flame/spiral

I'll make a set with the blue as the slubby single and the green with the thin, consistant single and vice versa

My apprentice hard at work as per usual

My apprentice was aghast that we had to share the balcony atelier with the *shudder* youths.

I am unashamed to admit to bribery

I'm almost done with all the image editing which is great and exciting since that's the bulk of the project. I have a ton of other blog topics and experiments I want to run off and do, but I'm making sure I finish this first!

the only challenges that require multiple people are at the beginning and end - at the beginning to allow the players to bounce around there for a bit before they realize they need to go down, and also at the end to ensure that a runaway player has to wait for another to catch up

count the rice itself, of course, can only be played with one player, so that players never actually have to count rice (if you had to wait for a second player at the end, then whoever got closest would win) (this is ofc not accounting for hannah pilkes)

the middle rooms are great too, because they are easy to intentionally fail, and hard to win. the spot the difference rooms are especially good, because you think you understand what it is (spot the difference between the two halves of the room), and this is seemingly confirmed when you successfully loose, but once you come back to try to win, you realize you did not actually fully understand the game. the placement of these is important, too - only players who were intentionally trying to lose got to those rooms. any higher in the sequence, and they might have had a player trying to win reach the rooms first, and then they'd realize the twist

and also the decision to split the rooms up? 2 and 3 in a separate space from 4-8, so players would assume there are only 3 until someone loses enough, subtly hiding the majority of the game from them

did you know that by the time fallow deer were introduced to the british isles in the eleventh century, drop spindle spinning was already at least an eight thousand year old craft?

it is thought by archaeologists and anthropologists that spinning developed from cordage rolling, where plant fibres and animal sinews would be rolled on the lap. this practice emerged between forty and thirty-four thousand years ago and is still practiced all over the world.

true spinning began with tying fibres to a rock and spinning the rock over ten thousand years ago and quickly developed into the drop spindle which consists of a stick and a whorl (or weight) around nine thousand years ago. the earliest drop spindles tend to be found in the fertile crescent and egypt, though it is not known whether this is where they first developed or where they preserved best.

there are many arguments about when and where the spinning wheel was invented. but when the normans were taking rule of england in the eleventh century, it would be another two hundred years before spinning wheels began to be used there and another three hundred years yet before wheels began to displace drop spindles within the british isles.

You are a librarian! You have taken on management of a Mystical House full of secrets, which you must slowly reveal room by room. But! A catastrophe struck before your arrival, so you gotta clear the rooms out as you go.

Except you're just one person, you gotta go get your neighbors to help out.

Most of the people will charge me money to help out, but the towns blacksmith, my old war-buddy Denzel, he'll help for free.

"Denzeeel!" I pound on his doorway at the break of dawn. "Come up to the big spooky house, why don't you?"

He comes to the house. And I show him the best time. We drink a smoky tea, feast upon rare pears that only bloom in the fae seasons, I gift him some metal and encourage him to look at it's cool magic properties. Dawn to morning to afternoon, we have a wonderful time. And then, as the day grows dark and he's thinking about heading home, I stop him.

"before you go, can you do me a quick favor?" And then I walk them into the basement, through some caves, and point to a room with roughly one billion bats.

"you can clear out roughly a billion bats, right? I really need to get in there."

And then my sweet, long-suffering friend goes into the room filled with roughly a billion bats to clear it out for me. Good man, I think fondly, as he stumbles home to his smithy after.

And then, as night turns to morning, I contemplate the next room, deep in the library's secret prison, burning with an eternal flame of the monstrous prisoner that broke his chains.

*wipes a single proud tear from my eye*

This is a fanbinding of The Dwarf Queen, a discworld fanfiction by @sassysnowperson which I loved and want to recommend.