This second edition is going to be printed to a higher standard, and to do that we needed to get good images of those old woodcuts. Many are available online, but unfortunately the cover image (the Hand of the Philosopher) was not: the book we need is Chymischer Schriften by Isaac Hollandus, containing the book Hand of the Philosopher, and its namesake illustration. We could only find low resolution images, and those in high resolution had very deteriorated paper (I'm looking at you, Munich Library).
Fortunately Glasgow University has a very well-supplied Special Collection unit!
I went on a little trip on the other side of town to my alma mater, up to the twelfth floor of the library, and played around with 17th century books. And that's the Hand we were looking for.
(Photos courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections)
Staying on topic, 1000 woodcuts: Still Life is a brilliant video by Conner Griffith made animating more than 1000 woodcuts. It starts a bit slow, but it picks up wonderfully.
One Scene Adventures. An old trick of no-prep GMs is to create a situation that is Compelling, Complicated, and Contained: my players fall into this kind of stuff regularly, and you can have a one-scene session where you mostly adjudicate and make funny voices. In one of my favourite blog posts ever, Alex explains how to build them.
Public Service Broadcasting are band from London with a peculiar style: they are mostly instrumental, but weave in old radio broadcast and propaganda as voice tracks. They came to Glasgow last month for a preview of their last album, The Last Flight, based on the final trip of Amelia Earhart, where she vanished with her navigator. PBS are on a European tour now, and they are terrific live.
