I have run several campaigns in Dolmenwood - from early Wormskin and OSE Patreon days through the current open game license free format.
I’m consistently amazed at the depth this setting offers a sandbox-curious referee and a creative table. It is well worth exploring. It is also a masterpiece of information design
and the easiest tool I’ve used at the table.
My session notes for my current campaign are here if you are interested in what is achievable.
I am designing a long term early edition d&d sandbox (Delving Deeper rules) and I have found this series and ACOUP’s other worldbuilding very helpful in shaping my thoughts and filling in the edges of procedurally generated stuff.
If this triggers your interest in IRL firewood splitting it’s a very meditative and satisfying yard job. Also great mild to moderate workout between the splitting and stacking, especially on a crisp Fall afternoon.
I have a lot of splitting to do right now, and you're welcome to it. I'll only charge a low nominal fee. But let me know before September, because that's when I usually go rent a hydraulic splitter from the local hardware store. Then I spend a very long day splitting so that I can return it the next day.
I've spent a lot of time splitting with a big maul, but for me it's harder that it looks. I've broken two mauls by striking to far. And even with "soft" wood, I have stacks of green rounds that I couldn't split at all, the maul just bounces off. But I'm glad that you enjoy the process, I'd probably enjoy watching you work.
If the hydraulic splitter could be electric, so it would not be so loud, I could see that task being meditative. Preferably if the rounds could on a raised platform, so they could just be rolled onto the thing.
Next request, the wood could stack itself somehow.
Vertical splitters are better since the splitter comes down to ground level where your rounds already are. Much less lifting.
I'm not super quick with a maul, but I can pretty easily keep up with the hydraulic splitter I've used. The hydraulic splitter is nice for the ones that have really gnarly, interlocked grain.
Until you get a log so tough, it just stalls up when you draw a splitter. Happened more than once. Usually the log is stuck so far in the wedge you can't get it off either.
Yikes. That sounds like the kind of lesson one tries to learn secondhand, or at most once. Like the time I stalled out a tow-behind wood chipper (the kind tree services use).
It was a smaller one, and the process for getting the log out involved taking the jack off the trailer tongue and hooking it up to the feed roller springs assembly to spread the rollers far enough to pull the log out.
When I was a kid Dutch Elm disease was killing all the elm trees around me so that is what everyone was heating with. An elm log that is just large enough you need to split it can stall out a wood splitter (not every time, but you will get several in a day of splitting). When splitting by hand it is common to have the handle of the maul sticking out of the log and you can't see it from the top where it went in, you just keep beating it hoping it eventually goes.
Then we got a large oak tree once, logs you couldn't even life split clean when you barely did more than blow on them.
This reminded me when we I was a kid we had to split the wood for the whole winter and that was actually a huge job all day or few days and way harder than just a moderate workout.
I hated it then but actually now I miss the time I spend with my father and brother.
I hated cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, all of it. We ran a potbelly stove in the living room when I was a kid for heat. I hated the stove too.
The only thing I don't miss is rolling a piece of piss elm over to my city living "tough" cousins after two or three pieces of oak and watching the maul just bounce off. Always funny.
I absolutely hated it as a kid, but once I got into my late 20s I started loving it. A great workout and you can go at your own pace as long as you don't wait until the last minute to get it done.
Good workout and satisfying, I totally agree. I actually really enjoy it.
But the long term effects on your joints, even if you think you have perfect technique, its better to just get a wood splitter. We can do a whole winters wood in less than a day now, with minimal effort.
Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces.
Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.
Nope, splitting green wood is much more difficult than splitting dried logs, so I often cut a tree in the spring, stack the rounds, then split those rounds in the fall.
People overestimate how dry wood needs to be to burn correctly. Just have some ultra-dry kindling (seasoned for 2+ years) and you won't have any problems.
On the contrary, I know some folks who let all their wood dry too far, and it burned way too hot and ruined their stove (and almost burned their house down).
It’s an equation. If you have dry firewood, you need less of it at once. Some folks don’t understand that.
More water in the wood means less efficient combustion, more smoke and harsher smoke, which may irritate your neighbors downwind, or everyone around on still days.
Something every pit master learns along the way. People can tell you, you can read about it, but until you actually try using wood of different dryness, they are just words.
Don't listen to this noise; it fucking sucks, it's kinda dangerous, and it's not at all meditative. It's the exact opposite of meditative. My parents made me do it because they certainly didn't want to, because it sucks. I'm so glad I don't have to split firewood ever again.
If you're looking for a meditative exercise try yoga.
Most open-hearth fireplaces are tremendously inefficient, not only sending most of the heat up the chimney, but drawing in additional cold air in doing so.
A masonry stove with an external air draw should be far more efficient, and burn much more cleanly to boot. The pollution factor from woodstoves is another major consideration, and means wood-burning is limited in many areas.
My dad and his father built the house my family grew up in. The fireplace had two vents on either side of the fire box that drew air from the floor and vented near the ceiling. The ceiling fans in the room would circulate the air in the room. It was the only place I've spent time that a fireplace actually was useful.
When those work well they're fine but be very careful. It's not uncommon of for smoke to go out what you think is the in intake and often those aren't correctly built as a chimney and so you can burn your house down.
Knowing how ours were built, I don't even know what you describe could happen. The intake vents are on the floor with a standard height raised hearth (12"???) while the exit vents are about 6' off the floor. Not really sure how smoke is any where near the intake. The smoke is contained within the chimney. I'm at a loss at how to design something so poorly that the smoke is near any vents. Then again, I've grown up around construction, so maybe that knowledge is preventing me from thinking dumb???
Maybe I misunderstand your description. I'm referring to the fresh air inlet for the fire, not additional HVAC pipes. It is common for attempts to put a fresh air inlet in a fireplace to instead have smoke go out that fresh air inlet.
My understanding is that the venting dylan604 is describing relate to airflow around the firebox / chimney, rather than in or out of the firebox.
An incorrectly-placed firebox intake, or even a poorly-drafting open-hearth fireplace, can indeed dump smoke (and carbon monoxide) into the living / heated space.
Well, it's the kind of "meditative" you get when training martial arts forms. It gets good after a few years of preparation; before that, it's not as fun as spars and way less useful than general conditioning.
Coming from a kendo background, when I had to chop firewood for a few years while living in the countryside, I generally focused on accuracy. The swing is completely different than with a sword, and getting the chop to land at the exact spot (I drew lines with a marker) tens of times in a row was very satisfying, but required a lot of conscious effort to get there. It's not trivial to land a chop at the exact spot you want, and it's also quite hard to ensure the axe travels at its fastest exactly at the moment of impact.
It can be fun, but you need to be into things like that in the first place; plus, having to do it no matter the weather and all the other things you need to do can kill all the joy instantly.
The concept of what constitutes a sale under CCPA is pretty expansive. An exchange of value can be a sale that occurs outside of a processing relationship. I’d say their note is inaccurate.
American Catholics aren't really a monolith on this matter...or any. There are substantial differences between Catholics who seek out Jesuit parishes and those who seek out the Tridentine Mass and people who are just achieving physical presence and thinking about kickoff at 5:00 PM Sunday Mass to fulfill obligation and get out ASAP (no choir please, keep that sermon snappy). All of these are spiritually valid approaches imho.
The same is true here, yes. You'll see widely different stances and practical approaches to topics like immigration, premarital sex, and so on. Some people are strict, some people self define as catholic but only see church during weddings and funerals.
Putting effort in triggering the end of the world is nowhere on the spectrum though. I think if you told a priest you're pushing for that he would be seriously alarmed, like calling the police alarmed if you hold power.
> American Catholics aren't really a monolith on this matter
No, but as a general rule, Catholics don’t and have never fretted about the end times the way all sorts of Protestant sects have, historically. Which is curious given Matthew 24:36 and all the hullabaloo Protestants make about being “scriptural”. And perhaps more importantly, because it has authority on such matters, Church teaching makes no claims about when the end of the world will occur and it never has, because it cannot.
