Skip to content

$ published 2026-09-24| ~2 min read| 392 words

Berlin in Darkness

Work has been pretty rough these last few days and I barely have the energy to come home and do anything. Even so, I did end up getting something done, so the least I can do is put it down here.

First off, I’m about to finish the map of the Berlin in Darkness chantry. There’s a single room left, still empty, and I’m waiting for my players to come up with some idea to fill it with. The truth is I’m happy with the result; it’s certainly pretty eclectic, but I do think it captures each character’s mindset well.

Top-down map of the Berlin in Darkness chantry, set up in a dockside warehouse: bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms spread across the corners, a library with shelving and chests, a dark room with a red sofa, an armory, a gym and a meeting room with glowing walls; in the center, a large clear bay with a circular emblem on the floor.

On another front, yesterday I was tinkering with a few things in Aleph, the software I wrote to document roleplaying campaigns. Specifically, I set up the quests (the things the characters have shown an interest in doing) with a short description and a long one, the short one so you can take them in at a glance from the list. Nothing too heavy, but genuinely useful given the volume of stuff already in Berlin in Darkness. We’re talking about a hundred characters and dozens of locations with maps, all geolocated. Plenty of cloth to cut, so to speak.

Screenshot of Aleph showing the quest list for the Berlin in Darkness campaign: a sidebar with sections for world, history, economy and campaign, and a column of quest cards, each with its title, a short description and an active or completed label.

Next on my plate is a small change to Corylus, the writing software I’m developing. This is actually the first time I’ve worked cross-platform, meaning a language compiled on Windows and on Mac, and I’m running into strange problems with paths and with the integration with sync tools like Dropbox or OneDrive. It’s a tricky subject and, truth be told, a complex one, but there you go, one step at a time.

Screenshot of Corylus, the novel editor: on the left the folder tree and the story bible with characters and places; on the right the open chapter, with the paragraph being edited highlighted in white and the rest of the text dimmed.

To finish off, we got in a couple of short hours of the Berlin in Darkness session and it went pretty well. My players met a woman looking for an old Geiger counter, and I took the chance to slip in a hook about some black silhouettes that have turned up in one of the abandoned stations of the Berlin metro. I also left the session with the group standing outside a neo-Nazi bar with police there and a guy dressed in a sort of armor cobbled together out of pieces, Shaquille O’Neal in Steel style. My idea is to use it to expand the arc of the Iron Lady, one of the characters. We’ll see how it goes :)