Congenial

Spent the weekend at this years BRS con, with Friday being an "on my bike day" so I could sample the Real Ale Bar, the other days playing chauffeur for Karen, and running other errands.

As usual, it was a good chance to meet people I'd not seen in ages -- including Paul Mason, who had managed a visit back from Japan, to talk about (or point and laugh about) how academia views the fan phenomenon.

And as usual, it made me think, maybe I should dust off something from the cupboard and try doing this thing again, even if only just once every other year. Maybe some HeroQuest or something similar. But then the moment passes.

Sic transit…

http://wkbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=7963395

Looks like Gary failed a Con check while taking his ageing roll.

Interesting

Was at Consternation, the RPG con held at New Hall over the weekend, mainly to free up a yard or more of shelf-space at the auction.

In between getting dragged into playing railway board games, which I never do any good at, I was helping ensure that the real ale bar was not going to be left with a surplus. Drinking stuff at over 4% rather than under makes a notable difference. At Worldcon, I was going for the 3.8% Goldihops; and on the Friday, the Minotaur mild. Saturday and Sunday the other beers at 4-4.3% were on, and the mild was exhausted.

I cycled home quite happily after six pints on Sunday, but as soon as I got off to push the bike down the drive and into the garage, I was well wobbly. That was quite weird.

Web (server) logs

I detected a couple of new trends this month, adding to the Eva lemon enthusiasts, and the ones looking for people whose names appear in my genealogy. Both are driven by the wonderfully dumb “Ask Jeeves” engine.

The first looks like people trying to research their homework (questions about planets without moons or rings, or the land under the sea, or worker bee leg adaptations) — and may Eschaton preserve them if they use what they find on my pages.

The second is more of a shock, as my site gets amazingly high (often first place!) ratings on queries about girls' kecks or rainwear fetishism.

Though I was amused by the hit my old RPG pages got for Superhero 2044.

Reading list

I have been assigned some improving books as part of my personal development goals for the next half year or so, to wit:

• The Mythical Man Month
• Systems Analysis for Engineers and Managers
• The Innovators Dilemma
• Crossing the Chasm
• The One Minute Manager
• The 59 Second Employee: How to stay one second ahead of your one minute manager
• The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups
• The Games People Play
• Getting to Yes

But haven't been being that sad over the break.

No, rather I've been working through other stuff:

BESM — Revolutionary Girl Utena I & II

Very pretty series guides, but how do you actually manage to make an RPG, even a one-shot - out of this?

BESM — Serial Experiments Lain Ultimate Fan Guide

Unlike the above, this is not new, but like the above, only squared as to how do you make this a game. Industry veteran Bruce Baugh (author) loses a couple of street-cred points in managing to miss the blatant Proust reference during Lain's final conversation with Yasuo (not that I've read À la recherche du temps perdu myself).

Trio for Sliderule and Typewriter — Iceworld, Needle, & Close to Critical

Collection of essential classic SF by Hal Clement, when hard SF was adventures in practical physics and chemistry. The passage of 50 years has worn some stories better than others - Needle only seemed dated in its use of propellor driven planes in its medium term future with abundant cultured biofuels; Close to Critical is offworld, alien environment stuff where the lack of networked information infrastructure can be set to one side. But Iceworld doesn't wear its age well. Star-faring aliens needing to perform a sample return chemistry mission to determine the composition of Earth's atmosphere?

It was thus with a great degree of future shock I then changed gears to read

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross [Pick of the bunch]

One of the depressingly few big picture edge-of-singularity space operas that have come out since A Fire Upon The Deep; and here we are not protected by any zone boundaries... Read it, enjoy it, and wonder why people still keep churning out standard issue spaceship fiction.

More memes

RPG meme

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?
   OD&D up to Eldritch wizardry with Pasadena cleric system
2. What RPG do you currently play most often?
   Burned out years back; last as player was using the WEG Star Wars d6 system; as GM varAD&D2.
3. What is the best system you've played?
   I was never really a player, much more a GM. In terms of enjoyment hours, the old var-D&D c1978, follwed by Champions (3rd).
4. What is the best system you've run?
   I would have liked it to have been HeroQuest - but that didn't quite manage to rekindle the embers. In terms of the players having a good time for a reasonable number of sessions - AD&D2+house rules, followed by Champions (3rd).
5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?
   Uh? You what? I'd consider myself a gamist with simulationist leanings.
6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?
   HeroQuest, even though the 25 year wait was just a bit too long, because I liked the feel as I read it.
7. How often do you play?
   Not at all for the last 5-6 years. Was monthly before that. GMd weekly for a good bit in the early 90s.
8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?
   If there is a theme, it's characters who walk up to opponents and hit them; and if they do develop as characters to role-play, they are ones who wonder why they're not doing something safe instead.
9. What is your favorite Genre for RPGs?
   Fantasy, followed by 4-colour superhero. I couldn't get into the dark style of games that seemed to be everywhere in the 90s; and SF games always had "which sub-genre" and "how to justify 1950s technology" issues.
10. What Genres have you played in?
    Fantasy, superheroes, a little bit of "'60s spy show crossed with Dr. Who", a number of abortive attempts at SF. Once each Paranoia and CoC (and never again).
11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?
    By far the most as GM. Play got less and less comfortable. Before I GMd I wrote SF for my own amusement; and since I stopped GMing, I went back to that. Not that characters are as amenable when they're your own :)
12. Do you like religion in your games?
    In fantasy games, yes. It's what makes Glorantha such an appealing setting. I could even do the generic-Catholic quasi-mediaeval setting. Other settings stay secular, by tacit consensus.
13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything "fair game"?
    The tacit consensus was very much PG-13 style play, staying away from the areas not to be discussed at dinner parties - sex, religion, politics (No sex please, we're British)
14. Have you developed your own RPG before?
    Yes, back c78, as a codification of the complete rewrite of D&D we'd been playing.
15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so...what?
    Yes - in WD50 (RQ and some D&D stats for the Citadel WD special figures collection) and 78 (planetary system accretion program based on Stephen Dole's ACRETE); a review in Interactive Fantasy, with credits for assist on a number of Phil Masters' GURPS or Hero publications.

What a difference a year makes

A year back I was at Conjuration, the latest instance of the RPG convention, and the temperatures were just down from their record-breaking levels. There I got inspired by Heroquest - and I would have expected to have been in Leicester this or one of the last couple of weekends for the alternate year biennial, more Glorantha oriented, con; and I'd expected to have been blogging more about it. But as noted earlier, anime has managed to win out.

It also makes a year since the temperatures finally goaded me into getting a cropped haircut, rather than the non-descript, parting on the left, style I'd maintained at various lengths — up off the ears for the previous decade or so; very shaggy while in the 6^th form and at university— for as far back as I remember (at least back to '63). And it's so much more comfortable and convenient - it's not really a noticeable loss of insulation in the winter, but it is better when it dries quickly after a shower in cold weather.

It did mean adjusting the fit of my cycle helmet :-)

Fan-fic 1, RPGs 0

One of the things promised by "proper" role-playing, deep character immersion, beyond the initial hack'n'slash rush, is the emotional involvement. I've not checked it recently, but nearly a decade ago, this was the sort of thing being discussed on r.g.f.advocacy, with tales of players reduced to tears by the death of their PC's favourite (NPC) uncle or some such.

I trust people to recount their experiences — but I can say I've never encountered such in 25+ years involvement with the hobby. Anger at how the PCs (or players) are treated is about the only emotion beyond ennui.

Meanwhile, having written a chunk of Evangelion fan-fic, mainly to exorcise the gloomy nature of the concluding movie, the first other reader that I know of was actually moved to weeping. (and, I admit, I'd had to stop for the occasional snuffle-break while composing it).

It's not as if writing is easier than GMing — characters are just as contrary as players, when all is said and done — but I think it does allow one more easily to approach matters with defences of cynicism and distance lowered.

It also makes me wonder how many real *paid* authors have a quiet snuffle when writing the bits that have that sort of effect on me…

Film — Avalon

Having had to resort to amazon.co.jp to find a DVD of Mamoru Oshii's Avalon after deciding to look for it to see again a while back, it arrived today after surface mail transit.

It is a tribute to the commonality of UI design that with only a little translation, I could work my way through the shopping process on the Japanese site.

The film is a bit of a sleeper - the first time around when I saw it in the cinema in summer '02, there was a lot of "what the hell is going on here?" - later, with more exposure to Oshii's work, and knowing what the ending was, I could see what was actually going on on the way to the ending. This made it a lot more satisfying.

I'm still amused by the complete use of D&D terminology - save for Cleric => Bishop - for a modern small unit tactics VR game...

Man is the measure

One interesting thing I've noticed over the years is how RPGs tend to work from the author as norm, and what is actually human doesn't always fit. At under 150cm in height, Lee Gold (Alarums and Excursions, Land of the Rising Sun, GURPS: Japan, Lands of Adventure) never finds herself on other peoples' height/weight charts. Neil Taylor, a gamer friend of mine from college days, was surprised to find that he only fitted as a Melnibonean on the original Stormbringer height/weight charts. Ron Wheelhouse, another college friend, had such poor night vision that as well as at times having to help him through dimly lit parts of various Cambridge colleges, I found that I rated somewhere between elf and dwarf in his nightsight tables. And the 100kg normal human from Hero System is more an upper bound than a mean.

And it's not only what makes a human. It's the ecology too. A lot of USAn material assumes USAn ecology, with funny stuff like poison ivy or critters like racoons (but it's not only games - see also the live action 101 Dalmatians for a racoons near London episode), rather than old world bestiaries. Glorantha has shedloads of New World material - pumas, maize, potatoes.

And the climate. OK, the UK does have a fairly anomalous climate, in terms of mild winters at high latitudes (until the North Atlantic Convergence chokes). But I just discovered one that had passed me by. It's about the Wastes, east of Prax in Genertela in Glorantha. Historically, my reading of these has been rather like the Red Center of Australia (or perhaps the Tekla Makan desert of Central Asia), with Prax being like the West Australian acacia scrub.

But the other day I read The Book of Drastic Resolutions : Prax for the first time since burn-out, and looked at the climate descriptions there. The wastes are supposed to have 20" rainfall a year, almost all in the winter half.

Hello?

I live in East Anglia. It's the grain and sugarbeet arable heart of UK farming. It has an annual rainfall of 18" a year (semi-desert - real desert starts at 12" or below); again mainly in the winter, with summer thunderstorms. That's a whole different take on the Wastes as being mainly just steppeland, south of the snowline.

That's before we consider that the Heortlings (standard skills including snowshoe use) live to the south of the inveterate toga wearers of Dara Happa. IMG, at least, Sartar is more like the Yorkshire Dales in terms of climate - but the cool is due to altitude and being south of the Solar equator, which passes through Dara Happa.

Let it rain...

What a weekend - two solid days of grey and rain, the light going not that long after 15:00. It was nice four weeks back that the drought broke after some months, and the garden - and water table - need a lot of gentle just-more-than-drizzle to replenish over the autumn; but this was a bit much. We'd been spoilt with the previous dry weekends into actually doing some tidying of the garden. Now we have the soggy state that left the compost unused for previous years because the garden wasn't in a state to receive it.

So I spent a lot of time at the computer - extracting user facing strings from FOX 1.1.41, so it can be localized; a topic that no-one on the foxgui mailing list has ever raised - which speaks well for the US idea that international means including Hawaii and Alaska too...

And then doing a lot of fiddling with HeroQuest character sheets, and watching some DVDs.

Wet weather also meant a lot of alternately stir-crazy and soggy moggies. *sigh*

All change...

After some thought, Peter and Janet have decided to swap, chop and change characters. Peter is now intending to play the same sort of weakling character, but as a hunter, and initiate to Odayla, while Janet will play the merchant, and initiate to the default-weirdo cult for such things of Issaries. And I'd had such hopes for the original ideas. For one thing they all had mythic antipathies to Darkness. Ho hum.

Keeping a tradition alive

It's always been assumed (at least since campaigns became more than a dungeon which characters appeared in out of a between-time limbo) that in FRPGs, the PCs are misfits and trouble-makers. This was amply proved again the other night when I started character generation for some HeroQuest.

At the moment it's only Karen, Peter and Janet. Young Elizabeth was too busy writing a D&D 3e character generation program in VB4 with all the tables of skills and what-not in Access; and at not yet 11 she was demonstrating hacker persistance in extending and fixing it until, after much convincing, she agreed it was time for bed. [I must say I was impressed - if one ignores the fact that she's used a lurid colour scheme, and assumes a given screen resolution, it's actually a well featured and systematic program.]

I started by running them across a version of the on-line clan generator, stopping before the Lunars come on the scene, as that's when I want to start the campaign. They managed to build a clan that was Balanced when Heort showed the way; it ended up in modern times as a Peace clan, but one whose favourite gods included Urox and Humakt! This game it's not only the PCs who are going to be odd...

At that point we started the first bit of the character descriptions - filling in the blanks in the initial "[Name] is a Heortling [profession]. [Pronoun] is a [relationship] to [deity]."

So after a couple of hours explanations, discussions, and passing books around, we have

• a merchant, initiated to Desemborth the Sly Breeze - according to Peter's outline of character concept (the words still have to be firmed up) he's an avowed non-fighter, and disappointment to his family. So having lighted on the thief sub-cult of Orlanth as the obvious complement to his profession, but really not wanting all the Combat affinity and expected skills of the usual location as part of the Adventurous aspect, and not being respectable enough for Allfather, will have to reach Orlanth though his Thunderous aspect instead.
• a hunter, initiated to Gavren the Hunter, the subcult of Yinkin the Cat.
• a warrior, initated to Vingamakt the Defender (Vinga with sub-cults of Defender Storm and the Orlanth Thunderous sub-cult of Helamakt the Warrior Storm).

This leaves them all with 89 words to use; and I can see the two latter characters picking up alynx followers or sidekicks.

I was intending to start off with some of the material from Barbarian Adventures, modified for a starting date in the 1590s - but with the majority of the players being female, and the PCs being same-gender, the sections that assume the default all male (even in the modern-day when that's only usually the Orlanthi all) party, will be, shall we say, interesting.

Too few hours

Having spent a week on holiday (so away from the always-on Internet) had the expected effect on the posting frequency, especially when I got engrossed in other things. Passive consumption of old media, or ruminations about what I might do in an HeroQuest game aren't the stuff of great blogs. And then when I got to work, a project I had expected would have been handed over to another team to complete has been bounced back, so I'm neck deep in work.

For anyone who's interested, the old cat is doing well - putting on weight now, and being right spoilt by having the individual servings of Senior cat food (which clearly taste better than the average run of meatblob) - and not too distressed by the twice daily dosing. He's filling out so the ribs don't show, and the spine is a lot less bony when you stroke his back.

More Gloranthan musings

If Kallyr Starbrow exists in any campaign I run, I think she will have to be an follower of Rigsdal One-Eye-Open, not that funny foreign Polaris chap.

A revelation

Thinking further about the Ehilm/Elmal thing. I just figured where Elmal is - it's the Orlanthi name for the Buserian Lightfore or Praxian Sun Daughter. The night-watchman, who patrols the skies while the Sun is absent.

MGDV as one might say.

A dragon wing of string and sticks

A while back, I lamented a lack of possible takers for a HeroQuest campaign. Mentioning this to Peter and Janet, when I saw them the other day, for the first time after the rebuff from local players, they expressed a qualified interest, but in the face of a different problem to the one I had considered. Not that the kids would be up and demanding of attention, but that it would be likely that Lizzie, the elder of the two, would want to join in (having demanded to be let play, and having played a little bit of D&D 3e already).

Certainly when she puts her mind to it, as a bright 10 year old girl, she can be surprisingly grown up in the way she acts, especially when she is wanting to associate with the grown-ups, rather than stepping down to the level of her little brother.

It strikes me therefore as something that might offer an intriguing possibility. If I were to run a fairly standard Sartar/Heortling based campaign, where we now have a lot of data about the people and the society, playing up the culture game aspects, it would be possible to do things like turning the character generation into a story-telling/role-playing hybrid, talking her through the childhood and initiation/coming-of-age of her character. It would be an opportunity to tell the tales of the people, in a form that children might be told them, and let her make the decisions for her character in a role-played manner.

It would be work for me - I'd need to do the job pretty damn well - and it might just bore her to tears, but wouldn't it be something if we could pull it off!

[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]

Conan the Republican

It was back in '91 that a Shadowrun supplement had a throwaway about one Senator Schwarzenegger. Being born outside the US, that really is the only possible next destination for the new Gubernator.

Not Dead Yet

Another one of those weeks where miracles need to be performed on a daily basis at work, and then just too much to do in the way of hobby activities. On one strand I've been upgrading my network-facing machine at home from one I got 4 years ago to a more recent second-hand machine, which means a ton of stuff to do in the way of hardening it (not helped when Norton AV LiveUpdate doesn't play nicely with WinXP). Still to come are setting it up with all the external network stuff, installing all the hardware and software from the old box, swapping the network around, and decommissioning the old one.

Then, in the time I'd normally spend blogging, I've been advising my friends at Mhorann Games on the web-site they've put together. At the moment it looks slightly better than a "My First Website" - and at least there are no broken links now - but the table driven layout has its problems. If I were doing it myself, I'd be using .pngs with transparency for the banner and the buttons, and CSS layout, for reasons explained on sites like A List Apart. [That piece was written over 30 months ago. There's no reason to be molly-coddling old browers in Q4'03!]

Later

The Norton LiveUpdate issue turned out to be a proxy problem of some sort - at time of writing, both XP machines were going out through a copy of the Privoxy proxy server. Moving the new one to have the modem, LU seems to work OK. Although the modem seems to need to be on at boot time for XP to notice it's there. My older XP box has the same problem with my Visor in its synch cradle - have to see if the new one is better behaved. At least having an industrial strength OS kernel, however wrapped in consumer glitz and entry-level limitations, the frequent blue screens seen with the Mailwasher spam-filter on Win98.2 are a thing of the past.

The Orlanthi sun-god [update]

In the spirit of blogging, I'm adding a new entry rather than overwriting the earlier draft.

Greg Stafford asked an interesting and correct question over a decade ago, when asking about "who is the Orlanthi sun god?" - but the answer he got is one that caused a lot of confusion, until it was hammered into a compromise , such as this summary by Nick Brooke…

Unfortunately, I still think Greg's answer was wrong in its essentials. One god is the night watchman who stayed behind when Orlanth went on the LBQ - his aspects are twilight and the watch-fire. The reconciliation with Yelmalio is an identification of the twilight aspects, which presumably rejected an origin amongst the Lowfires that the watch-fire implies. This is the god most obviously deserving of the name of Elmal. His devotees are able to use some minor fire magic appropriate to a night watchman's role (no Hill of Gold in his story), while Yelmalions are not. That aside, any deity around during the Great Darkness really, by definition, cannot be a sun god – the mythic precedent is too strong.

At about the same time that Greg dropped his bombshell, Neil's RQ game almost stumbled across the what I feel is the right answer, when the PCs stumbled across a remote Orlanthi tribe who partook of very austere ways like the Solar monks of the far northern Empire of long ago. Their Orlanth is, I think, much more likely to be the real Orlanthi sun-god.

The obvious Orlanthi Sun-God is, of course, Orlanth in his aspect as the successful completer of the LBQ, restorer of the Sun after the Great Darkness and the Gods' War, Orlanth Lightbearer, or Orlanth Lucifer if you rather. We can see the influence of Orlanth in the fact that what he restored was not the static Sun of the old sterile Fire Tribe Emperor, but a Sun that follows the Storm Spiral, around and around the world, sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south. Orlanth Lucifer would be the god of the Sun, but clearly not the Sun himself. The Orlanthi New Sun, the thing he came back with would be a separate entity - and Ehilm sounds the most plausible name for the sacred fire itself, which may or may not now be borne by Elmal.

Variant keywords:

Orlanth Lucifer: Affinities: Light, Underworld, Reconciliation; Secret: Return from Underworld. [This very mystical cult would have almost no devotees.]

To be initiated in this aspect, the candidate must have completed the Lightbringer HeroQuest, either as principal or by significantly supporting one of the principals. As a consequence, there are few initiates; and almost all of them are devotees.

Elmal: Combat as in Storm Tribe, but replace Light with Fire: Illuminate Surroundings, Tend Watch-fire, Kindle Brand, Unquenchable Light, Withstand Cold.

Ehilm, the sacred torch: Light as Storm Tribe's Elmal , Sunpath: Find Sunpath, Reveal Sunpath, Follow Sunpath, Sunpath Defence, Rising Leap, Warmth - Banish Frost, Resist Chill, Ripen Fruit, Cruel Heat; Secret - Radiant Gaze.