Where Worlds Collide

From Boing Boing comes news of a terrible horror: Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones.

The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.

That’s what they want you to believe: they’re really a wave of attack from an alien life form; trying to strangle our lines of communication.

Perhaps they’re even early prototype versions of Daleks: the sink plungers of doom and the killer egg whisks will come later.

I’m always known British commercial radio was direly banal; now we have official statistics on just how bad things are (I won’t say ‘Has become’, because I don’t think there was ever a day when it wasn’t)

1. George Michael

2. Elton John

3. Robbie Williams

4. Kylie Minogue

5. Bryan Adams

6. Madonna

7. Phil Collins

8. Cliff Richard

9. Mick Hucknall

10. Paul McCartney

I blame the legion of people that change channel the second a radio station plays a song they don’t like. Commercial radio stations live in fear of such people. This fear forces them to keep their playlists ‘safe’, and they won’t threaten their advertising revenue by playing anything edgy or innovative.

John Bradford, director of the Radio Academy (whose collected royalties form the basis of this chart, had this to say:

“This chart is an interesting snapshot of which artists have most shaped popular culture, as the number of radio stations both competing for our attention and playing their material has spiralled”

If all commercial radio stations end up competing for the same lowest common denominator, then perhaps those glorious free markets aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.

Or maybe it’s just that too many people have no taste. Bah! Force them to all to listen to Mötorhead!

I suspect the same sort of pathologies exist in an awful lot of different hobbies. Compare this post from Bruce Baugh about RPG fandom, with this one from Electric Nose about the model railway hobby. Spot the comparisons?

Another weekend, another train show. This time it was the Derby show.

I was a little disappointed in this years’ show, while still good it wasn’t quite as good as previous years. Perhaps it was because this year focussed on American outline modelling rather than continental European. It’s probably because I’ve never spent any time watching trains on the left hand side of the Atlantic that American layouts, however well modelled don’t really appeal to me. It’s also the two best American layouts, “Pueblo Falls” and “Bethany Wells” have appeared at many shows over the last couple of years, and I’ve seen both several times before.

For me, the best layout was the superbly modelled “Farkham”, an urban layout set in an industrial part of northern England in the 1990s, with some very good urban scenic modelling; the office block under construction, alongside decaying Victorian structures.

My credit card did not escape unscathed; M G Sharp were there, and so were the Kato SBB Re6/6s. I’d already bought one in the newer red livery, now it’s been released in the older dark green colour scheme (some of the real locos still carried this livery at the time of my last visit to Switzerland in 2003)

My journey suffered significant delays in both the outward and return journeys; outwards there was a 20 minute delay on the Virgin Trains connection from Chesterfield caused by a ‘fatality at Northallerton’. Coming back, I had a long wait at Sheffield because First Trans Pennine’s 158 had broken down somewhere (perhaps it died of shame from the horrid First ‘livery’?)

I mentioned in the previous post about running convention games using my Kalyr setting. I though I’d post the one page summary of the setting I’ve written to use as player handouts; I’m interested in hearing some feedback on this.

Races

Kandar
Physically, the kandar are a race of slender humanoids, a head taller than humans, with copper coloured skin; some individuals have a purplish or even a greenish tinge to them. Kandar are not native to Kalyr. Millennia ago they were transported to the planet by the beings known as The Guardians, who the Kandar still worship as gods to this day. At one time the Kandar had an advanced technological civilisation, but it collapsed into barbarism following war and plagues. Today’s kandar have rebuilt on the ruins of their own past, but have never managed to get anywhere near the heights of their previous civilisation, whose ruins still litter the countryside. Their present day society is highly stratified and static, and individual Kandar can be arrogant and cruel.

Humans
If the Guardians brought the Kandar to Kalyr, it was the Kandar themselves who were responsible for bringing humans to the planet, by means of a now lost technology involving some kind of dimensional portals. The first humans were kidnapped through time and space to serve as workers and slaves. Today many humans are still enslaved, working the vast farms that feed the Kandar of the cities, but many more are free men, either living as second-class citizens in the Kandar cities, or setting up new communities outside the areas of Kandar rule.

Organisations

The Academy of Knowledge
Often known by the kandar name The Karazthan, the Academy of Knowledge preserves what remains of the technology of the Kandar. They maintain workshops in every Kandar city, which are the sole source of any mechanical or electrical devices, from firearms to vehicles to electric lighting. The means of producing or repairing anything technological is a jealously guarded secret, and the organisation has no qualms about using violence to protect its monopoly power. Two other things of note about them; firstly, they make great effort to keep completely out of the constant political intrigues and disputes in Kandar cities. Secondly, they are one of the few organisations in Kalyr where Kandar and humans work together on more or less equal terms.

The Academy of the Mind
The Academy of the Mind is a powerful guild of psionics. In the past Kalyr has gone though periods of rule by psionic elites, and periods where psis were hunted and persecuted. The relationship between psis and ‘normals’ today is a sort of nervous standoff. Psis do not attempt to rule themselves, but no city ruler is without psionic advisors. They also find psis extremely useful for dirty work such as locating or interrogating criminals or awkward dissidents. In return, the rulers pledge to protect the psis from ‘the mob’. The Academy of the Mind itself is a microcosm of Kalyr as a whole; all the same political and cultural issues that divide Kalyr divide the Academy.

The Academy of Life
The Academy of Life is to bio-tech what the Academy of Knowledge is to ‘dry’ technology. It’s their genengineered crops and farm animals that keep the populations of the cities fed. Unlike the Academy of Knowledge, they’re alleged to be deeply involved in any number of political conspiracies, and there are all kinds of dark rumours concerting ongoing projects in secret research laboratories in remote locations. But people say bad things about the Karazthan too…

This week’s Game WISH asks:

Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t?

I love games with rich, detailed settings. I remember the time I first joined the RPGAMES forum on CompuServe many years ago, and reading through the background files for the various games run on the message boards. Two of the first games I joined were the two with the greatest volume of background material: Hawiian Vacation, a GURPS cyberpunk game with a very detailed future history and long lists of megacorps, and Gensalorn, a game using the Runequest rules, with an equally detailed list of cultures and history. The first proved to be one of the most memorable games I have ever played in, the second unfortunately folded not long after I joined because several other players dropped out around the same time (nothing to do with me, I have to say!).

I think the reason like detailed settings as a player is because I like my characters to be grounded in some kind of context. Unless the game is set in some variant of the real world, in which case the real world can stand in as the setting, I have difficulty coming up with character concepts unless I have a clear idea of the character’s place in the world. If so much of the world is unspecified, I then have to create bits of the world myself, which risks treading on the toes of both the GM and of other players, whose vision might be different from mine.

This isn’t to everyone’s taste, though. I know gaming groups and have heard of plenty of others that think a defined setting is an anathema, because it ‘restricts what can happen’. That is a perfectly valid style of play, especially for campaigns that lean heavily on the tropes of Hollywood action movies; it’s just not to my taste. I’ve heard such campaign styles described as “Truman Show Games” after the film, in which the PCs and the immediate plotline exist in a vacuum, and there is no wider world that either affects or is affected by events within the game.

Putting on my GM’s hat, the problem with detailed complex settings is making them accessible to new players. It’s a fact that many would-be players aren’t prepared to wade through a hundred or more pages of closely-spaced text explaining weird cultural customs and the complex interrelationships of clans, cults, guilds and megacorps.

One approach to take is for the starting player characters to have as little knowledge of the gameworld as the players themselves. This was the approach, I believe, taken by Empire of the Petal Throne, in which the initial PCs are assumed to be crass barbarians newly arrived in the empire. I’ve tried taking a similar approach when I decided to add a couple of new players to my online Kalyr game. The existing characters encountered an ancient space/time portal, and I asked the two new players to generate characters from present-day earth, who then ended up falling through this portal, to land in a strange and exotic world.

Another is to narrow the focus, an approach I’ve also used for convention style one-shots for the Kalyr setting. Don’t try to explain the whole world, just the bits necessary for the character’s backgrounds. For my Kalyr one-shots I’ve made all characters agents for the same guild. Hero Quest takes a similar approach; rather than overload players with details of all the myriad races and cultures of Glorantha, focus on just one or two of them as the settings for beginning campaigns.

Luca Turilli, with or without his band Rhapsody, plays music you will either love or hate. Playing operatic pomp-metal that makes Queen sound like XTC, his music goes way beyond over the top and comes out the other side. Multiple choirs and orchestral instrumentation swell the band’s sound, and typical lyrics are so Dungeons and Dragons you can hear the polyhedral dice rolling.

Prophet of the Last Eclipse is Luca’s second solo album, following on from 1999′s “Kings of the Nordic Twilight” and four albums by Rhapsody. (It came out in 2002; either I missed it the first time round, or the distributors had been very slow getting it into the shops)

“Prophet”, like “Kings” and most of Rhapsody’s albums, is another concept album. The concept is more than a little corny, lyrically he’s gone into outer space this time. But this isn’t really the sort of music you listen to for the words. Song titles like “The Age of Mystic Ice” and “Rider of the Astral Fire” should give you the idea. All the trademark sounds are there; sweeping choral parts from four different choirs, fragments of Latin, and symphonic sweeps interrupted by bursts of speed metal. Compared with previous Rhapsody and Luca Turilli solo releases there’s noticeably less guitar on this one, with more focus on the choral and orchestral parts. Again we have an appearance by the Icelandic soprano Rannveig Sif Sigurdardottir (Now there’s a name to conjure with).

As before, parts of the album are so cinematic I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Luca starts writing film scores; the instrumental “Zaephyr Skies Theme” certainly sounds like the theme from one of the heroic fantasy films that will surely be made in the wake of the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

Overall, a Threat Rating of 4, does +2 damage vs. minimalist indie fans.

The Non-Euclidian Staircase now has it’s own domain! I wondered where it had gone….

And talking of End Times fundies, Slacktivist continues his dissection of the excrable “Left Behind”. He’s going through the hell of reading this awful book, so that the rest of us don’t have to.

I’ve often considered the Guardian’s George “Moonbat” Monbiot a bit of a wingnut; too often he can be the sort of enviro-leftist loon that gives both the left and environmentalism a bad name. But in this article on American fundamentalism, he might just have a point.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all “true believers” (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.

I’ve started to fear that Christian fundamentalism in America, particularly the ‘End Times’ crowd have now become as dangerous to the security of the world as their Islamic counterparts. The danger takes a completely different form: Followers of the twisted version of Islam commit individual acts of terrorism, often on a large scale. The danger of the twisted form of Christianity is more subtle, it that it uses it’s voting power to influence foreign policy of the United States in dangerous ways.

Of course, I accept the possibility that I might be wrong. Just as some American commentators conjure up apocalyptic scenarios of an Islamised Europe which flies in the face of reality, it may be that we Europeans exaggerate the power and influence of the lunatic fringe of religious right in America. But with someone as extreme as John Ashcroft in such a position of power, may we do have cause to worry.