Where Worlds Collide

For weeks Dapol have been teasing us with their secret new N gauge product to be released at Warley next weekend. Rumours of ’58, 59 and 60 reasons’ made some people wrongly suspect it would be one of those three classes of loco. Then came two more rumours, one that the RRP would be �140, which suggested a multiple unit rather than a loco, and that it would be suitable for both modern and steam era modellers. In a conversation with Grahame Hedges at the Crewe show a few days ago, we considered the possibilities of a Southern Region 4-CEP, or a Blue Pullman.

Today, they decided to let the cat out of the bag, and only one of those two rumours turned out to have any truth in it. The new model will be a Class 220 Virgin Voyager.

I’ve posted many, many times about the shortcomings of the full sized Voyager from the perspective of a traveller on this blog, but when viewed from the outside it’s both an iconic and ubiquitous train. They literally travel the length and breadth of the country; from Scotland to Cornwall, from Wales to Brighton. Very few present day main line locations would be complete without one.

Also coming up are a couple of interesting wagons, most notable of which is an intermodal ‘Spine’ wagon with containers, to go with the 66. The combination of the Voyager and the 66 with two or three decent modern wagons to go with it means that the modeller of the contemporary scene has the start of the ‘model railway in a box’ that GWR BLT modellers had from the start.

That wet splattering noise you hear is the exploding heads of certain members of the kettle brigade. One or two of their number were still pontificating up to a few hours earlier that there was no way that Dapol would be doing any modern multiple units because there was clearly no demand for anything wasn’t a locomotive, preferably something that ran before 1968. And anyway the Voyager only runs in one livery, and Dapol will only do things in 57 livery variations. The mystery Dapol product was ‘obviously’ going to be a large tender loco. Let’s hope they accept the Q1, Dapol’s next model, as an acceptable consolation prize.

Interesting post by Bill Stoddart on generic roleplaying systems, in particular which ones to choose when setting games in a specific fictional setting. Read the whole thing to find out which fictional world he set his game in and why he chose the system he did. It’s very much about Simulationist systems, an area of gaming that seems to be neglected by the post-Forgeite RPG theory crowd.

BESM has what might be called a core model of what’s going on: If you’re trying to decide whether a rule or a game mechanic makes sense, you can try to visualize the game events as a series of pictorial images that you might see in anime, and ask if the game rules produce the outcome and the flow of cause and effect that you would expect in anime. GURPS, in contrast, isn’t designed around that core model. In GURPS, what you try to do is decide how things would happen in the real world, or in the-real-world-if-people-had-superpowers or the-real-world-if-magic-worked or whatever. GURPS reinforces this with the concept of “reality testing” and with the use of real units such as pounds, yards, and seconds, eschewing all game units such as game inches or encumbrance points. The reality testing of GURPS is testing against, well, physical reality; the “reality testing” of BESM is testing against anime reality.

…

It strikes me that other games might be looked at in similar terms, as each having a core model of how things work, that specific rules can be compared to to see how well they work. For example, the core model of Hero System is not a physical one but a tactical one: characters are tactical units that are supposed to be balanced against each other in tactical terms, to produce as even a match between opposing forces as possible and thus best allow players to test their skill in handling those forces. The core model of FUDGE is a narrative one: characters are defined in terms that could be used in a story, and the outcomes of their actions are supposed to be plausible elements in a narrative. The core model of Toon is of course classic Warner Brothers cartoons, a visual reality somewhat different from that of anime.

Perhaps that explains why I’ve had such bad experiences with Deadlands; that system’s incoherent mishmash of mechanics completely lacks any identifiable core model, which is probably why the game simply doesn’t work, at least for me.

I agree with Bill about FUDGE, which is why I find FUDGE the most appropriate system to simulate the conventions of much written adventure fiction, especially through the medium of PBeM. Note that FUDGE isn’t really Narrativist in the Forgeite sense; the core mechanics are still pretty Simulationist, even though it’s simulating fictional conventions rather than the real world.

This week’s meme comes via Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector

Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov Like a lot of ‘Golden Age’ SF, this one has dated badly, and is nowhere near Asimov’s best work. Ignore the flatulent 80s sequels like the plague.
3. Dune, Frank Herbert * Just read the original novel. Ignore the terminably dull sequels.
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson * Notable for having changed the real world, in that it caught the imagination of some of the people that went on to create the Internet. Were it not for this book, you might not be reading this.
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick *
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe * I find Wolfe frustrating. Some of his work, such as this one, are utterly compelling. Other’s I’ve really struggled with.
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.*
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov *
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett. I found this quite amusing at the time, although it pales by comparison to later Discworld novels. I’ve never emphasised much with Rincewind as a character, and later Rincewind novels are by far the weakest Discworld books.
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson. Danger! Hazardous leak of long words following explosion at thesaurus factory! Quite possibly the worst prose this side of E. Gary Gygax. And that’s before we start on the utterly dislikeable protagonist.
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin *
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny. Agree with Dorothea, Übermenchen lording over mere mortals doesn’t do it for me. And I don’t care much for Amber either.
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick * Rivals Keith Robert’s Pavane as the gold standard for alternate-history novels.
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven. Probably Niven’s best, in that the central ideas are strong enough that you don’t notice that Niven can’t really do either characters or plots.
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson Still a good book even if nothing can top that incredible first chapter.
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein Ugh. This is the only book I’ve ever thrown across the room in disgust. Reading it was like being stuck in a lift with Norman Tebbit. On the other hand, I loved Paul Verhoeven’s movie adaptation precisely because it trashed Heinlein’s awful book and royally pissed off all the crypto-fascist SF geeks that worship the book.
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock Black Blade! Forged a million, billion years ago!
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Glen Boyd, in what’s supposed to be a review of a Nirvana DVD, considers the longer term cultural impact of the Seattle grunge scene.

Still, as a rock and roll fan, and with the added benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I really like what rock became after Nirvana. For awhile there, you simply could not turn on a radio without hearing the numerous knock-off bands that came in Nirvana’s wake. From Bush to Silverchair, these bands were in many ways every bit as faceless as the REO Speedwagon sort of corporate rock that Nirvana sought to destroy.

Kill Rock Stars indeed.

While guys like U2 and Springsteen tarry on and continue to wave the banner of a bygone era, your choices in music these days basically boil down to flavor-of-the-minute rappers and popsters played through the delivery systems of choice you hear on your tiny MP3 and cell phone speakers. The music business itself is run by and large from the corporate cubicles of software companies.

I’m not even sure that marvels of studio craft like Dark Side Of The Moon, Pet Sounds or Born To Run are even possible anymore.

Nirvana may well be the last of the great rock and roll bands. When Nevermind shocked the world by knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the pops, I cheered just as loud as anybody.

But looking at things as they stand today, you’ve simply gotta ask yourself. Was this the revolution? There is no doubt that Nirvana succeeded in stripping a bloated rock monster back to it’s core essentials at a time when this was sorely necessary. But in doing so, was rock ultimately stripped out altogether?

Revolutions always eat their own children.

What was true of Grunge in the US was just as true of Punk in Britain two decades earlier. The standard mythology that’s repeated ad nauseam from the likes of Tony Parsons or Paul Morley is that punk destroyed bloated corporate rock and ushered in an era of unparalleled DIY creativity.

But anyone who bothers to look beyond that blatantly revisionist narrative and examines what really happened in the late 70s and early 80s will discover that most of the bloated corporate dinosaurs survived unscathed. All punk really achieved was to make musical ability and craftsmanship unfashionable, and killed off a whole generation of hard-working non-superstar artists. In just a few years the rise of the expensively-produced music video allowed the big media conglomerates to snuff out most of that DIY creativity. By the mid 80s mainstream Britain was a musical wasteland with vacuous manufactured pop and bland demographic-driven corporate rock dominating the airwaves as if punk had never happened. Sure, there was plenty of good stuff around if you took the effort to look for it, but it was all driven underground.

Punk and grunge produced both left us with some classic rock’n'roll records. But their long term legacy has at least as many negatives as positives.

Busy weekend coming up. Tomorrow night I’m seeing the wonderful Hayseed Dixie for the second time this year, followed on Saturday by the Alsager Railway Association exhibition in Crewe. If you’re attending either event, see you there!

Funny how gigs and model railway exhibitions seem to pair up in the second half of the year. I’ve already had the Manchester show and Porcupine Tree on the same date, followed by Mostly Autumn in Bury the night before the Blackburn show. And next time I’m seeing Mostly Autumn, it’s the Friday before Warley.

Been a while sing I’ve posted anything substantial on RPGs.

So let’s look at settings. What is a setting? How much or how little setting does a game need? On Troy Costisick’s Socratic Design, one of the better RPG theory blogs out there, Troy tries to define settings:

At the moment, I have identified nine aspects of Setting. They are:

-History
-Geography
-Authority (as in Government/Rulers/etc.)
-Social Situation
-Mythology/Religion
-Inhabitants
-Where the PCs Fit In
-Dynamic Forces
-The Mutables

ALL of these are important to a Setting, but not all of them are always present. The first five aspects I call Lesser Aspects. Not because they are unimportant (remember I said all aspects have importance) but because if they are absent, the game can still be quite functional.

I find it useful to make the distinction between the Gameworld and what I call the Campaign Frame. A given gameworld can include more that one possible campaign frame. To use a well known example, The World of Darkness is a gameworld, while Vampire is a campaign frame. ‘Setting’ is often used ambiguously to describe both, but in many cases they’re really two different things.

What Troy calls the Lesser Aspects seem to me to be attributes of the Gameworld. The last three aspects are attributes of the Campaign Frame. ‘Inhabitants’ is probably a bit of both.

Published settings seem to emphasise one or the other. Call of Cthulhu or Dungeon-Crawling DnD are all about campaign frames. Games like HeroQuest/Glorantha and GURPS:Transhuman Space are primarily gameworlds; the former contains several potential campaign frames, while the great perceived weakness of the latter is that it doesn’t provide any clear campaign frames.

Of course, ‘Dynamic Forces’ and ‘Mutables’ need definition; Troy defines them thus:

Dynamic Forces are forces that directly impact the characters. It can be anything from orcs to secret police to a terrorist organization. Where does the conflict in the Setting come from? What do the players play against? Finally, the mutables. These are things the PCs can change in the world. What can the player-characters impact? How do their actions matter in the context of the Setting?

So what about my Kalyr setting? I’ve got a lot of history, geography, mythology,social situation and authority; some of my players even claim to have read it all. One quite important element of Kalyr is that it can support a number of distinct campaign frames, which have different but overlapping sets of Dynamic Forces, Mutables, and where the PCs fit it.

For my online PBeM and PBmB games I didn’t start with an explicit campaign frame. I began by throwing the whole gameworld background at the players and let them come back with just about any character concept that caught their imagination. Then I built the game around whatever they came up with. The end result was a diverse roster of PCs with very different allegiances and agendas. I never really have a ‘party’ as such in either game, and there have been an awful lot of one-to-one threads. But the games have been running for 10+ years, and it’s been a lot of fun to GM (and presumably to play as well), so clearly I’ve been doing something right.

But for a face-to-face game that approach won’t work well. All the face-to-face games I play nowadays are convention-style one-shots. Such games really need much more of a specific campaign frame on order to work at all, both to cut down the amount of background information that the players have to assimilate before play, and to be able to create a coherent group of PCs with a rational reason to stay together.

My Kalyr gameworld can support at least four different campaign frames, possibly more. What I think would be useful for a published game would be tools to create campaign frames out of the conflicts inherent in the game world.

Jim Macdonald has a depressing post on Making Light explaining how the misadventure in Iraq has long gone irrecoverably pear-shaped, and no amount of ‘strategy changes’ can turn it round. Not that it will stop the Freepi from trying to blame the likely final unravelling on the left, particularly now the Democrats now control the US congress.

But I pray that Charlie Stross is wrong about the likely endgame:

The “last helicopter out of the embassy in Saigon” scenario is optimistic.

It was obvious that the war was illegal, immoral, and to be fought under false pretenses as far back as summer 2002, when the White House and Downing Street began spinning on the pretext for hostilities in a manner that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush. (I’m not kidding. Re-reading Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” with an eye for the propaganda campaign against Poland during spring and supper of 1939 makes the parallels utterly, blatantly, clear.)

It was also obvious that the aftermath was going to be a complete clusterf**k when the rift between the Powell State Department and the Ministry of War^W^W^WRumsfeld-controlled DoD resulted in the DoD trashing State’s detailed plans for administering Iraq after the invasion.

I don’t know what drugs the neocons were taking to come out with that rubbish about being greeted with flowers, but they seem to have actually believed it, which only makes the resulting fiasco pathetic as well as stupid.

Finally, when the military governor sacked the entire Iraqi army … then it was clearly only a matter of time before it was going to be “occupation: game over, you lose”. (Six. Hundred. Thousand. Men with automatic weapons. And no jobs. WTF did they think kicking them out of their barracks and mess tents was going to achieve? The mind, she boggles.)

But this latest idiocy …

“12-18 months” indeed.

In 12-18 months the remaining allied forces in Iraq will have their work cut out to evacuate all their personnel, abandoning their bases in place, and fighting their way out to the border with Kurdistan or Kuwait. If they manage to organize the evacuation for autumn/winter/spring (avoiding the 50-degree death march of summer) and if they can protect their ammunition and fuel dumps along the route, they might survive. If not, it’s going to look more like the First Afghan War than Vietnam.

I’d been hoping against hope that we hadn’t yet reached the tipping point. But the stories coming out Iraq have been getting more and more depressing of late, and can no longer be written off as defeatist propaganda from a traitorous leftist media. I think we passed the final tipping point several months ago. We’ve lost. If there ever was a chance of a favourable outcome, then the criminal incompetance of Rumsfeld, Bremer and the rest have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

There’s an old story about a motorist hopelessly lost in country lanes in a remote part of Ireland, who stopped to ask the local the way to the town he was trying to reach. “If I were you”, said the local, “I wouldn’t start from here”.

Iraq is like that.

I really don’t know what’s the best course now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll have to choose between the least bad of several pretty appalling options. Unfortunately Bush and Blair, along with a diminishing band of True Believers, still seem to be in denial.

Sweden’s death metal meets prog rock Opeth are probably an acquired taste. If the first time you listen to Opeth’s music, you think ‘What on Earth is that racket’, then your reaction won’t have been dissimilar to mine. But listen a few more times. Once you get beneath the surface you’ll begin to appreciate their dense and multi-layered sound. Their eight studio albums are filled with songs typically lasting ten minutes or more, which have little as straightforward as identifiable verses or choruses. Piledrivingly heavy sections frequently give way to gentle semi-acoustic sections. Vocals vary from death metal ‘Cookie Monster’ style to some quite mellow ‘clean’ vocals. And it all meshes together perfectly to create something almost symphonic in scope.

Last time Opeth came to Manchester, their show in the smaller Academy 2 sold out before I could get hold a ticket. On their return, they played the larger Academy 1, and I made sure I got a ticket early. I wasn’t going to miss them a second time.

Support was Yorkshire doom metallers Paradise Lost, veterans of sixteen years and eight albums. Due to the show starting 15 minutes earlier than advertised, I spend two or three minutes too long in the pub (talking to a couple of Mostly Autumn fans, as it happens; they get everywhere!), and missed the beginning of their opening number. They delivered a consummate and professional 45 minute set before an appreciative audience, concentrating on their earlier, heavier material, although the very Goth ‘One Second’ album got a good airing. It almost seemed that they were the headliners at times, which is a sign of a good performance. The only thing that annoys me about their sound is their insistence on using programmed keyboards on quite a few songs. Please, guys, since the keys are such an integral part of the sound, get yourself a flesh-and-blood keyboard player and make it 100% live!

Opeth took the stage at nine, and for the next two hours proved that their reputation as a great act is fully justified. They can indeed reproduce the full majesty of their material live, and the songs come over incredibly well in a live setting. They had that very rare combination extreme tightness and ferocious energy levels, something you very rarely get in the same band. The guitar sound was crystal-clear, the often very complex twin guitar harmonies coming over perfectly. The intense heavy sections turned the hall into a sea of flying hair, then the quiet reflective parts came in just in time to get your breath back. Mikael Åkerfeldt’s lead vocals were quite low in the mix, especially for the ‘Cookie Monster’ parts. This actually works quite well, and I think the mix was intentional. He was certainly clear enough when he sang ‘clean’.

Not satisfied with being a great guitar player and composer, Mikael Åkerfeldt is also a superb frontman with a great sense of humour. Between the songs he regaled us with tales from the band’s early history, made the audience play ‘guess this tune’ by playing various intros, and told us how the drummer allegedly turns into a psychopath when under the influence of Coca-Cola.

While they played quite a bit of their latest opus, “Ghost Reveries”, the setlist also drew heavily from their early albums “Orchid”, “Morningrise” and “My Arms, Your Hearse” rather than other more recent releases, which meant that I didn’t know a good proportion of the set; it sounds like I’ve got some CD buying to do!

Overall, superb show, up there with the best I’ve seen this year. This is a band I’ll be seeing again next time they come to town.

I realise that haven’t posted anything about the American elections. But a few day’s pause does give time to assess the impact.

Unlike some anti-American idiots of the left, I have always believed that the majority of the American people, although ill-informed by the corporate-controlled media, and restricted by an hopelessly corrupt and gerrymandered electoral system, are not stupid or evil. And this election represents the moment where the electorate have woken up and smelled the coffee. They’ve collectively realised that dick-swinging macho posturing is not the same as decisive moral leadership, and is no substitute for competent administration. People have remembered Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina. So George Bush has been thwacked by the clue bat, and not before time. And it’s great to see the dismissal of that hubris-filled Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq. He’s not fit to be a rat catcher in Scunthorpe. I hope he gets investigated for war crimes.

I don’t think it’s the end of conservatism in America. America is and always has been a small-c conservative nation by European standards; their centre of gravity is several degrees further to the right compared with ours, and we have to recognise and live with that. And I think it’s more that the Republicans have lost, rather than the Democrats have won. But then that’s true of almost every election where power changes hands.

But it is a major defeat for the so-called ‘Conservative Movement’, that bastard offspring of Cyrus Scofield and Ayn Rand. As many people have pointed out, it’s not really conservative all all, but radical right. And no matter how the wingnuts try to spin it, they’ve lost big time. Orcinus has some good analysis on this.

All this has left Tony Blair twisting in the wind. It’s patently obvious that British foreign policy is being decided in Washington, and our government doesn’t actually know what’s going to happen next, even though our soldiers (and civilian population) are still very much in the firing line. It was telling to see what people said on BBC1′s “Question Time” on Thursday. We had former Labour Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon weaseling, while former Tory Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind launching a blistering attack on the war in Iraq. If a time traveller from the 1980s had watched that programme, his head would probably have exploded as soon as he realised which one was Labour, and which one was the Tory.

It’s going to be a very turbulent next two years.

These thoughts are prompted by two things. First, Karnataka touring this year with just founder Ian Jones remaining from the original band that imploded two years ago. Second, the news that Gabriel-era Genesis tribute band The Musical Box is touring at the same time as much-hyped reunion of the Phil Collinsoid version of Genesis.

When you go to see a live concert, what are you really going to see? Is it to see the and hear artists perform on stage, or to experience the music performed live? Obviously it’s a bit of both, but which is most significant for any given band?

Tribute bands get a bad rap from a lot of quarters, and with some justification. But surely sometimes a good tribute band can be better than a bunch of has-beens going through the motions, especially when there’s only one or two original members left. It depends on the band, of course. If the main appeal of the original artist was the frontman’s charisma or virtuosity, a tribute band is pretty much pointless; it could never match the original. But when the appeal was the music itself, it’s less clear. Pink Floyd were very much four anonymous guys playing wonderful music. How is four or five different anonymous guys playing the same music that much different? On the other hand, what’s the point of someone pretending to be Jimi Hendrix, no matter how good a guitar player he might be? (Disclaimer, I know of no Hendrix tribute bands on the circuit. That doesn’t mean that no such thing exists)

The Musical Box are an odd case. Unlike a generic tribute band playing a generic greatest hits set, TMB have carefully reproduced the original 1970s shows as accurately as possible with the original staging and vintage instruments (including a real live Mellotron!). The setlist is taken exactly from the historical shows, and even the dialogue between the songs is authentic. Yes, you have got a guy in a French-Canadian accent pretending to be Peter Gabriel, but having seen them live before, they do what they do very well.

As for Karnataka, I’ll approach it with an open mind. I never got to see the original band live. They were booked as support for Blue Öyster Cult about three years ago, but pulled out at the last minute because Rachel Jones suffered a throat infection and lost her voice. Then the band imploded just before the already-announced UK tour for which I was planning on seeing the Manchester date. The new Karnataka are playing Crewe in March, and I’m quite likely to be there.