A Jenner mugs a Zeus!

I blew into the early morning time slot a few minutes late. The two players were brand new to the game, though, so I didn’t feel too bad about grabbing a soda from the drink machines while they set up and went over the rules.

The guy that blogs at The Rhetorical Gamer was running the game. As much as possible I tried to bite my tongue and let him do all the teaching. But… it is a totally classic game. There are so many cool things about it, so many rules, tactics, things that have happened…. You can very easily overwhelm the new guys. I probably did. But hey, it was Trial By Fire, so we might as well have just jumped in.

The Panther is forced to come out from his cover….

We divided up the mechs for our side. I offered to take the wimpiest one and they went with that. I didn’t want to be too pushy and make them do everything I thought was best. But at the same time… I wanted them to have enough information that they could make informed decisions throughout the game. At the early stages of the game, they ended up holding their position in cover while I charged in. I was hoping to draw enemy fire and maybe even make an opening for them. (I remembered the Jenner to be a fairly serious threat back in the day….)

This turned out to be a major tactical error, though. We missed an awful lot. One guy never hit at all the entire game. When we did hit, the only place we landed a decent concentration of damage was in the center torso. As we started  crunching through the internal structure, we never got any criticals, either. This ended up being the proverbial tough row to hoe.

Getting in our last licks before the opposing mech could leave the board…!

Meanwhile, one of the first hits I’d taken had caused an engine hit. Did that ever make me wished I’d overheated my mech already! I just lurched along after that contributing only a shot or two each turn… until I got into a decent enough position that I could unload everything. This hit next to nothing and promptly shut my mech down.

Did I mention that we were playing novice mechwarriors? I tell you, that extra penalty on the to-hit rolls that we had made it really tough on us. To make matters worse, though, we lost initiative far more often than we expected to as well. That pretty well sums up our game, though: we did really good except when it came to making to-hit rolls, rolling criticals, and winning initiative. Doh!

But you should have seen that enemy mech when he finally made it back to base. His center torso was blown wide open with maybe one or two strands of myomer fibers still holding it together. (I’d really like to have a better strategy if I was going to try this again. Maybe if we had ignored taking cover altogether and  got into short range a little quicker…. But then, maybe that mech would have just clobbered us! So who knows….)

At any rate, a couple of new players got walked through the basics of BattleTech. And they got to do it with a really nice set of models, too. It was a good game. It was just enough to whet my appetite, though. I don’t think I’ve seen the last of this game system…!

—

“If the PCs unknowingly venture into an area they’re not prepared to handle, they should suffer the consequences, including death.” — Justina’s Player

Here’s the score:

1. Last I heard, you are chomping at the bit to go back into the ruins and try to find that giant pearl, because trudging back to the ship empty handed is too much for your pride. But some of you want to have all sorts of third level characters just magically appear in the village next to the dungeon. Sorry… that’s not happening. If you want a brand new, balanced party that starts at level three you can have it… but not there. If you want to go back into the ruins for loot, you’ll do it with your surviving 3rd level characters and the all-new complementary first level warriors from the village that I already promised to you. (Oh yeah, there’d also be that first level “shaman” that you wheedled out of me.)
2. There is also the entire freaking Island to explore, of course. Also… the treasure map that… uh… someone (??) has indicates that there may be something potentially valuable to the northeast of your position. (This was not clear to Justina at one point so I am making it crystal clear now. He/she thought the ruins was where the X is on the map– not true!) Maybe you’d want to use this village as a base while you look for other potential adventures that you could have. Who knows what could be out there….
3. Replacement ~3rd level characters are back at the ship if you insist on them… but of course it took y’all ~20 days or so to make it to the central plateau. No telling how many people will get eaten by dinosaurs on the way back. Heh.
4. The above three options are the most obvious ones off the top of my head. If it doesn’t cross your minds to even consider what else you can dream up to do… then… well… you may not understand just how much autonomy your actually have– not to mention the lengths I would go to accommodate it. Not that you should feel guilty if you don’t go off on a random tangent– straight ahead old school treasure hunting is perfectly legitimate goal. But #1-3 outlines “the box.” I remind you that you’re free to think outside of it. But it’s also your responsibility. I’m not going to spell out every possible option or goal that you could set for yourself.

—

It is not my view of this island that characters can necessarily respawn there ad infinitum. Unless you come up with a different vision/goal, you are conquistadors. You’re here to pillage and loot and then GO HOME. That’s part of the reason why I was originally pushing that XP would only be awarded to the folks that make it back to Specularum. Two reasons for that: civilization is the only real home base… and this extreme lost world wilderness location does not provide the fame aspect of the leveling up process. (I have ruled that Justina, Han Yolo, and Steve Erwin will get XP before next session, though. I’m not going back on that agreement– mostly because I’m curious what you guys will do with access to the second level cleric spells.)

Now… there is some objection to the wimpy first level villagers that now make up the bulk of the party. There’s a few reasons why I think you should embrace this:

• They may be what it takes to get your surviving party members back to the ship. In a conquistador scenario, they are a HUGE windfall. Not having them at all could mean that Justina and Han Yolo are effectively stranded to die of some random disease. If they made a run for it back to the ship by themselves, who knows what their chance of making it back alive would be? Probably not very good. Show some gratitude to an otherwise stingy dungeon master!
• “But that’s no fair,” you say. “We didn’t know something bad would happen when we killed off most of our party and our new-found Rakasta buddies.” Well yeah, sorry if you didn’t see it coming… but death is already fickle and all-too-likely. You were going to lose characters no matter what. But face it… you lost more because you were careless and you took your matériel for granted. Okay, so you had no idea a dungeon master could be so cruel. The “No Fair Do Over” characters are back at the ship.
• If any of the tribesmen survive to level two… that is a significantly cool accomplishment. I’d think it would be awesome if you actually did it. I don’t know what your exact odds of doing this comes out to, but it’s there. Adventure around the plateau and see if you can pull it off if you want. You’d risk losing your now-fourth level characters in the process, or else improve your chances of making it back to the ship. Who knows what the best course of action is– or if there even is one at this point.

It would be pretty darn useful for continuity purposes if either Justina or Han Yolo actually did make it back to the ship. (And I know this has been a low-treasure high-death game… but do not underestimate the value of the exploration you’ve done and the intelligence you’ve gathered.) BUT… that’s my assumption. However… I haven’t heard anything to make me think that you guys think that would be awesome. In fact… maybe it is that you… dread… the onerous trek through the wilderness. Maybe the thought of taking a twenty day journey back the ship and then backtracking back to the plateau again– maybe that sounds just completely silly, dull, and pointless. If you genuinely feel that way… let me tell you. Maybe you don’t really want to play “The Isle of Dread.” If you want to do unlimited respawn with a town that is very close to a massive dungeon such that you would not ever have to play out very much in the way of hexcrawling… then what you actually want to do is play Stonehell Megadungeon. Just sayin’!

So… that last bit is the reductio ad adbsurdam that explains why I am so stingy with the concessions you’ve been asking for here and there. At some point, you can make so many modifications to the implied campaign structure of this adventure that you’re not really playing “The Isle of Dread” anymore. If you genuinely want to play a different type of game, that’s fine. There’s a reason why there is a big campaign setting map included with the module. I know I need to be flexible juggling the desires of the players and all that, but I’m not going to tinker with the parameters of this scenario until it is functionally identical to every other adventure you’ve played. The Isle of Dread is its own place. It has its own distinctive qualities and if we’re going to play it, I intend to preserve them.

Which leads us to option five: We could just rule that Justina and Han Yolo made it back to Specularum only to get killed in a bar brawl before they could get another expedition together. Your new party would have their log, so you’d know everything you already know and you can take another stab at the adventure with that information more-or-less intact, but out of date by a few years. This gets your balanced, full-strength party in place without violating my precious sense of narrative coherence. It would also preserve the island as being a remote, treacherous location that you cannot adventure on indefinitely. Option six would be the same as five except that you would do something else for a while on the mainland and then tackle the Isle once you think you have enough levels and magic-items to do it. If that is the case, then I can place both Stonehell and The Darkness Beneath on the campaign map and you can take your pick of those two megadungeons.

My chief concern in all of this has been to reasonably and impartially present this classic module to you as a change of pace from whatever else it is that you normally do. I am not necessarily trying to steer you one way or the other… but I do hope this explains why things have been done the way that they have been. It’s not my job to continuously throw resources at you which you then spend like drunken sailors until you manage to systematically clear out every stinking hex on the island. It’s your job to take the resources that you do have and then see what you can accomplish with them in the context of a situation that is rapidly evolving.

—

Space Gaming News:

Star Fleet Universe (ADB) The latest update on upcoming releases — “Origins is looming. It’s only 29 days away as I write this, and none of the new products are ready. Captain’s Log #47 is the highest priority, and that (at least) will get done…. It remains to be seen if the rules problems in ACTASF and the production problems with the 2500s have fatally wounded those product lines. We’re basically going to have to reboot them to make them the success they should have been…. Over the next two years, SFB will get X2, F&E will get Minor Empires, FC will get X-ships and go beyond the Borders of Madness, Star Fleet Marines will get a third (armored cavalry) and fourth (monsters) module, new RPG books (Orion Pirates, Feline Empires, Gorns) and new game engines will be done, the long-awaited expansion deck for SFBF will happen, Starmada needs another couple of books, and more Starline 2400-series miniatures will be done. Those won’t be the only products released for existing lines.”

BattleTech (Board Game Geek Geeklist) Games Where You Become Emotionally Invested with the Game’s Universe — “I had such an attachment for my pilots, that I started writing fan fiction about them.”

Star Frontiers (Delta’s D&D Hotspot) SciFi Saturday – Ship Index Cards — “I also shrank the Basic Game Combat Table onto an index card. Print out a page of these, and then you can basically run the entire game from your stack of index cards.”

—

Designer Spotlight:

Jeffro: Okay, I’ve looked over the sample that’s over on Lulu. First off… it looks gorgeous. It sounds like the setting is much more serious than Gamma World, much farther gone than Car Wars, and unsettlingly creepy what with all the weird magical fallout that you’ve engineered into it. It’s almost like… you’ve managed to preserve the insane post-apocalyptic ethos of eighties gaming while adapting to more current sensibilities. Did you specifically set out to accomplish something like that or did this game’s comcept simply emerge from the ether unbidden?

Kyrinn S. Eis: The game’s first session was actually a D&D pick-up/one-off game with G+ folks. It was decided before that there would be no standard fantasy RPG races, and other tropes were to be toned down. I decided to run this as a post-apocalyptic setting, and drew inspiration from fleeting and half-remembered concepts from “The Night Land” novels by William Hope Hodgson. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands,” too, was an instant influence — I’m a very visual thinker — as well as Rodney Matthews’ depictions of various book covers, etc.

Duke Barclay’s PC was a cleric of Finnian, and he was sent out from his cloister by his master, and the other PCs were henchmen sent with him on his mission to reach civilised lands top the south. Their cloister was one of the remaining towers of the Barrier of Elysth, once used to try and contain The Burn when it had touched down upon Porphyry. These intrepid travellers made their way through the blasted heath and mossy rocks until the vast pine forests were encountered across a broad and strong river or tributary. A PC was lost in the crossing and the player soon left the game. The two remaining PCs made their way to forsaken Ownys, rich in un-looted goods, but crawling with Burn cultists, mutants, and cannibals. A bungled burglary attempt resulted in the cleric’s unconsciousness and the end of the first session. I remember telling them that I liked the game and planned not to write anything down for it. I failed. Within a week I had a large amount of kernel of the setting sketched out and ran the first Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition session with at least five players.

Jeffro: So… you framed up just enough of a setting to get a game off the ground… and then your brain inexorably continued to interpolate the reality of it in the aftermath. Nice. It sounds like an extended journey through wilderness was fundamental to your games’ sessions. This is something that seems to have fallen out of favor over their years as games have shifted towards focusing on large, set-piece MMORPG-style combats and/or six scene fully-plotted narrative arcs. How did your players react to having such a wide open set of choices…? Did this style of play impact Porphry’s overall design…?

Kyrinn S. Eis: That journey was fairly brief, subsumed in the course of a few hours of play, but a large portion of the campaign, most of it, I dare say, was wilderness or surface urban exploration. Actually, I think there were only two or three underground portions: a mythic underworld akin to that of the Aztecs, a foray under the streets of Ownys, and at the end of the campaign, north of Ownys once the Burn Cult was wiped out. That last one was true delving, and felt the most disconnected from what had come before it. Of the hours in the Playtest campaign, the vast majority had the characters experiencing the rigours of overland travel, the foul weather, constant vicious attacks, etc. Even the urban sessions (many of them) of Ownys the characters were slogging through the ashfall of winter (in place of snow), and much in the way of murder and mayhem.

The campaign was entirely PC-driven, based on their interest in following up on rumours, repaying debts, utilising contacts, taking advantage of contacts or their reputation. Mercantile adventurism played a part in two or three portions (beginning, middle, and end), and was actually the way the game started. Hiz Eruk from a Black Ship hired two PCs to produce weapons and shields for a young prince’s birthday party. When the party arrived, they found that the party was actually a ritual to determine the right of succession. Backing the existing prince with a poisoned and enchanted sword guaranteed his place upon the throne.

I made a conscious effort to fill the world with very Pulp-inspired locales, and enough of a latticework of interrelation for it to hang together as a whole, while being very conscious to make it wide open enough that you folks could make it your setting without concern of it violating canon or holy writ. There is a lot of flavor without there being anything like a chronology or other absolutes apart from Tsanzel Metal, Arcane Inks, the Serefolk/Hiz Eruk, and the Beastfolk. The cursed and magic items are all flavor-filled, but could easily be replaced or added to without throwing the setting.

Jeffro: Ah, the Beastfolk…! I almost hate to mention it, but they bring to mind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can’t tell you how cool those independent black-and-white comics were when they first came out– though I was more of an Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters fan at the time. The Palladium T.M.N.T. and Other Strangeness Role Playing Game was pretty innovative back then, with martial arts, a point-buy system for animal abilities, and psionic powers. All of that went away with the advent of the movie franchise and the Saturday morning cartoon. Given that almost freakish chain of developments, how did you go about making animal type characters cool again in your game? (Maybe this particular sub-genre has lain fallow long enough that it can make a comeback again…?)

Kyrinn S. Eis: I grew up with Aesop’s Fables, cartoons, wildlife shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and pets. Animals are always going to be cool. I often prefer the company of animals over people. That said, I don’t really pay attention to trends, and haven’t ever gone in for the TMNT cartoons, nor read many after High School (an artist friend was heavily into them). I owned a lot of the supplements and know the system, but I’d say that Ken St. Andre’s Monsters! Monsters! is of much greater and earlier an influence than TMNT. In it are Chinese Foxes, Tsathogua, Chinese Demons (bat creatures), Snollygosters, Snarks, and other non-human, animaline creatures as playable races. Porphyry never strays far from Tunnels & Trolls  ’Canon’, as it were, and where it does, by not including standard monsters and Kindred, it preserves the ‘Other’ aspect from the aforementioned product’s ethos. I will say, however, that the all-animal mutant Gamma World Cryptic Alliances: Zoopremiscists, and The Ranks of the Fit have more to do with my treatment of the Beastfolk than anything that came afterwards.

—

Blog Watch:

Cthulhu (Los Angeles Review of Books) To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft – “Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have.” (Hat tip to Akratic Wizardry.)

GURPS (RPG Snob) Thoughts on GURPS and Skill Levels — It may be that a lot of the recent… er… grappling with tempo and pacing issues in GURPS combat are in fact due to the recent trend of increasing point levels for starting characters. If you are a fan of the grittier 150 point game, this is one reason to stick with it…!

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (Dungeon Fantastic) PC Tips for my GURPS DF Game (inspired by the OSR Primer) — Well, you can sit around scratching your head and wondering why your players don’t get it. Or you can post something like this to the front of your GM Screen. Allons-y!

Game Design (Lewis Pulsipher) Giving Victory Points for Fighting Battles — “Now if you see a game design as just a collection of mechanics devised to allow certain things to occur, you might see awarding VPs for fighting as just one more mechanic.  If a game is abstract, this point of view is easier for me to understand.  But a non-abstract game is modeling some reality in some sense, and that’s when this VP-for-fighting mechanic becomes an obvious kludge.”

Adventure Design (Semper Initiativus Unam) Integrity, the Living Dungeon and Module Design – “What Gary had on his paper, that’s what was written in stone about his world. The rest was a living thing that came about in play through memory and winging it.”

Policy (Jeff’s Game Blog) How many commandments have you broken? — I think Tolkien fretted over the fact that orcs were irredeemably evil in his last days. Still, it’s weird to see something like that turned into corporate policy.

—

Apropos of Nothing:

How David Weber orders a pizza — I read a dozen books in the Honor Harrington series, often starting the next one immediately upon finishing a novel. But I gotta say… this nails it.

Rules Of The Most Complicated Board Game Ever – Risky Settlers, Knights and Allies of the Lords of Dominion of Earth, Pandemic Edition!

How To Plan Your Life, When You Can’t Plan Your Life — “You follow this Act, Learn, Build Repeat model until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal. It’s not career planning. It’s acting your way into a future you want. How do we know this approach will work? Because it already has.”

—

Note: You can find “Jeffro” on Google+ here. Add me to your circles to receive notices about each new blog post! If you cannot stomach the recent improvements to the Google+ interface, you can alternately get email updates with the “Follow” button in the right column.

“How heavy is it? Can we carry it?” That would be Ogbar the dwarf’s player– only interested in one thing.

“You can’t tell how heavy it is just by looking at it,” I said… perhaps a bit too smugly. “I dunno, though… if it was made out of brass or something, a couple of you could haul it out of the dungeon. It’d slow you down because you’d have to stop and rest every ten minutes or so.”

“Thief! Check it for traps!” Ever since getting hit by that crossbow bolt while looking for secret doors, Flinderflaff the elf had been noticably more careful. Heh.

“Yeah, okay. I check it for traps,” said the thief’s player.

“Yeah, but how do you check it for traps,” I asked. “Describe your actions!”

“Well… I walk around it and look it over very carefully. I keep my distance, though. I don’t want to come any closer than one foot from it.”

“Okay. You see nothing special about the statue.”

“Fair enough,” said Ogbar’s player. “I’m going to sort of tip it over to see if it comes off the dais without us doing any stone work. Thufir, give me a hand with this, will ya?”

Thufi’rs player nodded in assent.

“Okay, Ogbar…. You grab the statue and give it sort of a shove… and yes, it does tip over. It doesn’t seem overly heavy. Not for you, anyway. But before Thufir can pick up the other end of it… you notice that the statue begins to glow with a dull cobalt light.” At this point, I picked up an oversized twenty-sided die and rolled it in front of everyone. It was a seven! “Huh. That’s weird. Your hands have gone numb.”

“Wait, what did you just roll? Was that a saving throw?”

“Well….”

“I’ve always rolled my own saving throws.”

“But, well–”

“That’s not right!”

—

Sometimes things happen like this that make me realize just how big of a cultural gap there is between me and some of the players in the games I run. In the first place… the rules at best govern what goes on in maybe twenty percent of what we do at the table. And secondly, most of the rules that we have are there for one reason only: so that when I say, “you’re dead,” you starting rolling up a new character instead of kicking the table over. Role playing rule sets are, if anything, a solution to the long standing cops and robbers problem. (And you do realize, of course, that if things get to the point where you’re making saving throws that it’s pretty well game over for you anyway, eh?)

Never mind, for the moment, the absolute absurdity of anybody insisting on being able to roll their own dice. Sure, it’s a courtesy of the game master to let the players to do that. And yeah, gamers love their personalized dice sets. Role players especially are superstitious as hell. But at the end of the day, the only reason you get to roll your saving throw is that it’s fun. You hold that swirly D20 in your hand and think about all the stupid stuff you’ve done in the game… and everyone is watching to see how this plays out…. It’s just stupidly fun.

But maybe there are reasons that I might want to roll something like that myself. Maybe I suspect that certain players have loaded dice or else are fudging die rolls– maybe I just want to be one hundred percent sure of this roll’s authenticity. Maybe I don’t want to go through a big production of asking a player to look something up on their sheet and rolling a die. Maybe there’s some stuff going on that I want to be more discreet about. Maybe I just want to make a real quick roll to keep the game going…. Or maybe… just maybe… you have a huge misconception about what we’re doing. Maybe we all think we’re playing this thing called “Dungeons & Dragons,” but in actuality, we’re both bringing radically difference assumptions to the table about how this works.

So… let me make myself perfectly clear…. The rules aren’t there for you and they aren’t there to protect you from me. And even if I were one of those mythological “abusive Dungeon Masters,” rules cannot afford you any protection anyway. (“Rocks fall; you die.” Q.E.D.) If the rules could protect you from me, then we wouldn’t be playing a role playing game anymore. It’d be either a straight up tactical wargame or else some kind of board game. What really holds the game together is a loosely enforced separation of concerns. The players and the referee are each responsible for different things– and the individual player and the party as a whole each have their domain as well.

With that in mind, here are ten meta-rules that take precedence over anything that is spelled out in the actual rule sets:

1) Play the game I’m running, not the game you think this is. If something goes wrong or else something doesn’t work out quite like you expected, you will feel a strong temptation to blame it on the rules. Don’t do that. You’re probably focusing on what other systems emphasize anyway.

2) Quit making rulings. Focus on imagining exactly what your character is doing. (I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a veteran player explain to a new person that they shouldn’t even try something because of their interpretation of the rules… or even because of the rules in some other edition of D&D! In a lot of cases, I would have just said, “yes” to whatever they were suggesting in order to keep the game moving and reward out-of-the-box thinking.)

3) Don’t tell other people what to do with their combat turn. Sure, there are times when the party could conceivably hash out a game plan before battle; that’s cool. But in the heat of battle, you’re just not going to have time for a full-on committee meeting. Of course, explaining a new player’s options in order to be helpful is different, but the “help” should be given in a spirit of preserving their individual autonomy.

4) Likewise, if your character is not in the same location as another party member and they’ve found something cool or dangerous… then step back and let them play it out without your interference at least until your character gets into their vicinity.

5) If you’re dead… then please just be quiet about everything the surviving party members decide. Really. Go roll up a character or something. It’s part of the suspense to slowly be losing the creative input of other players over the course of a session.

6) Some players get hung up on who knows what and which players can communicate with which other characters. For the most part, I am happy to hand wave all of this and just assume that the entire party knows everything that is discussed at the table. In an immediate situation, who knows what may matter a great deal… but after it is resolved, it’s safe to assume that the party has hashed out the ordeal even if they have to pantomime it.

7) If rules and rulings are the domain of the referee, then deciding what your character does is yours. I will not stand in your way– even if it will kill you or set the campaign on an unsustainable course. Player autonomy is sacrosanct.

8) Strategy and tactics are therefore the domain of the players. It is bad form for a referee to tell players the finer points of these things directly. Divulging “what might have been” or even slightly more efficient solutions to known problems really kills the magic of the game for some reason. (I’ve never heard anything good come of it.)

9) Death, then, is the only real way that I have to signal that your tactics aren’t effective. Sure, a lot of deaths are just stupidly random… but others are flat out your responsibility. And even the random ones are something you have to be prepared to manage. Instead of begging for more resources or more character options, try to think about what you could have done differently.

10) If I’m running a classic module that has unique monsters in it, it is an extremely bad idea to announce their true names and then start iterating through everything you can recall about them. Anything that smacks of this brazen, meta-gaming, spoiler-ridden attitude makes me want to kick the table over!

Normally when I’m running a game, I just do initiative by sides. When it’s time for the players to attack, I just go around the table and have them roll to-hit and damage. I usually can’t even see the die rolls from where I’m sitting. They just holler stuff out while I frantically make notes on the status of their foes. Usually these combats end pretty quickly– either the players cast one of the “we win” type spells or else the monsters fail a morale check. (Alternately, the party is surprised and loses initiative on their first turn and then is almost completely wiped out… but that’s another story.)

Anyway, when I first start playing a new rule set, I am often extremely careful to attempt to play as much by the rules as is possible. But especially with some of these older rules sets, I’ll start coming up with rules of thumb to keep things moving and hand waving other stuff… and then after a while I’m making lots of rulings based on what I’ve been doing rather than the actual rules. For instance, I’ve been ruling that magic users that lose initiative and take damage during a turn cannot cast spells. I have no idea where I got that rule other than that I just suspected that there had to be some sort of substantial justification for the legendary tactic of targeting the magic-user first. The thing about this sort of thing is that when I go back and look at the rules they have almost nothing to do with what I actually do at the table.

So… let’s go back through this and see what’s actually there.

1. Morale Check — This is a signature component of the Moldvay ruleset and I strongly encourage everyone to use this component of the system. It shortens the combats tremendously, makes encounters far more believable, and goes a long way towards differentiating the various monsters.
2. Movement — I don’t tend to use miniatures lately, so this generally doesn’t come up. Note the bit there about “meleed” opponents only being able to move defensively. That would be at best at half speed going backwards. This is a mechanic that would allow fighters to move forward and pin their opponents by “basing” them. Pretty cool. Also note that if the magic-user opts to move, he just kissed his spell-tossing ability goodbye for the round!
3. Missile fire — Nothing surprising here, but note that when the movement rules are omitted, then the range modifiers on page B27 are going to be forgotten as well. Cover is something that I have rarely applied, so be sure to note the guidelines on page B26.
4. Magic spells — Given the extreme limitations on the number of spells that can be cast in a day in Moldvay, it’s no wonder that spells automatically hit. What’s more, there’s no saving throw on some of them. The example of combat on page B28 has the party forming a “defensive line across the room” in order to stay out a Sleep spell’s area of effect, but I don’t see anything in the rules that would nail down quite how that would have to work. (I wonder if that is an artifact from earlier editions of the game.)
5. Melee — A lot of times in the past, I have ruled that melee attacks are effectively random in terms of who they effect. This maybe makes some sense when you’re not using miniatures, but I don’t see anything in these rules that would imply anything like that. (Where could I have picked that up…?)

So here’s the thing. Why is there such an elaborate sequence of play like this when we just do initiative by side anyway? I’m not seeing a lot of reasons here right off. All I can really come up with is that if melee happens after magic, then spells will get let loose before the party can know what they heavy hitters will do. Is that really worth not being able to just go consecutively around the table? I dunno….

What really stands out to me is that these combat rules are undeniably miniatures rules. This is interesting more for the fact that in the mid-eighties, I don’t recall anyone playing with these rules even close to as they are written. Indeed, none of us would be able to afford miniatures until after we graduated college. Never mind that we’d maybe never obtain the requisite skill and patience in order to actually sit down and work them up. Of course, these rules as remembered will always be much closer to the loose, lean, simplistic form of play that seemed to spontaneously emerge on playgrounds at elementary schools all over North Armerica right around 1983 or so and which just so happened to be reflected in computer games like Zork and Ultima II.

Is playing correctly something that would even be worth the effort? Well, with a game that was utterly opaque for as long as this one was, it is arguable that it cannot ever be played “correctly.” It’s part of the attraction. Certainly there are dozens of better explained, more tightly designed games of this sort that will effectively go unplayed for all eternity. I have to admit, I take a special pleasure in playing by the more child-like rules. They not only signal that a session played with them will be focused far more on exploration, pretend, and what we now term as resource management, but they also make what is ultimately an obscene gesture at the thirty years of design and development that have occurred within role playing games since the release of Moldvay and Cooke’s B/X rulebooks.

My retro-hipsterism is short lived however, as there are still the seeds of more current styles of play within those old rules. Most notably, there are optional rules not only for d20 style attribute checks, but also for individual initiative rolls modified by dexterity bonus. (So much for being a purist.) At any rate, if there is one case where I will attempt to apply the sequence of play explicitly as written, it is in the unusual case where the two opposite sides roll the same number for initiative. Sure, it doesn’t happen very often, but it is the one situation where the exact sequence of the five “M’s” suddenly take on a lot of significance.

Previous installments of Designer Spotlight featured:

• Jim Krohn – Space Empires 4X
• Bill Cavalier – The World’s Worst Dungeon Crawl
• Rob Eaglestone – Deneb Sector

—

Space Gaming News:

In the mail… tatoos, a book mark, and a post card from The Fellowship of the Troll!

Heroes & Other Worlds (Christopher Brandon) Magi Carta COMPLETE — The Magi Carta will provide over six hundred spells for the Heroes & Other Worlds retroclone, the game that synthesizes Melee, Wizard, and Moldvay Basic D&D to give you a tightly engineered microgaming take on old school role playing. Keep an eye on Lulu for its release, but don’t look for a Kicksarter. Christopher Brandon makes his game the old fashioned way– he just makes ‘em and then, uh… sells them to you?! Yeah, I know… it’s crazy.

Other Suns (via Wayne’s Books) — “Other Suns features a setting of the L’Doran Hegemony, where humans are a defeated race, one of many. Although the alien races — let’s be honest — aren’t very alien (bears, dogs, squirrels, etc.), the setting is tantalizing. With a little less rules, and a little more background, Other Suns would have been more than the obscure game it is.”

PORPHYRY: World of The Burn (Kyrinn S. Eis) Now on Lulu! — A lavishly illustrated game set in a Chtuloid Post-Apocalypse with just a dash of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and run on top 5th Edition Tunnels & Trolls.

—

Designer Spotlight:

Jeffro: The Anarchist Relief Front  was of course a silly, tongue-in-cheek group for Car Wars that could function as a generic excuse to have random people with armed cars come shoot up the players. Just mentioning them brings back memories of proto-flamewars about Anarchism with Leslie Fish in ADQ’s Backfire department. So… my first question for you is this: when you set about to design your Ogre supplement, did you take ARF and run with them for the sheer, stupid fun factor alone…? Or did you invest a little on the world building side and actually try to follow this insanity through with some logic…? Or was it just the only way that you could think of to slip pink G.E.V.’s into Ogre…?

Andrew Metzger: My counter sheet is in many ways homage to a number of things that have influenced who I am at this point in my life. Some are serious (my kids) and some are whimsical. This falls into the latter category.

Initially, I wanted pink GEVs just for the pure randomness of it. SJ seemed to like the idea, which further encouraged their inclusion, and my daughter thought having a pink tank would just be amazing. She allowed that playing “that tank game” with myself and her brother would be more attractive to her if she could beat her brother with a pink tank. Finally, others echoed my daughter’s sentiment in the KS commentary as a means to encourage girls/women into the game. So in they went.

It was also easy to include them because I already knew that I wanted to include a Missile GEV (and later, a Heavy GEV) into my set. This expanded the available units for an all-GEV squad beyond just the basic GEV and LGEV (I excluded GEV-PCs because I was not including ARF Infantry in this set).

But as I began to work on a backstory for my Tiger units (which ironically, at this time is far less developed than the ARF!), I realized I needed a reason for these units, if I was to be consistent with the set I was developing. It became apparent that just having pink GEVs wasn’t enough; they needed a reason. But why would a commander have combat units with pink as a dominant color? Because they wanted to make a statement, specifically in defiance of someone or -thing else. And my backstory grew from that. I chose the name Anarchist Relief Front as a tip of the hat to Car Wars, in that Car Wars was one of my three favorite games growing up (the other two being Ogre/GEV and Traveller). But I think the name fits with the origin of this ‘faction’.

So in summary, I put them in initially “just because”, but gradually had them grow into a (semi-) feasible faction in their own right.

Jeffro: You say that you’ve put in a Missle G.E.V.– is that a completely new unit? How does it impact the battlefield? It seems it would imbalance the game to have a unit that could move like a G.E.V. but shoot with the same range as a Missile tank. Now… I realize that Henry Cobb has had a unit design system for a long time, but how exactly did you work out the issues that such a unit could create?

Andrew Metzger: It is a completely new unit. Prior to Henry, there was the great piece of fiction entitled “The Lone GEV” by Michael Stackpole. This is in part an acknowledgement of that fun piece of fiction, but the key with any unit is establishing its value relative to other units. In this case, I’m breaking (relatively) new ground in that this unit will cost 1.5 ‘armor units’. Or in other words, you can take two of these instead of three regular GEVs during unit selection. The stats aren’t quite the same as a Missile Tank merged with a regular GEV, in that a unit that had a range of 4 and an ability to move 3 hexes away after firing would give it a ‘stand off’ range of 7. In other words, in open ground a Heavy Tank could never counterstrike that unit. Thus an A3, R4, M4-3 unit was a game breaker. I softened the stats some to allow it to compete with other units, while still acknowledging that it was superior to a regular GEV one-on-one.

I stated that the new ground was conditional, in that Steve Jackson contemplated a 1.5 armor unit (or 9 VP) tank with his Heavy Missile Tank using Ogre Missiles (as seen on the Ogre page at sjgames.com). I just put that concept into actual play. My actual stats for this unit are A3, R3, D2, M4-2. It is a specialized unit; in most cases you’d be better off with three GEVs vs two MGEVs, but there are occasions where having that extra hex of range matters. It is a great infantry support unit.

As an aside, the Heavy GEV included in my set also costs 1.5 armor units during selection. This is a reinforced GEV chassis that carries two GEV cannon on it. it may split its attack in the same manner as a Super Heavy Tank, but moves like a GEV. The stats for this unit are A2+2, R2, D2, M4-3. It attacks like two GEVs, but defends like a single one. The HGEV is a very balanced unit and I think will be a popular one.

All three of my factions (the Vatican Guard, the Sons of Old Nassau, and the Anarchist Relief Front) have both the MGEV and HGEV as the available units, with the appropriate livery. Each faction will have two of each new GEV in the set.

Jeffro: I know that for me personally, I look at the scenarios that are included with the original Ogre and G.E.V. sets and I just can’t imagine surpassing them. They’re are just good, clean designs… balanced… fun… brilliantly executed. Who knows what would happen if I forced myself to sit down and come up with something. What I want to know is… how did you get get up the gumption to tackle something like this? And how did you see it through to the end to a complete, finished project?

Andrew Metzger: I couldn’t agree more that Ogre and GEV are two very elegant games. It all works very well together. And at no point did I ever think I could surpass them; I still don’t. But I hope I can add something to them that allows a broader experience, without hurting the core. My goal was to offer some variety for those who wanted it. Sometimes you jump into the lake without completely thinking through whether you can swim or not. But once you’re in, you better swim! This was a little like that…I wanted to have pink GEVs, the Vatican Guard and a tiger striped faction to play the game with my family, so I sponsored the sheet. Plus I wanted the Missile GEV on my sheet. It was then that I realized if I was to sell all of these sheets and do the game justice, I needed rules for all of this plus some scenarios. Who wants to buy just counters? So it started to grow after I was already committed.

Daniel Jew has been a huge help. He actively worked through a bunch of different designs for the MGEV and HGEV with me, forcing me to look at things from a different viewpoint. They’re as much his as mine! And obviously Steve Jackson had the final say for everything. I’m still play-testing scenarios (man, that takes time!), and with the help of a few others on the forums, tweaking some variant rules. One of my scenarios is a huge “end of the world” type battle with up to six factions on all four maps at once! I’m now mostly at the artwork and layout stage, and Alvin Helms is helping me with that. I’m grateful for all the support I’ve gotten. So no, it’s not finished yet but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is a ton of fun.

—

Blog Watch:

Old School D&D (Dungeon of Signs) Stuff That’s Cool in D&D — “The Owlbear is a ravening destroyer from the chaos dimension of unreasoning hate! Owlbears exist for one reason, Owlbears teach 1st level parties to run. They don’t have treasure, they don’t make sense, they can’t be reasoned with. They are real monsters, and D&D needs monsters that are strange and horrible and without reason.”

Old School D&D (Zenopus Archives) Holmes’ Little Metal People — The newspaper article referenced in the post is fascinating not just for providing a window into the past of D&D culture, but for also demonstrating what in-depth reporting used to look like even for otherwise trivial topics. (See here for additional updates.)

Old School D&D (Random Wizard) One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 Slideshow — If you think that innovation would necessarily be absent from the Old School scene, then you haven’t seen any of the more mind blowing one page dungeons that have been done the past while.

Old School D&D (The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms) Playing the Game Wrong — The modern emphasis on more combat, the demand for more healing options, and the refusal to use hirelings combine to create one of the stranger quirks of the dominant D&D culture.

Old School D&D (Semper Initiativus) Some goings on in the OSR – “I think at this point our community has more to do with exploring the roads that could have been traveled but weren’t, from S&W Complete and LL/AEC making the “AD&:D Lite” that a lot of people would have preferred, to Joseph Bloch creating an extrapolation of “2e if Gary did it” to games like ACKS that explore the endgame. Even megadungeon publications focus on a style of module that never got done well rather than rehashing. There are some middle of the road modules, and there always will be, but I think the OSR has evolved into something far beyond nostalgia and it’s a shame that it isn’t really understood.”

Old School D&D (Roles, Rules, and Rolls) A Short History of Murphy and the Rules He Rode In On – ”To be fair, every edition of D&D has contained a way out for the DM, a big red fiat button to push if the rules corner you into an absurd judgment. But the more rules there are, the more authority the rulebook seems to usurp.”

Steve Jackson Games: Stakeholder Wrapup – ”I’m good enough that I can help my competitors without endangering myself. And I’m a game fan. I want other companies to do well, provided they do right by their customers . . . who are often my customers too. Please note that I’m still doing just fine after ten years of playing my hand face-up, and a lot of the hard-nosed “businessmen” of yesteryear . . . well, they seem to have left the building.”

—

Apropos of Nothing:

Currently Watching: Fringe, episode 2 — It looks like this particular show was set up such that you could follow the action without having seen the pilot. This idea of “the Pattern” is fascinating to me, but I just don’t like the characters. The fact that the main girl had an intimate relationship with her partner in the FBI is first overlooked… and then spun into being a positive character quality: she followed the evidence wherever it’d lead. She even gets promotions, job offers, and raises in spite of this clear lack of professionalism. Meanwhile, “the bad boy with a heart of gold” does little more than play the role of baby sitter for his mad scientist father. The latter, of course, is ultimately responsible for the research that is being used to create all manner of freakish accidents and death. To top it all off they collectively have the Superman problem– they spend all of their time attempting to quietly clean up after the bad guys. This passivity actually makes the melodramatically evil Massive Dynamics company compelling in contrast.

House Rules Gone Frighteningly Wrong: The Night I Broke Monopoly — In its earliest iteration it was called The Landlord’s Game, and it was designed for the express purpose inspiring a general suspicion against “evil” property owners. The game became a depression era mega-hit only when the didactic elements of the game were jettisoned in favor of giving regular people a chance to revel in being the “evil” property owner. The game’s transition across the political spectrum would not be complete, however, until a few drunken teenage boys would inadvertently use it to illustrate some of Margaret Thatcher’s talking points.

“You’re Playing it Wrong,” the prequel:  A Nation of Wimps – “Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees.”

Meanwhile, in the real world: Performance Review — “Ahhh. You inherit language from someone else, give me a grade on it and then admit you don’t know what it means. That’s one hell of a wonderful system!”

Schoolin’… Jeffro Style: My wife was out of own this weekend, so I was directly responsible for implementing school for a few days. Besides keeping up with the usual math and chores, we also did the following:

• We watched the (1995) Biography of Stonewall Jackson. This was disappointing as it focused far more on his personal quirks than it did his specific military tactics. This topic will have to be revisited in the future….
• We played Settlers of Canaan and got a game completed in a little more than an hour without coming to blows.
• We got our miniature painting backlog back in process.
• I finally helped my son finish rolling up his Uplift alien.
• I finally tried to teach my kids some music– just some scales and a baseline ditty for now.
• We read the last five chapters of Padraic Colum’s The Children’s Homer. Money quote: “Rejoice within thine own heart, but do not cry aloud, for it is an unholy thing to triumph over men lying dead. These men the gods themselves have overcome, because of their own hard and unjust hearts.” Epic.
• We read “The Palantir” chapter from The Two Towers. They’d been clamoring for Treebeard for weeks now, but this happened to be where the bookmark got left last year.
• The special treat for the weekend was getting to watch the 1962 film The 300 Spartans. The kids actually liked it a lot. The most obvious theme slathered on by the Hollywood types was a heavy handed emphasis of “E pluribus unam,” but it was a treat to see that many reenactors bashing each other without any computer graphics turning it into a glorified video game. The next day my son pretended to be a great king and his sister pretended to be his military adviser.

Picking up immediately where session two had left off… Stripe (Rakasta) had quaffed a potion of giant strength and thrown a bolder through two successive walls before putting his rampage to a halt. While the rest of the party dedicated themselves to looting the body of their comrade Otis (Dwarf-3), Stripe examined his immediate surroundings on the other side of the giant defaced and now-smashed head worshipness. On the wall to his left, he spied a lever on the wall next to him.

Now… being a cat… it was of course in character to stupidly investigate these sorts of things. Justina’s character smelled trouble, however and argued that the primitive, tribal creature would not necessarily understand such mechanisms. I ruled that one of those (optional) attribute checks would govern this situation… and Stripe’s player failed the roll. However… Stripe’s player was determined to see this through… and thanks to the fact that we were short one player, she was actually playing both Rakasta at once. So… “Skinny” pads over to the lever, makes an intelligence check and… pulls it.

This was going to sting. But would the mechanism still work after a boulder had smashed through the wall? (There is nothing in either the rules or the module that could help me determine this impartially.) I ruled that it would still be operating on a five or six on a D6 roll… and a five came up. The lever is pulled… the mechanism is still working… and into the room where the rest of the party is… there came a burst of flame!

Looking at the size of the flame as specified in the module, I ruled it would either hit one or two people. Dio (Dwarf-3) took four dice damage, but made his saving throw and cut the total in half. Trevor (Fighter-3) was not so lucky. Having just picked up a +1 sword off the body of Otis, he was completely and totally incinerated. (His player took Skinny from the player that was running the two Rakasta. You know… it kinda bothered me that we had someone running two characters at once anyway…!)

The mildly singed dwarf Dio picked up the shiny sword+1 from Trevor’s body, muscled his way around the corner and explored the far passage with the two Rakasta. They came to a wall that was clearly of a different style of stonework than the previous advanced Atlantean-style stuff– this was much closer to a Mayan look, maybe. Dio set to work removing the wall. I think the rest of the party focused on guarding their rear– the group had not “cleared” the previous section, so they were wary of something coming up from behind. After an hour of game-time, the wall was cleared and the party reformed their marching order on the other side. They opted to send the scouts on ahead to check things out– the dwarf and the two Rakasta. The scouts went around the corner and on ahead into the darkness, when suddenly heard, “crumble… smash; whoosh– SPLASH!”

Rushing around the corner to see what had happened, the torch bearing set of party members saw that much of the passage had given way. The dwarf was down on the next level standing in a room with water right up at his chin. Stripe was on top of Skinny’s shoulders. The dwarf felt something move past his leg, while stripe leaned down into the water and managed to catch it– a blind cave-fish! The party was sufficiently rattled that they did not want to explore either the water-drenched region or the hallway any further. They climbed up a rope that was attached to a grappling hook and the party went back to explore a side-room that they had bypassed.

The party unanimously agreed to send Han Yolo ahead to search for traps. Han crept incredibly silently down the stairs and then found a trap… by setting it off! A trap door opened beneath her him and she he fell with a thud down to the next level into a room with strange green and red stone statues. There was something unearthly about those statues… but that didn’t keep Han from limping over to one of a hobgoblin to attempt to remove a small ruby from its base. While working on that, Han discovered the spitting cobras that were in the room. One of them spit directly into her his eye, but she he made her his saving throw and thus avoided some horrible life-ruining effect.

The other players climbed down to fight the cobras. Dio had an IQ of 4 and his player had really keyed into that with his role playing. At the first report of a ruby down there, he’d *jumped* down taking the same amount of falling damage that Han had received. (“Well *that* sure helped to waste a healing spell,” someone remarked.) The party then lifted the portcullis and wedged a statue underneath it. They reset their marching order and went down the long hallway. The scouts passed by some large holes in the wall, but once the party heard scritching type sounds coming from them they waved torches around them and kept on moving. They assuredly did not want to engage any rodents of unusual size….

Turning the corner, they found a large hole in the floor. Someone dropped a torch down it and it dropped a heck of a long way down. The party sent the thief across it to listen at a door– he heard “glug glug” sounds. I actually made the thief roll to open the door; his player just so happened to make it. On the other side, the party saw a portcullis with a door on the other side of it. They also had the choice of going down some stairs toward where the “glug” sounds were emanating. The party argued about this for a bit. Should they explore the second level some more or should they continue on down into the depths. Lemmy (Magic-User-3) argued that it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep going down, but Justina (Cleric-3) swayed the party’s opinion towards continuing on down the steps. When the party got down there and saw the mudpots, someone mentioned that the black perl probably wasn’t down there in that weird place, but was probably in some kind of throne room or something somewhere. Justina *still* argued to continue on and the party collectively agreed to continue on.

The floor was extremely slick, so the players had their characters tie each other together. (They drew a zigzag through their marching order to represent the ties.) It wasn’t long before a geyser erupted and sprayed a character with scalding hot water. They went along the edge of a gigantic mud pot and came to a three-way intersection. One way led to a terrace which they opted not to climb. (“Probably nothing up there… and we don’t want to slip and fall into the mud-pots.”) While exploring the second way, there was a tremor. The party became rattled, thinking that something they had stepped on had triggered it. They navigated the third way, went through another branch in the path, and then stopped when they heard ominous sounds coming from far into the mud pot on their right.

Just on the edge of the their torchlight… the party saw a strange hippo-sized beast in the mud. It had a face like a star-mole. The players without torches fired missile weapons at it for several turns when… Drake (Cleric-3) suddenly started bashing on Justina with his mace. (Come to think of it, it was a little odd when he’d readied his mace instead of his sling the previous turn….) Reacting quickly, Justina and Lemmy immobilized Drake by looping their ropes around him and pulling tight! Meanwhile, at the front of the party, the two Rakasta turned on the rest of the party as well. Han Yolo pulled out his mirror and used that to distract the cat-men with a moving light. The Rakasta chased the light madly– evidently light-hating relex trumped whatever mind-control they were experiencing. Lemmy and Justina shoved Drake to the ground and pinned him with their boots.

The party kept shooting at the mud-mole creature throughout all of this… gradually getting up to about thirty points of damage. But the thing just wouldn’t die. Panic set in when Lemmy showed signs of being about to turn on the rest of the party. Even worse, in the previous turn the dwarf Dio had suddenly started shooting at Justina with his bow. Thinking fast, Justina jerked on the rope to pull the dwarf Dio off balance while falling on top of Lemmy. Dio fell into the mud pot and was boiled to death. Justina fell on Lemmy and shoved him down on top of Drake, managing to pin them both at once.

Whatever the mud-monster was, it disappeared under the mud. The party members shot at the last location that they has seen it… then hog tied the two Rakasta, Lemmy, and Drake. Only three sane party members were left now. Han Yolo (Thief-3), Justina (Cleric-3), and Steve Erwin (Fighter-1). These three decided to continue exploring– there just *had* to be some good loot down there somewhere, they thought. Meanwhile… Drake begged them to throw a tarp onto him and the other tied up party members, but he was ignored.

Sallying forth, the final trio came to a dead end. It was a wall. The path was narrow enough that they had to send Steve Erwin up by himself to examine the wall. They were sure there would be a secret door or something. It turned out that the ground was just a thin layer of crystallized minerals covering up a deadly hot spring. Steve fell down into the boiling waters. He was hurt, but was still alive. This was the point where the party decided this had to be a death trap and that there was nothing of value down by these mud pots. They decided to go back and try something else. But going back the way that they came, they blundered into the rest of their party members– who were now not only untied, but still intent on killing them!

I announced at this point– before a single die was rolled– that if a magic-user loses initiative and takes damage before his turn, then he cannot cast spells that round. (This is perhaps not exactly rules as written.) The side with the magic-user lost initiative and everyone on the other side tried to take Lemmy out. Lemmy took some damage and was reduced to tossing daggers instead of casting a game-ending Sleep spell.

There was a confusion of blows as melee ensued. Han Yolo took out the mirror and attempted the moving light trick again, this time leading the cat characters into the boiling mud pots. The cats (who reflexively hate the evil-light-of-hell more than anything else) dove after it. Though the burning hot mud damaging, it managed to knock some sense into them. As they attempted to scramble out of the mud pot, they were met with Justina and Steve Erwin, who kicked them in the face while screaming, “this… is… Sparta!” The Rakasta then back flipped back into the mud-pots where they met their demise.

Stunned, confused, and terrified… Justina, Han Yolo, and Steve Erwin quickly looted the bodies of their companions and then ran out of the dungeon as quickly as possible. They scrambled back up the terrace, when through the doorway and past the deep pit, down the hallway, under the portcullis with a statue wedged under it, up the grappling hook rope, up the stairs, back through the temple area, between the feet of the destroyed colossus, and back to their boats. Justina’s player said, “oh… my… God.” Other players immediately began rolling up new first level characters and arguing about how to plan the next delve. In response to a suggestion that they go back to their ship at Tanorora, it was indicated that they did NOT want to go back without the giant perl that was supposed to be here….

The Death Log:

Session 1:

• Rex-Tum (Elf-2) — Gored by a triceratops in the swamp near the tar pits.

Session 2:

• Tirantis Blackhawk (Magic-User-3) — Fell off the side of a volcano on the central plateau.
• Otis (Dwarf-3) — Impaled with the spear of awesomeness by the bone-armor wearing warrior in the temple with the huge, defaced head of worshipfulness.

Session 3:

• Trevor (Fighter-3) — Incinerated by a fiery blast that emerged from the defaced head of worshipfulness when Skinny pulled the lever that Stripe found on the other side of the smashed walls in the temple area immediately after picking up a sword+1 off of Otis’s body.
• Dio (Dwarf-3) — Boiled to death in a mud pot after getting mind controlled by a star-faced mud-mole monster and then getting shoved off the path by Justina the cleric.
• Lemmy (Magic-User-3) — Head smashed in by Steve Erwin with a sword+1 after getting mind controlled by a star-faced mud-mole monster, hog-tied by the party, and mysteriously set free.
• Drake (Cleric-3) — Cut down in a melee by Steve Erwin with a sword+1 after getting mind controlled by a star-faced mud-mole monster, hog-tied by the party, and mysteriously set free.
• Stripe & Skinny (Rakasta) — Maneuvered into a pit of boiling mud by Han Yolo’s moving-light-of-evil and then kicked in the face by Justina and Steve Erwin, back-flipping through the air in a slow motion movement of acrobatic perfection… after getting mind controlled by a star-faced mud-mole monster, hog-tied by the party, and mysteriously set free.

Note: The sword+1 is connected directly or indirectly to the deaths of Otis, Trevor, Dio, Lemmy, and Drake.

This week’s special guest is Rob Eaglestone, the author of The Third Imperium: Deneb Sector.

—

Designer Spotlight:

Rob’s Traveller bookshelf…

Jeffro: Several sector books have been done over the years, ranging from the small, little black book of Supplement 3 on down to the third edition GURPS treatment in Rim of Fire. What design principles guided you as you made choices about how detailed to go and in what to intentionally leave out…? Can particular books that were examples of what to do or what to avoid…? Did Mongoose gave you specs…? Or did you just write the book as you saw fit?

Rob Eaglestone: Mongoose did not give me specs. I gave Matt an outline of how I planned to break it down, and then I ran with it. M. Dougherty’s Spinward Marches and Reft books were good examples of how to divide the text into topical categories, and suggested some of the overarching topics as well. One general concept that was in the back of my mind is that the sector book needs at least one ‘something interesting’ behind it. Not only plot hooks, but also an overarching concept that brings a sector together, helps define it as its own thing, rather than just another sector list of UWPs and random encounters.

As far as level of detail. There’s enough space to give a sampling of a sector’s worlds — and that’s it. Specifically with the world descriptions, I used a distribution, with a few worlds having either very short or very long text, and a larger number of worlds with something in between.

One thing I determined to do was to detail several alien races — something I found lacking in Traveller for decades, simply because aliens are so difficult to do. Once the conceptual barriers are overcome, though, it only takes a couple pages to have enough technical and color text to produce a playable character from them, or at least a reasonable description. I actually used Traveller5 to generate the aliens, then mapped them into Mongoose Traveller’s system.

Jeffro: The Spinward Marches was a frontier crowded by Aslan land-grabbers, Vargr pirates, Zhodani warships… and full of nefarious imperial research stations and mysterious ancient artifacts. The Solomani rim had a cold war with racist, goosestepping commies… and lots of whales to save and scientists to help defect to Imperial space. What’s the essential shtick of the Deneb sector as you present it?

Rob Eaglestone: Unlike the Marches, Deneb is not quite frontier, and has much less of a border problem. The central shtick of Deneb, I think, is the Curse of Civilization. Due to a case of Bad War in the 600s, there is no sector duke. So, we have actively squabbling subsector dukes (think subsector-funded small-ship squadrons occasionally duking it out; big ship battles would bring the wrath of the Navy).

The 2,000 ton Sydkai-class Cruiser was ported into Mongoose Traveller for this book, as was the 800 ton Brilliance-class passenger liner, known more famously by the unfortunate accident off Regina with the Trimkhana-Brilliance. We also have some “interesting” research bases; the only Imperial world at TL16; a starship chop-shop; an alien race that raises the population digit of the system when their trading planetoids exit jump; a subsector whose main population (including the duke) is Imperial Vargr; and more.

Jeffro: It seems to me that being away from the borders (and being without a different Major Race on each of three sides of your sector map), the sort of themes in your game would tend to focus more on the actual nature of the Imperium itself. Maybe it wouldn’t be cast at either extreme of good or evil, but more as an impersonal bureaucracy that blunders forward into the future, inadvertently damaging worlds and peoples in the process. Given the scale at which the players are usually forced to operate, how can they do anything to change the status quo of the Deneb sector in a positive way?

Rob Eaglestone: Remember first that Deneb is deliberately not a static political and social cog in the Imperium. As mentioned earlier, if interior sectors are all alike then they will be boring. What you can say with certainty is that the political structure of Deneb is different from the political structure of the Spinward Marches. If anything, the ability to change the sector for good or ill is amplified.

Note that the major power in the Marches is the Imperial Navy, whereas In Deneb more power rests with the duchies and the Megacorps. And, by breaking Deneb into competing Imperial duchies, small troubleshooting groups become more numerous (and more profitable) here than in the Marches, and by extension relatively small groups of characters with can have a huge impact. The actions of a crack squad of agents, in the right place at the right time, could topple a coalition government — a subsector government — and tip the balance of power in the sector.

—

Blog Watch:

Old School D&D (Necropraxis) Simple Corruption — This is best house rule for D&D that I’ve seen in some time. I’m not sure how many of the “corruption” side effects I’d necessarily want to use, but I’ll be passing an index card to clerics hinting that attempting to turn evil magic-users might be a good idea. (Turned magic users cannot cast spells, they lose a number spell levels equal to the margin of success, and a “D” result is the same as a hold person spell. Awesome.)

Old School D&D (Geek Dad) Has the Earliest Version of D&D Been Discovered? — Yet more evidence that role players have all too much in common with theologians and biblical archaeologists.

GURPS and Old School D&D (Dungeon Fantastic) Mixed Feelings on Wandering Monsters — The interesting thing about this post is how it demonstrates that the significance, usefulness, and fun of a random monster encounter can vary tremendously based on the rule set being used. Even so, even Gary knew when to say “when” on the topic of wandering monsters.

—

SciFi Smackdown:

As of this writing, Jasper T. Scott’s Dark Space is #34 on Amazon’s top 100 Free Science Fiction and Fantasy books. It’s got spaceships on the cover and its prologue opens up with star-fighters whizzing around tossing missiles at each other and shooting energy beams. A few problems are immediately leap out at me:

1. “Frek” is sufficiently like “frack” that I can’t stop thinking about Battlestar Galactica. Once you start saying “frekker”, you might as well just start using real cuss words. “Motherfrekker” is right out.
2. You want to put women in combat? Fine. Give me Vasquez. I’ll take Honor Harrington or River Tam if that’s all you got… but if the bantha poodoo is hitting the fan, I want to see a freaking ballet of destruction where the sex of the combatants absolutely does not come into it. Seriously, though, the last thing I want to see is a damsel in distress on the freaking battlefield.
3. So there’s fighter group A from ship B fighting fighter group C… and ship D comes along and also fighter group E… which is from who knows where. You know… I have no freaking idea what is going on here. Draw me a diagram, already. Or else take a little more time to sketch out the situation. I know we’re going for a fast paced in media res that’s building to a dramatic knife twist of emotional investment here, but if I don’t understand what’s happening here none of this matters.
4. And the combat situation… it seems very linear and static to me. I do not get the relentless pace of The Battle of Yavin… neither do I get the feeling of mindblowing 3D maneuver à la Ender’s Game. The pilots come off as being like monsters from a third grader’s D&D game: they’re just sitting in a “room” waiting for the people with agency to come and encounter them. These passages don’t sound like the author has played very many tactical space combat board games.
5. Afterburners…? On a starfighter…? The original Battlestar Galactica show at least had the sense to rename it to something spiffy. (The automotive themed “turbo” was at least marginally better than “afterburners” which sounds too much like an atmosphere-dependent jet fighter thing.)
6. “Gina” and “Ethan”? And numbers instead of call-signs? Robotech Macross and Top Gun beat this. Heck, even “Red Five” is better. I prefer Traveller: TheNew Era’s derogatory two syllable appellation that is given to you by your squad mates early on and then sticks with you for the rest of your career. They can also be colorful enough that I’ll remember who is who– especially if it’s something like “Pom Pom” or “Monkey Butt”! (The latter two served on the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan.)
7. And what’s up with dude not knowing how to work in a team? Heck, I wouldn’t go into a bar without a wing-man. Even if I wasn’t used to being one, I’d expect anyone that knows how to fly to pay attention to the concept if the laser beams were letting fly.

I know it sounds like I hate this book, but I really want to like it. (I dearly love small spaceships shooting at each other.) Moving on into chapter one… we get a triply layered scene: dude looking out the window and thinking about all the background setting information we need to know… while talking to babe-woman-girl-thang… while a mysterious star-fighter of some kind docks at the station. Problems here:

1. You’d think that a slower paced scene would be a good contrast to an explosive prologue… but this is too much brain dump with too little action. I like the setting details, mind you…. And sure… not everyone could set it all up the way Joss Whedon did in ten minutes of Serenity… but I’d rather have an Asimovian style dialogue than this.
2. The most beautiful girl in the known universe alone with this guy… but he doesn’t notice her most of the time. Wait… what?! This is the main protagonist. There is NO WAY I can relate to this sort of nonchalance. A Heinlein protagonist might be the ultimate playa of the universe, but even the sort of guy that had seen everything would still notice a woman like this one’s supposed to be. If these are androids or something, this is not the way to introduce that fact. My head is caving in here.
3. They are in a room and there’s a squeaky bed in it. But you just tell us that fact. I mean… can’t dude just sit on it so that we hear it? Something. Anything! I could forgive everything else… but that squeaky bed is a deal breaker. Why do I even need to know that the bed is squeaky? Wait… don’t tell me… the squeakiness of this bed is actually going to be pivotal to a later plot point? Heh… now if that is true, then the bed needs to be far more significant in the scene!

You know… I’m no Jack McDevitt… and I don’t know where the author is going with this but taking it more or less as is and running with it, here’s what I would do. Eradicate the grimy window and the squeaky bed. If this dude is alone with a mindswimmingly hot woman and ignoring her, then it’s for one of two reasons: he’s either a Jeff Godblum type character obliviously engrossed in solving some sort of technical problem… or he is a Jack Nicholson type guy that is ignoring her on purpose just to mess with her. I don’t know how you could incorporate your setting brain dump into their dialogue… but if an opportunity presents itself, go for it. She might turn on the news really loud just to bug him and we might pick up some stuff that way… or when the ship approaches, they might verbally ask the computer for an assessment of it.

Honestly, the authors of Cyberdrome did a pretty darn good job of getting the reader up to speed with action and more action instead of doing any kind of brain dump– you could do a lot worse than copying their approach to pacing a novel. Kudos to them! Cyberdrome goes to the top of my to-read list while Dark Space takes a distant second. Tune in to next week’s edition of SciFi Smackdown to see how they each handle a new challenger…!

—

Experience the power of the atom! Subscribe to Joachim Boaz’s blog and never miss another of his posts on Adventures in Science Fiction Cover Art!

Apropos of Nothing:

Dungeon Bastard: Ask The Bastard: Men Playing Women — “If you think a lady can’t sport facial hair and a husky voice, you skipped an IMPORTANT chapter on dwarven culture!”

Priceless: Users of pirated copies of Game Dev Tycoon complain that… wait for it… pirates are ruining their in-game business. “Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can’t make any profit.” (Hat tip Ken Burnside.)

Currently Listening To: Devo’s 1982 album, “Oh no, it’s Devo!” — Listen to this seminal work in order to fully deconstruct Weird Al Yankovich’s classic pastiche, “Dare to be Stupid.” The core riff is lifted from “Out of Synch.” The catchy turn-around is from “Deep Sleep.” In the video the cowboy playing guitar is reminiscent of the redneck guys from the video for the earlier hit “Whip It.” The special effect of Al and his bandmates riding down the street is similar to the one in “We’re Through Being Cool.” The bit with the band members wearing pantyhose on their heads is of course in reference to the even earlier video for “Jocko Homo,” which Yankovick also reprised in his medly, “Polkas on 45.” Say what you want about Al, but the guy knew his Devo.

Currently Watching: The pilot episode of Fringe – I can handle a show that is taken up with a wooden and low-chemistry relationship that I don’t really care about. I can handle a show where somehow the main character makes me constantly reevaluate just exactly how hot she is. I can handle a show where you can practically set your watch by the plot’s inflection points. But can I handle a show where the government’s black ops people know less and are less trustworthy than the bionic vice presidents of stereotypical multinational corporations…? Eh…. You know, Lost was absolutely riveting for the first few seasons, but this show has a very lackluster beginning.

For some reason, this doesn’t surprise me: ‘We’re just average folks’: The family sending all ten of their home-schooled children to college by the age of 12 – ”We find out what their passions are, what they really like to study, and we accelerate them gradually.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world: (From a comment on an article at the Atlantic) “Our kindergartner reads at a relatively high level. I couldn’t tell you what that level is, but as an example, he reads Tolstoy’s short stories before bed. He also writes very well for his age, he wrote a 16 page story about his day at school on Monday using full sentences and paragraphs. So, he’s a bright kid. His homework yesterday was to write the letter ‘Y’ ten times. He accomplished that in 20 seconds and he was done for the evening. They have been teaching a letter a week for the last 25 weeks and three-letter words. They give him a book and he sits around and reads all day. They are learning to count to 20 and he already knows his multiplication tables. His day is a complete waste.”

Real Science: How Social Scientists, and the Rest of Us, Got Seduced By a Good Story – ”Well accepted effects are turning out to be hard to replicate outside of the labs of the people who discovered them.  Social Science research is vulnerable to all manner of statistical shenanigans, and a number of academics seem to be exploiting those vulnerabilities, either accidentally or deliberately.”

Currently in drydock: An assembled Starline 2500 Gorn DD awaits priming.

Real Science: The Real Problems With Psychiatry – ”The DSM is created by a group of committees. It’s a bureaucratic process. In place of scientific findings, the DSM uses expert consensus to determine what mental disorders exist and how you can recognize them. Disorders come into the book the same way a law becomes part of the book of statutes.”

Life Imitates Gaming: Who knew a monstrous Saturnian hurricane could look so lovely? — There is a strange hurricane-like storm inside of a inexplicable hexagonal shaped weather pattern at Saturn’s north pole. In the first place… I would never put a natural phenomenon in my game that is this weird. Secondly, this has “ancient” precursor race written all over it– I’d totally expect the navy to interdict the world and  the scout service to concoct some sort of lame scientific cover story.

“Roger that, Pogo.”

“10-4.”

“The rest of you are to hold back forty percent of your missiles from the initial pass. I need not remind you that if any of these guys get through, there’s not much chance of there being anything for us to dock with once we’re done here. If I do not see your requisite quotient of missiles in the final mop up, I will personally disembowel you even if I have to E.V.A. and then torch my way through your canopy to do it.”

“Sir.”

“Got it.”

“Understood.”

“Putz, Cheese Fry, Dribble, and Panty-Waist, you are on point. You each have three bogies assigned to you. They’re marked as such on your screens as of now. I will be back stopping you. Hold your fire until I give the signal– we cannot waste ordinance on any long-shots here, there are just too many of them. When the explosions start you’re going to want to switch to beams right away, but hold off with those until they are in the orange-zone. If you both survive to point-blank range, you don’t want to be the one waiting for your pulse-lasers to cycle. Are we clear on that, people?”

The com-wave blossomed into a chorus of assent.

“Alright, then. Look sharp… and good hunting!”

Pogo flipped off the mic, did a final run-through of last-second checks, and exhaled a deep breath. The engagement clock hit its last-minute, and began winding down. At e-minus fifty seconds he injected battle-hype. At e-minus forty seconds he triggered a long-wave sensor pulse to refresh his tactical screen. There were no surprises, so he unlimbered his missile packs and warmed up his pulse lasers. At e-minus twenty-six seconds, he noted the missile bursts throwing up flack as the point defense of the lead fighters took them out. He flipped his pick-up back on.

“Steady, boys,” he said. “Begin ripple-fire on my mark in ten seconds…. (Split the difference in your approach vector there, Dribble.) Release in four… three… two… one… fire!”

The lead fighters began launching missiles. Several enemy glyphs winked out in succession…. but Putz’s crest switched off while Panty-Waist’s went to yellow. Pogo altered his vector to intercept Putz’s remaining two bogies.

“Hold it together…. Divert twenty percent of your power to screens. Begin pulse-laser barrage… now! Sweepers, engage targets at your discretion.”

Pogo’s display showed the enemy targets pinned by pulse-laser fire– even as they accelerated toward the frigate, their facing was riveted towards the interceptors. But the two sweepers began cutting across the axis of the rapidly closing squadrons and cutting into them from the side. One after another, enemy glyphs began disappearing. Dribble’s crest blinked out… followed by one of the sweepers. In just a few seconds of destruction, the fighters passed each other and began pivoting their facings.

“All wings… begin a triple-weight ripple barrage… now!”

Five bogies remained on Pogo’s display. It quickly dropped to two. But the density of the barrage was decreasing due to distance. The glyph of one of the last bogies winked out, but each second that passed increased the odds of the last enemy fighter breaking through the line. It entered the yellow-zone… then the green-zone… then… just as it was about to go cold, it’s image disappeared off the scopes. Cheers erupted over the com-wave.

“Excellent work. Adjust vectors with a 1G burn… and set a return course. Tonight, the drinks are on my tab.”

This week’s special guest is Bill Cavalier… the inimitable Dungeon Bastard!

—

—

Space Gaming News:

Car Wars (Wayne’s Books) Sold! — “Car Wars box sets, more so than other game lines, are typically very used. Owners played their Car Wars sets.” The design of the game has been under fire as of late, but I don’t think that many critics are cognizant of just how much play the old editions saw.

Ogre (Steve Jackson Games) Ogre Garage Open For Business! — You’ve probably heard about the hassles that Steve Jackson Games has had getting the plastic “Ogre Garage” produced correctly. Well that particular issue has finally been resolved… and the thing will hold not just every 3D unit in the Kickstarter edition, but it will also hold the 3D units from the sponsored sheets as well! Incredible.

Traveller5 (Marc Miller) The Cold Equations — Marc is currently pushing out about fifty Kickstarter packages a day…. He expects all of the packages to be shipped by the end of May. (Of course, that still leaves all of the deck plans to get out the door this summer….)

—

Designer Spotlight:

Jeffro: Do you think that science fiction role playing games are just Dungeons & Dragons with jump drives replacing planar travel and techno-gadgets replacing magic items? Or is there something quintessentially different about them?

Bill Cavalier: Sci-fi games are DRAMATICALLY different from fantasy games. Look, if I play a fantasy game CHANCES ARE, I know exactly what I’m getting into. There’s elves, dragons, swords, the world is vaguely medieval. There BETTER BE DWARVES OR I’M OUT. If you come to me and say “Hey, we’re going to play Worg Riders of Hammerstone” I may have no idea what the mechanics are, but I know the genre fairly well.

With sci-fi games, you can throw that right out the window. It could be relatively near-future like Star Trek, or it could be space opera like Star Wars, or super-heroic like RIFTS, or hard sci-fi like Eclipse Phase, or just gonzo balls-out off-the-wall like Gamma World.

So the genre is a lot more varied and specific. You put a D&D guy in a RoleMaster game? No problem. You put a Traveller dude in a Paranoia game, he is going to WIG OUT.

(NOTE: Either way your character dies in the first ten minutes!)

Jeffro: Zowie!! <wipes nonexistent tear from eyes> It’s clear you’re not a D&D-only guy, but that you’re well versed in many of the various strata of gamerdom. Can you describe the most awesome moment you can recall from playing in or game mastering a science fiction themed role playing session…?

Bill Cavalier: It was, in fact, in a game of GAMMA WORLD. Alien forces were attacking the floating outpost of New Berlin and the party was sent aboard the alien destroyer to stop it AT ALL COSTS. Under heavy fire, Oberstkommando Helmut Dankenstein flung a disharmonic bomb directly into the warp core. Everyone else managed to escape before the resulting explosion, but as the turned back, they saw the faint outline of Helmut’s mech raise a beer in salute… and pour it all over the windshield of his battlearmor. END OF CAMPAIGN.

Jeffro: Wow. Give me a second here. I have to just sit back and ponder the extreme awesomeness of that…. <sigh> Yeah. Now… historians of early Dungeons and Dragon gaming often point out that there’s a surprising amount of science fantasy and gonzo elements in the older adventures and campaigns. In your World’s Worst Dungeon Crawl, are you going to suss some of this strangeness out…? What exactly are the parameters of your dungeon design philosophy here…?

Bill Cavalier: There’s no doubt Gygax sprinkled some sci-fi elements into the game. One of my favorite entries in the Monsters & Treasures booklet of the White Box set is “Robots, Golems, Androids: Self-explanatory monsters which are totally subjective as far as statistics are concerned.” YOU SAID IT, GARY: DMing is easy, just MAKE SH*T UP!

That being said, this is the World’s Worst DUNGEON Crawl, so my design goal is to focus on the fantasy elements that make the game simultaneously compelling AND ridiculous. WHY do you tear a rift in the fabric of space if you put a bag of holding into a portable hole? And, more importantly, HOW CAN I USE THIS TO MY ADVANTAGE!? My intent is to take these types of classic — dare I say WORN — tropes and show that if you game THE DUNGEON BASTARD WAY, they can still evoke massive entertainment.

Also, I plan on brutally killing some PCs, because it can’t be the World’s WORST Dungeon Crawl unless somebody dies.

—

Blog Watch:

Role Playing Games (The RPG Corner) A GNS Timeline of Gaming — “This may be the first decade in the history of gaming where there really isn’t a dominant trend of game play.”

Board Games (Pulsipher Game Design) Buyers versus players –”In the long run certain types of commercial tabletop gaming may not survive because even though there are many people willing to play there are not many willing to buy.” (This post got some push-back on Board Game Geek… but really, there are people that just play, there are people that buy their favorite game and then have all they need for a long while, and there are the people that go to Essen every year and bring back a dozen games with them.)

OSR (Hack & Slash) On the OSR New Wave: Patrick Stuart of False Machine – “Violence, Magic, Faith and Greed. Imagine setting out to make a story with the four characters powered by some of the most fundamental strangeness in human culture, how could that not go horribly wrong and be amazing?” (Hat tip to Brendan. Though I suggest substituting Zealotry for Faith– this is, after all, a game of exploring the anti-virtues.)

AD&D (Delts’a D&D Hotspot) More on Gygax’s Drow – This post exemplifies why AD&D was both mystical and unplayable at the same time. There’s a reason why I never played it much but instead took up comprehensible, tightly designed microgames instead.

GURPS (No School Grognard) Adjusting Swing Damage in Dungeon Fantasy — I’ve always been a bit leery of high point-value GURPS games. I grew up with second edition, so anything beyond 100 points seems uber-munchkiny…! Mark Langsford makes a case for why the core design imbalance between swing and thrust damage actually breaks down in Dungeon Fantasy– and he also offers up a simple means of fixing it. (I may not depart from the rules as written… but this critique is still pretty useful to know.)

GURPS (Dungeon Fantastic) GURPS Weapons & Tactics: Using Shields Offensively — Peter V. Dell’Orto’s series of combat breakdowns are a valuable map to what all is in the rules and include many tactical pointers that you’re unlikely to pick up on during a first read-through..

GURPS (Gaming Ballistic) Shrug It Off — A boxing match in GURPS just will not last all that long, so Douglas Cole tinkers around with some simple house rules to more accurately model what is happening.

GURPS (Orbs and Balrogs) Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part III. Learning and skill advancement — A new stat-block for tomes of knowledge… and notes on how to use them for research and teaching. (And note that while some other recent house rule posts have come out lately, this is one that was endorsed by Peter V. Dell’Orto over at Dungeon Fantastic!.)

—

“On the Shelves” at Wayne’s Books…! A quick search on Zenopus Archives reveals that the lizard logo is from the first edition….

Apropos of Nothing:

On Kickstarter: Dark Dungeons: The Movie – “Now I want you to listen to me very carefully here. You cannot parody a work of this magnitude. With something like this, all you can do is present it with one hundred percent sincerity.” (Hat tip to Once More Unto the Breach!)

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know: The New Rules for the Modern Workplace — “There is no longer such a thing as a linear career path. A college degree doesn’t magically turn into a job and an MBA doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get a promotion. Even if you get a job, it’s not stable and you won’t be staying with the same employer for life.”

Currently Watchng: Robotech Episode 9: “Miss Macross” — The Zentradii dispatch a scout vessel to reconnoiter the Miss Macross contest. Rick Hunter violates his orders by borrowing a new armored battleoid (aka a Crusader) and goes out to meet them. Everyone is distracted by the swimsuit competition and the two enemy forces blunder into each other. Rick successfully parries a small missile barrage with his rifle, and unleashes a full salvo of his own in response. The enemy ship comes out of the resulting explosion nearly intact, but the Zentradi must abandon their ship– leaving valuable footage of scantily clad anime characters behind!

Electronic Books: As of this writing, Cyberdrome is #15 on Amazon’s top 100 Free Science Fiction and Fantasy books. It opens up in the middle of some action, introduces some neato tech, and then tops off some snappy banter with the usual mind-blowing twist. On the balance, that’s not a bad hook. Clearly the authors are here to entertain– not to attempt to displace Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein as giants of the field. Some aspects of the “nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other next generation fields” are more fully developed than the idle speculations I carry around in my own subconscious, but some aspects are pleasantly dated. For example, it’s not since TRON that I have seen anthropomorphic computer programs embraced with such alacrity: “He could still remember his first day as a Green, so full of ambition routines he thought he would overflow a buffer.” Heh.