Where Worlds Collide

So it wasn’t a Shoggoth after all. The beached “blob” was a whale carcass. Well, that’s what they want you to believe. (Link from Adam Lipscombe)

In this week’s Game Wish, Ginger asks about character naming:

How do you choose character names? What makes a good or bad name for a character? What are three examples of really good (or really bad) character names, and why are they so good or bad?

My favourite line in any RPG rulebook comes from The Dying Earth RPG, and reads as follows:

If you give your character a mundane or anachronisic name, like Nigel or Sue, your GM should allow you proceed though the entire creation process, only to have your character horribly slain in the opening scene of the first adventure. Do not say we failed to warn you.

You can spoil the atmosphere of a fantasy game by inappropriate names. (Same goes for books, having characters called “Kevin” and “Nigel” clunked badly for me in Katherine Kurtz’s Dernyi Rising)

I believe fantasy characters need to evoke the feel of the setting; whether it’s taking names from historical source for a game based on fantasy versions of historical cultures, or using made-up linguistics for a complely original world. I’ve tried to come up with some consistant languages for my own setting, Kalyr, which is worth doing if you’re GMing the setting, since you need dozens of NPCs. Read what Dorothea has to say on the subject. It’s why J.R.R.Tolkein is a better fantasy writer than Katherine Kurtz, and what goes for novels also goes for games.

However, most of my recent characters have been in modern-day settings, where naming a little bit easier. For example, Ivor Tregonning, my character in David Edelstein’s The Stand is a Cornish railwayman, named by taking the first name of real-life railwayman mentioned in a book, and the distinctive Cornish surname of one of the posters in a railway mailing list. I didn’t realised he’s also one of the characters in The Who’s mini-opera “A Quick One While He’s Away” until later.

Then there was the Sword-Worlder in a Traveller game (which never really got off the ground) called Þorkell Svensson, partially named after an Icelandic poster on the boards of Pyramid Online. There are problems, though, in using a name including characters that don’t appear on standard English keyboards on an on-line game. (Ümläüt had the same problem!)

I’ve gone for slightly humorous names in some games. Leaving aside my AD&D Viking called “Mudgard”, I’ve played an Ofanite of Jean in In Nomine called “Ed Craigentinny”, on the basis that Ofanites took humorous surnames like “Jett” or “Wheeler”. This was in a setting where an earlier character had used pseudonyms of “Neville Hill”, “Philip Marsh” and “Adam Longsight”. Anyone reading this who comes here for the train posts might understand those.

While I’ve been a good boy and not spent vast sums of money at Waltons of Altrincham this weekend (Dealer in n-gauge Fleischmann, Roco and Minitrix), I did go on a CD splurge at HMV. Expect reviews (both here and on Blogcritics) of the new album by the Neil Morse-less Spock’s Beard (good), British glam-metal sensation The Darkness (also good), and the latest album by Blackmore’s Night (which I haven’t listened to yet).

My friend Kevin Hooke forwarded his. Has someone from Timepiece or Stopwatch got lost in our continuum and wants to get home? Or is someone just trolling for addresses of gullible schucks?

From:
To:
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 10:08 PM
Subject: Dimensional Warp Generator Needed ftls bwshw cbi

Greetings,

We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply. I’m offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I’ll immediately pay you $5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.

1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available

2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system

3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.

4. I will also pay for Schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufature which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.

If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.

Email his details to me at: spammer@spammer.isp

Please do not reply directly back to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.

Yesterday, seven people died when a minibus carrying fourteen holidaymakers to Manchester Airport crashed on the M56, half-way through it’s three-mile journey. As many people died at the train crash at Southall, and three less than the crash at Hatfield that all but brought Britain’s railways to a complete standstill.

Those rail crashes were all over the news for weeks. Yesterday’s M56 accident wasn’t even the lead item on Channel 4 news. All of which highlights the totally different attitudes towards accidents between the two modes of transport.

On Transport Blog, Brian Micklethwaite writes this rather silly post.

The big difference between road safety and train safety is that road safety is in your hands. If you drive carefully you can pretty much guarantee not to get killed in your car, or to kill anyone else.

That may be a popular opinion, especially by those people who think they’re immortal, and don’t drive safely. But it’s completely false. It’s the comfortable lie motorists tell themselves because the truth, that they are responsible not just for their own safety, but for safety of every else sharing the same road as themselves, and vice versa, is too much for them to handle.

He goes on to describe his father, who sounds like a very safe and careful driver, who insisted that a properly aware driver will never always be able to avoid any accident, even he meets some idiot driving on the wrong side the road on a blind bend at twice the safe speed limit.

Millions agree with my dad that all deaths on the roads are the fault of the drivers involved, all of the drivers involved. If any one of the drivers involved had been driving like my dad did instead of how they actually did, there’d have been fewer deaths and maybe none at all. It’s tough on passengers who die on the roads. But they could have created a culture of safety instead of nagging dad to go faster, so they too deserved to die, if they did.

Take the argument in the final sentence to it’s logical conclusion, then anyone killed at Southall, Ladbrooke Grove and Hatfield that voted Conservative in the 1992 general election deserved to die as well, for they voted in the government that fragmented the railway and compromised safety.

Road deaths? They’re up to us. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is right.

Millions of people might believe that. But millions of people believe in horoscopes. Millions of people think the most pressing question in Britain is who’s going to be the next person kicked out of Big Brother. Millions believe everything they read in the Daily Mirror. But that doesn’t make them correct.

Mullets will cause the downfall of The Republic, at least according to this. I now have horrible images of Jar Jar binks in a mullet.

One of those “You know you’re a gamer” moments happened at Stabcon a couple of weeks ago. Out of the window we saw a squirrel make a death-defying leap from the top of a building to a nearby tree (and got a round of applause). We then got into a discussion over what card he’d just played (we were playing Castle Falkenstein at the time), and what his skill level was. Sad, I know…

BBC NEWS | UK | £7bn scheme to tackle congestion

So New Labour have done a traditional Labour U-turn, and decided to embark on an orgy of road-building. Well, not quite.

I suppose I should be grateful that they’re just widening existing roads rather than building a whole lot of completely new ones, and some of the more feared proposals (like the 12-lane M4 past my parent’s house in Slough) aren’t back on the agenda. From my perspective as a non-driver, new roads make my life worse. Why? Because as soon as somebody builds a new road, out-of-town ‘business parks’ and ‘retail parks’ inevitably spring up alongside them, sucking economic activity out of town and city centres and moving them to places that are a pig to get to by public transport. Just try commuting round the M25 by public transport and you’ll see what I mean.

We’ll get a lot of environmental protests, especially some of the controversial sections of the road along the south coast. I wonder how much the environmentally-insensitive routing by the dessicated accountants at the Department of Transport have to do with this. The reason so many new roads plough though local beauty spots is because their philistine calculations assign a zero value to such things as ancient woodland or downland, while they assign a much higher value to flat, unscenic farmland to which they’ll have to pay higher compensation to the landowners.

I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that Spamcop.net is down, due to massive DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, and I’m currently getting twice as much spam on a normal day.

Next time some spammer claims he’s just an honest small businessman trying to get by, or worse, some Heroic Randian Entrepreneur, just remember, spammers are lying crooks who are quite happy to use viruses in order to spread their bottom-feeding messages advertising half-price V1agra or methods to “Enlarge your Chopper”.

Most of them live in Florida. I say nuke the place from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.

New round of posts up on the Kalyr PBeM. If you want to know what a Play-by-Email game (for that is what the acronym stands for) looks like, you can always follow that link.

I’m currently using Moveable Type to archive the turns, using categories for threads, and numbering each post to ensure they’re sorted in the right order. The category archives are sorted in ascending rather than descending date order, so that they read as a narrative of sorts. The game itself runs on the list server run by those nice people at Phoenyx.net; so far it hasn’t become play-by-blog using the comments facility for player responses. Yet.

One of the threads has got becalmed again, something that seems to happen every so often. Perhaps I should be more amazed that the game is still running after more than seven years than the fact that it sometimes runs very slowly.