Where Worlds Collide

Some people think that many post privatisation British liveries are awful. But so far, nobody has come up with anything quite as bad as this. Who said Germans had no sense of humour?

Amadán (aka David Edelstein) warns us about her in Online GMing Tips 2

Hornby Trains have made a big announcement today. After fevered speculation regarding whether or not they were going to buy up the tools from the now-defunct Lima, it turned out to be nothing so mundane. What they’re going to do is this.

The locomotive is powered by a mini immersion heater located in the tender and is heated by a safe low voltage current passed along the track by the remote regulator. This low voltage boils the water which in turns creates the steam pressure.

Being simple to operate, after a small amount of practice, the driver can obtain approximately 25 – 30 minutes of running before the locomotive needs topping up with water. The engine also produces realistic steam sounds from pumping pistons to the engine whistle, coupled with the unmistakable nostalgic smells of steam and hot engine oil.

Hornby Marketing Manager Simon Kohler said: “The Hornby Live Steam locomotive is a superb achievement. What was once supposedly an impossible dream is now a living reality and opens up all sorts of possibilities for the development of model railways. The future is steam, the future is Hornby!”

What next? A working internal combution class 50?

Carnival of the Vanities No 50 hoovers up the best of the blogosphere over the past week.

Which is an excuse for a quite gratuitous train picture (as if I really needed an excuse)

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 62: My Favorite Villains

Describe three of your favorite villains from campaigns you’ve played in or GMed. What makes them good villains? Why are they your favorites?

This is a difficult one. Much of my gaming, the ‘opposition’ has been dumb monsters or ‘bad guy of the week’, and I haven’t done much with recurring villains. Since much of my face to face gaming nowadays is convention-style one-shots, there’s not so much scope to develop villains. Therefore most of the ones that come to mind come from online gaming.

First, from one of my own games, there’s Tanala. Tanala started out as one of my cast of background NPCs for Kalyr, a member of the psionic guild called The Academy of the Mind, and defines in my initial three-line description as a racist kandar-supremacist telepath. (The alien humanoid Kandar are the ‘master race’ in Kalyr; humans are their oppressed slaves). One of the players, Sean, wanted to play a human psionic and member of the same guild and asked me some questions about the other guild members to help him flesh out the character submission. We decided that Tanala would have to be an Enemy, which prompted me to flesh her out further; she remains one of the few NPCs to have a full-blown character sheet. She became a leading light in the underground kandar supremacist cult known as Kaasranth Sar, and acquired a lover in the form of a rather stupid and headstrong kandar knight called Kluranyr. Most of the time Tanala lurked in the background, but the knowledge she was there kept Reylorna, the human psionic PC on edge. Ultimately we has the famous incident on the road, when what started as a bout of verbal taunts ended up with Kluranyr challenging a quite different PC to a duel, and losing quite badly.

Tanala is currently recovering from a psychic interrogation gone horribly wrong; and a third PC has a contract on her. We’ll have to see how that plays out.

I can’t not mention Steve Leywood. He started life as a character in the back-story of the character submission for my own PC, Karl Tolhurst, in a present-day Call of Cthulhu game. As those who have read some of my previous Game WISHes, Steve was the singer of the band Ümläüt in which Karl was the guitarist. In the original backstory Steve had vanished after the murder of Ravila, the band’s keyboard player, who was also Karl’s lover.

The GM took all this and ran with it; weaving it all into her own campaign background. It turned out that Steve had been incorporating bits of blasphemous Cthulhoid rituals into song lyrics, getting audiences to sing along. Steve turned up as a hideous shrivelled undead creature, turning up at regular intervals to taunt poor Karl and strip away his SAN, while hunting down and killing the other surviving NPC band members in front of player-character witnesses.

Sadly the game folded. I since resurrected Karl in a completely different game, only this time Steve is a player character, played by Jill, (recipient of a Warm Fuzzy in an earlier WISH). The original game’s GM is on record as saying that Jill is the only roleplayer she knows that could play Steve as a PC. Will the bloody history repeat itself?

Sybil from the online game GURPS Cyberpunk game HVG has to be one of the strangest RPG villains I can remember. Sybil was played as a PC, without the player knowing her true nature. Sybil was an AI who’s lost her memory; it was only at the very end of the adventure we found that the green slime we’d found was Sybil; escaped experimental nanotech. And it wasn’t until the sequel we found our just how Evil this slime really was, and who was behind it. Yes, folks, not just a metaphor, this one!

Amazing post on the SWRG (South West Rail Gen) mailing list.

EWS 08865 (en-route to Par harbour) overtook 37142 (in lay by) on A30 on Bodmin Moor about an hour ago.

Railway locomotives being carted about the country on the backs of low loader lorries is an increasingly common sight these days. 08865 is a shunting locomotive with a maximum speed of 15mph, and on today’s congested railway they’re no way something so slow could be routed over the main line for any significant distance. Modern yard shunters in continental Europe have the ability to be towed at significantly higher speeds, so they can be included in the consists of freight trains when there’s a need to move them from one part of the country to another. But in Britain, the decline of freight traffic over the past few decades has meant there’s been no demand for new shunting locomotives; and the 1950s build “Gronks” are far from worn out.