Where Worlds Collide

This review of Pat Benatar’s latest album has sparked a discussion. What’s happened to guitar solos? Why have they gone so completely out of fashion that even bands like Rush and Metallica feel obliged to release albums devoid of any solos?

It seems the culprit is Grunge, which was a reaction against the soulless widdlywiddly soloing of 80s hair metal. Like punk in Britain a decade and a half earlier, Grunge threw the baby out with the bath water and rejected guitar solos altogether. Somehow solos have vanished from the British scene as well, and we’re stuck with boring strummy stuff.

GURPS Planet of Adventure is the latest in a long line of licenced GURPS worldbooks based on science fiction novels, based on a series of four novels by Jack Vance, City of the Chasch, Servants of the Wankh, The Dirdir, and The Pnume, later collected together as Planet of Adventure.

Steve Jackson Games have never gone for any of the really big licences like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Dune, presumably because they didn’t want to bet the company on something that they don’t control. Instead, they’ve chosen lower profile works, usually literary rather than TV or film. Past licences have included Andre Norton’s Witch World, David Brin’s Uplift novels, E.E “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Planet of Adventure comes from the “Sword and Planet” sub-genre of SF. The four novels follow the adventures of the Earth Scout Adam Reith, the first man from Earth to visit the planet Tschai, after his starship is shot down and he’s the sole survivor of the crash landing. Tschai is typical of Jack Vance’s creations, a picaresque planet filled with strange baroque cultures and larger-than-life characters. The dominant powers are the four warring alien races, each with their own races of human servants, who share the planet with a wide variety of human cultures. Adam Reith encounters many of these in his efforts to build or steal a starship to get back home.

The GURPS adaptation presents Tschai as a setting for further adventures. The first chapter gives an overview, starting with GURPS game statistics for the planet’s animal life, including the dangerous Bombardier Birds (who dive-bomb their prey with stones) and the feared Night-Hounds. It goes on to give some details of the history and geography of the world, as well as a synopsis of the four novels.

Chapter Two, Masters of Tschai details the four alien races who dominate the planet through higher technology. There are the scaly xenophobic Chasch, The inscrutable frog-like Wanek (who in the novels were called The Wankh!), the man eating hunters the Dirdir, and the enigmatic insectile Pnume, the original native inhabitants of the planet. For each race we get GURPS racial templates and a description of their physiology, psychology and culture. The chapter also covers the human servant/slaves of each of the four in much the same way.

Relations among the various races of Tschai can be summed up fairly simply: Everyone hates everybody else!

Chapter Three, Humans of Tschai details the human inhabitants of the planet living in those regions not controlled by any of the alien races, descendants of Earth humans brought to Tschai by the Dirdir millennia ago. We meet the nomadic steppe nomads the Kruthe, who ride lorries and electric motorcycles. At the other extreme there are the decadent city dwelling Yao, obsessed with status games and petty intrigues. We get all we need to know about the daily life, religion, technology and economics of the human cultures.

Chapter Four, Characters and Equipment is the rule-heavy chapter, showing how to represent Tschai in GURPS terms. It gives plenty of character templates for various archetypal characters, both Earth visitors to Tschai, and locals. It also covers the available technology, including weapons and vehicles.

Chapter Five, Campaigns and Adventures puts it all together with advice on how to run games set in Tschai. It gives various campaign frames; the obvious one being the player characters as Earth Scouts in better armed and better briefed followup mission to that of Adam Reith. It also suggests a number of ideas for parties of Tschai natives such as from merchants and pirates. Finally we have four adventure scenarios, some for Earthmen, some for Tschai natives, some suitable for both.

The last chapter gives a glossary of people, places and terminology.

Overall, this is one of the better GURPS licenced worldbooks. It takes a very rich setting and shows the potential for adventure. The inclusion of some sample adventures demonstrates the things player characters might expect to do, something a few GURPS worldbooks of the past have neglected.

Board your starship and go there now!

Yet anothe reason why I’m glad I don’t live in America. The local police act like a bunch of jackbooted thugs and conduct an armed drugs raid on a high school, apparently with full support of the school administrator. The raid terrorised more than a thousand school pupils and found no drugs.

So there were allegations of drug dealing at the school? Surely there are more effective ways of dealing with this than lashing out in a way that terrorises guilty and innocent alike.

Heads deserve to roll over this.

My experiences of (much milder) collective punishments at School never left me with any greater respect for authority, or even anger at the miscreants that provoked the punishments. All that was left was a burning sense of injustice, and a belief that the teacher in question was a fascist idiot.

The only good it did was to teach me that collective punishment is always wrong, whether it’s carried out by some frustrated Welsh economics teacher, or by Ariel Sharon.

Slacktivist gives us a tour of surreal worldview of the all American heresy of Millenial Dispensationalism, through the pages of the truly dreadful Left Behind books. Here Slacktivist concludes that they’re just not creepy enough.

Left Behind, despite its religious trappings, is part of a larger genre of earth-shattering apocalyptic tales. Contrast the opening chapters of LB with the early pages of Stephen King’s The Stand, which offers a similar sweeping epic tale of the end of the world.

King’s story is genuinely frightening. L&J’s is not. This is, of course, partly because Stephen King is a better stylist. But the main difference is not King’s skill as a storyteller, but his objective. When you read The Stand, he wants you to imagine this is happening to you.

The tone and objective of LB, instead, asks you to imagine this happening to someone else. The reader has no purchase, no foothold in the story — and thus no reason to find it personally unsettling.

L&J’s approach divides their readers into two categories. You can, like the authors, consider yourself among the departed, looking on these wooden characters with a gloating scorn. Or else you must be, like these characters, the object of that scorn. Either way, there’s little room for the empathy necessary to make such stories truly frightening.

What I find truly frightening is that millions of otherwise sane Americans apparently believe this nonsense. Not only that, but this heresy, thanks to the political power of the Religious Right, is influencing American policy in the Middle East.

There’s a new mailing list for European N gauge modelling, Euro-N. It’s only been going for about three days before the list starts costing me money! Just about the first discussion of the new group concerned the SBB EWiii “Swiss Express” coaches. Thisencouraged me to buy the last remaining Minitrix 5 car set in stock at my local model shop.

I will need a modeller’s licence to operate the thing on a layout that’s supposed to be somewhere on the BLS North Ramp. Yes I know the stock is due to be transferred to the BLS as some time, but I’m guessing they will get repainted into BLS colours by then.

Something Awful rants about Radiohead. This is about their unlistenable “Kid A”

‘IDM’ which is an imaginary sub-genre of electronic music (the “I” stands for “Intelligent” which stands for “pretentious and meaningless”). One would think that such wild-eyed, obstreperous garbage would have no choice but to be interesting, but Radiohead once again defied expectations by making the albums as boring as a tea-party with grandma. Not even your own grandma, with whom you had an emotional connection. This was like a tea party with your neighbor’s grandma. The decidedly lukewarm reaction from the music press only added to the die-hard fans’ mistaken impression that these albums were deep and mysterious.

I thought “OK Computer” was a decent album (although a few Dave Gilmour style guitar solos would have improved it immensely), but after that, they Jumped The Shark in spectacular fashion. However, large sections of the music press continue to worship them. (Link from Adam)

If you want to communicate with the yoof of today on the internet, you need The AOLer Translator. Turn English into the style of a typical 12 year old with an AOL account. (Link from Meera Barry)

Is this really just Carnival #45 repackaged in a European shaped box? Are these bad train puns getting worse? Yes, it’s Carnival of the Vanities time again.

The Non-Euclidian Staircase discusses Rolling Dice, with a growing comment thread, on what makes a good RPG dice mechanic, and what doesn’t.

The Czechs have a radical new solution to the problems of road congestion. Expect Ken Linvingstone to adopt the idea shortly! Link from Transport Blog