Where Worlds Collide

This weeks Game WISH is about Religion and Controversy

A lot of neogamers I play with are uncomfortable with taking real religions and putting them into play. With all the “Satanist” backlash against D&D that there’s been, do you feel comfortable having any religion in your games? Do you scrub it of anything controversial?

Being a believer myself, I feel that including any real-world religion in a game that also includes magic and supernatural elements is always going to be a situation where you have to tread carefully, especially if any of the players are strongly religious. I would not want to include anything that made any player uncomfortable. Religious faith, much like sexuality, is an important part of people’s identity, which is why religion, like sex, can be a very touchy area.

My own position is that games must treat any real-world religions with respect; if the world-view of the gameworld is completely at odds with any mainstrean faith, then it’s better to avoid explicit mentions of that religion in the game. For example, I would never play a strongly religious character in a Call of Cthulhu game. On the other hand, I do play a believer in STD, a game based on Steven King’s The Stand, as does at least one other Christian player.

I had mixed feelings about In Nomine, the game of Angels and Demons. Some people feel the game is inherently blasphemous, and it can be if you play it that way. But it can also be one of the most explicitly Christian games out there; I’ve certainly played games that have had a very strong moral tone. It is about the ultimate struggle between Good and Evil, after all.

When it comes to fantasy worlds with fictitious religions, I have trouble imagining a plausible world where religion plays no part whatsoever. I’m very into well-defined and coherent worlds with detailed histories and cultures, and religion should play an important part in that. Take the religion out of Glorantha and you won’t have much left. Likewise my own Kalyr setting would be much weaker without the enigmatic Guardians and the array of wierd and wonderful human cults.

Transport Blog have started a game of Mornington Crescent. The first two moves were Baron’s Court and Gunnersbury.

My move is British Museum, which, according to Patrick Crozier, is a legal move according to the Hepplethwaite-Everard rules.

The Warley MRC exhibition, held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, is the largest model railway show in Britain. It gathers together many of the best layouts in the country, and is also the occasion for manufacturers to showcase their latest new releases.

A couple of the most impressive layouts were 4mm scale BR steam era lines, both set in the Pennine Hills in the 1950s. First there was Blea Moor, a slice of bleak Yorkshire moorland with a stretch of the Settle and Carlisle railway running through it, served by a vast bank of staging roads hidden beneath the moor. The only thing that could have made it even more realistic might have been some cold horizontal rain. Then there was the Kendal MRC’s Askrigg Bank featuring a double track on a 1:40 grade. This is an unusual layout in that all four sides are scenic, with the visible track climbing though 360 degrees round the layout, then descending again inside the hillside on slightly gentler grade; the tracks actually make three laps of the board, two of them hidden inside the hill. Another very impressive layout was the 40 foot long HO scale Lorrette, a slice of electrified Belgian main line with some impressive scenic modelling.

American readers of this weblog my be struck by the difference in emphasis in the model railway hobby. I get the impression that the American hobby is all about big permenantly installed basement empires. In contrast, the really big and impressive British layouts are sectional exhibition layouts. This may be because British house builders typically don’t build houses with basements; in fact some layouts can never be fully set up in their owner’s homes, and only run at shows.

Yet again, Warley made a huge dent in my wallet. First there was the Kato/Hobbytrain Swiss Re6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo, released just a week before the show, a magnificent model that’s gliding round the layout on a train of container flats as I type this. Then I bought a whole load of British outline stock, several Farish VAA vans, and a Artrans grain hopper that I’m planning to convert into a ‘Polybulk’ china clay wagon. Worst of all, I succumbed to a complete HST set in First Great Western’s “Barbie” livery! And last, but definitely not least I also ordered a CJM 67. (”Why spend all that money on something that just sits there and goes ‘ying, ying, ying’”, said Roechard Wibd)

Shows like this are great gatherings of people. Nowadays I tend to keep in touch with fellow modellers over the net, and meet up with them at shows. Over the weekend I met up Alan Monk, Steve Grantham, Mike Hughes, Stu from Swindon, Paul Martin, Bryn Davies, Roechard Wibd, Natalie Jones, Kelly, Maurice Pearce, Chris Marchant and Fat Belly Jones, plus many more.

You may be familiar with Jack Chick’s infamous badly drawn loopy fundamentalist tracts (such as the infamous Dark Dungeons). Now it looks as if something unspeakably horrible has happened.

Patrick Crozier gives us his thoughts on The Origins of the First World War. It seems Patrick is a fan of Bismarck.

So, in 1887, Germany can look forward to an age of peace and prosperity. And then, in 1888, Kaiser Friedrich III dies to be succeeded by his son, Willhelm II. More or less his first act is sack Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, the man who almost single-handedly, unified Germany and granted her this Golden Vista.

I never really enjoyed history at School; perhaps it was the dry and dull way it was taught. Two and a half decades later, I find it a fascinating subject.

When Good Rock Goes Horribly Wrong, a list of 25 albums the compiler of the list believes should never be recorded.

I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of Deep Purple’s “Stormbringer”

And I quote: “Ride the rainbow/ Crack the sky/ Stormbringer coming/ Time to die.” Yeah. Mmm-hmmm. Thanks for channeling Michael Moorcock. Now, shut up and play “Smoke on the Water.”

This album came out the same year that Gary Gygax started getting our nation’s youth to worship Satan. Coincidence? I think not.

OK, so it wasn’t their best album. But has he heard “House of Blue Light” or “Slaves and Masters”? I think not.

The Michael Moorcock interview it links with is well worth reading too.

(Link from Solonor’s Ink Well)

Looks like I’ve got another problem with corrupted comments database. As before, the only cure for this seems to be to trash the entire existing comments database and start over, so all existing comments on this blog are now gone
Wherever I end up hosting, it’s got to support MySQL. Then you have at least a chance of repairing corrupted database files.

Eeek! I’ve just received a bill from my hosting company for exceeding my bandwidth quota for November. I’ve checked by web statistics, and it doesn’t look as though anything’s been slashdotted or instapundited, just the general upward trend in hits. It looks like this weblog has just outgrown my current hosting package.

This forces me to consider my options. Do I stick with the same provider and upgrade to the next level up in hosting plan, costing 50% more but giving me four times the bandwidth? Do I try and redesign the site to use less bandwidth by making the front page (which accounts for the majority of hits) smaller? Do I learn some google-fu to direct search engine hits away from the main page towards the much smaller individual archives instead?

Or should I change to a different host? My current provider had been hosting my homepage well before I started blogging; It’s really geared towards small-scale e-commerce rather than as a blog host. Perhaps one of the specialised blog hosting companies might be a better bet?

Recommendations, anyone?

I know it’s two days after the event, but what with (1) recovering from the party, (2) Sunday lunch with my parents, and (3) the long journey back to Cheshire, this is the first time I’ve had the chance to post about it.

There were a good fifty or sixty people people there. Of those on my blogroll, I met Tom Coates, Matt Webb, Annie from Going Underground and Bobbie from PolitX. Much fun was had, and much beer was drunk.

There’s a partial list of attendees here. There are even some photos, one of which is of me, although I will not say which one.

I stayed until (almost) the bitter end, caught the very last tube to Paddington, and which just got there just in time to catch the 1am train back to Slough (which was standing room only).