Where Worlds Collide

This accident had the same death toll as the Hatfield derailment. I just hope it doesn’t produce the same overreaction.

A small rail trolley loaded with rails on one work site somehow ran away down a falling gradient. Four miles down the line it had picked up speed and ran down a group of track workers on another work site. Four were killed, and three more injured.

They were under arc lamps and the trolley would have come out of the dark.

Mark Lenderyou of the Health and Safety Executive said the runaway vehicle would have been running “virtually silently” - while the men were working amid the noise of lighting generators.

“It’s very unlikely they would have known anything about it until the trolley hit them,” he added.

First, my condolences to the families and friends of those who lost their lives in this accident. The rail industry does need to take all sensible methods to prevent a repeat of this accident. It’s wise to reexamine safety procedures when there are multiple work sites on a steeply-graded stretch of line.

But…

The aftermath of Hatfield saw the rail network crippled for months with severe speed restrictions, which probably cost more lives in additional road accidents than it saved. I hope we don’t see a similar overreaction banning all overnight maintenance work regardless of possible risks; that would only result in more daytime closures forcing passengers onto more dangerous modes of travel.

Sadly I don’t trust the HSE to see the bigger picture.

Game WISH 84 asks:

What five games would you love to run/play if you had a willing group and a weekly time slot?

Transhuman Space
This is the ‘Powered by GURPS’ game set in the year 2100, and supported in depth. It’s ‘realistic’ hard SF rather than 50s space opera. There’s no FTL space travel, but mankind have colonised the solar system, Mars is being terraformed, and there are a host of habitats both in the asteroid belt and in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are no aliens, but there is a plethora of genetic modifications, Bioroids (think Blade Runner replicants) and AIs. There’s also plenty to do on Earth, as if the lawless frontier of space wasn’t enough. In many ways, it’s very cyberpunk, especially in the 2100 equivalent of the third world.

Hero Quest
I greatly enjoyed the Runequest campaign I played in a few years back, which sadly fell apart when I moved north. Glorantha is still the most richly detailed fantasy setting out there, and blows the formulaic Forgotten Realms style pabulum out of the water. While Runequest was a good, innovative system in it’s day, it’s rather dated twenty years later. HQ is a much more streamlined system, one for the Noughties rather than the late 70s.

Alternate Earths
I love the alternate histories in the two GURPS Alternate Earths books, with a secret struggle between dimension hoppers from rival parallels across dozens on different worlds. If I was GMing, I probably wouldn’t use the Homeline/Centrum setting ’straight’. I’d be tempted to make it a little darker, perhaps introducing a third, more sinister set of bad guys, and I would certainly toss the cheesier elements like the ridiculous “Time Tours”.

Traveller Scouts
This would be favourite option for a game set in the Traveller universe. Travel to strange new worlds, encounter weird and wonderful societies, and get into all sorts of problems. While you may be in the pay of the mighty Third Imperium, once on a remote planet, you’re really on your own, and have to solve problems using your own initiative.

Kalyr
My own homebrewed gameworld in which I not only run two online games, but several convention style oneshots as well. Despite all this, it’s still not worn smooth from overuse. Two ideas I’d still love to try are a pair of high powered games, one centring on a party of high level psis, the other a political intrigue game of scheming nobles set in the Vohrleyn empire.

That’s the top five. If I had to choose even more, I’d include In Nomine, one of the few ‘high powered’ games I really like, Call of Cthulhu, although it’s more suited for convention one-shots, and some sort of historical fantasy combining supernatural elements with ‘real’ history; possibly along the lines of Mage:Sorcerer’s Crusade. (but definitely not 7th Sea!)

I would say “yes”. But this posting on ‘Constrained Writing’ at the The 20′ By 20′ Room doesn’t seem to agree:

Play-by-Email (with its precedent play-by-mail and play-by-post) is an interesting hybrid of the two above forms with tabletop roleplaying. I personally am not so sure pbem is roleplaying, but I do think it is an excellent writing exercise that can provide many of the pleasures of world and character creation.

I’ve been playing either PBeMs or their close relative, message board gaming for several years now, and I find them just as much ‘roleplaying’ as the more traditional tabletop style of gaming. In fact, I’m sure that many of the online games I’ve played in have much greater characterisation and emotional depth than most of the face-to-face games. It might just be that I’m better at writing than I am at improvisational acting. To many times in face-to-face gaming I’ve either thought of a witty in-character line just after the game has moved on, or got tongue-tied at just the wrong moment. It’s also true that the slow nature of the PBeM/PBmB format tends to deemphasise tactical combat, and characterisation and plot take their place.

I think it’s true that the FtF and PB** format are quite different, and appeal to a different kind of player. But I can’t see that both are not roleplaying. But MMORPGs? That’s a different story….

I know Mac users are sometimes fanatical, but this makes me wonder about the sanity of some of them. (Link from A Skeptical Blog)

Warning! Link contains words uttered recently by Johnny Rotten!

Spent yesterday at the Doncaster Festival of British Model Railways, held in the conference centre at Doncaster Racecourse. It’s a big show, but does tend to have too many traders and not enough layouts. As one who’s more interested nowadays in modelling continental Europe I was disappointed to see not a single layout with a non-British theme. On the other hand, as someone who still has a interest in the British post-steam era, there were plenty of modern era layouts; wall-to-wall GWR branchlines it was not. I liked the minimalist Avonmouth Road (see below), and Prices Street Gardens, a classic urban location on the western approach to Edinburgh Waverley station, featuring a scale model of Edinburgh Castle; this is really the sort of thing you can only do in N.

Being a UK-centric show, my wallet got off lightly. The only item of Swiss rolling stock I bought was a Minitrix SBB baggage car, although I did also buy four Bachmann HEA coal hoppers for my next British layout. Bachmann’s policy of batch production means you have to buy them while they’re available; if I’d waited for four years until I actually needed them, I would find they were no longer available.

I have a few pictures: there would have been more, if I’d remembered to charge up the spare set of camera batteries.

Who says 0 gauge needs a lot of space? This is the entirety of the layout! It’s a very well-modelled piece of urban decay, set in the late sixties. In a few years time this area will be covered by out of town shopping centres, with no sign there was ever a railway there.

Closeup of the locomotive, a BR class 07, a type built for shunting in Southampton docks

A general view of the main hall. The layout in the foreground is Selsey Beach, set on the south coast in the present day, with a fleet of kitbuilt third rail EMUs in NSE and Connex liveries. Behind it on the left is the large Runswick Leamside, a big diesel era crowd-puller, set just before privatisation.

There are some evil people on the Blogosphere. Al-Muhajabah has had to disable comments from her Islamic Blog after some fascist moron decided to crapflood her blog with several hundred comments like the example below.

STOP TRYING TO INFLUENCE OUR VOTES, TERRORISTS. RpnIGQkXBH TFfvjYmB UmjGJFELWr CMlfaN oGRIIIPRgkDA ql IUpv KXyycH LK KmUdcUZk xoWo cwEma MbQxLAc QvoYv qSei heEbYcACQp

If anyone actually reads Al-Muhajabah’s blog, you’ll find that she’s consistently posted robust condemnations of terrorist acts.

I believe we’re going to see more of this sort of thing as the US election approaches. There appears to be no shortage of unpleasant thugs that only believe in democracy and freedom of speech when it applies to their side. I wonder how many more liberal (or conservative) blogs will be hit by DOS attacks in the next few months?

Alan K Henderson recalls the songs from William Shatner’s ‘classic’ “Transformed Man”, and shudders at the thought that the man might one day consider a followup, making apalling mockeries of well-loved classics. So he came up with the following list.

Top Ten Songs That William Shatner Should Be Legally Banned From Singing

10. “Achy-Breaky Heart” (Billy Ray Cyrus)
9. “Sympathy for the Devil” (Rolling Stones)
8. “Space Truckin’” (Deep Purple)
7. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” (AC/DC)
6. “Gentle on my Mind” (Glen Campbell - also recorded by Leonard Nimoy)
5. “Stairway to Heaven” (Led Zeppelin)
4. anything by the Bee Gees
3. “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen)
2. “Theme to ‘Shaft’” (Isaac Hayes)
1. “I’m Your Captain” (Grand Funk Railroad)

I couldn’t resist adding a few more…

11. “Get your hands off my woman” (The Darkness)
12. “Anarchy in the UK” (The Sex Pistols)
13. “Spirit of the Age” (Hawkwind)
14. “Starship Trooper” (Yes)
15. “I’m the Urban Spaceman” (Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band)
16. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (Meatloaf) Slasfic fans; don’t even think about this as a duet with Leonard Nimoy…
17. “Bike” (Pink Floyd)
18. “Wannabe” (The Spice Girls)
19. “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” (Frank Zappa)
20. “Killed by Death” (Motorhead)

After a long absence, the Fudge ezine Fudge Factor is back with a new issue.

It appears that Electric Nose does not like the new Heljan Western. (No permalinks, scroll down to the Jan 30th entry)