I just hope this complete nutjob represents the extremist fringe of the Religious Right, and there aren’t thousands more like him. It’s said people get more rightwing as they get older; if he’s this extreme when he’s 19, what’s he going to be like in middle age? Or will he fall off the edge and reappear on the left?
Fortunately, if these photos are anything to go by, he’s unlikely ever to reproduce.
(Thanks to Pyramidian Tony Smith for the link)
Patrick Crozier has a post on Transport Blog explaining why buses are never going to an acceptable substitute for train travel.
WISH 91 is about Appropriating From Fiction
How often do you appropriate bits from books, movies, comics, and other sources as a player or GM? Do you like to steal names or flavor or go more whole-hog? Is there a difference between stealing for background and stealing for in-game plot?
Please take care to file off the serial numbers first! I like game universes to at least give the appearance of being unique creations of the GM and players, and I find things lifted wholesale from works of fiction detract from this. I remember being slightly annoyed with one of my online players who introduced a lot of background elements that I didn’t realise had been lifted straight from Jack Vance’s Alastor series, names and all. On the other hand, I did allow a player in Kalyr to run a character who’s a refugee from Andre Norton’s Witch World (”The Kolder are responsible for everything!“), who wandered in through an interdimensional gateway.
I’ve never had (to my knowledge, at least) any player in my games using names from other works, and it’s not something I would allow. Names just have too much baggage associated with them. I wonder what prompted Steve, the GM of the Victorian age Vampire game at Gypsycon, to name one of the characters “Max Hastings”.
On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with basing a character on someone from a favourite book or film, provided you make a reasonable attempt to file off the serial numbers. I’ve done this myself, with one of my favourite characters, Karl Tolhurst, who was at least partly based on Dan Ward from Iain Banks’ “Espedair Street”.
On the third tentacle, I doubt that many of us have the imagination or the time to create complete original setting from the whole cloth. It’s also hard to sell a game concept to potential players unless you can point at some points of reference. Therefore, unless you’re playing in an established commercial or licensed setting (DnD generic fantasy counts as such in my book!), you pretty much have to borrow significant setting elements from somewhere. My own Kalyr game is a case in point. It started out as combination of some elements from Julian May’s Pliocene Exiles sage mixed with other bits from Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and Long Sun books. The overall flavour of the setting has ended up resembling more than one of Jack Vance’s planetary sagas. The theme of a static and rather hidebound society at the point where things are starting to break down is a recurring theme in Vance’s novels.
Things have been quiet on this weblog for a while.
This is because I’m still recovering from four solid days of gaming at Gypsycon, in Pidley in Cambridgeshire. Games included such RPGS as Victorian age Vampire, a game based on Firefly, Castle Falkenstein, and GURPS Time Travel. We got to messily dispose of a cult, work out what to do with two horses, a naked woman and 400 kilos of cocaine in the airlock of a starship, explore the sewers of Vienna, and assassinate Baron von Richthoven, although not all in the same game.
Sadly I didn’t get to run the GURPS Kalyr game I’d prepared; several people had to drop out at the last moment, and a number of games had to be cut. I’m now considering running it at Stabcon in July.
My sleep pattern still has to get back to normal.
Game WISH 90 is about System Updates
What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not?
As ever, it depends on the update. I’m very much looking forward to the fourth edition of GURPS; the third edition is now sixteen years old, and the system is in danger of collapsing from the weight of accumulated cruft of additional rules from the literally hundreds of supplements SJG have published over those sixteen years. The new edition should cut through this accretion of rules to give us a new streamlined ruleset that will hopefully last another sixteen years.
On the other hand, I’m sure D&D version three-and-a-half is no more than cynical money making exercise. Was 3.0 really that broken to need a new edition that soon? Not that I’m going to buy it; I don’t play enough d20 in any form to justify purchasing. And I wonder if the upcoming sixth edition of Call of Cthulhu will have enough changes to justify my buying it.
Heroquest is an interesting one. It’s really the second edition of Hero Wars, which in turn was the new game system for Glorantha, the world for RuneQuest. Hero Wars suffered from appalling layout and editing problems, bad enough to all but cripple the game, and has to rank as one of the most disappointing releases I’ve ever bought. Heroquest has kept the same core game engine, but they’re totally rewritten the rules, so that the result now makes enough sense to be able to play the thing. The rule system bears little or no resemblance to Runequest at all, which is likely to be a turn off for many old school RQ players; it’s a much simpler and more freeform game, Dramatist rather than Simulationist.
Conversions, again depend on the system. Traveller has gone though a great many systems, some of them good, some awful (remember T4? Ick!) GURPS Traveller works at least as well as classic Traveller or Traveller: New Era. I haven’t seen the d20 version, so I can’t comment. On the other hand, d20 Cthulhu brings out the garlic and crucifixes. And as for Deadlands, any conversion has to be better than that the awful, awful original system.
Setting reboots: Who remembers Traveller: The New Era with it’s Virus? This is a textbook example of How Not To Do It. A pity in some ways, the post-holocaust Virus background was actually an interesting setting with a lot of possibility for adventure; it’s just that most fans didn’t like the way they had to blow up the Third Imperium to do it. Who can blame GURPS Traveller for setting that game in an alternate universe where the Third Imperium never fell?
Today’s essential reading from The Guardian. It reveals the full horror story behind the West Coast Modernisation, starring everyone from the Adam Smith Institute to Halliburton. Nobody comes out of this story with any credit, least of all the Tory government that privatised the railways, and the Labour government that failed to tackle the problem.
As for how this affects me personally, the five month blockade from Cheadle Hulme to Crewe doubles the length of my daily commute, adding an hour to my day. Over five months it’s 100 hours of my life I won’t get back.
(Link from Transport Blog)