Frankenstorm Miscellany

How many random items make a post again?

• Release the Kraken!  We're bracing for Hurricane Sandy here on the east coast of the US.  Cygnus Central is hundreds of miles away from the projected path, but we're expected to get lots of rain, 30-40 mph wind gusts, and possibly power outages.  In doing some searching for the above image, I also found an old-school RPG discussion of treating a Maelstrom as a "monster" rather than a mere environmental event.  It certainly feels like a determined foe right now!
• I reviewed a book by John Calvin Batchelor a few months ago on the blog.  More random internet hopping tonight revealed that I could listen to him live, right now, on the radio if I wanted to.  (He's now a talk-show host.)  Politics aside, I'm not sure if I want to listen, just because that book means so much to me and I worry about ruining it...
• I'm still pondering the Right Stuff RPG and slowly building lists and forked trees of missions and events.  Slow going because of teaching and other things.

I've also been saving up some of the oddest of the odd search terms that I've found in my Blogger traffic sources.  If anyone reading this got here by way of one of these terms, more power to ya!  (But I can't resist riffing on them...)

• "Foundation trilogy cartoon:"  If only Max Fleischer had done that!
• "Skeeball wizard:"  Kevin Smith is doing a remake of the Who's rock opera.
• "I Ching sword:"  New magic item for Oriental Adventures!
• "Bardic grade:"  I just see a medieval Simon Cowell making snarky remarks about minstrels in a tavern.
• "Veve 3D:"  Heck, I'm scared of them in 2D!
• "American gesture connected with nose:"  So, why do they call you Booger, anyway?  (Revenge of the Nerds reference)
• "Avatar airbender p*rn:"  Why, Rule 34, why?
• "Enochian miniatures:"  Pew pew!  A 28mm Edward Kelley just destroyed John Dee's obsidian mirror!

Be safe, fellow east coasters!

Timey Wimey Blendsday

We've been really enjoying the exploits of the 11th Doctor lately.

Artist: James Hance

I loved the classic exploits of the 4th Doctor back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I caught one or two adventures of the 7th (Pex Lives!), but it wasn't until this year that my lovely wife got me back into the Whovian fandom with the 11th.  Now we're eagerly awaiting what will happen on the fields of Trenzelor -- and whether we'll see Oswin again at Christmas time!

There have been several Doctor Who board games and RPGs, and I'm currently having a look at an old one that is freely available for download.  The most modern one looks pretty interesting, too, but I don't know if I'll ever plunk down the cash for it.  I don't think I've ever actually played a "licensed-property RPG" -- other than Star Fleet Battles, which isn't an RPG -- but I have bought some supplements in the past, since they often contain so much extra world-immersing detail!  :-)

More picturey wicturey fun is below...

Artist: Bill Mudron

Artist: Misskari

 

Am I a Pythagorean?

A few interesting threads have come together for me lately, and they all seem to have something to do with music.  I don't play an instrument, but I've made no secret of my love of the interesting aspects of musical harmonies (especially as related to the Glass Bead Game).  My long-time devotion to math-rock gods Rush is also on record.  :-)

I also have an on-again, off-again fascination with astrology and its metaphorical links both with psychology and with numbers and harmonies.

Then, just over the past few days, I've heard random songs on the radio that all seem to be telling me that music is Something Important...  There's been Frank Turner telling me that something as simple as rock and roll will save us all.  Then Triumph saying that music has the magic power to bring us closer to our dreams.  Then, my man, Stevie, cluing us in how music is a world within itself; a language we all understand.

Then!  Fellow blogger Suze chimes in, weaving a musical creation myth to explain the trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit.  (I couldn't resist commenting on the similarity to Tolkien's Music of the Ainur...)

There's definitely something in sound that strums us where we live.  Is it such a leap to connect it with spirituality?

Of course, music has always played a big part in communal worship.  True prog geeks (like ol' Johann Sebastian) have known how to make the most uplifting use of harmonies for a long time!  But for some reason I'm thinking further than just the "use" of music.  The actual worship OF music?  No, that's not quite it.  The deification of Harmony as an abstract concept?  Not really that, either.  I'm not actually sure where it's pointing me, but I will be reading more about the Pythagoreans, who seem to have trod this path before.

I thought for a while about whether or not to write this up on the blog.  I haven't made any concrete breakthroughs, nor had any truly NEW insights (yet?).  And, I worried, how relevant will it be to my true-blue D&D gamer readership out there?

Then I remembered that the Pythagoreans had quite the affinity for the Platonic solids...

These ARE the gods... of the player characters, anyway!

Relevant enough for me! 

And I still believe (I still believe) in the sound, 

That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down.
And I still believe (I still believe) in the need,
For guitars and drums and desperate poetry.
And I still believe (I still believe) that everyone,
Can find a song for every time they've lost and every time they've won.
So just remember folks we not just saving lives, we're saving souls,
And we're having fun.

Superdome

No real post today; just a neat picture I snapped the other day.  I got to visit a really cool place this week...

"I don't always give a talk underneath a 120-foot tall buckyball, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis..."

Dude, where's my L5 colony?

(Insert standard blogger apology for not posting more frequently... my teaching this semester is rewarding, but it's taking up a huge chunk of time.)

In the last post I began outlining a new game concept where players take on the roles of 1960s astronauts.  We follow both the missions and the personal lives of our intrepid sky pilots, and each success helps them "improve" in various ways.  They can spend their down time honing their technical skills, or they can choose to do things that may benefit them in other ways (who wants to go on Johnny Carson?).

But if one turn is one year, then players would reach the end of the Apollo period pretty quickly. We all know that things slowed down a bit after 1972.

What if they didn't?

In the comments on the last post, Porky predicted that this game could shift into alternate futures quite easily.  Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was entranced by the grand goals of the L5 Society...

In the last post I threw out the phrase "engineering positivism" about the gung-ho early NASA period. That was nothing in comparison to the L5 peoples' attitude!  They were planning for the evolution of humanity into a fully spacefaring, space-living race.  I'm overjoyed that their full collection of L5 News PDF files is online... I'm going to read a bunch of them as inspiration for where I'd like to go with the game.

(There's a lot one could say about the sense of disappointment felt by many that these imagined futures didn't come to pass.  That's a whole 'nother post in itself.  I feel it to some degree myself, but I also cringe when I hear people say, even in jest, things like "I was promised a flying car! Where's my flying car?"  Come on... does this really look like a societal contract to anyone?)  :-)

For the game, I'm leaning in the direction of having the players choose from a set of several possible "Event packages."  (I could call them "decks" if I was settled on the use of cards, or "tables" if I was sure the players would all be familiar with D&D-style lookup charts... we'll see!)  These events will contain the possible space missions -- and their progressions and prerequisites -- as well as the "worldly" events that may occur randomly.  I'd also like to include guidelines for players to make up their own packages.  I'm hoping these will get rid of the need for a human "Game Master" (GM) and allow everyone at the table to actually play a character.

Some sets of events will be more "out there" than others.  As I work on these packages, I'll certainly start by emulating history and tracking some of the "retro-future" paths not taken.  But there's nothing stopping the game from containing increasingly sci-fi-ish elements such as alien first contact, self-aware AIs, terraforming Mars, and having to save the Earth from being hit by an asteroid.  It's a cliche, but the sky is the limit!

The Right Stuff RPG

A few months ago, I made a cryptic post about a new game idea I was starting to develop.  I didn't give any real details, since I wanted to give it some time to gel before releasing it into the world.  I admit that I still haven't done a huge amount of work on this thing, but I had a change of heart about discussing it.  I'm hoping that working through my ideas on the blog will be more helpful for (a) prodding me to accomplish some real work on it, and (b) improving it via either external feedback or my own process of just writing it down.  :-)

So, you've seen the working title above.  The idea is to have players play the roles of test pilots and astronauts at the dawn of the space age.

You know the 7, but do you know the 13 ?

There are other games with semi-related themes, but I haven't seen one that focuses on the test pilot culture, the friendly rivalries, and the overall sense of "We Can Do It" engineering positivism that Tom Wolfe famously wrote about.  (Of course, The Right Stuff is a copyrighted property, and my game will have a different name and will be based purely on our common public history and my own extrapolations!)

All of the games that I've seen that attempt to evoke or simulate this period of history focus mainly on the "Space Race" aspect -- i.e., one player is the Americans, another is the Russians, and they compete to see who can get to the Moon first, or whatever.  Fritz Bonner's Liftoff is one example.  Prolific DIY game designer Lloyd Krassner has another.

The overall idea, as it stands right now, is that each "turn" of the game will correspond to a time period of something like one year.  The big events are the space missions, of course -- which can go well or badly, depending on the roll of the dice.  But the astronauts can attempt to do other things in their "down time" to improve their lot, too -- training, publicity, research, and so on.  Semi-random "events" can happen to them in each year: some personal (divorce? broken leg while water skiing off Cocoa Beach?), and some worldly (what did those Russians just do?).

I'm still not clear on how the game is won.  Maybe there should be multiple options.  A clearly defined "victory condition" would be nice for a version that could be played out in just an hour or two -- a casual party game.  But I'd also like to enable people to be able to role-play an open ended long-term RPG-type campaign.  (I'm in awe of what Greg Stafford has done with the Great Pendragon Campaign, for example.)  To play John Glenn first going into space in 1962, then again in 1998, could be quite an experience!

Anyway, in future posts I hope to discuss more of the details that have been swirling around my brain about this game.  The next post, for example, will describe how this game may just be something MORE than nostalgic historical simulation...

Why are we here, part deux

Okay, maybe not why, but more like when.

Earlier I splurged out some thoughts on some possible ways the Sun and Moon may have teamed up to help get life started in the tidal pools of young Earth.  But that's a separate issue from why WE are here -- we humans, who come pre-packaged (these days) with all this culture stuff piled up around us.

And we can also wonder "why now?"  There have been true homo sapiens walking around for something like 250,000 years, pretty much identical to us in terms of anatomy and brain size.  The Neolithic revolution could have happened at any time, but it waited until about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Agriculture, animal domestication, and the development of towns and cities took off like a rocket.  Other things like writing and commerce came not too long after.

It's probable that the end of the last ice age had something to do with it.  With more opportunities for movement and resettlement, formerly isolated peoples may have found new ways to interact with one another and share their cultural developments at a faster pace.

Or maybe the aliens came down to teach us?

No, I'm not really going there.  But I do want to bring up a kinda-sorta related idea proposed in the 1970s by archaeologist George Michanowsky.  He made note of the fact that there was a very bright supernova that exploded in the southern sky approximately 11,000 years ago.  It would have been much brighter than the planet Venus -- maybe almost as bright as the Moon -- and it would have shone for several weeks before fading.  There's no doubt that it would have been a shocker to ancient peoples.  Michanowsky wrote a book that described various ancient inscriptions that may be dim memories of people observing this event.

Michanowsky was also a bit of a mythmaker...

"The psychological and possibly environmental impact of the Vela starburst triggered a development in their culture that, in a short time span, made them something entirely different from what they had been before. For better or worse, humanity had thus quite suddenly bitten into the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge."

"My research indicates that this heavenly event became the source of the creation myths, the cosmological concepts, and the cultural traditions of much of our civilization."

Too far?  Maybe.  But it's still fun to think about, and a nice reminder that we're not isolated from what goes on out there in this huge, awe-some (literally!) universe.