Dystopian Pokeverse
- Richard's other dystopian pokeverse
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richardthinks- April 14th, 2014
So all these recent DDoS attacks have convinced me that I should set up a second site just for the roleplaying stuff. I'll be posting it in both places for the foreseeable future. Some recent posts have made it over there but they lost their marching order on the way.
- Outrage Over Game Cancels Kickstarter Funding (reposting Stuart Robinson's post)
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- richardthinks
- May 16th, 15:46
Stuart said it pretty clearly - there's not much for me to add:
"I don't like anime very much. I don't like hentai at all. I really don't like the tentacle hentai stuff (wtf? I personally find this very creepy...). But even more than that? I don't like the idea that outrage hobbyists in the gamer geek community are able to censor other people making tabletop games.
"Soda Pop Miniatures, makers of the popular Super Dungeon Explore game had a Kickstarter for a game called "Tentacle Bento" which was about tentacles and anime schoolgirls and all that weird stuff. Not my thing, so I wasn't going to buy it, support it, or talk about it.
"Kotaku didn't feel the same way. They didn't like it and they decided to campaign to have the game stopped. After raising over $30,000 (of their $13,000 goal) the project's funding has been pulled and the kick-starter campaign "cancelled": http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1189988320/tentacle-bento-by-soda-pop-miniat ures
"If they were doing something illegal then that should be dealt with through appropriate channels. If they didn't then where do we draw the line in what it's okay for Kotaku or any other loud voice on the web to get offended by and $30,000 taken away from a creative project?
"This right here is why the topic of outrage vs art has been on my mind so much over the last year or so. I knew it'd lead to this point, and while losing a "Tentacle Anime" game is no real loss to me personally but it sets a disturbing president. What else will be subject to needing to meet with Kotaku / Outrage hobbyist approval if this trend continues?"
So here's the thing: kickstarter is just a fundraising forum - there's no censorship per se happening here, the company is free to try to fund its thing elsewhere, contact the people who agreed to support it, etc. But not having kickstarter involved will certainly make a difference, and we all know the arguments about soft forms of censorship and/or boosting - net neutrality and all that. And legislators look at what the private sector is doing in forming their arguments. And who wants some bunch of loudmouths stopping stuff from being made?
I'm kinda out of reasoned argument over here. Do you guys have a level head to bring to bear?
- delightful animation of shifting European state borders
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- richardthinks
- May 15th, 10:35
just in case that embed didn't work, here's the link. Beware wildly apocalyptic music, which rather colours the whole experience.
Sitting here in the post-war, post-Napoleonic, post-Westphalian EU, there's something rather dispiritingly misleading about at least the first half of the video and really about the whole thing. State boundaries are of course not the whole story - painting Spain grey under Franco tells us one particular political thing, while obscuring a whole lot of maybe more important things. Then there's the Eurocentric focus - but it's a map of Europe! Sure. But note that moment when the Seljuks just become the Golden Horde, without so much as a colour change. And maps like this one don't model uncertainty well: they always look authoritative.
Still, interesting, and a (timely?) reminder that things aren't as stable as they seem, day to day.
- I don't want all Ken Hite's speculations to be made real...
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- richardthinks
- May 14th, 13:44
...but this one just might be my all-time favourite. A replica air loom
...a human Influencing Machine. Borne of the same paranoia and psychosis that characterises contemporary reports of mind control... [its designer/whistleblower] believed it ran on magnetic fluids. Operated by skilled pneumatic chemists who controlled the warp of the fluids that travelled out of the machine toward the intended victim. The primary targets were MPs and the patients of mad houses (including Matthews himself). Targeted in coffee houses by the Assasins who worked the machine, their victims were surreptiously primed with vapours, ready for the dreadful event-workings of the machine. Matthews writes of the formidable arsenal of tortures that the Air Loom could deliver. They include: Kiteing, Bomb bursting, Lobster cracking, Thigh Talking, Fluid Locking and Lengthening the brain.
Apparently it was (is?) on display in Newcastle.
Dallas McNally suggests a dungeon that rises from the material plane to the ethereal or astral, using the old Yogic chakras:
The root chakra dungeon level is the level which abuts the PCs' prime material plane. The third eye and crown chakra dungeon levels abut the astral plane.
My aim is not to make a new-agey D&D but merely to imagine how the pieces of the PHB Appendix IV fit together without ending up with Star Trek.
Sounds like an example of Ars Magica's regio to me, or maybe the hermetic idea of shaking off the influences of the planets to rise to your proper god-nature, but he mentions specifically the old new agey changing frequency idea - getting a new vibe - as a means for etherastral travel, and it set me thinking first about the air loom and second about what I actually want from the ethereal/astral/altered states/ghost/spirit world/umbra in fiction or games. I always find the ones people come up with unsatisfying, maybe because when you talk about what this Other World of the Imagination is, you're really asking "what is fantasy?" in the widest, most far-reaching and personal sense. And... I still want to be surprised. Any time you nail it down - any time I have to decide myself what it is - it can only disappoint.
Update: from the same thread, Heikki Hallemaa mentions the Temples of Humanity, dug out of the mountains near Turin! How did I not know about this when I actually passed through Turin earlier this year, dammit! Must go back.
On the topic of fooling with things man was not meant to fool with, check it out, they're digging out some Easter Island Moai! Unhinging of the continents in 10, 9...
On the topic of things that should be hoaxes but might not be, here's a series of lectures by Borges! I know what I'll be doing for the next few evenings.
For anyone who's still interested in Toxic Tartary, I've found some more photos of the place brought back by terribly lost travelers who thought they were in Mongolia or playing video games. Also, I think Carcosa might be the perfect ambiguous game where you might actually be able to play a monster as a monster.
Finally, there has been much discussion of DnD's endgame - should you set about running a kingdom, or get lost in clearing brush and charming the locals, or fight gods to claim your place in the sky, or eventually kill the source of all the trouble in the gameworld (the DM?) and retire to the Western Isles? Well, if the campaign's been a Tolkien manque with all your standard fantasy creatures and whatnot, I think this would have to be my answer. That's planar travel I can get behind.
- to whoever it was who...
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- richardthinks
- May 11th, 15:05
...made me aware of Cookie Monster's deep introspection, thank you.
...suggested I go hot air ballooning, double thank you.
...put that leaflet concerning the Hermione replica ship project among the tourist attraction leaflet at the hotel, professional thank yous (how did I not know about this?).
...and thank you, scottbot, for telling me about the reflexive Roman Empire mapping tool. I will have to investigate it in depth.
In Carcosa Wacky Races news, I was confronted by two unfamiliar problems requiring solutions:
1. Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa rules allow for a ludicrously easy and cheap method of calling 1-3 Byakhee. A player tried it 3 times. They got 00 (maximum crit fail on percentiles) twice.
So what do you do with a double max crit fumble?
2. Lovecraft wrote about rendering people down to their essential saltes so you could call them up again centuries later. I adapted this, apparently unconsciously assimilating influences from the 1966 Batman: The Movie, into a saltifier gun. Frank Belnap Long wrote about implacable extradimensional beings that would chase you through space and time and would boil up out of corners and angles anywhere to get you. I put both of these things in Carcosa Wacky Races and of course the inevitable ensued.
So what happens, do you think, if you try to saltify a Hound of Tindalos?
I know my solutions. What are yours?
- I love getting feedback like this... from Carcosa Wacky Races
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- richardthinks
- May 2nd, 11:42
If we see the Melter, Mumbles is going to try to shoot him while I try to RUN HIM THE FUCK OVER. Let’s see him concentrate on a spell when he’s got a [vehicle name redacted] crashing through his thoracic cavity! Arr! Full steam ahead!
So far I’ve had players siphon gas, rodents and NPCs out of each others’ fuel tanks; attempt to nobble each others’ vehicles with mi-go brain cases, the aforementioned rodents, and mummy heads; use acid to drop rusty ship hulls on each other; engage in astral combat and attempt to summon Hastur. Oddly I did not have rules in place for all these eventualities. I call it a successful play test…
Also, gmail has started giving me the strangest suggestions for products I might be interested in, based on the content of my emails.
Elsewhere, I went hot air ballooning and it was great, and ludicrously expensive. Still, if you get the chance, do it once in your life. Really.
Then I went for breakfast here. I thought about the potential difficulty of opening a branch in the US.
We didn't talk about anything potentially offensive, and their chocolate was delicious.
If you can't go ballooning today, check out Tokyo Good Idea Development Co, which is almost as good. Via the also day-brightening Tony Dowler. If you can't go to Carcosa today, check out Jason Sholtis' list of 12 things on the blasted lands of the fallen moon, rivalled only by those found near the hovering archipelago. Everything else he does is also arrestingly brilliant.
...and finally, something I've been waiting the past quarter century for: an RPG based on cult classic Monkey! If the contents are as good as the title, I will be happy indeed. And totally derailed on all my other projects. Again.
- So now I've seen Jurassic Park 3...
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- richardthinks
- April 20th, 16:40
...I can't remember a single thing about the plot. But I do remember that it brings back Sam Neill and makes fun of the "preachiness" of the earlier movies by blaming Jeff Goldblum. This is really ingenious - the kind of move I've previously only seen pulled off by religions and nation states.
And remember those dinosaurs that were surprisingly interesting back in JP1? Yaaaawn. So the new big bad is Bigger! and Badder! than T-Rex, who it TRAMPLES ON! for emphasis. And I think it's called Reallybigosaurus Madeupii but no doubt there's some scientistic justification out there somewhere. Anyway it acts like Godzilla and is finally driven off by Impressive Orange Fireballs.
And now I know where the mutant dinosaurs of Carcosa come from. The first T-Rex we see in JP3 is plain old green. The second one in greenish and reddish. The third one is green and black tiger-striped, and the fourth one is totally Devil Dinosaur. So now I'm really looking forward to Jurassic Park 4, where Sam Neill gets "unexpectedly" dropped out of a helicopter, Prisoner style, and is immediately confronted by this.
...the revenant spirit of Jeff Goldblum, perhaps?
- collection of bird's-eye view aerial photos from Bing
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- richardthinks
- April 19th, 8:04
Something actually interesting from Microsoft's Google-wannabe, Bing: bird's eye views (here of sites in Washington state)
- Finally saw Jurassic Park, became confused
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- richardthinks
- April 18th, 13:12
and the sequel, too. Sometimes I do ludicrously out-of-touch reviews here, but this time I just have one thing to note:
that film really, really wants to mean something, but I don't have the faintest idea what it is. And I don't think it knows, either: it's like a rambling conversation with a drunk undergrad - it clearly feels passionately about a whole bunch of stuff and it feels like lecturing you about it, but it can't quite string the thoughts together.
To begin with I thought it was just that they'd given all the talking head points to Jeff Goldblum, who would not be my go-to guy for clarity or sympathy, but after a while I started to see that this was a deliberate choice - they were masking the script's incoherence behind Goldblum's trademark wandering gaze. And so then I started to wonder who it was on the writing/directing/producing team that Goldblum was channeling. Spielberg? He only seems to want to say "be scared! Be amazed! Be touched!" IMDB usefully offers that Michael Crichton wrote "cautionary tales about the dangers of technology" but I'm trying to figure out what the cautionary lesson is here - the dinosaurs are no danger to anyone unless you engineer a kind of fake post-apocalyptic scenario around them. So they're ecological, natural treasures that must be protected from humanity except people made them. In his stream of consciousness spew, Goldblum makes some vague anti-GM foods noises, but Crichton already did all that with The Andromeda Strain and frankly there's no way even smart Velociraptors are going to become the enemy within, and anyway anyway those noises are buried in a load of mystical faith-first bons mots better suited to the "rockstar" his character is described as, rather than the scientist he's actually supposed to be.
Clearly the biggest message of the film is "dinosaurs are more interesting than you thought" and that's a worthwhile thing to bring to the public's consciousness: they were pre-packaged with moral significance in their first presentations as media icons back in the mid-19th century*- God's monsters killed by hubris, they were the poster boys for progressive evolutionism even before Darwin made that a buzz word, and after Darwin they became poster boys for the necessity of adaptability. Anyway, the story always went, they must've died because they were dumb (which is why we won't, you see), and JP works really hard to overturn that. But in doing so it manages to make environmentalists, paleontologists, geneticists and philosophers of science look dumb, in favour of... theologians?
*Actually, googling this I see the history of Natural History is maybe not such common knowledge... and now I can't find the really interesting book on the development of natural history museums I should point you to. The links above are all tangential to that story, which I perhaps ought to rehearse in full here some day.
- where is Captain Haddock from?
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- richardthinks
- April 15th, 11:38
I'd always heard him as Scottish in my head, so the recent film didn't bother me at all, but a friend and fellow Cornishman insists he's supposed to be Cornish.
These days I like him kinda ethnicity-free or "third culture" - he's a seafaring man, after all.* The only hint I've found in canon is that the unlikely Marlinspike Hall is architecturally clearly a French Second Empire Chateau, but that doesn't tell us much - only that his illustrious ancestor Sir Francis (clearly English? Maybe...) had a 19th century (or later) descendent who spent a lot of money in France. I suspect him of being a Belgianized or Anglicized Huguenot.
*And we first find him aboard a freighter with the Armenian-sounding name Karaboudjan - recalling perhaps the great Armenian trade networks of yore? The more I think about it, the more I see Haddock as a "man of the world" - who bears the scars of that status.
- Carcosa Wacky Races is Go!
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- richardthinks
- April 12th, 12:11
So remember that Wacky Races Carcosa thing? It's a thing. Are you in? 6-8 turns, play by blog. If you survive AND wind up in the lead you win the (totally imaginary but nonetheless mighty) Grand Prize.
I'm thinking I could run it both inside and outside of G+, because for me that just means publishing the turn results in 2 places instead of one (the second venue being on the Other Pokeverse - each turn's a new post). Non-G+ players would miss out on some of the crosstalk between other players, but would otherwise participate fully. And could hatch their own, blog-based, evil schemes against the G+ers.
Chargen and vehicle gen are already up. All the rules you'll need to know will go up later today or tomorrow.
- really, motorbikes? Really. I think...
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- richardthinks
- April 2nd, 13:01
so researching visuals for Carcosa/Mad Max Wacky Races has taken me to many peculiar places. These are the best, mostly from englishrussia:
If you click nothing else, click this: Mikhail Smolyanov concept cars and motorcycles. I didn't think I could be surprised by motorbikes any more.
Gallery of cars used in Mad Max films plus fan-made vehicles. And people who don't know when they've taken it too far.
Herb Grasse's custom cars for movies.
Not really a car, but not really a plane, either.
and one that's just plain big.
And an obligatory boat.
- neurons I will never get back
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- richardthinks
- April 2nd, 1:25
So I wind up making custom birthday cards for my kids, and I usually try to keep them simple, graphic, clean, somewhat unexpected. Which has been a tough but fun brief with my son, who has asked for Star Wars, Pokemon, Lego, Indiana Jones, and Pirates.
But now my daughter has entered the mix with ideas of her own. And she wants two things on her card: ponies and rainbows.
The google image search for this combo would be traumatizing enough under any circumstances but for whatever reason safesearch was disabled. Don't do that. Just in case you were thinking.
I bet there's a post-tenure book to be written about how certain kinds of cultural memes provoke certain kinds of backlash, but I'll never be the man to write it.
- Callously mining tragedy for gaming material
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- richardthinks
- March 27th, 13:59
this in lieu of a coherent post: I'm really just holding these things here until I can build something around them.
1. reposted from Robin Laws: what has to be the perfect, Platonic setup for a Call of Cthulhu adventure. A drifting tsunami-spawned ghost ship that just happens to be a squid boat. The obvious thing would be to replay Alien in a traditional Cthulhu modern or 20s setting. What are the less obvious things?
2. but what if you could make little Lost World plateaux and store all your Atlantean treasures up there? What if you had the idea of doing that in Japan?
3. or what if just one Bermuda Triangle wasn't enough for you, and after staring at Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Projection of the Earth you suddenly saw the pattern? Is the earth a gigantic crystal that resonates at 7 Hz with harmonic focal points at specific equidistant points? The answer may surprise you.
Notice there is only 10 triangles listed here the other 2 i am not sure of there location i think the 11th triangle is in lake Michigan which is called the great lakes triangle and the 12th still may remain hidden. All triangles have one thing in common they all match up to 666 this is why we call the devils triangles because they are suppose to be where the beast comes through a gateway to hell and maybe its not hell maybe an alien world will use these to there advantage either way all of these triangles are deadly if you are in them at the wrong time.
What if there were a Carcosan dinosaur-cavecowboys meets Bollymecha Wacky Races play-by-comments game on google+ in which you could race Mad Max style dune buggies and T-rexes across an electroradiant hellscape in pursuit of some fabulous but mysterious Prize? Would that be enough to get you to create a pseudonymous G+ account, in order to take part?
- les machines de l'ile: all the animatronic wooden octopus fun of Nantes
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- richardthinks
- March 22nd, 17:46
damn these guys are hard to hunt down. I'm planning to go see their workshop in about a month. Alas I can't get to (their quondam sister, now competitor?) Royale Deluxe's Titanic show in Liverpool (confusing links seem to be a feature of this whole endeavour), nor to the opening of the Titanic Museum in Belfast.
In the meantime, Sir Eusyram the Ebullient has entered the lists at the +Flailsnails Jousting Field:That's Or, a conga-line omniguardant Seussian in fess, a second line in Base, reversed. If Skeree the Bonewoman joins in the jousting fun she'll need a shield Sable, a Sign d'Or excised, bend Gules. But jousting's not really her style, when there are still sorcerers that want murderin'. In other words, I've been having some good, trashy fun with G+ gaming.
Tone's a concern for Toxic Tartary, though. I don't want it to go stodgy but (against the material) I don't want it to go too throwaway trashy either - for me there's an important difference between it and Gammy World, for instance.
I'm also realising that I'm at least a week from starting anything Tartarous, but I am working on it...
- canvassing interest in a pbp game
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- richardthinks
- March 20th, 15:41
Is anyone interested in a pbp flailsnails** game set in Toxic Tartary (previously Baikonur*)? Updates would be every few days and it wouldn’t stop you flailsnailing elsewhere (dimensional gates are a feature, not a bug). No G+ or other funny accounts necessary: I'd set up a blog for it and update there, you can enter your actions in comments or email me if they're secret.
The setting is like Girl Genius played absolutely straight, with industrialized magic in place of steampunk, and golden-domed Samarkand and doomed, brooding Tashkent in place of pseudo-Germany. You don’t play sparks – they plot from their guild-halls in the citadels – but otherwise the power level is wide open: it’s the sort of game where you might become Khan of all the Uighurs or Rajah of Shangri-La, only to have it all taken away the next week by giant brass Timurid mecha-tigers. System is ODnD-compatible, hot-rodded down to the bone, Searchers of the Unknown-style.
( acid test: is there a character class you'd like to play? )
** flailsnails means that characters from any system or background are welcome, but run them by me first just to make sure my universe is big enough for them. We'll do elementary and arbitrary system conversion where necessary. I'm not too worried about inter-PC balance because of this. And if you haven't been over to my other pokeverse then you might not have seen my appeal for novel 4-handed weapons for Barsoomian Green men.
Also, I don't know if you guys can see this without a G+ account - could you let me know?
* part of my reason for wanting to do this is to nail the setting down. Like, deciding on a name and sticking to it would be a start. If you play, you’ll be helping to do that.
- Chapeau Melon et Bottes de Cuir
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- richardthinks
- March 16th, 9:40
Just learned that the title of The Avengers in French is "Bowler Hat and Leather Boots." I feel this is an under-explored genre in RPGs. They fight crime, villains too insane to rise to James Bond's inbox and too British for Batman, and Cthulhu, if he shows up. At the very least I see a couple of new character classes or highly specific feats...
link to alternative versions
- trying to figure something out about games and stories
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- richardthinks
- March 13th, 12:38
Can you help me figure out how to run a Barsoom game?
Here's the problem: people get all fired up watching adventure movies or reading books and then they want to play out those adventures in an RPG. Only the book/movie stories are carefully constructed to play out toward a conclusion and the heroes act the way they have to in order to make those conclusions happen and your players probably won't.
( why not? )
ERB's Barsoom stories are a prime example of a source that's hard to emulate. John Carter is a gol-danged hero, darnit, and Dejah Thoris is his motivation, and I just cannot imagine making that work around a gaming table. I say that at greater length here.
So. If you know how to reconcile these two approaches and deliver actual heroic mighty struggles with real challenges, then please tell me about it because what you have to say is better than what follows.
If you don't, here's a little insight I had - no doubt others (Bakhtin, for one) have had much better insights and/or said this better.
( set a target that you can't aim straight at )
No doubt this is all dead obvious. Reading back over it, I kinda think that's how everything's structured. Everything except just-started-up, first level DnD games, perhaps. Still, I wonder if in actual play it would allow us to have those epic adventures, rather than hardscrabble, gold-grubbing, Russian-roulette spelunking. Or if all bets are off the moment you get the allegiance of a big bunch of Tharks and whatever you thought you were doing before, now you're looting Helium.
Problems with this structure: 1. all such goals require backstory, which is railroady. You are saying "we will play this game which is about fixing the air engines." This will annoy a contingent of hardcore sandboxers (unless, perhaps, you say "do whatever you like, but be aware that the air is running out, the water is draining away, locusts got the crops and the Therns got your love interests... so whatever you want but you might want to focus on those things"). 2. whisking the end-goal out of reach will annoy your players unless it's done very cleverly or it's been foreshadowed to set expectations or there's a consolation prize. 3. goods piling up is anathema to capitalism: JC gets to handle aircraft and artillery and kingly authority and all kinds of goodies, but then he lets them go again for the next step. Your players will not want to let them go. Trust me. Which will complicate your later challenges and may lead to some kind of arms race.
- Competing with bldgblog for my affections
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- richardthinks
- March 11th, 20:14
13 Above has an awesome, awesome post about pigeon towers across Central and South Asia.
Pruned has all sorts of fun it seems, but in tonight's postapocalyptic mood I'm loving their noodlings about the art-industrial complex, as revealed by Walter da Maria and cold war listening posts.
Viaratmmjess: a walk through the Crystal Palace.
Finally, here's a few photos of my nascent Baikonur setting.
- SF with a short life before obsolescence
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- richardthinks
- March 9th, 14:51
Lowell's observations of Mars prompted a wave of Martian-civilisation and Martian-invasion stories; Einstein's relativity work fed a contradictory wave of FTL fiction. What might the recent Kepler mission findings - of Earth-like planets in 0.7% of observed solar systems (rather than Traub's 34% of Sagan's speculative 50%), of common "Super-Earths" and of the atypical nature of our own solar system - do to current SF? Especially given that the findings are apparently likely to change in character significantly over the next 10-20 years?
Is there a market for intentionally-soon-to-be-obsolete SF? Is there any other kind?
