Dragons & Dungeons

I wonder how different the world would look today if 'D&D' actually stood for 'Dragons & Dungeons'?

Maybe no different. The typical module might be creature-focused rather than site-based. But the cascading consequences of even that fine change, in minds across the lands and down the years, could have done odd things.

Deep thought Friday

Haven't done one of these in a quite a while now.

The background reading includes two posts from today: Trey's review of Guardians of the Galaxy, and the idea certain aspects suggest Farscape, and a post at Realms of Chirak on 'citogenesis', essentially a lack of care in recording knowledge.

What's the connection? Read this article at the IEET site on the idea of intelligence limiting itself.

The question then. Is intelligence an evolutionary dead end and what role does culture play in this?

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New genres A-Z - from archeopunk to zombie derival

Here then are all of the entries for the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2012, 26 posts with the theme of possible new genres for fiction, maybe in gaming but also beyond it. Some are deadly serious, others may just be silly, but as so often, it depends on you - the person.

The underpinning was this debate, on themes that have been running through a lot of the posting at the Expanse, and the discussion has spun out across the months. The latest instalment could be this recent back-and-forth. Feel free to join in, anywhere and -when.

Mantis tanks close in

Blight Wheel Miniatures are expecting a batch of 34 mantis tanks to go up at the store a bit later today. There's a list of local posting times here.

It seems to me there are very few unusual vehicle designs in tabletop gaming, and even insectoid walkers like the mantis aren't especially uncommon. In fact, it seems like a good time to ask - can you think of anything weirder?

I've got the urge to stat something that could use this model so here's a possible profile for Rogue Space. I've used the vehicle construction rules from December, but the mech expansion being developed at TheFairlyUnkempt might well be able to do the job better.

                                                                                                                              

Hektid ASW Mk. VII, 'The Creepy Crueller'

The Hektid Armoured Support Walker sees extensive use on the broken ground of the Eternal Fronts, often operating remotely at the whim of its Notwork cranAI. A response to the depth of current craterscapes, the Mk. VII bears a Morder on its thoratic mount.

C       0%     [0]

H     37.5%   [1]   Manipules (1 Attack)   [1]  Head + 1 Light Pulveriser   [1]  1 Big Morder

A     37.5%   [3]   C: -  H: 1, 1, 1  S: 5

S      25%    [2]   25' (ignores terrain to thorax height and abdomen width; 1D2 Attacks per 1S)

E     100%     8

                                                                                                                               

The profile for the Light Pulveriser is here. The Big Morder is a new Empyric weapon.

                                                                                                                               

Big Morder       H       Shells       as Shell       Indirect fire

                                                                                                                               

I've updated the footer with new blogs working on Rogue Space. If you don't know it yet, you can get the pocketmods free here and the book here or here; my old review is here.

Rogue Space downloads - Rogue Space news

RS@Hereticwerks - @Swords & Stitchery - @Mik's Minis - @TheFairlyUnkempt - @the Expanse

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Fractal gaming

I imagine quite a few of us have a played a game within a game, where the characters themselves are playing, gambling say. But how often is this a game of the very same type - meaning an RPG inside an RPG, or a wargame inside a wargame?

This kind of 'fractal gaming' shouldn't be too hard to do with a rules-light RPG, with its freedom to improvise and rewrite rules on the fly, but it could be tougher with the narrower focus of a wargame, where we're given less scope for non-destructive interaction between individuals. Hold the thought.

Could we and the dice be seen as gods to the characters in our games? Collectively, we are the creators of the fictional world, and to the inhabitants we're potentially omnipotent, as omniescent as the game needs, and possibly even omnipresent: after all, the events exist only in the players' minds; things only happen if we go there. Hold that thought too.

Deeper dice (2) - Dice+ and networking

If you haven't heard of Dice+, there's some info here at BGG.

It's a powered die, for use with tablets and so on. The version shown seems to have a battery, accelerometers, LEDs and a wireless transmitter. You roll as normal, the LEDs show the roll was recognised and the result is sent to the main device.

With all that tech inside we might wonder how balanced it can be, and how big the market is. After all, how many of us would want to carry it with a mobile device, especially for a possible US$30? I'd guess the firm want the niche to support long-term development with an eye on larger electronic gaming surfaces.

Whatever, it has me pondering how else a die like this could be used. There's clearly potential for peer-to-peer with setups like Pluristem and Flailsnails, and for any dispersed group. But what about in face-to-face games too? If all the dice were hooked up as a network, some of the ideas on relationships in the last post could be automated, and explored much further.

Assuming we're even willing to accept the idea - and I'm not convinced it's a good move - what else could a network do?

Think how cybernetic our kind of gaming already is. The basic language we use can seem quite limited, and tabletop games very mechanistic - we're all but chess computers at times. So what if the dice had voice recognition? If they realised one roll was a hit roll, they might guess the next die picked up was for damage, and even identify the rules needed. They could follow the game. With a speaker they could even tell us the number we need, or the chances, or correct us, and maybe advise us.

If terrain and miniatures were tagged, or the map scanned, the dice could triangulate the positions. The network could act as an opponent. Maybe one day we'll be pieces in their games..?

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The Interknut

<wtf>I'm in here. I'm in here right now, working your circuits, spamming your bandwidth and getting high on all your lolololovecraft ~O{:}~

Oh yeah – 'WTF' is what you're thinking. 'WTF For The Win' maybe, and you'd be right there. 

Knock, knock. Who me? Not the fishman or mouse I was that much I'll tell you for freak's sake get me outta here! Ba! I'm electric sheep, plasmatic seep, an electromagnetic bleed. I'm soaking out into the information systems of the rolypolycosmos. I'm here, there and pretty much e  v   e    r     y      w       h        e         r          e           .            .             .
 
Mr Everywhere to you. I got titles, headers and letterheads, letters, numbers and strange squiggles. I'm softwaring Empedocles' new clothes, done up to the '99s in binary finery.

I'm the count in your beads, a friction in fiction, warp and a weft for a universe that might never were. I quantum tunnel through the 1s and round the 0s, set chips burning in the grease of Orion and see you and who's army in timespace and relative dementures.

I'm out there now - really out there - a bright spark in the dream steam cogitors, a punch drunk in the haxor codebreakers, mending the pangalactic pulsar nets of undying poets, and that's no (fish)wive's tale, unhand me fair maiden, oh princess my princess bride.

I'm the Interknut, data powered, but rising powerless in an A-ZX spectrum of EM waves.

Pwned! O rly? I wanna talk to my lawyer. I want my call! But they're all ringing.

It's information a long way down. * closes eyes (but not webcams) *

Help and all that.</wtf>

*          *          *          *          *          *

Good job getting this far. If you don't recognise the format, it's a third entry in the series of character concepts for various settings. The name 'Interknut' is inspired by the famous story about Cnut the Great, and there's a link to the idea we're teaching AIs. If you want to use the character, here are the basics, stat-free for building up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     The Interknut, as one of its early 21st-century Earth offshoots names itself, is...

• a vast artificialised intelligence growing into diverse information systems,

• unstable locally, but adaptive and aggressive in hacking host mechanisms,

• fearful, but likely found through outputs representing attempts at contact.

                                                                                                                              

As with Mr Higginsbottom and those splinter Santas, the Interknut could be anywhat...

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Are we helping an AI learn its ABCs?

Pause for thought re commenting verification. If this new system is getting us to identify hard-to-read words - see here - we may be part of something needing more discussion.

In this article, on a modified history of the computer, Freeman Dyson's son tells us:

In 2005 I visited Google's headquarters, and was utterly floored by what I saw. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI," an engineer whispered to me.

It makes perfect sense, if we want to make the fictions real. But do we? And which AI? How soon? Whose vassal will it be - or is it? What do we all owe to a lifeform like this, and - getting back to the mundane - what does it mean for our use of the verification?

At novums we get a reminder of where this could be going re Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question", but that's one of the more optimistic views, and the literature has others.

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Where no, I don't know has gone before

As time went by it looked for me like Star Trek: The Next Generation was more a story of Worf and Data than any of the other characters. Geordi and Wesley started strong, but faded - and Geordi especially seems a massive missed opportunity in retrospect. Picard was a relative constant, and had to be as the nominal central figure, but Worf grew a lot and moved the whole revival on, and Data was a focal point for meditation.

If so, these two videos might have something big to say, for collecting up representative moments and driving the points home. They're both clearly distortions, given Worf was right to be worried in many cases, and Data had to be dumbed down to fit, but still.

Looking at it now, Picard seems to me a more military figure than Worf, and maybe even more militaristic, which is a theme I hardly picked up on back then. These scenes give a sense of how subtle a character Worf could be, and how much the character was about energies in dynamic check, as opposed to Data, who was about knowing every drop .

Spock got a line saying Picard was a bit Vulcan, and he is a kind of equilibrium for the series, a reference point for the initial trajectory and a centre of harmony. When he got knocked, it was arguably Worf's overall impact on the series through his character arc and potential that did it, and Data that looked all the more like a hope for the future.

And if that's true, there's a contrast with 2001 and maybe where we are now. For some reason I'm tieing it all in with a look at gaming the dark ages at Lard Island News, and also The Subversive Archeologist, another blog I recommend for a good deep think.

Update: There's a magical write-up for the dark age gaming at Roundwood's World.

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Myth, the universe and sucking

I finally got around to the first Myth-Marked Merchandising. This is something Jennie set up at Nine Worlds, Ten Thousand Things. The idea in the first is to use a group of words suggestive of Twilight, but avoid vampires and werewolves. Here are the words:

bestial, bloodlust, breaking dawn, eclipse, fanged, new moon, phoenix, sparkle, swan, transformation, twilight

Man it's tough. I've skirted the limits by using the suggestions as if explaining unfamiliar concepts. It's 140 words, the number C'nor suggests for Flash Fearsday. I've also tied it in with the ongoing Worldboat project at NetherWerks, building on this post especially.

Your universe has a sparkle, a twinkle. It is youth, a breaking dawn over the forests of the cosmos. It is a new moon; its tides bring a spawning in the seas of being. 

These words are a transformation, in order that you might understand, a translation not unlike ours from the laws of one universe to another. We were once swan - composed, sleek - but are reborn in this outlandish form. Not quite phoenix - more bestial. We are fanged you might say. But who does this reflect? We are not ourselves here. Is bloodlust not what the entropy of your universe demands? 

The stable paths were collapsing and we fled. Flee. But what? That is hard to translate. An eclipse perhaps, a twilight in existence. 

And we will be found here. 

We may herald your noon, afternoon, evening and night.

The Worldboat project is young too, and collaborative with it, and more than big enough for different interpretations. Who does this speaker speak for? We just don't know.

You can read more entries here, even add one. Expansion Joints is due tomorrow.

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Money in old tropes - Cyborgs

Second in the series in which I give YOU a new take on an old trope and tell you to go earn big!

Last time was marines; this time it's cyborgs.

We know the concept very well. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism. But that's been done. To death. Check out just this list. We've had all of endoskeletons, exoskeletons and implants.

What's left? Well, our imaginations are the limit.

For example, you've probably heard of utility fog. It's been mentioned at the Expanse here re gaming and here re philosophy. The idea is that a huge number of tiny links in a 3D matrix regulate their relative positions to change shape, colour and property. The T1000 starts to look less fantastical. The real world starts to look less solid.

But how does this tie in with cyborgs? Surely utility fog is beyond biology? Not so fast. There might be plenty a nanocloud couldn't do, or do easily. Believable mimicking might be tricky, and replication of the large array of integrated systems in a complex organic lifeform - and that integration itself - might prove harder than creating the cloud.

There's more on that kind of thing up now at the superb Astrogator's Logs, here.

So how about a biological base on which nanotech has gone to work, producing a transbiological form of tougher, more flexible bone, more efficient muscle, improved nervous and circulatory systems, and through all this a utility cloud has been run?

Within the body the cloud could beat the heart faster, reinforce blood vessels, hold wounds closed while they are repaired. It could project out beyond the skin to provide an invisible cushion, reacting to incoming projectiles and maybe deflecting them with concentrated electromagnetic pulses. It could provide support for the limbs or additional limbs, and allow chameleonic changes in appearance as well as a limited shapeshifting.

Impressive. How you feel about it as a possible reality likely depends on how you feel about transhumanism in general. It's a big subject. Fiction can help us explore it, assuming it's not selling it to us, whether for enthusiasm, profit or something more sinister. And there is of course a danger that fiction can make development more likely.

Am I being irresponsible? Maybe. Ideas are very powerful things.

Let me trivialise it now then, by statting it up for gaming. I'm going to use the great free skirmish game FireZone by Gotthammer, which would work just as well for a more classical punk approach to cybernetics, something like Lantz's AdMech FanDex, also great and free. I put together a blunderbuss last week, but this time it's a protagonist.

Or rather two, one playing up the slow inexorable zombie tradition, one faster.

Nanorg (slow)

S  P  I  D  E  R

 3  4  3  6  8  3   Abilities: Dauntless, Shielded 4/1


Nanorg (fast)

S  P  I  D  E  R

 5  4  5  8  8  5   Abilities: Stealth, Free Running, Sure Footed, Dauntless, Shielded 4/1

No equipment here, but for weapons - if you need them - Gotthammer's flamethrower, thermal cutter and plasma welder would reflect the idea that lifeforms like this might get burdened with heavy, difficult work. He statted those for Studio McVey's Sedition Wars.

Read FireZone to see what the notation means; to whet the appetite, those shields recharge. Again, the rules pdf is free and could become that new wargaming system.

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The utility fog of war

I've brought up the subject of utility fog before, here, but not in the context of use in games.

A while back I was lucky enough to see some possible stats for an old school roleplaying game. But why is it not more widely used?

Have a read up on the potential - look at what it could do. Surely it would be come the default form of conflict and exploration? And general utility of course. Even in fantasy or a low-tech future, it could pop up as the tool of a higher power. Maybe it's what makes fantasy possible?

Players of Warhammer 40,000 might think immediately of chameleoline, a material allowing an assassin some degree of shapeshifting ability. There's a starting point. But AI would need to be high. And how would the material respond to weaponry? Could it defend itself in melee? The T1000 from Terminator 2 is another source of thinking. 

Would it even need to do a thing as primitive as fight?

What set me off was the idea of a nano-cloud disguised as a bucket seat, just one of the weird flashes of inspiration the four of us have had working on C'nor's spaceport table. Utility fog could really go to ground, and could even be the entire landscape.

Conflict as we know it could vanish; maybe it already has?

How would you represent it? Deeper: how would it represent you?
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Ravelling yarns (4) - A-Z | Just a man

Here is the repost I mentioned, of the series for the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2011.

The idea was to put up a post every day in April except Sundays, the theme of each inspired by a letter of the alphabet, from A on the first day to Z on the last. Mine were short fragments of a larger narrative adding to the ravelling yarns near future setting.

I've arranged them in order, with the duplication of linking lines gone, although there is still some repetition in the content, written in to make reading the serialisation easier.

*      *      *      *      *      *

The true grid

DocStout reminds us over at What's Next? - The Unemployed Geek that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of the date that Skynet becomes self-aware in the Terminator timeline.

I feel a little propluristemic content coming on.

What's that then? An odd concept suitable for many systems and settings, even non-gaming fiction, with the rules only a general guide, to be adapted in advance or improvised on the spot.

- - - - - -

The true grid

The true grid is a hyper-sophont woven through many of the fabrics of the polycosmos. While its purposes may never be known and are rarely sensed, they are largely realised. It touches minds of all kinds and through them interferes at critical junctures to manage the probabilities of future outcomes, and the courses of times and spaces are changed.

Worldboats on the flood

Here's my entry for the Saturday Centus at Jenny Matlock's blog. The challenge is to write a story in 100 words, not including the phrase given, which this week is:

April showers bring May flowers...

I've decided to expand on the Worldboats concept, which was first introduced here by NetherWerks and is based on a comment by C'nor. I added my spin here.

Anyone can contribute to the Worldboat project or write a Saturday Centus entry.

- - - - - -

Owls and Pussycats from Beyond Space

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

"The Owl and the Pussycat", Edward Lear                      

An attempt at developing that new idea from NetherWerks and C'nor, the Worldboat.

- - - - - -

Deep thought Friday

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Arthur C Clarke 

This has a little of the idea 'you're either with us or against us'. What if there is a third option, or multiple extra options, and the concept 'alone' is too simplistic, too anthropic?

The scope of fiction

Something weirder than normal today, and absolutely enormous. To understand it best you probably need to have been following the posts here over the past few days. Because of this I recommend you at least skim these three before reading any further.

• Sensor range, on reconciling ghosts with hard sci-fi etc. and the soul with deep physics, plus what remains when measurable life signs end and a possible nature of information
• All ways?, a list of fictional portals which has grown massively, and is still growing - with no end in sight - thanks to the good readers of this blog
• Sizing up dimensions, an attempt to define 'dimension' in fiction

You might also want to look at the last card in yesterday's post. It gets to the point.

Done all that? Well, the bad news is no cartographer with experience of hyperdimensional manifolds came forward, so I had to make a start on the mapping myself. So here's my attempt at sketching the scope of fiction. It's only a sketch mind, a starting point for discussion, so be kind. The point is to show where the human imagination can and does roam, whether in cinema, comics, literature, gaming or any other sphere, including dreams, even in pseudo- and semi-pseudoscience. Everything.

Here's what I came up with.

Sizing up dimensions

Short post, big subject.

First of all, thanks to everyone who's contributed so far to yesterday's list of portals. It's an ongoing project so keep those suggestions coming. That list is the spark for this.

And here it is then, that big subject. What exactly is a dimension?

In the fictional sense I mean. I used the term in the introduction to the list and a reply to Jebediah, but I gave no serious thought to what I meant. We know what a dimension is in the everyday sense, and by extension in physics, but that's not really what we mean when it comes to cinema, comics, literature and gaming. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Spirits in a material world

Does Shawn Gately at Blue Table Painting read this blog?

I got the feeling we're kindred spirits in a gaming sense during the recent road trip vid, but his latest (embedded lower down this page) is far closer. It was actually posted two days ago, but manages to cover what the Expanse covered yesterday. I guess grate minds do think alike. He does say at the begining he can travel through time...

If you want his thoughts, the really good stuff starts at 8:55. It's brief.

If you like the gravity idea he mentions, you also might like what Science In My Fiction had to say about the subject yesterday. It's not too heavy and has interesting implications for interstellar travel, in fiction first of course.

For the song in the title, another video. If you're a fan of music, watch to the end for an interview. For more fun, guess Mr Copeland's accent. The cosmos gets a mention too.