Making bones about Nagash

The 'leak' is here for the new official miniature for Nagash, the necromancer in the Warhammer setting. It looks like a sleek, comfortably variable plastic kit, nipped and tucked neatly using CAD.

The previous one gets a lot of stick and seems widely regarded, online at least, as one of the worst ever Citadel miniatures. There's mention in this thread of the idea the skull was badly sculpted on purpose. If true, not badly enough for me. I've always been quite fond of the model, and I'd argue the skull's the key feature.

So this is an alternative perspective, a reappraisal for posterity, or possibly Midhammer.

Fifth edition thoughts - the depriving background?

A quick comment on a piece of fifth edition D&D.

At first I was generally positive about the idea of the so-called 'background' - the personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws. Now I'm not so sure. It seems more gimmicky as time goes by, more predetermining of narrative as if establishing the characters for the first chapter of a novel, a set narrative, rather than supporting an exploration of another world - and ourselves - wherever it leads; and a shortcut avoiding the need for fuller player engagement, or further restricting player freedom.

Why play to someone else's prewritten background if you can decide one for yourself or start vague, as light as in a DCC funnel, or with a single word or less, and let specifics emerge in play, based on choice and the elaboration of the world in the interaction between players and GM, and characters, factions and landscapes? I'm genuinely curious as to the justification. Surely not just to save more of that increasingly precious time..? If so, I've got a suggestion - do less. None of us have to do everything we're sold.

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.

Near future wor*fare

When mum came back from the war her skin was on inside out and she was crapping through a hatch in her belly button. That was nothing. Last time she'd coughed her lungs up and if not for the nanopills we'd have needed to stuff them back in ourselves. Like we did with aunt Claire's. Hanging down her front like a forked bib they were. *Yeugh.*

We did laugh though.

But this time it was the baddies came off worse. She had a vid to play us and it was a case of your tote destruxor. She took out two bungalows and the playground beside the old folks home, and Mrs Moggins vaped the brick flats on Mill Street. They pulled everyone back when the 'topes came in.

'Topes? No snopes. We never opened the windows anyway these days, what with the smell from next door. All just piled up out there they were. Good neighbours. Plain bad luck...

Bzzz...

Choose-your-own-annihilation and cheese with peas

Pegboard left an interesting comment at Faeit 212 yesterday. Here's the essential part:

Tzeentch book has a table on every page. You start by rolling a d6 per page number and comparing it to the table. Your army then takes that many hits. Your opponent gets that many models back. If you roll an even number, you go back a page, odd, forward a page, roll more dice and then your opponent gets the special rules haywire and feel no pain.

It's a joke of course, presumably aimed at GW and a certain thinking on randomness and fun, but there's a radically conservative idea in there. Wargaming and roleplaying have long used tables for resolution, but they've fallen out of favour in the mainstream even if a business model based on large books of rules hasn't. Games like DCC still get good mileage, and there are the funky system-neutral tables at the The Dungeon Dozen.

Imagine this: a choose-your-own-adventure-style book of tables for use at the table, for gaming without randomisers like dice, but with more potential effects and less linearity, at least as many outcomes as table entries. Choose your action, check for contexts and apply the results, maybe jump. But not Student's-t-like distributions: there could be nested tables, option trees and 2D or 3D charts, even close-the-eyes-and-point pictures.

Ban tabletop gaming..?

Following that post on banning Warhammer from last week, look what's just turned up at Slashdot.

A request for details of the web filter that may be introduced in the UK reveals it could also block "esoteric material". What does esoteric mean..?

Choose your dictionary. From the entry at Wiktionary:

1. Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest, or an enlightened inner circle.
2. Having to do with concepts that are highly theoretical and without obvious practical application; often with mystical or religious connotations.
3. Confidential; private.

That's pretty open. Could it cover niche interests - like wargaming and roleplaying - not always shown so positively? Or dungeons, dragons and made-up worlds, god-emperors and grimdark sci-fi? Could it just collect them up accidentally? Or not so accidentally..?

That's even before we get to "violent material".

In fact, it looks like it could be extended to cover any non-mainstream interest. Blocking an interest could mean it vanishes or declines. It could mean whole areas of knowledge being hard to find or access, maybe lost. With a tool like this you could remake a world.

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A defence of Read Magic, and battlefield power gain

This is for D&D, and any game with magic, psionics etc., including wargames like 40K.

A defence of Read Magic

The prompt is the discussion here at Like Being Read To From Dictionaries on the point of the Read Magic spell, and possibly a lack of clarity in the rules. I think Nagora gets it.

What's Read Magic? Put simply, in OD&D etc. just looking at magical script - at the text of a spell on a scroll say - isn't enough for a spellcaster to read it, and, if it's a spell, to learn it: it needs to be deciphered first, i.e. translated from the system and even the scrawl of the writer, a little like understanding a prescription maybe. There's a spell for that - Read Magic - but it means forgoing another potentially more useful spell to learn it.*

Wired-up Fighting Fantasy Necromunda in Itra's City

Of all the games you've known or loved, what fine fusions would you make if you could?

I wouldn't mind exploring the early version of Necromunda from GW's Confrontation, but in the form of a networked Fighting Fantasy gamebook that's still a paperback, borrowed from a local library - with dust, stains and the pencil marks of past players - using the resolution system from the Norwegian RPG Itras By, and all on a rainy British afternoon.

Here's some of the rich setting material, although Itras By would encourage reworking it.

Hive clusters are connected together by roads across the [ash] wastes and transportation tubes supported on pylons and suspended from cables. ... the landscape resembles a petrified forest entangled in the web of some enormous spider. ...

...

... The ash occurs in many different, often vivid hues such as sulphur yellow, citric green, cobalt blue, pink, mauve, as well as various shades of grey, and it varies in texture from fine dust to crystalline clinker. The creatures and nomads that live there are equally colourful ...

... A moderate ash storm will strip an unprotected man to the bone in seconds, and then reduce his bones to a handful of dust. ... Imperial scholars who have studied dust ecologies believe that there may be currents and tides within the ash surface.

...

In hotter weather, when Necromunda’s sun breaks through the planet’s cloud cover, noxious vapors rise up and form poisonous mists and fogs. Mists are invariably followed by toxic rain storms, laden with particles of deadly ash dust and other contaminants.

White Dwarf No. 130 (October 1990)

The aspects are all there, in the intricate lived-in tone and weirdness. I'm actually looking for a gaming equivalent to this video, a soulful blend of individually outstanding material...

The major sources used, or a close and relevant match otherwise, are this ("Silent All These Years"), this ("Down by the Water"), this ("Cover Me") and this ("Dissolved Girl").

If you're wondering how the metaphor shifted, it probably passed at least partly through the prism of Tadeusz Różewicz's "Draft for a Modern Love Poem", especially the lines:

...

a spring-clear
transparent description
of water
is a description of thirst
ashes
desert
it produces a mirage
clouds and trees move into
the mirror

Lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
is a modern love poem

Gaming can also be seen as a kind of ensemble musicmaking, even lovemaking, with a good metre, a few riffs and plenty of flights of fancy, all kept developing with gentle cues.

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Towards a new model army?

Many of us feel that certain areas of wargaming can be pricey, some areas increasingly and unreasonably so. A handful of posts from the past few days suggest ways forward.

• James S at Warp Signal proposed the not-so-alien notion of army sharing...

• Matt Plonski at Apocalypse 40K described wargaming online with Vassal.

• The guys at Dark Future are reorganising their blog to highlight work in the wider community like tutorials, reviews of alternative bits and conversions.

• Loquacious at House of Paincakes followed up the OGL post and wondered about extending community licensing to other game systems and settings.

• For 40K especially, Tales of the Maelstrom posted a lead-in for tomorrow's festive meet-up, blending Rogue Trader's use of a GM with wide group play.

Interestingly, BoLS this week posted some homebrew, which I think is the first time in a good while. It's a full mission, like those Creative Twilight produce, possibly a step into a new golden age, and Loken reminded us of the first and its magical Lords of Battle pdf.

Dunroamins & Decline - GW, the OGL and its OSR

First, Itras By has finally been published in English. There's a fine review of the original at Harald's and the sample pdf is here. Thanks to Nørwegian Style for posting the news.

Second, in a discussion at BoLS on GW licensing its IP Vossl claimed "the OGL died a horrible fiery death 4 years ago". The OGL is the Open Game License. Part of my reply:

The OGL is alive and kicking. Pathfinder, which was built through the OGL, has at least for some time outperformed the official fourth edition and an Old School Renaissance is thriving because of it too, via what may well be hundreds of smaller publishers. The fact we know about fifth so early, not to mention the general direction it's headed in, may be in part down to the power the OGL has given the player base.

Vossl is clued up and a crisp thinker, so how many other people have never heard of the OGL, a licence that lets gamers create materials compatible with a much-loved system or IP and sell them. It's essentially D&D, but other companies, like GW, might catch on.

One of the beneficiaries and drivers of the development is this Old School Renaissance, or whatever we choose to call it, specifically the D&D OSR. But where are the pioneers vanishing to? How will we stumble across their worlds, or talk to and learn from them?

Full of beans, out of spam

It's been quiet here the last two or three days, but I haven't been far away. I've done some relevant reading and worked on a few projects, including the ongoing resolution system and an unusual conversion that might be good for INQ28 or InquisiMunda. Most of that will turn up here sooner or later.

I've also made a change to comment settings. The number of spam comments has been going up and the time taken to trawl through them all was getting seriously out of hand.

Frontline Gamer is managing it by turning word verification on and anonymous comments off, but I'm not willing to do the first yet based on this intriguing claim, for the lack of clarity about who gains from the work commenters do. There's more on the theme here.

Instead, given that most of the spam was posted with the anonymous option, which was rarely if ever used otherwise, I've only turned that off. I'm not so happy about doing it, but it seems the lesser of the evils for now. So far, so good - there's been zero spam since.

If you do want to comment and this change means you can't, just email me the text with permission to post it. If you can see any other solutions to the problem, don't hold back.

_

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.

Skyrim and the horizon

On Saturday Dylan at Digital Orc wrote that he hasn't been playing video games much lately, and compared movies, roleplaying and novels as media, while Stuart Lloyd wrote about an old ST game called Mystic Well, a simple example of a digital dungeon crawl.

Coincidentally, on the same day I also watched some videos of a player running through stretches of Skyrim with a good knowledge of the earlier Elder Scrolls games. He had a thoughtful approach to the morality of the sides in what's still a very modern insurrection, and took the time to edit and polish the series in line with the general tone of the game.

Skyrim seems to encourage this kind of thinking. In Mystic Well historical terms, it feels like a Lure of the Temptress meets a Frontier: Elite 2 for depth and scope, with few easy answers. Although Jim joins the Empire out of pragmatism - and an odd lack of dialogue options - he's not entirely happy, and hopes there could one day be a return of religious tolerance, but presumably doesn't expect so subtle an approach will be accommodated.

But when he's there as the leader of the uprising is executed, an incautious comment by another character suggests there is hope, as if the designers did think it all through. The game seems happy for a player to take no side, and an armistice can be negotiated too.

This and the overall complexity, from politics through terrain, weather and encounters to picking flowers and even tasting bees, makes me think any options missing in the game might be not so much limits of thought or technology, just space for a future instalment.

Where am I going with this? As in Skyrim, it may be near incidental, but there is a point.

Getting here

Some of the stranger search terms people and/or bots have used to visit the Expanse...

Back-to-back reality, or Ouroboral gaming

Cygnus of Servitor Ludi reminded me of this at the dis-Atlantean post. It's a sequence from an old episode of Red Dwarf, a sci-fi sitcom about a group of humanoid misfits lost in space three million years in our future. Just before the clip begins they're blown up...

After watching it again I really want to set up a marathon session with a mix of settings and systems, with each game flowing on into the next and the players running through scenes based on this one, or using the kinds of framing at the Conan le Barbare post.

It could be another approach for S. P.'s guerilla gaming concept, and there might even be a universal supplement in it, just inspiration and possible methods for transformation.

Maybe it could be integrated into the Pluristem campaign when it gets up and running?

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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...

_

For more sting in the tail...

Look what Jedediah found...

Javascript folds. You can see them used to hide spoilers at this post at Book Scorpion's Lair - another fine write-up, on a Cthulhu by Gaslight session - but it could do even more, like break up long posts without forcing a full reload. More reason to join the menagerie.

But be careful if you do try it - better safe than sorry when it comes to template code...

_

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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Winged messenger, but whose message?

Forget cloaking devices. Could the anomaly near Mercury recorded by STEREO be evidence for plasma cosmology? It was elongated and it did appear in a solar flare...

Who knows?

I'm no advocate for plasma, but it's a subject that's fresh in my mind, just as UFOs were presumably fresh in the mind of the guy who said 'manufactured object', and the tried and tested presumably fresh at the NRL with the suggestion it's just an artefact.

But all three do seem a bit premature. Reading how the image was built, it's hard not to think how complex and subjective the process could be. Are we all denying our limits?

It's not only outer space. Our own natures as reflected in archeology are also subject to our subjectivity, and I recommend The Subversive Archaeologist for a good reminder.

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