Old Stuff Day - For the love of Spock

It's Old Stuff Day today, for bloggers to highlight a post or two deeper in the archive, that might not otherwise be seen.

Leonard Nimoy passing makes me feel mine could be this:

'The glad lightness of a far future and alterpluristemics'

The video also has Mr Nimoy giving some thoughts on the nature of Spock as a character, and clips from the episode.

Thanks to Miniature Musings of a Bear for the memory jog, and Rob at Warhammer 39,999 for setting it in motion four years ago, not to mention Nimoy for helping make old stuff like Trek some of the newest we've got, even decades later. Per The Secret Sun, where are the moon bases already?

The rot might have set in even while the original series was being prepared, if it is true it was Mariner-4 that rattled our confidence, showing us a Mars different than in the fiction.

And if you're a blogger, for any tabletop space, and want readers for newer posts too, maybe join the House.
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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.

The glad lightness of a far future and alterpluristemics

The recent focus on paths among universes or settings set off some thinking here. What if the journey could be planned, or the destination known, or a traveller could move back and forth? You could import/export between paradigms. Then came the next thought...

Which item from any given setting or universe could really change the nature of another?

One that came to my mind was the flower from the classic Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise". It sprayed spores that removed resistance to empathy and freer love - see the first video below. And I thought of the grim dark of a setting like the 41st millennium.

Wouldn't work? Xenophobia between the factions is just too strong? In the second - and potentially very offensive - video, of Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache, a train of thought starts at 3:32 in which Herring jokes that while many of us embrace the existence of so many nations, anyone who sees only Them and Us is just one step from universal love.

Of course, in a war-torn far future like M41, anywhere the flowers were planted could be subject to Exterminatus or the equivalent, and probably would be once their effects were known. Conflict can be made profitable, or be the sum total of experience or a source of identity - that we know. So what mechanism could be used to spread the love around?

Well, the Orks are a major, dynamic vector. And they multiply via spore release. What if a rogue xenobiologist or bad dok raised an Ork to produce the love spore too? Orks get everywhere and could inherit the galaxy. Now they'd share it. What would that mean?

At any rate, a transpluristemic path like one of those for the Ends, especially if it could be hacked or co-opted, or a follow-up found, could give rise to a new kind of protagonist: a figure who travels the settings, maybe the genres, altering them for a given purpose...

Where does a Maelstrom go?

Hereticwerks recently looked at the Maelstrom in gaming, with ideas for treating it as a monster or hazard to navigation, a basis for a terrain piece.

They also suggested it could be a gateway, maybe to a strange sea, or even a Weak Point between the worlds, possibly one of the more final Ends.

I'll definitely add this take on it to the Ends list, but it would be good to explore the idea and get some options, maybe a table to roll on for each descent.

That could be used in roleplaying for an encounter, or in weird wargaming for a campaign event, maybe as a way to move a long-term game to a new setting or transform it. In fiction overall it could be a good source of inspiration.

As an example destination, the original post gives the fluidic space of Voyager's species 8472, and I suggest it could be somewhere a flood washes up, like the Deadly Desert in Return to Oz, or that a traveller could become a water baby, as in the novel or 1978 film.

Like the portals list and the Ends itself, it's a good subject to crowdsource. If you have a suggestion, leave a comment. I'll expand the table and credit you with a link.

     The descent into the Maelstrom... (1d8)

1. ... carries the traveller into fluidic space. (Hereticwerks)
2. ... washes the traveller up in the Deadly Desert.
3. ... transforms the traveller into a water baby.
4. ... becomes a water chute pouring into a cavern holding a galleon, an Inferno.
5. ... with a hideous pause on the very threshold of bearability gives way to a cataract of surging, turgid unseen green waters cascading with a mighty roar into the heart of a fog-bound estuary just on the very verge of visibility. Some place long abandoned. Deserted. But very much alive. (garrisonjames)
6. ... wakes the traveller - who is afloat and wired up in a sensory deprivation tank.
7. ... fades to calm as the traveller emerges from a long-overgrown spawning pool.
8. ... builds to a convulsion, ejecting the traveller either into or from a bodily cavity.

There's more inspiration in the original post, and the first for the Ends could also help.

Update: Entries 4+ are being added now, as per this post. 

Update: All done - it's now one of the Ends.

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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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Deep thought not Friday

Here we are as planned, but still not on a Friday. For a warm up, I suggest this, this, this and this.

Saying that the laws of physics as we know them permit travel into the past is the same as saying that, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, they permit a teapot to be in orbit around Venus

Brian Cox, Cern researcher

Can we doubt if this quote spreads and we do reach Venus, there won't one day be a teapot in orbit there, even if only as a prank? Could time travel, or any speculated tech, be as inevitable?

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Pulp sounds (4)

The slow wander after a soundtrack to gaming goes on. Here's another piece which manages mystery and militarism, but which doesn't seem limited to any one genre despite being part of a well-known sci-fi score, to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Interesting film, and interesting that it seems to grow in the memory over time. Star Trek is a funny old thing. I wrote a recent post here on the radical in the franchise, and later read this enjoyable post at The Secret Sun with a different focus. It goes deep.

I'm pretty sure there was discussion of The Wrath of Khan somewhere else recently as well, but I can't remember the place. Damien G. Walter mentioned it today too.

Inspired by the film, a response to Jennie's Expansion Joints this week. The idea is to write a narrative in 15 words, with one word given; this time the word is free. For some discussion of the nature of stories and how short they can be see the last post here .

Free! But free's a crowd, of choices...

We strike out; by our decisions close caskets.

If you write your own 15-worder, you can leave it or link to it here. And have a listen.

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Deep thought not Friday

It's been another long time since we had one of these posts. The subject today is less obviously epistemological and there's optional reading too.

- That David Brin article; several of us responded.

- A look at potential with Alexis; last paragraph.

- JB's review of Tron: Legacy, seeing it differently.

- Harald evolves Argos, Von the Iron Kingdoms.

- Evan's worldbuilding and some protagonists.

The question then. Can we define science fiction and fantasy so as to clearly separate them? If not, how might the continuum be visualised?

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Zombies, Daleks and the triumph of death

Kent at Some King's Kent has an interesting approach to the nature of encounters with zombies. I can't help but connect this with the story Dave Morris tells at Mirabilis - Year of Wonders of meeting a Dalek at BBC Television Centre as a boy in 1964.

But what is that connection? Do you sense it too? The zombie and Dalek seem akin.

I think Kent gets at the movement link well with mention of resource management, and Dave in the suggestion of the sterile Dalek environments of the 1960s. Dave also hints at the body horror of the claustrophobic Dalek interior - "something small, vulnerable and fearful surrounded by electronics and armour" - and its world observed remotely, which ties in with the small but insurmountable distance separating us from a zombie.

In this sense, both creatures suggest an alienation from our bodies. That's something I remember played up well in a sequence from the novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch, and it could be part of what makes Davros so compelling.

Zombie and Dalek are unlike us and yet oddly similar, recognisable, even if only by eyestalk, upper-limb-like extensions and voice. There's an uncanniness in there too.

Interestingly, both can also be product of an apocalypse, nuclear in the case of the Daleks; and that powerful image of the '60s Dalek comes back - the petrified forest - and what is that if not ranks of the dead? A potentially empty future.

Linked with all of this, Beedo at Dreams if the Lich House recently posted on the idea of the familiar dead returning. That's another reminder of the triumph of death, of loss.

Isn't that the root of all the terrors our games evoke? Loss of a shot at greatness, of a squad, of a much-loved character. But also the loss of time as the years go by; christian at destination unknown had a wonderful post on this a while back, on a fleeting light. We may well play the good old games to relive the early feelings. The zombie and Dalek represent decay visibly, but also less visibly entropy, as they slowly close us down.

That icy cold sweat.

Remember Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru? Here's the line from The Wrath of Khan; very appropriately for Father's Day, it's Kirk speaking to his son, David Marcus:

I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.

In a way we gamers cheat, every time we deploy our army afresh in yet another battle or roll up a new character. How about a propluristemic rule then, a rule for many games?

The cold sweat

If your army loses the campaign or your character dies, close the ruleset, book or box, put it on the shelf and never open it again. You may hold a ceremony.

- - - - - -

As an aside, talk of Kent and Daleks makes me think of John at John's Toy Soldiers, who's based in the county of Kent in the UK; just today he posted on an odd sign. He also has a Doctor Who battle report featuring Daleks, based on a modified 40K.
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Half-elf, half-orc and the USS Enterprise

It struck me today, more forcefully than ever, just how radical by our standards Star Trek was when first shown. A mixed-race crew with representatives of former and current opponents in hot and cold armed conflict. They may have had a white North American male ordering them about, but by contrast the alien half-elf was arch conservativism.

The Next Generation always seemed to me a step forwards, but I suspect now it could have been a step back. An elder captain meant a more subtle paternalism, and as a Frenchman played by a Brit a reference to early influences on modern North American culture. For all the extra women on show - one to three in the main cast - and a man with a disability - overcome in part - there was less reflection of our diversity.

That diversity seemed to have been moved into other forms of life - an android and a Klingon - and with regard to opponents, the assumption seemed to have been made that mass conflict would eventually be overcome too. The Prime Directive reinforced this, suggesting each group had to make its own way up. But, as the android suggested with his growth arc, up appeared to mean human, or at least the ideals of the Federation.

It became fashionable to bash the good guys over the course of TNG, certainly in DS9, perhaps even to denigrate the idea of good. But there was a bright light in a character we might easily first equate with a half-orc - a trope I'd say is still fresh - Worf. The development of the Klingons through him made so much possible, not least DS9. 

His being there highlighted the value of an alternative perspective on things, the wonders of a reference to multiple sources, the deep fulfilment in a constant struggle to know the best approach. This struggle is likely a very general thing, something fundamental to a universe in which it appears just one of potentially many possibilities is experienced. If the Federation was this, Worf's essence as a character, it might have been a worthwhile venture, and on that level, through Worf, TNG may have kept that early radicalism alive.

Of course, that radicalism was largely conservative, belief in a wholesome past used to shape a better future. It seems to reject the Enlightenment while actually being at root the same process, an opening up of the mind to a lost, forgotten or revealed body of knowledge, the demonstration of its value and its use to synthesise new solutions.

But then from 1987 to 1994, the consensus outside Trek was for consensus itself, and a globalisation was moving visibly and fast. In this sense TNG may have been advocating the other view still, albeit this time a comfortable, cosy, closed tradition, as far as the franchise would tolerate. After all, an update of a successful series isn't especially bold.

As for the ideas of the original series, I won't argue the times weren't already moving ahead of Star Trek in the '60s, that the series was just matching a trend. But what does that say about us now? Who heads our fantasies today? A state-sponsored torturer in 24, an exclusive prostitute in Secret Diary of a Call Girl and a serial killer in Dexter.
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All ways..?

A belated supplement for the post on portals. That post was set off by the domain-level project running at Hill Cantons and this one by The Angry Lurker mentioning Stargate. It's another list to inspire or help with research, as with the fictional mines and seventies films.

I've decided to include any method of instant or greatly accelerated travel through any or all of space, time, dimensions or universes. A major issue is classification of course. Alphabetical order is no real use, but we know there's little difference between high technology and magic, or science fiction and fantasy. So I've grouped them by general feel, but could it be better? And what else should be here?

Fundamental laws of a fictional universe (2)

There's a bold venture on the cards at Ostensible Cat and I'm behind it all the way. It's clear Johnathan wants not just a new game, but a new kind of game, one breaking new ground. It must be possible. For an existing game that doesn't necessarily fit the mould, see Harald's review of Itras by at The Book of Days. Synapse looks very promising too.

How would this affect those fundamental laws of a fictional universe? Well, I'm not sure they'd be so easy to lose. They're extensions of our nature after all, our expectations of a story and our willingness to pay with time and money, whether it's a story in cinema, literature or gaming. To change those expectations and that willingness we have to change ourselves. A noble mission, and not such a strange one at this time of year.

Here then are two more cards for the growing deck. The aim is manifold: first to allow the big events of fiction into your games; second to break down the barriers in how we define game types; third to identify recurring tropes as the first step to moving beyond them.

Viva la revolución!

Happy new Gregorian calendar year! Here's to another orbit of the sun, more or less!

If you want gaming inspiration for 2011, you might start with the personal summaries of games played - or not - at Creepy Corridor, Fire Broadside!, ArmChairGeneral, Plastic Legions, Super Galactic Dreadnought and Mik's Minis, all of which cover various options.

Need your lists of bests? Lazy Thoughts From a Boomer has best bits in blogs, books and movies. Asking the Wrong Questions has opinions I trust on best and worst books, while shadowplay does movies that appeared only in alternate universes...

Papa JJ at diceRolla has something similar, a list unpublished posts. This seems to me dangerously like the approach Zanazaz took at Have dice, will travel... re iron spikes...

Resolutions abound, but the reading list at Huge Ruined Pile is a huge ambitious pile. If that helps put you in your place in time, see Slight Foxing for your place in existence.

Finally, there may or may not be an actual arrow of time, but there is an Arrow of Time at Tower of the Archmage. Impeccable timing.

With Earth history moving on, I thought you might also appreciate a few speculative timelines, elements of histories and/or info on calendars. Here they are then, by scope.

All mines?

Here's a brief list of fictional mines and other mining-related resources, hopefully useful to someone at some point for settings, scenarios or terrain, in whatever kind of game or fiction. I'll update as I find or remember more, with your suggestions too if you have any.

Have a look at the original post for a few thoughts on how these or similar places might fit into games. With the length of the list as it is, they do seem relatively underused.

No kill

I'm working on a resource list that's nearly done, but this is too good not to show alone. Look out for more of those poor guys in red shirts, not one, not even two, but three.

Gold struck

On the subject of gifts, a brief look at wealth, specifically mining in games. One of the three wise men gave gold and mining is a real ghost of past, present and future.

The past we know about - 2010 was a year the human cost really made the news. In the present we have the battle for rare earth metals, a big one - you could easily have some of these in whatever you're using to read this. For the future, if you think Branson et al are interested only in tourism and lifting, think again - a smart investor would be growing the technology to mine the moon and asteroids. There's money in them thar belts.

How to fit all of this into a game?

From stardust to moondust and beyond

Regular readers know by now I have a bit of a thing for aliens and their potential reality. Here's a wonderful line from The BFG by Roald Dahl, coming out of nowhere in the book.

'I'll bet you is also finding it hard to believe in quogwinkles,' the BFG said, 'and how they is visiting us from the stars.'

I is not finding it all that hard to believe, even if living in an age of science has me demanding a proof of the thing, and one requiring multiple layers of trust.

For we dreamers, there's speculative fiction as well as action. Secure Immaturity today applies the usual analysis to a sci-fi staple in a stimulating article about Star Trek and metaphor. Not everyone's cup of tea it's admitted even there.

The blog as a whole might not seem to be one of ours, but the authors are as much like us as we are each other. After all, even the quogwinkles are made of stardust.