Theatre of dreams

I just heard a track from the last Dream Theater album and gaming was the first thing that came to mind. Christian at Destination Unknown recently posted on how playing again as an adult might be an attempt to recapture fleeting memories. I'd imagine he had the OSR most in mind, but it's a part of modern 40K too for example. Dream Theater have also been going 25 years. Are we doing it right? Listen and give it some thought.

There's also a portal theme going on to match the theme here of late.

Ravelling yarns (2) - Find your kind

Today a strange story, the second in the 'ravelling yarns' series. The first is here.

It won't be to everyone's taste, but if you've not disliked the recent posts,
you might not dislike this.
It's tongue in cheek as ever, and based on lessons being learnt at the feet of the great ideasmiths in the blogrolls on the left-hand side.

I'll avoid infodumps, despite agreeing with Kim Stanley Robinson, quoted today at Strange Horizons.

The inspiration came especially from the discussion still running at Ecumenical Monday, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker and a chance listening to Johnny Cash's cover of Redemption Day and Arcade Fire's Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). I strongly recommend you listen to both of these before reading, and best of all in this order.

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From little acorns grow

I'd guess most of you have heard the recent news on amino acids and asteroids. It may be harder to trust NASA than it once was, but panspermia is a humbling idea. This and the talk of nature, aliens and souls makes me think of Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If it's new to you, you can read it here.

The preface could be enough to suck you in. The writing is old world elegant, with a simplicity and directness that makes guessing its age difficult.

Here's a little.

PROTOSTARS!

No difference and every difference this time. I'm aiming to satisfy most of the pulp wargamers and still keep the promise to Harald, to recommend a blog which is pure roleplaying and storytelling.

It's ix.

What's the blog all about? All I can say with a certainty is the parts are wondrous, but the whole is something else. I can give you links, but you need to feel your way in.

Talk Tuesday

After the runaway success of Ecumenical Monday, thanks in large part to Dethron linking to the post from his blog, today becomes Talk Tuesday, for one week at least.

Ecumenical is still going and recently too there's been all kinds of discussion deeper inside the Expanse than the latest post; I want to give a summary of where, so the good ideas, recommendations and musings of the commenters don't go to waste and questions new and old get answered.

So here's a list of older posts with discussion ongoing or comments just added - in order of activity, most to least.

• Ecumenical Monday - religion informing fiction, and in it, with examples
• The scope of fiction - an attempt to map all the space that fiction covers
• Hanging back - help needed, plus C'nor has Warmachine and D&D queries
• Discussing terms (1) - Beer and pretzels - the hobby, expression and food
• From stardust to moondust and beyond - the first post on quogwinkles

It's all yours.

Life, but not as we know it (1)

Following on from the mention of Discworld in the last post but one, and all the talk of the scope of fiction, here's the first of a series on especially unusual fictional lifeforms.

This one's from Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett, possibly one of the first places you'd expect to find something out of the ordinary (except maybe The BFG..?). I'm a latecomer to Pratchett, and for many years was a bit closed-minded about the Discworld series. Now I realise what I've been losing, with the earlier books at least. It's good, unexpectedly old-fashioned fun, unpretentious. Pratchett's one of us. What I like most is the way we're given idea after deep idea seemingly only as a catalyst for the jokes.

PROTOSTARS!

A new PROTOSTAR!, a gaming blog of such quality it deserves 113 followers rather than 13. I'm not superstitious, but we do need to get it off that number.

The attractions then, and they are many.

Terrain-building - an excellent tower, designed for sci-fi, but close to Orthanc in design, and part of a larger outpost, as well as a stunning Gothic cathedral tower, a Tyranid reclamation pool, sci-fi containers and a superb modular hill. Pages of inspiration, advice and pretty pictures, and downloadable plans too.

Red planet - getting a good red planet tabletop, a technique also suitable for many a battlemat, and basing miniatures in the style.

Painting - a superb and thorough Tervigon tutorial, but with much for all, especially painters of Tyranids, pulp aliens and monsters, and stranger creatures in general.

Miniatures - classic 40K space marines and their wargear as well as classic Epic-scale models including titans - a Warlord, a brace of Warhounds and a Reaver (mentioned here before) - and examples from two topical space marine chapters: the rejuvenated Dark Angels and the Ultramarines of movie fame.

And if you want to know more about the blogger, here's a post with a surprising but satisfying blend - ninjas, D&D, Blood Bowl and LARPing.

The moreish Confessions of a 40K addict. You might develop a habit.

Don't forget the previous PROTOSTARS!

• Super Galactic Dreadnought
• Fire Broadside!
• Blighty Waaagh Boys, including the intro to the series

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Ecumenical Monday

Interesting departure today, getting away from everything from the God-Emperor of Dune to small gods, every kind of religion in fiction in fact. With a slight humanist angle possibly detected in the last post - and presumably secular humanism, unlikely if so - I thought you might appreciate a couple of links on religion informing fiction.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the zen of modelling re the latest Ork in the series, and we're all aware of the Christian influence on fantasy set in Middle-earth and Narnia, but how many of us know anything about Jewish fantasy or Islamic SF? Didn't think so. Then that seems like a reasonable place to start. Time for a revelation or two perhaps?

Thanks to Bibliophile Stalker for the second link, and possibly the first indirectly.

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.

Fundamental laws of a fictional universe (4)

It's been a while since I made up any fictional universe cards, so here are four more, inspired by the amazing response to the list of portals, and the concepts involved, especially time travel and dimensions.

For anyone who missed the earlier instalments (two cards here, two more here and one here), the point is to allow the big events of fiction into your games, to break down the barriers in how we define game types and to identify recurring tropes as the first step to moving beyond them, possibly by making them so familiar we've had all we can take.

To these three I'm adding a fourth, also inspired by talk of other worlds: recognition of us in the game, and of the scope of fiction. The final card in this batch deals with this.

The idea is they work with any game type, but especially with wargames and roleplaying games. I know they're not balanced and the effects can vary dramatically from system to system. The unevenness is part of the fun - think of them like badly-made dice. The definitions are in the first instalment. I'm claiming no copyright on this batch either.

You can have fun guessing the source of the quotes in the titles too.

Porky models - Ork (6) - Choppa 1 & Shoota 2 (components)

I've started work on the next Ork in the sequence. For newcomers, the thinking behind the series is introduced here and here and the first completed build is here.

As with the first, I'll show the components I'm going to use for the arms as a visual puzzle. The question: how might these pieces be cut up and various parts combined to produce a big, shooty shoota and a slightly unusual, more clubby choppa?

As a clue, I'll remind you I want to start playing up the idea that Ork physiology has no real trouble accepting primitive 'bioniks', and I want more of a sense of their alien nature to come through in their equipment; it's too recognisably human. This explains why there are more elements being used than might be expected. One is the arm left over from the last Ork build, and this build will leave two. I'll also mention there's nothing here not on the Ork boyz sprues, though I will of course be adding plenty of greenstuff.

Shadowing

If you've been following the recent discussions on quogwinkles, portals and dimensions, and especially if you're a fan of the 40K game world, you might well like Just_Me's most recent post on minor aliens at Bell of Lost Souls, this time the Umbra.

By another coincidence there's currently a follow-up post on alien physiology at the top of Science In My Fiction, written by Juliette Wade of TalktoYoUniverse.

Barking Alien also posted recently on the difference between an alien and a monster. This was a discussion I enjoyed very much, even if we do disagree a little; perhaps more so for it. I'll be pondering the ideas at any rate, and you can make up your own minds.
_

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.

The Codex Project...

Attention all Warhammer 40,000 fans!

You almost certainly have an interest in this.

If you don't have time to read the whole text, just go straight to the fourth paragraph, the one beginning: "So we have created..." That's the reasoning and intent in a shell casing. 

Big Jim at Galaxy in Flames will put up more on the project later this week.

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?

PROTOSTARS!

Today's blog I think deserves more readers is Super Galactic Dreadnought.

Why? The first reason is ships - spaceships to be exact - and we may all feel a bond, whatever our fiction. Super Galactic Dreadnought has a lot to say about them, whether it's spaceship design and designers, model scale, ship naming or spaceship gaming.

Wargamers more interested in terra firma - or even extraterra firma - might like the recent branching out into Ogre by one of the Steve Jacksons, with its robotic tanks. The introduction is here, and the first part and second parts of the model review here and here. SGD also has a clear liking for Hordes of the Things, which gets played monthly.

Roleplayers of all settings might like the recent world and system building post and its links to some powerful tools. (A tabletop world is built here.) Fantasy roleplayers in particular may be surprised to hear that ckutalik of Hill Cantons fame dropped by a week or so ago - in physical form no less! - to play a game of starship combat. And he liked it.

So strap yourself in, power up the turbos and go engage. Super Galactic Dreadnought. It's super. It's galactic. There's nought to dread, except missing out.

Don't forget the previous PROTOSTARS!, also well worth a look.

• Fire Broadside!
• Blighty Waaagh Boys, including the intro to the series

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Story arc

Last month I suggested looking into legend, myth and history when creating scenarios in wargaming, roleplaying and writing. Here's an example, a great story arc that almost comes full circle. It looks fantasy but is just as easily sci-fi, or horror. Do you recognise it?

In a war-wracked land an illiterate shepherdess is brought up in a deeply religious home. She has visions at the age of 12; saints tell her she will lead the armies of the occupied nation, drive the invader from the realm and bring the rightful king to coronation. She is shown how to achieve this and takes a vow of chastity.

At the age of 16 the time has come. A relative drives her to a friendly garrison where she asks to be taken before the heir. She is turned away. Almost a year later she returns, to prophesy an imminent military defeat. News comes that the battle is lost; the shepherdess is escorted on the long journey to the royal candidate.

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.