DShomshak

Ooh, nice. I am indeed tickled pink. Some years back I ate at an Assyrian food truck. IE, cuisine from northern Iraq, but the truck was painted with scenes and designs from ancient Assyria. It would have looked right at home in Babylon. Dean Shomshak

I once suggested to Steve Long that he should write Book of the Warlord. It could provide a look at the Third World in the CU, and at the mercenary/paramilitary/terrorist side of things. It's nice to know that other people are using Babylon. It's one of my favorite creations, and I had a lot of fun with it in my Supermage playtest campaigns. (Personal favorite was the bachelor party the other PCs held in Babylon when Jezeray Illyescu married Black Fang -- long story, okay? The roaming party stopped at both a Roman gladiator bar and the Folies Bergiere.) I'd be tickled pink if someone else contributed to Babylon's development. Dean Shomshak

Quite right, Bubba Smith. Last I heard, it was still possible for new CU material to appear as Hero Plus licensed products. This requires approval from Cryptic as well as Jason, though, and in my one attempt I found Cryptic's standards, well, cryptic. Instead, I now work on products that do not mention the CU but could be integrated with it (or other mainstream superhero settings) without too much difficulty. "Spells of the Devachan," available through the HERO store, is my first example. I currently work on the final character illustration for my next mini-book, introducing a series of "Shared Origin" supplements. Still, I would be interested in seeing what sort of CU products other people would like to see. Maybe someone else will be inspired to write them. Dean Shomshak (Finally able to use the library's computer, hurrah.)

"Mandate" is an interesting term, because a mandate is given by a higher authority to a lower one. My dictionary gives examples such as "A prescript from a superior court or official to an inferionr one," "A papal order in an individual case, as preferment to a benefice," "An order of the [Roman] emperor to an imperial officer, esp. in the provinces," "An order or commission, granted by the League of Nations as mandator to a member nation as its mandatary [sic], for the establishment of a responsible government over former German colonies or other conquered territory; also, a mandated territory," and, "The instruction given by a costituency to the elected legislative body or one of its members." The Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven has already been mentioned. So if the interstellar empire has "mandate" in its name, that implies the nobles receive their authority from some outside or prior authority. Divine right, as in the Mandate of Heaven? (What's the divinity or religious authority? Also tricky, in that droughts and other hard times could make the Chinese think the emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven.) An older polity, back when the empire had an emperor, or a parliament or some other truly galactic governming body? A loya jirga of megacorporation CEOs, guild masters, religious authorities, warlords, and anyone else with far-reaching power? As Mr. Onassis says, this can be a chance to delve into the deep history and social psychology of the setting. Dean Shomshak

We're talking about mithril as if it were a standard feature of faerie folklore, but I'm pretty sure it's Tolkien's invention. I've never seen it in folklore; the wikipedia article doesn't mention any prior source except Heidrek's Saga. The Saga article says it contributed many names and tropes to LotR, including "a mithril shirt" -- but the translation I downloaded does not seem to include this. At least, I found nothing similar in a simple word search for "mail," "silver," "steel," "shirt," etc. There's a magical shirt, but it's made of silk: "Then Hjorvard went forward and he and Odd had a hard exchange of blows. And Odd’s silk shirt was so reliable that no weapon could get a grip on it, and he had a sword so good it bit mail like cloth. And he hadn’t dealt many cuts before Hjorvard fell dead." Steve still might want to include mithril because players will expect it in the narrative: It wasn't part of faerie folklore before Tolkien, but it has become so. Instead of technobabbling about sintered aluminum, though, I suggest simply saying, "It's magic." Perhaps the weakened faerie magic can make protective garb that's lighter and stronger than any mundane gear, but the Fae still need something genuinely damage-resistant to work upon: aluminum mail, silk, kevlar, whatever. "Like a riot shield in form was the shield of Lieutenant Soames, and like them of plexiglas wrought; but chased around the edge with gold and struck with runes of power. For Soames had saved the life of the dwarf Vindalf, who made the shield in gratitude. And though clear as glass, the shield was stronger than the armor of tanks and battleships, for no weapon wrought by Man could pierce or crack it." In their full power, the Fae don't worry about maintaining plausibility. Maybe take a page from Exalted's Fair Folk: armor of pure glamour. It can look like bronze or silvered steel -- or it can appear to be made of spun glass and peacock feathers, the bones of infants, or moonlight on running water. Dean Shomshak

A noble family might even *want* to have a relative in one of the Guilds, as a way to gain influence and sweetheart deals. Like you say, just like noble families and the Catholic Church. Hey, if Junior plays his cards well, he might end up running the Guild the way the Borgias held the papacy. Or at least Junior might run the local Guild franchise, to the grea benefit of his family. Which reminds me, have you given any thoughts to the religions or ideologies of the Feudal Stars? Dean Shomshak

Could be! I'm just commenting on the information from my old history college textbook. The Holy Roman Empire might be a model for Steve's Imperium, though, at least in what it looks like politically. I have this map (in Historical Atlas of the World, ed. by R. R. Palmer) of the HRE after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. By modern standards, it's deranged. A patchwork of Kingdoms, Archduchies, Duchies, Principalities, Abbacies, Bishoprics and Archbishoprics, Counties, Electorates, Margraviates, Landgraviates, and Imperial Free Cities. Lots of exclaves, especially with the ecclesiastical statelets. Coloring shows the possessions of the Spanish Hapsburgs, Austrian Hapsburgs, Brandenburg, and Sweden. Dean Shomshak

I like the techno-legionnaire a lot. Great as always, Storn! The croc-man reminds me of a society of gatormen I created for Exalted. For a sample character, I drew a gatorman warrior. It was of course pretty poor work compared to the people posting here. Still, I'll try to insert it into this post (and probably fail, because I haven't learned the codes yet, but oh well. If this doesn't work but you really want to see it, look me up on Photobucket.) http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee439/DShomshak/Yaan.jpg Dean Shomshak

In Jack Vance's "Demon Prince" quintet of novels, galactic society was called the Oikumene, Greek for "the inhabited world," ultimately from Oikos, a house. It's "the home of all people." Also has a somewhat religious connotation through words such as "ecumenical." Vance never went into detail about how the Oikumene was governed, but there were a numberr of powerful and widespread institutions, such as the bank that issued the forgery-proof bank notes, and the Institute whose goals and influence were... a bit mysterious. The name might refer to some institution or creed that keeps people thinking they live in a common social framework, despite division into many societies. For instance, Muslims speak of the Umma as the totality of Muslim societies (and everyone outside the Umma lives in the House of War or, possible, the House of Truce). The Holy Roman Empire managed to include religious ideology, a historical precedent it wanted to claim for itself, and a political statement of how it was ruled. (Though the Emperor was arguably not an Emperor, it only held Rome on-and-off, and while it was Christian, the holiness was debatable too.) Maybe the interstellar Imperium similarly tries to claim succession from a greater, more unified galactic society of the past. Dean Shomshak

Or you just say, "It's political." The two guilds try to recruit the dual-function psionic, 'cause it's a way to cut into the other side's monopoly and aggrandize themselves. Likewise, there will be ad-hoc accomodations for a noble who develops psionic talents, based on the relative power and interests of the noble's family and the two guilds' local branches. One of the features that distinguishes such a quasi-feudal system is that it's a government of men, not of laws. Absolute rules matter less than negotiation between influential individuals. (Which is often true in Modern Real Life too, but in a feudal or traditional society, people might not bother to pretend it's otherwise.) Keeping up the appearance of tradition matters too, but that too is merely another interest to balance rather than an absolute law. Dean Shomshak

Well, the Middle Ages in Europe actually saw a fair bi of technological development. But the idea of "progress" as such was not nearly as strong, and new inventions and techniques appeared and spread slowly enough that it wasn't so obtrusive. Nothing like Isaac Asimov's observation that his father was born before the airplane and died after the Moon landing. As LL says, some SF settings may deliberately try for a mythic, "archaic future" feel for exoticism or to make a point about the setting. Though, it's also possible that technological progress does have limits and someday people will have built everything that could be built. But that doesn't account for the retrogression or appearance of archaism in some settings. A more sinister possibility is that of James Blish's Day After Judgment or H. P. Lovecraft's introductory paragraphs to "Call of Cthulhu": The human mind can only stand so much truth before reason cracks and people go mad or retreat into deliberate ignorance. In which case you could get a future of high technology maintained by rote, but it's socially dangerous to inquire too deeply why things work or try to invent anything new. Such a view may even be justified. In Jalk Chalker's "Well of Souls" series, it's mentioned that genetic engineering and other technologies have enabled powerful or ideologically driven people to build horrific societies. Some technologies have been banned as, literally, too dangerous to exist. Though in an ultimate crisis, the long-sealed Weapons Locker of super-weapons and suppressed discoveries is opened... (Incidentally, see J. B. S. Haldane's Daedalus; or, Science and the Future for an interesting discussion of how scientific progress inevitably turns good into evil. Though also why this is a good thing overall.) Dean Shomshak

Ah -- I missed that shoals also block access to the deeper/faster levels of the Sea of Dirac (though I should have figured that from the name). In that case, the Core is not just uninhabitable: It's less accessible, too, because ships are limited to the slowest rate of FTL. As for what might luk in the super-deep levels made accessible between galaxies, I remember the warning from the Chaldean Oracles: Step not down, therefore, to the Darkly-Shaining World: Beneath is spread the Deep, forever formless, lightless, foul, joying in illusion, irrational, precipitous and sinuous, ceaselessly whirling around its own maimed depth, eternally wed to a shape inert, not breathing, and Void. The ancient tale of the Magellanic expedition might be a horror story! On a more practical level, I did some calculations about star density in open clusters. The Pleiades has an estimated mass of c. 350 solar masses in a volume 4 parsecs wide: That works out to an average of 1 solar mass per 3.3 cubic light-years. The Pleiades are a young and dense cluster, though. For M67, the oldest known open cluster, the density is only 1 solar mass per 7.7 cubic light-years. Other clusters have even lower densities. Though, stars aren't arranged homogeneously in a cluster, either. (Denser in the center, sparser at the fringe.) You could have wiggly shoals and "channels" interpenetrating in a cluster, but that might be more complication than you want. It might be easier just to say that the stars being so closely packed "spreads out" the shoaling effect to suffuse the entire cluster, even if not every star is close enough to other stars to share a shoal if they were alone. It's rubber science, you can make up the rules you want. (And the stars in a cluster are still much closer together than is usual, judging by the map I made of stars within 25 LY of Sol. Especially given all the red dwarf stars, it's more like 1 solar mass per some hundreds of cubic LY.) Dean Shomshak

Set aside your scruples, Cancer, and do so. Wikipedia is a good place to begin learning about a subject, but it's a terrible place to end. (And while astronomy books for laymen such as Philip's Atlas of the Universe by Patrick Moore are nice places to start, too, they have their limits, too. Give us the astrophysical freak show!) Dean Shomshak

Thinking about shoals: Shoals will arise by chance from stars coming near each other, but these might be quite small (depending on how far apart the stars can be to produce this effect). You'll get shoals that encompass hundreds of stars from open clusters: stars that formed together from the same cloud of interstellar gas, but have not yet drifted apart. The Pleiades and Hyades are the best-known examples. Open clusters typically have masses a few hundred times that of the Sun, in a volume less than 10 parsecs across. The "Double Cluster" is especially large, with 900-1000 solar masses each. Problem: Most open clusters are very young. Some, like the Pleiades, are mere tens of millions of years old. No planets yet! Others are hundreds of millions of years old. Planets are still forming, their orbits might not be stable yet, you might get Late Heavy ombardment episodes as the outer planets sort themselves out, or there might still be spare protoplanets drifiting around. Crusts will still be very thin, with intense vulcanism. Nothing even remotely habitable unless you terraform it. But, humanity's had 10,000+ years for terraforming. Open clusters might be powerful kingdoms due to having so many stars and worlds in such a small space. (There is also at least one open cluster known, called M67, whose estimated age is in the billions of years. It's very rare for an open cluster to last that long, but the Milky Way is so gigantic there are undoubtedly others. Here, you might get dozens of habitable worlds ready to settle.) Open clusters are puny, though, compared to globular clusters. These can have tens or thousands to millions of stars in a volume 10 or so parsecs wide. The globular cluster M22, located 3,100 parsecs from Earth, has an estimated mass 7 million times that of the Sun in a ball just 9 parsecs wide. But globular clusters have the opposit problem from open clusters: They are too old, with an estimated age of around 10 billion years. The stars formed generations before the Sun, when the interstellar gas held much less heavy elements. They might not have any planets except gas giants. Hundreds of thousands of stars... but no place people could live, and not even any resources for building space habitats. Finally, there's the galactic core. Stars are packed pretty tight there, though not as tightly as in a globular cluster. Still, there might be shoal hundreds of parsecs across, containing hundreds of millions of stars! But just like the globular clusters, these are mostly very old stars. Again, there might not be any planets except for gas giants. Though, who knows? This picture might change. Astronomers are getting awfully good at finding planets, and the new data is showing that most of what we used to think about planet formation was wrong. (You also might have problems from the central black hole.) I'd say you can get away with some dramatic license here. The question is, do you want globular clusters and the galactic core to be populous and, consequently, powerful? Or do you want to keep settlement out in the younger, more chaotic disk? An inhabited core tends to suggest an Asimov-style Galactic Empire, or Somtow Sucharitkul's "Inquestor" setting. An uninhabited core suggests a corresponding lack of a center for social or pilitical authority. That might be more appropriate for a quasi-feudal Galaxy with many competing centers of power. Dean Shomshak

I have always seen red dwarfs listed as part of the Main Sequence. Another important datum about red dwarfs: Most of them are flare stars. Every now and then they release gigantic solar flares that actually shine several times brighter than the star itself. The flare also sends out a humungous blast of hard radiation. So, even if a planet formed in the red dwarf's habitable zone, any life-as-we-know-it would get fried. Which means that planets around red dwarf stars might have life as we don't know it. The ecosystem might even need periodic radiation blasts to survive. Dean Shomshak

The Telepath Guild can be influential because it provides an important service, but it cannot easily manipulate nobles in the way suggested. First, guilds are not hive minds. Suppose there's a ruling Guild Council and it decides to foment war between the grand Duchies of Abecedaria and Zymurgia. (Why? Never mind why. They're mad and evil, that's all.) The command comes down to deliver the proper false messages. Aaaand... Some telepaths in the two Grand Duchies will surely agree, because there's always someone willing to agree to any dumb-ass thing, there will also be telepaths who like living in Abecedaria and Zymurgia and feel some loyalty to the nobles that employ them. Someone goes to the Grand Duke and says, "Hey, boss who pays me extremely well, I just got the screwiest order from guild Central." And the scheme is blown. The second problem is that telepaths are not the only source of information. If Abecedaria and Zymurgia are close enough that they can fight each other, they have trade, diplomacy, and other contacts that involve actual people going back and forth. Including spies. If the telepaths start reporting messages about what's happening in Zymurgia that are too divergent from what the spies and other actual people are saying, the Grand Duke of Abecedaria might get suspicious. It's still possible to manipulate the two Grand Duchies into war. But no evil Guild mastermind can just give a command and have it done. Dean Shomshak

I think Steve's originalquestion about evenly-sized duchies may have been an allusion to the tidy rectangular sectors and subsectors of Traveller. The planetary Dukes answer to their subsector Governor, who answers to his sector Viceroy. (Or maybe it's a subsector viceroy and sector governor, I don't remember.) I think it's a fairly absurd setup. And as Lawnmower Boy pointed out, real feudalism never divided up territory in such tidy hierachies. It seems to me that the main political divisions will center on the shoals. Since travel between these nearby star systems can be handled by machines, they will be far more integrated, politically and economically. They will tend to build spheres of influence among the nearer, but less accessible, star systems. (Though many factors can affect the prosperity and power of individual star system communities, and consequently their influence on other societies.) But you won't have hard borders between centers of power. Dean Shomshak

Bits of coconut shell set in jewelry? There may be more to the story than "It's exotic." Before the discovery of the Seychelles Islands where they grow, the Coco de Mer was one of the rarest and most mysterious commodities of the Indian Ocean -- and consequently believed to possess nigh-magical powers. (The nut's resemblance to a woman's midsection probably added to its supernatural reputation.) The Wikipedia page "Legends of the Coco de Mer notes: "In the Maldives, any Coco de Mer nuts that were found in the ocean or on the beaches were supposed to be given to the king, and keeping a nut for yourself or selling it could have resulted in the death penalty.[2] However, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor was able to purchase one of these nuts for 4,000 gold florins. The Dutch Admiral Wolfert Hermanssen also received a nut as a gift for his services, from the Sultan of Bantam in 1602, for fighting the Portuguese and protecting the capital of Bantam. However, the nut that the admiral was given was missing the top part; apparently the Sultan had ordered the top of the nut to be cut off, in order not to upset the noble admiral’s modesty.[3][4] João de Barros believed that Coco de Mer possessed amazing healing powers, superior even to those of "the precious stone Bezoar".[4] In one of his books, Dr. Berthold Carl Seemann mentioned that many believed the nuts to be an antidote to all poisons.[2]" There's no way of knowing without the full provenance of the jewelry, but if the shell is coco de mer it might have been amuletic, just as if it were set with a bezoar or a bit of supposed unicorn's horn. Dean Shomshak

The strange? axis is the square root of strawberry. "But strawberry isn't a number!" You think so? Well, that's why you don't have FTL. (IRL you can create number spaces with as many axes as you want, and the math is perfectly well understood. Clearly, strange? numbers involve something a bit more esoteric. But "a third axis" is the best one can do to explain them to non-mathematicians.) Dean Shomshak

More from the prolific Poul Anderson: In one of his Fantasy novels (I forget which one), the elves had daggers of magnesium. IIRC, the protagonist set one on fire to use the blinding, UV-rich light against the sunlight-averse elves. Dean Shomshak

Ah, thank you, Markdoc. Very cool! (In my admittedly-hasty research for the Forge Masters, I found a picture of meteoric iron set in a gold brooch. That was from the ancient world -- I *think* Mesopotamian, but it's been several years so my memory might play me false. That this was still happening in Medieval Europe suggests the power and persistence of the idea.) Dean Shomshak

I've heard that "cold-worked iron" hypothesis as well. I've never seen anyone present evidence for it, though. In Poul Anderson's Operation: Chaos, which I've mentioned before, iron suppressed all things supernatural had something to do with its magnetic properties. At any rate, the new age of scientific magic only began once it was found how to degauss iron. In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Oberon and Titania lament that the proliferation of iron-based industry is driving the Fae from Britain. I suppose it all depends on how much of a plot element you want the power of iron to be. Whatever you choose, I like the "Iron is the death of suns" justification for iron's magical potential because it inverts that tired old cliche that "Science strips the magic and wonder from everything." A claim usually made by people who are notably ignorant of science. (And yes, I know that in most stars, fusion does not proceed all the way to iron. But iron is nevertheless a "hard cap" to stellar fusion. If fusion ends at carbon, oxygen, or whatever, that's contingent on the accident of the star's mass. The iron limit, OTOH, is absolute: Stellar fusion does not proceed past iron because it cannot, which gives it symbolic power.) Dean Shomshak

Steve: In your urban fantasy, are you giving the Fae a special weakness against iron? After all, it's a common trope nowadays (though I wouldn't call it a necessary one). In case you do, you might be interested in this bit I wrote some years back for White Wolf's Mage: The Awakening. I created a group of magical blacksmiths called the Forge Masters, AKA the Powersmiths. This section dealt with the magic and mythology of iron. You may find it inspirational. (NB: As I read the old ms. I thought of one or two new details to add, so it isn't exactly as published.) The Power of Iron For centuries, Western scientists doubted that stones and metal fell from the sky, but ancient peoples knew this perfectly well. The Sumerian word for iron loosely translates as “star-stone,” and the Greek name “siderite” has the same meaning. The metal from the sky obviously came from the gods and so was used for sacred blades; bits of iron were set in gold like jewels. Even after the Hittites learned to smelt iron, meteoric iron retained special value because of its celestial origin — plus, it didn’t rust, a property now ascribed to its nickel content. For thousands of years, mortal blacksmiths could not liquefy iron. They charged their furnaces with ore and charcoal. Weeks later, they pulled out a spongy mass of iron still mixed with sand, slag and other bits of mineral that wouldn’t burn away. The smith had to hammer these impurities out of the hot metal. Blacksmiths thought the spongy iron looked like a plant, and so they called it a “bloom.” Every iron-working culture in the world developed the same conceit: Iron, and other metals, slowly grew in the earth as a refinement or perfection of common stone. The heat of the furnace accelerated this growth into a higher and purer form; the furnace itself was a man-made womb where the generation of life took place. By speeding the work of nature, surely the smelter had worked magic — or maybe even seized the fire of divinity itself. Iron’s new birth within the furnace did little to reduce the awe attached to the metal from the stars. Even though Homer contrasted “democratic iron” to the bronze of aristocrats’ weapons and armor, no one ever imagined that bronze would kill spirits or bring luck. Iron retains its mythic role as a symbol of strength and power: No soldier ever received the Titanium Cross. Indeed, modern Powersmiths say that science reveals greater depths to iron’s mythic power. Iron is the death of suns: The fusion process that powers stars ends when it reaches iron. Building heavier elements consumes energy instead of releasing it. That is the cold of iron, the cold that quenched a star. Every element heavier than iron (including the other six mystic metals gold, silver, copper, tin, lead and mercury) is generated when a massive star dies in a supernova explosion, building heavier atoms from the iron in its dead core. One such supernova sparked the creation of the Solar system, though. Iron from that dead star enables blood to carry oxygen, and the iron at the Earth’s core creates the magnetic field that shields the atmosphere from blowing away in the solar wind. Some Forge Masters give iron a different primacy. Iron nails held Christ to the Cross. Through the iron of Calvary, a single death led to life eternal. These mages would not deny the stellar significance of iron; seeing connections between theology and astrophysics is just part of being Awakened, at least in the Free Council. Whatever their faith, Forge Masters see iron as the greatest of metals. It is the metal of life and death conjoined. Iron tools give humanity dominion over nature, and iron weapons enslave them to other men. It is power itself. ---------------------- Dean Shomshak

That may be more complication than you want in a game. It reminds me unpleasantly of the astrology chart that Nephilimused to show how characters' magic waxed and waned from day to day, which I found one of the more witless elements of a generally witless game. IMO astrology is best kept as a source of rare, GM-controlled Arbitrary Plot Complications: for instance, "You must conduct the big ritual at this hour of this day. The bad guys know this too and will try to stop you." I know various Fantasy novels have presented settings in which men and women draw on different sources or styles of magic. But it's a fine line between "Mythic Archetype" and "Offensive Gender Stereotype." I am not sure I would want to take this route at all. (This does not apply to the basic idea of women having greater magical aptitude, statistically speaking, than men. Given the quantity of RL male chauvinist idiocy about "Women can't do X," I find it a nice turnabout to make women dominant in a demanding technical field.) Dean Shomshak

Then again, in Poul Anderson's Operation: Chaos, it was mentioned that a military medic had the Evil Eye. He used it medically by glaring at disease bacteria through a microscope. By sympathetic magic, he similarly cursed and killed the disease bacteria in the patient's body. D&D wasn't my first experience with fantasy, either, so I don't see healing magic as specially "divine." The most important questions, I think, are how powerful, available and, I'm not sure how to put this, "problem-erasing" you want healing magic to be. D&D clerical healing represents an extreme case of powerful healing magic that is easy to use with no special conditions: If a cleric has sufficient level, bam, he can cast a spell to perform any definable feat of healing without proactical difficulties. It sort of goes out of its way to be a resource to manage rather than a source of stories. OTOH if the only way to heal a wound is to inflict an equivalent wound on someone else, that's a far more restrictive system with fairly significant implications for the setting and stories. More questions: In your setting, Steve, what can healing magic do that mundane medicine can't? Is there anything mundane medicine can do that healing magic can't? Dean Shomshak