DShomshak

In my old "Seattle Sentinels" campaign, I wrote occasional "news of the world" handouts about what other heroes and villains were doing, including taking current events and "superizing" them. What Steve Long described is pretty much how I handled 9/11: It happened as in the real world, but superheroes (and not a few super-criminals) responded to help pu;ll pweople from the wreckage of the towers. Because as in the real world, for a brief moment old rivalries didn't seem to matter. I absolutely would *not* have PCs get involved in the Ukraine War *directly.* That would be in appallingly bad taste. But Putin's government has shown its unbridled villainy. There's a long history in comics of superheroes fighting supervillains who explicitly work for hostile and evil governments. Putin's government now qualifies. Putin has also said repeatedly that he views NATO and the West in general, and the US in particular, as his real enemy. Just as Golden Age comic book characters fought Axis villains, it does not seem out of line to me for PCs to fight Russian supervillains sent by Putin to cause trouble in the PCs' home countries. (Though players' mileage may vary. I would still recommend asking first where they want you to draw the line between reality and fantasy.) Dean Shomshak

As it happens, one of my friends has been tinkering with his own D20-based superhero game for some time. The playtest we did of the first version was too brief, really, to assess it, but we had a bit of fun. He's been noodling with a revised version based on what was learned, though, and promises that someday we will play it again. I look forward to it, as his previous design experiments have worked well. Dean Shomshak

I found most of TNG rather forgettable. With a few, such as "Code of Honor" and "Sub Rosa," that I wish I could forget. But I liked "Devil's Due" very much. Even after repeated meetings with Q, and presumably knowledge of all the super-aliens from TOS, Picard remains skeptical -- and cracks the fraud. Also good as an exploration of just what could be possible if some clever person put together the various technologies established in the setting. I would like to have seen "Ardra" return in another episode. I forget the name and I'm too lazy to look it up, but the episode in which an accident leaves the primitive vulcanoid villagers thinking Picard is God. So many times in TOS, the Prime Directive was brought up only so Kirk could explain why it didn't apply. Nice to see Picard take it seriously -- and show how far he'd go, and risk personally, to fix the damage and uphold the principle. Dean Shomshak

For the April 2, 2022 issues of The Economist, the cover shows a picture of Pres. Zelensky with the caption, "Why Ukraine must win." The lead article is about their interview with Zelensky, sharply drawing the contrast between him and Putin. Here are the last three paragraphs, which may offer some hope: Well, I hope so. Dean Shomshak

Tolkien knew the tropes of myth and epic legend, and used them in constructing Middle-Earth. But he was also both a devout Catholic and a modern writer, so he was ready and willing to subvert those tropes. Deconstruction before deconstruction was a thing. 😉 So yes, the Great and the Wise (but Not Wise Enough) have ignored hobbits and never recorded their history because it wasn't a history of heroes and battles. But the standards of God confound the Wise and humble the Mighty. Dean Shomshak

For my "Fantasy Europe" alternate-history Fantasy Hero Campaign, I did a version of hobbits but they never came up in play. For this I emphasized the "Hidden Small Folk" trope, owing more to Pliny by way of Robert E. Howard that to J. R. R. Tolkien. (Though in the introduction to The Hobbit Tolkien said hobbits were still around, just staying out of sight from clumsy Big Folk.) Humans called them Pygmies, or Picts. They took care to stay hidden, still living underground. They are still Stone Age folk, wielding spears, bows and arrows with points of chipped flint, and practicing their sacred rites in deep caves with paintings on the walls. Their lore-masters know much that Big Folk have forgotten or never knew. Their demons are the Unreborn, souls grown monstrous through refusal to submit to the cycle of reincarnation. Some pygmies, however, resent the Big Folk who supplanted them. They form terrorist bands, using stealth, poison and dark magic drawn from the Unreborn to murder isolated communities of Big Folk... or, sometimes, entire neighborhoods of cities. They are called Goblins, and are justly feared. Dean Shomshak

There are halflings in my "Magozoic" D&D campaign because it's a D&D campaign. I treat them mostly as just small humans. I have had no reason to develop their cultures to any great degree, in part because no one has yet asked to play one. There are multiple halfling ethnicities. Halflings native to the heartlands of the Plenary Empire are called Leptopoda ("Lightfoots" -- no Stout subrace because their poison resistance schtick overlaps too much with dwarves.) Your basic peaceful agrarian folk, living in smallish hill areas with subterranean homes. Probably the most notable feature is that their gods form a divine village rather than the divine royal family so common among human cultures. There's no King of the Gods, there's a Mayor of the Gods. Other gods have similarly homely roles: shepherdess, wise old granny, artisans, farmers. No warriors or other "hero" types. Myths emphasize quick thinking and good sense, and usually end with everyone sitting down to a good dinner in good humor. Many Leptopoda have moved into human cities and assimilate well. The Laterculi ("Bricklings" -- not their name for themselves) come from arid western lands that used to be part of the Plenary Empire, where they built pueblo-like adobe villages in oases. A long history of attacks from desert raiders made them clannish and suspicious of outsiders. They did not assimilate particularly well. The chief result of their becoming part of the Plenary Empire was to generate a national consciousness that they, as a whole, didn't belong in it. They got their wish when the western provinces broke away in the chaos following Panopticon's War. Then the Sorathite zealots returned from their long exile in the far west, conquered the whole regions, and gave the Laterculi the same choice they gave everyone else: convert or die. Plenary cities now have ghettoes of Laterculi refugees who still show no interest in assimilating. Distant lands have their own halfling cultures. The port city of Thalassene has a small enclave of halflings from Vohai. Vohinese halflings have dark brown skin and straight black hair, often worn long in elaborate braids. These equatorial halflings introduced the Plenary Empire both to choolate and curry (Vohai is a major source of spices). Every lunch counter in Thalassene now includes a curry booth. Everyone knows, though, that for the very best curry you have to know someone in Little Vohai. Dean Shomshak

I still consider Classic Enemies the gold standard for Enemies books. Scott took characters, most of whose brief initial descriptions didn't go much beyond, "Embittered, he turned to a life of crime," and made them, well, characters. Rest in peace, Mr. Bennie. DEan Shomshak

For particularly decadent societies, or especially mad tyrants, the Game of Death first introduced by Edgar Rice Burroughs in, IIRC, Chessmen of Mars. Gladiatorial combat structured as a chess game (or analog), with gladiators as the living pieces and the arena as the board. Two players order the gladiators around. When one gladiator moves into another's square, they fight to the death. One of the requirements is unfortunate: The Master of the Games needs a smackdown-hammer big enough that the captured PCs can be compelled to go along with the game instead of saying "Screw this" and trying to fight everyone at once. Or, well, some reason that a pack of egotistical murder hobos (and their player) will play along. (At least until the equally traditional slave revolt, when the heroes persuade the other gladiators to break their chains and turn on their debauched and evil masters.) Dean Shomshak

As for, "How many races?" I must again bring up Exalted. Yes, there are actual nonhumans, some of them even (technically) playable, but they are kind of niche and peripheral. Most notably, they cannot become Exalted as magical superhumans, and the game's name is, after all, Exalted. Only humans can become Exalted, and outnumber other mortal sapients by, at a guess, tens of thousands to one. But Exalted also has it both ways. From another POV the number of sapient "races" is arbitrarily large, because various magical phenomena can alter humans pretty drastically, in ways that breed true. In the past, the Exalted of the Old Realm engineered human subspecies to serve different functions and live in different environments; some of them are still around. The taint of Primal Chaos seeping in from the edge of the world can mutate people in diverse ways. The shapeshifting Lunar Exalted have bred many races of animalistic beastmen. But all these peoples remain theologically human: They can all Exalt... and they are all playable, fitting easily within the rules for character creation. Want to play a yeti who is also a fateweaving kung fu secret agent of Heaven? You can do it. Want to play an elementally powered Dragon-Blood who is also also one of the Horse-Legged Folk from the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas? You can do that too. If your Storyteller can fit it into the campaign, the rules will support it. Dean Shomshak

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/01/1089990539/climate-change-politics A disturbing story from All Things Considered about the environmental movement's deep roots in white supremacist/nativist/far right/alt-right politics -- and there's still considerable overlap today. Dean Shomshak

BBC World Service discussed this just now. The situation may be, well, muddled. Ukraine's government neither confirms nor denies the strike in Belgorod. A Ukrainian MP opined it was more likely a Russian "False Flag" attack -- see, Ukraine is attacking Russia, we're just defending ourselves. For Ukrainian troops to cross the border and attack a target in Russia, he said, would play into Russian hands. But other observers suggest the Russian announcement seems unusually muted, compared to the usual hysterical bombast of Russian accusations. Whether Ukraine did it or Russia did it, where are the accusations of genocide? Possibly the ?Russian authorities are in shock that anyone actually managed to strike into Russia. He also suggested such an attack might be illegal. Or, someone suggested that oil depots have been known to catch fire by accident. It seems not totally implausible to me that a Russian depot manager might try to cover up an accoident by saying that Ukrainian helicopters did it. It's a downside -- for Russia as well as the wider world -- of Russia's policy of constant lying. No claim can be trusted. Dean Shomshak

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil A good book for people who delve far too deeply into the minutiae of worldbuilding, and a sobering guide to exactly how modern industrial society is not sustainable. A quantitative history of human energy usage, from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to the present. Yes, people have actually worked out things like, how many calories in an antelope vs. how many calories to hunt the antelope? And every other mode and purpose of energy expenditure. For me, one of the biggest surprises was the degree to which, for quite a while, water power was humanity's most intensive source of industrial energy. A 19c water turbine was tremendously efficient at extracting useful work from flowing water... right in time to be unhooked from factory driveshafts and hooked up to electrical generators. Another oddity: Multi-person treadmills, used as a form of prison labor -- though one warden advocate also extolled the health and recreational benefits for the convicts. Much discussion of how many people can be fed per hectare of land farmed, using various methods. Agricultural productivity increased over the millennia, but each improvement relied on increasing energy inputs, whether the intensive human labor of Asian rice cultivation or the need for more and larger horses to pull plows and other farm machines, not to mention the extraordinary labor inputs to fertilize land or the time costs for crop rotation. The modern world didn't invent environmental degradation. Large areas of the ancient world, from Spain to Afghanistan, suffered deforestation even before the Iron Age, from making charcoal to smelt copper. Speaking of which... Smil discusses the eventual exhaustion of cost-effective fossil fuels (they will never be truly exhausted, but eventually extraction costs too much to make it worthwhile). What then? Well, if the US tried to maintain current iron and steel production using old-fashioned charcoal instead of coke made from coal, this would require an area of forested land twice the size of North America. Smil also discusses the important concept of Energy Return on Energy Investment. EG, given the energy in a ton of coal, how many tons of coal can you mine? Upper limit is 80; more often, about 20. The EROEI for a Sudi oilfield is in the hundreds. The EROEI for wind, however, maxes out at 20 but is difficult to push past 10; the EROEI for solar is currently 2. So switching from fossil fuels to renewables without crashing industrial civilization will be "challenging." Early chapters are more useful for Fantasy worldbuilders, or at least designing preindustrial societies. Later chapters deal with the modern world of fossil fuel usage. Final chapter puts it all together and gives at least a little discussion of the future. Also, not a book for people allergic to graphs and tables, of which there are many. Dean Shomshak

Sibling, I too know the Codex. I envy those who get to see it for the first time. Dean Shomshak

Heard on the radio today: Hubble found a gravitational lens powerful enough (from a whole cluster of galaxies) and fortuitously placed to provide the image of a single star estimated 12.9 billion light-years away -- from less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Whole galaxies have been imaged at greater distance, but this is apparently the first image of a single star at such a range. Estimated 50x Sun's mass, so of course very bright. Astronomers plan to study it intensively with the James Webb, looking for differences from modern stars. Maybe the Webb will get lucky and find a gravitational lens powerful enough to image the hand holding a galaxy at the start of time... No, that's (probably) just the DC Universe. Dean Shomshak

I too never knew him personally, but his work helped make me want to write for Champions and showed me how to do it. Rest in peace. Dean Shomshak

Unfortunately, yes. One reason why I think NATO *should* be giving Ukraine tanks as fast as they can be delivered. For the safety of the rest of the world, this has to be an unmitigated debacle for Putin. I accept the arguments that NATO should not try imposing the no fly zone Ukraine wants, as presenting too great an escalation. (No way to do it without striking anti-aircraft systems inside Russia itself.) But international relations expert, former diplomat and public raedio talking head Ivo Daalder argues that Russia's invasion has largely been a ground war anyway, so keeping Russian planes out of Ukrainian airspace wouldn't do that much to help beleaguered cities. A few hundred tanks, though, might make a difference. (If they can be fueled, and don't get bogged down.) Maybe even enough to take back Donetsh and Luhansk. Dean Shomshak

Here are relevant paragraphs from Medieval Demographics Made Easy, by S. John Ross: ---------------------- Merchants and Services In a village of 400 people, just how many inns and taverns are realistic? Not very many. Maybe not even one. When traveling across the countryside, characters should not run into a convenient sign saying "Motel: Free Cable and Swimming Pool" every 3 leagues. For the most part, they will have to camp on their own or seek shelter in people's homes.Provided they are friendly, the latter option should be no trouble. A farmer can live in a single place all his life, and he will welcome news and stories of adventures, not to mention any money the heroes might offer! Each type of business is given a Support Value (SV). This is the number of people it takes to support a single business of that sort. For instance, the SV for shoemakers (by far the most common trade in towns) is 150. This means that there will be one shoemaker for every 150 people in an area. These numbers can vary by up to 60% in either direction, but provide a useful baseline for GMs. Think about the nature of the town or city to decide if the numbers need to be changed. A port, for instance, will have more fishmongers than the table indicates. To find the number of, say, inns in a city, divide the population of the city by the SV value for inns (2,000). For a village of 400 people, this reveals only 20% of an inn! This means that there is a 20% chance of there being one at all. And even if there is one, it will be smaller and less impressive than an urban inn. The SV for taverns is 400, so there will be a single tavern. Business SV Business SV Shoemakers 150 Butchers 1,200 Furriers 250 Fishmongers 1,200 Maidservants 250 Beer-Sellers 1,400 Tailors 250 Buckle Makers 1,400 Barbers 350 Plasterers 1,400 Jewelers 400 Spice Merchants 1,400 Taverns/Restaurants 400 Blacksmiths 1,500 Old-Clothes 400 Painters 1,500 Pastrycooks 500 Doctors 1,700* Masons 500 Roofers 1,800 Carpenters 550 Locksmiths 1,900 Weavers 600 Bathers 1,900 Chandlers 700 Ropemakers 1,900 Mercers 700 Inns 2,000 Coopers 700 Tanners 2,000 Bakers 800 Copyists 2,000 Watercarriers 850 Sculptors 2,000 Scabbardmakers 850 Rugmakers 2,000 Wine-Sellers 900 Harness-Makers 2,000 Hatmakers 950 Bleachers 2,100 Saddlers 1,000 Hay Merchants 2,300 Chicken Butchers 1,000 Cutlers 2,300 Pursemakers 1,100 Glovemakers 2,400 Woodsellers 2,400 Woodcarvers 2,400 Magic-Shops 2,800 Booksellers 6,300 Bookbinders 3,000 Illuminators 3,900 *These are licensed doctors. Total doctor SV is 350. Some other figures: There will be one noble household per 200 population, one lawyer ("advocate") per 650, one clergyman per 40 and one priest per 25-30 clergy. Businesses not listed here will most likely have an SV from 5,000 to 25,000! The "Magic Shop" means a shop where wizards can purchase spell ingredients, scroll paper and the like, not a place to buy magic swords off the shelf. -------------------- Dean Shomshak

To adapt a bit from Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies: "Good Fantasy must have elves, they're traditional." \ Let these two asses be set to grind corn. / "Good Fantasy mustn't have elves, they're cliche." Make a world to fit the story you want to tell. You have no external obligations. Dean Shomshak

Garrison Keillor once did a sketch about "Creeping International Canadianism." "Frostbacks comin' through the woods!" <sound effect of helicopter taking off> Portentious announcer voice: "A Canadian takeover of the United States: Could it happen? What might it be like?" Dean Shomshak

You are not alone in this thought. Game writer Ken Hite has explored this idea a bit, and I don't recall the name of the ufologist he said inspired him. But yes, there's plenty to work with. Strange abductions with gaps in time, crop circles as fairy rings, for a start. Hite prefers the term "ultraterrestrial" for all creatures from Beyond the Fields we Know, as not presuming where the entities come from. Are Greys fairies that have adopted modern, quasi-scientific guise? Or were fairies aliens, filtered through the interpretations of low-tech people? Or are both of these equally false and true -- attemots to classify and ascribe meaning to entities that are wholly Outside? Any option might be good for a game. Incidentally, Jim Butcher plays with the idea in the Dresden Files books as well: his version of svartalves look like Greys. Dean Shomshak

Based on the clip, this looks even more entrancingly bizarre than Eagle Shooting Heroes. Thank you, I will look for it. Dean Shomshak

This. So much this. I am sorry if this comes off as sharp, but... The initial question -- What can you do with elves, dwarves, and other D&D-ish multiple races, that hasn't been done to death -- is the wrong question. The correct question is: If you are not, in fact, playing D&D, why are you making everything just like D&D? As I have said before, I quite like 5th ed D&D. I find the rules, well, adequate for doing what they are supposed to do. Embedded setting elements that I don't like I find easy to alter or remove. (Like, my game has a completely different set of other planes -- which is a possibility the 5e books themselves suggest.) But I don't imagine that because D&D did something a particular way, any other Fantasy game must follow its lead. As has been noted here, folklore, myth and Fantasy fiction have portrayed many different versions of faerie-folk whom we might fairly describe as "elves." Other games have, too. Take Exalted, for instance. In Exalted, the "Fair Folk" -- also called raksha -- generally follow the familiar pattern of beautiful, pointy-eared humanoids. Though they don't have to. But they are creatures of primordial Chaos that have taken a semblance of form in order to enter the world and destroy it from the inside. They eat souls. They are masks without faces behind them, playing at being people, but not. Part of their survival and predation method is to play roles, and beguile mortals into playing along. As the emotional interaction gets more intense, the raksha feeds, untio the mortal is left an empty, mindless, soulless husk. And this version of elves has jumped from game to Fantasy fiction. Genevieve Cogman, who as a game writer did much to develop Exalted's Fair Folk, now writes a Fantasy fiction series starting with The Invisible Library. I've started that first book, and am amused to see that her faieries follow the Exalted model. "The forms and themes of poetry do not become outworn or exhausted. The exhaustion is in the individual poets." -- Clark Ashton Smith. One could say the same about the tropes of myth. It's only the particular executions that become cliche. Dig down into the raw ore of myth, and you can forge a new version. Dean Shomshak

Ah, thank you. But given how many things that people thought would never happen have then happened in the last several years, I am not so sure. Before this is over, there may indeed be foreign tanks in Moscow, or something equivalent. Some condition in which Russia has so unraveled, from military exhaustion, economic collapse, and whatever else an increasingly angry Western alliance can inflict, that it literally cannot resist any demands from the victors. I hope someone is encouraging the second-tier business and military leaders to think seriously about such possibilities, and the desirability of steering Russia onto a different and less dangerous path. Dean Shomshak

Indeed; I thought that was obvious. Putin has made clear for decades that his vision was Russia Against the West: The Western world (and a good deal of the rest) have woken up that Ukraine is merely the current battlefield, and is fighting back with a force and in modes that Putin didn't expect. That might change, if Putin expands his war by attacks on Poland, say, or by really damaging cyber attacks. In that case, NATO and others might take a more direct hand -- and gain direct grievances that must be satisfied. Plenty of military experts are saying that Russia is going to lose, as long as other keep backing Ukraine and sanctioning Russia. (And maybe even if they don't.) Even if Putin decides to just annihilate Ukraine, it will be such a Pyrrhic victory that Russia itself might collapse. From what I hear and read, the oligarchs will *not* break with Putin. They are entirely his creatures. That's how they became oligarchs. Likewise, the top tier of military leaders. But the second tiers might not be so dependent on his favor, and so might not be willing to go down with him. If so, I hope that Western agents and diplomats are cultivating them. Dean Shomshak