DShomshak

DeWine was mentioned on today's episode of The Daily, the NY Times radio program/podcastt. The subject was the resurgence of governors in national politics, arguing they'd sort of been eclipsed in public consciousness for the last decade or so as culture wars intensified and politics became more nationally focused. But with Trump making the federal government irrelevant for two months in responding to coronavirus, it's been left to governors -- and the difference in their responses has been stark. NY's Cupmo has been the most visible, but DeWine was noted as an example that Republican governors have not all parrotted Trump's line that everything's fine. Conversely, Florida's DeSantis was called out as particularly psittaceous. Here in The Other Washington, yesterday Gov. Inslee said something good: We are not helpless in this crisis. "We have power in this thing. And the power we have is we can use our heads." And today he vetoes a passel of bills he'd previously worked hard to get passed, as a way to cut $445 million from the state budget over the next two years. Because state revenues are going to take a beating, and there just won't be money for everything. Dean Shomshak

EDIT FOR DOUBLE-POST: Anyway, I've seen some Fantasy stories and products that include "hero races" apparently without irony and, well, they sometimes leave me feeling a little uncomfortable. Dean Shomshak

Thank you; excellent article. The flip side of the "villain race" is the "hero race," and here I'd argue that Tolkien gets sneaky. Elves are angelic, but not meant to be in Middle-Earth. Their depiction is deeply shaded with sorrow, which doesn't fit very well with the usual racist vision of heldenvolk. Not to mention how many of Middle-Earth's problems are caused by elves, from Feanor's crafting of the irresistibly tempting Silmarils to Celebrimbor's gullibility in perfecting ring-forging for his good buddy Sauron. And the Dunedain? These seem like an Aryan dream, the heroic "Men of the West." Except when you look at their history, they don't look so good. They can defeat Sauron militarily in the Second Age, but their king Ar-Pharazon and ruling class are putty in his hands. Then Isildur and the Last Alliance defeat Sauron again, but Isildur lacks the moral fortitude to destroy the One Ring when he has the chance. The north kingdom of Arnor does half Sauron's work of destroying it through its own partition and civil war. And finally, at the end, we have Aragorn -- who transcends his heritage by realizing that he is not the hero. All his deeds in the War of the Ring are to protect Frodo and distract Sauron. He is Frodo's sidekick. That humility is his most heroic trait -- in contrast to proud Boromir, who falls to the temptation of the Ring. So just from the text, I'd say any argument about a racist worldview in LotR is iffy. Tropes are there, but at least some are being subverted. Dean Shomshak

A few days back, the BBC aired a story about, IIRC, a black hole being detected ripping apart and eating a star. Particularly important becaue the black hole is in the mid-range size between what could be created by a collapsing star and the supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies. But, radio, so there wasn't much detail. Does anyone know of an article with more information? (No video, please. My internet connection is too slow and erratic.) Dean Shomshak

As an example of what one can do with the variant humans of Exalted, here's the introduction to a society I designed and posted as a bit of fanwork. It uses these variant humans for a number of purposes: to intensify an underlying premise of diverse peoples coming together in a greater union for common good; to extend possibilities for adventure into an underused environment; and sheer "sensawunda," to show how exotic the setting could become. ----------------- <1>Warrakai, the Land Under Waves Of all the Directions of Creation, the West has the least land area. For this reason, people in other Directions usually think it has the lowest population. They forget that not all people need land. But then, most land-dwelling folk do not regard the beastmen, Wyld mutants and other aquatic races of the West as people. Warrakai, the Land Under Waves, is one of the more complex societies of the Western Ocean. On this undersea plateau, fish-scaled folk trade harvests of kelp to dolphinman hunters of tuna and bonito. Men covered in crab-chitin, with pincers for hands, practice slow, underwater battle-dances to fight the creatures who enslaved their ancestors. Ghost-pale, one-eyed folk descend into lightless depths and return with prophecies and jade. People of the Sea, indistinguishable from human save for the gills in their necks and the webs between their fingers, travel bearing land-made trinkets and tools. The five races do not love each other, but they worship together at the sacred atoll of the god Warratoa. In return, Warratoa and his subordinate spirits protect them from the Wyld. The federation, however, is still fragile… and an ancient evil already moves against it. Will the Time of Tumult forge the sea-folk into a great nation? Or will it wash them away in a riptide of forces beyond their comprehension? ----------------- That, I submit, is a bit more than humans with a coat of paint. Dean Shomshak

As I've mentioned in another thread, the game Exalted sort of manages to have it both ways. Creation is mostly human, and most humans still fall within the baseline of merely cosmetic differences of skin and hair. But an indefinite number of altered humans exist, some created deliberately and others warped by ambient supernatural forces, to give a "sensawunda" feeling of the unearthly. But from amphibious People of the Sea to feathered hawkmen and scaled snakement, to furry cannibal Varajtul Wyld-mutants, they are still theologically human in that they can all be chosen as Exalted. (Convenient for the player who insists on a special snowflake character, but it can be used for thematic purposes as well.) There are also genuinely inhuman intelligences such as Fair Folk (elfy-looking, but these are humanoid masks for soul-eating entities of primal Chaos), Mountain Folk (dwarfy, but born from jade eggs and strange in other ways), Dragon Kings, Lintha pirates, and a few others. Some of these are marginally playable, but they all tend to be in some way deeply strange -- encounters with the alien. Dean Shomshak

I'd agree that one thing Fantasy elements do is intensify the features of stories. Returning to LotR: Could the story be told without dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs? (and as lesser players, ents and trolls.) I suppose so. The hordes of Suron and Saruman could just be human cultures they subverted; the Fellowship could be made of representatives of different countries. But I think Sauron's evil is shown more when his hordes aren't just people with unpleasant cultural features (the Southrons and Easterlings -- Middle Earth's Saracens and Tatars -- who could fill this role, are ciphers). Orcs are monsters, literally created to be brutal and pitiless. It isn't their choice. That Sauron, and then Saruman, would employ such creatures shows in turn that they aren't simply leaders with politics one might disagree with: It gets to the heart of what makes them evil, of what evil means in Tolkien's world. Similarly, having the Fellowship consist of different races/species strengthens the point that resisting Sauron requires diverse peoples to overcome long estrangement. Men, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits have good reasons not to like each other very much. But Sauron isn't just a common military threat. Sauron is a moral, even theological, threat, that requires fundamental changes in how things have been. And so the friendship that develops between Gimli and Legolas means more, too, because the barriers they overcome are more than just those of people from different cultures. Dean Shomshak

Perhaps someone with better internet access than me could find and post a link to the NYTimes story that just appeared in my local paper? It's worth reading. It's the story of how the federal govt set out to buy a whole bunch of ventilators to have on han d for just such emergencies as we have now, and didn't. Short version: Ventilators are bulky, complex, very expensive devices that need special training to use. HHS, rationally frightened by SARS, MERS, etc., decided, "This sucks. We need lots of cheap, portable ventilators." They negotiated a contract with a relatively small company that just made ventilators. Company said, "Great, we'll do it." Because while they'd make less money per ventilator, they figured they'd sell a tone of them. Better product, lower price, grab the market. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Just after Newport Medical Instruments delivered its prototypes, the company was bought out by a much bigger company, Covidien, which makes a lot of stuff. Including, as it happens, those large, expensive ventilators. And Covidien made clear it did not want to honor the contract with HHS, and HHS eventually gave up. Protect your product by crushing the upstart: This, alas, is how capitalism often works in the real world. HHS tried again, but too late. The story's headline, as it appeared in my local paper, is, "US failed in its mission to build a new fleet of ventilators," by Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. Dean Shomshak

Perhaps someone with better internet access than me could find and post a link to the NYTimes story that just appeared in my local paper? It's worth reading. It's the story of how the federal govt set out to buy a whole bunch of ventilators to have on han d for just such emergencies as we have now, and didn't. Short version: Ventilators are bulky, complex, very expensive devices that need special training to use. HHS, rationally frightened by SARS, MERS, etc., decided, "This sucks. We need lots of cheap, portable ventilators." They negotiated a contract with a relatively small company that just made ventilators. Company said, "Great, we'll do it." Because while they'd make less money per ventilator, they figured they'd sell a tone of them. Better product, lower price, grab the market. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Just after Newport Medical Instruments delivered its prototypes, the company was bought out by a much bigger company, Covidien, which makes a lot of stuff. Including, as it happens, those large, expensive ventilators. And Covidien made clear it did not want to honor the contract with HHS, and HHS eventually gave up. Protect your product by crushing the upstart: This, alas, is how capitalism often works in the real world. HHS tried again, but too late. The story's headline, as it appeared in my local paper, is, "US failed in its mission to build a new fleet of ventilators," by Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. Dean Shomshak

Yesterday, All Things Considered reported on a COVID-19 outbreak in Sun Valley, Idaho. (I *think* they said Idaho.) Super-rich people thinking they're going to do the Masque of the Red Death or Decameron thing by riding out the pandemic in their luxury ski resort town... but they and their entourages bring the disease with them. oops. Sorry, guys, we have millennia of epidemiological history showing that running from the plague never works. Their little hospital has 25 beds. Total. One of them is occupied by a local doctor, sick with COVID-19. Oh, the irony. Dean Shomshjak

That's probab ly the best response you could give, under the circumstances. Though we are getting a graphic example of why germ warfare would be a... peculiarly unreliable, uncontrollable, and counterproductive weapon. Apropos of this, I recommend the essay "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by physicist Freeman Dyson, in his collection Disturbing the Universe. It includes the story of Matthew Meselson, the Harvard biology professor who almost single-handedly ended the US biological warfare program of the 1960s. He kept turning up at Congressional hearings for the program's appropriations to ask questions the generals in charge of the program couldn't answer. Quite a story, though I would not be surprised to learn that a later president re-started a biological weapons program after Richard Nixon abolished it. Some presidents since Nixon have been, hm, notably simple-minded. Dean Shomshak Dean Shomshak

That's probab ly the best response you could give, under the circumstances. Though we are getting a graphic example of why germ warfare would be a... peculiarly unreliable, uncontrollable, and counterproductive weapon. Apropos of this, I recommend the essay "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by physicist Freeman Dyson, in his collection Disturbing the Universe. It includes the story of Matthew Meselson, the Harvard biology professor who almost single-handedly ended the US biological warfare program of the 1960s. He kept turning up at Congressional hearings for the program's appropriations to ask questions the generals in charge of the program couldn't answer. Quite a story, though I would not be surprised to learn that a later president re-started a biological weapons program after Richard Nixon abolished it. Some presidents since Nixon have been, hm, notably simple-minded. Dean Shomshak Dean Shomshak

Oh, yes. A historian of epidemics, interviewed on On the Media, predicted that the next stage would be the search for a scapegoat. Jews for the Black Death, gays for AIDS. It's deeply rooted in the human tendency to personalize everything. Bad things can't just happen: They must be the result of someone's malice. Jews, witches, evil spirits, Communists, Catholics, bankers... or even Jewish Communist bankers. Imagining that the upcoming relief check is from Donald Trump, personally, and so one should be grateful to him, personally, is just the flip side of this. Dean Shomshak

Some of them, possibly, to the Land of Legends. Or at least the stories of them did. I gather from what LL has posted that elves, at least, survived into the Valdorian Age... greatly changed. (Dunno about the others.) But it seems quite possible to me that many of the original non-human races died out in the various cataclysms that ended past ages. But they made enough of an impression on humans that the survivors still told stories about them, which re-created them in the Land of Legends. Though not exact copies, as stories tend to be simpler than actual people. Though it's also possible that groups of actual people escaped into the Land of Legends. Over the centuries, though, they assimilated to the story-based reality of the Land and became legends themselves, as is happening to the mortals caught in the Even Wilder West. After thousands of years, it may not matter which process actually occurred. It's also worth remembering that the assorted cataclysms were at least partly supernatural. Earth's history may have been rewritten, along with the other destruction, to remove evidence that these non-human races ever physically existed. So, archaeologists are never going to find the real, unambiguous remains of a drakine city, or the skeleton of a dragon or troll. Or if they do find such remains (it's the Superheroic Age, after all, and reality is more flexible than usual), there won't be enough context to interpret them. (Such as not realizing that homo floresiensis were, in fact, halflings.) There'll be just enough for a crackpot/visionary scientist to issue some wild-sounding theories, and maybe cause an origin or two. "The fools! I'll prove that [fill in the blank] once walked the Earth -- by cloning them from these remains! That'll silence the mocking tongues of the Academy!" Or whatever, The adventures almost write themselves. Dean Shomshak

Some of them, possibly, to the Land of Legends. Or at least the stories of them did. I gather from what LL has posted that elves, at least, survived into the Valdorian Age... greatly changed. (Dunno about the others.) But it seems quite possible to me that many of the original non-human races died out in the various cataclysms that ended past ages. But they made enough of an impression on humans that the survivors still told stories about them, which re-created them in the Land of Legends. Though not exact copies, as stories tend to be simpler than actual people. Though it's also possible that groups of actual people escaped into the Land of Legends. Over the centuries, though, they assimilated to the story-based reality of the Land and became legends themselves, as is happening to the mortals caught in the Even Wilder West. After thousands of years, it may not matter which process actually occurred. It's also worth remembering that the assorted cataclysms were at least partly supernatural. Earth's history may have been rewritten, along with the other destruction, to remove evidence that these non-human races ever physically existed. So, archaeologists are never going to find the real, unambiguous remains of a drakine city, or the skeleton of a dragon or troll. Or if they do find such remains (it's the Superheroic Age, after all, and reality is more flexible than usual), there won't be enough context to interpret them. (Such as not realizing that homo floresiensis were, in fact, halflings.) There'll be just enough for a crackpot/visionary scientist to issue some wild-sounding theories, and maybe cause an origin or two. "The fools! I'll prove that [fill in the blank] once walked the Earth -- by cloning them from these remains! That'll silence the mocking tongues of the Academy!" Or whatever, The adventures almost write themselves. Dean Shomshak

OTOH Marketplace interviewed a hairdresser in Boise, Idaho who voluntarily closed her shop before any order came. She doesn't know how she'll make her mortgage payments or how her employees will get by, but she decided that staying open would endanger the lives of her customers and staff. Grade: Pass, with honors. Dean Shomshak

Count Mississippi governor Tate Reeves among the fools and idiots. Heard yesterday on All Things Considered: He addressed a suggestion that Mississippi needed to stay-home restrictions like China used to stop the spread of the coronavirus by proudly proclaiming, "Mississippi will never be China!" Wow. Way to miss the point, Guv. Grade: Fail. Dean Shomshak

Count Mississippi governor Tate Reeves among the fools and idiots. Heard yesterday on All Things Considered: He addressed a suggestion that Mississippi needed to stay-home restrictions like China used to stop the spread of the coronavirus by proudly proclaiming, "Mississippi will never be China!" Wow. Way to miss the point, Guv. Grade: Fail. Dean Shomshak

EDIT FOR DOUBLE POST, AND WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? The people who make me actually shake with rage, though, are the "Young Invulnerables" partying on Florida beaches. Apparently they are too stupid to understand, or too selfish to care, that the virus is spreading among them, rapidly, and they will start thousands of new chains of contagion when they return home. Epidemics are IQ tests from the Universe: Can you change your behavior to stop the disease' transmission? Americans are failing the test, in ways that cannot all be blamed on Trump. Dean Shomshak

Well, firefighters make pretty good money, judging by the one to whom my sister was once married. Not doctor or lawyer good, but pretty good. But I take your meaning. Now imagine if all the garbage collectors disappeared. Though there was a TV news segment here in The Other Washington about garbage collectors receiving applause. As for athletes: Both NPR and CBS ran segments asking how cancelling the Olympic Games would affect the athletes scheduled to compete. I admit, my reaction was, "Who gives a rat's ass?" With a pandemic likely to kill hundreds of thousands, I am not worried about amusements. It's why I suspended gaming a month ago: I have to care for my 87-year-old mother, and can only get to my gaming group by spending 3 hours on crowded buses. I miss spending time with my friends, but I will not risk my mother's life for the pleasure. I call it "responsible adulthood." Dean Shomshak

The D&D 4th ed. Forgotten Realms book gave a table of "Regional Feats" for every country in the setting. If you're from Amn, take your pick from Cosmopolitan, Education, Silver Palm or Street Smart. If you're from Damara, choose from Bullheaded, Foe Hunter or Survivor. Not quite the same as sub-templates for High Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Elves, Sea Elves and Keebler Elves, but heading that way. <eyeroll> For my 5e campaign, I really really tried to stay close to the published material instead of rewriting everything, but... Well, the elf sub-templates are the result of training, not birth. Any elf can grow up to have Wood Elf stealth and concealment, or a High Elf bonus cantrip, or whatever. It's just a matter of how a young elf chooses to express the faerie magic of their kind. Different elf ethnicities (Rhovistae, Taishomanae, Usmantae, Chulangkorae -- or Forest Elves, Mountain Elves, Desert Elves or Jungle Elves) may favor one path or another, but that says nothing about any particular elf. There are also Street Elves, because in the Plenary Empire many elves live in cities among other folk, and this leads to a new expression of faerie power. Drow are a story to frighten children, Everybody says so. If you absolutely must play a special snowflake character, I give other options. 🙂 Dwarves? If anyone ever wants to play a dwarf, I'll let them pick either the Hill Dwarf or Mountain Dwarf template, as they feel suits their character, but nobody ever speaks of Hill Dwarves or Mountain Dwarves because there ain't no such thing. There are Fjellkin, Zilkin and Svarkin, who are identical for rules purposes. And so on. I have already spoken of my I eliminated half-whatevers, and why. One great advantage of the Hero System is that one can ignore such nonsense, and I see no good reason to bring it into a FH campaign. Dean Shomshak

EDIT FOR DOUBLE-POST: Perhaps the more interesting story arc comes after the heroes foil VIPER's attempt at bio-terrorism. Plague evokes visceral horror and disgust unlike, say, threatening to blow things up. In the aftermath, world governments might come together for Operation: Snake Hunt (AKA the Saint Patrick Sanction) -- to destroy VIPER once and for all. The public demands no less. Heroes are pressed to join the campaign, even if it's not their regular "beat." Even some supervillains might join -- they're scared and disgusted, too. No more protection from rogue regimes; no more plea deals to captured agents; no limits. Things will get ugly, on both sides. Heroes may face tough choices about how far they'll go. Dean Shopmshak

Absolutely. The more "superish" plot would be to release a deadly disease worldwide, then say you'll release the cure/vaccine if the governments of the world submit to your rule. VIPER might start with a small "demnonstration" release in an isolated area... and find that their plague spreads faster than expected. A nastier, more Iron Age plot could be to release the plague in hopes that civilization collapses and you can pick up the pieces. Cure or vaccine only for VIPER members. In my Millennium Universe campaign, the megavillain Helix has threatened to release pandemics in retaliation for moves against him. One of the PCs comes from a possible future in which he did this, exterminated humanity, and replaced it with a new species of his creation. Dean Shomshak

All Things Considered reported that Sen. Burr was recorded telling a group of his wealthy supporters about coronavirus weeks before he and the Trump administration changed their happy tune that there was nothing to worry about. ATC even played the recording. So it sure sounds like he and a group of his chief donors are all guilty of inside trading. Dean Shomshak

Well, it's hard to get a sense of sources or style from the brief treatment in The Mystic World. I also drew a bit on The Night Land and maybe a bit of Clark Ashton Smith -- I try not to draw too much on just one source. You know the old saying about plagiarism and research. Dean Shomshak