DShomshak

And now, more real Space News! with Scott Manley!
 
 
 

The Capsule should return on Satirday.

Oh, and of course Thalassene has festivals timed with the solstices and quinoxes, because those are natural times to celebrate something-or-other. The Furanian immigrant community celebrates all four, since their religion is sun-centered. There are many Furanians in the neighborhood of Oddmonger, so the Furanian Sun Cake -- glazed golden with saffron and honey -- is a familiar treat for those four days, and popular with non-Furanians as well.
 
The Plenary Empire began among the Yidmiri people, so that pantheon of gods remains popular. The festival day of the Yidmiri war god Sar sees a variety of martial contests. One of the PCs won a local archery contest held as part of the festival.
 
The biggest religious festival of Thalassene's year, though, is the annual Marriage to the Sea in which gthe city renews its covenant with the sea-god Manakel and the local merfolk. Ten young men and ten young women dive into the sea from the Pera Sacra, or Sacred Pier, the holiest shrine to Manakel, and swims a seven-mile race to Treaty Reef. There, the male and female winners make love in the surf with merfolk who won their own contest. Mer and landwalker priests bless the unions; and offspring are born with the magical power to exchange feet and fins, becoming merfolk or landwalker humans as needed. The gift is sometimes inherited, but remains miraculous: "Children of Land and Sea" are unique to Thalassene and the local merfolk tribes.
 
Dean Shomshak

The city of Thalassene is in the Plenary Empire, so the chief secular/political holiday is the anniversary of the reigning Autocrat's ascension to the throne. The biggest to-do in the city is the parade and street fair in Mactown, the district settled by refugees from the Macrine region. So many Macriners arrived at once that Mactown seems more like a transplanted bit of "the old country" than like part of the Plenary Empire, and other Thalasseners sometimes grumble that the Mactowners should decide what country they're in. But the Mactown Ascension Day Parade is the biggest in the city. I'll decide what actually happens as part of the parade when I can arrange to make it part of an adventure.
 
Most of the festivals in Thalassene are religious -- and since the Plenary Empire absorbed many different cultures, each with their own gods, there's usually at least a minor festival going on somewhere. In Vicus Drohasus, another ethnic district. the largest public festival is dedicated to the Ennead, the nine chief gods of Drohashi religion. The idols of the gods are paraded through the streets while people sing the old hymns and play the old music of sistrum, flute and tabor, while waving banners of the Golden Lotus that was the symbol of Drohashi sacred kingship.
 
Every year, the Viltish ambassador Hegetsa -- representative of the theocratic empire that conquered Drohash -- secretly watches the parade and seethes with rage. The sun god Sorath is honored, but to no greater degree than the rest of the Ennead, and not by the rites ordained by the prophet Orvikka. The Drohashi of Thalassene are worse than infidel: They are heretics! Soon, Hegetsa promises herself, they, their city, and their false idols will burn.
 
Dean Shomshak

Oh, and of course Thalassene has festivals timed with the solstices and quinoxes, because those are natural times to celebrate something-or-other. The Furanian immigrant community celebrates all four, since their religion is sun-centered. There are many Furanians in the neighborhood of Oddmonger, so the Furanian Sun Cake -- glazed golden with saffron and honey -- is a familiar treat for those four days, and popular with non-Furanians as well.
 
The Plenary Empire began among the Yidmiri people, so that pantheon of gods remains popular. The festival day of the Yidmiri war god Sar sees a variety of martial contests. One of the PCs won a local archery contest held as part of the festival.
 
The biggest religious festival of Thalassene's year, though, is the annual Marriage to the Sea in which gthe city renews its covenant with the sea-god Manakel and the local merfolk. Ten young men and ten young women dive into the sea from the Pera Sacra, or Sacred Pier, the holiest shrine to Manakel, and swims a seven-mile race to Treaty Reef. There, the male and female winners make love in the surf with merfolk who won their own contest. Mer and landwalker priests bless the unions; and offspring are born with the magical power to exchange feet and fins, becoming merfolk or landwalker humans as needed. The gift is sometimes inherited, but remains miraculous: "Children of Land and Sea" are unique to Thalassene and the local merfolk tribes.
 
Dean Shomshak

Long ago, I set a super-battle in a junkyard, modeled on one I'd visited briefly with my father some years before that. (Why were the villains using a junkyard as their base? The leader was a metallokinetic. His plan was to steal rare and valuable antique cars, use his powers to make copies using the metal in the junkyard, and sell the copies to all those unscrupulous millionaires in comic-book worlds that are just waiting to buy stolen treasures and not tell anyone.)
 
Anyway, one thing I remembered from my visit: This junkyard had a huge, rusty iron sphere. An old bathysphere? Okay, it was probably just one of those spherical storage tanks for natutal gas or the like, but I decided it was a bathysphere. It turned out to be just the thing to hold a captured villain who was too strong for any mundane confinement.
 
Dean Shomshak

A friend of mine recommended this youtube essay about why Russia's military has done so badly in Ukraine. I guess the presenter "Perun" started by commenting on wargames, but since the Ukraine war began he's used his knowledge of RL military matters to offer his own take. This installment deals with the corrosive effect of Russia's culture of vranyo, a particular form of lying. He seems fairly careful in his research -- and his analysis explains a lot. It's an hour long, but worth it.
 
 
 
Related (and in fact an earlier installment -- Perun's doing a series) about corruption.
 
Dean Shomshak

A friend of mine recommended this youtube essay about why Russia's military has done so badly in Ukraine. I guess the presenter "Perun" started by commenting on wargames, but since the Ukraine war began he's used his knowledge of RL military matters to offer his own take. This installment deals with the corrosive effect of Russia's culture of vranyo, a particular form of lying. He seems fairly careful in his research -- and his analysis explains a lot. It's an hour long, but worth it.
 
 
 
Related (and in fact an earlier installment -- Perun's doing a series) about corruption.
 
Dean Shomshak

A friend of mine recommended this youtube essay about why Russia's military has done so badly in Ukraine. I guess the presenter "Perun" started by commenting on wargames, but since the Ukraine war began he's used his knowledge of RL military matters to offer his own take. This installment deals with the corrosive effect of Russia's culture of vranyo, a particular form of lying. He seems fairly careful in his research -- and his analysis explains a lot. It's an hour long, but worth it.
 
 
 
Related (and in fact an earlier installment -- Perun's doing a series) about corruption.
 
Dean Shomshak

I'm inclined to go with the pseudo-archaic/Fantasy myself. Several ancient Earth cultures built stepped pyramids: The one in the image could be a Mesopotamian ziggurat, a Mesoamerican pyramid-temple, or a Buddhist stupa. (Only the stupa would have chambers cut in the sides; but the stairs look more Mesoamerican. The stupa for which I have plans has a more complicated shape than a simple square, and the stairs are on the inside.) Could be Atlantean/Muvian, as the prototype culture that gave rise to all those designs.
 
But for my Millennium Universe, it's one of the bases for one of Earth's most powerful villains, the chaos-goddess Tiamat. She's into stepped pyramids, per her Mesopotamian origin. (Or vice-versa.) With her magic, she can create a base anywhere she wants: The site could be any rugged mountain range on Earth, including the Trans-Antarctic Mountains (for a Savage Land vibe). Or since Marvel's Blue Area on the Moon was mentioned, she could build her base in a lunar range and have a Gate back to Earth.
 
Recruits to Tiamat's cult are brought to bases like this for advanced indoctrination. Those that are especially diligent and lucky to have the right qualities of soul are transformed into snake-dragons, lion-demons and other creatures of myth, the better to serve the Queen of Chaos. Only a very few possess the right qualities to be transformed into new Dragon Warriors, Tiamat's cadre of supervillain demigods.
 
Heroes who try to whittle down Tiamat's cult resources could find their way to this valley. They'll be in for quite a fight just from the cultists (some of them armed with magic weapons) and monsters. They'll have to act quickly, though, before someone sends an alarm message to Tiamat and the Queen of Chaos comes to join the battle.
 
Dean Shomshak
Dean Shomshak

The "evil race" issue is a consequence of the "Gygaxian Naturalism" to which the blogger alludes (and his link leads to an essay that's interesting in its own right). If orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc. are essentially "natural" creatures presumed to have lives of their own when PCs aren't fighting them, modern sensibilities may not be comfortable with saying, "Oh, just kill them and take their stuff." Including killing all the children? Not an issue for, say, the book of Jashua when God tells the Israelites to exterminate entire cities because they are inconveniently located in the land God has promised, but monder Western folk often feel uneasy with genocide. Or the rationalizations adduced to justify it.
 
If the adversary is emphatically *not* an essentially natural creature that has a life and culture of its own, the issues are a bit different. If goblyns are truly mythic monsters, their motives are not going to be natural either, and the moral calculus *might* change as well.
 
So, goblyns as primordial chaos. That can be developed. They might be, in essence, the world pushing back against the order that humans (and gods?) try to impose. Giants as comparable to natural disasters? They might actually *be* personified natural disasters. Why does an earthquake flatten a city, a storm capsize a fleet, a swarm of locusts devour everything and cause a famine? No reason. No malice. It's what they do.
 
OTOH the Norse trolls the blogger cites as inspiration are not always and implacably hostile to gods and heroes. Some of the Aesir are descended from giants, or marry giants. They have power: Odin stole the Mead of Poetry from a giant (who, in turn, extorted it from the dwarfs who brewed it from the god Kvasir's blood, so in a sense Odin was reclaiming stolen property? Complicated.) So it might be possible -- though still dangerous -- to deal with goblyns in non-combat ways. Like, moving from Norse to Russian, the ogre-witch Baba Yaga's usual story role is the reluctant helper: Heroes overcome her to obtain magical treasures.
 
On the other other hand, were goblyns always hostile? Or did something happen to make them that way? Like the conflict between the Hindu Gods and the Asuras, this conflict might go back to before the beginning of the world. (The gods and asuras had to cooperate in churning the primordial ocean of milk to produce the elixir of immortality. The gods cheated the asuras of their share.). But there might have been some historic event that turned the goblyns hostil and, effectively, broke the world. If it's something people did, then maybe people can fix it and restore harmony.
 
For instance, that desert that was burned over in magical war long ago. The devastation could have broken an ancient pact with the goblyns. They are trying to expunge humanity to prevent such destruction from happening again. Or conversely, the devastation might have been inflicted by the giant leaders in retaliation for some terrible offense given to them. Either way, they will not accept an "Oops, sorry, can we be friends again?" But if goblyns are a symptom of the break in the world, and not its ultimate cause, then just killing goblyns might not be an ultimate solution, either.
 
Okay, this has gone way too long. Enough for now, and more than enough.
 
Dean Shomshak

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, on Svengoolie. A bit slow in parts, but behind the conventional horror movie tropes of scientific hubris and obsession there's quite a good treatment of Lovecraftian themes without making a single Lovecraftian reference. The scientist wants to expand the range of vision. It works. He sees more... and more... and more...
 
Dean Shomshak

The "evil race" issue is a consequence of the "Gygaxian Naturalism" to which the blogger alludes (and his link leads to an essay that's interesting in its own right). If orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc. are essentially "natural" creatures presumed to have lives of their own when PCs aren't fighting them, modern sensibilities may not be comfortable with saying, "Oh, just kill them and take their stuff." Including killing all the children? Not an issue for, say, the book of Jashua when God tells the Israelites to exterminate entire cities because they are inconveniently located in the land God has promised, but monder Western folk often feel uneasy with genocide. Or the rationalizations adduced to justify it.
 
If the adversary is emphatically *not* an essentially natural creature that has a life and culture of its own, the issues are a bit different. If goblyns are truly mythic monsters, their motives are not going to be natural either, and the moral calculus *might* change as well.
 
So, goblyns as primordial chaos. That can be developed. They might be, in essence, the world pushing back against the order that humans (and gods?) try to impose. Giants as comparable to natural disasters? They might actually *be* personified natural disasters. Why does an earthquake flatten a city, a storm capsize a fleet, a swarm of locusts devour everything and cause a famine? No reason. No malice. It's what they do.
 
OTOH the Norse trolls the blogger cites as inspiration are not always and implacably hostile to gods and heroes. Some of the Aesir are descended from giants, or marry giants. They have power: Odin stole the Mead of Poetry from a giant (who, in turn, extorted it from the dwarfs who brewed it from the god Kvasir's blood, so in a sense Odin was reclaiming stolen property? Complicated.) So it might be possible -- though still dangerous -- to deal with goblyns in non-combat ways. Like, moving from Norse to Russian, the ogre-witch Baba Yaga's usual story role is the reluctant helper: Heroes overcome her to obtain magical treasures.
 
On the other other hand, were goblyns always hostile? Or did something happen to make them that way? Like the conflict between the Hindu Gods and the Asuras, this conflict might go back to before the beginning of the world. (The gods and asuras had to cooperate in churning the primordial ocean of milk to produce the elixir of immortality. The gods cheated the asuras of their share.). But there might have been some historic event that turned the goblyns hostil and, effectively, broke the world. If it's something people did, then maybe people can fix it and restore harmony.
 
For instance, that desert that was burned over in magical war long ago. The devastation could have broken an ancient pact with the goblyns. They are trying to expunge humanity to prevent such destruction from happening again. Or conversely, the devastation might have been inflicted by the giant leaders in retaliation for some terrible offense given to them. Either way, they will not accept an "Oops, sorry, can we be friends again?" But if goblyns are a symptom of the break in the world, and not its ultimate cause, then just killing goblyns might not be an ultimate solution, either.
 
Okay, this has gone way too long. Enough for now, and more than enough.
 
Dean Shomshak

This has promise. Give more thought to how the world is broken, how it broke, and what PCs can do to fix it. For instance, why are goblyns so hostile? Is there any way peace could be made between them and humans?
 
The desert with the ruined cities is a good location to show the brokenness of the world. Likewise Reuchia and the country withe the backstabbing aristos.
 
To reinforce the exploration theme, include something cool in ever location the PCs visit. Not necessarily anything important, but memorable. Maybe there's something distinctive about the way people adorn their houses, or themselves. Maybe there's some peculiar local tipple -- I've got a lot of use out of that one. If you need inspiration, read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, or pretty much anything by Jack Vance.
 
You can combine these themes through locations that are both interesting to describe, and in some way broken. For instance: A great bridge crosses one of the main rivers. Its three arched spans are longer than humans know how to build, and its stones are larger and heavier than humans could move into position (at least without powerful magic). But tales say humans didn't build the bridge: goblyns did, long ago. The stones are not too heavy for ogres to move, and legend says giants waded the river to build the bridge -- or charmed the blocks into position!
 
But the central span of the bridge is broken. <Insert story about who broke it, and how.> The bridge is wide enough for two elephants to cross, going opposite directions; but people must cross the central gap on rope bridges that can bear the weight of fewer than a dozen people at a time, going single file. Merchant caravans must stop when they reach the bridge, unload all their goods from their wagons and pack animals, and carry them across to where a new set of beasts and animals wait on the other side.
 
(If humans have magic that could build something sturdier, OK, it doesn't make sense to have the rope bridges. But you can still make the patch across the gap clearly inferior to the rest of the bridge.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Shadow World. Ah. I acquired one supplement set there, The Iron Wind, back when it was all fairly new, and even then I had, hm, issues with the design stule. Some aspects were an advance for the time, but the state of the art has moved on. (And some bits I intensely disliked.)
 
Sample adventures not using the countries the supplement is about is kind of a flaw by any standards...
 
The biggest question remains what style of campaign you want. Treasure-seeking murder hobos call for different design emphases than a campaign of social and political intrigue, a cold war that threatens to turn hot, High Fantasy quest, or the like.
 
For instance, my current D&D campaign has a nesting series of design choices. Overall, the setting is the Magozoic Era -- Earth 250 million years in the future, become a world of monsters and magic. Everything has a past -- sometimes a very long past, stretching back to legend. Every few days' travel, you encounter some eerie or enigmatic relic of past events, from a forest of living stone trees to a field that lightning strikes every time a storm passes nearby. The city that forms the focus of the campaign is on a spit of land that formed around an immense granite breakwater, so old that coral covered it and turned to stone. It is not the first city to occupy the site, either.
 
Shrinking the focus, everything's happening in the Plenary Empire, modeled a bit on the Byzantine Empire: the shrunken remnant of an empire that was once much larger, menaced by aggressive neighbors that want to complete its fall and take its land, people and wealth. The greater danger, though, may come from the infighting among the empire's elite as they seek to gain greater shares of the empire's wealth and remaining power, or attempt secession because they'd rather be masters of small domains than functionaries in a big one. Politics and war and the themes: I explicitly decided that while the world includes dragons, beholders, liches, demon lords and other such threats, they won't be the principal threats. In its rise and heyday, the Plenary Empire faced such threats and defeated them. It's a premise of the setting that once a state reaches a certain size and effectiveness of government, no outside force can defeat it: It can only defeat itself. (Yes, you might find some contemporary resonance here. That is deliberate.)
 
The specific campaign began in the city of Thalassene. It's low fantasy: the PCs are members of a neighborhood watch that finds itself dealing with much bigger threats than bar brawls and riots, from an undead serial killer to scheming foreign ambassadors. The characters have advanced in power, though, to the point where such challenges are no longer challenging: The campaign is on hiatus while we, and the PCs decide where to go next, but the PCs are sufficiently involved in the lives of various NPCs that Thalassene will stay the center of the campaign for a while. No world-spanning quests in the offing.
 
What sort of campaign do you imagine running?
 
Dean Shomshak

Sounds good. And speaking of one bit you brought up... I am so tired of "Chosen Ones." I prefer my heroes to be fighting the good fight because somebody has to, not because it's their Destiny.
 
I crystallized this view several years ago while watching the Shannara TV series that aired (only one season AFAIK) on MTV. Okay, not a fan of The Sword of Shannara and never felt any reason to read the sequels, but somebody was trying to do Fantasy on TV so I watched it. And I got really irritated by Alanon the druid telling the young hero that it's his Destiny to fight the demon horde and save the world, because he's descended from the last great hero and so is the only person who can activate the power of the Elfstones, yadda yadda yadda.
 
Especially when the material was there for a different approach. Untested Young Hero doesn't want to save the world; he wants to be a doctor, because his mother suffered so much in her final illness. I think the line should have been: "You're probably not the only descendant of Shannara. If I tried, I could probably find a dozen others. But you responded to suffering and grief by wanting to help others. That's special. Other people could use the magic pebbles. You're the one who should use them."
 
Dean Shomshak

Sounds good. And speaking of one bit you brought up... I am so tired of "Chosen Ones." I prefer my heroes to be fighting the good fight because somebody has to, not because it's their Destiny.
 
I crystallized this view several years ago while watching the Shannara TV series that aired (only one season AFAIK) on MTV. Okay, not a fan of The Sword of Shannara and never felt any reason to read the sequels, but somebody was trying to do Fantasy on TV so I watched it. And I got really irritated by Alanon the druid telling the young hero that it's his Destiny to fight the demon horde and save the world, because he's descended from the last great hero and so is the only person who can activate the power of the Elfstones, yadda yadda yadda.
 
Especially when the material was there for a different approach. Untested Young Hero doesn't want to save the world; he wants to be a doctor, because his mother suffered so much in her final illness. I think the line should have been: "You're probably not the only descendant of Shannara. If I tried, I could probably find a dozen others. But you responded to suffering and grief by wanting to help others. That's special. Other people could use the magic pebbles. You're the one who should use them."
 
Dean Shomshak

Sounds good. And speaking of one bit you brought up... I am so tired of "Chosen Ones." I prefer my heroes to be fighting the good fight because somebody has to, not because it's their Destiny.
 
I crystallized this view several years ago while watching the Shannara TV series that aired (only one season AFAIK) on MTV. Okay, not a fan of The Sword of Shannara and never felt any reason to read the sequels, but somebody was trying to do Fantasy on TV so I watched it. And I got really irritated by Alanon the druid telling the young hero that it's his Destiny to fight the demon horde and save the world, because he's descended from the last great hero and so is the only person who can activate the power of the Elfstones, yadda yadda yadda.
 
Especially when the material was there for a different approach. Untested Young Hero doesn't want to save the world; he wants to be a doctor, because his mother suffered so much in her final illness. I think the line should have been: "You're probably not the only descendant of Shannara. If I tried, I could probably find a dozen others. But you responded to suffering and grief by wanting to help others. That's special. Other people could use the magic pebbles. You're the one who should use them."
 
Dean Shomshak

Sounds good. And speaking of one bit you brought up... I am so tired of "Chosen Ones." I prefer my heroes to be fighting the good fight because somebody has to, not because it's their Destiny.
 
I crystallized this view several years ago while watching the Shannara TV series that aired (only one season AFAIK) on MTV. Okay, not a fan of The Sword of Shannara and never felt any reason to read the sequels, but somebody was trying to do Fantasy on TV so I watched it. And I got really irritated by Alanon the druid telling the young hero that it's his Destiny to fight the demon horde and save the world, because he's descended from the last great hero and so is the only person who can activate the power of the Elfstones, yadda yadda yadda.
 
Especially when the material was there for a different approach. Untested Young Hero doesn't want to save the world; he wants to be a doctor, because his mother suffered so much in her final illness. I think the line should have been: "You're probably not the only descendant of Shannara. If I tried, I could probably find a dozen others. But you responded to suffering and grief by wanting to help others. That's special. Other people could use the magic pebbles. You're the one who should use them."
 
Dean Shomshak

Sounds good. And speaking of one bit you brought up... I am so tired of "Chosen Ones." I prefer my heroes to be fighting the good fight because somebody has to, not because it's their Destiny.
 
I crystallized this view several years ago while watching the Shannara TV series that aired (only one season AFAIK) on MTV. Okay, not a fan of The Sword of Shannara and never felt any reason to read the sequels, but somebody was trying to do Fantasy on TV so I watched it. And I got really irritated by Alanon the druid telling the young hero that it's his Destiny to fight the demon horde and save the world, because he's descended from the last great hero and so is the only person who can activate the power of the Elfstones, yadda yadda yadda.
 
Especially when the material was there for a different approach. Untested Young Hero doesn't want to save the world; he wants to be a doctor, because his mother suffered so much in her final illness. I think the line should have been: "You're probably not the only descendant of Shannara. If I tried, I could probably find a dozen others. But you responded to suffering and grief by wanting to help others. That's special. Other people could use the magic pebbles. You're the one who should use them."
 
Dean Shomshak

EDIYT: Oops, BNakagawa already posted this information. Never mind.
 
Update: On All Things Considered last night, the possibility was raised that the missile that struck a "grain processing facility" in Poland might have been a Ukrainian antimissile, launched in response to the Russian barrage, that went off course.
 
I just hope the investigation is thorough, honest and reported accurately. If it does turn out to be a Ukrainian antimissile, that's not a disaster for Ukraine: Acknowledgement of the accident, apology, and reparation to the families of the victims, shows the government is honest and worthy of trust. Commitment to truth, even when it isn't good for you in the short term, shows strength and confidence to those who are strong and confident; Russian bluster and lies shows weakness and cowardice, that only looks strong to those who are themselves weak and cowardly.
 
Dean Shomshak

In the supplement Rasul is a theocracy, dedicated to the god of commerce where strict religious and statutory laws keep people in place.  Is very divided, with clergy at the top then, far below them the tradesmen, then a bit lower serfs and slaves and finally females.  But they are known for being the best merchants on the continent.  But merchants have no political or economic power.  (Non sequitur, must analyze.  Faulty, faulty!  Must Sterilize!).
 
So how do I keep  them as a mercantile city, where Tobaris, God of Commerce, Travel, Exploration is still held in high regard, merchants have more of a say in the affairs of the city and finally where females have a greater share of the power.
 
I was going to use a system of government taken from a city in the Turakian Age supplement.  But now I think I will add as a wrinkle, the wife may vote in place of her husband, if they declare she has his proxy vote before the council before he leaves town.  And the reverse is true also.  
 
 
HMMMM!   Ideas welcome.  
 
OH OH OH.
 
Is actually a matriarchy today.  The men got so full of themselves and the majority left town to fight the goblyns, and got destroyed.  Now we have a city of mostly females who have been taking the reins of government because they have no other choice.  Even if some of the men make it back, the city has been irrevocably changed, and refuse to go back to their tidy small existence.