DShomshak

This is hilarious. 
 
Right-wing superhero movie ends 'in disaster' after $1 million in funders' cash goes missing
 
https://www.rawstory.com/rebels-run/

To review the online speculation I've been seeing around this:
The martial law and "evacuations" are a cover for mass abduction of Ukrainian civilians and for the impending retreat from right bank Kherson Kidnapped Ukrainian men might be mobilized to fight against their own country Thousands of mobiks are being ferried into right bank Kherson to serve as literal meat shields for the not-totally-untrained conscripts that are withdrawing across the river at the same time Russia has been laying the propaganda groundwork for a false flag op to blow the Khakovka dam, flooding Kherson and preventing the UA from pursuing across the river Russia is evacuating the area around the Zaporizhzhia NPP for unspecified reasons Putin puts all other Bond villains to shame.
 
 

May and Johnson were just over 3 years in length.
Gordon Brown was nearly 3 years until he lost an election
Edward Heath was nearly 4 years
Harold Wilson's second go round was just over 2 years
Callaghan was just over 3 years
Alec Douglas Hume was just under a year
Antony Eden was about 1.75 years
Churchill's premiership in the 50s was 3 and a half years.
Stanley Baldwin was nearly 2 years
Neville Chamberlain was nearly 3 years
And in succession for under a year in the 1920s we had Bonar Law, Baldwin and Ramsey McDonald
 
Only one of these was caused by death (Bonar Law). And of these Ramsey McDonald, Callaghan, Wilson and Brwon were Labour. The others all Conservative.
  

There is so much wrong with this  that it's difficult bring up all the implications.
 
First off as rape is already illegal the crime that triggers this is the intent to breed  an army on unwilling victims.  Of course that's illegal. But would that mean that a government or private project to do the same with volunteers would be acceptable? "Have Super Kids for the Nation's Future" suddenly become a worldwide debate and a new arms race begins( Or just becomes public, you can bet that many countries already have these projects going clandestinely.) What about a project with donated eggs or sperm?
 
Secondly, it doesn't matter if the criminal or the victim is normal or paranormal, you are making an international law that says that rape that results in pregnancy is a death penalty offense. I can't see anybody being happy with this except stockholders in DNA testing labs. Victim's rights groups will cry for it to apply to all rapes and defense advocates will argue that this is excessive. Can you imagine the crapstorm that will happen when a female mentalist is found guilty of raping a man to get pregnant by him against his will? What should the penalty be for false accusations? Would it be  attempted murder?
 
Next what happens when a more reactionary country executes a "rapist" before the exonerating DNA results are in? Not usually an issue in countries with drawn out appeals processes but that's not the case in all member nations of the U.N.
 
I'll stop here though. The abortion debates centered around predestined evil are a political, religious and moral sewer that I don't care to contemplate.   

The essence of Russell's Teapot is a critique of religious belief: that belief in unobservable deities is as absurd as belief in unobservable orbiting teapots. Never mind the philosophical critique of the critique: They are in the wikipedia article. Let's play with the connection between gods and impossible objects.
 
At some point, space travelers or probes or whatever *do* find a teapot between the orbits of Earth and Mars. It's hard to see how anyone could have put it there. It is an absurdity -- or a miracle.
 
Somehow, the Space Teapot is brought back to Earth. (Maybe a special probe is launched. If only one space agency knows about the teapot, there might be a "cover story" about retrieving space dust, or the like, a followup to the "Stardust" mission of several years ago.)
 
All physical tests show the teapot is ordinary china. But it is a portal to the realms of myth and deity. Whoever drinks tea made in the teapot is possessed by a god. Did gods exist before? No way of knowing, but they exist now.
 
(This would also make a good "Shared Origin" McGuffin for a Champions setting.)
 
Dean Shomshak

As an interested layman, I suspect our resident practicing scientists would take exception to such a claim about their field. But this is not the time or place for such a discussion.
 
Getting back to assault's premise: The wikipedia article quotes other philosophers who refer to Russell's "celestial teapot." Such an item sounds like it would be right at home in Exalted, where anything connected to the gods of the setting's Heaven, Yu-Shan, may take the adjective "celestial." A Celestial Teapot could be an item of divine chinaware, once a possession of the God of Tea but lost in the sky. Perhaps the Celestial Incarnae were holding a tea party on the Daystar when an argument broke out and Mars, the Maiden of Battles, lost her temple and threw the teapot at Luna. She dodged, of course (Luna is slippery that way) and the teapot sailed out to lodge among the stars of the Firmament. Anyone who can retrieve it will be able to make the veritable Tea of the Gods, the best tea in any of the worlds. But such perfection is dangerous for mortals. If you survive, it might enlighten your Essence -- but avoiding addiction to Celestial Tea might be an even greater challenge.
 
A teapot between Earth and Mars in a Fantasy version of our contemporary world? I'll have to think more on that.
 
Dean Shomshak

I’ve found that some scientists including physicists are aware/influenced/usage Platonism, to some degree. This isn’t many, but it is there. Aristotle has more aware/influenced/usage than Plato. But it is a start.
 
Re Plotinus the time traveller. Your welcome. Have him meet Russian Pavel Florensky when the later was imprisoned in the Gulag, and have Florensky discuss his 1922 maths paper on imaginary numbers in geometry which includes mentions to Ptolemy, Dante, and Einstein. Given Plotinus’ aversion to maths, having Florensky advise him that if you go faster than the speed of light, you break Einsteinian space-time – what Star Trek calls ‘warp speed’ and into Dante’s super-luminous Empyrean. It would be one way to bust out of prison. 
 
Florensky’s paper is freely available on the web in Russian, and commercially published in English. I use it as an example of crossover with the humanities (Florensky was a polymath mathematician, scientist, inventor, art historian, philosopher, theologian, and priest).  

Here's a few cultural/entertainment-related notes from the worlds in my SF setting:
 
JUPITER INDUSTRIAL ZONE
 
The chief Jovian art forms are plasma sculpture and LED designs on spacesuits and the ubiquitous jumpsuits that form standard Jovian wear. Plasma sculpture arose from centuries of practice at the precise control of thermonuclear plasma and force fields; the latter, from the need to identify people at a glance while in spacesuits. “Mood implants” — LED disks, bars or other shapes that change color and brightness in response to brain waves, heart rate and other stimuli — are a recent fad. Many Jovians wear implant-jewelry with useful functions, such as radios, radiation detectors or microcomputers controlled by subvocalized commands.
 
The Jovians deeply love a sport of their own invention called Plazball. Players wear gauntlets equipped with magnetic projectors. They use the gauntlets to move a ball of plasma stabilized in a force field. The result is a bit like tennis, except the plasma ball doesn’t follow simple ballistic paths — the magnetic fields from the four moving gauntlets make it swoop and swerve in strange ways. Plazball can only be played in reduced or zero gravity, since a person confined to a flat surface can’t possibly keep up with the erratically-moving ball. Plazball stars make big money.
 
NOVAKIEV STATION
 
Economy:  Ships pass through the Tau Ceti system on the way to more remote worlds. The station proper subsists on tritium fuel sales, docking fees and maintainance fees. Military pay forms the second leg of the station’s economy. The herms’ entertainment businesses, from a musician in a bar to the Pachersky Opera Company, bring in a significant income that the station personnel cannot ignore. The herms also have their own small but duty-free spaceport. Presperton sees considerable smuggling and other illicit commerce. It also supplies legal prostitution: Some people pay a lot for something “exotic.”
 
The Pachersky Opera Company has a reputation for excellent but low-budget performances. The herms couldn’t afford extravagant stage effects and sets when they established the company; they made it a virtue by using stylized, minimal sets. They make up for visual sparseness with magnificent voices, equal to the rare (because legally dubious on most worlds) castrati.
 
Dean Shomshak

If you're going for a Fremen vibe, the desert folk might be working, slowly, to restore the land. Create pockets of soil that can support drought-resistant vegetation, gradually expand them. A bowl or basket of soil is an important ceremonial gift to establish one's goodwill. Especially if an important ingredient for turning sand and dust into soil is the bodies of the dead. "Know that I come in peace, for I offer you the bones of my ancestors." Which also means that soil theft is the most deadly insult imaginable, grounds (so to speak) for a vendetta that lasts generations.
 
The ruined cities are the cities of the ancestors. "When the land is restored, we shall live here again." Perhaps they have ancient tablets or scrolls copied and re-copied that describe and depict the cities as guides for the rebuilding. Or perhaps the elders keep the details in lore-songs and memory-cathedrals. If you visit a city with an elder guide, he or she can tell you the name of each street, who dwelled in the palace of which only sand-drifted stumps of walls remain, describe the long-vanished golden statue in what was once the main temple...
 
It's doubtful the cities would still have any artifacts worth looting and trading, even if they were not sacred homelands to be reclaimed in some future age. But deserts do have commodities of value, such as the frankincense trees of Yemen.
 
Dean Shomshak

There was an early Meso-American civilization living on the northwest coast of Peru. It was mostly desert, and it didn't rain a whole lot. The farmers worked tight river valleys into the Andes.
 
This has a deliciously different take on a desert civilization without any Arab connotations.

If you're going for a Fremen vibe, the desert folk might be working, slowly, to restore the land. Create pockets of soil that can support drought-resistant vegetation, gradually expand them. A bowl or basket of soil is an important ceremonial gift to establish one's goodwill. Especially if an important ingredient for turning sand and dust into soil is the bodies of the dead. "Know that I come in peace, for I offer you the bones of my ancestors." Which also means that soil theft is the most deadly insult imaginable, grounds (so to speak) for a vendetta that lasts generations.
 
The ruined cities are the cities of the ancestors. "When the land is restored, we shall live here again." Perhaps they have ancient tablets or scrolls copied and re-copied that describe and depict the cities as guides for the rebuilding. Or perhaps the elders keep the details in lore-songs and memory-cathedrals. If you visit a city with an elder guide, he or she can tell you the name of each street, who dwelled in the palace of which only sand-drifted stumps of walls remain, describe the long-vanished golden statue in what was once the main temple...
 
It's doubtful the cities would still have any artifacts worth looting and trading, even if they were not sacred homelands to be reclaimed in some future age. But deserts do have commodities of value, such as the frankincense trees of Yemen.
 
Dean Shomshak

That right there; that is precisely what I would do.
 
We use it for Vampires: susceptible to sunlight.
 
We use it for werewolves: vulnerable to silver.
 
We use it for monsters: double damage from luchadores.
 
We use it repeatedly for individual characters, but we rarely consider that its broad-spectrum use on an entire type of being (all witches are  susceptible to water) is not just a points-saving measure, and not just a restriction on a particular set of characters, but one of the foundation stones upon which your universe is built.  You are not just defining a character, but a world.
 
"All gargoyles turn to stone in the sunlight" is something we have trained ourselves to look at as a weakness in gargoyles.  With the _mandate_ that gargoyles must all take that exact limitation, what have done is not weaken gargoyles, per se, but instead you have given the sun the power to petrify gargoyles!  You have established a universal law of "how this world works."
 
As this incredibly expensive power construct you  are pursuing....  Well is what it does _worth_ what it costs?  Only you can answer that, of course: what is the value of being able to see pixies as opposed to the value of not being able to see them?
If the cost is unjustified, or this is something that you want to be relatively attainable, it makes more sense to choose the "the world works thusly" route and all pixies are mandated to have the disadvantage "visible in the presence of X magic" (cost to taste) then create a simple spell- maybe a change environment (where the change is that Pixies are visible in this area; and it has built-in AOE, so..) as opposed to a penalty skill level or whatever-
 
Side note: while I am cool with the fact that Change Environment can now grant skill levels or impose PSLs, I feel this has caused too many to absolutely throw away the memory of Change Environment's chief purpose: altering a given area specifically to take advantage of someone's power build, and specifically to trigger Disadvantages and Power Limitations:  "if I create a wind vortex, your gliding should be strong enough and fast enough to carry all three of us to safety!"  Or "don't worry!  I know that Camenbert Man gets too soft and runny to fight when he overheats!  I will use my "create a zone of intense dry heat" power!"  Though honestly, given the number of threads over the years asking if CE had a real purpose, of how to model what it does, etc-  I suspect a fair number of people never actually figured that out to start with.  Oof-- especially the discussions about pinning down the "mechanics" of CE.  The mechanics were chosen by the player of the affected character when he selected the Disadvantage or Limitation.  That is where you look to see what happens when CE is used.
 
I expect it stems from the need of many to know "exactly how."  "I _know_ that Pyrojet's cone of incineration doesnt work in a vacuum, but _how_  doesnt it work?  _Why_ doesnt it work?!  Points, levels, penalties, shades, degrees!"
 
Well, the various characters and creatures were effected exactly,as it said they were affected on the character sheet.
 
Yes; I agree that a grassy slope covered in ice should _probably_ have an effect on everyone, at least to some extent.  I already confessed to having no beef with that.
 
I am regularly incensed, however, over the complete forgetting of it's baseline ability in favor of specific numbers and "affects everyone exactly like this and in no other way" mechanics.
 
But back to the point:  if, in your universe, all members of X should equally and infallibly suffer Y when exposed to Z, well this is precisely the Limitation / change environment Schtick we used for what?  Thirty-odd years?  Before someone decided it just didnt work and needed to be "fixed."  A mandatory So sad: "member of X, so exposure to Y causes Z."  Then simulate X with judisciuos use of Change Environment.
 
And that is how I _would_ handle it, personally.
 

Thomas called Al-Shujaea home these days. He couldn't remember how old he was, exactly, but he figured he was around his mid-thirties, and for the past five years an attic off the Street of Potters had been where he'd hung up his hat. His hair was greying before his time, and the lines of his face were not getting shallower -- a rough life and the dust carried on the winds off the high desert saw to that.
 
It was now close to midnight, and Thomas was not-at-all staggering home. The evening's job had been a success, and he and his ... associates -- friends was too friendly a word -- had earned enough silver to last a good while. The strong date wine had flowed rather freely afterwards, but he'd managed to limit himself to a few cups. Thomas knew better than most what dangers lurked in the dark alleys along Al-Shujaea's mean streets. He had no intention of making it too easy for some desperate robber to relieve him of his hard-earned coin. The days being what they were, the desperate were growing in numbers, and the desperation grew even more.
 
But Thomas got home without incident. As they usually did at times like these, when he climbed the stairs to his room, memories came flooding in of another groaning old house with creaking stairs, and as usual he fended them off. He sang a dirty song to himself and tried to think happy thoughts. He entered his room -- as always, fighting a bit with the crooked door -- closed it, barred it, threw himself on the palliasse without even removing his boots, and fell asleep. And dreamed.
 
TBC

If you're going for a Fremen vibe, the desert folk might be working, slowly, to restore the land. Create pockets of soil that can support drought-resistant vegetation, gradually expand them. A bowl or basket of soil is an important ceremonial gift to establish one's goodwill. Especially if an important ingredient for turning sand and dust into soil is the bodies of the dead. "Know that I come in peace, for I offer you the bones of my ancestors." Which also means that soil theft is the most deadly insult imaginable, grounds (so to speak) for a vendetta that lasts generations.
 
The ruined cities are the cities of the ancestors. "When the land is restored, we shall live here again." Perhaps they have ancient tablets or scrolls copied and re-copied that describe and depict the cities as guides for the rebuilding. Or perhaps the elders keep the details in lore-songs and memory-cathedrals. If you visit a city with an elder guide, he or she can tell you the name of each street, who dwelled in the palace of which only sand-drifted stumps of walls remain, describe the long-vanished golden statue in what was once the main temple...
 
It's doubtful the cities would still have any artifacts worth looting and trading, even if they were not sacred homelands to be reclaimed in some future age. But deserts do have commodities of value, such as the frankincense trees of Yemen.
 
Dean Shomshak

This is a lot like an old fill-in campaign of mine, UNICoRN (United Nations International Criminology Resource Network). In my campaign world, some countries had more heroes, or would-be heroes, than they needed; others had a shortage. So when supervillains start causing trouble in, say, Togo, the government asks UNICoRN for help and UNICoRN tries finding volunteer heroes to respond. I encouraged players to make heroes who were low-power and a bit goofy, such as American Ninja (ninja suit is also flag suit!) or Insectomorph (a.k.a. Bug-Eater Man... don't ask). These were not Earth's Mightiest Heroes; they were All We Could Get On Short Notice. Sometimes they fought similarly loopy villains. At the other extreme, some adventures got very dark (sometimes even on purpose). The "headquarters" consisted of a small office in the UN building with a file cabinet, a rolodex, a phone, a secretary and a morose Brazilian bureaucrat in charge of it all.
 
Alas, I didn't get a chance to run the adventure in which the goofier villains (such as Baroness von Boom and Commander Coleoptera) formed a revenge super-team called CAToBLEPS (Criminal Alliance To Beat Law Enforcement Personnel Soundly).
 
Dean Shomshak

Fortunately, I photocopy articles that interest me. It's in Scientific American, June 2017; author Yasunori Nomura.
 
In the introduction, he quotes Alan Guth, one of the founders of inflationary cosmology, on one of the admittedly philosophical problems that have developed with it: "In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." You'd have to ask Dr Guth about his knowledge of Scholastic philosophy. 😂 Nomura simply notes that a theory that gives equal probability to every possible event in the multiverse "tells you nothing about what will go on in our specific world."
 
Nomura's own two-sentence summary of his theory is that "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occuring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space."
 
Perhaps his most important claim, though, is that his theory is testable. It predicts a slight negative curvature of space. Current measurements suggest space is flat within current limits of measurement, but that precision could well be improved by two orders of magnitude in the near future. Detecting any negative curvature will support the theory (though not prove it conclusively). "Conventional" inflationary cosmology also predicts negative curvature of space, but "many orders of magnitude smaller than we can hope to measure." Positive curvature, of any degree, would falsify his theory (and, perhaps, all inflationary theories: Nomura says they demand that all universes have negative curvature.)
 
Nomura admits that some of the further implications of his theory, such as time being a local illusion within the universe, are "speculative." But I give him credit for laying out an observation that would make his theory just plain wrong, without trying to patch it.
 
Nomura's article makes a good double feature with another article from earlier that year,February 2017, by Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb. Steinhardt is one of the early architects of inflationary cosmology, but he's now calling bullpucky on it, based both on the observations from the Planck satellite and the broader point that a theory which predicts everything and anything, predicts nothing. The authors make some tart comments about "non-empirical science" suggest it's time to seek other approaches to cosmology. And wow, they set the cat among the pigeons! The next issue featured an angry letter signed by dozens of cosmologists who thought the critique of inflationary theory was most unfair. Nomura was among the signatories.
 
If I really cared, I might spend a few years trying to work up the math and physics chops to at least venture an informed opinion as to who's just blowing smoke. As it is, I'm only at the make-popcorn-and-watch-the show level of interest. I'll look into it again if I think of a novel way to use the theories for gaming.
 
Dean Shomshak

This is a lot like an old fill-in campaign of mine, UNICoRN (United Nations International Criminology Resource Network). In my campaign world, some countries had more heroes, or would-be heroes, than they needed; others had a shortage. So when supervillains start causing trouble in, say, Togo, the government asks UNICoRN for help and UNICoRN tries finding volunteer heroes to respond. I encouraged players to make heroes who were low-power and a bit goofy, such as American Ninja (ninja suit is also flag suit!) or Insectomorph (a.k.a. Bug-Eater Man... don't ask). These were not Earth's Mightiest Heroes; they were All We Could Get On Short Notice. Sometimes they fought similarly loopy villains. At the other extreme, some adventures got very dark (sometimes even on purpose). The "headquarters" consisted of a small office in the UN building with a file cabinet, a rolodex, a phone, a secretary and a morose Brazilian bureaucrat in charge of it all.
 
Alas, I didn't get a chance to run the adventure in which the goofier villains (such as Baroness von Boom and Commander Coleoptera) formed a revenge super-team called CAToBLEPS (Criminal Alliance To Beat Law Enforcement Personnel Soundly).
 
Dean Shomshak

This is a lot like an old fill-in campaign of mine, UNICoRN (United Nations International Criminology Resource Network). In my campaign world, some countries had more heroes, or would-be heroes, than they needed; others had a shortage. So when supervillains start causing trouble in, say, Togo, the government asks UNICoRN for help and UNICoRN tries finding volunteer heroes to respond. I encouraged players to make heroes who were low-power and a bit goofy, such as American Ninja (ninja suit is also flag suit!) or Insectomorph (a.k.a. Bug-Eater Man... don't ask). These were not Earth's Mightiest Heroes; they were All We Could Get On Short Notice. Sometimes they fought similarly loopy villains. At the other extreme, some adventures got very dark (sometimes even on purpose). The "headquarters" consisted of a small office in the UN building with a file cabinet, a rolodex, a phone, a secretary and a morose Brazilian bureaucrat in charge of it all.
 
Alas, I didn't get a chance to run the adventure in which the goofier villains (such as Baroness von Boom and Commander Coleoptera) formed a revenge super-team called CAToBLEPS (Criminal Alliance To Beat Law Enforcement Personnel Soundly).
 
Dean Shomshak

This is a lot like an old fill-in campaign of mine, UNICoRN (United Nations International Criminology Resource Network). In my campaign world, some countries had more heroes, or would-be heroes, than they needed; others had a shortage. So when supervillains start causing trouble in, say, Togo, the government asks UNICoRN for help and UNICoRN tries finding volunteer heroes to respond. I encouraged players to make heroes who were low-power and a bit goofy, such as American Ninja (ninja suit is also flag suit!) or Insectomorph (a.k.a. Bug-Eater Man... don't ask). These were not Earth's Mightiest Heroes; they were All We Could Get On Short Notice. Sometimes they fought similarly loopy villains. At the other extreme, some adventures got very dark (sometimes even on purpose). The "headquarters" consisted of a small office in the UN building with a file cabinet, a rolodex, a phone, a secretary and a morose Brazilian bureaucrat in charge of it all.
 
Alas, I didn't get a chance to run the adventure in which the goofier villains (such as Baroness von Boom and Commander Coleoptera) formed a revenge super-team called CAToBLEPS (Criminal Alliance To Beat Law Enforcement Personnel Soundly).
 
Dean Shomshak

Yeah, that was a bit more of a jump than I intended. I'll try to fill in the blanks.
 
I gather that attempts to explain dark matter using stuff that's known to exist have not gone well. As Cancer says, gravitational lensing studies haven't found enough MACHOS. IIRC there are also arguments that if there was enough normal matter in the universe to supply the needed gravity, this would have altered the proportions of helium and lithium produced in the very early universe, though such arguments are well beyond my Physics 101 level of understanding. Simulations assuming "hot dark matter" don't generate a recognizable universe, so that rules out neutrinos. And so on. So theoretical physicists have become steadily more speculative. WIMPS were one such. (There was an experiment to detect them, based on the premise that once in a very rare while two WIMPs would collide and make particles that could be detected... though it's beyond me how you know what to look for, when you don't know the masses or other properties of the WIMPs.) Or swarms of quantum black holes that are individually too small to be detected through gravitational lensing. Or let's try modifying gravity so it works differently on the necessary scales.
 
Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble.
 
It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math.
 
Arguing for divine intervention wouldn't be scientific either, but it might be more honest. Not that the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis has a great track record either...
 
Or just admit that at this point, we don't know, and don't even know how to find out.
 
Dean Shomshak

DART mission altered target asteroid orbit rather more than planned

Angela Lansbury Dead At 96
 
Godspeed, dear lady.  Here's to a good life and a brilliant career.

The cover article for the October 2022 issue of Scientific American is "The Power of Viking Women," with the abstract, "Analyses of ancient North Atlantic textiles show that Viking and medieval women wielded considerable cultural and economic influence." No, the old Norse weren't matriarchal as such. But women ran the farms while the men were out raiding and trading for years at a time. More particularly, cloth-weaving was exclusively women's work (with taboos against men even entering the weaving-house), and cloth was of great economic importantce -- to the extent that standardized lengths of cloth were used as money. So not as simply patriarchal as one might think.
 
Dean Shomshak

I had thought it imodest to mention Loezen, but I see LL has done it for me.
 
The last story arc in my second Supermage playtest campaign had the PCs trying to save that world. (Not entirely altruistic: Some Loezenians were escaping to Earth and behaving like, well, D&D PCs.) This involved a visit to an oracle to find how to do this, a treasure hunt to acquire the three elements they needed, and various side-quests to deal with problems along the way. There was time travel (including at least one predestination paradox), allies recruited, enemies fought, and a terrible price paid, but ultimate success.
 
Among the problems the PCs faced were other Loezeniens with their own ideas how to save the world, or at least to save their own skins. In addition to the Loezenians invading Earth, the mage Naktorial had enslaved a whole country and numerous lesser sorcerers to build a Last Redoubt arcology that could survive the sun's death, while Norom Barcaldine, the Prince Who Never Was, sought to trap Loezen in a Groundhog Day time loop: The world would never end, but it wouldn't continue, either.
 
Dean Shomshak