Lawnmower Boy

Re: Alternate Earth 3: Passionless Christ That is a much more controversial point than you seem to think. The Prophet (PBUH) had run-ins with many people. His troubles with local Jewish tribes persuaded him that he could not position himself as a Jewish reformer, or something like that. Let's not forget that the Koran was not compiled until a generation or more after the Prophet's death --and for all my respect for him, I am not going to rule out the possibility that the correct verb here is "composed," not "compiled." Judaism got along just fine under Islamic rule. The one Jewish state that did coexist with Islam, the Khazar khanate (back, conspiracy theorists, back!) got along just fine. As for the divisions within the Roman Empire --well, the Western Empire ceased to exist in 471AD, mainly because Justinian's court historians said it did. That story happened to work for Italian power groups, which is why the "eastern" Roman empire continued to rule most of Italy south of the Appenines well into the 700s. The role of Jerusalem is pretty trivial here, and I wouldn't underestimate the flexibility of religious thought. A central temple is crucial. Its location in a physical, as opposed to spiritual Jerusalem is another matter. If Rome could be "transferred" to Istanbul, and then to Aachen, the Temple could get where it was needed, too. Now, the empire that emerged from the chaos of the early Islamic conquests was very different from the earlier one, it's true. But bear in mind one crucial factor: the conquest ended the grain --and of course papyrus-- shipments from Egypt to Istanbul. Just try to imagine the cultural, economic, urban, intellectual consequences of going, overnight, from a city/capital built around massive grain imports to a city/capital functioning as the centre of the local agricultural economy. Without wanting to sound like a Marxist here, I cannot imagine the Iconoclasm and the break with the Papacy in the late 700s except in this context. Recovery from massive economic dislocation allowed the reestablishment of urban elite culture in Istanbul at the same time that the spread of the reformed Benedictine rule finally gave Western monasteries institutional permanence. The latter was no great change except in that it marks the moment when libraries and archives achieved institutional permanence. The recopying between (and the absence of recopying during the Classical era) has far more to do with our losses of antique literature than the burning of the library of Alexandria. Which, if not a myth in its entirety, is clearly mostly religious slander. Notice that we cannot even agree on when the legendary burning happened. Don't like Romans? Blame Julius Caesar. Don't like Christians? Blame the mobs that killed Hypatia. Don't like Muslims? Well, that's the story we're working with here. Those guys who say, "I only need one Book," and burn the rest? It's spin doctoring. I have it from a reliable anonymous rource that they sleep with lobbyists, too.

Re: Alternate Universe 2 the problem isn't that people don't want to have children. It's the planning. People calculate when to have children, and that would have been a more common and pointed calculation in the era before modern health care. Don't take the risky plunge into pregnancy until all your ducks are in a row, until you have resources to ensure that your child survives. And, oops, ran out of time. Nature's cruel that way.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns Oops, sorry Mr. Halmades. Got you confused with Amadan naBriona. That said....Cast Wall of Text! Before, say, 1780, coal mining was a significant local industry in Britain supporting home heating and a number of industrial applications and perhaps the largest network of railways in the world. (It's hard to tell, because there were a lot of railways before there were railways, if you catch my drift.) However, still not that important in the grand scheme of things. What changed things was the emergence of coal-fired "Walloon furnaces" in the Severn watershed. Basically tall reactors filled with iron ore, coke and crushed limestone for flux and fed with "blasted" air from the bottom, they were ideal for producing large quantities of cast iron, and were certainly introduced to Britain by Romanophones, but probably Seicento Milanese rather than the Franco-Belgian Protestants often credited by the religious prejudices of an earlier age. Producing large quantities of cast iron carries with it one problem. Hardly anyone wants cast iron. It's a pretty crap product, and in the old days had to be handworked in fineries to make wrought iron or low-grade steel, or crucible-treated to make cemented or high grade steel. That changed in and where it did for one reason, and one reason only. The Royal Navy needed a lot of cast iron for making guns, nails, braces and bars. A large amount of iron on the market allowed opportunistic competition in the gee-gaw business, and from there the use of cast iron spread to areas where it wasn't really suitable except by price --notably steam engine parts and rails. Come the 1850s, it was increasingly obvious that cast-iron rails were not a good idea. That was not on Henry Bessemer's mind when he was experimenting with what we now call converters, though. He was aiming to produce artillery-grade steel by some means cheaper than baking wrought iron in a crucible. When he discovered that some of the impurities in cast iron caught fire in his converters, raising temperatures to the point where he could pour molten steel, he thought he'd discovered a Brave New World. He was wrong. Converter steel (whatever the specific process used) is by its nature pretty low quality stuff, suitable for girders and rails in low traffic areas and not much else. Fortunately, the world needed so many girders and rails that hardly anyone cared. Those who did care went on looking for what we now call an open-hearth steelmaking process. The result was complex, highly engineered, fuel-dependent plants in operation by the 1880s. The age of cheap, good steel had arrived. And within a generation, some of it was being made with electricity instead of fossil fuels. In summary: we would not have taken the first steps down the road eventually taken without gunpowder. However, there is a road to cheap, mass-produced steel that does not run through fossil fuels. I am skeptical that we could have the civilisation that we have without fossil fuels, but the civilisation we would have would not be marked by an absence of steel. It would certainly have less cheap steel. No railroads, no large automotive industry, no sprawling suburbs. It would have many more canals, more dams, nuclear reactors, and lots of macadam roads still using animal traction. With vastly more need for animal fodder, agriculture would be big business. There would be Finnish-style farms in the Canadian north, rice paddies in lowland New Guinea, and genetically modified horses for the cavalry.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns Nothing would work. These are pretty fundamental physical principles we are talking about. Deflagration occurs because a rapid combustion produces very hot molecules. Heat equals velocity, so lots of molecules start rushing in any direction open to movement. If they encounter a musket ball in the way, it moves, too. I'm also at a loss as to why one would go to this trouble. Apart from siege warfare, which everyone in fantasy fiction seems to regard as too boring for life, gunpowder changed surprisingly little in war during the 4 centuries of its use. People still hit each other with pointed metal sticks. A lot. Thia Halmades' story about pneumatic guns sounds confused. Before "pneumatics" was a branch of control engineering and an eternal day-after-tomorrow technology (sleep on an air bed if you want to know why air guns don't work), it was a pretty convoluted branch of theology with a very high heresy quotient. The Pope most certainly did get involved in condeming one branch of pneumatic thinking in 1607 (IIRC), but it was speculative theology --and Spanish Dominicans fighting Spanish Jesuits--, not engineering, that was at issue.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns Actually, the Cumbrian and Swedish steel industries went "Industrial revolution" on charcoal. There's no need to assume less steel. Same with gunpowder. There's lots of alternative explosives. Saltpetre was just the cheapest and most readily available. Cordite replaced it in the 1880s, long before the European expansion had gained momentum in Africa and east Asia. (In fact, the case can be made that cordite is the secret ingredient there.) You'd have to go really soft science to exclude all possible propellants.

Re: Alternate Universe 2 We have that now. Result? Negative population growth. So.. the human race is extinct.

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II I've been thinking ever since I saw this thread that the problem is that whilel there were lots of working "superweapons" in World War II, most of the ones that actually made a difference were beyond boring. I have a very long list for my Unsolicited Manuscript of Doom, The Industrial History of Strategy, but I have no idea whether anyone would care about, say, Quonset Huts, in an RPG context. Good thing I like hearing myself talk, eh? And not that Quonset Huts are the most boring superweapons of World War II. Not by a long shot. My candidate? Bitumised paper. Essentially tar paper, although made of jute and so available in longer lengths. See, ever since the Romans demonstrated how not to do it, we've known how to make good roads. You take crushed rock (it is important that the rock be handcrushed. Besides making work for the Chain Ga-a-ang, it has to have sharp edges), lay on top of a dirt causeway (with appropriate drainage) and roll it down until the edges grind together creating a water-impervious surface of rock dust. It has to be top-dressed to deal with pneumatic tyres, but otherwise, Bob's your uncle. Such is the level of civil engineering history that a couple British engineers of the early 19th C., notably that Mr. Macadam fellow, get credit for inventing this. But there's a problem. The road has to be located near an adequate quarry. The reason that the Arnhem offensive went up a single road is that there was only a single metalled road leading from Belgium to Holland. There's a certain lack of rock in this alluvial landscape, and this is not the first time that the issue shaped military history. Even worse is the stretch from eastern India to the "civilised" part of Burma. Hundreds of miles of jungle sitting on top of Bay of Bengal alluvial mud. How, oh how, were the Allies to invade Burma without a road connection? Well, back in the Great War to end all wars, it was noticed that bitumen sprayed on dirt tracks made for an adequate seal. Forumites may have encountered this driving on rural roads, and it was a key ingredient in Marshal Lyautey's campaigns in the 1920s to make North Africa safe for French civilisation forever. But even this wouldn't work on mud. And so, the brilliant solution. Hundreds of miles of cheap jute carpeting, saturated with bitumen and done up in rolls. Just wind them out over the roads and you get.... Well, something completely sad. But the point is, it worked well enough to provide a main logistic support road for Slim's invasion of Burma. And also, various fighter airfields throughout the world. And it supported Bengali landowners in their pathetic delusion that the jute craze would last, but that's another story, best told by P. J. O'Rourke.

Re: Anyone Ever Run an All-Esper Group? No, But there was talk of a never-done non-CU setting built around this idea in some way. Psi Wars?

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe

Re: THE ATLANTEAN AGE: What Do *You* Want To See? Somewhere, somehow, I would love to see homages to the DC "historic" superheroes --the Silent Knight and the [Golden?] Gladiator. Since Atlantean Age is supposed to be "superheroic" fantasy, maybe here?

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe i)More tantalising hints about the Elder Worm homeworld, please. ii) Thane plots to take over the Galaxy? Yes, please. iii) It's been suggested that there is more to the Xenovore origin than Alien Wars lets on. Okay, I like the origin as it stands, but let's hear more. iv) Who or what moved the Perseid homeworld? v) Is there a prehistory to the Roynish? That is, are they active in the current Champions Universe? vi) The Molians (Thrilling Places) aren't well integrated into the setting, giving another origin for the Mole Men, for example. Can they be retconned in? vii) Is the Rigel system engineered? If so, by whom? viii) What, exactly, did the Zerlians of Cybul III do to themselves? ix) Ravanche is set up as a mystery. Presumably there is more to tell. x) Not so much a mystery as a loose end. I'd like to here that somehow, some Zarnians (the people exterminated by Mechanon 3000) survived. xi) The Desert Dragon Spirit presumably has a continuing agenda for the Ackalian people and could generate Desert Dragon-like characters in the current era. xii) Supernova's origin hints that the supernova that destroyed the Z'rel was not entirely natural. If not, who did it? xiii) How did Charm come by her powers?

Re: The cranky thread Okay, this isn't rocket science, but then I haven't noticed that you guys at Coke hire rocket scientists. If a product line doesn't sell, stop making it. I haven't noticed that you have any problem with this. So WTH is it with Dasani Fridgemates? No-one wants them. It's not that you're not promoting them enough. They're inconvenient, look cheap, and the bottle size is too small. So why are you leaning on your reps to get more of them into the stores? Not to put too fine a point on this, but why is there a ton of them in my backroom today? You have the numbers. You know they won't sell. You know that you'll eventually have to pay to take them back. Do your stockholders like it when you waste their money? Do they look at their portfolios and say, "Oh, good. Atlanta has thrown some of my hard-earned dollars away today, let's send them more!"

Re: Kishi Banahana "Banahanas in pyjamas/ They're coming down the stairs..."

Re: Superhero Universes, A to Z There has to be an entry for the 1970s Atlas. Tiger-Man, Morlock, The Cougar, the Grim Ghost.... If "A" is already taken, may I suggest "L" for "Lame?" To be fair, Destructor and Devil Hunter were ..okay; but I hope never to come across a concept as profoundly lame as Phoenix: the Protector.

Re: Order of the Stick He's gay? Also, where will the quest for mackerel lead?

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? Calling William a foreigner presumes that there is just a natural country called England that was generally recognised as such, so that a Doverite would recognise someone from Devon or Northumberland as a fellow citizen and a Norman as an alien.

Re: from little plot seeds, mighty games do grow: Share your ideas! Champions Beyond/Teleios This is a setting plot seed, The Secret Human Extraterrestrial Colony. I've tied it to Teleios because the original inspiration was a Lex Luther story, and the CU has no direct equivalent to the Silver Age Luther who could go off into space, adopt an alien planet, endanger it in an extemporaneous attack on Superman, realise his error in time, and return to Earth because, unlike some aliens in the back of beyond, it's just his home planet, so why should he care if he endangers itin insane attacks on Superman? I rationalised this by deciding that Lex had already set up a secret extraterrestrial colony --that he would have nothing to do with-- so that the human race would survive if his next planetary death ray actually worked. Lacking good reasons, I've singled out Teleios as someone who might do it for crazy ones, or because he's rationalising what is actually his creator's plan. That said, for the obsessive world-builders out there, I'm assuming that the place produces testosterone, estrogen and plasma in return for Earth goods and more people. Perhaps Teleois kidnaps folks; or perhaps whenever he clones or modifies someone he sends a control copy off to the Colony, in which case there's a lot of muscular young men running around out there. Specific Seeds i) Something's Out There Some menace is on the loose in the colony, which is a free society because Teleios doesn't care how it's run. (See any old Andre Norton double book for a suitable menace,or use Maraud from Galactic Champions), and the colony sends its flying saucer to kidnap your group and set things right. Unfortunately, Teleios sends Hurricane on the same mission. He's in over his head, and you have to save him, defeat the menace, and keep your presence secret lest Teleios overreact. ii) "When in the Course of Human Events" The colony is a horrible eugenic slave state, full of kidnapped citizens labouring for Teleios. You lead a revolution! iii) Bumpy Foreheads The gang tagged along with Tetsuronin on some galaxy-spanning mission to, I don't know, fetch coffee or something. Anyway, ol'Tet won, but he's got a crazy concussion, and the ship isn't working right. You have to land on the colony for repairs, and in order to keep its secrets, the colonists all pretend to be war-like, honourable aliens or some such, with bumpy foreheads. How long will a groggy Tetsuronin buy it? And what happens when the Hzeel attack? iv) (campaign seed) When the Magic Goes Away ..it means that the colony's flying saucer's superscience engines begin to malfunction. Your team has to nurse it back home across the galaxy with the last cargo required for colonial self-sufficiency before they give up the ghost entirely. There's specific scenarios to borrow everywhere from Fire on the Deep to Mad Max to Witches of Karres. Not to mention space pirates.

Re: Teleios: The origin story We've been set a mystery. Like all mysteries, the whodunnit is spoiled if it isn't one of the guests in the parlour room. Otherwise we get something like "I know who killed Colonel Mustard! It was some random spree killer from the next county over who hasn't even been mentioned in the book so far!" No. So: method, motive, opportunity. i) Opportunity: it was a dream. M. Nocturne is the only candidate that this singles out, so Teleios is a creation of Demon for some reason) Okay, technically Dreamwitch and some others operate in the Dreamzone, but that doesn't really get us anywhere. ii) Method: It was superscience. Could be anyone, except Doctor Destroyer. iii) Motive:Teleios is doing stuff, so we can assume that it serves the agenda of the force behind him. So what is that service? iiia) Apparently, Teleios has an ideological programme, so he has fellow travellers. The obvious inference is that he is a eugenics Nazi. Panzer?? But that's a pretty complex combination of ideas. Robert Heinlein, king of libertarians, portrayed eugenic utopias in several of his novels. And, in fact, I'm inclined to view Teleios as Heinlein on steroids, if only because I hated Number of the Beast that much. Can't think if any libertarian villains in the CU, though. iiib) Laying the groundwork of someone else's plan. This is the Captain Chronos angle. But there are three plausible villains who have the timedepth and agenda for a longrange plan involving altering human genetics or even society. They are, first, the Elder Worm, already big into modifying human DNA for obscene reasons. Second, the renegade Mandaarian, Sovereign, if only because I take him to be an homage to the main villain of Julian May's Pliocene Exile/Metaconcert novels. Third, Krim, who evidently has some longrange plan 70,000 years deep. Of them all, I find the Elder Worm by far the scariest.

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign. I'm a heretic. I admit it. I far prefer the Neanderthal invaders from the Spider to zombies. They're fast and brutal, and apt to perform the most horrid outrages. They have all the savage's wiles, and only a scientific, red-blooded American (Briton) can best them in hand-to-hand combat. Sure, a bullet or two (so long as it is .45 calibre or so) will stop them. But this ain't zombie apocalypse. The heroes have access to dynamite, 75s, dreadnoughts and Bristol Fighters, not cricket bats. The Neanderthals will need their cunning. And it plays to the spirit and anxieties of the age. The whole matchup is just like Harvard, skippered by Hamilton Fish IV, playing the Carlisle Indians, led by that beastly professional, Jim Thorpe. Go Crimson Tide! And yes, I'm aware how that game came out.

Re: Capaign Theme: The Chase I've contemplated a flight campaign -not that I ever run anything, so take it for what it's worth. China or the eastern United States have been overrun by zombies, and the last survivors of the Twelve... uhm, civilisation flee across the Oregon Trail/Silk Road to the promised land, with zombie hordes in hot pursuit. The heroes can fight off goblin raiders, cross rivers, fix wagons, find shelter from blizzards...

Re: Let's make a superhero base auditions (Topside description) Northampton Mall sounds good. (But the food court better have a place where you can get fish and chips!) I'd suggest one minor addition. To avoid skirting the "ground level public" result, people would have to know that Captain Justice IV and his team hang out in the back room at old Chang's. Like the gaming room at the back of a gamestore, only quieter and less smelly --of people, anyway. Incense, cumin and fried ginger, OK.

Re: Let's make a superhero base auditions (Topside description) Don't rush me, I'm a-thinking. Okay: generic Vancouver-style building. A three-storey full-block, one/block deep building, facing towards the avenue in a parabola with a too-narrow access road cut 4 metres below the street level in the parabola. The exposed concrete below street level is heavily coated in lichen, there's grass on the earth berm and, slightly scraggly evergreen ornamentals are everywhere along the base. Colour is white and deep green. The back of the building is shielded from public view by a massive amount of vegetation, heavily overgrown in season by morning glory and blackberry vines. It might be a somewhat-less-than-well-maintained apartment building. But it's not.

Re: Lost cities under Russian lake... "Kasar" is hard to identify as Julius Caesar unless you follow the literary tradition back, but he is a hero of Mongolian epic poetry and has been deified in that crazy way the Tibetans do things. My source here is Pamela Kyle Crossley's Translucent Mirror, but I hesitate to recommend it as either an easy read or the last word on the subject of Manchu imperial ideology. Oh, and if Dr. Crossley googles here and reads this, I have to say that I was favourably impressed. I'm just aware that other experts have criticised it.

Re: Lost cities under Russian lake... It's pretty clear that the Cimmerians ("sons of Gomer"), or Gimmeru were an Indo-European people of the Zagros region, probably some of the earliest cavalry, c. 800, and that they later turned into "Medes and Persians." Herodotus, our major source on the Phrygians, is telling us seriously distorted stories. For one thing, recent excavations at Kerkenes Dag reveals a "Phrygian" capital that was still a going concern in 585BC. That's not to say that the folk there hadn't changed their ethnonym by that time. But it is pretty clear that the story about the Cimmerians coming from the "steppe" (much less going back there) is a minor error, much magnified since. There have been some really cool books on this general subject recently. Mark Munn,The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyrannies of Asia (2006) exposes some of the subtext, although the story is just coming to light now. Much more accessible is Robert Davies, Early Riders, a review of archaeological evidence coming to the key conclusions about cavalry I just referred to. Connected to the "late emergence of cavalry" thesis is the current argument that the equestrian-nomadic lifestyle emerged in Inner Eurasia with a bang at the beginning of the Iron Age. Nicola di Cosma, Ancient China and its Enemies highlights this thesis, which, going by the Cambridge History of Early China now qualifies as the "received version." Cool of course doesn't necessarily mean readible, so if you want to pursue this I would recommend Cosma's chapter in the Cambridge History and Davies over the longer and denser monographs. Good stories often travel in books. Even in ancient times. There is a reason that Julius Caesar is worshipped as a god in Tibetan/Mongolian Buddhism.

Re: Champions Universe: The Unresolved Questions/Plots Just for the record, I would love to see a tease of some of the big secrets. Mr. Long can play a few cards in a 2009 sequel to C:NOTW, lay 'em down and sweep up the chips in 2012 (only 4 years away now!) --and draw a new hand. I especially want to see --More about Teleios, Takofanes and Krim, Mechanon, Thorn, Lightning Man, Taipan and Tesseract; and amongst heroes, Tetsuronin, Machacuitl and Corrente. --Ditto Sovereign (Galactic Champions) --I want to see the Edomite get his in a way that plays to plot teases I read into Demon: Servants of Darkness And I would like to see survivors of the species exterminated by Mechanon 3000 when he established his Thirty-First century base. This isn't a mystery (although it could be!), but it would rectify a rather grim bit of background.