Lawnmower Boy

Re: Begining of an idea Crack the blacksmith's anvil, or perhaps the millstone. Flood the creek. Snow. Mud. The cattle get out of the paddock. A rogue wave sweeps the canoes off the beach....

Re: [Review] Champions Universe Mine is missing about a half-page of text between pages 132 and 133. (A kkey to the map of the Milky Way Galaxy.) I have the material in other formats thanks to someone dumping Alien Wars and Terran Empire second-hand , but I missed it at the time.

Re: WWI Battleship The German official naval history is a bibliographer's nightmare. Krieg zur See im Weltkrieg (I think) started with consolidated volume numbers covering various theatres, acquired subtitles ie (Krieg zur Nordsee), and later acquired a new volume series when it moved on to the Baltic. It took 40 years to get that far (last volume was published in 1961), and changed authors, editors, publishers and even governments, so that you can't even go with the last resort and identify the country as the author. I would recommend going to your local library and shelf-scanning. Even at a major university library with the help of two reference librarians, that is the only way I got this information. Don't forget that the British account of Jutland is divided between two volumes, battle and aftermath (and two authors: aren't official histories great?) Or you can just cut to the chase and look up Mark Campbell's Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting.

Re: WWI Battleship A 4 gun round every 20 seconds means an Attack every 2 turns, but not a ROF of 3/minute. That would require all guns firing. Fiddling with speed is not the way to go here, though, because the smaller guns will have a much higher ROF and there should also be torpedoes to consider. On the gunnery subject; watch out, there are some myths out there, some embraced by apparently quite serious books. A new revisionist work, John Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland is out, although unfortunately too expensive for anyone to actually buy. On the optics thing, (IMNHO Warning!) I reconstruct the story as follows: in the 1880s, Britain had a small optical industry centred in London and Birmingham, often subsidiaries of Prussian companies to facilitate prism dumping. (Prussia has the right sand, and so makes optical glass. British deposits had not then been found.) At this point, high precision optical needs are dominated by astronomy. (Which is what makes the whole "inferior British optics" story such nonsense. Astronomy required far higher performance than military rangefinders.) However, surveyors are making better and better instruments, and armies and navies are experimenting. Two professors in Yorkshire, Barr and Stroud, put in a bid to the navy and army for a calculating optical rangefinder. The navy buys, but not the army. It is good, and orders steadily build up. By 1910, Barr and Stroud have a big factory in Glasgow, a Liberal bastion whose senior minister is --wait for it-- in charge of the army, while Birmingham and London are now Unionist strongholds again. At this point, the army finally admits that it needs a calculating rangefinder. Barr and Stroud has been doing the corporate raiding thing for years, taking over London firms, shutting them down, and moving the work to Glasgow. Now its only rival is Chance Brothers of Birmingham. Time to bring out the big guns. The country is ga-ga over the "National Efficiency Movement," best described as a "if it's British, it's crap" campaign for subsidies, tariffs, and more money for the right schools and universities. Led in the Liberal Cabinet by --wait for it-- the Secretary of State for War. A word in the right ears and the story is everywhere, and there are jobs aplenty for Glasgow! Yay! Spring forward to the summer of 1916. The mind-blowingly over-confident Royal Navy is out looking for Germans. They've totally ignored safety regulations in order to stock more ammunition in the turrets of the battleships in order to push up the achieved ROF, in spite of the fact that turrets in this era are not designed to be impenetrable. (That's why battleships have so many of them.). After all, "speed is armour," "fast firing is accurate firing," "war is peace," all that stuff. When they, predictably, get what is coming for them, the officers of the Grand Fleet can't look for scapegoats fast enough, because some serious professionals are already investigating what made assorted ships suddenly blow up in the Battle of Jutland. The Germans are talking up a storm, how their ships resisted countless British hits with nary a scratch due to superior German engineering. No one knows what happened over there yet --it's only a week since the battle. The point is to have an excuse out there before the facts solidify in any important minds. Thank Heavens for censorship, so that the great unwashed won't get involved. All you need is a story to distract a few people. Oh, here it is, "National Efficiency!" Perfect. It was all the engineers' fault. The Fleet was let down by inferior shells, armour, optics, toasters, you name it. Say it long enough, and loud enough, and by the time peace rolls around and the Press is unmuzzled, it will be the Truth, and no-one will ever trace the responsibility trail and find out just who let all that naked propellant sit out in the open in vulnerable turrets.

Re: Megastructure Worlds I doubt anyone here cares, but sparked by curiosity I tracked author C. C. Macapp down on Google and learned two things. First, that my posting appears pretty darn high on the search, which means, interest or not, I should post the second thing I learned, which was that "Carol" was actually Caroll Mathers App (1913--1971), a guy, and, if it matters, a Bay Area chess player.

Re: Stun/knock outs, overwhelming the combats I find long combats tedious, and was enormously pleased by how quickly hit locations tended to end them with massive BODY to the unfortunate recipient. It has the additional advantage that you don't need a mook rule. PCs will mow the mooks down with called shots in no time.

Re: Medieval Doctor Package How are they going to cast their patients' horoscope? This is obviously the package for one of those Caribbean medical schools that don't even teach the basics!

Re: how much is too much??? Always do up a very detailed writeup of the starship your players start with, so that after they crash it landing in the first half hour of the first session, trade it in for a random ship and head off for a planet you haven't charted, you will know exactly what the new owners can do with it!

Re: Megastructure Worlds Something similar, albeit a little less grand (two hundred miles long, fifty miles in diameter), appears as the "Vivarium" in one of much-missed science fiction writer Catherine MacApp (C. C. MacApp)'s 1960s page-turners, Recall Not Earth. Worth a look in if you ever see it in a used bookstore, and a worthy plot seed in its own right.

Re: Glamour Guns Is there something with a tripod and a Dora motif for the next time my sister crosses my littl'st niece when her blood sugar is low?

Re: Order of the Stick Some thoughts: i) For the happy couple: Hinjo + Lien= an heir for the House of Kim, and 'bout time! Heck, they've been shipping for months! ii) Roy's resurrection hasn't happened because Hayley, the corpse and Durkon are still trapped under Cloister. iii) But... Eugene has everything under control. Uncle Myrtok is lined up to Resurrect Roy, which is why Eugene caved so readily in 500. This is, of course, arrant speculation, but notice that Uncle Myrtok was introduced for the first time in online continuity back in 497, making him available. iv) We are given a picture of Eugene in the books which is quite at variance of our Roy-mediated picture in the online strip. Some details of his biography either need to come out or be finessed.

Re: The Rouges of Sci-Fi I'm glad to hear that the CFL will be around in the Stainless Steel Rat's time. (If I have to explain that a "rouge" is a 1-point scoring play in Canadian football, it isn't as funny. Fortunately, it isn't funny at all.)

Re: [Review] The Mystic World Mystic World is one very big package, hard to boil down. This thread has focussed on Tyrannon so far, but what really impressed me are the settings, and particularly Babylon, City of Man. There's a sense in the CU that Babylon is less real than Earth, whereas Grimjack's Cynosure is more real, but cosmology aside, that's because it is visualised as an adventure, rather than campaign setting. That could be changed, although the writeup might have to be more than 5 pages long. Still, want to tackle "two-faced men in suits who talk backwards and forwards and remember the future as well as the past; and the Young Pioneers, truculent boyos in coonskin caps, armed with oversized hatchets and paralyzing squirt guns" --or perhaps assist them in their battle against "guerilla home redecorators?" (Did they exist yet when this book was written?) Only problem? The Library of Babylon has the potential to be a bit of a campaign buster. "Takofanes, mysterious menace to reality?" The reference librarian looks over her glasses as she types at her terminal. "You know we have his memoirs, 300 volumes of collected papers and ..looks like 250 major scholarly studies. They look a bit old, but that should keep you busy for a while."

Re: [PA Hero] Limited Nuclear War Not So Good Just for the record, Pakistan is 310,000 square miles, about twice the size of California, and Bangladesh is 55,000, not exactly big, but at least larger than New York State. (It is also more exactly on the delta of the Brahmaputra than the Ganga.) The customary gloom-and-doom scenarios for a limited nuclear exchange of c. 100 warheads are fair enough, but fallout poisoning the entire Indian subcontinent to the point of making a billion people flee the continent across the Tibetan plateau/ jungles of Assam/Baluchi desert:idjit: seems a little unlikely. But I'm really popping in to be the wet blanket and point out that the whole "Volkerwanderung" thing about migratory tribes pushing each other across Eurasia is a nineteenth century myth with precious little actual evidence justifying it, as distinct from the handwaving of a surviving hardcore minority of academic specialists.

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so Everyone should get a PhD in history. They make the world so much more interesting and complicated. Mainly complicated. And then when you're forty and looking for a real job you can at least kvetch about how unrealistic the D&D "medieval" world actually is. Why, most of those castles should actually be stockades! The core issue for me? A brawny kid wielding a chainsaw can sneak up on you wearing while you're wearing your civies and, striking a perfect blow with complete surprise (I don't know, maybe you're wearing your Ipod and you're totally engrossed in the vocal wonderment of Michael Bolton) --and, if you're a high level fighter, you then turn around and beat him to death with your bare hands. Not that anyone ever actually did that in the version of D&D I used to play. Figure out the Pummeling rules? I'd rather do psionic combat as written. But, if you're a first level MU, watch out for those deadly flying squirrels....

Re: The Inconceivables! I love all these guys. Way to go, Hermit. I would love to chime in with an equivalent character concept. I even thought one up once, but then I forgot, so, no. Anyway, that's my story. I would love to write interior dialogue for Atomic Zombie, but in my head he's smarter than me (not that that's hard; plus he's actually read Richard Rorty), so, again, no.

Re: What were the best Marvel titles of the 70's? Super Villain Team-Up also introduced Shroud and Henry Kissinger as Marvel characters. Kissinger seems to have made more return appearances, too. Moon Knight had a Marvel Premiere one-shot and didn't graduate to his own book until the glorious 80s. Which isn't to say that Marvel Premiere was not a great book. It and DC's Secret Origins were cool. Whatever happened to Code Name: Assassin? (I'd ask about Woodgod, but, unfortunately, I know.) I will second Howard the Duck's place as one of the great Marvel titles of the 70s. I also liked Captain Marvel, Deathlok, Ka-Zar (flying sharks!) Killraven (although for no good reason that I can think of in retrospect) and really tried hard to like Guardians of the Galaxy.

Re: Fact vs Fiction - Medieval Europe vs Typical Fantasy Settings I'd sub in 7) "mend" for "birth control," which medieval people handled for themselves the old-fashioned way. Otherwise, though....

Re: BBC Airship Article Unless there's a magic handwave of which I'm unaware, dirigibles need mooring masts or the equivalent in raw manpower in order to offload. And I wouldn't recommend the latter. A surprising number of riggers were killed during the Golden Age by hanging on to their mooring ropes too long when a gust kicked up and lofted the dirigible.

Re: How long does tech last after The End? How about a whole adventure based around a monastery preserving, say, a blueprint of a lost technology?

Re: [Review] The Turakian Age It's interesting that the local gamestore (the one three blocks away, that is), brought in one copy each of Tuala Morn, Turakian and Valdorian. The first two vanished overnight, the third is still gathering dust on the shelves. Generica, and Celtica, sell.

Re: Thoughts on having more than one liaison just as a theoretical question, if you had two liaisons and both they and you were invited to the same party, how would you keep them apart? Also, what if one of them found the credit card slip from the birthday present for the other? Hoo boy, it's those kind of problems that learn ya to settle for just one. Or five.

Re: BBC Airship Article I'd say that the big problem with airships was their sail area. A big enough envelope will let you lift what you want, but it catches the wind and there's not much you can do about it. The heyday of the dirigible is full of accidents large and small. The Hindenburg accident just shut down the last people who were still trying. Also, the Clippers were very loud and very dangerous, best appreciated through a haze of nostalgia.

Re: How long does tech last after The End? And notice the difference between knowledge and praxis. Books can tell you all about the crucible method of making steel or of generating microwaves. Actually doing it requires that you hold your mouth right.

Re: How long does tech last after The End? You have to admit that having Sol go Type II Supernova would be pretty tough to take around here if you didn't get your parasol popped in time. (Now I'm imagining the Sun curled up on the couch after flunking second year, binging on one tub after another of Ben & Jerry's Hydrogen Hacienda 'till its bloated off the main spectrum...)