Lawnmower Boy

Re: Star Hero:? Let's face it. Involving people in a sci-fi setting is hard. That's why fantasy outsells it in the bookstore, and it is that much harder in gaming. Most sci-fi settings are "hard," and manage to drain even more of the thrill away, while ones that aim for space opera have a hard time not being self-consciously silly. Look at the way that Steampunk ends up looking like warmed over D&D when its roots lie in what Victorians thought would be possible in the next decade! Worlds of Empire did a great job of getting beyond that, but I probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place if it weren't for the Thanes.

Re: [Review] Solar Smith And The Sky-Pirates Of Arcturus This sounds almost sounds like more fun to write than to play. (I explained the "canals of Mars," etc. to my eight-year old nephew the other day. You should have seen his eyes go wide as he gave a moment's thought to the notion that all that stuff about ancient races, dying planets and dinosaurs of Venus could have been true.)

Re: Steampunk Campaign Ideas In the good old days (stupid automated retrieval system), the University of British Columbia had its entire _Engineering_ collection going back to 1871 on the open shelves. Some ideas: i) We're running out of fertiliser? No problem: the coal seams of England have lots of fossilised dinosaur, er....doodies in them. All we have to do is dig it out, mulch and spread it around. Of course, who knows what else is down there with it, or what kinds of seeds might survive. ii) Train tracks are expensive, but there's these "endless tracks" that loop around tractor wheels. Why not land trains to penetrate the wilds of Canada/Australia/Africa? iii) New miracle explosives such as "cordite" can change the world! For example, we could cut a channel into the interior of Australia/the Sahara and create an inland sea and an entirely new Mediterranean coast. And sail places where only the Tuareg go now. But it is a reasonable geographical supposition that those seas have existed before. Surely urban civilisation was not invented in the Middle East (I say "surely" because if I filled in the assumptions of the 1890s I would sound like a Nazi). What lost cities await on reborn coasts for the first intrepid steam-explorer, full of artefacts for archaeologists to plunder? iv) The great scientists of the age are constantly working on new steam valves and drive cycles, as well as novel high tensile alloys of steel for engine components, using exotic elements such as chromium and nickel. A sufficiently powerful steam engine could generate almost unimaginable amounts of energy, especially if radium were substituted for coal. For example, a sufficiently powerful "electromagnetic" could veritably fling an sealed vessel into the airless void of space. A visit to Mars (which will be reaching its conjunction with Earth in 1897), might reveal the truth behind the "canals." Yes, I know iv) has been done, a lot. I just think that all this talk about aether flyers underrates just how _practical_ people thought these plans were in the 1890s. They didn't have to imagine antigravity because the real world technology seemed to be almost in their grasp.

Re: [PAH] 50 years After Looking at the "small smash" grim and gritty model. I'll assume a spontaneous meltdown of largescale infrastructure. The POL in the pipeline and tanks just goes away. The main problem: there's not food where most people are (big cities.) People are mobile, and will go where there's food, although big cities are also built over a great deal of agricultural land, much of which is reasonably accessible in North American cities, at least. The earlier the exodus/planting-the-park happens, the more lives will be saved. But it will be a mob scene. Just how violent and unpleasant is left to the people involved, but most survivalists expect to have to defend their self-sufficient nuclear plants/farms in the middle of nowhere from desperate mobs of urban cannibals. That's cause they're dorks, but it doesn't meant they're wrong. The next stage is rebuilding economies appropriate to a more spartan transportation system. Assuming POL isn't available still, IC will be a luxury, since they burn fuel oil. Steam locomotives are another matter. Modern ones are few and far between, but hardly unknown. On the other hand, I suspect that railroad park enthusiasts could turn them out of LRT chasses pretty durn quickly, if you don't demand too much in the way of drawing power. I'd say that the result would be an 1850s-style economy. Local road transport links to the restoration of local economic balance. The big change since 1914 has been the collapse of the very large portion of the agricultural economy that produced grass (and other feed) for horses and cattle. There's no way to restore the hundred million-and-more working horses that existed on Earth in 1900 overnight, but cattle stocks would be replenished much more quickly. Here in British Columbia you might see massive cattle drives from the Interior ranching country to the much wetter Coast, where pastures are crying out for hooves. Oxcarts would be a good bet within a few years. Carpenters would really miss their power tools, so that might be an island of rapid reindustrialisation. Water/wind mills/steam engines to generate electricity, electricity to run the ol' Black and Decker. Guns are not overwhelmingly hard to make, but at least in the short term, modern ammunition is even easier. An industrial chemist could turn out fulminate and cordite without too much trouble (barring the occasional explosion), and that's all that's required for a home reloader. Cartridge shells would be another matter. Hold onto your brass! How much ammunition is another question. Anarchy and tyranny make for a cool adventure hook, but are not nearly as common a mode of social organisation as some people think. Mob justice, random executions, houses burning down in the night and local feuds settled by "unsolved" shootings? That's another matter. 'Course, that kind of thing quickly leads to a countryside organised into two well-armed factions that transfer most of their aggression to court. Look for a county seat where some luckless executive trys to steer a middle course between the factions to get anything done, ending up instead randomly swerving from one faction to another, political shifts being signalled by either elections or "conspiracy" plots accompanied by random executions. See seventeenth century history (any) for details. Once intellectuals get involved, expect a veneer of principles to be laid over the naked competition for positions as county dike warden, road contractor, and sheriff.

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries The thing about all the high profile mysteries like the Voynich Manuscripts is that they tend to detract from the real ones. The "Minoans" and their mysterious, undeciphered Linear A script are very exciting, but if the Minoans actually were an advanced, powerful civilisation, there are virtually guaranteed to be Linear A-Akkadian bilingual texts in the diplomatic archives of nearby powers. Many Bronze Age archives have been found in the last few years. If the premise is correct, the key to Linear A is lying underground somewhere. It happens that the biggest power on the Anatolian coast was Arzawa, and its capital is very likely to have been Sardis. Sardis today is a greenfield site covered with picturesque ruins, easy to excavate and self-evidently worth it. Yet only a tiny fraction of of it has been dug. There's not the time, money and energy.

Re: [PAH] 50 years After What happened? People are resilient, so big changes require either a largescale effect or else fantastic changes in the nature of things. i) Grim and gritty, big smash: cavemen. ii) Fantastic, big smash: mutant metis priests riding telepathic moose fight zombies! iii) Grim and gritty, small smash: everyone picks up and rebuilds best they can. There's a lot of horse-rustling, because there weren't many of them around before, and they're really valuable now. The richest family in the region used to run a hayride with Clydesdales, and now have the postal monopoly. iv) Fantastic, small smash: half-elven werewolves are jacked into the cybernet!

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain?

Re: Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils Maybe not an archaeological conference, but the Learneds, for sure. Every day at 5PM, right after the last paper is given to a few earnest grad students, there's Dr. Smith the physicist talking about overthrowing a galactic empire in his space-battleship and being back in time to slip his grant proposal into NSERC under the wire. Dr. Grant explains how dealing with a herd of brontosauri rampaging across campus before they can do any real damage (the educationi building gone? Oh, that's just ...terrible) can really change minds on the tenure review committee. For real credit, wait until the football team has been smushed, 'cuz even a team of walk-ons wouldn't let themselves get beat 50-14 by Ottawa for Pete's sake. And then, since the rule is that everyone at the table buys a round and tells a story, you have to hear about freakin' ocelots.

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain? Apparently I have to give up on the "Darkseid is behind Intergang/ARGENT" reveal. Poo. Oh, well, it's not as though the real thing was anywhere near as cool as I remember it as a 10 year old. But I'm still going to hold my breath until I turn blue.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Hero You Americans are just so cute when you're having an election. Is there any chance you can schedule them so you're always having one? Oh. Never mind then. Uhm, uh, Post-Apocalyptic Hero. Is that like when the grocery store runs out of Pellegrino? (We're a little sheltered here in Kitsilano.)

Re: Pulp sci-fi Nah, the rancor (darn, you've seen right through me) is directed at a guy named Corelli Barnett. The Hollywood vision of the world is just about being human. What a pity that I spewed all my anger over what looks like a a fine game setting. That said, if we all just surrendered to bad history, we would still believe that Columbus proved that the world was round.

Re: Pulp sci-fi I refuse to not flip out. Flipping out is my right. It's in the constitution, right under the part where the government has to run a railway on Vancouver Island. (That's right, we Canadians have a good constitution. And if there isn't an Internet constitution that says that you're allowed to flip out without reading something, then there's a lot of very confused people out there. What got me about the scenario presented in this fine resource is that it puts the Brits in a tagalong sidekick mode. Britain ended up on the verge of being a sidekick, but while I don't know if you Americans have noticed, the Brits usually walk a fine line. They pretend to be sidekicks, but mainly to rook you. When they're really incapable of playing an independent part, they sit in their rooms feeding coins into the heater and pretending to be above such things. Great Britain's national income (the measure of choice in 1939) was about 40% larger than Germany's. Modern GNP estimates pull the numbers down to parity. (Or so it says in Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction. The long and the short of it (I lie, I'm incapable of being brief) is that the British armed forces were huge, as was their defence budget and the R&D portion of it was equally big. British aircraft production pushed past German in the second quarter of 1939, and this was a great deal worse than it looked for the Luftwaffe as it was approaching a developmental and scientific bottleneck in which ULTRA and radar are only the tip of the iceberg. Of course all the spending in the world doesn't matter if there aren't boots on turf where it matters. I suspect that the imminent next flight of BEF reinforcements might have been enough to turn the tide in the critical fighting of 20--2 May, but that's as may be. At that point, the UK was hooped. It had to accelerate army production to the same scale as air and naval building, cutting off exports at a time when American imports were as vital to their economy as ever. Worse, American manufacturers were suddenly on the hook for a 2 billion dollar French spending spree. It would have been as idiotic for the Americans to let Britain goas it would have been for Britain to let many of the best American defence contractors suddenly declare bankruptcy. So Britain pretty much spent its immediate credit assuming the French buys, and the Administration played along, making an additional offer of American surplus field guns, mortars and rifles to really involve Americans in an expected imminent German invasion of Britain. This wasn't what the British needed. Guns and rifles are glamorous but not that hard to replace. What was lost in France was stuff like shells, cable and trucks. "Lend-Lease" won the war, but later. In the meantime the folk "fact" that is stuck in people's heads is that an advanced industrial economy with the largest public research and development effort on Earth somehow couldn't produce high technology. This is a bad lesson to teach, IMHO. Not quite up there with, say S. M. Stirling pounding us with the notion that eugenics works, but bad enough.

Re: Old Enemies Crown Prince Angelus Quintus of Not-Spain. Or, he used to be a Crown Prince. Then he was a King. And then his vassal Not-Cortez landed on a far coast and ...let's say he has some resources to pursue an old vendetta.

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain? Sticking to Champions ('cuz John Mill and Thomas Macaulay are not going to head many other "enemies" lists) i) Tesseract (also Gyre, so maybe a split vote) has a very cool powerset with enormous plot potential. ii) Foxbat is a popular choice for goofball, but El Sauriano might just be even more ludicrous. iii) Telios is my idea of a master villain. I'm not quite sure how he got to have a 30 body, but what really gets me is his genetic loyalty treatment. I've always envisioned him as being an evil Hari Seldon masquerading as a "mere" genetic mastermind. And behind that is whoever set him up... iv) Takofanes. He has ruled the world before, and he's had a long time to cook up a plan. I cannot shake the feeling that he's behind some of the other mysterious things going on around the Heroverse --unlikely, unexpected things, like Mechanon, for example. v) Arvad the Betrayer and his boys. He's not quite as grand as Darkseid (I'm hoping that a better Hero-Darkseid will turn up behind ARGENT), but close enough.

Re: After DEMON wins... Not high enough, not dark enough. There's a plothook in Arcane Adversaries that works here. It is a Matrix world. The few surviving humans live in a very thinly veiled illusory world that they cling to haplessly until the very moment they are harvested, while outside the tiny little pockets of life, non-Euclidean structures loom over a black, blasted cinder, except for the Congo and Amazon basins, where Elder Worms and Thanes prepare to move on. I wouldn't put in a Resistance at all, except that the heroes have to talk to someone and get out. Leader? the only one it could be. Takofanes. The Crowns are his toys. So are Teleios and Mechanon. Other than that, he knows better than to trust human flesh in his desperate fight. He is more than willing to send the characters back in time to prevent this outcome, but he doesn't even bother denying that he is using this opportunity to engineer his past ascension. As far as he's concerned, it is Takofanes or the Lords of Edom. Your choice.

Re: Pulp sci-fi Help me out here: there were Americans in World War 2? Oh, wait, sorry, missed a footnote in my history books here. December 7th, 1941? Well, better late than never to join in, I say. Seriously, I accept that the gaming industry is going to be a little fixated on 300 million American consumers, but is anyone out there in the community even aware that the United Kingdom had a GNP as large as Germany's in 1939 and a lot more Nobel Prize winners than the States? What, exactly, were the French and British doing about space? Waiting for the Americans to give them second-hand spaceships so they could join in? Jolly good show, what!

Re: Artificial Islands Nan Madol already has a place in the Hero Universe. It is the place where the Basilisk Orb was stored until the Edomite showed up to use it in 1968. My first thought when I saw this was that it was going to be a bit about the "seadromes" that were supposed to be strewn across the Atlantic in the 30s so that passenger planes could island hop to Europe.

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

Re: Planets from Past Futures Incredible site. "Mad scientists of the twenty-first century, get cracking!"

Re: Questions for the Canadian HEROBoard members Bearing in mind that this all comes from CBC Radio playing in background (our southern buddies should imagine what would happen if PBS and ABC got married and nine months later..., only with a radio service, too) The big Winnipeg street gangs for many years past have been Native, usually called [something] Warriors [something]. The excitement of recent years has been Somali immigrants. They're into meth, the old ultraviolence, and living life by the code of gangsta rap. (So just like suburban white boys, that way.) They'd like to have Glocks, but are a great deal more likely to try to stick pointy things at your players. A trend here in Vancouver in recent years has been big machetes and curio swords. Don't know if it has spread to Winnipeg. There's a reason that hardware stores sell machetes in Vancouver, and it doesn't really apply in the Peg. Hope that helps.

Re: Questions for the Canadian HEROBoard members Winnipeg? Well, when a 'Pegger gets on the Internet, maybe there'll be a better response. But... hot in summer, cold as heck in winter. Mosquitoes. An underground mall beneath the main intersection in town (Portage and Main), much appreciated because of the wind. Francophone, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Native culture intersecting, with a new generation of colourful ethnic street gangs added to the mix. A CFL team but no other pro franchises above junior, although they're desperate keen to have their old NHL team, the Jets, back. Allegedly, a vibrant cultural scene. Keanu Reeves played Hamlet in a local production one summer back in 1996, and a local tycoon bought the unwieldy TV/newspaper conglomerate built up during the convergence craze, so that the Asper family was supposed to become Canada's designated opinion-havers. Unfortunately, they forgot that they lived in Winnipeg.

Re: Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils The point isn't that he is unlucky, or strong or dextrous or has OCD. The point is, he's a whiner. The other archaeologists never complain about this. Look, take a deep breath, step back, and accept. It is part of the job. Why do you think you had to take that Methods and Techniques seminar on bullwhip fighting in grad school? Geez.

Re: Alien Stereotypes The immensely long-lived race that finds human FTL (and maybe even its taste for living around stars, 'lit' or otherwise) tasteless. The incomprehensible gas-giant dwelling race that just might actually know what is going on --if you could talk to it. Also incomprehensible, the sonar-using batlike people. This one is sure to be a hit with philosophy majors. Giant, powerful reptilians that may or may not want to eat us. Intelligent, mind-controlling plants. Blobs that assimilate our protoplasm to grow.

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries When this came out, I nearly posted that the original feature ought to have been called "World's Most Overrated Mysteries..." But that would be biting the hand that feeds. What I ought to have said then, and want to say first of all now is.... Thank You, Susano for posting that and considerately keeping this forum alive. Thankythankyou. That said, I'll take on the Tarim Mummies. Way back in the day when the whole Indo-European thingie wasn't on life support (recently linguists have talked in terms of the "Indo-European Fallacy" that languages occur in large families or related tongues), one of the first things people noticed about the presumptive Indo-European families is how remarkably close Greek and Iranian are. Throw in a few presumptively similar languages along the road between Iran and Greece (Armenian and Phrygian), and there was a strong presumption that we could talk about a Greco-Iranian civilisation from, say, 1000BC to 500BC. This, to put it mildly, did not sit well with the somewhat less than enlightened theorists of the 19th century, and they were very glad indeed to notice that they could group all "European" IE languages separately from all "Oriental" IElanguges by the way they pronounced a word ("centum" is Europe) ( "satem" is Asia) Then, in the 1950s, researchers recovered a "lost" Indo-European language that had been spoken in two of the major Tarim Basin oases from a vast archive of documents accidentally preserved from the versos of Buddhist devoltional exercises, precisely dating them to the Mid-Tang. There was already plenty of evidence that the Tarim had been occupied by Indo-European speakers in the 600s/700s AD, with archives in both Iranian and Indian Indo-European languages. But these were Oriental as Oriental could be. Tocharian was a centum language, hence European. The discovery of Caucasian mummies dating to the millenium before from the area around Urumchi was therefore a great relief to the theorists, who even seized upon shroud-weaving styles to proclaim the Tocharians "Celts." See, Urumchi isn't, exactly, in the Tarim Basin. It is the Dzungharian Basin, parallel and to the north of the Tarim. Dzhungaria is colder than the Tarim, but also wetter, making it possible for Stone Age peoples to live there and travel through it from the Middle East to China, as we already knew had been done. There's no real reason to think that the mummies spoke Tocharian, but there is no reason to think they didn't either, and the breed of archaeologist that does think that he can figure out what language dead bodies spoke by talking to their pots was already convinced that Mummies=Tocharians. So there's the first point. The Tocharians carried wheat, barley, sheep, chariots from the Middle East to China. Second point: it has also been argued that the Tocharians also brought bronze, writing and Middle Eastern religion to China. Certain linguists have been claiming to see signs that Early Chinese was an Indo-European language since the 1950s, and the theory is given pretty serious attention in the Cambridge History of Early China. The Tocharians can be seen as China's culture bearers, and China's ancient civilisation as "derivative." This is a petty and stupid argument, but hey, if the Internet has proven anything, it is that people have a taste for such. Third point: on the map it looks like the easiest route from west to east via Dzhungaria runs across the Kalmyck Steppe to the Volga and thence to the Middle East via the Caspian or across the Volga to Ukraine. Thus proof that the Centum languages really did keep clear of the Middle East and that the vigour of our Aryan ancestors was not polluted by inferior Semitic stock... Ur, what I mean to say in purely dispassionate, scientific terms is that this proves the "Kurgan hypothesis" about Indo-European origins, which is a purely scientific dispute that laypeople should not pay any attention too, and.. sorry if there are any typoes here, but my right arm tends to fly into the air of its own accord whenever I start writing about the Kurgan hypothesis. (The foregoing is brought to you by the Committee of People Who Unfairly Parody the Views of Hard Working Historical Linguists, Thereby at least Skirting Godwin's Law.)

Re: Another human civilization may live inside Earth's hollows So we all agree on the importance of the scantily-clad ladies. There's other stuff to like about the Hollow Earth such as.... Uhm, dinosaurs?