Lawnmower Boy

Re: COPS, CREWS, AND CABALS -- What Do *You* Want To See? _I_ would like to see the religious angle covered. Why not writeups for a made-up church? Say, the Zoroastrian Church of America, conveniently headquartered in Campaign City, right next to the offices of the Old Northwestern Baptist Conventicle, which features as an example of how to handle interfaith issues. Then if we want to use the Chief Priest's writeup for the Dalai Lama or relocate the Secret Underground Exorcist Headquarters to the Vatican, that's our lookout. And now that I'm being eccentric, can I put in a request for a DNA Project (as in the Kirby Jimmy Olsen run, and/or Hydrobase down in the Submariner's neck of the woods? Gotta love those irresponsible scientists in their underground laboratories/ regular people irreversibly transformed by the evil science of Doctor Dorcas and making a new life for themelves in an exotic environment. Also, I like the Time Bandits group. (Perhaps because these days I only read the stuff rather than running campaigns. But, heck, I'm a market, too.) And I am now officially waiting for the ARGENT sourcebook. Hope it is half as cool as DEMON.

Re: Thoughts on some superhero origins And before Mcloud, there was Vigilante. Has he ever been cooled up? Aquaman works as a "Jungle Lawman," too. With the same problem that they all had. No banks to rob under the sea. At least Turok had dinosaurs to fight. Skull the Slayer (gang of Bermuda Triangle survivors trapse through an underdefined weird setting, one of them equipped with a superpowers-thingamazoo) gave the concept far more story potential, much of it pissed away.

Re: Hero vs D20 Future Predictably, Hero Boards say that Hero is better. But I've heard rumours that D20 Future will get a fantasy expansion so that you can, you know, fight dragons in dungeons and stuff.

Re: Need Viking Data There's a nice review article in a recent _Antiquity_ provoked by Chris Wickham's claim of an archaeologically verifiable "flattened hierarchy" in Denmark as late as 700AD. The upshot: perhaps no kings at all. In what follows I am going to assume that we can build a picture of a Scandinavian army-raising society in which a king and organised court or feudal apparatus is only an epiphenomena. The book I am waiting for promises to deconstruct the entire idea of the Viking. (_Goodbye to the Viking_). There's a real point to that. The classic view is that these communities mobilised for war in the form of warbands of 1--200 persons led by charismatic figures (war chief?) who might become the "Traditionskernel" of a contingent ethnogenesis. In that case, why not Slav, Scot, Irish, Permian, Lapp "Vikings?" More to the point, kingdoms can rise and disappear with the fate of the individual war chieftains. According to N. A. M. Rodgers (_Safeguard of the Sea_, 13--18) all "Viking" warships are rated in "rooms," defined as the interval between frames. The number of rooms is by definition the number of oars. A 20--25 room vessel of more than 75 feet length would be the typical warship, one of 30 or more (as much as 145 feet long) an exceptional vessel fit for a king --and apparently the true "dragon ship." (Rodgers cautions that some archaeologists disagree.) More than one man at each oar would be the inference here for the larger vessels. (Notice that as a medievalist Rodgers doesn't have to enter the trireme controversy. Presumably the laws of physics have changed to their modern form since the 400s BC.) So you cannot raid, nor establish a new settlement, without, say, 45 men. But is a 100 man warband a reasonable number, either? It does seem relatively well attested, making a single 20 roomer too small for a warband, so a war chief has at least three long ships. When I think of a Scandinavian notable, I tend to think of someone like Erik the Red. He certainly did not plant a household of 100 warrior males in Greenland, nor did he go there in 3 20s, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't recruit the men and obtain long ships. So here is the key point: it comes down to the leader in his (and his lineages') pursuit of charisma. He might build wealth from as few as a couple hundred followers in an _economic_ context (where he would need craftspeople, women, older individuals), and deploy that wealth to gather in warriors from all over the northern seas. These individuals would then identify with the leader and perhaps come to be seen as members of his family/tribe/nation, but they could disappear as quickly as they were recruited. In a stable context he would need to be able to feed all of these out of the surplus of the agronomy/fishery under his control. That goes to the expected productive surplus of northern farms. Test cases suggest that the Norse could extract a great deal out of their typical island farms, although you'd never know that from, say, Jared Diamond. Populations of thousands in south Greenland are one way of framing the question. Being able to pull an actual field survey of, say, an Orkney island would be another way. Unfortunately, I don't have that available.

Re: How do you become a Jedi i) Try a career as a child jockey. ii) Have a high midchlorian count. The rest takes care of itself, and everything ends for the best.

Re: Best Recurring FH Villains Francesco the Cruel. Actually, all he wants to do is marry the girl next door back home in his Istrian village. He's a good catch --rich, strong, psionically potent and an important member of Louis XIV's inner circle. Who wouldn't want him? Too bad that she's got some kind of high falutin' mystic destiny and is surrounded by PCs who play incomprehensibly rough every time he makes a move... Come to think of it, the next time I try to run this plotline, I think he will end up with the girl.

Re: Walking Directions To Mordor What the heck? Okay, this worked great for the Shire, but directions get a little sparse later on. When I hit the Pelinnor Fields interchange I pretty much had to take an exit at random. I thought I was on the Minas Tirith bypass until I ended up in grinding traffic jam at a dead end a thousand feet in the air stuck watching some guy go all Burning Man. Let me tell you, do not even bother looking for a motel room in M. T. It's like there's an army in town. I had to drive all the way to Minas Morgul to find a place with a vacancy at a reasonable price, and let's just say that it was not exactly a 5 star joint. The SO was talking about skinflints and being stuck "in hell," the kids were all going totally arachnophobia, and some 3" juvenile delinquent stole the car and crashed it into a volcano. And don't even get me started on the MEAA. "Blah blah epochal crisis blah." "Some delays" my arse. We were stuck in that crummy motel for a week waiting for a rental.

Re: Where did this come from? I'm going to get all stubborn-like and say that no, they're floats. I could argue that they are shaped like pontoons and have no obvious shock absorber in their wing connection, or point out that this is how they made floatplane amphibians back in the day. But really, this thing has to be an amphibian. How could it not be a seaplane? It has everything else going for it! (Tho' maybe someone could photoshop a wireless antenna or three in.)

Re: Where did this come from? Actually, there were monoplane fighters in the late 20s, and the one in the background looks like one from the fixed-undercarriage type wheel spats. The big thingie's engines have such poorly-fitted fairings that I would say they were more WWI-era. Or the engines are some kind of super-Napier Lions on a Junkers "big wing." Alas, the floats are far too small, so this 'plane just would not float.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares I'm glad that the trustees of the Jane Austen papers are finally loosening their grip on her unpublished manuscripts. But when will Sense and Sensibility and Terminator Robots From the Future Blowing Stuff Up be published, exactly?

Re: Quantifying Interstellar Empires You're perfectly right. They all make cool campaign backgrounds. I was just getting professionally shirty, is all. Chris Wickham is a good example of why good campaign backgrounds don't match to good history. If there's one conclusion to be drawn, he says, it is that everything was incredibly boring and anticlimactic. Lead in the waterpipes is much more fun.

Re: Quantifying Interstellar Empires However, some historians think that there is virtually no data with which to measure relative income levels in Late Antiquity. Those (really) interested may want to look up Chris Wickham's recent _Framing the Early Middle Ages_. Two things recommend it to me. First, while a dry, dry, dry read, it deliberately resists drawing clear conclusions. There's far too much speculation out there, backed by far too few facts, and far too many books that need to carry a "Danger: obsolescent" sticker on them. Edward Luttwak, I'm a-looking at _you._ Wickham's use of cutting-edge theory and great wallops of archaeology points to Roman Empire suffering a top-down political collapse. Wickham's theories are not incontestable. A recent issue of _Antiquity_ has a much more accessible review essay that critiques some of his test cases, but his overall framework (that the withdrawal of the taxing state provoked the social "simplification" that we see as Dark Ages) seems convincing even to non-Marxists like, well, most of us.

Re: Trans-Atlantic Airplane Flights in 1933 Although there were a number of chartered transatlantic flights in 1933/34, the one that sticks in my mind was one by an American couple, the Hutchinsons, who were billed in the tabloid press as the "Flying Family." They weren't the first themed trans-Atlantic fliers, but they were the most irresponsible, something that took a lot of doing after the "Florence Nightingale" episode. See, their gimmick was that they had two young children. Whom they brought along for their flight. Plus a videographer to take home movies in flight so that they would have something to sell to the newsreels. Whoops, I mean, "some cherished memories of the family outing." Anyway, it was a multihop flight. They arrived on Anticosti Island on 25 August 1934, intending to do a Canada-Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Britain route. But since they were not exactly burning road, and there was a lot of publicity, various authorities were alert and eager to stop them. A _lot_ of people died trying to cross the Atlantic in those days, and the killjoys thought it wasn't really a child-appropriate activity. In spite of this, they reached Greenland, refuelled at a supply depot set up by Charles Lindbergh, and proceeded across the ice cap. There were a bunch of weather and aviation expeditions active on Greenland's east coast at the time (that's a whole 'nother story, and very pulpish, since some of them were half-seriously looking for lost Vikings) and the Hutchinsons presumably aimed to meet up with them or something. Instead, they crashed their 'plane (a Sikorsky twin-engine amphibian) and had to be rescued, apparently costing the life of one of the rescuers. I say apparently because IIRC it was someone named "Udet," and the death report was never confirmed. I don't know Ernst Udet's biography well enough to be sure, but Greenland air expeditions are something he would have been involved in at the time. The Hutchinsons were last seen in family court, arguing for custody...

Re: Thrilling Places question That's it. I'm buying Masterminds this afternoon if it's still down at Drexol Games.

Re: Go home, Superman! Anyone out there working in Western Canada these days? Superman is there, of course. The problem is that he's a Boomer, pushing 50 and juggling his career as publisher with family responsibilities. Let's face it, at that age you need your 8 hours and you have to spin by Metropolis U at least daily to keep the boy on the straight and narrow. Inheriting half-Kryptonian powers doesn't somehow make you hand in your calculus homework on time. Too bad that the Giant Clams from Saturn and Saberhagenhomagetron don't follow current job market demographics. They're out to destroy Metropolis 24/7. The answer? Hire someone! You can probably afford a few disgruntled and cynical Gen Xers ("Hey, I have a PhD, why am working entry level? Ooh, right, big pay cheque") to leaven a team of over-employed Echo babies. ("Are 17 year-olds normally put in charge of the Justice Satellite? You know I have to be at home at 11, right? It's a school night.") Only this incredibly green, somewhat overscheduled team stand between freedom and apocalypse. At least when the Big Blue Cheese is doing his six weeks at the lake in the summer. And, hey, August he's taking the family on a Grand Tour of the Galaxy circa 6 million years ago to get in touch with their heritage. Overtime for everyone!

Re: Thrilling Places question What is this love-in? Thrilling Places has a huge problem. It ought to be about ten times longer! And be an Ace Double Book. With a Ken Bulmer _Dimensions_ adventure on the flip side. Now that be pulp!

Re: Trans-Atlantic Airplane Flights in 1933 And just a quick note.... Flight (Flight -Airline Industry news....) magazine has just opened its archives to online search. I just ran over there and checked out the Arc-en-Ciel and pulled up four or five pages from 1928 to 1935. As a card-carrying techno-moron I don't know how to paste in the link, but it should be easy enough to find on Google. (It is also available in a complete microfilm edition from UMI at your nearest municipal library, but that's another story.)

Re: Greening Earth’s Deserts I, on the contrary, would be surprised if it hit the currently predicted low range estimate of 10.6 billion. The problem in most of the world already is underpopulation, and it will get much worse, much faster than is currently realised. Imagine what will happen to immigration dependent countries like Canada when China starts aiming for a 1%-of-population-annually like Canada's never-achieved immigration target. As for the Sahara in particular, a point is being missed. It is _already_ being used for agriculture --as a very low intensity ranch. The limiting resource is water, and by and large we use it well elsewhere, or we'd divert the numerous, gigantic rivers of Africa into Lake Chad and Bob's your uncle. Such projects, and others, were very much on the table back in the nineteenth century, especially in France, where they got kinda crazy after inventing the first modern demolition explosives. Suez canal, Panama canal, good ideas; diverting the Nile, not so good. My goodness there's a lot of untapped Pulp Hero adventure seeds out there....

Re: Trans-Atlantic Airplane Flights in 1933 Spam, spam, spam, spam..... Oh, look, I killed the thread. But, yeah, I know far more about this stuff than is good for me, and I assume that someone cares. Transatlantic flying has some tangential importance to the pulp era, after all. Types of Transatlantic planes 1) Really Big conventional big flying boats The basic idea is that the bigger the F/B, the more efficient it becomes vis-a-vis the land plane. The definitive "pulp" Atlantic crossing was by the legendary Dornier Do. X in (1931 I think?). Twelve engines set back-to-back in traditional Dornier style and a very conventional and overweight structure. It might have been the first F/B with a tunnel in the wing to allow the flight engineer to manually adjust the idle screw, although a similar feature shows up as late as the Consolidated PBY Catalina. With endless waits in various ports, it took the Do X almost a year to cross the Atlantic. So not a complete success. Still, the legwork in '39--41 was done by Pan Am in a perfectly conventional Boeing F/B. Imperial was going to go that way too, as soon as the civil Hercules was uprated to allow the new "G" boats (original civil version of the Short Shetland) to takeoff with a "safe" amount of fuel. Obviously Pan Am showed that Imperial was being a little pessimistic in that regard. France, Italy and Germany were already working on RBC F/Bs, inclusing a German Dornier boat with six conventional engines. 2) Unconventional F/Bs RAF prototypes under test in 1939 included one with a retractable hull and a high gull wing (to bring propeller blades out of the spray), but already in operation were Short boats with mid-air refuelling (Imperial's conventional service) and Lufthansa diesel-powered Blohm und Voss mail boats that used a ship-mounted catapult to take off in the Azores. Tom Clancy types figured that ship-catapult-launched-F/Bs would be the next big thing in ocean merchant raiders. The diesel thing turned out to be a step too far as far as Jumo was concerned, although the basic design was eventually made to work by British licensee Napier. 2) Conventional landplanes Focke Wulf and de Havilland both had mailplanes that could cross the Atlantic, but the 4E landplanes of the late 30s tended to be either disappointingly heavy or too small. British firm Fairey was working on a 4E type that could carry passengers and cargo from London to Newfoundland against the worst winds, the basic requirement for a continuous trans-Atlantic service that would be London-Montreal in ideal weather. 3) Unconventional landplanes Basically, the higher you fly, the less fuel you use. Many people were working on a pressurised stratospher 4E type in 1939, and Short was supposed to deliver in 1941. I wonder if the Short brothers ever saw Glenn Martin's account of how the crew would deal with a cabin breach. "Everyone can just stay calm until someone arrives with a patch." 4) Now that's Just Weird One entry that just won't go anywhere else, the Maia-Mercury composite, in which a stripped down Short F/B lifts a light floatplane into the air. They separate, and Mercury goes on to fly from Britain to Montreal or whatever. Mercury had the seaplane range record at the outbreak of war, but this was a little disappointing to its designers. I'm not going to edit this since I doubt anyone cares. If you need details of weight and dates, Wikipedia is pretty good these days, if sometimes erroneous.

Re: Thoughts on Early Modern Magic I can't say I had a system, but when I ran an early modern FH campaign, I had a pretty good player running a Finnish shaman and some psionic NPCs. Leaving out the largescale telekinesis, mental powers start to be recognisable in early modern concepts of magic. (Not the way I did it, but you live and you learn...) Most contemporary magicians were obsessed with learning the secrets of the universe more than they were with calling down lightning bolts on their enemies. And really, that makes sense. What could possibly be more powerful than knowing next week's weather in an agricultural society?

Re: Clean up aisle seven: who is in charge? Clean up in aisle....? Oh, gee, too bad my hearing's going. Oh, well, someone else will get it. And so, while Kyle, Guy and those Booster Gold and Blue Beetle guys are playing cards back at HQ, Superman is cleaning up from where the rendering plant train hit the olive oil-in-glass-jars train near the schoolyard. Again. What a chump.

Re: Trans-Atlantic Airplane Flights in 1933 I'm sorry that I'm being lazy about looking this up, because there were a great many heroic (in a goofy, goofy way) things done over the Atlantic between 1927 and 1939. But I did take a peak at the Wikipedia article on Amy Mollison (nee Johnson), which incidentally incorrectly identifies the plane that she and James Mollison flew from London to Connecticut as a De Havilland Dragon Rapide. Probably because no-one believes that a Puss Moth could make the trip. But believe it. This single engined three seater with an empty weight of only 1,265lb, a.u.w. of 2050lb and a De Havilland Gipsy Six inline air-cooled engine of 120hp made not one but many trans-Atlantic flights. I know that the numbers I gave in my posting above are not exactly GM-friendly, but the Wikipedia article on the Puss Moth gives it a maximum range of 300 miles! If it helps, the bracketting long-distance open-course records of 7400 and 8100 miles were set by the RAF Long Range Flight in 1931 and 1938, with the next record set by a B-29 in 1946, of somewhere upwards of 9000 miles. Note that none of these records were set by seaplanes, even though they are often creditted as being the best long distance performers of the era. In fact flying boats and floatplanes were usually chosen for this kind of thing for operational reasons. Since there was no good airfield at Midway, or on the Azores or Newfoundland when various flights were made, a flying boat was the only choice.

Re: Trans-Atlantic Airplane Flights in 1933 The first heavier than air commercial flights across the Atlantic were by four-engined flying boats in the summer of 1939. The first "survey" flights took place in 1937, and there was an abbreviated experimental flying season in 1938 involving various highly colourful aircraft. Before that there was plenty of transatlantic stunt flying ranging from ridiculous to tragic, or in some cases both. The aircraft used were pretty unusual. For example, in 1934, the Mollisons flew nonstop from London to New York in a D.H. Moth, the direct ancestor of the tiny, tiny little WWII secondar trainer. Basically, skilled pilots who knew how to nurse their engines could persuade these tiny little civilian aircraft to fly pretty incredible distances --with luck. I wouldn't even want to gues what the "range" of a DH Moth would be in the hands of pilots like the Mollisons, but basically 0.48lb gas/hp.hour is far too high for any engine of the era (that is, assuming 86 octane), .41 too low. The skill here consists of making the engine run at low output. 33% of the maximum listed hp output in your handy guide would be the absolute, very best. The amount of fuel carried you can guess from a maximum loaded weight of say, twice dry weight on the ground, but only the most skilled of pilots could take off with that load.

Re: Favorite All Time Hero/Villian/Group Good times.. Favourite hero would be Phoenix: The Protector. No, I kid. Captain Comet, but the Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter is close, and in a different vein, She-Hulk. Or Doc Samson, who deserves more respect. Heck, Toronto deserves more respect than Doc Samson gets. Favourite villain: oh, come on, who dares defy Darkseid? That Thanos M. S. Titan [guess what his middle initials stand for... no, just guess!] even comes close is testimony to the pure genius of this creation. Favourite superteam: X-Men, through all their ups and downs (all, I say, all. Marrow? La la la, I can't hear you.). This is just the best single distillation of what a teenagers buy comics for, and comics are for the inner teenager --outer teenagers should have a steady diet of uplifting, moral literature until they're old and dried up like me. Serves 'em right for being young. But the Forever People would have to come close. Favourite supervillain team? Before the GLA, before Xykon, the Frightful Four were always hiring! See, there's only three of us and we have a match with the FF in fifteen minutes.... and anybody with flight discs and superglue guns gets my respect. Um, why are you guys committing crimes to get rich, again?

Re: Democratic Republics in Fantasy Worlds? I'm guessing that we're niggling over terms because "hoplite" has a very specific political meaning. Hoplites are the basis of Greek democracy because they allow the upper middle class to take part in warfare and franchise is linked to military service. If the Roman Republic was stabler than Greek democracies, it was because the Roman military constitution went deeper into the class structure. It had hoplites, but also soldiers with cheaper equipment, drawn from lower social classes. In the long run, this gave poorer Romans the right to participate in political affairs. Drop these distinctions, say that guys with shields, armour and spears are all "hoplites" fighting in "phalanxes," which can be any kind of mass formation, and you wipe away the connection between "constitution" and "military constitution." Now, I think that would be a grand move, but that's just me.