07:53 am - Fringeworthy and Unworthiness

I just finished reading the 1993 reprinting of the 1987 game, Fringeworthy (hereafter FW).

I’m reminded why that I’m so deeply and abidingly glad that the design of games has changed so radically in the last twenty years, and simultaneously reminded why my friend maliszew’s near-obsession with the structure and feel of late ‘80’s games leaves me wholly cold.

Conceptually, FW is awesome. You probably know it better as Stargate SG-1 since 80% of the underlying concepts that went into the latter originated in FW. So much so that I’m absolutely shocked there hasn’t been any subsequent suits and huge settlements for ripping the idea off wholesale, but I digress. In FW, the world has discovered a set of huge, hovering rings that lead to a network of pathways between worlds. Only 1 in 100k can actually use these gates, so the UN administers the exploration of this new resource. Some gates open to planetary locations, some to alternate Earths (in fact, a massive, endless array of them), some to places in the solar system, some directly to other star systems. Humanity goes in, runs into aliens, finds some cooperative, others less so, and a Big Bad.

All pretty straightforward, right? I could run something based on the underlying idea in an endless parade of fun.

Then there’s the rest of the book. Remember, Tri Tac, ‘93. Ten pages of detailed, small-print human form location tables down to “front of spleen” or “5th metacarpal.” Fifteen of complicated strangely interwoven skill system, to the point of “Solar Powered Electronics” is on par with “Xenobiology.” Fifteen on randomly generating a new planet to be discovered, which is unlikely to really even be human habitable. Don’t forget the inevitable d100[1].

Could I run this? Not on your stinkin’ life. Which is pretty exemplar of the games of the era, a number of which I own in my extensive historical library.

I occasionally wonder if there’d be any money in picking up a license for some of these older properties and retrofitting a new system on the old setting info and feel. Some kind of stripped-down Fudge system would do just fine for the more mechanical systems, or maybe even just a description of common themes and means for dealing with characters in Primetime Adventures or Capes[2] . This would be impossible, since such licenses are always overpriced and would undersell, but … A man needs dreams.

Traveller done up as a Universalis plug-in and seed set amuses me so, though.

1. A review of the Fringeworthy 10th edition says it all:

   And then there’s the combat system. I’m not even going to try to describe it—you won’t believe me. To make a long story short, it makes even Rolemaster seem fast and simple by comparison. Those who want the details anyway are hereby referred to Michael Richter’s review of FTL:2448.

   In summary, this system is misbegotten all the way. Whether in or out of combat, the players and GM will be constantly flipping to different sections of the book just to find the information they need to do something. When they’re not doing that, it’ll be because they’re still trying to figure it out in the first place. Very bad for a game that has supposedly undergone ten years of playtesting.

2. Pretty much my core workhorse games now in many ways. PTA gives you a truly stripped-back character descriptor and conflict system, Capes gives you the GMless and conflict-focus for other things.

Current Mood: contemplative

04:45 am - Piracy

Arrrr, matey. Remember the rather keen WizKids pirate CCG-esque game where you assemble ships from cardboard and assign crew, then sail around blowing the living Hell out of each other?

Yeah, they've moved it online.

What? Of course I bought a starter deck. They have undead zombie pirates! You think I'd ever give up the pleasure of undead zombie pirates? I even bought an undead zombie pirate deck for the 7th Sea CCG to play with Heather and played it like three times ... but never regretted putting a single slim dime down for undead zombie pirates.

Alright, they have English and American and Spanish fleets and crews as well. But, who cares!? Undead zombie pirates, dude! With ships that can go all ghostly for a turn, or drift into and out of any fog bank, or ... well, any number of undead zombie pirate glorious wonder!

And the game has squid. OK, giant sea-kraken, monstrous multi-tentacled beasts that can sink a ship with pure malice. Can anyone reading this say nae to that?

Anybody?

Current Mood: impressed

07:33 am - The Beasts are Loose

Reality is, occasionally, good to me. In this case, my copy of Steel Beasts finally made its slow, winding way to me.

Alright, maybe it wasn't that slow. It just felt like it.

I've installed the thing and actually tinkered around with it, in a very tentative way. It comes with a 90+ page manual with coil binding, one CD, and a dongle from CodeMeter which slips into a USB port and comes with its own little USB dongle sheath. Its quite the professional-looking thing.

Of course, the reason I've been so slow about jumping right in is that the bloody thing reeks of hardcore grognardy pure-manliness simulation that's actually used by Sweden / Germany / Australia / New Zealand (in fact, the additions the ANZAC additions will be integrated into the Personal version as soon as they're added to the military versions over the next year) as a tanker training system. Admittedly, with a larger network support component and the ability to import detailed map data, but still. With all that in mind, I've been taking my time, making sure that I actually have a grasp of the way the software works before I start going painstakingly through the tutorials.

Lots of tutorials.

Tutorials for ... well, a scary number of units.

I've run through the beginning gunnery course for both the M1 Abrams and the M2A3 Bradley, and the beginning tank commander tutorial scenario. The level of detail is absolutely disgusting. And the Abrams isn't even the most highly detailed tank in the sim! That distinction goes to the Leopard 2, since most of the clients of the military version have been Commonwealth. And when I say "detail,I mean things like modeling the entire gunner's tactical information system and the interior of the tank commander's cupola and interfaces.

But that's just driving, gunning, and commanding the tank / IFVs / whatnot themselves. Combine this with a pre-combat / action-time integrated topological map and command interface, and things get really keen for a geek like me, and I'll tell you why.

Anyone but me remember the old FPS Rainbow 6? Not the newer version, which pretty much sucks (no offense intended to Richard E. Dansky), but the older ones, where you'd spend hours with the 3d projection map and various call-codes, pre-planning your teams' insertions into the environments and getting through it smooth as glass while hitting all your objectives? I was obsessed with that for a while, pretty much getting through 3/4ths or more of the first couple R6 games simply through ruthless, aggressive pre-planning and letting the bots execute my twisted and complicated, fiendishly clever plans.

SBpPE has a pre-planning mode which rivals R6 and then some, with conditional routes and various notation for battle positions and the like. The idea being that you turn out your pre-plan routes and waypoints, then run along them, juggling them as contact with the enemy demands. You can set various conditionals and even randomized routes along the way.

Its an automated drone-programmer's dream.

Alright, the hardcore of the elite FPS were running through R6 missions commanding the lone-wolf Ding Chavez, whose accuracy and resilliance were such he could take on an army alone and leave the rest of the teams sitting outside having a smoke break, but it being long established I can't hit the broad side of a barn with a, well, a tank, I thought it best to leave him in the hands of the automats with backups.

And then there's the stuff in this manual.

An excerpt:

Tank Tactics

By Nils Hinrichsen

The Single Tank

Three major properties influence the appropriate tactics for the single tank on the battlefield,

• armor protection,
• the capability of the weapon system, and
• mobility

Armor Protection

Both the Leopard's and the M1's frontal armor are impenetrable to armor piercing (beyond about 1500m) and simple HEAT rounds at any distance. Extremely strong HEAT warheads of ATGMs might have a chance, though.

Even minor HEAT warheads will easily penetrate the side armor of the turret, while the hull's track skirts may still deflect at least bazooka missiles.It is unclear whether the improved turret armor is capable to protect from bomblet submunitions -- it sure won't save your life from a top-attack guided missile. While both hulls can withstand simple blast mines, neither of them will deflect the HEAT explosion of a modern scatter mine like the German AT-2. So remember: It's the front that will protect your life as a tanker, and nothing else! Life can be uncomfortably short in wartime, and in most cases, the crew won't even know what hit 'em.

And so on at great length. Keep in mind, this is the author being conversational, the rest of the text is both dry and direct, as befits a training system.

I'll try and get some screen shots of the rather strange panoramic format I have the game set to; in a rare bit of genius, the game actually defaults to running in a window, and remembers the format you drag it out to. More games should be so accommodating.

Ah well, back to hitting the books and even maybe possibly getting some serious sim time in at some point. I'm still thinking I'd like to try and hit First Clash at some point on a Saturday night, maybe just commanding a FIST-V or section of two tanks in a flank position, just to try and get into things. You can never go wrong giving me control of an artillery barrage or two ...

Current Mood: impressed

01:59 am - Blow. Shit. Up.

Damn you, NCsoft, damn you all to hell. First Auto Assault, and now something else you're going to make me want to spend my hard-earned dollars on.

Exteel

Test your mettle in Exteel, a fully-loaded, futuristic shooter that puts you in control of a heavily armored, completely customizable mech. Playing a mercenary pilot, you'll charge into combat, destroy your opponents, and compete for total domination.

Modify your mech and stamp out the competition as you progress through intense player-versus-player battles - learn devastating special maneuvers, upgrade vital parts, and equip deadly assault weapons.

Lock onto the enemy - the next generation of mechanized warfare is here!

• Customize your mech, upgrading key attributes like speed, endurance, defense and firepower to create a distinctive and deadly unit
• Choose from a huge arsenal of weapons, from razor-sharp melee blades to devastating siege cannons
• Learn brutal combat maneuvers to make the most of your arsenal
• Engage in deathmatch and team battles that take place on a variety of terrains, from futuristic cityscapes to bleak deserts
• Deploy tactical and strategic combat techniques to seize key campaign objectives

Giant robots. Shooting things. Big explosions. I mean, can you hit the sweet spot of me enjoying the idea any more?

Current Mood: envious

10:06 pm - The Battle Rages On

I know I'm an utter geek. There's no real question. I take books places I shouldn't, and read inappropriate things. But this is never a surprise.

Combine this with the fact that I just picked up Battle For Middle Earth II, the Collector's Edition (as if I'd settle for less), and you get things like this, me carting the manual off to the restaurant to flip through and try to get a handle on in the middle of ordering teriyaki steak. There's a certain madness that ensues when one has utterly lost one's flippin' mind that's both casual and quite comforting. I've relished it for decades.

Of course, that's just prime material for me to launch into my impressions of the game so far.

Here you see the result of my inevitable favourite part of the game, the Create-A-Hero system. Ever wanted to sit down and create your own, customized, personal RTS unit, a hero, capable of mighty magics and powerful destruction? Now, you can! CaH is particularly interesting in that it allows you to not only pick your character type and some minimal equipment / colour editing (which makes sense, I suppose, so characters remain distinct on the screen at all scales; wouldn't do not to know what kind of hero it is) but also what exact power progression they access as the character levels up during the course of the game.

In the case of the character here on the left, Vrai Sarkur, an "Avatar," or wielder of the profane Istari power, that meant picking Lightning Bolt as his first Power and taking every single upgrade for it as the levels advanced, first thing. In play, I tend to just right-click to set it to auto-fire, and just wade into combat with a particularly lovable smile. Since you point-allocate several of your traits at creation time, including things like Armour, Health, and Heal Rate, Vrai ended up with a chunk of Armour, high Power, and really lousy Heal. Just like the original!

Contrast that with Ky-Lin here on the right (inspired by one of nyxsis' characters in other contexts, certainly not Middle Earth) who's a female Elven archer with pretty much every archery upgrade one can take on the power tree, the ability to summon a powerful tornado at her higher levels, and a tendency to heal herself at opportune times. Handy stuff, especially the "No, I just keep getting scarier and scarier as an archer as I go, thanks!" Plus, check out that lovely blue I managed to wrangle out of the system!

So, that's Create-a-Hero.

In-game itself, the graphics level has been pushed up over even the original, which wasn't slacking, and they've changed the factions around a bit, including adding the Goblins in, which I'm sure will come as great pleasure to Eric the .5b, since their primary calvary unit is a big-ass spider-riding goblin that you can upgrade with venom sacks later. Whoot! Plus, the usual assortment of Nazgul, Witchking of Angmar, and your custom heroes (of which, only the mages can fight on either side; the rest are one or the other).

The base-building system has been significantly altered, though. Now you have to build a Fortress instead of having a pre-chosen plot on which to build, but you still get the cool surrounding attached nodes on which you can build things like guard towers, catapults and the like. Oh, yes, and several factions can actually build walls which can be modified with defensive and offensive options. Very cool stuff.

The rhythm of construction still eludes me. You have to build resource gathering sites to have enough funds to recruit an army, of course, and I haven't quite figured out the right rate at which to juggle constructing things like mines and building up my army. Playing online, I generally get smacked with an archer rush early on, because the factions I tend to play don't have anti-archer hordes that work for shit in the first tier. So I clearly need to work on building some defenses for my Fortress first up and then work on a defensive push.

Still, Battle For Middle Earth II has some of that same coolness that Dawn of War dragged me, Heather, Eric the .5b, and Mike into it with, the fascination of interesting-looking bases to build (the Goblins have the coolest Fortress in the game, bar none, even better than Mordor, which can have the Eye of Sauron atop it at full build), powerful hero-units (the Balrog is a summonable for the side of Evil and Good can summon floods), and pretty graphics.

I think we have a winner, here. At least until the next Dawn of War expansion comes out. Necrons, ho!

Current Mood: contemplative

06:07 am - Stranger Than Fiction

Man breaks display case to read rare book

By The Associated Press | October 3, 2005

MADISON, Wis. --Some book worms live outside the law.

Matthew Brooke, 26, allegedly smashed a display case at the Wisconsin Historical Society to steal a Revolutionary War-era volume worth $5,000. He was charged Friday with felony theft of library materials and criminal damage to property.

Brooke went to the Historical Society on Thursday, according to a criminal complaint, and smashed the window on a second-floor antique display case with his elbow. He allegedly swiped the "Pennsylvania Evening Post" from inside the case.

The book is a collection of the newspaper's issues dating from January to April 1777.

A police officer found the book stuck in the waistband of Brooke's pants, the complaint said. Brooke told detectives he took the book because he wanted to read a story on page 106 about a historical figure named William Hill.

Am I the only one reminded, strongly, of every single game of Call of Cthulhu ever played? Seriously. At some point during every single CoC session, at least one of the characters, if not all of them, will break into some city building and crack open a case containing a rare book or reference. Usually, it happens a couple times.

So, let's try and figure out what Brooke was after, shall we?

Its Madison, Wisconsin, which puts us just outside Milwaukee on the lovely shores of the Great Lakes. The tome he lifted was a collection of newspaper articles from a very specific range of dates, in a period 200-plus years ago, and specifically from a non-local paper, from a Pennsylvania paper, the Pennsylvania Evening Post. The period in question is not the usual 1776 period of interest around Pennsylvania, but the following year, early on.

Certain questions immediately come to mind:

• Why was the text not kept in Pennsylvania? What threat to its local safety necessitated its relocation?
• The winter of 1777 was a particularly hard one for the fledgling rebellion of colonies. What horrors or dark pacts might they have been driven to?
• Who is William Hill?

The last question is of particular merit. A naive search doesn't actually turn up a "historical figure named William Hill." There are two oblique references which might be of interest here:

• A colonel William Hill wrote a memoir of the revolution.
• Less prosaically, there is this reference to the geography of Philadelphia:
  
  One of the most famous of the outlying country homes around Philadelphia was Bush Hill, the "Seat" of William Hamilton. Located just north of Vine Street, the house was to play an important role as a hospital during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793.

Perhaps Brooke was more interested in the "hill of William" than an obscure soldier of the Revolution. We would need a copy of the text itself to make sure, and I'm certain anything useful we might learn at this point will have been redacted by the Powers That Be. But if Bush Hill was used as a hospital 14 years later, in 1777 it would have been a site of some significance, as William Hamilton was a man of not inconsiderable power and influence. If there are dark arts to be sought in the Forefathers' acts, Bush Hill would not be a poor place to start digging.

My suspicion is that Brooke was, in fact, seeking a clue to lead him to the resting place of some buried horror in the Pennsylvania landscape. If not located at Bush Hill itself, it may have been reported by a passing reference of Colonel William Hill (or whatever his rank was 3 years before the text for which he is known was written). It would take a considerable mental shock to make a young man of 26 so driven that he would break into a Historical Society, break glass openly, and attempt to abscond with a tome, so it would not be unlikely to suggest this action was born of an imbalanced mind, as one oft finds touched by the knowledge of Things Beyond.

If this analysis does, indeed, come close to the truth, it is in our best interests, as protectors of the world of the sane and the defenders of the rites of Man, to continue his work and put an end to the unholy horrors which Mister Brooke has, until now, sought alone.

Who's bringing the dynamite?

Post Scriptum: Of course, I missed it the first time. Yellow Fever. Its another incursion of the King in Yellow, who Hamilton had truck with, and whose later malaise nearly two decades later was covered up as a plague. Its so obvious, in retrospect! We need to start looking for examples of the Yellow Sign in both Madison and Philly. I'm certain there is some dark link.

Current Mood: crazy