2295 Stellar Survey - Appendix F (Anomolies & Restricted Worlds)

Captain's Log, U.S.S. _________, H_____ S___, commanding...

We have completed our remote survey of stellar system ZA-9748PJF, usually known as the Zelazny System. Of the ten planets circling this G class star, four of them are not only class M, but inhabited. Though this, in and of itself, is not unusual; there is considerable evidence that this is an engineered situation.

Zelazny-3 is a hot, humid, jungle world with small oceans. Most native intelligent life bears great resemblance to insectoid and reptilian forms. However, there are pockets of other sapients - humanoid and more unusual forms, that my Science Officer insists are not of native origin. Also, dispersed across the planet are ruins of a mysterious nature. I believe them to be remnants of a star-faring society due to their similarities to the architectural stylings of the F______.

Zelazny-4 is a warm, ocean world. Land masses only cover ten percent of its surface and consist of three micro-continents and a plethora of islands. The native intelligent life is, quite reasonably, mainly aquatic in nature. However, the aquatic sapients are of three derivations; pseudo-piscine, pseudo-cephalopod, and aquatic humanoids. All of these appear to be in a state of war with the others. Some humanoid forms exist on Zelazny-4's scattered land masses, the majority of which appear to be related to the aquatic humanoids. Once again, my Science Officer speculates that these apparently unrelated sapients are not native to the planet. I find myself in some agreement with her, as there are traces of ruins similar to those on Zelazny-3.

Zelanzy-5 is very similar to Earth in terms of physical properties. However, unlike Earth, it is inhabited by a wide array of sapient species; the majority of whom are humanoids. Zelanzy-5 is also the most heavily populated planet in the system and as such supports a great variety of polities and ethnocultural groups. Many of these appear to be remnants of more technologically sophisticated societies. Though our scans were unable to discover any traces of ruins similar to those on the other inhabited planets, we did uncover a large amount of ruins of a bewildering assortment of styles; primitive, technological, and post-technological.

Zelanzy-6 is not a dead world, yet. But the inhabitants certainly tried to make it one once. Some form of thermonuclear apocalypse occurred roughly seven or eight hundred years ago and this has left the planet rife with deadly zones and common sense defying mutants. Due to these rampant and peculiar mutations, and the abbreviated nature of this survey, we were unable to determine the exact number of sapient species on Zelazny-6. Obviously, there are considerable ruins of the pre-apocalypse civilization, but there are also earlier ruins that appear to be of the same style as those on Zelazny-3.

None of the various governments are ready to be contacted by our federation due to their lack of star-faring technology. However, that alone would not make me recommend that this system be quarantined. There are at least two reasons I can provide that will support my recommendation of quarantine.

1. There is considerable evidence that there is surviving, working technology from earlier periods of the system's history. The natives refer to these by multiple, usually supernatural, terms, but they do grasp the basics of how to use many of them. Mostly weapons systems, according to our scans.
2. Across all sapient species on all planets there is a high occurrence of elevated psychic abilities. The natives possess a supernaturally themed view of such abilities and refer to them as magic. Nevertheless, they are powerful and likely to cause difficulties should we attempt to interact with the native cultures.

Accordingly, I recommend that the Zelazny System be placed on the list of restricted planetary systems, on par with the T____ System. 
    

The Unsavory Tendencies of the Vagabond

A friend recently spoke to me about a term he had either created (or heard of, I misremember) as an alternate title for player character.

It was, and is, simple, elegant, and possesses a shockingly large amount of truth to it.

The term is: murder-hobo.

A murder-hobo is a person of dubious background and no fixed abode who travels the land, murdering and robbing those that society deems antagonistic (orcs), threatening (dragons), or terrifying (mind flayers). On the frequent side of occasionally, the murder-hobo also murders and robs those that society has no particular grudge against, but this is oft-times o'er-looked because the murder-hobo is of great use in keeping down dangerous species. Also, the murder-hobo typically spends what wealth they rob, thus being a wondrous boon to the economy.

 And have you seen these people? They are damned scary... Crawling out of the ruins of a mad wizard's keep gleefully waving about barely understood and less controlled magical things that a sane person would want destroyed...

Let's just say it's often easier just to tell a murder-hobo about a new, unexplored, and conveniently far away, ruin and let them traipse off rather than lose good lives putting them down.

Frighteningly, and all kidding aside, the term makes sense.

There were many published adventures where the NPCs who are asking for the PCs' aid nevertheless treat said PCs like garbage. And suddenly that was perfectly reasonable: the NPCs thought they were murder-hobos!

And let's be fair, many PCs are murder-hobos.

They smash in a door/wall/gate, lay about with a dazzling array of deadly effects, strip the place of anything and everything remotely valuable, and proceed on to do it again until they get tired.

This is not what playing a role-playing game is all about, this is what my lovely companion refers to as "playing Duck Hunt".

There is a place for "Duck Hunt", but I am well convinced that computer games do it faster, better, and without the sinking feeling that a DM gets when their campaign goes to pieces because someone wanted to mouth off to the Duke...

Murder-hobo syndrome can be avoided, just pause before you start the slaughter and think of something else to do.

Like talking.

It won't always work, but those seven foot tarantulas might be reasonable.

The other tip to avoiding being a murder-hobo, give your PC a home. Even if it's a dive bar, something that connects that PC to the world, even a story about why the PC lost their home will work. Just make it so that your PC cares about something more than descending into a terrifying, trap-filled netherworld to loot and pillage.

And stop telling the Duke that you can eat him for breakfast, you're seventh level and he's second, of course you would wipe the walls with him, that's why he's asking for your help...

Words fail me...

I quote: "There is a class of magic item - the really, really cool magic item - that we here at WotC HQ cannot publish. I'm going to talk about why that is and what we can do about it."

Here's the link: http://community.wizards.com/wotc_peters/blog/2009/12/08/magic_items_the_items_we_cant_publish

The summary: We designed "magic" items to be weak and have no plans to change that.

Why bother? No, seriously, why even bother including magic items?

Have these people no sense of joy, wonder, or excitement? Have they no desire to experiment with the warped creation of a probably unhinged and certainly obsessed mind?

Apparently fun is not mechanically sound...

"Not allowed to give quicklings Mountain Dew."

So, I recently stumbled across a small list on the vast and wonderful web...

I'd be frighteningly willing to allow many of these things in my game.

Specifically allowed are the elf with the Scottish accent (as soon as I play Shadowrun next...) and the gnomish god of heavy artillery (who I have decided is named Gelaris Thundertube, which is roughly three hundred times less dorky than Gelf Darkhearth).

Thoughts on the Nature of Things.

Being the witty and personable fellow that I am, I have a splendid collection of equally astute friends. From time to time, these worthy persons occasionally give me gifts, as has been known to happen throughout the nation. I am always thankful to receive such presents, especially when they are in line with my eccentric and occasionally odd interests, but I do not always take the time to peruse them right away.

In today's case the perusal portion of the process took about two years.

In short, I just read 'Fantasy Imperium' last night.

For those few of you with short attention spans that still struggle to gain insight from my ramblings, though I doubt any of you are left, I shall make it short and simply say, "Oh, dear..."

Allow me to lead the rest of you down a merry pathway for a time and I shall endeavor to provide additional enlightenment.

There was a time when, as a matter of course, games would set characteristic maximums at differing levels depending on the gender of the character. Generally by limiting female character's strength score. What was that from the back? No, males received no limits to any statistics, why do you ask? Sarcasm aside, this was and is defended by many as "realistic" (more on this below) but has generally been dropped from most games produced from about 1990 on (if not before). Since, you know, it's sexist and pointless and drives off players.

'Fantasy Imperium', my copy dated 2006, has such rules. They are, in the interest of full disclose, mostly optional. The non-optional part is that female character's may re-roll their "attractiveness" statistic...

Because it's a woman's job to be pretty.

Right?

And we wonder why the hobby is not that popular amongst females...

Galloping forward once more, the rules system seems horrifically convoluted, the sub-title exudes pretentiousness ("An Interactive Storytelling Game of Historical Fantasy"), and the chosen setting is Europe... with magic.

The setting has many problems. One, it's basically impossible to boil enough information on Medieval Europe down to a setting chapter that is either usable or accurate. Two, despite the vast and complicated theologies of the times, the author has decided that Christianity is the One, True Faith. This despite the provisions for "mythical races" in the rulebook...

Perhaps this is just mine own opinion, but the existence of centaurs would rather successfully argue for the presence of the Greco-Roman Pantheon.

But apparently not.

The game's piety system is vastly amusing, however. As long as one performs the rituals, one can have a high piety score, belief isn't necessary and believing in God only nets one ten points out of a one to a hundred (or more?) scale.

But enough. Though the game is bad, it's not 'Racial Holy War' or 'F.A.T.A.L.'

However, it is enough to make me wonder about the thread of misogyny that seems to weave itself into this hobby. One could, perhaps, forgive the old 'Fantasy Wargaming' its flaws as it was a product of an earlier, more benighted, time (the '80s) and it did provide really spiffy lists of the Hosts of Heaven and Hell... Nonetheless, it is part of the spectrum that includes the previously mentioned games, as is 'Fantasy Imperium'. It is possible that we simply live in a misogynistic culture and that permeates everything, but that merely redefines the problem on a grander scale.

We should, I think, consider how this sort of thing begins, and why it begins. It's easy to point at 'F.A.T.A.L.' and see that it crosses the line, the trick is finding the seemingly innocuous thing that might allow someone to think that the next step is OK as well. Keep in mind, as horrifying as it is, that the author(s) of 'F.A.T.A.L.' and 'Racial Holy War' are a part of this hobby and they started gaming somewhere before they wrote their games...

Moving on, or backwards for a bit, I wish to touch on the old AD&D limits on a female character's strength score. A sadly large number of people defend these, even unto this day, as being "realistic". The usual counter to these folk is, "So, where are the realistic dragons?"

I don't think that addresses the problem.

I am not sure if the problem can be addressed. It may be pure misogyny, it may be far more harmless.

I do know how I plan on addressing the argument in the future however.

I plan on implementing what I call "Conan-reality" in my games.

As I was thinking about this old, old argument, it came to mind that, "realistically", there was no way that R.E. Howard's Conan could be as supremely muscular and powerful as he was described in the stories. Historical barbarians could be strong, but were generally worn down by the hardships they endured, not built into towering powerhouses. However, I like the archetype of the mighty barbarian and I plan on keeping it.

The "realistic" limitations on a female's strength go in the same basket as the "realistic" limitations on the barbarian.

I hear the horde of the outraged, "But, but..." and a million reasons are proffered.

I'm not going to listen to them. Not even those that harshly restrict everything in their campaign world to "realistic" levels (where, I might ask, is the fun in that?).

Suffice to say that there could be any number of reasons for the seemingly "unrealistic" and I see no reason to artificially penalize female characters.

Adventures in Gaming

For the last month, I have been running a role-playing night at the Tacoma Public Library. This is only every other week, so only two sessions have happened, but it has been fairly well attended...

For something with virtually no publicity...

So, you know, about a dozen folks showed up...

The game I chose to have available, with an assortment of pre-gens, was the Mentzer Basic rules. Mainly because I know them well, but also because they are easy to start up and easy to explain.

I'll be whipping up a new adventure for the next night (November third, if any of you are in the area), since everyone died last night due to poor thinking on the magic-user's part.

However, the room that the library has kindly allowed us to use is absolutely enormous! We could easily fit eight tables in there and I'd kind of like to do that, if only to keep the programme going (it's running through December right now, but if the turn out is good, who knows...).

Several attendees have been surprised that 4th Ed. D&D is not being run, but the thing is, that's not what I want to play and, more importantly, no one has offered to run it.

I mean, I'm not going to be stingy here, I've got more space than I can use... You want to play 4th Ed., be my guest, grab a table and we'll try and get players for it. It's not appealing to me, but my own ego is not what this is about, this is about the love of gaming.

Sadly, even though I have asked, nay, begged, for these fans of 4th Ed. to run a game, not one seems willing to do so...

It's a tad frustrating.

I want to be helpful, but though I might play it at some point, just to see if it plays better than it reads, it's not my cup of tea.

I'm certainly not going to run the thing just for a few people who aren't willing to at least try and DM once...

My first DM was a guy named Aaron. Not because he was good at it, it was because he had the books (well, boxed set, this was Mentzer's Basic rules) and wanted to play with people. We were all eleven then and we had a great time.

I suppose the point of my rambling is, if you're not willing to DM, don't be disappointed that you can't find a group.

Someone has to be the DM.

I Strongly Suspect I'm Mad...

But I need to refine this a bit further...

Yes, if you can make it out, it's R.E. Howard's Hyborian Age affixed to E.G. Gygax's Oerth.


Oh, come on, as if the Suloise weren't related to the Stygians?

Men Out of Time

The thought occurs to me that there has been a multitude of examples in literature of the hero being a man (occasionally a woman, but I think the disparity greatly favours men) from "our modern world" - whenever that is - who is transplanted to a fantasy world.

It never seems to be the villain who is the cross-world voyager.

Oh, there's occasionally a lesser bad-guy who is such, usually weak, venal, or tricked into assisting the true villain, but there's not (to my knowledge) any example where the Dark Lord(tm) is such a traveler.

So, depending on your groups style, you could spice things up a bit in your fantasy game by having the new and terrible threat be from a modern (or futuristic) world. You'd have to make such a villain a competent, lucky, and powerful as the heroic types of the stories, otherwise they wouldn't survive. Let's face it, if dropped into a medieval fantasy world, most of us would be dead in short order. This has to be someone who is able to survive, prosper, and be a credible threat.

Motive becomes something of an issue, however. In the literature, the hero usually picks the correct side by pure luck (and/or incredible prejudice), if he does pick the wrong side, he's usually made aware of this pretty early on and gets to go on a revenge kick as well as protect the good guys. This could work for a villain, but you'd still have to work out why he's evil.

Some ideas:

The villain has been converted somehow. (Been made a member of the undead, "seen the light" (dark?) and converted to an evil god, etc)
The villain is trying to make things better, casting down unfair monarchies and re-building the world in a more "sensible" fashion.
The villain is out for blood. (The fantasy world's wizards' guild refused to help him get home/refused to believe him and so he's going to smash them all, despite this nonsense about cosmic calamity...)
The villain senses opportunity... (Just because he's a cubicle-monkey back home doesn't mean he's going to be one here).
The villain doesn't want to go home... yet some heroic group are trying to make him. (This ties in well with the above, but on its own is a bit weak).

Random Gaming Link

Because some things need to be known.

And because I hope that it will one day come to fruition. Call me mad, if you will, but Synnibarr is glorious fun.

Mayhaps insane, but fun...