A Horde of Ice a Throne of Gold

This is cribbed from a email to a friend about a poential game of Diaspora that never quite went down. Put here because it may be useful to someone else.

I made this chart to see if it would be possible to combine the Disapora rules for generating clusters and the actual moons of Jupiter to create a playing space that seemed real but could still be improvised at the table.

This is only some of the estimated 66 moons but the names are real. The small inner moons are the ones next to Jupiter. The large Gallilean moons are arranged around them and there are three groupings of six moons each, the Carme group, the Ananke group and the Pasiphae group.. The positions on the chart aren't meant to represent their actual positions in space but to show the ease of moving between the moons. We can use the random Diaspora rules to find out how easy it is to get from moon to moon within a group. Assume you can move around the inner worlds quite easily.

The tiny moons are really tiny, like a few k's long, but thats enough for a settlement or even a conflict, if there's one set of miners on one end and another on the opposite side.

If you print off the chart and re-do the transport routes with each game then it should present an energetic simulation of a moving orbital system, but one abstract enough that you can actaully make sense of it (or that I can actaully make sense of, I found actual orbital mechanics too hard).

This fits in well with the idea of reation mass, or fuel, being quite expensive and diffucult to get. So you have to conserve your mass and think carefully about when you are going to use it and where you are going to get more.

The simplest kind of reaction mass is water. Water is also valuable to us because we can use it to make air and to fill hydroponic systems to make food. It seems that for a bunch of relativly poor (in mass) Jovian moon settlers would use water as the basis for currency.

(Europa has loads of Ice of course but it's at the bottom of a gravity well and we could assume that having access to loads of water has turned the rulers of Europa into decadent Oligarchic Ice Kings lording it over everyone else, imprisoning ice pirates in the deep oceans, trapped by the very thing they sought to steal, which seems like the kind of thing dickhead rich people would do.)

So I turned the environment chart from Disaporia into this:- 

4	This rock is pure ice, nothing else.
3	A thin skin of rock over ice, or a rock of dirty impure ice with some fragements of other stuff locked inside.
2	Large amounts of easy to find Ice, some hard to find metals.
1	Lare amounts of Ice, somewhere, if you can get to it. Rumours of other stuff deep beneath.
0	An average rock, some ice and some metals beneath the surface.
-1	Enough Ice here to export very small amounts at a very steep price. High concentrations of metals somewhere beneath the surface.
-2	Not much Ice, or very hard to get. Lare amounts of metals if you mine for them.
-3	Precious metals easily accesable. Ice locked deep beneath in very small amounts.
-4	This rock is made of almost pure gold, or some other precious heavy metal. No ice at all.

The idea is that places can have Ice, which is really valuable in the moons but almost worthless elsewhere, or rare heavy metals, which are worthless in the moons but can make you a millionare back in 'The Wells' (or The Deeps? However low-g settlers would refer to the planet bound.)

This way there is a kind of market and politics inferred by the world creation and an interesting dichotomy of choice. Do you go to the moon-of-gold where starving miner kings rule from thrones cut from pure shining gold and barter kilos of platinum for chipsof ice? If you do, will you have the ice to get back?

I made this after watching some of the Sagan Series on youtube. Anothe chart-hack for the mining cultures of the Jovian Moons.

Optimism

4	"Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there."- William Westmoreland.
3	"There can be no boundry set to rational hope." Sagan/Rodenberry level optimism. As optimistic as you can be without being nuts.
2	"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,I would still plant my apple tree." -Martin Luther
1	"Have a great day!" Standard American level optimism.
0	"Eh"
-1	"Typical" Standard British-level pessimism.
-2	"Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is. "- H.R Giger
-3	"Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities." Lovecraft
-4	"Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue." Herzog

Complex Theory, meet Mundane Reality

"What defines the depth, background and consistency of your invented world?"

The weight of things I can carry in my bag. About three to five kilos back and forth to the Nerd Cafe is the most I can move without it becoming a stress.

(A factor in moving away from 4^th is that the books just physically weigh too much.)

So, two LOTFP rulebooks, Realms of Crawling Chaos, Vornheim, Isle of the Unknown, a folder of one page dungeons and info to tie it all together. Dice, many many pencils and a bottle of water. If it doesn’t fit in there then it probably wont be forming a firm part of the game background.

"So if you dropped the water bottle and took something else then the world could become more dense by a measurable extent?"

Yes, but that leads to another problem. Energy levels.

"Explain"

The extent to which I can connect different parts of these sources as meaningful aspects of the living game depends on my state of mind as the game is being played. This is affected by the amount of food I have eaten and how recently, how thirsty I am, how much caffeine I've consumed and where I am on my depressed/maniacal cycle.

Caffeine makes me more aggressive and intent, for about half an hour, then leaves me more isolated and lethargic. Then I need to go to the toilet. I'm pretty sure Mountain Dew got more than one character killed when I was playing Cyberpunk. So when I was MC'ing Apocalypse World games would peak in violence and danger as I got caffeinated, then undergo a period of distance and ennui, then break for 5 mins while I went for a piss. Like a Michael Bay film turning into a Werner Herzog film, then just stopping for no reason.

I try to moderate my caffeine intake to ride this wave.

Being hungry makes me monomaniacal and emotional. Emotional in a bad way, like a 13 year old girl who had a birthday party and no-one came. Never DM hungry. Gives you decision fatigue. (Though sometimes the impaired self-regulation can lead you interesting places.

“What about the weird shit that comes out when you run out of stuff to say and just start free-styling?”

Some of that comes from stuff I daydream about at work. So if the flow of calls at Argos is low then the game should have more colour and original incident. If its high then the game gets more derivative. Other stuff is fragments of books I'm reading. Like Werner Herzog is the grand Duke of the Isle of the Unknown because I was reading an autobiography when I was putting together the tables. Other stuff is just from dreams or the silent moments between events.

“When does the Quantum Ogre come out?”

Good question. When does stuff get moved around behind the scenes? Only if it can happen so quickly that even I can't think about it. Two or possibly three seconds from conception to statement. Something else I noticed MC'ing Apocalypse World is that if you invent something very quickly and as part of a rapid interaction with one or more players then it doesn’t feel* like railroading.

The same thing goes for reincorporating stuff that’s already in the game, or that came up in tables but that the players don't know about. So one of the random NPC relationship tables is Scrodd, a place the PC's are visiting, came up that one NPC wanted to consume another one. This made no sense to me. But then one of the players used the word 'vampire' and I remembered a dungeon I have with a vampire in it. So it became part of the game. It happened very quickly. It didn't feel like making something happen, it felt like discovering something or allowing something. Iain Mcgilchrist has a lot to say about that sort of thing.

But if you think for longer than about 3 seconds, the nature of the choice seems to change. Almost as if different parts of the mind were coming online and trying to assume control of the situation. Forcing it to make sense in a different way.

The nice thing about dice is that they are a kind of gateway between the parts of you that hunger for control and want everything to be logically consistent and the parts of you that love to abandon control and experience new and inconsistent things. So the whole thing becomes a kind of continuous tennis match between the different parts of yourself, and more than the parts that make it up.

A DM gets to make more of those kind of choices than players which might be why a good game leaves me with a vaguely ecstatic feeling.

“How do you know if you are fucking the players out of a meaningful choice?”

I actually don't know. I believe that I'm not. But I wouldn't win a public debate with myself on the issue. I trust to the silent parts of my mind to arrange the patterns so that they remain true to themselves

*Cue Nerdstorm. Man obeys feelings. Betrays REALITY.

The Point of No Return

D&D exists on a kind of permanent cultural event horizon and this is a good thing.

Listening to this podcast, Satine Pheonix is asked why D&D still carries with it the stereotype of being populated by mouth breathing asocial weirdo's. She says 'because it's kind of true'*

The game has rules, this attracts people for whom rules are important. Because they need the game the way other players do not then they obsess over it and come to dominate it. because they are more willing to spend money on it the become the most easily capitalised part of the market. They then shape the kind of game that is produced over successive editions, making the game more like themselves.

It also inspires a number of very interesting and innovative people at the same time.

So the game is always being sucked into the black hole of crippled nerdery and being destroyed. It is also continually in a state of being rescued by the other nerds. So it orbits, kind of, like a doomed moon around a black hole.

The reason this is good has something to do with Charles Fort and with why Forteanism is a good thing.

Fort is outside the system. he ranges himself against neither faith nor doubt, only orthodoxy. He's also tangled up with some really odd stuff. Because he is so outside the system he is almost impossible to build a structure around. Even more than Anarchism, he's impossible to pin down. Because at least Anarchism is cool, and will get you laid, and you can be sure that everyone believes the same thing. In a room full of Forteans you have no idea who believes what. There can be no power structure.

All good things have two qualities to them. The thing itself, and the structures we build around them.

We chase things like beauty, meaning, truth and honour because they are good in themselves. But because they have inner value they become a route to social, political, cultural or financial power. 

Because people who really really like power are dicks, and they shape the structure then the structures around all these things, which are meant to protect the important things with inner meaning, always end up being corrupt.

This is upsetting for almost everyone involved.

But this can never ever happen to D&D because it is already half-crippled by its damaged relationship with its fiercest adherents. 

It's orbiting a black hole, that makes it poor real estate for people who like power. That means it maintains a strange, fractured kind of purity. You are free playing D&D, free despite the damaged freaks that sometimes  surround you. Free, in part, because of them.

(It's like the perfect intellectual salon, one that never gets taken over by boring dilettantes because they will never turn up.)

*I think thats what she says, I haven't replayed it. Sorry if I got it wrong.

Megadungeon Hinterland (IRAQ?????)

Has anyone ever done a Megadungeon, set somewhere in the wilderness, where the amount of gold and treasure and crap that the party brings up, and the gradually increasing security as they bring down the monster population, ends up creating a kind of shantytown development on the surface? And then a real town, one whose initial source of capital is from a lost culture in the distant past. (Or from a fucking magical dimension?)

Like a gold rush town but with the PC's at the main economic movers? 

(Also weird thought, small groups of experts fighting to increase security and then spending loads of gold with local population is essentially counterinsurgency theory?)

Has anyone ever done a megadungeon where you start off trapped in the underdark and have to fight your way to the surface, square by square?

And also, in economics, has anyone though about what happens when one culture acquires and buries wealth. Then a millennia later a bunch of graverobbing scallies come and steal it? What does that count as? A natural resource?

Have economists thought about the Belloq factor, like how something gets more valuable just because its been hanging around a long time:-

PRICELESS

Is a megadungeon like an oil field being robbed, like Iraq or a cultural museum that's being looted for ready cash, like Iraq, or a counterinsurgency problem, like Iraq or what?

So I have juut talked myself into seeing Megadungeons as a metaphor for the Iraq war, or visa versa, fucking hell.

Hey... I'm your cha'DIch

I was going to write a long argument in favour of Lawful Good. I have a friend who is essentially Lawful Good in real life, he doesn't think it's cool enough.

The way I see it, Bad Guys play Life with the setting on easy. Lawful Good is expert level.

But I got side tracked by Worf/Picard quotes.

You'd think having two lawful good characters talking to each other would be boring but in reality it's like they are constantly daring each other to be even more good and even more lawful. It's fucking boss.

Don't blame me for knowing you so well.

Picard: Well, I know that I am an old man and I am out of touch. But the Worf that I remember was more concerned with things like honor and loyalty than rules and regulations. But that was a long time ago, and maybe you're not the Worf I once knew.

[Worf curses in Klingon]

Worf: You have always used your knowledge of Klingon honor and tradition to get what you want from me.

Picard: Because it always works, Worf! Your problem is that you really *do* have a sense of honor, and you really *do* care about trust and loyalty. Don't blame me for knowing you so well.  

For me to seek escape when my Captain goes into battle...

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Now hear this: printout message, urgent, all stations on all decks. Prepare for emergency saucer sep. You will command the saucer section, Lieutenant.

Lieutenant Worf: I'm a Klingon, sir. For me to seek escape when my Captain goes into battle...

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: You are a Starfleet officer, Lieutenant!

Lieutenant Worf: Aye, sir. 

Worf's question is valid

Lieutenant Worf: What gives them the right to enter Federation space?

Commander Tebok: Silence your dog, Captain!

Capt. Picard: Lt. Worf's question is valid.

some of the things I said

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Mr. Worf... I regret some of the things I said to you earlier.

Lt. Commander Worf: Some?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: In fact, I think you're the bravest man I have ever known.

You would do no less for me

Lieutenant Worf: The family of a Klingon warrior is responsible for his actions, and he is responsible for theirs. If I fail in my challenge, I will be executed. - Will you grant my leave, Captain?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: No. If I understand correctly, a Starfleet officer, a respected member of my crew, could be accused of a capital crime. Your actions in this matter will reflect on this ship and on the Federation. Therefore, it seems only appropriate that your Captain should be at your side while you make your challenge. I'm sure you would do no less for me.

Oh Lieutenant

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Lieutenant - sometimes, the moral obligations of command are less than clear. I have to weigh the good of the many against the needs of the individual, and try to balance them as realistically as possible. God knows, I don't always succeed.

Lieutenant Worf: I have not had cause to complain, Captain.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Oh. Lieutenant, you wouldn't complain even if you had cause.

Hey... I'm your cha'DIch

 [Picard informs Worf that he will go into the city's old quarter to look for Kahlest]

Lieutenant Worf: It is too dangerous. You must not go alone.
 
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Hey... I'm your cha'DIch.

The Translation Is Always Better

Courtesy of Google Translate

'Specialist' is boring in every language except Latin. All of mine will be called 'Artifex' from now on. I urge James Raggi to change this in the published game. Moving away from 'Thief' was a good idea but 'Specialist' lacks poetry and 'Adventurer' is too general. 'Artifex' sounds fucking cool and could mean almost anything. Just someone who is really really good at shit.

'Experto' is also good.

'Fighter' comes out pretty well in any language. Highlights are 'Jagerfly' and 'Batalanto'.

'Autor Maxia' and 'Magicae Lorem' are the best for Magic User I think.

Anyone in my Isle Of the Unknown (plus Vornheim plus Realms of Crawling Chaos) game who wants to rub out their class name and put one of these in instead is welcome to.

(or anything else really so long as you can remember what it refers to)

English -

Fighter

Magic User

Cleric

Specialist

Latin -

Pugnator
Magicae Lorem
Clericus
Artifex

Catalan -

Luchador
Magic User
Clérigo
Especialista

Swedish -

Jaktplan
Magi Användare
Prästman
Specialister

Romanian -

Luptator
Magica Utilizator
Preot
Specialist

Norwegian -

Jagerfly
Magisk Bruker
Skriftlærd
Spesialist

Italian -

Combattente
Magic User
Religioso
Specializzato

German -

Jäger
Magiebenutzer
Kleriker
Fachmann

Galician -

Combate
Autor Maxia
Crego
Experto

Esperanto -

Batalanto
Magio Uzanto
Kleriko
Faka

Danish -

Kriger
Magisk Bruger
Præst
Faglig

He would have been an interesting DM.

Carl Maria von Clausewitz on, in the first paragraph, the consequences of rapid mutual improvisation, and in the second, table chatter.

I changed the word 'war' for 'game or gaming'.

The italics are his, he barely uses them for the whole book, then spews them all out in the space of one paragraph.

“But wild as the nature of gaming is it still wears the chains of human weakness, and the contradiction we see here, viz. That man seeks and creates dangers which he fears at the same time, will astonish no-one.

If we cast a glance at gaming history in general, we find so much the opposite of an incessant advance towards the aim, that standing still and doing nothing is quite plainly the normal condition of a table in the midst of a game, acting, the exception.”