Not a Dead Communist

Loskalmi Canonicity

2011-09-04T18:27:00.001+01:00

One of the questions I have seen more than once with regard to the Book of Glorious Joy (well, all right, the only question I've seen more than once) concerns its canonical status. As one questioner put it:

what is the relationship between the Book of Glorious Joy and mainstream Glorantha? Are they letting you define Malkionism in Loskalm?

The simple answer to this question is "no".

But it may deserve a slightly more detailed explanation than that.

When Issaries originally commissioned the work that eventually became the Book of Glorious Joy, it was intended to be the official, definitive source on Loskalm - later extended to the whole of Malkionism. As such, it was always important to make it compatible with other sources. From the beginning, it was always compatible with material that had been previously published, and I believe it still is. In addition, I had access to a number of unpublished writings from Greg's work. Once the first book was written, it was sent to Greg, he sent a number of comments back, it was revised to make sure it all fit what he wanted, some things that didn't fit were deleted, and, in general, there was discussion to make sure it was "right".

So it's not as if this is something I've just written on my own; it's not just my vision, and I have worked hard to ensure it's as canonical as it can be. However, as the fact that it was eventually published as a non-canonical source indicates, there are some fairly major caveats to that.

Firstly, the discussions with Greg over the initial manuscript were never fully completed, due to changes at Issaries, a long trip to Mexico, and so forth. At no point did he say "this is 100% correct". As a couple of examples, we never had a chance to discuss the calendar or the section on the Abiding Script at all, so these remain entirely speculative (and, especially in the former case, likely quite different from the eventual canon).

A second point to be made is that, since all this happened several years ago, he may well have changed his mind since, as is his prerogative as creator of the world. Material that was perfectly correct then may be so no longer. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we never got to discussions on the third manuscript - what became "Book Two" in BoGJ - at all.

Sure, that section is as compatible as I can make it with both published and unpublished works that I had access to. Much of it was shaped by the discussions we had on the Loskalm sections of the original Heroes of Malkion manuscript, which ended up being subsumed into the later work, rather than simply repeated. So its as close to canon as it could have been, and very much influenced by others, not just something I made up on my own.

But that doesn't make it official canon, for all the reasons given above. It will almost certainly - heck, scratch the 'almost' - be contradicted by later official books. Obviously, my hope is that people won't be concerned by that, and this does seems to be the general attitude, at least among people that have written to me. There will, inevitably, be coverage of Loskalm in the Guide to Glorantha, when that eventually comes out, and that will be a different vision. Still, I imagine it's going to be a heck of a long time before another 170-page book comes out focussing on that particular kingdom.

Do with Loskalm as you will in the meantime.

Book of Glorious Joy

2011-08-29T18:14:00.000+01:00

In case you haven't heard (and its hard to believe that many people reading this haven't), after nine long years, The Book of Glorious Joy has finally been published. Seeing it in print at last is, indeed, both glorious and joyful.

You can buy it, in paperback, hardback, or just as a PDF, here. I don't get royalties, but, obviously, I'd like to encourage you all to do so nonetheless!

This is the book that would have been Lords of the West 3, and the first three chapters of Lords of the West 1: Heroes of Malkion added at the beginning for good measure, and in order to set the scene. It primarily serves as an overview of the magical and idealistic Kingdom of Loskalm, one of whose valiant wizard-knights you can see riding through perilous lands in the superb cover by Jon Hodgson.

I'm not sure there's much more to say here about the book that I haven't said already, so I'll gloss over that. I will say that I actually don't know what has happened to Lords of the West 2: Kingdom of the Flamesword, which would have covered Seshnela and the Rokari in the same way as BoGJ covers Loskalm, and would have also included the full write-ups for the more widespread saints and wizardry schools from LotW1. The last I heard it was still due to be published - but not in a single standalone volume - but more recent attempts at communicating with the publishers have not been successful, so that may no longer be the case.

I may therefore, try to get it out by other means, since Moon Design will naturally not want to it to clash with their own upcoming Guide to Glorantha. That may be a webpage-only release, or some kind of no-frills PDF, but one or another, something will happen, and I'll try to avoid any conflict with Moon Design's release.

In a similar vein, what would have been LotW4: Jonatela is being written and released bit-by-bit on my website, just as basic art-free HTML, but that's a long-term ongoing project, to which I am not devoting the time and energy that went into the books intended for physical publication. Current progress has me through all of the political, historical, and social information and most of the way through magic and religion, as well some bits of the gazetteer. It will plausibly be at least another year before I finish doing everything I want with it, so there's plenty more to come there - and all of it entirely free of charge, should anyone want to use it.

At the moment, I'm spending a fair amount of time writing other material, unconnected with Glorantha. My other blog, Synapsida, for example, takes up a lot of time - it can take hours to write each post, what with all the background research needed. With that, Jonatela, and the Hogwarts MBRPG that I'm still helping to run - and write classes for - there isn't much time for anything else, and what there is has no plans for publication any time soon.

But the good news is that Book of Glorious Joy is at last out there, and available for purchase. I'd be interested to know what people think of it, once they have the time to digest it. It's no good asking me what the sales figures are, because I don't know, and publishers normally keep that sort of thing confidential, but if other questions arise from it, I may well return to the subject here, or elsewhere.

Until then - may the Invisible God bless you and your endeavours in the light of righteous peace!

Commoner Cults of Jonatela

2011-07-28T17:39:00.000+01:00

So, in my last post I discussed the reasoning behind the rule mechanics I used for Jonating commoner caste magic in the recent piece at my home page. As I said then, I can think of two other questions the piece might have raised in the minds of readers, and I'll discuss them now.

To begin with, if the Elmoi are supposed to represent a denuded form of Ernalda worship, and they really are theistic, which gods are we talking about here? I see no reason to stay being mysterious about that, and people might wonder, so that's something I can quickly deal with. It should be said, though, that I think it's more important that the cults are distinct, than whether or not the beings behind them are, so I don't think it really matters much. Which means that anyone else's interpretation is as good as mine - if I thought it was important, and made a meaningful difference, I'd have put it in the article, not here.

At any rate, Frona is, I think, fairly clearly some sort of aspect of Ernalda the Great Goddess. She's mentioned as a grain goddess in RQ3, and Thunder Rebels reinforces that the grain goddess cults are different ways of worshipping the great earth mother. Frona, clearly, is the mother goddess and land goddess for Fronela as a whole, and will have her own, regular, theistic cult elsewhere.

Uryana and Vilecha are also aspects of Ernalda, and remember, we're told in Genertela: CotHW that the Jonating commoners worship Ernalda as their main goddess, so it makes sense that she gets the key roles. I don't think of Vilecha as a Chalana Arroy, incidentally, because she's just not powerful enough.

By definition, the Jonating commoners won't have a counterpart of Orlanth Rex, and Orlanth Thunderous doesn't really fit either. The closest you'll get to Orlanth here, then, is Vereled the hunter, and Tak may well be Orlanth Allfather. Isyedik might be as well, what with having the change/motion rune, but he's more likely Issaries, removed from the trade role taken by the nobility - and obviously, a heck of a lot weaker for it. Note that all of these are pretty minor, compared with the "Ernaldan" cults.

Of the remaining four, I think Inoria's pretty obvious to anyone who follows Gloranthan mythology! The others are probably unknown to the Heortlings, at least as anything of importance. Why should the Fronelan Orlanthi from whom the Jonating commoners evolved have had exactly the same list of deities as the Sartarites? I don't see why there can't be some local differences. Thus, Ishkaya might look superficially like Minlister, but he's a god of vodka, not beer, and his story is quite different. Svetara certainly isn't Elmal, or Yelmalio, because she's a she, although there's probably some forgotten mythic connection in there somewhere.

Kagshei is intentionally more ambiguous. He doesn't live in the Elmoi realm on the Other Side, and his origin story is different from everyone else's. He's manifestly not Humakt, even if he does share one role in common with him, and he isn't Ty Kora Tek, either, although that resemblance is probably closer. Is he, perhaps, an intruder from another pantheon, now gone from the world? Is he actually an essence being, receiving misapplied worship? He could be either, or neither; I have no particularly strong opinion.

The final question is one that arguably matters a little more. Namely, why bother? I don't mean 'why bother writing the Jonating material?', although that's perhaps also a question worthy of examination. But why bother describing and writing up the Elmoi cults?

The official publication Under the Red Moon has come under criticism from some quarters for devoting an entire half page to the cult of Asyrex, the benign Lunar Immortal of home-making husbands. Specifically, therefore, a god of the kind of people that don't become adventurers and aren't likely to be player characters. I'm not sure why he gets picked on specifically, because he isn't alone in that respect (Felkanna being the most obvious instance, I'd have thought). Nonetheless, some people have complained that even half a page is too much paper to waste on him.

The Elmoi cults are pretty similar. Few, if any of them, are going to be of much use to player characters in typical games. Their magic is deliberately crap at a mechanical level, and the range of things they can do with it is almost almost entirely restricted to everyday life. When they do have useful abilities, they're too specialised to be able to do much else. An Inorian can survive the winter, which is useful, but survive it to do what? From the perspective of most PCs, not a lot.

So, if they're not useful for PCs, if, in fact, they're intentionally not useful for most PCs, why include them in game writings? One answer is that, since this isn't a hardcopy book, I don't have to worry about page count. I'm not cutting something else to squeeze this in, so at worst it means that anyone following this project as I write it has to wait another couple of months before they can read what I have to say about the magic of Jonating wizards (I've already done the warriors and nobles, of course). Anyone coming to it later doesn't even have that problem; they can ignore the entire section if they want to, and don't lose anything because of it.

But I could use that as a reason to include anything at all; it explains why I could add it, not why I did. There's at least two answers to that, and they may give some insight into my writing.

Firstly, there's the fact that I find it just plain interesting. What sort of magic do the commoners have? That's just an interesting question in its own right, and its fun to explore that. Of course, I could do that through flavour text alone, but the actual quantification of that magic, the process of writing a cult, puts that into perspective for me, allows me to work out how it all fits into a framework. Writing up commoner magic caste in the form of cults is as interesting as writing the cults for more player-suitable character types, a fun exercise even if the end result receives little use.

But there's a deeper reason than that. In short, I don't have a problem with Asyrex. The world is not inhabited solely by PCs, and PCs are going to have to interact with a whole range of different people. Some of those are going to be regular, everyday people, the kind that follow Durev among the Heortlings, Asyrex and Felkanna among the Lunars, and the Elmoi among the Jonatings. These NPCs may, in some respects, not be as important as the ones you're fighting, but that doesn't mean they don't matter.

I want to know what the magic of the regular people is, what the "norm" of society represents that the PCs are differing from. We all know how difficult it is to predict what players are going to do, so I never know when I might need the stats for a minor NPC, to know exactly what it is he's capable of. For that, I need to know how his magic works, what he can and can't do with his spells. You never know when it might be relevant. As a GM, I both want and need the complete picture.

Yes, I could make it up on the fly, and sometimes I have to, but I'd rather not, and, anyway, it's easier if the background info - including the quantification into cults - is there to serve as a guideline. So I like Asyrex, because a lot of NPCs are going to follow him, even if the PCs don't (to be honest, he's actually less bland than some of the more active cults in the book). It's only half a page; that's not too much.

For the same reason, I include the Elmoi cults here. They're useful as background, as an illustration of how your wizard and warrior PCs outclass the plebs, as a fall-back in case I do need to know what the commoners are capable of, or of what sort of threats they'd find particularly worrying. You could argue it's just completism on my part, and there's some truth in that, but I do think it's actually useful, even if it's not always obviously so.

When I write the Jonating material, as when I wrote Book of Glorious Joy, Kingdom of the Flamesword, and Heroes of Malkion, I try to put in what I think is useful in a game; the kinds of things that I'd want to see in a book. Perhaps the people who don't like Asyrex aren't going to read the Elmoi stuff anyway, or perhaps they won't care because it's a free web publication, or perhaps they will think there's some important difference between the two that I'm missing. Perhaps, therefore, I don't need to justify this at all.

But it's at least possible somebody will have wondered, and the answer may give some insight into why I write what I write.

The Magic of Malkioni Commoners

2011-07-26T17:24:00.001+01:00

Yes, it's been several months since I've posted here. Not that I haven't been busy writing in the meantime, of course. For one, I have managed to write weekly posts at my mammalogical blog, Synapsida - and those do require quite a lot of preparation. There have been many other bits of writing besides, some of which may eventually appear somewhere for public perusal. But, on the Gloranthan front, I have also continued to write some fan material on Jonatela - what would have been LotW4, had the series not been cancelled.

The latest instalment has taken a while to appear, because its quite a big one - ten new cults, in fact. The next will focus on the wizardry schools and that, too, may take a while because of its complexity (I predict early September). But I think the latest one will likely raise a few questions that I think its worth answering here, rather than in the more formal outlet of the web page itself. The questions are:

Why did I treat the commoner caste cults as I did?
What, if anything, is their relationship to the Orlanth cults?
Why did I even bother?

Taking the first question first, we have to go all the way back to the days of RuneQuest 3. That was the first rules edition to address Malkioni magic in general, or Jonating magic in particular. The RQ3 publication Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars says, in the Players Book, that about 75% of Jonatings follow the Orlanth pantheon and gain "the benefits of a barbarian initiate", while the remainder follow the Malkioni religion and receive, unless they are professional wizardry adepts, some limited sorcery magic. There is no indication that - priests and adepts aside - this is anything other than random. That is, parts of Jonatela are Orlanthi, with all the magic that implies, and parts are Malkioni, with all the implications of that.

This was, an aside, recently mentioned as a surprising new revelation by Moon Design... I have no idea why it was considered so surprising now, since it was first published back in 1988, but there you are.

The Genertela Book, however, adds a little more. That says that the Lords worship the Invisible God (albeit together with "any of several war gods") and the peasants "worship Ernalda". That's the approach I took when writing up Jonatela for LotW1, and expanded on in my new writings: the upper castes are Malkioni, and the commoner caste are, in some sense, Ernaldan. It may or may not (probably not, but you never know) be the approach taken when the official material eventually comes out, but its the one that interests me, and I prefer to write about what I'm interested in, especially if I'm not doing it for money.

Now, the thing is, the Jonating peasantry are severely oppressed by their rulers, and Ernaldan magic, while not great for fighting, isn't that crap. It seemed to me that what was most interesting and fitting for the Jonatings was to keep the idea that the commoners worship Ernalda, but to make her magic somehow weaker, not giving them the same level of power that the Heortling Ernaldans enjoy. Since RQ3 only had a limited range of cults to draw from at that time, that the commoners might worship something like Ernalda, without being the full Sartarite version of the cult, seemed then (and seems now) perfectly reasonable to me, and quite consistent with prior publications.

Others may disagree, according to their personal taste, but such was my thinking. And so I created the Elmoi.

But how does the magic provided by the Elmoi work, and how does it fit in with the magic other commoner caste Malkioni? Step forward to the Hero Wars rules. Here, its implied that Malkioni commoners - and for that matter, the knights and nobles as well - never have any magic of their own, just the spells that the liturgists cast on them. That goes against what RQ3 said where, aside from oddities such as the Brithini, all Malkioni can cast at least spells directly. More significantly. if the Jonating peasants are initiating to Ernalda, they're actually better at magic than those in less oppressed countries. Which didn't seem right.

HeroQuest 1 solved that problem very effectively indeed. It introduced something called "Common Magic", which was generally less potent than either wizardry or theism, and it became obvious that that was what the Jonating commoners used. All Malkioni commoners had access to Common Magic, and the Jonatings would be no different. Their magic would look a bit more theist, and there would be specific Ernalda-lite common magic cults that they followed, but essentially, it all fit together.

That was the approach used in LotW1, together with some text elaborating on the Elmoi, and how they made Jonating Malkionism into a form of "henotheism", worshipping other gods alongside the Invisible God. When the manuscript was submitted for perusal by Issaries, it came back with a number of suggested amendments, but nothing disagreeing with the approach I had used for the Jonatings. Also, in fairness, nothing endorsing it, either, so it could be they didn't read that bit. Or that I hadn't written it very well, and they didn't understand what I was getting at. And, of course, even if it was considered acceptable by Issaries then, that says nothing about what Moon Design will do now, since they're hardly bound by an unpublished work by a contract writer.

But, regardless of that, no criticism, so I kept it - and I'm pleased with it. But, of course, LotW1 was written for HQ1, and we've had a new edition since then, and I'm trying to keep my new, expanded, Jonatela material consistent with that, as well as with my own existing work. HQ2, however, makes no mention of Common Magic. That's actually fairly reasonable, since the only culture looked at in depth so far is that of the Heortlings, for whom such magic is relatively unimportant - they all initiate and have full access to theist magic, after all. It's minor by comparison.

Nonetheless, there were no rules on which to base the Elmoi magic. I toyed with the idea of essentially re-inventing Common Magic for HQ2, and using that but, until and unless such rules come out, that didn't seem very fitting. On the other hand, I could hardly give them full theistic magic, as in Kingdom of Heroes, since that was the very thing I was trying to avoid - the commoners would be as magically potent as the wizards, even if they concentrated on different areas.

So, instead, I came up with a stripped down version of theistic magic; only one affinity, no devotees, and so on. Make the affinities themselves pretty crappy (on which more later), and it begins to fit. This also has the advantage of making the Jonating commoners "Ernaldan", or something much like it, and allows me to explain how they're really theists, even if they see themselves as being Malkioni.

It may well be that the official version of HQ-style Jonatela makes the commoners fully Orlanthi, maybe just keeping them down by restricting cults like Orlanth and Humakt to the ruling elite, alongside the likes of Saint Talor. But, unsurprisingly, I like my version, of a weird henotheism that's kind-of-Malkioni-but-not-really, making the commoners emasculated Orlanthi with a partly Malkioni world view. Hopefully, some others will also find this useful.

I'll try and post on the other two questions this raises soon.

d101 Con

2011-02-28T19:34:00.000Z

I've just returned from the d101 "convention" in Matlock, Derbyshire. It's not really a con in any meaningful sense, just a group of people renting out a cottage to do some gaming for a weekend. It was a pretty enjoyable weekend away, and it seems to have been popular enough with those who could attend that we may do it again next year, possibly renting out a second cottage to allow a larger group of players. My thanks go to Newt Newport for arranging it, but my main purpose for posting here is to ruminate on the games we played.

We started off with Action Castle, which, is basically a fun party game for those old enough to remember 1980s computer RPGs. This means we are all now "King of Action Castle"! Cool...

Being too tired from travelling to do anything more taxing on the Friday evening, we kicked off the RPing proper on Saturday morning with Savage Worlds. I've played this once before, but the game is a flexible one not tied to any particular genre, so it's not surprising that the experience was very different. That time, the setting was the old Captain Scarlet TV series, but this time it was a rather more serious sci-fi setting, with distinct Travelleresque overtones. I gather that d101 is planning to release this as a more formal setting at some point, possibly using the easy-to-obtain Savage Worlds license. The setting was a crumbling interstellar empire, with various different factions vying for control, including mad cyborgs and sinister telepaths.

Because the Captain Scarlet game obviously used characters from the TV series, those were all pre-gens, but this time we all made our own characters up on the day. Considering that few of us had any experience with character generation in this system, this seemed a remarkably quick and painless process, which suggests that Savage Worlds would be a good system for use at conventions where you don't want pre-gens. In general, its a pretty simple system, and plays quickly, and has fairly straightforward mechanics, perhaps with something of an emphasis on pulp style excitement. Here for example, is the character I came up with:

Lady Corinia

Agility: d6 Guts d4 Psionic Background d8

Strength: d4 Healing d6 Psionic Resistance d4

Vigour: d4 Investigation d8

Smarts: d8 Notice d6

Spirit: d8 Shooting d4

Psionic Powers: Obscure, Stun, Pyrokinesis

Edges: Mentalist, Rich, Alertness

Drawbacks: All Thumbs

Weapons: Engraved laser derringer (carried in handbag)

...which was enough to give me a reasonable overview of the character, without over-complicating things, or making it seem all overly generalised and simplistic.

In the afternoon, time for a game of HeroQuest, using the Call of Cthulhu setting. Obviously, I'm very familiar with both the system and the setting, although I've never seen the two used together before. In this instance, it seemed to work very well, with, for example, lingering penalties being used to reflect the inevitable loss of sanity that accrues as one continues investigating. The scenario, created by Newt, had the wonderfully appropriate title of "Normal for Norfolk" (unfortunately, if you're not British, the meaning of this reference may not be obvious). Since it was set in the 1970s, and the PCs were all members of the Flying Squad, the inspiration we ended up using was, perhaps, inevitable... Our characters were perhaps, not entirely serious, and we never really got to the end of the scenario, but I won't give out any more details, in case d101 should choose to publish it some day. At any rate, this was my character:

DC Bob Bawdsey

Drive Like a Lunatic  18       Boozing                 13

Shooters              13       Hate Scroats            13

Ignore Procedure      18       Plant Evidence          13

Streetwise            13       Blag Way Out of Trouble 15   

Boxing                13       Look Hard               4M

The actions of our DS (another PC) perhaps got a bit too extreme towards the end, but, being a con game, that was easy enough for me to ignore.

On the Sunday, there was only time for a single game of Burning Wheel, using the introductory scenario from the rulebook. Burning Wheel was once recommended to me (I won't say by who) as a flexible, rules lite, modern system with plenty of options for different ways of resolving things. Most of that seems true, but what would make anyone think it's "rules lite" is beyond me. Indeed, in an age where RPGs seem to be getting simpler, it has to be one of the more complex new systems on the market - although there are plenty of older ones of similar complexity. It's fun enough to play in, especially as a one-off, and it does seem to be very good at describing characters and fleshing them out, but its way too complex and detailed for me to want to ever GM it. I've run a version of GURPS in the past, but that was stripped down so far, that I consider it an entirely new system. Still, even that was more than I'd be happy with today, so while I have no doubt that Burning Wheel is very good at what it does, as a GM, it's not my cup of tea.

But, as a player, I had no problem with it, and it seemed to work fairly smoothly. I certainly had fun with the pre-gen character, who was a somewhat snooty and sinister sorceress. The scenario worked well, and it was an enjoyable game. I'm certainly glad to have tried it, and I wouldn't object to playing it again - so long as I don't have to run it!

The rest of the time was spent relaxing, chatting, watching old movies, etc. making it all a pretty enjoyable weekend, mostly with gamers that I haven't played with much before. Since this was a d101 event, I'll also add a brief update on Book of Glorious Joy: about two thirds of the interior artwork is in (and more came in over the weekend), all of which looks pretty cool. Things are stepping up, and I don't think its going to be too much longer now.

On similar lines, there should be further updates to my unofficial Jonatela material soon - the next one is quite large, which is why its taken longer than usual for it to appear. And, for my ponderings on mammalian biology, there's Synapsida, which has been updated fairly regularly of late. I'm not fully happy with all of the latest posts there, but its something I'm learning as I go along, and I think its getting better.

Just possibly, most likely if I can get something to run put together, I might attend Concrete Cow 11, but no promises there. As for cons later in the year... well, we'll see.

Thoughts on Ratings in RPGs - pt 2

2011-01-28T00:29:00.002Z

So, earlier I posted about my recent experiences on providing ratings guidelines for an online RPG, and how they might (or might not) be more generally applicable. I touched on general issues of theme there, and I'll now look at how we implemented more specific guidelines, and what those might indicate.

Language
The use of strong language is naturally something that might concern both film censors and anyone involved in text-based RPing. Among a group of friends RPing together over the table, its likely that it really doesn't need to be spelled out, but when you have a larger pool of players, perhaps from different backgrounds, it can be a different matter. As with theme, this can be an important aspect of simulating a particular written or filmed genre - Harry Potter should not, it seems to me, sound like Pulp Fiction.

On the other hand, that cuts both ways. I recall a few years back commenting on a mailing list about someone planning a Torchwood campaign. Now, in Torchwood, especially the first season (which at the time was the only one released), there is quite a bit of swearing. Is that an inherent part of the genre? Arguably not, but equally it wouldn't occur to me that a campaign might have tighter restrictions than the source material on which it is based, so I said - to the shock of other posters - that, unless someone told me otherwise, I'd assume that strong language was permissible. The characters in the series do it, why would I assume a PC should be different?

In the case of our Hogwarts RPG, we went with a 12-certificate. We didn't have to follow the full guidelines for that, of course, but we mostly did. At 12-certificate, only the strongest words are outright forbidden, although the use of others should be limited. Deciding that Americans are more offended by the F-word than we are, we banned that one (specifically permitted at 12-certificate), along with discriminatory words (e.g. that one that begins with "N") and terms relating to the reproductive anatomy.

This, in fairness, allows considerably more leeway than actually appears in the books or films. It means that we allow some moderately strong British swearwords - possibly because many of the Americans don't know what they mean, and consequently aren't offended - that Harry & co. certainly don't use. In general, our players haven't take much advantage of this, and I think that's a good thing. Writing swearing so that it seems natural, rather than being inserted for the sake of it, isn't always that easy. Going back to Torchwood, strong language is still found in the later seasons, but after the first one, it wasn't so noticeable, largely because the writers seemed to be using it only when it made sense, rather than "ooh, I can have a character say 'f***'".

Which probably means our players are showing more restraint than some professional writers. Good on 'em.

Drugs & Alcohol
Speaking as a European, it has often seemed to me that Americans in general have a fairly odd attitude to alcohol. That may be unfair, but its notable that one of the rules we had on the site for some time was "no alcohol". This, despite the fact that alcoholic drinks are clearly mentioned in the books. On the castle board, where the characters are all underage, that's sensible enough, but it felt slightly odd to me on the board for Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade - which, notably, have pubs. I used to get round it by having characters at the pubs "have a drink" without specifying what it was they were drinking, but it still felt a bit strange.

Now that we've relaxed that - albeit with specific restrictions on underage drinking - I've noticed that it's actually the most popular of our new, expanded guidelines, to see use. To begin with, a lot of that revolved around players tormenting their own adult characters with vicious hangovers (some of which were, in fairness, pretty good to read in a black humour kind of way). More recently, it seems to have extended to scenes where characters drown their sorrows, or just the casual mention of the stuff that I missed not being able to write. So its being used to develop emotional plotlines, and just to have your character feel more realistic.

Fantasy RPGs usually have a quasi-medieval setting, and in the real world, medieval folks tended to drink a lot of wine or beer, not least because it was safer than the water. Taverns are a staple in such settings, being such good meeting places, and its hard to think of a teetotal fantasy RPG (I'm sure there must be one, though, especially if it's based on medieval Arabian culture).

Other drugs tend to be a different matter, especially where we're talking about anything that exists in the real world. Particularly in a text-based game, it's probably wise to avoid real details, or to portray harmful drugs in a positive light, if there's any risk of younger players reading. So far, that one's not cropped up for us, unless one counts mind-altering, but non-addictive, magical potions, but one can see it possibly being relevant in a modern game, or something like Call of Cthulhu.

Violence
Violence of some kind is pretty endemic in tabletop RPGs. You may be only inflicting it against foul monsters, or whatever, but, at some level it seems to be integral to almost all of them. (I actually can't think of a system that doesn't have at least some rules for combat, although there probably is one somewhere). But, when it comes to violence as an indicator of a more "adult" game, we aren't talking so much about "I hit him for 5 points of damage" as whether or not the descriptions are graphic.

I'd suggest that, in tabletop games, this probably makes little difference unless you're planning on being really gory in your descriptions - which would suggest a horror game, anyway. Text based games may rely more heavily on description, and the issue here would be how much the text dwells on blood or mutilation. For our 12-certificate game, that meant no dwelling on detail, and its a game setting where much of the violence will be in the form of zapping people with spells rather than hewing at them with axes, that's a pretty easy guideline to keep to. There is some mild gore in the books, but not much, and that seemed a fair limit for us, too.

In point of fact, there seems to have been no demand to use the relaxed rules on our site at all. Contrary to the likes of D&D, it seems our story lines do not generally focus on combat, outside of tightly regulated practice duelling.

Sex
So we come to the area that's probably most touchy. The British Board of Film Classification treats nudity and sex as separate topics, the former being of more significance in a primarily visual medium than it would be in tabletop or text-based RPGs. Merely saying that your character gets undressed, or has a shower, is somewhat different from showing full frontal nudity on the screen. If there is an equivalent to the latter in a text-based game, it would be going into a lengthy description of your character in the buff, which seems a slightly odd thing to do, especially in a supposedly non-sexual context.

But, if nudity doesn't matter in itself, sex is different. People do, rightly or wrongly, get concerned about that kind of thing. There's nothing further than snogging in the HP books, and, since most of the characters in our RPG are going to be underage anyway, that's a good place to draw the line. Adult characters in the game had previously become pregnant, although never with any indication of how they got that way! It could be argued that that was quite sufficient, and that this was an area where we could be stricter than the 12-certificate guidelines.

My own attitude is that, if we're going to allow nastier things to happen to the characters, we should also allow them to have a bit more fun, too. So, for adult characters outside the school, we instituted a rule that allows story lines that make reference to "off-screen" sex, without describing it. Barring mention of nudity in a sexual context also makes it clear where you should be "fading to black", even if, as noted above, nudity per se isn't much of an issue. This, I think, allows a wider range of story possibilities without showing anything that's not strictly necessary for the story to work - it's the consequences that are more likely to be key to a story, after all.

There are also gradations between that and "insert Tab A into Slot B", which might be appropriate in other games. I can certainly see how character development might be enhanced by exploring that side of a character's life and personality in more detail, for instance. And, if there's any area where ratings of proposed campaigns might be relevant, other than horror (which is usually implied by the setting, anyway), it's probably this one.

Thoughts on Ratings in RPGs - pt 1

2011-01-27T09:06:00.001Z

As some of you will know, in addition to face-to-face RPing, I have, for many years now, also been helping to run a message board RPG based on the world of Harry Potter. It's effectively a parallel universe, and doesn't feature any of the characters from the books, but the background and locations are the same (or at least very similar), and the general theme - wizards in a boarding school - is, naturally, also the same. I mention this because I've been reflecting on the effects of a change we went through recently in the rules for RPing on the board.

A message board RPG is different from a face-to-face one in that it has a large number of players, most of whom will not know each other in real life, and may come to the game with different expectations. It's also a 'sandbox' setting, which means that a wide range of different themes could crop up in different story lines, and the admins (GMs) can't possibly keep a track of them all, let alone read and vet all of them. As a result, the site has rules for what sort of stories and descriptions are considered acceptable - a rating system of sorts.

I'm not really suggesting that such things are easily extendible, or even relevant, to most face-to-face games, or e-mail games, for that matter. Certainly, its unlikely they'd be required in face-to-face games among a small group of friends, unless, perhaps, there is some intention to have different ratings for different campaigns, and the players need to be clear on what those are in advance. But, nonetheless, the fact that we recently reviewed, and changed, our ratings strikes me as something of general interest in RPing.

Our previous rules on this particular subject were fairly simple. Essentially, we said that the site was intended to be PG certificate, and mostly left it at that. The choice of PG made some sense at the time, since the first two films had this certificate (in both the UK and US) and were pretty close to the books they were based on. It seems to me, if you want to simulate a particular literary source, you'll want to follow its conventions, and the rating is part of that. (There are, of course, sites on the internet that are ostensibly based on the HP books but allow all manner of hardcore material - that's a perfectly valid approach, but I think there is very much a place for following the theme of the books. After all, if somebody likes the books, the absence of such content might be part of their reason).

However, with time, it became clear that there were a couple of problems with this. The more obvious one, perhaps, is that the later films, once they came out, had a higher rating. In general, they had a PG-13 rating in America, and a 12-rating here in the UK - and, by implication, the same could be said of the later books. Since the message board we host on does not permit members under the age of 13 anyway, there was a good case for raising our rating to match that of the later films. I think, in practice, a number of players had done this anyway, without us jumping on them, and it made sense to formalise that.

So, when some players raised the issue with us, we polled the members of the board, and agreed to switch to a higher rating, one more in line with the later films and books - which are darker in tone than the first two. However, there is another problem with stating "this site is considered PG certificate" - what does that actually mean? The rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America is fairly vaguely defined (although the website linked to there is actually rather more informative than it was at the time) often boiling down to "if we don't think its appropriate, it isn't". And that was pretty much our rules at the time, as well. So, when we updated it, we instead used the system of the British Board of Film Classification, and went with a 12-certificate.

By adapting the rules of the BBFC to writing, rather than film, and spelling them out in detail, I think we made it much clearer what was and was not acceptable. This means that, hopefully, everyone knows where they stand, and I think that, in addition to allowing a greater freedom for players to explore their own story lines, it also makes it much clearer what we won't accept. Once again, I'm not suggesting that such detailed guidelines would be of much use in a face-to-face game, but I think there is some interest in looking at them.

One point to make here is that we run the game over a number of different boards, reflecting a wide range of different in-universe locations and activities. For example, there are separate boards for quidditch, magical duelling, and for magic lessons, in addition to the main one at the castle. Most of these have the same rules. However, the board that deals with the world outside the school is mainly populated by adult characters, and we felt that that made a significant difference to the sorts of stories that would be appropriate. Thus, it has the same general rating, but the actual rules are slightly more relaxed, reflecting the fact that a story in which an underage character does a particular thing may be very different from one in which an adult does the exact same activity. In practice, if one were going to extend these rules more generally, there could be a lot of changes like this, depending on the particular genre and expectations of the players.

Theme
The general theme of an RPG is the sort of thing that is normally included in a campaign description, whether any more specific ratings are needed or not. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu, its fairly obvious you're going to have a horror theme, and something that would be at least the equivalent of a 15-certificate were the game a film or video. Its also a reasonable expectation of a game like Vampire, although there is a fair degree of leeway there in just how dark the game could be (depending, for example, on how you portray the feeding).

Many other RPGs have an inherently dark theme, and this is the sort of thing that I feel it is generally useful to spell out when proposing a particular campaign, especially if it's radically different from what the group have been done in the past. In the case of our message board Hogwarts RPG, it seems to me that keeping a theme generally in keeping with the books is good thing to do. I suspect that the inclusion of dementors, and later, of zombies, was the main reason for the 12 (or PG-13) rating the later films got, and this shows that mild horror is certainly acceptable within the genre.

There is, I think, something to be said for writing within a particular genre, and selecting limits for oneself based on that. That doesn't mean that taking a particular world and exploring some of its implications beyond what the source material covers doesn't also have its place. For instance, that the Potterverse has vampires and so on in it has some fairly dark implications that aren't explored in the books because of their target audience. I find it interesting to note though, that on our site, there seems very little demand for horror stories, although there have been some darker themes with respect to, for example, murder. Plus, we recently opened a Necromancy class, which is proving popular - and will, I suspect, lead to something a little darker than our usual fare.

In part 2, I will ponder on some more specific aspects of ratings an "adult" gaming.

Sartar Companion - Review pt 2

2011-01-03T08:34:00.000Z

The Sartar Companion includes six scenarios. They are not linked together by any common theme, and can be run in between sessions of the Kingdom of Heroes scenario, or separately. The first of these is "Return to Apple Lane", which is a sequel to the original Apple Lane scenario, first published in the late '70s, and later, for RQ3 in 1987. Its hard to avoid the feeling that this is a nostalgia-fest for those whose first experience of Glorantha may well have been this introductory adventure way back when. However, no knowledge of the original is required, and the scenario will work just as well for those new to the hamlet.

Details of Apple Lane itself have been changed to fit the new rules, but most of these changes are fairly minor, and the majority of the original NPCs are present - albeit five years older. The only ones who are obviously missing are the Humakti weaponmasters; their building is shown on the map, but they appear to have left the hamlet at some point, perhaps to prevent them offering too much assistance to the PCs. The scenario itself is also reminiscent of the original, with the heroes once again finding themselves defending Gringle's Pawnshop, this time from the Lunars.

The conclusion to the scenario is fairly scripted, although it feels natural enough, rather than railroading the players. Suffice to say that "Return to Apple Lane" is also a bridge between the original RQ version and "Sheep, Clouds, Thunder" from the Gathering Thunder scenario book for HQ1. That received some criticism for the way it treated the hamlet; at least this time the heroes get to salvage something first, and the ending isn't as downbeat as might be expected.

The second scenario, "The Hero and the Grove", is a short heroquest about strengthening the magical pact between the Colymar Tribe and the local wild lands. It's a fairly average heroquest, but does have the advantage of being a good introduction to the concept of re-enacting myths in the Otherworld. If possible, it would probably be a good idea to run this (or something like it) before the more dramatic otherworldly adventure in Kingdom of Heroes, at least if your players are new to the concept. A nice touch here is the description of how the myth was enacted first by Orlanth, then Heort, then Colymar, showing a common historical theme in heroquesting.

"Treasure of Two-Face Hill" is an expansion of a plot hook provided in the background section of the book. There's a good chance the players will need to spend some hero points just to have their characters survive the first part of the scenario (although its also possible to side-step this entirely, if they're more sensible than your average PC), but from then on it turns into a question of how to defend your clan from something that's essentially unbeatable in combat. This is one of those areas where the HQ2 habit of rating opponents as "Nearly Impossible" to defeat, or whatever, really does make sense - if the enemy wasn't significantly tougher than the heroes, there wouldn't be a scenario.

For my money, the best scenario in the book is "Ghosts of the Ridge". Here, the players are presented with a problem that can be solved in numerous ways, all with their own pros and cons. The judicious use of extreme physical violence is certainly one of the options, although perhaps not the best one. While the heroes are certainly free to try that, and other possibilities besides, the scenario nudges them towards seeking a legal solution to their situation, and undertaking a rather cool heroquest to recover an item of considerable magical power. Characters following Lhankor Mhy, god of knowledge, will probably get as much chance to shine in this one as the warriors, if not more so. The heroquest can also be run as a stand-alone scenario, should the characters choose another way of dealing with the central issue in this one.

"The Gifts of Stone" starts out fairly scripted, with some obvious scenery-gawking, but later turns into a return visit to another old RQ scenario, in this case the Sazdorf tunnels from Haunted Ruins. The nature of the heroes' mission makes this feel somewhat different from the original, and there are a few reminders that you're not here to just steal treasure from the trolls!

The final offering isn't so much a scenario as a bit of scenery setting. The Crimson Bat arrives in Sartar, eats a bunch of people, and then buggers off to Whitewall. This can be used as an opportunity to do all sorts of things, and is rather more dramatic than it may sound. If you already know what the Crimson Bat is, 'nuff said... if not: "scary" about sums it up.

So, the actual narratives of the scenarios are, on the whole, pretty good. Where they fall down is for the same reason as in Kingdom of Heroes: the lack of any stats. This was, to my mind, a significant drawback in that book, and it hasn't been fixed here, either. This flaw naturally extends to the encounters, and, to some extent, the background material, as well as to the scenarios.

To be fair, the writers are quite up-front about it - literally so; they mention it in the introduction. Their argument is that stats "aren't necessary" in HQ2, which is technically true, but doesn't mean that they aren't highly desirable, at least for some GMs. Instead, anyone who thinks such things are useful is just told to go away and do all the work themselves, which isn't terribly helpful.

Now, one of the problems with HQ2 as a system - if you like the style of gaming I do - is that you couldn't give numbered stats to NPCs if you wanted to. The system doesn't work that way, and sometimes (as in "Treasure of Two-Face Hill", mentioned above) that's an advantage, and sometimes it isn't. Either way, nobody can blame the writers for leaving out the numbers, since they just wouldn't make sense.

But that isn't to say that you can't give a clearer idea of what the NPCs and other encounters are capable of. A listing of significant abilities is all that's required. In fact, this is done for one particular being (p226), so why not the others? You're presumably supposed to infer any stats you might need from the text descriptions, but this really isn't very satisfactory, especially for the more important characters, like the villain in "Return to Apple Lane". Yes, you can do all the work yourself, as you're advised to, but you shouldn't have to.

A rather sour note to end on, then, although it has to be acknowledged that many people won't find the lack of stats a problem at all, and some will doubtless rejoice in the freedom it gives them. But, really, it's my only major criticism of the book, which in every other respect (except maybe the proofreading) is of high quality, and eminently useful for any Sartar-based campaign. If you don't mind going only PDF-only, you can even get it for almost half price, which is pretty good value, all things considered. There's a lot of really good material here, and the book deserves to do well.

Sartar Companion - Review pt 1

2011-01-02T19:31:00.001Z

The Sartar Companion is the follow up to Kingdom of Heroes for HeroQuest 2. The book has the same format as the earlier volume, weighing in at 296 pages, for a rather steep €40 price tag. Still, given the size of the book, and the volume of material in it, that doesn't seem an unreasonable price, and the alternative would presumably have been two books at rather more than half the price each - economies of scale being what they are. The book also includes a couple of full page, full-colour maps, one of the whole Dragon Pass area, and the other of the Colymar lands.

One negative point is that the proofreading does not appear to have been done to a very high standard, with a number of jarring typos throughout the book. Having said that, its not as bad as it was in the early Hero Wars books, or some of the Mongoose books, for that matter. I've seen much, much, worse in other published RPG products, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Perhaps the instance most in need of an erratum or clarification is the description of the walls of Runegate, which manages to contradict itself within the course of a single paragraph! Other than that one example, however, the intended meanings are usually clear.

The contents of the book are something of a random assortment, which is only to be expected in a "Companion" volume. That is, the book includes all the bits they couldn't squeeze into the already large Kingdom of Heroes. In a similar vein, as the title implies, the book is of little use if you don't own the previous one. Unlike KoH, though, virtually everything in this is GM-only information, with only the 40 or so pages dedicated to cults being of much use to players. Character generation and general background were, after all, fairly well covered in KoH.

Broadly speaking, the book can be divided into four sections: background, encounters, scenarios, and cults.

The background section describes the city of Jonstown and the towns of Runegate and Clearwine, along with several other locations, such as the Old Wind Temple and the Starfire Ridges. Much of this is directly linked to the scenarios later in the book, and a few "For more information, see p. XX" tags might have been helpful as a result. Some locations, such as Two-Face Hill, are therefore described into two different parts of the book, with neither making reference to the other. Having said that, everything in this section is stand-alone, and much of it serves as detailed background for gaming.

Places such as Jonstown are described in some considerable detail. Town plans in the style of those in the first book are included again, but here there is more emphasis on individual characters within the city, and the material is even more directly relevant to play. There are some oddities here and there, where NPCs are described as "very hard" to defeat in combat, or whatever - apparently regardless of who the player characters are. This is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in a scenario, but putting such things into a background description that doesn't have a specific narrative feels rather odd. Of course, its easy to ignore, and is doubtless useful information for someone, so its a little unfair to actually complain about it.

The emphasis in the locations is fairly strongly on the Colymar clan and their local geography. For some reason, the Colymar have never particularly interested me, but given the scenario in the previous book, it does make sense to expand on them here. It can also provide useful ideas for anyone wanting to strike out with their own tribe, and gives groups the opportunity to feel that a particular corner of Sartar is more "theirs", without official publications contradicting it. And material on large and important places like Jonstown should be useful to everyone, regardless of their choice of tribe.

In addition to what is really some very good location writing, the background section of the book also includes a section on dragonewts, which is useful but adds little to what long-time fans already know, and a bumper section of 100 rumours in the old True/False/Mostly True/GM Choice/Meaningless format from the RuneQuest days. Nostalgia aside, a good GM can get a lot out of this section, and its a welcome addition.

The next major section focuses on encounters. There is an actual random encounter table, rolling percentile dice against the terrain type to generate possibilities, although, of course, its use is entirely optional. (As an aside, there is no explanation of what percentile dice actually are - since they are never used in the HQ2 rules, its apparently just taken for granted that you already know. On the other hand, one might well argue that that's not an unreasonable assumption for Glorantha players!) There is also a table showing the typical weather in Sartar throughout the year which, if you'll pardon the pun, should help set the atmosphere.

The book includes 42 typical encounters, and 31 special encounters. The typical encounters include things such as merchants, Lunar patrols, dwarves, and broos. Each has a description covering at least a page - it is, however, slightly confusing to discover that, for example, the page with "Encounter: 17b" at the top in large bold letters is not a variant of Encounter 17, but simply the second page of that encounter description.

Each encounter type also includes at least one specific group or NPC in detail, and, in a nice nod to the past, these include such familiar characters as Biturian Varosh. These help put a face to a general encounter such as "Sartarite Farmers", illustrating how they can actually be used in play. Many are detailed enough that they serve as plot hooks that could lead to short GM-written scenarios.

The special encounters are somewhat different. These are unusual events, such as odd meteorological phenomena, or finding mysterious ruins, as well as meetings with unique NPCs, such as the Puppeteer Troupe. Most of these are relatively briefly described, as strange bits of scenery one might come across, with some entries being as short as a single sentence, while others go into more detail. As a result, most aren't really plot hooks, but rather ways of showing off the unusual environment.

After the scenarios, the book concludes with write-ups of six cults not included in KoH. These include Heler, Eurmal, and Odayla, all of which were previously seen in Storm Tribe for Hero Wars; Argan Argar and Babeester Gor, who haven't been properly written up since RQ3 days; and Kolat, who has never had an official cult write up at all until now. Taken together with KoH, this is all of the regular deities of the Sartarites, although the Tarsh exiles also worship Maran Gor, who we've yet to see, and Yelmalio is popular in some places, too. The latter, though, belongs more properly in the Pavis book, which will be the next one in the series, so his absence here is entirely expected.

The cult write ups follow essentially the same format as in KoH, at least for the four relatively normal deities on the list. Eurmal, being a god of the occasional outcast nutter, doesn't quite follow the usual scheme, and the writers do a fairly good job of pointing out all the huge disadvantages of worshipping him. Playing an Eurmali is, as it should be, therefore something of a challenge, and they're much better suited to being sidekicks who can get the PCs into trouble rather than heroes in their own right.

Kolat is the first proper look we've had at a shamanic, spirit-based cult. The book expands on the information in the appendix to the HQ2 rules, as well as listing numerous types of spirit on which the Kolating can call. The write-up gives the impression that Kolatings are rather more limited in their magic than followers of theistic cults, with their abilities generally being narrower, as well as giving them what could be quite a complex series of taboos that they must not break. This may well be intentional, emphasising that the Heortlings are predominantly a theistic culture, with little room for strange spirit wranglers. On the other hand, a Kolating does have magic that's different from everyone else's (at least in an all-Heortling campaign), and that difference alone can be an advantage.

It's perhaps worth noting that Serdodosa, Kolat's female counterpart, gets no more than a passing mention. Doubtless there wasn't room for two spirit cults in the book - Kolat's is the longest cult write up here - but hopefully we will see her described properly at some point, along with Maran Gor, and perhaps some of the more obscure options.

In part 2, I will look at the scenarios included in the Sartar Companion.

Lords of the West: Update 3

2010-11-21T23:18:00.000Z

As many of you probably know, if you follow the Gloranthan mailing lists, my Facebook page, and so on, progress on Lords of the West has definitely been picking up recently.

Having said that, I should begin by saying that I have, as yet, no further news on LotW2: Kingdom of the Flamesword. It has a publisher, but no release date or further information. There is no reason to suppose this won't happen at some point, but for the moment, you'll just have to wait.

Progress on the Jonatela material that could potentially have formed LotW4 is slow but steady. The material currently available at my website deals with the more mundane aspects of Jonating life, the workings of the government, and what can laughingly be called the justice system. Obviously, Jonatela is not a very nice place, especially if you're a peasant, and this inevitably colours the material, but it's still enjoyable to write, so I'll keep on doing it. This background stuff will soon be finished, and I'll then move on to starting to compile a gazetteer of interesting places to visit across the kingdom, emphasising some of its magical power as well as its murky peril.

But what's really cool, of course, is the news about The Book of Glorious Joy, which incorporates bits of LotW1 with most of LotW3. As you can see, the cover has been completed - and a very fine piece of work it is, too, showing a valiant Loskalmi wizard-knight charging through a dark and chilly landscape so typical of many parts of Fronela. The interior artwork is well under way, and you can see a sample at the d101 Games product page. Proofing and editing are all completed, and the publisher is aiming at a release in January or February. As always, these dates can slip, but in this case, I doubt it will be by very much.

If you've already seen the article on Junora published in Hearts in Glorantha #4, you'll have a fair idea of what to expect from Part 2 of the book, at least. Junora originally would have been chapter 6, following on from the five chapters included in BoGJ, and follows a similar format and style. But let's talk a little about what's in each chapter:

Part 1

The overview is all about the West taken as a whole. The West of Glorantha is not, let's remember, a single culture, but rather a collection of two or three major cultures and a bunch of smaller ones. They have a lot in common, but several differences, too - Loskalm and Seshnela differ more from each other than, say, medieval England differed from medieval France. Thus, this is inevitably a broad and sweeping overview of the region.
The next chapter deals with the mythology of Malkionism (although, of course, the different sects do disagree on rather a lot), much of it written by Greg, but also with plenty of elaboration from myself.
The final chapter of part 1 is the cults. Much of what would have been in this part of LotW1 is instead going to appear in Kingdom of the Flamesword, but hopefully there's enough here to fill it out and make it playable.

Part 2

Part 2 deals specifically with the Kingdom of Loskalm, and contains the bulk of the material that would have been in LotW3. The initial chapter covers the Kingdom itself, and the more mundane aspects of its culture. This is similar in format - though much less dark in tone - to the web-only Jonating material currently at my website.
The second chapter of part 2 describes the Loskalmi religion. The focus here is more on how to make this useful to player characters, rather than many of the details of the theology and myth (some of which are, in any event, in part 1). But it does explain in some detail how Idealism actually works.
The gazetteer will probably be the largest single chapter - it would have occupied around 40% of LotW3 had that been published on its own. It covers all the major cities of the kingdom, and a host of other locations important for religious, military, or magical reasons, as well as major geographic features. It's based, of course, on the maps here, although these will not be the final maps used in the product.
This short chapter deals with commonly encountered NPCs, from travelling knights to troubadours.
Finally, Haut Ussle is a typical community, intended to be used either as is, or as the basis for creating your own Loskalmi communities. In this respect, it is much like the clan write ups one often sees for the Heortlings.

This is a corner of Glorantha that has not been looked at in as much detail as it could have been, especially in official publications. Many people, we know, prefer the more obviously bronze age and non-European cultures of Dragon Pass and Prax, so I'm under no illusions that this will do as well as Kingdom of Sartar. But there also seem to have been a number of people out there waiting for more on this region, and, while this book is not fully endorsed by Moon Design, I have tried to make it consistent with existing material, and, indeed, some of it was written in consultation with Greg, back when the project was still with Issaries.

The next update will hopefully be able to announce a definite release!

TAM London 2010 - Squeee!

2010-10-17T21:46:00.001+01:00

That was a geeky "squeee", of course. And, uh, a manly one, as well. Obviously...

So, I've just returned from the second Amaz!ng Meeting to be held in London, this time in the swanky environs of the London Hilton Metropole. This year the event was even bigger than last, with close to a thousand people attending, and an even more packed program. As a meeting of pro-science and pro-rationality types, I don't think it can be beaten; it really is quite remarkable.

The line-up for this year was pretty stellar, with some familiar from the world of science, some from entertainment, and a few who are, perhaps, a little less well known, at least outside skeptical circles.

The first talk was one of the best, with Susan Blackmore talking about her long journey on the road from firm believer in the paranormal to skeptic. I'd never actually seen her in person before, although I've read her autobiography (still on my bookshelf, indeed). That's largely because she hasn't been involved in skeptical work for the last decade or so, and its great to see such an engaging speaker back. The talk, like her autobiography, very much gave the impression that she was someone who really wanted to believe in psychic powers, and dedicated much of her life to trying to prove their existence, but was just too good an experimental scientist to find evidence that just wasn't there.

She was followed by the great Richard Dawkins, giving a speech about how the study of evolution should be as central to modern education as Classics was in days gone by. Perhaps over-egging the pudding a little bit, but the main point is a valid one: evolution is such an important concept that it impinges on almost every field of study in some way.

Cory Doctorow spoke on copyright and how the current systems of enforcing it are threatened by the internet. This is, he explained, much the same as the music industry back at the turn of the last century trying to shut down the production of phonographs on the grounds of copyright (since at the time, musicians made their money by collecting royalties from sheet music). Obviously, that one didn't work so well, and one can see something similar in Viacom's recent attempts (also so far unsuccessful) to effectively close down YouTube. Doctorow's solution seems to me a perfectly reasonable one, and it may well be that the music and video industries will eventually be forced to accept something much like it. It's as much a colossal waste of time and money for them to do otherwise as it is a pain to everyone else, and perhaps they'll eventually work that one out.

Adam Rutherford talked about the Alpha Course and its rather scary links to Christian fundamentalism, homophobia, and so on. In a similar vein, Paula King talked about the Christian Party, which is rather more openly zealous and, frankly, quite unpleasant. Now, it's true that the Christian Party has absolutely naff all chance of being elected to Parliament even under a PR system, let alone the one we've got - or the relatively minor voting reform that the Coalition is likely to propose, for that matter. But these are organised groups that can do lobbying, and that, in itself, is a worrying thought.

Also, on the first day we had a couple of awards being given out for great achievements in UK skepticism. This year they went, deservedly, to Ben Goldacre and Rhys Morgan.

In the evening, we had entertainment from the Amateur Transplants (check out, for example, this homage to Tom Lehrer's Elements Song), Simon Cox, and, of course, the superb Tim Minchin, who was premiering the animated version of his poem "Storm", which I may have mentioned before. To be honest, there was a bit too much waffle about the animation process at the end of the evening's entertainment, but all the songs Tim played were new to me, at least, and all very good in different ways. If I had to pick one of the three, though, I'd go for "Cont", for sheer cleverness.

And that was just the first day! The best talk on the second day was also the first one, and the one that focused most clearly on science, which seemed to have a slightly lower profile this year than last. This was given by Marcus Chown, on the subject of "ten reasons why the universe is bonkers" - you can find three of the reasons at the bottom of the list on this page. It was a great talk, with nice visuals on the power of space science.

Also on the second day, DJ Grothe gave a talk on the ideals of TAM's organisers, the JREF, a panel on use of new internet technology to spread the word, and an interview with the man for whom the very meeting is sort-of-named: James "the Amazing" Randi. He hadn't been able to attend the previous year, due to health issues, but he seemed remarkably spry and energetic this time round, and came across as a quite remarkable man.

And then there was PZ Myers, who has often been accused of taking an overly strident tone on his blog. I don't think I agreed with everything he said, but I certainly agree with his general sentiment that some things you just have to get angry about. On the other hand, I have to say that while I personally found Melinda Gebbie's talk on feminist pornography interesting, I appear to have been in something of a minority (among the men, anyway), and I actually do agree that it seemed rather out of place. All very well, yes, but what's it doing here? Stephen Fry also gave an interview, albeit by video link, which was quite wide-ranging. Alan Moore finished off the day, and seemed rather more popular - some interesting thoughts on how our geographic environment affects us, but I could have done without the poem on the psychogeography of Northampton. Maybe that's just me, though.

So, perhaps not perfect, but a very enjoyable weekend overall, with time for getting to know other people in between the talks. The food was better this time, too, which doubtless comes from using the Hilton as a venue. All credit to the organisers for pulling off what was really quite a large meeting.

I'll be going again next year!

Addendum: One thing that didn't help was the massive disruption on the Underground this weekend. So, in honour of London Transport, here's another song from the Amateur Transplants. (Warning: strong language).

What's with all the animals?

2010-10-03T18:11:00.001+01:00

If you read this blog at all regularly, you may just have noticed that there have been a few posts recently about, well... animals and stuff. If you were really only interested in HeroQuest news, or something of that sort, this might not really have been what you were after.

I've been considering for a while the possibility of setting up another blog. In order to do that, I first wanted to test whether I even had the time, or the base material, to make this worth the trouble. So, rather than go ahead and create a blog I might later have to shut down, I ran a few test pieces on this blog. I feel confident enough now to actually start the new blog, which means that this one will be returning to something closer to its old self.

That doesn't mean there won't be science-type stuff here, because this will remain a personal blog about whatever strikes me at the time. In fact, the very next post here will probably be some sort of report on TAM London. However, since Dragonmeet is coming up shortly after that, there's a good chance that this will be followed by posts on the Sartar Companion, and perhaps on Lords of the West, depending on what actually happens when. Posts here will also be likely returning to their former frequency, which is to say, not all that often.

So, if you didn't want to read me wittering on about zoology, you are now largely safe.

On the other hand, if you liked the recent posts, and want to read more, you can head on over to my new blog, Synapsida. And even unsubscribe from this one, if it was the HeroQuest stuff you didn't care about. Synapsida will be a random assortment of articles, all on the theme of mammals. Which is perhaps a little specialised, but when you consider that there are blogs like SV:POW out there, it's all relative.

The mission of the blog is to try and make recent science stories more comprehensible; everything I write about is already out there on the internet somewhere (albeit sometimes on paid registration sites), but not necessarily in an easily accessible format. As the subtitle indicates, coverage is going to be pretty random - it's largely whatever catches my eye that week. I aim to get new posts up every week or two.

Those of you following on Facebook should note that, because Facebook only allows users to automatically repost content from a single blog (which is currently this one), Synapsida posts will not appear there. You can, of course, follow Synapsida via the Atom feed on its page, if you want to keep up to date.

So, if you're interested, pop on over. If you're not, just hang out here.

Ground Sloths and the Size of Fossils

2010-10-03T16:53:00.002+01:00

The sloths are among the stranger groups of mammals, belonging to a lineage that split off from all other placental mammals probably even before the dinosaurs went extinct. They originated in South America, a continent that was, for a long time, as isolated as Australia is today. Just as marsupials survived in Australia, so a number of strange and early placentals survived in South America (as did some marsupials, come to that). Of course, South America eventually joined itself up to North America, and a great number of odd animals went extinct as more familiar forms crossed the Panama land bridge heading south. The sloths, however, survived - or, at least, some of them did.

Today, there are only six living species of sloth, all of which are tree-dwelling animals. Their ancestors lived not in trees, but on the ground, and many of them were much, much, bigger than those that live today. The last of these giant ground sloths died out remarkably recently, perhaps around 9000 BC, meaning that they must have lived alongside humans for thousands of years.

Perhaps the best known ground sloth is the largest one, Megatherium, which reached the size of an elephant. But there were a number of others, many of which were still quite substantial. In zoological terms, the ground sloths aren't even a real group; this is because they just represent those sloths that didn't happen to head up into the trees, and they aren't all directly related. Instead, the ground sloths form a number of different families, with at least some being more closely related to one or other of the families of living tree sloth than to each other.

2-toed     Mylodon     Megatherium     3-toed
sloths    etc. etc.    sloths
^    ^      ^ ^
|          |            |             |         Anteaters
|    |    | |
------------          |             | ^
   |    |             |   |
       |                    |             |            |
   ---------------------- |             |
                   |                      |            |
   |    |    |
                   ------------------------             |
|                   |
                                    |                   |
---------------------
                                              |
|

Mylodon is a genus of ground sloth, whose members were more closely related to the 2-toed than to the 3-toed sloths. Exactly how many species belong to the genus isn't really clear, and only one, Mylodon darwini, seems to be undisputed. As tree sloths go, its not particularly well known - even the image accompanying this article is of an animal now placed in entirely different genus, Glossotherium. Mylodon lived from central Argentina and Chile as far north as Bolivia, first appearing around one million years ago, and dying out roughly with the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 BC. In life, it probably weighed around 200 kg or so (over 400 lbs), around the size of a grizzly bear.

A recent report of a fossil Mylodon discovered near the city of Concordia in Argentina adds further to our knowledge of this animal. Interestingly, the specimen belongs to a smaller, slimmer, individual than those seen before, especially in this region. Assuming, as seems plausible, that the fossil really does belong to the same species as the other, larger ones, why might it be smaller?

Perhaps the most obvious reason is that it isn't an adult. There is no reason why young animals shouldn't sometimes fossilise, and failing to notice this fact could easily lead one to make the wrong conclusions. (There is, for example, an ongoing debate of this sort about Nanotyrannus, which is either a midget relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, or just a very young one). In this case, a the fossil of a juvenile Mylodon is already known. We know that that fossil is a juvenile because the bones of its limbs had not yet fully fused when it died, indicating that they were still growing. The limbs of the new specimen were not preserved, but the skull does appear significantly more solid and well developed than in the known juvenile, implying that it probably was an adult.

A second possibility is that it isn't the same sex as the other fossils. In living sloths, the females tend to be larger than the males, so it could just be that this one is a male, and the others happen to be female. This is possible, but is fairly difficult to determine from just looking at the bones. The authors who described the fossil consider it unlikely, largely because known Mylodon fossils don't fall easily into two different sizes, although that wouldn't necessarily be the case if the biggest males were larger than the smallest females. They also dismiss quite perfunctorily the possibility that the animal in question just hadn't eaten very well during its life, which would seem (to me, at least) an entirely plausible explanation.

We must also remember that animals do change over geological time. There is some evidence that, at least until the ground sloths died out, sloths as a whole were getting larger over the course of their evolution. This could well happen even within a single species, as they slowly evolve, without actually losing the ability to breed with one another. Unfortunately, there aren't really enough specimens overall to rule this possibility in or out.

So, even aside from "well, maybe it was a just a small one" (because, surely, they weren't all the same size even as adults), there are a great number of reasons why a fossil might differ from others of its own species. All of these sorts of things have to be taken into consideration when trying to analyse a particular specimen and determine what it tells us. But there is something else that the fossil can tell us about its species, and that's due, not to the fossil itself, but to the geologic environment around it.

The animal that left this particular fossil died around 80,000 years ago (give or take a few millennia), at a time when the Argentinian climate was different than it is today. A number of plant fossils were found in the same bed, including chunks of fossilised wood. Taken together, these indicate that the terrain at the time was forested, with cashew and acacia dominating, and also a significant number of palm trees. This would indicate that the climate must have been fairly warm and damp, and the structure of the rocks also suggests that the specific area where the animal died had a number of rivers or lagoons - probably tributaries of the Uruguay River. (This sort of thing, as you might imagine, is rather easier to tell with deposits just 80,000 years old than with those that are several million).

Furthermore, there were fossils of South American tapirs discovered nearby. This species is still alive today, and we know that it likes tropical and semitropical forests, and wouldn't venture out onto the open pampas that marks the region today. All of this makes sense, since we know from other evidence that the Earth was in one its warm periods at the time, in between the Ice Ages.

So far so good... except that other fossils from this species have been found in sites that imply a cold, relatively dry environment. They appear, on the whole to have grazed on open grasslands, rather than foraging among palm trees. A sample of fossilised dung from Chile that had (apparently) been left by a Mylodon showed that its last dinner consisted of sedges and grasses, supporting the theory of the sorts of terrain they usually lived in.

So, presumably, they were pretty adaptable creatures, certainly more so than had previously been thought. Normally, as the Ice Ages came and went, animals moved to warmer habitats, descending from mountains or migrating towards the equator, and then moving back again when things warmed up. From what we know of ground sloths, they don't seem to have done this much - which might suggest that they simply adapted to eat whatever was around them rather than taking the trouble to wander elsewhere.

Oh, and there is a twist: Bergmann's Rule. This piece of nineteenth century zoological lore states that closely related animals will tend to be smaller the warmer the environment they live in. For instance, polar bears are, on average, bigger than grizzlies, which are quite a lot larger than tropical bears. It suffers somewhat from the fact that nobody can really explain why this should be so - and perhaps more seriously from the fact that it may well be complete bollocks anyway. But, well, you never know...

[Picture from copyrightexpired.com]

Bats and the Cocktail Party Nightmare

2010-09-26T18:59:00.001+01:00

After the rodents, bats are the second largest order of mammals. In fact, around one fifth of all mammal species are bats. They inhabit every continent except Antarctica (the presence of encircling seas not having deterred them from reaching Australia as it has most other placental groups), and all but the coldest of habitats. Unless you happen to live in, say, Iceland, there are probably bats of some sort living not too far away from you.

And, yet, we don't know as much about them as we do most other broad types of mammal. They're mostly nocturnal, they fly about where it's difficult to spot them, and they tend to sleep in some pretty inaccessible places. That most people don't find them very cute and cuddly probably doesn't help much.

But, of course, they are pretty cool animals, when you think about it. The whole flight business is fairly remarkable, and has only been achieved on three other occasions in the entire evolutionary history of the animal kingdom. And, of course, there's the whole sonar business.

We're all aware that bats use sonar to find and catch their prey, and also to avoid bumping into things in the darkness. When you're flying over an open field, looking for tasty insects, this is all well and fine, but it presents problems when you're trying to do something as simple as heading out for the night. This is because cave-dwelling bats (which a great many of them are), often live in huge colonies. And when I say 'huge', I mean over a million individuals in some cases - bigger than most human cities.

All of these bats are crammed into a cave that, in all probability, only has one way out, and may not be all that wide, either. So, every evening, great clouds of bats have to emerge from their caves, and return again in the morning. Those bats are all making echolocation calls, so that each animal must be bombarded with an absolute cacophony of calls from its neighbours. How, in the midst of all that, do you make out the sound of your own call reflecting off the wall?

This problem has been termed "the cocktail party nightmare", and it's far from resolved. The answer is probably complex, involving a number of different factors. For instance, bats have rather more directional hearing than we humans, being able to swivel their large, highly mobile ears so as to pick up sounds coming only from a particular direction. They may also use the same solution that humans do when at the eponymous cocktail party: recognising the sound of their own voice as distinct from that of the others surrounding them. But the evidence for this isn't very firm, and it seems difficult to believe that it works so well when bombarded with literally thousands of other bats all shouting at once.

Although it doesn't provide any kind of definitive answer, a recent study examined the calls made by Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis, also called the "Mexican free-tailed bat") as they emerged from their caves. The free-tailed bats are a family of around a hundred species, found throughout the world, with, for example, one particularly close relative of the Brazilian free-tailed bat being native to the Mediterranean region. In fact, despite their name, the Brazilian free-tailed bat is itself found across a very wide region, reaching as far as the southern USA.

Free-tailed     Pallid       Vesper       (Other
   Bats    Bats Bats Bats)
^    ^    ^
|    |    |
    |              |            |            ^
----------------    |    |
           |                    |            |
           |                    |            |
           ----------------------            |
                      |                      |
                      |                      |
                      ------------------------
                                 |
                                 |

This particular study looked at colonies in a couple of caves in the hills east of San Antonio and Austin, Texas. The larger of these held a total of around 200,000 bats. So, around the population of, say, Newcastle. The bats emerged from this cave in three bursts, lasting from six to twenty six minutes, in vast columns where the individuals are pushed together almost wingtip-to-wingtip. This gives some idea of the scale of the "cocktail party nightmare" they must face. The other cave, while having a smaller population of only about 16,000 or so, managed to get all the bats in two bursts, totalling around eleven minutes between them. Which is still quite a lot.

The sounds they made were, as it turned out, quite distinct from those made while searching for food. They were much shorter, starting out at a high pitch, then rapidly dropping in tone. In contrast, foraging calls last longer and maintain a fairly constant pitch throughout, being used for a broad sweep to see if there's anything out there worth eating.

Being shorter may help the bat disentangle its calls from those of its neighbours. Perhaps as important, when combined with the wide range of frequencies employed during the call, this gives the bat a better idea of exactly how far away any obstacles might be, at the expense of having a shorter range. Of course, when you're emerging from a cave, not being able to detect objects further away isn't much of a problem, and, if anything, likely helps reduce confusion with objects not of immediate concern to you. In fact, these calls are similar to those employed by bats as they complete the very final part of their swoop to capture prey - when, again, exact distances are important, but range isn't.

Interestingly, the bats had slightly different calls at the two cave sites. At the larger one, the difference between the 'emergence' calls and those used while foraging were more extreme than at the other site. This could be because the much higher population density makes the short range and accuracy of the sonar pings even more important than it otherwise would be. On the other hand, the bats didn't seem to care much about just how many of their neighbours were nearby at the time, with stragglers making much the same sort of calls as those in the densest part of the emerging column.

However, only about half the calls fit this description. The others were equally short, but maintained a more constant pitch - albeit much higher than that used while searching for food. These would be even shorter range than the other calls, and their purpose isn't so clear. The authors suggest that they might be used for really close objects, such as nearby bats, while the variable pitch calls are used for things like the cave walls, that are (hopefully) further away. Another possibility is that they are, in fact, not sonar at all; instead, they might be social calls, being used for some form of communication between the bats, perhaps as a "don't bump into me" warning or for some other purpose as yet unknown.

None of which truly solves the mystery of the "cocktail party nightmare", but at least provides some new and interesting food for thought about what exactly the bats are doing.

[Pictures from Wikimedia Commons]

Seals, Sex, and Sickness

2010-09-19T14:41:00.001+01:00

Fur seals are members of the sea lion family, and not, as their name might suggest, the seal family. One of the easiest ways to tell the difference is to check the hind flippers. In sea lions and fur seals, the flippers stick out to the sides (at least when on land), enabling the animal to waddle about on all fours, or even rear up on its hind limbs. True seals, however, are more thoroughly adapted to life in the water, and their hind flippers, while great for swimming, stick out to the rear, making them pretty much useless on land - the animal has to drag itself about using only its front flippers, and cannot walk.

Of course, the two families are related, and share a number of features in common. Some of these are related to the difficulty of breeding in an air-breathing animal that spends almost all of its time in the water. They come ashore just once a year, during which time the females give birth to their pups, and then almost immediately mate again before retreating back to the sea. As a result, gestation almost always lasts just under twelve months, regardless of species, and the animals show a great ability to synchronise their births to the same time of year.

In both groups, the males tend to be much larger than the females, aggressively defending patches of shoreline and dominating a harem of females, once the latter have finished raising their pups and are ready to mate. Their larger size, visible differences from the female (such as a sea lion's mane), and aggressive attitude all require a lot of energy, and are controlled, as in other mammals, by the hormone testosterone.

One might think, therefore, that having more testosterone is an undoubtedly good thing, if you happen to be a male fur seal - you're bigger, sexier, and more likely to be a hit with the females, and overall, end up with more children. But there could be a downside as well - you're more likely to get sick.

A couple of recent studies, published in PLoS ONE and the Australian Journal of Zoology, looked at the breeding tactics of New Zealand fur seals (Arctocephalus forsteri) at a breeding colony near Kaikoura. These are one of eight species of fur seal found in the southern hemisphere, and are actually more closely related to the sea lions than to the single northern hemisphere species.

Southern   Sea Lions    Northern     Walrus    True Seals
Fur Seals Fur Seal
   ^       ^       |    |    ^
   |     |       |    |    |
   |     |       |    |    |
   -------------           |            |          |
          |                |            |          |
          |                |            |          |
          ------------------            |          |
                  |                     |          |
                  |                     |          |
                  -----------------------          |
                             |                     |
                             |                     |
                             -----------------------
                                        |
                                        |

The breeding males fell into two main groups. Around half of them followed what is, perhaps, the more obvious breeding tactic. They established patches of ground, vigorously defending them from other males, and gathering harems of up to fifteen females each. New Zealand fur seals are, compared with some of their relatives, not especially aggressive - they are more likely to posture, shout, and threaten than to physically attack their rivals, but even so they spent a lot of time showing off their masculinity. These were, as might be expected, the bigger, more muscular males - presumably the sort that the females tend to fancy. And, as a result, they got to have a lot of sex.

However, nearly as many adopted a quite different tactic. They tended to spend only a couple of days at the breeding site, wandering about and looking for a good opportunity to have a quickie while the territorial males weren't looking. They were generally smaller than their counterparts, with less pronounced masculine features, and they spent a lot of time running away. A third, much smaller group, were somewhere in between, sticking to a specific area of the shoreline for a few days at a time, but not establishing long-term territories. Nonetheless, the differences in behaviour between the two main groups were quite clearly defined, rather than just being points at either end of a spectrum.

Interestingly, when it came to doing paternity tests on the pups born the following year, it turned out that about as many of them were fathered by the wandering transients as by the big, masculine males. Certainly (so far as could be determined), the transients had had sex far less often than the territorial males, but it didn't seem to make much difference to their eventual chances of fathering offspring. Which, from an evolutionary perspective, is all that matters.

New Zealand fur seals, it seems, depend on a balance between two different tactics to father offspring, with each tactic having its own strengths and weaknesses.

The researchers also studied the urine and dung of the various males. This has to be collected fresh, which isn't terribly easy when you have large and aggressive males stomping about (they weigh up to 185 kg / 410 lbs). It doesn't help that, since they are spending so much time posturing and so little time hunting at this time of year, they really aren't eating much, and consequently, don't poo very often, either. But, with due Antipodean diligence, the researchers managed to collect enough of the stuff to analyse.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the big territorial males had much higher levels of testosterone than their wimpier cousins. But all this male hormone sloshing about and making them macho had apparently come at a price - because their dung also contained many more parasites than that of the transients. Roundworms, tapeworms, and flukes were all present, often in relatively high numbers. The price of so much masculinity, it seemed, was that they were also more likely to get sick.

Why would this be? One possibility is that, in order to bulk up their muscle, they had eaten more food before arriving at the beaches than the transients had. Since most of these parasites are passed on in food, that would mean they were more likely to get infected. But another possibility is that it's the testosterone itself that's the problem. Even assuming the parasites don't literally thrive on the hormone, its possible that because the seal's body is diverting energy reserves to building up mass, a thick and manly mane, and so on - not to mention all that exhausting posturing and fighting - they have relatively little left over to run their immune system properly.

The smaller males may not get to have sex as often, but they are healthier for it, and they seem to have just as many kids in the end, anyway. Their tactics only work because the other males are busy defending their harems, so both approaches are needed... but the big males don't get everything their own way, as casual inspection might lead one to think.

[Picture from Wikimedia Commons]

The Intelligence of Chimps

2010-08-28T19:20:00.002+01:00

Our closest living relatives are, of course, the chimpanzees. There are, in fact, two species of chimp: the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), and the bonobo (Pan paniscus). The latter is sometimes called a "pygmy chimpanzee", although, frankly, there's not a lot of difference in size between the two species. Both species are equally related to humans, having diverged from a common ancestor less than two million years ago, long after that common ancestor diverged from the line that eventually led to us.

Common
Chimp    Bonobo   Human   Gorillas
|         |       |
| |       |
----------- |        ^
       |            |        |
       |            |        |
       --------------        |
             |               |
             |               |
             -----------------
                    |
                    |

Both species live in fairly similar environments in the jungles of tropical Africa, and eat more or less the same kinds of food, so we might expect that their behaviour would also be similar. But that's clearly not the case; common chimps are significantly more aggressive than bonobos, while the latter are renowned for their frequent sexual exploits. Common chimps are also more likely than bonobos to use simple tools to extract food from difficult to reach places.

Do these differences in behaviour reflect real differences in intelligence between the two species? A recent large-scale analysis, published in PLoS ONE, aimed to find out. "Intelligence" is a fairly tricky thing to pin down, even in humans, so "which species is the more intelligent?" wasn't the sort of question that the study could answer. Rather, the researchers tested members of both species on a range of tasks designed to look at different aspects of intelligence. Would they perform the same, or would one species prove better at some tasks than the other?

Of course, the study was not conducted in the wild; the animals in question were orphans raised by humans in ape sanctuaries - their parents, in most cases, presumably having been killed by bushmeat poachers. Nonetheless, they had not previously experienced these kinds of tests, so they would have to solve the problems on their own.

For the most part, there wasn't a great difference. The researchers tested spatial awareness by placing food under cups and then rotating the table, moving the cups about, and so on, to see if the chimps could figure out where the food had ended up. Members of both species got this right a little over two thirds of the time. To test their ability to count and perform simple addition, the experimenters placed differing amounts of food under covers and watched to see which one the chimp went for first. Again, both species got this right about two thirds of the time. (This does not, incidentally, imply actual arithmetic - just that the animals could recognise that, say, six peanuts is more than three).

In tests of communication - could the chimps either understand an experimenter trying to tell them where the food was, or could they themselves indicate to the experimenter where hidden food was located - they still managed to get it right over half the time, but again, there was no difference between the two species.

The most difficult test was one in which the food was placed inside a container that required a relatively complex method to open. The researchers showed the chimp how to get the food, and saw if the animals could successfully copy them. In most cases, they couldn't - and, in previous trials elsewhere, no chimp had ever solved these particular problems on their own - although, interestingly, in both species, the females were far more likely to succeed than the males.

However, in tests designed to see whether the chimps could use clues to find hidden food, or could use tools to obtain food, although both species got it right more often than not, the common chimps were significantly better than the bonobos. Tool use, in particular, is something we particularly associated with human intelligence, so we might think that this makes common chimps the more "human-like" of the two species in this respect.

But, of course, using tools isn't really the be-all and end-all of human intelligence. Our ability to work together as a species relies, in part, on our ability to understand the minds of others and to bond together socially. The final set of tests evaluated the chimps' abilities to grasp concepts such as attention and intentionality. For example, a piece of food would be hidden beneath one of two cups; the chimp could not see which cup it was, but a second human could. When the second human tried (and failed) to grab one of the cups, would the chimp work out that this was because that was where the food was hidden? On this test, the bonobos did better, succeeding just over half the time.

So, given that they scored similarly on all the other tests, it seems plausible that the basic intelligence of the two species isn't all that different. Yet the way that they use that intelligence, or the particular skills that they possess, is different. Common chimps are better at physical tasks and understanding the operation of the physical world. But the peaceful and relatively shy bonobos scored higher on tests of social awareness and the ability to understand the minds of others. Both of these are important aspects of human intelligence. Our closest relatives have evolved along paths parallel to our own, and each, perhaps can show something of how we rose to our present position of power over our planet.

[Pictures from Wikimedia Commons - upper image is a common chimp, lower image is a bonobo (both males)]

Cat Eats Pikachu

2010-08-22T16:43:00.007+01:00

We're all familiar with the various species of Big Cat - the lion, tiger, jaguar, and so forth. However, with a few notable exceptions, the smaller wild cats are less well known. This is hardly surprising, since they are pretty good at hiding, and tend to do so at the first sign of an approaching zoologist or natural history camera team. When it comes to those that are about the size of a house cat, the words "shy" and "secretive" often spring to mind when describing them.

In fact, there are actually a large number of such cat species, found in every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Although a lot of them tend to prefer woodland - with undergrowth from which they can pounce on unsuspecting dinner - they have adapted to a surprisingly wide range of habitats, such as mountains, deserts, and swamps. In total, there are 23 recognised species that are at least approximately the size of a house cat.

The one in this picture is Pallas's cat, also called the manul (Octocolobus manul). It lives in central Asia, and can be found from northern Iran as far across as north-eastern China, taking in places like Afghanistan and Turkmenistan on the way. It likes hills and high grasslands rather than forests, using rocks and low bushes as cover while hunting.

Quite how the manul fits into the evolutionary family tree of the small cats is not particularly clear. It seems to have diverged from the others quite early on, and which other cats might be its closest relatives is a bit of mystery. Some studies suggest that it may be an early offshoot of the Felis line that led to the familiar domestic cat, others that it might be related to some of the species of south-east Asia, but its been evolving on its own for long enough that it's a bit difficult to tell.

The poor old manul has, like many cats, been hunted for its fur, and, while its not a truly endangered species it is considered "Near Threatened". Trade in the pelts is banned internationally, but this hasn't really stopped anyone. However, another possible threat to the manul comes from a danger to its food supply.

Manuls, like most small cats, primarily eat small mammals, supplemented with the occasional bird. It has to be said that there are, generally speaking, quite a lot of small mammals around, especially in the wild and remote areas where the manul makes its home. We might expect that, even if the manul normally hunts one particular kind of small mammal, it would readily switch to something else if the supply became short. Evolutionarily speaking, there are two basic strategies when it comes to food supply: you can specialise in eating one particular sort of animal, or you can go for anything you can get your claws on. The first approach has the advantage that you can evolve to get very good at catching that one thing, rather than spreading your skills like a jack-of-all-trades, but an obvious disadvantage if that animal itself becomes endangered.

So, which is the manul? A study recently published in the Journal of Mammalogy aimed to find out. The authors guessed that the manul would be a generalist, eating a range of different food, depending on what was available at the time. This would be good news, since the manul would not rely on any particular other animal for its survival. It was already generally known that the manul's favourite food consisted of small rodents and pikas.

Pikas look rather a like a hamster, although they are much larger, being closer in size to a rabbit. In fact, despite their appearance, they are more closely related to rabbits than to anything else, which means that they aren't officially rodents. (Rabbits aren't rodents, either, for reasons too long to go into here). Pikas are at least the partial inspiration behind the appearance, and name, of Japanese cartoon and gaming sensation Pikachu - although they have not been observed to shoot lightning bolts.

Anyway, in order to find out more about the manul's diet, the researchers counted up the numbers of different kinds of prey animal available in a wide area of Mongolia. They then spent a lot of time collecting manul poo, drying it out in ovens, and poking about in it to see what the cats had eaten. Oh, the joys of zoological field work.

If, as they expected, manuls ate whatever suitable animals they happened to come across, the two answers should have come out about the same, and should change with the seasons, according to what was available when. In other words, whatever small mammal was most common in the area should also be the most common in the manul's dung.

But it wasn't. It turns out that the favourite food of manuls is the Daurian pika (picture above), the Mongolian gerbil, and the mountain vole. They also ate some other voles, hamsters, small birds, and a surprising amount of insects - something not previously observed. But, significantly, the manuls had eaten a higher proportion of pikas than would be expected if they just ate at random. In other words, they must have been specifically hunting for these animals, rather than the gerbils and voles. Even when pikas were relatively rare, they seemed to form a large part of the manul's diet. (They also ate more insects in winter, which, given that insects are not around much in the snowy Mongolian winter, would suggest that the cats had spent some time trying to find them).

It was also notable that the manuls had apparently completely ignored jerboas and dwarf hamsters, both of which were commonly available where they lived. This was probably because those animals are strictly nocturnal, while the manul is active either during the day, or more commonly, at dawn and dusk - but not in the middle of the night.

Manuls, it seems are specialists - they will eat pikas even when there is much more of something else available. This makes sense in a way, since there is a lot more meat on a pika than on a gerbil, meaning that the cat does not need to hunt so often. But it is significant, because pikas are considered a pest locally, and are frequently poisoned. The Daurian pika is far from being an endangered species - in fact, its better off than the manul - but such specialisation does leave the manul vulnerable to loss of its major food source, at least in some areas.

It probably wouldn't be a disaster, especially since it could catch gerbils and voles instead if it really had to, but it seems that the manul is more vulnerable to pest control programs than had been thought. And it's a cat that we know relatively little about to start with.

[Pictures from Wikimedia Commons]

Triceratops Really Did Exist Shocker!

2010-08-01T12:55:00.008+01:00

Yes, folks, the famous three-horned dinosaur Triceratops did, in fact, actually exist.

I can tell you're shocked. Because you wouldn't know it, if all you had to go on was this article.

The short story is that it turns out that the skeletons we know as Triceratops were (probably) immature versions of a rather similar beast named Torosaurus. As Triceratops aged, the shape of their frills and horns changed, until they ended up looking like the animal we previously called Torosaurus. The two "different" dinosaurs are, in fact, the same thing - it's just that one is older.

The question is, if the two are the same animal, what do we call it? After all, you can't go around calling the same thing by two different names, at least not if you need to be scientifically precise. One of the two existing names has to be the official name, and the other must be "wrong" (or, at least, out-dated). But which is which? The gizmodo article linked above is quite clear about the answer: Triceratops never existed, and from now on we all have to call them "Torosaurus" instead. This is, to be blunt, utter bollocks.

Gizmodo got its story from an earlier version at boing-boing. You'll note that the writer of that piece has the honesty to say that he doesn't know which of the two names is now the correct one. The gizmodo writer obviously leapt to the conclusion that would give the most dramatic headline, and continued from there, without bothering to check further. This sort of thing is, sadly, not unusual in journalistic reporting of science stories.

The boing-boing writer may be honest, but he doesn't get off the hook, either. He got his story from a New Scientist article here, but he either didn't read it all, or didn't understand it. Because they got it 90% right: "Torosaurus will now be abolished as a species and specimens reassigned to Triceratops". The only bit wrong in that sentence is that Torosaurus is not, and never was, a species - it's a genus, or group of closely related species.

Tracing this tale of Chinese whispers even further, we find the original paper that sparked it all off, which is here. Okay, so you can't read the full article without putting up some money, but the title makes it all pretty obvious - and is the exact opposite of the gizmodo article. But "Torosaurus never existed, it was just an older version of Triceratops" sounds less sexy than what they came up with, and who cares about the facts? Even if I hadn't already known that it wasn't true (and, more importantly, why - which I'll get on to in a minute), it wouldn't have taken me more than a mouse click and a couple of minutes reading to find out.

So you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Who'd have thought, eh?

I suspect this 100% reversal of the story may have something to do with the fact that, superficially, it sounds plausible. If scientists can decide that Pluto is no longer a planet, why mightn't they decide that something else we're very familiar with isn't real either? Indeed, it wouldn't be the first time. The name Brontosaurus really did bite the dust, and those animals were re-assigned to the genus Apatosaurus, which is now the official name of the beasts we all used to call "brontosaurs". And, let's be honest, brontosaurs were well up there among the list of best-known dinosaurs, just as Triceratops is. Chances are, only Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus are likely to come close in terms of public familiarity.

Now, if your favourite dinosaur was, in fact, Torosaurus (fairly unlikely, I know), you are out of luck. That name has, as the New Scientist and JVP articles make clear, genuinely been given the boot. Or, at least, it will be if this study is properly confirmed and agreed to be correct - which, by the looks of things, it probably will be.

So, why is it that way round? It obviously isn't because of simple common sense, or Brontosaurus would still be with us.

The rules on how animals get their scientific names are laid down by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. These include, among other things, a rule on what to do when two animals you previously thought were different turn out to be the same. And it's quite a simple rule: you pick whichever name is the oldest.

This can, it must be said, sometimes produce some odd results. Sometimes the older name turns out to be more obscure than the newer one. Presumably, you didn't find very many specimens of the animal you gave the older name to, or they just weren't very good specimens (which might explain why you didn't realise that the newer one was the same thing). This is, more or less, what happened to Brontosaurus.

But the first scientific description and naming of Triceratops was in 1889, a full two years before Torosaurus in 1891. As it happens, they were discovered by the same man - the famous American palaeontologist O.C. Marsh; but that's by-the-by, and its hardly surprising that he thought they were different. The point is that Triceratops is the older name, and it therefore has to be the one that's kept.

You wouldn't be allowed to have it the other way round even if you wanted to. Triceratops is real. Them's the rules.

(Top picture is of Triceratops, lower one is of Torosaurus. Both from Wikimedia Commons.)

Lords of the West: Update 2

2010-07-11T13:30:00.004+01:00

I thought I'd post an update to clarify exactly what is happening with the Lords of the West books. As most of you probably already know, the books will no longer be published by Moon Design, but have been taken up by other publishers. One of those publishers has not made a formal announcement yet (that I know of), although it's probably not desperately hard to work out who it is! So, to summarise what has been announced:

The Book of Glorious Joy
This will be published by d101 Games, and will be a bumper volume including most of the material from both LotW1: Heroes of Malkion and LotW3, the book that would have covered Loskalm. We're working to make it self-contained, although many of the cults from LotW1 will lack detailed descriptions or rules sections, since a "book of cults" wasn't considered very desirable. There is no definite release date for the book as yet, although we're hoping to have it out by the end of the year, and work is already underway on art and layout.

One chapter of LotW3 has, in fact, already been published. It is available in Hearts of Glorantha #4, available from d101 Games via lulu.com. This is the chapter covering Junora (which does, unfortunately, to some extent make reference to the as yet unpublished remaining chapters). It is graced by some wonderful artwork by Peter Town, and, of course, is accompanied by articles by many other great authors - it's well a worth a read. The magazine is available both as a hardcopy, and as a (cheaper) PDF file.

Kingdom of the Flamesword
LotW2 would have covered the Kingdom of Seshnela and the Rokari religion. Details of the exact format and contents of the published material are still being finalised, but the publisher has permission to use everything from LotW2, plus all of the cults from LotW1 that didn't make it into The Book of Glorious Joy. There may end up being a few bits that are not published in hardcopy, but these will mostly be material directly tied to HQ1, and will eventually be made available on my website.

LotW4
Well, obviously, there isn't a Lords of the West 4, nor is there going to be. But if there had have been, it would have covered the Kingdom of Jonatela, a dark and sinister land lying east of Loskalm. Although this book isn't ever going to happen, I have started to put down some thoughts as to what it would have contained. I will be releasing this material as and when I have the time, under the terms of the Fan Publication Policy on my website. It is, of course, entirely unofficial, and cannot be considered binding in any way on anyone: these are just my own thoughts, much like any other website on the net. (Of course, I should point out that The Book of Glorious Joy and Kingdom of the Flamesword aren't official, either!)

Because this isn't being done for publication, I will not be working to any deadline, and the material will be in a somewhat rough-and-ready format - essentially unedited, and certainly without any artwork or fancy graphics. I hope to get something out every month, but no guarantees. The first instalment contains my musings on Jonatelan history, and is available at my website now.

Continuum 2010

2010-07-05T14:38:00.004+01:00

I have just returned from the 2010 incarnation of Continuum, the biennial games convention. I have, of course, mentioned this before, and now its back again! I have to say that this seemed, even by the high standards of Continuum, and its predecessor, Convulsion, to be a particularly good event. So far as I could tell, everything was running smoothly, and there was certainly plenty to do throughout the whole weekend.

Of course, a lot of the time was, as always, spent socialising and drinking (so much so that the bar ran out of cider on Saturday evening - fortunately they obtained more for the next day). As always, the conversations were eclectic, and covered much more than just gaming - such as the precise distinction between Prussia and Brandenburg, the funereal habits of the middle-eastern Neolithic, and methods of promotion in the Royal Navy during the 18th century. Because such things are, of course, more important than anything involving, say, footballs.

But, of course, we're there mainly for the gaming. I managed to get into four games over the course of the weekend, which, with seminars in the mornings, out-of-tune singing on Saturday night, and me shouting at people on Sunday evening, made quite a full timetable. The first game was a Glorantha HeroQuest adventure (just published in Gloranthan Adventures), which resulted in much craziness, and dropping of roofs on top of undead sparrows.

On the Saturday, I played in a scenario for the hard SF game River of Heaven. If you've not heard of that before, it's probably because it hasn't yet been published - apparently it should be out by the end of the year. Hard SF doesn't seem to get much of a look-in when it comes to RPGs (although I'm sure one could argue about just how hard is 'hard'), but this setting did look quite interesting from the brief glimpse we got. The scenario itself, concerning a crisis on an STL interstellar cargo ship, was written and GMed by the game's designer, John Ossoway, and gave us plenty to do, without it being too difficult to follow the relevant details of the setting.

On Saturday evening, that was followed by a free-form set in Kingsport, Massachusetts. I was playing a thinly disguised Herbert West, amidst a steadily growing mountain of insanity, much of which revolved heavily around snakes. By the end of the scenario I was was turned into a brain-eating zombie, which seems appropriate enough, under the circumstances. In short, this was a very fun free-form, and one where I managed to keep constantly busy (I've been in some before where this wasn't the case), which I'd recommend if it's run again.

And then, on the Sunday, I played in a game based on the 1960s TV series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I played Destiny Angel - I'm sure you can see the resemblance. The GM was obviously very well versed on the show - certainly far more than I was - and did a good job of working in its various conventions, as well as using a brilliant set of props. All in all, very well done, and a lot of effort looked to have gone into it.

In terms of my own publications, it looks as if much of volumes 1 and 3 of Lords of the West should be out in time for Dragonmeet, although no promises on that one. It's looking highly likely that these will, in fact, be published under a single cover, which will make quite a substantial book. There is no specific news on a release date for volume 2, as yet.

And, of course, the best news: there will be another Continuum in 2012. So that will definitely be something to look forward to!

Kingdom of Heroes - scenario review

2010-03-01T21:12:00.004Z

You may have noticed in my main review of Kingdom of Heroes that I said there were a few things missing that I would have liked to see more of. Given that, at the same time, I pointed out how unusually large the book is for a RP supplement, you might quite reasonably have wondered what I would get rid of to fit this extra information in. The answer, quite simply, is the scenario.

This isn't, I hasten to add, because it's a poor scenario - it isn't. It's just that I don't feel a scenario belongs in this sort of book, or certainly not a scenario of this length (70 pages). Removing this section, perhaps along with the material on the Colymar tribe that supports it, would not only have made the book shorter (and cheaper), but, perhaps more importantly, might have made it more attractive to players as well as GMs. The scenario deserved to be published, no doubt about that - but it could have had its own book without any real problem.

Nonetheless, Moon Design chose to publish it here, so the question is what is the scenario itself like? To begin with, it provides some information (most of it new, so far as I can tell) about the PCs' suggested base, the Orlmarth clan of the Colymar tribe. There is no particular reason why a GM would have to use the Orlmarth, though, and the scenario would work just as well with almost any Sartarite clan that isn't pro-Lunar - including, obviously, one that the players might have created themselves. Of course, it would require more work to do that, so the detailing of the Orlmarth as a typical clan is very welcome here.

The scenario itself concerns the PCs' attempts to acquire three things of great importance currently in the possession of hostile forces. I've heard it claimed that the scenario is rather 'rail-roading', but I really can't agree with that at all. There is one bit of rail-roading, which I'll return to later, but only one that I can see. For most of the rest of the scenario, multiple different options are frequently spelled out, often in some detail. This is partly why the scenario is so long, in fact.

The heroes have multiple different ways to resolve the problems in front of them, and the scenario won't break if they decide on the "wrong" approach, although choices made earlier on will most definitely have differing repercussions later. This, I think, is really the way to do it, and the authors have made a good job of it.

Oddly, though, I can see why it might not feel like that. In part one, for instance, the authors clearly hope that the PCs will take a specific, and fairly convoluted, path to acquiring the first item. That this path gets so much detail makes it appear quite rail-roaded even though, actually, you don't have to take that particular approach to succeed at the task.

Perhaps worse, there's a suggestion that the GM should, effectively, take over one of the PCs at critical points in the scenario, ensuring that he responds to challenges in the way that will best further the scenario. This is supposed to represent involuntary hero-forming, but the irony is that, in most cases, the players will probably do what they're supposed to do without the prompting. And if they don't... well, it might be a little more work for the GM, but the scenario won't break. In other words, you're giving them the illusion of having no choice in affairs, when actually they have free will. I'd recommend ignoring those bits, and let the players extemporise their own hero-forming, if they must.

There are also a few minor quibbles here and there. On a couple of occasions, the writers seem to forget that some of the PCs may well be heterosexual women, and there's an NPC with a background so mysterious, even the GM isn't allowed to know what it is - beyond the fact that, whatever it is, it's significant!

I had to read the description of one of the challenges three times to make head or tail of it, since it looked as if even a Complete Success would result in the hero failing abysmally. It turns out the stake wasn't what I thought it was, and the writers had made an unstated assumption that the heroes would be trying something that hadn't even occurred to me. That could have been made clearer, and alternatives provided. And the snippets of poetry get a bit tedious after a while, so that some groups might prefer to ignore or paraphrase them.

But these quibbles are, indeed, minor. Any experienced GM can sort them out with a minimum of fuss if they look likely to raise a problem in his game. Slightly more of a problem is the one bit of rail-roading, which occurs right at the beginning. Essentially, one of the PCs makes a decision that kicks off all the events in the scenario, and if he doesn't make that particular decision, you're screwed. Moreover, it has to be a PC who meets certain requirements; the scenario doesn't work if the "wrong" PC is the only one who takes the course of action in question.

Fortunately, the requirements aren't especially onerous, and I'd guess 95% of groups will have at least one PC who fits the bill... but how the other 5% are supposed to cope isn't at all clear. Given how far the rest of the scenario goes to account for varying PC actions, something more than the advice "you must ensure one of the PCs does X" would have been a very good thing here.

If the beginning of the scenario is a bit iffy, the ending is spectacular. It takes the form of a heroquest, with all of the good points of the Boat Planet scenario from Gathering Thunder, and none of the bad points. This time, the heroes really are the ones in charge, the ones that the legends will be written about - and, make no mistake, what they're doing is pretty legendary stuff, enmeshed with a key event in Gloranthan history. This really is "HeroQuest", not the HenchmanQuest of the Boat Planet. Yes, it's fairly linear, but then heroquests often are, and so long as the heroes get to come centre stage, that's fine by me.

All in all, I think it's a great scenario, one worthy of the Gloranthan canon. It's fun, exciting, and heroic, and most of the problems that might come up can be easily fixed by a competent GM.

The big let-down, unfortunately, is not the fault of the writers, but of HQ2: the scenario has essentially no stats. Not just no numbers, but no real stats at all, even in outline - opponents are described as "Very Hard to overcome", or whatever, and that's it. I'd hardly expect fully worked character sheets for the NPCs, because that would take up too much space, but I found that the absence of anything at all to get my teeth into detracted from something that should otherwise have been excellent. It feels empty and bland, only partially offset by the grandeur of the narrative scenery.

I can already hear some people moaning "but the stats never worked in HQ1". Perhaps not - although I remain unconvinced that there was no way of fixing that - but, for me at least, that's not the point. Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I very much having prefer stats that are "wrong" to having no stats at all. Bad stats I can adjust; missing stats require a lot more work than that.

But, as I say, that's not a fault of the scenario per se. It is written for the system as it is, not as I'd like it to be. With that caveat, it's one of the better HQ scenarios to be published. Even if I think it would have been better in a book of its own.

More Trick or Treatment?

2010-02-07T10:22:00.007Z

This will be a relatively quick summary of the remaining two talks in the Trick or Treatment? meeting I mentioned in my prior post.

The second speaker was Andy Lewis, better known as "Le Canard Noir" of the Quackometer website. His talk was a funny and entertaining look at alternative medicine down the ages. After a brief discussion of Bath, a city whose modern wealth was, to an extent, founded on alternative medicine, he turned to tractors. No, not that sort. These were, in fact, pointed metal rods that supposedly pulled out (hence 'tractor') malign electrical energies from a patient.

These things were very popular in their day, and were cited as having successfully cured a number of conditions. The crucial point here is that these devices were invented by a man named Elisha Perkins, around 1795, just a few years after Samuel Hahnemann invented homoeopathy. So why is it that we all know about Hahnemann's technique, but not Perkins'? There are probably changes in fashion that are relevant here. Perkins' tractors relied on electricity, which was a very cool and mysterious sounding sort of thing at the time - a bit like the use of the word 'quantum' these days in all manner of pseudoscience. The fact that Perkins was out to make a lot of money, and patented his devices, is probably also significant - his techniques required special kit that you could only buy from his company. Hahnemann, by contrast, spread his ideas widely, intentionally making it easy for other people to copy him, and for his technique to long outlive his death.

Lewis presented a list of features that any good alternative medical treatment should have if it is do well - one almost certainly needs a bit of luck and promotional skill as well, of course. He discussed Hopi ear candles, which you stick in your ear and light up to draw out noxious substances. (Which they apparently don't, in case you were wondering). These are an example of an alternative medical technique that claims an ancient pedigree to make itself sound more impressive. Supposedly, they were used by the Hopi tribe, whose origins date back at least eight centuries. Yet, interestingly, the Hopi themselves deny this, and say it has nothing at all to do with their culture. In fact, there doesn't appear to be any clear evidence that the candles existed before their manufacturer went into business in the late 20th century.

There was also some discussion of how some early examples of a book about "natural medicine" by John Wesley, better known as the founder of Methodism. There were a great many remedies in this book, and a lot of them involved turnips. It's interesting to note that many of these would actually have been quite effective. While its unlikely that, say, rubbing turnips into a woman's breasts will cure very much (although I'm sure a few people would be willing to give it a try), Wesley's recommendation that they be used to treat scurvy would have been quite sound. Not only do turnips contain vitamin C, but, for most people of the day, they would have been much easier to get hold of than lemons.

The last speaker of the day was Professor John Garrow, of HealthWatch. He has spent much of his career studying obesity, and discussed a number of alternative treatments that, essentially, promise to get rid of your flab without any actual effort on your part. Which one can certainly see the appeal of, but, as you might imagine, tends not to work very well.

His particular focus was on HealthWatch's efforts to fight misleading adverts for such cures, through the Advertising Standards Authority and Trading Standards Officers. In particular, he mentioned the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, which effectively outlaws dodgy advertising of this type - but which has never been used to prosecute anyone since its introduction in 2008. HealthWatch itself having so far failed to get apparent breaches of the regulations prosecuted, he proposed a wider study to determine whether there is any will on the part of the relevant officials to do so. If there should, for some reason, turn out to be a systematic bias against enforcing the regulations in the UK, then that would be a violation of British commitments to the EU, and action could potentially be taken on those grounds.

Trick or Treatment?

2010-01-30T21:09:00.004Z

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work?
"Medicine".
- Tim Minchin, "Storm"

Which rather encapsulates my problem with so-called complementary and alternative medicine. It is, at least in principle, not that hard to test whether a given medical treatment works or not, and anything that falls into the "alternative" camp has generally either not been tested at all, or if it has, has tended to fail the test. My view is that, if you're going to make medical claims you really ought to be able to back them up. And that's really the bottom line.

For instance, I see no particular reason why herbal medicines, for instance, shouldn't work. But they really ought to be tested to check exactly what they do (and what side effects they have, if any) and should only be sold and advertised based on what the evidence actually says. As a professional healthcare worker, this is something I do regard as important. Because the danger is that someone might take an inert treatment for a serious condition, and delay real treatment that might genuinely help them. There should be no double standards. (And that, incidentally goes for any malfeasance that the regular pharmaceutical companies might engage in).

So, anyway, I was obviously going to be interested in the latest event to be held by CFI London at Conway Hall. The "Trick or Treatment?" was a series of three talks on the subject of alternative medicine, and was well up the usual standard.

As it so happened, this was the same day selected by the 10:23 campaign to conduct a mass overdose to protest the selling of homoeopathic remedies by Boots the Chemist as if they were real remedies. Boots have been singled out here because, on 25th November 2009, Paul Bennett, the Professional Standards Director of the company testified before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that he did not personally believe homoeopathy worked, but that he was happy to sell it if people wanted to buy it. This strikes me as a pretty irresponsible attitude.

The overdosing had nothing to do with the event at Conway Hall, although some of the campaigners were outside. [Video of short discussion here]. But it does illustrate where this sort of thing can be useful. It's not going to convince the homoeopaths to change their mind, or anything like that. Nor any of their customers who have already made an informed decision (albeit, in my view, an erroneous one). But one has to wonder how many users know what homoeopathy really is. Do they, perhaps, think, that a homoeopathic preparation labelled, say, "Belladonna", actually contains any... well, Belladonna? Once they realise that, in all but the "weaker" preparations, it actually doesn't, then they might be in a better position to make that informed choice. And then it's up to them.

Anyway, the actual event opened with Simon Singh talking about acupuncture, chiropractice, and, of course, libel law. Acupuncture, as I probably don't need to explain, is the hypothesis that the human body contains channels, or "meridians" of magical energy called "Chi", and that by altering this flow by inserting needles into specific points along the meridians, it is possible to alleviate pain, and maybe also cure disease.

It's interesting to note, as a later speaker did, that this method may not be quite as ancient as commonly thought. Earlier references to the method apparently actually refer to cutting into patients with flint knives, which isn't quite what we think of today. Although, in fairness, the underlying concept is much the same. Some forms of acupuncture are even more modern. "Auricular acupuncture" only dates from the 1950s, when it was realised that the human ear looks quite like a foetus - and that it therefore obviously followed that, if you stuck needles in the parts of the ear that corresponded to where the meridian points would be if it were a whole body, the therapeutic effects should be the same.

Uh huh.

That aside, it has to be said that an interesting problem arises when we look at testing acupuncture to see how effective it is. To rule out the possibility of a placebo effect, with any proposed treatment it's important to test two groups of patients: one actually receiving the treatment, and another who think they are, but actually aren't. That's easy enough with a pill, but most people can tell if you've stuck a needle into them or not.

The problem isn't completely intractable however. The meridian lines are supposed to be quite deep, so you could just make a very shallow puncture, and see if that makes a difference. Or you could use fake needles, rather like stage daggers, that appear to stick into you, but, in fact, just retract. Or you could just put the needles in the wrong place - if acupuncture theory says they should go into the hand, put them into the feet, for instance. (Obviously this last one doesn't work if the patient knows enough about acupuncture to realise what you're up to).

And, guess what - when you do these sorts of studies, the "fake" treatments work pretty much as well as the real acupuncture. Which isn't to say that they don't work at all, just that acupuncture appears to be a fairly effective way of harnessing the placebo effect, and that all the stuff about Qi and meridians has no bearing on that.

Chiropractice was originally based on the theory that the body maintains its health by channelling vital energy through the spinal nerves. Virtually all disease, claimed its founder, Daniel David Palmer, was due to misalignments, or "subluxations" of the spine, blocking the passage of this vital energy to the relevant body parts. Now, not all chiropractors today necessarily believe that, but some it seems, still do, and claim that manipulating the spine can cure, for example, ear infections. One would have thought there was quite enough money in curing just back pain, but there you go.

In fact, it's probably worth mentioning that, regardless of what it might do for ear infections and the like, there does seem to be some reasonable evidence that chiropractice can help to relieve back pain. Perhaps surprisingly, it's not terribly good at doing even this - but in fairness, neither is anything else (such as, say, mainstream physiotherapy). In this particular respect, I'm not aware of any clear evidence that it's any different from the various alternatives, and at least some of the time, it does seem to work.

This brings me back to the point I made earlier about informed knowledge. Many people, it seems, are unaware that chiropractors aren't MDs, and that, at least when it comes to conditions other than back pain, there really isn't an awful lot of evidence that the technique works.

Given that my verbosity has once again got the better of me, I'll move onto the other two speakers at a later time.

Lords of the West: Update 1

2010-01-24T20:16:00.005Z

Well, things have been a lot more encouraging than I had feared. I am not going to give specific details here, since I would not want to seem to be making promises on behalf of other people. However, I can say that there has been a fair degree of interest from Gloranthan publishers in getting the material out there.

I should also stress that Moon Design have been helpful in this regard. While they no longer have any interest in publishing my work, they have been supportive in attempts to get it published by other means. For example, material that I did not originally write, but was supplied to me by Issaries has been cleared for publication along with those elements that I did write.

So, without going into specifics of proposed publication dates or issue numbers, here is what has already been agreed since the beginning of the week:

The Junora chapter of LotW3, which is largely self-contained, has been definitively accepted for publication in one of the Glorantha magazines. It will almost certainly be the first release, and could be considered a "teaser" for the rest.
The remainder of LotW3 (the Loskalm book) has also been accepted for publication, barring some specifically HQ1 rules sections. I would say that things are looking good for a time frame that I think most people will be pleased with.
Most of the material in LotW2 (Kingdom of the Flamesword) has been accepted for publication in principle, and I am confident that this will also see the light of day before too long.
LotW1 (Heroes of Malkion), ironically may be the last part to be released. An agreement has been made to publish around half of this, although another large section remains unclaimed at this time.
I have received permission from Moon Design to publish, free of charge, at my own website, any outstanding material that is not picked up by any of the licensed magazine publishers.

Obviously, I would have preferred my writings to be published, as originally intended, in book form. And I would have liked them to become, at least in part "official" or "canonical", neither of which will now happen. However, I do think that we have a very positive outcome here, from a situation that looked quite bleak just one week ago. It is, in fact, highly likely that this material will now be published sooner than would otherwise have been the case - since MD would, naturally enough, have been working on the Pavis Book and other high priority projects.

I would like to say thank you to all of those involved in moving this forward, who hopefully know who they are! I will, of course, give more specific details once the publishers concerned have decided to release it. For everyone who has been giving me words of encouragement over the last week, I would also like to say a big thank you, and I hope you are all pleased with the final result when it appears.

Further Mini-Update:

I can now reveal, to those who haven't noticed, that the Junora article will be appearing in Hearts in Glorantha #4. Note the expected release date of "March/April 2010"!

Lords of the West cancelled

2010-01-19T09:26:00.004Z

Or at least, the version(s) of it I produced have been; Moon Design may well decide to produce their own version with a different writer at some point in the future. Obviously, having worked for seven and a half years on this, this is pretty disappointing for me. In the end, Moon Design's vision of what they wanted shifted too far from the original agreement (which was not, of course, made by them) for continuing on the project to be worthwhile, and they chose to pull the plug.

Indeed, in general, I have a feeling that since the production of HeroQuest 2, the whole Gloranthan project has shifted from something I enjoy to something that's less so. This is not, of course, to blame any of those directly involved in that change. Change does happen, and whenever it does, people get left out in the cold. It happened before with RQ3 with respect to RQ2 fans, and again with HW with respect to RQ2/3 fans. It's inevitable to some extent, and more so when there is a major change in gaming philosophy involved.

It's hard at times like this, when one is on the losing end, not to feel abandoned or rejected by the Gloranthan 'tribe' that they keep talking about. But that's probably largely unfair. I certainly intend to go to Continuum this year, and hopefully have a good time, overcoming the doubtless unavoidable tinge of disappointment and regret. Heck, after seven and a half years of repeating cycles of hard work and frustration, I was hardly on my most diplomatic behaviour by the end. So, if anyone reading this feels that I have offended them over the course of the last year or so, I offer my sincere apologies.

So, enough moping; where do we go from here? Well, the good news is that I am currently negotiating for publication of at least some of the material through other channels. In fact, some of it may even appear earlier than might otherwise have been the case. I can't give further details yet, as nothing has been definitely agreed beyond an expression of interest from one respected source in the Gloranthan community. Stay tuned for updates as they become available.

Kingdom of Heroes - Review pt 3

2009-12-30T20:05:00.004Z

The cults in Kingdom of Heroes are written in much the same format as in previous Gloranthan books from Storm Tribe all the way back to Cults of Prax. However, much of the information is fresh, and, of course, the new magic rules put a different slant on things. It is here that the re-focusing on the runes is perhaps at its most obvious; we always knew why Chalana Arroy, for example, had the runes of Life and Harmony, but here its quite specific what that means in concrete terms.

Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe both focussed to a large extent on subcults; the various speciality forms of worship granting unusual magic. In a sense, one could argue that Destor, say, was the default Orlanth cult (at least for warriors), but it didn't truly feel like that - it was more as if one had to pick from a big list of options. Now, I never found that problem, and I quite liked the range of options that were provided, but restoring the subcults to optional niches (as they were back in the old RuneQuest days) is certainly a good deal simpler.

In fact, its not really accurate to say that the subcults of TR and ST have been done away with. A great many of them do survive, albeit somewhat downplayed in importance. Orlanth, for example, has eleven , including Hedkoranth, Destor, Helamakt, and so on. It would be relatively easy to add those that are "missing" (such as Yavor or Vanganth, for example), assuming you have access to the older sources.

There have, on the other hand, been some demotions. The powers of some of the old subcults are relegated to mere feats of the 'default' version of the deity, although, again, its fairly easy to build them back up if one is so inclined. Vinga the warrior-ess and Heler the rain god, both full deities in Storm Tribe, are here demoted to mere subcults of Orlanth. That isn't necessarily so bad, though, since Vinga was always supposed to be able to do anything Orlanth could do, so she might as well be merged in rules terms as well. Heler is perhaps a little more disappointing, but when you have space for only nine cults, its a perfectly reasonable one to leave out. (Incidentally, the others from ST who fail to make the grade are Odayla, who to my mind isn't as interesting as Yinkin, and Eurmal, who isn't very suitable for PCs anyway).

Having said that, cults are fairly central to play in the Dragon Pass setting, and, given the size of the book, I would have liked to have seen more. Expecting minor cults to get the full 5+ pages devoted to each those that made it in might, perhaps be a bit much... but one or two pages each would have sufficed to at least give us the basics. As it is, this is an area where having Storm Tribe available is going to be helpful - at least until a companion volume comes out with the lesser cults properly described.

The one cult in KoH that I felt unhappy with was Humakt, god of death. There seems to have been a general move since RuneQuest days to make the Humakti embody death to such an extent that they cease (at least from my perspective) to be truly interesting or really playable. Storm Tribe, while subscribing to this view, at least seemed to recognise what a big problem it could create in game. The "re-sheathing" ceremony mentioned in that book was a decent stab at keeping Humakti playable, and was, as a result, to my mind one of the most crucial points about the cult in that book.

Sadly, KoH seems to ignore that altogether. Technically, it doesn't contradict it, but that's not much of an excuse, when the reader will be clearly left with the impression that all Humakti - and not just, say, the Devotees - are somehow the "living death". It's a disappointing omission, and, perhaps, quite a surprising one.

While I'm on the subject, the section on Humakti gifts and geases feels weak and woolly by comparison with all previous versions - some more specific examples would have been very helpful here.

Still, other than Humakt, the cults are good. And they're by no means the end of the cool material in the book. There is a lot of good advice on heroquesting, expanding and improving on that in earlier books. Heortling culture is well described, bringing them as a people to life, helped by the high quality illustrations throughout. Dragon Pass itself is described, with the aid of several glossy full colour maps.

These maps in particular, are a part of the reason why I say that the book is worth the price. How often do you see full colour maps in RPG products that aren't produced by giants like Hasbro/WotC? And these are nice looking maps at that, and detailed enough to be really helpful in play. There are even black & white plans of the cities of Sartar, something that has generally been lacking in previous publications. There's also a detailed description of the Colymar tribe, complete with its own colour map.

The book has information about the Lunars, and about the various other cultures that neighbour the Heortling barbarians. Rightly, the focus is on the Heortlings themselves, rather than describing the Lunar Army in detail, or describing the cults of the Grazelanders. But even so, there is enough information here to play them as foes.

All in all, the sheer density of information in the book may seem a little overwhelming to a newcomer, but it rewards the effort with a wonderfully fleshed-out look at a culture different from that in so many other RPGs, and very much retaining the "feel" that Glorantha has had for so long. Yes, I have reservations about the book. It isn't perfect, but then what is? But that doesn't mean that it isn't one of the best Gloranthan products to have come our way in a long time.

If Moon Design can keep this up at a regular schedule - and we know there are more books in the pipeline - then its going to be a very good few years for Gloranthan fandom.

Kingdom of Heroes - Review pt 2

2009-12-23T19:45:00.002Z

Every time there is a new magic system released for Glorantha, we are always told that "this time it's the way we always wanted it to be", and "this time it really reflects Greg's stories." The magic systems in both HW and HQ1 were promoted with those sorts of phrases, and HQ2 is, of course, no different. I'm past caring whether or not they're true in any meaningful way; I just want to know whether or not the system is any good.

And, on the whole, the system presented in KoH is good.

Of course, there wasn't really much wrong with the theist magic system in HQ1 - although the same couldn't really be said for animism or wizardry. But nonetheless, the writers of KoH have managed to improve on it, and that can only be a good thing.

It's worth pointing out again that KoH is, rightly, a book about the Heortling barbarians of Sartar, dominated as they are by the magic of Air and Earth. So the book has essentially nothing to say about how magic works elsewhere in the world. The primer in the HQ2 core rulebook gave a sufficient outline of that, and it will hopefully be developed more as time goes by. But this is the book for the Heortlings, and its only their magic we see here.

The core of the new Heortling magic system then, is the runes. These are the same old familiar runes of RuneQuest, with Elements, Powers, Forms, and Conditions. We have always been told that the runes were the basis of all magic, but it is only with this new system that that is really shown to be the case. Every character starts off with three runes, one Element, one Power, and one other, which can be anything except another Element or a Power directly opposed to the one you already have. (So, no having both Life and Death, for instance).

Characters with no cult use their runes to augment everyday tasks; they don't create specific "spells". So, if you are strong in, say, the Death rune, you will be able to use it to boost your combat prowess - a sort of Bladesharp, if you will. Here, I would have liked to see more description of what the runes generally let you boost, and a broader discussion of what each of them means. Instead, the descriptions are short, and often of little use, although they do have associated personality traits. Perhaps it was felt that the names were indicative enough, but I feel a broader discussion would have been very helpful.

I'm also not overly enthused by the idea that PCs should be penalised if they fail to act according to the personality traits written for their rune. True, the book suggests that the GM should not use this punitively, but only if it works well with the story. Nonetheless, it feels a little overly prescriptive to me, and I suspect I won't use that part.

Most characters, however, will probably want to initiate to a cult, worshipping a specific god from the Heortling pantheon. To do this, you need at least one rune in common with your god (it's generally specified which one it has to be), and it makes sense to match all of them if you want your character to be magically powerful. A character who belongs to a cult gets to use his rune actively, to cast what would be called "spells" in most other RPG systems. Each god has one "affinity" for each of his one to three runes, which act as keywords allowing the PC to use magic directly related to that aspect of the god. So a Humakti, for instance, can use his Truth rune to cast magic related to honour and oaths.

In HQ1, similar affinities existed, and they were always labelled with an appropriate rune. However, the choice of rune often made little sense - since it had no game mechanical effect, it was merely for decoration anyway. For instance, out of all the many sub-cults of Ernalda in Thunder Rebels, only one had an affinity directly linked to the Earth rune. Similarly, many cults in HQ1 had idiosyncratic runes, creating a plethora of symbols that obscured the underlying simplicity of the system - Under the Red Moon was particularly notable for this.

But, in KoH, the original, simple, list of basic runes takes centre stage. Ernalda has Earth magic, because she is the Earth Mother; Lhankor Mhy, god of knowledge, has Truth magic, and so on. This is both easier to grasp and more atmospheric than the old system, and its a significant step forward.

It does, on the other hand, lead to some problems when the affinities are overly broad. If Orlanth can do anything possible with the Air rune, its difficult to see what the point of any other Air cult might be. As far as I can tell from the rules, a priestess of Ernalda should be just as good at creating earthquakes as a priestess of Maran Gor, the goddess of earthquakes, which sounds a bit odd. Of course, if they were competing against each other, you would give the latter a bonus for the more specific ability, but that seems to be rather side-stepping the issue. Fortunately, the cults provided in the book don't overlap very much, so it's less of a problem than it might appear at first glance.

Another issue in HQ1 was that almost everyone chose to be a devotee, a level of ability that got you more potent magic, but that was supposed to be really rare in the game setting (although, to be honest, this was never very clearly expressed). In KoH, the new "initiates" are essentially the equivalent of the old "devotees" in terms of magical power, removing the temptation to do this.

What KoH calls "devotees" are actually closer to the HQ1/Storm Tribe "disciples" - indeed, they seem to have the same in-world titles. Devotees get specific "feats" which are more focused, and hence more powerful, magic than the broad affinities. In return, they face considerable limitations on their freedom of action, making them less attractive as PCs, unless you really want to play a powerful specialist. Which is, to my mind, as it should be. It is also no longer possible to start play as a devotee; it's a status to be achieved through play, as disciple was in HQ1. A slight niggle is that some of the feat descriptions are a long on flowery text and short on what it is they are actually supposed to do. You're probably meant to work this out in play, but some more guidance would have been nice.

In part 3, I'll take a look at the cults themselves. It's a big book - it needs a long review...

Kingdom of Heroes - Review pt 1

2009-12-15T21:41:00.004Z

And so, the wait is over, and Kingdom of Heroes has been released. If you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you already know what that is, but, to summarise, it's the new HeroQuest sourcebook for the Kingdom of Sartar, a magical barbarian land dominated by the powers of Air and Earth. It is set in the world of Glorantha, where everyone can do magic, and there is a distinct bronze age vibe that makes it different from most other fantasy settings on the market.

On the other hand, if, by some chance, you are actually more interested in my occasional musings on secularism and scepticism, then I’ll take the opportunity to promote the recently released Tim Minchin single “White Wine in the Sun”. This is a beautiful Christmas song about the values that are more important to many of us at this time of year than something that may, or may not, have happened in a stable 2,000 years ago. Buy the MP3 online from a legal download site for just 79p, and maybe it’ll get into the Christmas charts. It’d be a nice thought.

Right, back onto gaming. Chances are that the first thing that will strike you about KoH is “blimey, is that the price?” And, yes, by RPing standards, it’s pretty darn expensive - although, if you’re willing to go PDF-only you can get it for much less than many D&D books by buying it online at sites like DriveThru RPG. The obvious question then, is whether the book is worth the price. I’d say that, if you’re already a fan of Glorantha, then yes, it is. (Of course, if your actual question parses as “is it worth my wife making me sleep on the couch for a month because I spent so much on an RP book?”, then you’re on your own).

The reason I say this is partly the sheer size of the book; at a whopping 378 pages, it’s the equivalent of a number of normal RP supplements stuffed into one cover. And, even for the size, there’s a lot of text. The artwork is great (although some of it isn’t new), and there are even full colour maps inside, which you don’t see very often outside of the really big publishers. Certainly, when you compare it with just about anything previously published by Issaries/Moon Design, the physical quality is in an entirely new league.

On the other hand, if you’re not already a fan, I can’t really deny that it has quite a steep entry price. Furthermore, one of the criticisms often levelled at Glorantha is that it’s too complicated, and there’s just too much to know to get into the setting. Dumping a book of this size down in front of someone is unlikely to dissuade them from that opinion! So, I’d have to say that this feels much more like a book for the fans than one for newcomers. The fact that the book has the name "Sartar" in huge letters on the cover, when nobody but a fan will have a clue what that means, supports the idea that this was what the publishers were aiming at; by comparison the more evocative "Kingdom of Heroes" title is in much smaller print.

But, hey, if you are a fan, or better yet, if you are a newcomer and want to try it anyway, then read on…

Perhaps the second question that might strike a potential purchaser is whether we really need this book. If you’re a fan of Glorantha, chances are that you already have the previous Sartar book, Thunder Rebels , not to mention later supplements covering the setting such as Land of Thunder and Storm Tribe. TR was a pretty damn good book, so do we really need a new book on more or less the same subject?

Here, the issue is a little more complex. It’s perfectly possible to run a game set in Sartar with what’s already been published, so “need” is perhaps too strong a word. On the other hand, there is plenty of new material in here, and a number of things that improve on Thunder Rebels. But, then again, there are some other respects in which, in my opinion, Thunder Rebels did a better job than KoH. In fact, for reasons I’ll get into shortly, I’d say that owning Thunder Rebels will make it easier to get more out of this book – they complement each other, rather than the new book replacing the old one.

The first part of the book concerns character generation. Here, the system is essentially the standard one from HeroQuest, although the original religious keyword has now been replaced by a choice of three runic affinities, which are described later on in the book. Aside from this, there is a cultural keyword that applies to all Sartarites, and then a choice of occupational keywords.

A positive step here was to return to the culture-specific occupational keywords of Thunder Rebels, rather than the generic occupations of HQ1. This makes sense for a book about a specific culture, and removes some of the bland generalisations made necessary in HQ1. It also allows a greater range of occupations than official HQ1 publications had, with, for example, distinctions between common mercenaries and elite weaponthanes.

Regrettably, though, this is one area where KoH falls short of the high standards set by Thunder Rebels.

If you have read my review of HeroQuest 2, you may recall that I praised the preservation of the old method of describing keywords alongside the newer alternatives. Here, HQ2 is allowing flexibility for the needs of the GM and players. Unfortunately, it’s wise advice that KoH chooses to ignore. In this book, there are only “umbrella” keywords, and no indication of how to create the “package” sort. Indeed, there isn’t even any acknowledgement that this might be a problem!

Essentially, all you get in your keyword descriptions is some text, with no clear guidance on what specific abilities they might include. For many people, that might not be an issue, but some might struggle to remember exactly what being, say, a skald, is supposed to imply in terms of abilities. Since many of the abilities that might be included under a keyword aren’t at all obvious (for example, that “entertainer” includes knife-fighting), I myself would certainly want to write down the individual abilities on a character sheet - even if I had to indent them and write ‘+0’ instead of a number.

The writers do their best to get round this limitation in the text descriptions, and largely succeed when it comes to the magic, but they do tend to fall down when it comes to the occupations. Sure, it’s possible to deduce what most of the abilities are going to be from the prose, but a list would have been much simpler to use. Fortunately, anyone who owns Thunder Rebels can use the keywords in there if, like me, they find them more helpful.

Of course, for many people, umbrella keywords will be an improvement over the way they were described in previous books – they might, for example, find it less limiting. But it’s a pity that KoH failed to acknowledge that not everyone might be the same when that variety is specifically catered for in the rulebook itself.

After character generation we come to the clan generation system. A previous version of this was published in Barbarian Adventures way back when, but this one has been retouched since then. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is a system for generating the history of the particular barbarian clan that your PCs come from. It guides the players through a series of questions about what their ancestors did at a particular time, steadily building up details of their clan as they do so, and providing a quick and entertaining course in the history at the same time.

When I’ve done this before, with people mostly new to Glorantha, it proved popular, and it can be something of a fun game in its own right. The decisions you make all have some sort of effect on the final clan, and the starting resources available to the characters. For example, is the clan warlike, wealthy, open to new ideas, etc.? The system for working this out has been somewhat streamlined since the previous version, although there are still times when the GM will probably want to give the players some idea of what the outcomes of their decisions might be in advance. And this time, there is a nice-looking clan sheet to go with it, which you can fill in when you’ve finished.

In part 2, we'll turn to the magic system, which represents perhaps the biggest change from earlier versions.

Sea Monsters

2009-11-07T22:34:00.004Z

As I indicated last time, this will be a report of a session I attended about sea monsters. Not the Gloranthan sort, but ones in our world. Since Kingdom of Heroes is due for general release from 28th November, those waiting for a review of that may not have too much longer, and I don't at present have any other meetings of this sort planned before January, so that review should be the next thing up here.

The event, like some of the prior ones I've mentioned, was hosted by CFI London and held at Conway Hall. The first talk was presented by Charles Paxton of St Andrew's University. He defined a "sea monster", not unreasonably, as "an unknown marine animal larger than 2 metres" - that is to say, probably bigger than YOU.

By this definition, it's interesting to note just how many sea monsters have, in fact, been discovered in recent years. Now, granted, some of these are actually instances of animals that were already known, but not identified as being a separate species before. (An example of this kind of thing from dry land would be the recently discovered forest elephant). But some are genuinely new and surprising - the megamouth shark, for instance, was only discovered in 1976, and doesn't really resemble anything known before that time. Just within the last ten years, we've discovered at least two species of beaked whale, a group about which remarkable little is known, along with such things as giant rays. Given all this, it would frankly, be rather surprising if there weren't any new species out there that we haven't yet seen. In fact, it would be downright astonishing.

Most, of course, are going to be cetaceans (whales & dolphins) or cartilaginous fish (sharks & rays). Some will probably be other sorts of fish, seals, or even giant squid. They are not, on the whole, going to be plesiosaurs, but more on that later.

What the talk focused on primarily, however, was sightings. What should we make of reports of giant creatures roaming the seas that just don't fit any known species? Some may well be genuine, but many probably aren't. For one thing, even assuming that the reports are genuine (and most probably are, in fairness), if the observer isn't a zoologist, they might not know what they're looking at. Take this, for example, which shows a historical drawing of a sea serpent encounter and a modern photograph of what's very probably the same thing:

You can, perhaps, understand the mistake, but, of course, that photo isn't really a whale being attacked by a pair of sea serpents.

Come to that, the following critter looks pretty much like a sea serpent (it's about 30 feet long), but is perfectly well known to science:

It's called an oarfish, and it's really quite cool.

One might expect - and I certainly did - that most reports of sea monsters would be of the creature being some distance away. For one thing, that would make it harder to identify, if it was, in fact, something well known. Also, since it is very hard to measure distances at sea, one might well think that something is further away - and thus, much larger - than it actually is. But it turns out that's not so. In fact, according to Paxton's analysis of sightings from 1748 onwards, most sea monster sightings are at much closer quarters than one would expect by random chance. That is, if a given creature is real, you would reasonably expect people to have seen at least some of them from a fair distance off, but actually that's not what they report.

There's a number of possible reasons for this. It could be that, having seen the beast, people then often approach it to get a better look, and report that as the distance. It could be that, from a longer distance, people quite reasonably conclude it's probably something familiar they can't recognise that far away, and don't report it. For that matter, exaggerations, intentional or otherwise, are quite likely, especially when one is telling an exciting story.

The afternoon session was presented by Darren Naish, writer of the Tetrapod Zoology blog, of which I was already a fan. He focussed on the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm; that is, the contention among many (but not all) cryptozoologists that many of the things they're hunting for are survivors of lineages so far known only to exist as fossils. Most obviously, of course, the plesiosaurs. After all, the argument goes, the coelacanth had been thought to go extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, until it was found alive and well in 1938. So couldn't the same thing have happened to the plesiosaurs?

Well, no, actually it couldn't.

There are quite a few good reasons for this. For a start, the fossil record of the two groups is quite different. Coelacanths were already very much in decline by the time they disappeared from the fossil record with the dinosaurs, whereas plesiosaurs were extremely abundant - anything short of total extinction would surely have left a bunch of more recent species in the fossil record. Secondly, it's a damn sight easier to identify a plesiosaur fossil than a coelacanth one. The bones are much more distinctive in shape, they're unusually solid (making it easier for the creature to dive) so that they should fossilise better, and... well, they are a bit bigger. Harder to miss, you'd think. Coelacanth bones, by contrast, mostly look like those of other fish - at least, aside from the fins - and they're smaller and more fragile. And, on the gripping hand, since 1938, some fossil coelacanths have been discovered from post-dinosaurian deposits, so the gap is a good deal smaller than one might suppose.

Another good reason for thinking this unlikely is that most "plesiosaur" sightings don't look a whole lot like plesiosaurs. They look more like this model (picture from Wikipedia):

Which may be the classic view of what real plesiosaurs looked like, but is, in fact wrong. The most notable point here is the head - notice how it bends forward, like a swan. Real plesiosaurs had relatively stiff necks, so that the head should be tilted upwards if the neck were at this angle. In fact, plesiosaurs might not have been able to lift their necks this much anyway; the long neck was, most likely, for bending downwards to pick shellfish off the bottom. But, even if it could do so, the animal's centre of gravity would have meant that the poor creature would have gone over if it had tried to achieve such a feat.

There was particular discussion of the "merhorses" reported from the northern Pacific. They may, or may not, be an unknown creature, but whatever they are, they're certainly not a plesiosaurs, because the descriptions really don't come close. Some kind of unknown long-necked seal is a better bet, if it's not just misidentification of something otherwise known.

Similar objections apply to other claimed prehistoric survivors, of which the most prominent are perhaps mosasaurs and basilosaurids. Claims that they may have evolved into something quite different since they vanished from the fossil record really don't address the absence of that record, and are a bit like groping for an excuse. Plus, it's fairly unlikely, as is sometimes claimed, that modern plesiosaurs might be furry, or that some modern basilosaurids might look like a cross between a turtle and a centipede (no, really).

The afternoon concluded with a workshop playing with a computer program to estimate the likelihood of something still being around after a gap in the fossil record, and trying to estimate the species diversity of coloured straws in a bucket (courtesy of yours truly, since nobody else volunteered!)

Oh, and if you're still trying to puzzle out that first photo: there are two whales in that photo. Two very happy boy whales...

TAM London - pt 3

2009-10-29T20:04:00.002Z

This will be the final part of this report. However, I am going to a talk about sea monsters next week, so there's very chance I'll waffle on about that before getting round to reporting on the next HeroQuest publication. It also looks highly likely that my predictions that LotW1 won't be out by the end of 2009 will be proven correct! Maybe early 2010?

We'll begin this last stretch with Ben Goldacre, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science. When it comes to UFOs, or ghosts, or things of that sort, it doesn't, it seems to me, matter a great deal that it isn't true. It's a bit sad that some people spend their time chasing around after things that don't actually exist, but it doesn't, by and large, do a lot of harm. The same cannot be said for quack medical advice. Even if it doesn't do direct harm (which it might or might not, depending on what the advice is) there is always the danger that it might persuade people that it's not really necessary to do something genuinely helpful. A pill that contains nothing but sugar probably won't harm you very much, but if you think that it's working, you might not take the pills that really do work until it's too late.

In short, I believe that quack medicine has very great potential to do harm. Sure, evidence-based medicine can also, at times, do harm, but at least there's a countervailing benefit. And this is why I'm crap at debating this sort of thing - it makes me really angry, and once you get angry, you've lost the argument, no matter how good your case. I work in healthcare; I don't want to see people harmed any more than they have to be, thank you very much, and the excuse that someone is honestly deluded rather than a deliberate fraud isn't always enough.

Goldacre began his talk with a discussion of the anti-vaccination movement, and its portrayal in the press. When he mentioned Andrew Wakefield, the name drew boos from some corners of the audience (although not, I have to say, from me), but Goldacre disagreed, arguing that Wakefield wasn't truly the one to blame. I'm a little less inclined to be generous, but it's a valid point - most of the fuss in the press about the supposed dangers of the MMR vaccine was apparently a few year's later than you might think. Without the press inflating non-stories, the public might well be better informed (or, at least, not so ill-informed).

From there, we moved on to those equations you sometimes see in newspapers where "scientists have discovered the formula" for the perfect body, or the happiest day of the year, or whatever it might be. Well, surprise, surprise, but scientists have, most likely, discovered bugger all. 99% of the time, what's actually happened is that some company or other has decided that a scientific looking equation will help sell their product, and have paid someone a few quid to write something down on the back of a fag packet that "proves" whatever it is they want it to prove. Who'd have thought, eh?

And back to the press over-hyping non-stories. Goldacre discussed the claim that valiant newspaper reporters had discovered deadly MRSA lurking everywhere, including a swab they'd taken from the front door handle of the Department of Health. Quite worrying, especially when you consider that MRSA, while it can get into a number of nasty places, shouldn't be able to grow on doorknobs (too dry, you see). Or, indeed, on most of the other places the "laboratory of a world-renowned MRSA expert" had found them.

Only it turns out that (presumably unbeknownst to the journalists) he wasn't a world-renowned MRSA expert. He was, in fact, some bloke with a microscope in his garden shed and no qualifications in microbiology at all. The papers had, it seems, unwittingly fostered his delusions, and that's rather a tragedy. Blimey, you can't even trust a newspaper these days.

Oh, hang on... I said in the last blog that I'd get down of my high horse for this one, didn't I? Hmm... OK, so how about:

And now we come to what The Londonist described as the high point of the two-day event. I refer, of course, to Tim Minchin.

Last year, round about Christmas time, I attended a sold-out event at the Bloomsbury Theatre entitled "Lessons and Carols for Godless People". It comprised a number of scientists, stand-up comics, and musicians doing short pieces that were very loosely on the subject of either science or Christmas without Christianity. There were a lot of very good acts, some of whom also made brief performances on the Saturday evening after the main TAM event. But one in particular stood out in my memory, even though I'd never heard of him before.

Minchin does stand-up comedy as part of his act, but it's for his songs, accompanied on the grand piano, that he's probably best known. He very much appeals to my sense of humour, with what one can only describe as a mixture of vulgarity and nerdishness. And it probably helps that we seem to agree on a lot of things.

Yet, good as his songs are, he didn't sing one back at that event at the Bloomsbury last year. No, what he did was read a ten minute beat poem. And it blew me away. I'm not normally one for poetry, but... wow. It turns out that I was listening to either the first or second public performance of "Storm", which subsequently, as they say on the interwebz, "went viral" in the pro-science community.

At TAM, he performed a number of his best songs: The Good Book ("I tried to read some other books, but I soon gave up on that / The paragraphs ain't numbered, and they complicate the facts"), the love song If I Didn't Have You (" Your love is one in a million, you couldn't buy it at any price / But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, statistically, some of them would be equally nice"), Confessions, and, of course, Storm. The latter included a clip of an animated version of the poem currently being made, which looks pretty cool.

His final piece was the song White Wine in the Sun. I can't say that this was one that particularly impressed me on the album... but it turns out that hearing it live is a whole different story. It's a serious song (for once), and beautifully emotional.

So, yeah, the Londonist is right: he was the highlight of the event. Which actually makes one glad that they got him on the bill at the last minute when Richard Dawkins had to pull out. But, hopefully, they'll hold TAM London again next year, and maybe we'll get both? Here's hoping...

TAM London - pt 2

2009-10-18T08:56:00.002+01:00

Yes, we're back on this again, so those still waiting for HeroQuest news will have to wait just a little longer, I'm afraid.

Anyway, I said last time that there were four sessions in particular of TAM London that I wanted to focus on here. I'll start with Ariane Sherine, who talked about how an off-hand comment spiralled into an intercontinental Atheist Bus Campaign. This is, in many ways, an inspiring story, because it's about giving atheism (or even non-religion in general) a voice that it rarely seems to have. That's partly, no doubt, because, by its very nature, it doesn't have organisations on the scale of organised Churches. And, while British society is a lot less religious than, say, the USA - let alone places like Iran - it does still pervade our society. Not, I think, in an oppressive way, but still in a way that's quite unnecessary. Britain, after all, still has constitutional union of Church and State, and there's really no good reason for that in the modern world that I can see.

A bus campaign, of course, isn't going to convince anyone much. I rather doubt that the much better funded religious campaigns one sees on public transport do much better, either - although those for, say, the Alpha Course presumably have at least some success rate. But conversion isn't really the point. I think it's more about presenting a positive message, and demonstrating that the community is out there, and if you have doubts, you're not alone. The American versions actually seem to be better at the latter, perhaps because that side of things is more important over there.

What's really interesting is the response to this. I'm sure the great majority of Christians either aren't that bothered, or at least support the right of people to disagree with them, but there's clearly a minority whose responses have been decidedly, well... un-Christian. People that, perhaps, feel frightened and threatened by the thought that not everyone agrees with them, and feel a need to lash out in response. There were a number of examples of this in the talk, some of which did verge on the alarming - I may not agree with many parts of the Christian message, but I'm fairly confident it's not supposed to be about bile and hatred!

The very fact that there have been arguments about this, and about the wording that's allowed (hence the "Probably") just goes to show that this has been a worthwhile exercise, and that there is an imbalance here to be addressed. After all, the same restrictions don't seem to apply to the other side...

So that was one uplifting and good-humoured talk that I actually enjoyed more than I expected to. But now I'm going to turn to somebody who has put a lot on the line for the cause of skepticism, and of science in general. I refer, of course, to science writer Simon Singh, who I've mentioned before. The previous times I've seen him give talks, they have been on the subject of the Big Bang, and other directly science-related matters. Naturally, that wasn't the case this time. And that's because of the huge and likely to be long-running libel action that now takes up his time.

I won't go into the details, because it will only be repeating what is available in more detail elsewhere. I will note, however, that there has been a positive development in the last couple of weeks, in that Singh's appeal against the refusal of the right to appeal against the outcome of the pre-trial hearing (don't you just love the law?) has been upheld. Which may yet turn out to make no difference in the long run, but is at least a start.

The specific issue is related to the right to raise scientific questions of public interest, but it seems to me that it's even broader than that. There really is a serious problem with libel law in the UK, and it extends beyond just science reporting. Those in the UK will presumably already be aware of the related issue this week of the Guardian newspaper being prevented from reporting certain proceedings in Parliament, an absolutely astonishing course of events. (This latter incident does not, as I understand it, stem directly from libel law, but the same underlying legal principles seem to be at the source). Britain does not have the same rights to free speech as, for example, the USA, and it may yet be for the European Court of Human Rights to make a ruling on this.

That Singh is continuing to fight this case, despite the risk of financial ruin (he'll be several thousand pounds out of pocket, even if he wins a complete victory) is enormously to his credit. He rightly received two standing ovations, and an award for his contributions to skepticism over the last year. I can't imagine anyone else was even in the frame for that.

Well, that seems to be a long enough post; looks like there will have to be a part three. In which I can, hopefully, get down at least little way from my high horse...

The Amaz!ing Meeting

2009-10-04T20:37:00.002+01:00

You may know (if only because I've mentioned it before) that my other main interest, besides gaming, is skepticism. If you don't give a monkey's about this, you probably want to ignore the rest of this post, and most likely, the ones that will follow it. You should find it safe to come back once Kingdom of Heroes is released, and I've had time to read and review it.

Still here? If so, you may well have wondered to yourself, what is the big gathering of the skeptical tribe? What, in short, is to skepticism what Continuum or Tentacles are to Glorantha?

Well, OK, you probably haven't actually wondered that. Especially if you're reading this blog for some reason other than being a Glorantha fan. (Hi, Mum). But let's imagine that you did: the answer is The Amaz!ing Meeting, held for the last several years in Las Vegas. Where, let's face it, I'm not very likely to go. But - and this is the important bit - this year, for the first time, there was an additional meeting held outside the USofA. That was TAM London, and I was lucky enough to attend.

I should probably explain why I say I was lucky, and why I haven't mentioned this at all before. That's because the convention was massively over-subscribed. Based on the figures in the US, the organisers figured the tickets would sell out in a few months; they actually sold it out in less than an hour. By the time I logged on to make my purchase - as soon as I got home from work - they were already long gone. So, I figured, I ain't going - and things suck, but there you go sometimes. They made some efforts to get further tickets out, but no luck there, either. Then, last week, they put out a few tickets that had been returned for refunds, and I just happened to be online when they announced it, being able to snag one on the spot!

And now I've just returned. A very, very good weekend, and hats off to the organisers. I most certainly hope there's one again next year, or, heck, even biennial like Continuum (the organisers have promised a bigger venue if it happens again in the UK, which would hopefully help with the ticket problem). The massive interest that this must have had to sell out so quickly is, I think, something of a testament to the growing popularity of skepticism in recent years, and by gosh, it feels good to be part of a tribe that's expanding for once.

Frankly, there was just so much good stuff that I can't really describe it all in detail. I know that Jack of Kent is covering it in his blog (which is probably a thousand times more popular than mine), so maybe there'll be more there, if you're interested. However, there are four presenters at the con who I'd particularly like to talk about, for very different reasons. But that's absolutely not to diminish in any way the contributions of the other six - as I say, the entire weekend was fantastic, and I was really impressed by the quality of the lineup.

Less so by the food on the Saturday night incidentally - memo to organisers: there's nothing wrong with serving sausages, but it's a bugger to eat them without a knife or a table. Just sayin'. (The food for the rest of the weekend was fine, incidentally, as was the quality of the cooking).

Anyway, I do think it behoves me to give at least a run down of the six presentations that I won't be discussing in much detail:

Brian Cox, presenter of various documentaries for the BBC's Horizon strand, started us off with a talk about the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, and of curiosity-driven science in general. This was a lot more fun than it might sound, and I have to say it takes real talent to talk about particle physics for an hour, and make it sound not just exciting, but easily understandable, without really dumbing it down. And the message was clear: curiosity-driven science is, in and of itself, important, and a fitting use of (at least some) public funds.

Jon Ronson followed up with an entertaining talk about his book about CIA psychics, The Men Who Stare At Goats, including clips of the upcoming film based on the book.

James Randi, who surely needs no introduction, and is the figurehead of the JREF - the organisation that runs TAM - gave a video call from America, answering questions, and seeming remarkably chipper, given his recent health problems.

Phil Plait, who actually runs the JREF, gave an fascinating talk about how asteroids could wipe out human civilisation, and other such hilarities, managing to balance the seriousness with a lot of fun. He's a good speaker, if apparently a little puzzled by the British at times (ha! as if we're the strange ones...)

Glen Hill, who I'd not heard of before, gave a talk on the Cottingley Fairies, photographed by his mother. He drew some rather strained parallels with recent conflict in the Middle East, making him perhaps the most clearly anti-religious speaker. Not that that would worry me in the slightest, of course...

George Hrab provided musical entertainment, and came across as a really cool bloke. I'll have to get an album of his music!

Adam Savage is, of course, one of the presenters of Mythbusters, and discussed some of the making of the show, primarily based around trying to see how well someone can swim in a pool full of syrup. Serious science, as I'm sure you'll agree!

So much for the summary... on to more serious discussion. And less serious, too...

HeroQuest Review - pt 3

2009-07-12T09:44:00.002+01:00

So now we come to what is, perhaps, the hardest part of the review. That's because it deals with what is, for me, the biggest problem with the new edition, yet that is not in any way a criticism of the writers. The writers make it abundantly clear what they're trying to do with the rules, and of how they've written it to support a certain style of play. Quite rightly, they warn you up front (on p. 5, and again on pp. 8 and 77) that the game they have designed won't suit everyone.

And that, to my mind, is a good thing. Too many games either make out that they're for everyone, or inadvertently (or otherwise) end up deriding other styles of play. HeroQuest 2 nails its colours firmly to the mast, and for that it should be congratulated. Unfortunately, they aren't colours I like, and I can't complete a personal review of the product without saying why. But, at the same time, it's important to note that the changes they have made are exactly what many people were wanting; a lot of people are going to love this new iteration of the rules, and more power to them. But for me, the changes have removed useful tools, made the game harder to use, and failed to provide a good replacement.

One caveat to the above though is that the rules do state on p. 7 that their intent is to:

...either help you run the game in its emulative style, or, if you prefer a simulative approach, to understand how you’ll need to modify it to suit your preferences.

In response to that, I really do have to say that the books fails completely in its intent to fulfil the second half of that sentence. I can't help but wonder, especially since it more or less says the opposite on the next page, if that sentence snuck in from an earlier draft, and got missed when something was revised.

Anyway, the core of the problem here is embodied in what the rules call the Pass/Fail Cycle. Oddly, it's not the cycle itself that's the problem, but more the underlying principles that allow it to work. The cycle aims to reproduce the way that narratives work in novels, films, and other forms of storytelling. As a guide to writing stories, or even to writing RPG scenarios for publication, it's pretty good advice (and, indeed, does not claim to be original in this regard). The sequence that you get in D&D of a bunch of relatively easy opponents/challenges leading up to a tougher Level Boss, and then starting the pattern again at the next level, is, it seems to me, an illustration of this principle in action.

So far, so good, but in an actual game we are not interested so much in the difficulty of past challenges as in how well the characters overcame them in practice. After all, sometimes you will fail at an easy challenge, or succeed at a hard one. As a consequence, the Pass/Fail Cycle of HQ2 relies on the outcome of prior contests. If your characters have been having a tough time of it, then whatever they try to do next should be easier, and vice versa. But that, if taken literally, can produce nonsensical results, especially if the players do something unexpected (as they probably will).

So, of course, you are not supposed to take it literally. There are "credibility tests" and the oft repeated exhortation to "use your own judgement" in the rules to compensate for the shortcomings in the Pass/Fail Cycle. Well, yes, but how often would you expect to use the Pass/Fail Cycle to determine difficulty? 90% of the time? 5% of the time? And, crucially, when you want to ignore the Pass/Fail Cycle and go with a clearly simulationist approach ("well, what they are doing is X, so, to maintain credibility, it should have a resistance of Y"), where is the guidance to help you do that?

There isn't any, because there's not supposed to be - you "use your own judgement". But, for my money, that's just not good enough in a rules system. If you're doing that all the time, you might as well be doing systemless gaming. Not that there's anything wrong with systemless gaming, but if I've paid to buy a game system, I kind of want something for my money. You use your own judgement when the system doesn't give you clear answers, of course; no rule system can cover everything. But HQ2 doesn't give you clear answers at all, unless what you want is a wholly narrative/emulative game (which, of course, is the idea).

And this is really where HQ2 fails for me. If you do want a wholly narrative/emulative game, great - you'll love this. But, if you don't, there just isn't the guidance. HQ1 managed to strike a good balance between the narrative elements and the simulationist support where it was needed. You can see it, for example, in the Community Support table (or at least the general idea that such a table should exist). All of that has now gone.

What an update of HQ1 needed, more than anything else - the one thing I was really, really looking forward to seeing in a new edition - was clearer guidance on how to set resistances in a simulationist framework. Many times you won't want to do that, and that was where HQ1's mixed approach really shone as a stirling example to other systems, but I, at least, always need that framework to be visible to me as GM. If nothing else, it tells me what I need to do to depart from it.

As another illustration of the same fundamental problem, nothing, other than the PCs, ever has stats in HQ2. It seems that everything is pretty much made up on the spot, using the Pass/Fail Cycle or "your judgement" as a modifier to something called the Base Resistance, which gradually increases as the game progresses. Again, this creates the same issue of their being no fundamental, objective framework, on which to base your judgement. (Not to mention that writing up the stats is half the fun of prepping for a game session).

But, moreover, there is no clear guidance on what the increase rate in the Base Resistance is supposed to represent. And I don't mean in a simulationist sense (since, clearly, it doesn't represent anything in that sense), but actually in the narrative/emulative sense that the book is supposed to be about. What's the intent here? What is it supposed to do? Is it meant to keep track with the increase in the PC's abilities - in which case, why not base it on that? Is it meant to increase more slowly than the PCs, and, if so, by how much? Sure, I might want a different pace, but without knowing what the original intent is, how am I supposed to modify it to reach my desired goal?

Going back to look at an actual character, I see that in the time that my current PC's best ability has increased by +5 points, the Base Resistance should have increased by +7 points. That may, of course, reflect differences between HQ1 and HQ2, or it may reflect my play style, so it's not necessarily illustrative of much. Which is as well, since, whatever the intent of the rule is, it's probably not that!

And, of course, the rules do say that you should modify the Base Resistance based upon your play style, and that it won't work for certain styles at all. There is, of course, no clear guidance as to what you should do if this happens. Which, once again, suggests that HQ2, wonderful though it may be for those who want a particular sort of game, just doesn't support my own preferences.

To which the obvious response is, "why should the game support your preferences?" And that's a fair answer, since the game clearly works for many people, and supports what they want, and any game, no matter how well designed, will always leave someone out in the cold. But, remember, this is a personal review - I am saying why the game does not work for me, not why it will not work for you. It so happens that a game I really liked has been turned into something I like a lot less, and that there won't be any further published support for my preferred style from Issaries/Moon Design. It would be dishonest to pretend I'm happy about that, but sometimes, those are the breaks.

From my perspective, it's a tragedy, but it was always going to be a tragedy for someone. If they had done it my way, a lot of players who were looking for a more emulative approach would have been pretty narked. Someone always has to luck out when there's a change.

And this time, it's me.

HeroQuest review - pt 2

2009-07-04T12:39:00.003+01:00

So, in some significant ways, HeroQuest 2 is an improvement over earlier editions. Which is just as it should be - why else do a new edition, rather than re-releasing the old one? There are, however, a few areas where I have niggling doubts; where it looks, certainly at first glance, that they have made a step in the wrong direction.

Incidentally, it's clear from forum discussions that very few people agree with me on any of the following. If you think HQ2 is perfect, and you don't like people disagreeing with you, you probably don't want to read on. And, frankly, if you've tried it, and it does work for you (as it will for many people), what do you care what I think, anyway? I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: this is a well-designed system that many people will love; I'm just not one of them.

Character generation proceeds in much the same manner as in HQ1, although, obviously, with less specific Gloranthan guidance. For the proper Gloranthan implementation we're going to have to wait for Kingdom of Heroes, currently planned for release this Autumn. As I haven't seen even a pre-release of this, I know little about its approach, and it will, in any case, deserve its own review when it appears. Judging from the rulebook though, there should be no problem with compatibility issues, and characters should translate easily from the old edition to the new one, which is a great relief. For instance, while there are two new approaches to writing keywords, the HQ1 method is still enshrined as one of the official options (now called the "package" approach) in the new rules, and the sample keyword format on p. 94 is fully compatible with this.

Which makes it a little odd that the designers have been saying elsewhere that the two systems actually aren't compatible at a character generation level - that is, that characters designed for HQ1 won't work properly with HQ2, and that, in practice, you're going to be forced to create new ones. I hope they're wrong, since continuity is a major selling point for me, but it seems unlikely that they don't know what they're talking about. Mind you, they're not claiming its actually impossible - after all, one could convert from D&D to RuneQuest if one really wanted to - just that the changes are drastic enough that the character will lose a lot of it "feel", making the whole result unsatisfactory and a little bit pointless. Either way, this sounds counter-intuitive, given the similarity between those aspects of the relevant editions. So, I'm going to test it out for myself, to work out just what it is that I've missed (probably something in the magic rules). I'll post the results here at a later date.

On to a problem that is apparent from the rules as written, and that I've observed in actual play using the pre-release at conventions. Or rather, a set of problems. These concern augments, bonuses that can applied to a main roll to boost its effect. For instance, if I'm trying to chop a tree down, my ability in Forestry might be augmented by my physical strength, or by a Tree Chopping Spell, or by a magical axe, or, well... many other things. One problem that HQ1 ran into here, at least for many players, was that you could, in principle, add a vast array of augments to a single roll, boosting it into the stratosphere, and slowing the game down while you hunted out all the possibilities.

Now, I can honestly say that I never had this problem. The only occasion when it happened, I actively wanted it to happen, so it wasn't an issue. (As an aside, that specific situation could probably be handled using "Lingering Benefits" in the new rules, so we can leave that aside). Normally, it just never cropped up, because, in my experience, players Just Don't Do That. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that for many groups, players do indeed, do just that. Indeed, I've seen it happen myself, in games I'm not GMing, so there's no doubt it is the case. For those groups it was an issue, and, clearly, something had to be done about it.

For me, though, the cure looks worse than the disease. I liked the idea of multiple augments per roll; what was needed was a way to limit them. The obvious method is a simple cap, but, unfortunately, the writers of HQ2 have picked a cap of, err... one. In other words, multiple augments are now completely forbidden - one roll, one augment. Now, I can sort of see the rationale for this; keeping to a single augment makes that augment more dramatic. But, in practice, in my experience, it feels constraining, and I don't think that that's good. As I say, I liked multiple augments.

I've been told that I will change my mind if I play the game with single-augments-only for a few more sessions. In fact, I'll concede that that is possible, although I remain unconvinced. Because, unless the opposite is obvious, I can't really know what I'll think after I've done something that... well, I haven't actually done yet. So, yeah, maybe.

What I'll require a lot more convincing about is the "freshness" clause that has now been added to the augment rules. This, except under the most exceptional of circumstances, prohibits you from using the same augment in the same way twice in succession. To which my immediate response is "why the heck not?" The excuse seems to be that it isn't interesting, but that, to my mind, is forcing the game designer's (or the GM's) opinion of what is interesting onto the player, whether he agrees with it or not. It's almost saying "you might think this is interesting, but it says officially here in the rules that you are Wrong".

OK, so I'm sure that's not the intent. And, true, there is an "entertainment" clause that trumps freshness, but it's written so as to imply it's meant to be used only sparingly. If you expect to employ it for about 95% of all requested augments, then fair enough, but I really, really, can't imagine that's what the writers envisaged.

There is also, incidentally, an "illumination" clause that's rather difficult to make head or tail of; I'm left with the question of what sort of an augment wouldn't fulfil that criterion!

And I'm not talking from abstract theory, here: I have played HQ2 at conventions and found that the freshness clause was, without doubt, my biggest impediment to enjoying the game. Might I change my mind after, say, a further ten sessions? I can't say definitively, but, in this case, it looks pretty damn unlikely from where I'm standing right now. Arguments to the contrary are going to have to deal with the simple fact that, when I tried it, I just did not like it.

One problem that HeroQuest 1 did have, and its predecessor, Hero Wars, as well, was that it never handled weapons and armour well. The new edition deals with this problem by sweeping it under the carpet, and essentially ignoring the whole issue, leaving it up to on-the-spot judgement by the GM. To be fair, I'm not sure that that's actually a step backwards... but it's hardly a step forwards, either.

Now, there is one thing that all of these problems have in common: they're easily fixed. Don't like the freshness clause? Just don't use it; it's not going to make any difference to the rest of the rules, or to your ability to use any published supplements. Want to have multiple augments per roll? Sure, that's easy - although you'll probably want to use the HQ1 version of the Quick Augment rules as well, or it's going to get real slow with all the dice rolling. Heck, if you wanted to use the old bidding approach to extended contests (not that I would), that's no problem, either.

One might well argue that, by this point, you're not really running HQ2 any more, but so what, if it doesn't actively create problems? There's nothing wrong with what we might choose to call HQ1.5. Problem is, though, there are other issues that are harder to deal with in this way. They're bigger, and more fundamental.

And they're also the topic of part 3...

HeroQuest 2 review - pt 1

2009-07-02T18:10:00.003+01:00

The second edition of HeroQuest was launched yesterday, and, since the first edition is what I've done most of my game writing for, I immediately picked up the PDF. I've had the preview edition for about a year now, but I didn't want to write a review of it until I'd seen the final, published, version. On the other hand, since my opinion seems to be different from virtually everybody else's, I think that some commentary will be useful now that it is out. Because differing viewpoints are always a good thing.

But let's begin with the positive stuff, and get on to the differences of opinion in later posts.

Perhaps the most obvious difference from earlier editions is that HQ2 is a generic system, not wed to a specific setting (namely Glorantha). You don't need to do more than flip through the book to realise that the intention is that HQ2 will work with any setting you can imagine; it's about general rules for resolving dramatic situations, not about modelling a specific world. And that, to my mind, is a good thing. I have no idea how many people will pick up this edition when they avoided the earlier ones because they didn't fancy the setting - but I am sure there will be at least some. And because the system does work with a wide range of settings, that's a useful thing to do. The downside is that I get less of the specific stuff that I'm after, but I think that's a price worth paying for the ability to do all sorts of other things with the rules.

Of course, it's not really true that HQ2 will work beautifully with any genre imaginable; no system can do that. Any system, as a result of the way it is constructed, will favour certain game styles and genre conventions over others. In the case of HQ2, what it favours is dramatic, cinematic, often larger-than-life genres. It would be good for action films, superheroes, high fantasy, space opera, and many more besides. (It would probably be quite good for soap opera too, were one so inclined). Which isn't to say that it can't do grittier genres, since it's open enough to fit anything, but I suspect it's going to be somewhat unsatisfactory for those. Grim danger just isn't something it does well - just as some other generic systems won't do the cinematic stuff very effectively.

This isn't a criticism, since no game can be all things to all people. In fact, I'd say that HQ2 is about as generic a game as its humanly possible to construct, and that's a good thing. In this respect, then, HQ2 is a clear improvement over HQ1.

And the improvements don't end there, because once you do get a chance to properly read the rules, it becomes clear that they are chock full of advice. And much of it is very good advice, at that. The resolution system in HeroQuest was always a little different from that of most other RPGs, so the addition of even more examples than in the previous edition (which had quite a few) is certainly a welcome feature.

A particularly significant change, in terms of the nuts-and-bolts of the system is the new Extended Contest system. In previous editions, this worked by a bidding mechanism, which, in my experience, never really worked well. In its place we have a much simpler and easier-to-grasp system that relies on a series of simple contests to generate a final outcome. This really is a big improvement, and seems to have been successful the few times I've managed to try it. Moreover, the chapter explaining contest resolution is the biggest in the book, being chock full of varying ways the system can be used, and examples of how to do so. This is, from my perspective, pretty neat stuff. If I used nothing else from this book, I'd use that.

But, aside from a nice rule on p. 57 ("Catch-ups"), is about as far as the improvements over earlier editions go. Still, it's not a bad start, and many of the good features of the earlier editions, such as the scaling, remain more or less intact. It's still a fairly good system, but... well, we'll get to "but..." in Part Two.

Don't Rest Your Head

2009-06-27T17:22:00.003+01:00

I think this is the first time I've actually been able to do any face-to-face gaming this entire year; if not, it's certainly been a long time. Anyway, I finally did manage to get a session in last night, and we played a one-shot of the indie game Don't Rest Your Head. Rather like indie music, the term "indie game" seems to refer more to a specific style of game than anything actually to do with some kind of independence. (I've heard indie games defined as anything published by the original designer - but, arguably, that's true of GURPS, which clearly isn't what they mean).

In practice, indie games seem designed for short term play, generally have fairly simple rule mechanics, and, using the terminology of the Three True Wayists, are strongly Narrativist. Now, you might think, from my earlier post, that that would mean I wouldn't be keen on them. But that's not so; the problem with 3TWism isn't that it doesn't work, so far as it goes, it's just that it's so obviously incomplete. I have nothing against a good Narrativist game, so long as you don't try and tell me that there's something wrong with an "incoherent" one.

So, on to the game. The biggest failing of DRYH - in fact, so far as I can see, the only failing - is the "blank page" approach to character generation. The concept sounds simple; you jot down a few things about your character that are relevant to the game. In practice, though, that can be a lot harder than it sounds. There's a real danger that you'll sit there staring at a blank character sheet with no idea of what to write on it. In fact, that happened to me, to the point that I began to feel a little uncomfortable. I eventually jotted down something, but it didn't make a lot of sense. I get the impression that this is a common flaw in indie games, and one that they've never satisfactorily fixed. (I'll note, in passing, that HeroQuest can be similar, although, in a campaign, there's more of a tendency to spend time on character generation, which obviates the problem).

The two unusual features of character generation are connected with the fundamental theme of DRYH: that it's a supernatural horror game about insomnia. So, you have to explain why you aren't sleeping, and you also get a weird supernatural power. And that, fortunately, was what solved the problem of the character generation, because our GM handed out random pre-designed powers from the DRYH supplement Don't Lose Your Mind. I got a good one, and, to be honest, largely ignored most of the stuff I'd actually written on the sheet in favour of making the power the centre of the character. If I'd had to make something up on the spot, the result would have been much less fun. (And, on the converse, spending too long prepping for a one-shot game also seems a bit daft).

From there on in, though, it worked really well. The system is slick and simple, and the concept and imagery behind the setting are really cool. It probably helps if you're into the works of people like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, and I'm not at all surprised to discover that Morrison's stint on Doom Patrol was one of the inspirations behind the game. I dare say it's possible to run without the surrealism, but for me, that's a large part of fun.

So there much scenery-chewing as an insane insomniac hearing voices in his head, with the other characters being a conspiracy theorist cabbie, a psychotic policeman, and a woman with a talking teddy bear, an imaginary ray gun that really worked, and an obsession with being probed by aliens. We were pursued by men made of newspaper who only printed the stories that hadn't happened yet, men with thumb-tacks instead of heads, a spiv who bought memories, and a man who oozed wax (at this point, you may already be seeing the influence of Doom Patrol, and for that matter, The Sandman). Eventually, after many explosions, my character embraced his insanity, and spent the rest of his days gibbering in a padded cell. Which was, oddly enough, just as it should have been.

So, no question in my mind, this is a good one-off game. I don't think it would work as much more than that, but I doubt it's intended to. It's the sort of thing that's ideal as a con game, and for playing short runs of sessions at most. That's a very valuable and useful niche for a game to fill, and let's not forget that the setting, from what I saw of it, is stunning. Plus, blank-page syndrome aside, it uses a very clever and effective system, specifically tailored to its own concepts.

All in all, very enjoyable. But what about longer term games? HeroQuest 2 attempts to be a strongly narrativist system suited for just that sort of game. And, it's out on Wednesday, which means I'll finally be able to review it. And that review may be less positive than this one...

Western Heroquesting

2009-06-16T18:06:00.004+01:00

Here's a post I made on the World of Glorantha list about Western heroquesting, responding to the statement that it's rather "abstract":

>
> The Monotheist experience seems a bit more abstract.

It can be, yes, but it doesn't have to be. Remember, the majority of monotheists aren't wizards (that is, they use wizardry magic, but they aren't pointy-hat wearing professionals). When you attend a monotheist religious service, you experience the Otherworld, and you re-enact the myths of Malkion, the saints, and whoever else it may be. Sure, to an outsider, it may appear that the vicar takes the holy book out of the Arcarium and reads a lesson from it, but if you're in that congregation, the "lesson" becomes real for you; it's a myth that you're interacting with.

Take the New Year's Day ceremony, since that's pretty much universal (albeit not your regular weekly service). You're standing there in the Church, and then the walls and ceiling begin to fade. Now you're in the middle of the countryside, and the sky is gray, like early twilight... but you know it's been like that for all of your life. The landscape around you is gloomy, starved of light. You feel the crushing monotony of the world, of your life in this semi-darkness, holding onto the hope that, one day, God will make it better. You begin to pray, feeling a presence that God is with you, and that soon, very soon, your wait will be over (because you feel you've been waiting all your life for this, and so have your ancestors, for generations back). God will deliver you, because you have been faithful, and Malkion's sacrifice made it so.

And then the sun rises.

And so you continue through the story of the first day, and the first night, and the service ends with the second dawn. Now, here you're experiencing how your ancestors *felt*, but the point is that it's not purely abstract. Another example might be on the High Holy Day of Saint Josselyne, where his adepts will find themselves in the garrison defending his castle against the final onslaught of the Brithini. And, of course, you can heroquest by repeating the saint's actions to gain some benefit - the key point usually being to emulate his virtues.

Sure, if you're a wizard of, say, the Iron Blood School, your heroquests may well be a good deal more abstract, trying to forge link between nodes on the Essence Planes, or building the runes into a new pattern, or something. But even then, you may be interacting with physical (if fairly impersonal) entities that have obvious meanings to anyone - the Sea, for instance, if you're a Debaldan.

Three True Way-ism

2009-06-08T17:59:00.003+01:00

There is a term sometimes encountered when discussing roleplaying, of “One True Wayism” – or some variation on that theme. It refers to players or GMs with a very specific idea of how an RPG should work, and an insistence that this is the only right way of doing things. Often, the very idea that someone might prefer a different style is considered “Hurting Wrong Fun”, and any attempt at gaming in such a style must be quashed lest it infect others with its perversity. Few, if any, people identify themselves as One True Wayists, but the concept is often encountered under some guise or another.

Unsurprisingly, few people who really think about the theory behind gaming espouse such a narrow-minded view. But it seems to me that a rather more insidious version of the same sort of general idea has become quite popular. I refer to this as “Three True Wayism”. It arises from the theoretical discussions on The Forge website (now, I gather, somewhat curtailed) that classified RPGs into one of three categories: narrativism, simulationism, and gamism. The first focuses primarily on the needs of the story, the second on the demands of verisimilitude, and the third on the establishment of fair game mechanics and reward mechanisms (or such is my understanding). The argument seems to be that all of these three approaches to RPing are equally valid, and if you happen to prefer a different category than I do, then so be it (they prefer to use the word “agenda”, but then much of their terminology is somewhat opaque).

Which sounds fair enough, so far as it goes. The problem is, it seems to me, that it acknowledges only these three approaches, and, more to the point, claims that they are mutually exclusive. The theory says that a rule set can only effectively support one approach of the three, and it even seems that they have pretty narrow definitions of what those approaches are. Hence, “Three True Wayism” – the contention that there are only three possible ways to enjoy a roleplaying game, and if your approach isn’t one of them, you’re doing it wrong. It’s insidious, because the people who adhere to this attitude (and, believe me, I’ve met some) believe they are being open-minded and fair, and accepting of all other approaches, even if they differ from their own. But – unless you accept their thesis that there are only three possible, and mutually exclusive, “agendas” – I don’t think this is the case at all.

This seems to manifest in two different ways, either or both of which can be problematic to those who do not fit into their neat little pigeon-holes. The first is an overly narrow definition of what the three agendas mean. Simulationism, for instance, is supposed to be about verisimilitude, and the obvious conclusion therefore seems to be that any system that supports it must be detailed and relatively rules-heavy, to reflect the various different aspects of reality (or, at least, a particular genre's version thereof). One thinks of systems like GURPS and Hero in this category, and a great many others that were popular in the 1980s.

This attitude seems to have stifled the development of rules-lite “simulationist” systems, which, to my mind, is very much to be regretted. Three True Wayists, when pressed, may not deny that a rule-lite simulationist system is possible, but they certainly don’t seem to spend any effort in encouraging the creation of such a thing. And that, I suspect, is because it lies outside the comfort zone of their theory. I dare say there are other examples of this narrow thinking stifling creativity, but the absence of much in the way of rules-lite simulationist systems, from where I’m standing, seems a particularly striking example.

The second problem is arguably worse, because it's more explicit. And that’s the contention that there are three, and only three, mutually exclusive approaches. Assuming that one defines the three approaches broadly enough, the first half of that statement – that there’s no fourth agenda – might well be true. (One could, of course, argue that rules-lite simulationism is, itself, distinct from, say, the GURPS approach, but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we accept that it isn’t). The problem comes from the ‘mutually exclusive’ part.

It seems to me self-evident that a system can provide a good mix of at least two, and possibly all three, approaches at the same time. A narrativist game does not have to be ‘narrative above all else’, for instance; it could allow a proportion of some other “agenda” in. Realistically, any game has to strike a balance between the three approaches – a narrative won’t work if it’s completely implausible, a simulation won’t work as an RPG if it never has any dramatic challenges, and so on. Surely it’s obvious that that balance does not have to be strongly weighted in one particular direction for a rules system to work?

Yet, while the Three True Wayists do have a term for a system that tries to balance two (or more) agendas, that term is, so I’m told, “incoherent”. Now, you can’t convince me that that was intended to be a value-neutral term to refer to a gaming style just as valid as the three they espouse. It’s pretty much explicitly saying that this style of play is inferior and somehow wrong – really no different to the attitude of the One True Wayists. Was this term deliberately coined so that anyone trying to say “I prefer incoherent games” would sound like a loony, Orwellian Newspeak style, or did it generally not occur to them that anyone would prefer it? I don’t know, although I rather suspect the latter.

But, when you poke beneath the bonnet, it’s ridiculous to assert that an “incoherent” game can’t be just as good and valid and worthwhile as one that follows a single "agenda" more or less exclusively. And, even if it weren’t, it would hardly be accepting of alternative styles of play to deride it. The Three True Wayists are here, it seems to me, falling into the very trap that their theory seeks to avoid.

Obviously, such a system could be done well, or done badly – that’s true of anything. But surely it’s possible to strike a balance? How could it not be, if you really look at things with an un-blinkered attitude? And this, of course, gets me to the point: I believe that 1st edition HeroQuest was such a system. It’s not that it didn’t have faults – it had a number – but the balance between narrativism and simulationism was done superbly and, so far as I know, has never been bettered. Yet that, it seems, had to be sacrificed on the altar of orthodoxy, because surely nobody could really like a game that worked that way? After all, no matter how much common sense said it worked, the theory said it couldn’t, and that was surely that?

But, to quote Robin Laws – who, despite having written the new 2nd edition of HeroQuest, seems to be no friend of Three True Wayism – there are more than three types of art, so why can’t there be more than three types of RPG? In fact, isn’t that just obvious?

The sad thing is, not so much that this happened – games change editions and approaches all the time – but that there doesn’t seem to be anything else available today to fill that niche. Because gaming theory says that that the “incoherent” approach must automatically be a failure that nobody could really, deep down, actually prefer to the alternatives.

Because Three True Wayism says that I don’t exist…

Keep Libel Laws Out of Science

2009-06-04T22:53:00.003+01:00

I am, perhaps unusually, going to talk about something that I believe is actually important.

Everyone in your genuine, serious-type, science blogs has been on about the BCA v Singh libel case for quite some time. In fact, I've been following the case since even before the judge made the ruling that really kicked up such a stink. At issue here, it seems to me, is whether scientists should be able to raise questions and engage in open debate without fear of being sued, and whether the libel laws in our country are, in fact, a pile of poo. I'm not enough of an expert to add anything that hasn't been said a hundred times before on the blogosphere, so I'll just direct anyone interested to the excellent Jack of Kent, who also has links to many other sites covering aspects of the story. Certainly, I didn't know our libel laws were quite such a mess before this (though I knew they were fairly bad), and one does hope that something might actually be done about them.

And if, having read all the background, you agree with me, please sign the petition of support:

Ramalia

2009-04-11T21:48:00.002+01:00

Just a note to say that Tradetalk magazine #10, including a lengthy article on the were-boars of Ramalia that I wrote back in 2002, has now been re-released in PDF format for the trifling price of $4. And, of course, its not just me, because every other issue of Tradetalk from #5 onwards has been re-released, too - so check them out, there's some really good Gloranthan material in there.

On a related note, there may be some good news about Heroes of Malkion on the horizon. With the emphasis on the "may" and the "horizon", of course, but at least there's something to hope for. And, no, I don't have any more information than that I can give out at the present time... just keep an eye out!

God in the Lab

2009-03-23T15:46:00.002Z

On one of the Glorantha lists, I recently commented that I seem to be able to attend skeptical meetings more often than I manage to get any gaming in this days. And so it seems, since I've only had gaming session this year so far, yet I have attended two skeptical meetings.

The latest was titled "God in the Lab", and it was about scientific studies into the basis of religion. One of the talks was about religious analgesia, in which Catholics had reported feeling less pain while viewing a picture of the Virgin Mary (together with some brain scans that showed they were indeed, Not Making This Up). I wasn't terribly clear of the point of this; certainly the researcher wasn't trying to claim that they had actually been divinely protected. Basically, so far as I can tell, viewing the image put them in a frame of mind where they felt comfortable and protected, and that was reflected in their psychological and physiological perceptions of pain. One suspects the same could have been achieved with other comforting images, that were not necessarily religious - but apparently, nobody has done that study. Getting ethical approval for studies that involve electrocuting people probably isn't all that easy...

Two of the other talks had a fairly similar theme, although addressed from different angles. They both concluded that children have an innate tendency to believe in gods, and in the separation of mind and body. It is intuitively "obvious" to most people that the mind and the body are different things - that, for example, "I" want to do something, but "my body" won't let me. While the specifics of beliefs in the nature of the soul vary widely, the broad ideas behind what properties a disembodied spirit would have are remarkably consistent across different cultures. One could, of course, equally attribute this to "and that's because disembodied spirits really do have these properties" as much as to "this tells us something about the way our brains deal with the world."

Similarly, children naturally attribute the natural things about them to purposeful design, regardless of their religious upbringing (or lack thereof). And these things remain as holdovers even into our adult lives. For example, a three year old child has no conception that other people do not know what they know - in essence, they assume that everyone is omniscient, at least about things they know themselves. As they grow up, it's not so much that they have to be taught that God is an omniscient being, but they have to learn, as their brain develops, that everyone except God isn't. (An interesting aside here, though not brought up in the talk, is that chimpanzees are, so far as I know, the only other animals demonstrated to be able to pull off this trick - essential if one wants to, say, lie...)

These sorts of things, I think, explain why religion is so ubiquitous... although they have nothing directly to say about whether or not it is true. The remaining talk addressed another reason: that some people have religious experiences in which they personally contact the Divine. Now, often this in the form of mystical experiences, in which one feels at one with the universe, or the Godhead, or whatever it may be, and loses a sense of self. But this particular talk was about the more extreme form of experiences, in which God, or a guardian angel, or whatever, speaks to the person. These experiences, it seems, are virtually identical phenomenologically to psychotic episodes, save for the crucial difference that they are positive and life-affirming, rather than deeply unpleasant. But the underlying processes in the brain do seem very similar (although clearly there must be some difference, and these things probably lie on a continuum from clinical insanity to religious revelation).

In particular, brain scans conducted while people were hearing such voices showed the same activity whether they were psychotic or experiencing something benevolent. Indeed, I found it interesting that the scans look very similar to those of people simply asked to imagine hearing a voice - that is, the brain areas for interpreting speech light up, while those for actual sound do not. The difference being that, when you imagine a voice, centres of the brain associated with planning and taking action light up immediately beforehand, but in the psychotic and religious experiencers, the voice interpretation areas just light up on their own, without any prior warning. It's also worthy of note that anti-psychotic medication seems to be able to dampen these positive experiences as well, in those that experience both - although, for ethical reasons, one can't really try them out on people whose experiences are only ever positive, and aren't, therefore, mentally ill in some way.

So, a pretty interesting day, and one which gives some food for thought. Lets see if I can get another gaming session in before the next Centre for Inquiry meeting, though...

Runes in the West

2009-02-04T12:40:00.003Z

I've mentioned the way that Malkioni interact with runes from a rules perspective in an earlier post. To illustrate further, here is the list of cults from Heroes of Malkion, with their runes. Note that some of these cults may have been moved to later books during the editing process, or had other minor changes - this is just the latest information I have. Furthermore, I won't be describing the cults themselves here; you'll have to buy the book if you want that! Instead, it just shows the range of cults in the book, and perhaps illustrates a little bit of how runes work for Malkioni.

Saints

Althens	Artifice
Anazieta	Harmony
Burning Arrow	Death
Drezedan	Death
Elleish	Man
Falerine	Fertility
Gerlant	Fire
Hasterax	Death
Iames	Harmony OR Light
Josselyne	Strength
Mistandar	Trade
Ongaring	Motion
Padelnik	Strength
Palenna	Fertility
Rendoir	Hunting
Xemela	Harmony
Zemuron	Law
Zmes	Artifice

Wizardry Schools

Areeshka	Luck, Fate
Avlor	Man, Victory, Stasis
Conwy	Trade, Truth
Defences of God	Law, Defence, Force
Hecretes	Illusion, Magic
Herigian	Law, Truth, Mastery
Inner Temple	Literacy, Light, Truth
Iron Blood	Law, Death, Harmony
Jenerin	Law, Trade
Kipperly	Harmony, Illusion
Kyria	Harmony, Motion, Protection
Lenderyn	Motion, Death, Magic
Nerivon	Motion, Destruction
Octahedral	Earth, Mineral
Ouxey	Perception, Stasis
Pure Waves	Water
Querto	Law, Motion, Mineral
Raceen	Law, Artifice
Rose Nuns	Law, Harmony
Siglat	Harmony, Perception, Mastery
Talara Ignia	Fire, Essence
Ulfrathgar	Chaos, Undeath
Urestes	Truth, Matter
Vonerin	Death, Spirit
Yarilia	Storm, Protection, Cold

Some additional things you might notice from this list:

Not all wizardry schools necessarily have three runes; it depends on the range and scope of their magic.
Saints grimoires, in particular, may focus on particular aspects of their rune; for example, Althens' Artifice rune/grimoire does not include metalwork, because he's a shipwright.
Some grimoires, again especially amongst saints, mediate the power of their main rune through another rune; for example the Order of the Burning Arrow's rune is Death, but it's largely (though not entirely) through the medium of fire.
Iames has two different runes, just to be awkward - but individual members only ever have access to one.
Pastors of the main Malkioni prophets, such as Rokar and Hrestol, use the Law rune in almost all cases, and are therefore too repetitive to list here. Their grimoire is usually The Abiding Book, or some variant thereof.
Talor simply used his own rune, in the last version I saw.
There are additional cults, such as the Order of Shining Steel, in LotW2 and LotW3!

Weird Science

2009-01-19T18:56:00.004Z

As some of you will have noticed, my usual e-mail sig includes the description "Gamer and Skeptic". This blog has been largely about gaming until now, because, let's face it, to the extent hat anyone is interested in what I'm doing, its probably because of my gaming books. (Well, aside from my relatives, presumably...) But, for today, let's talk about the second half of that, and the wonderful world of Doubt!

Of course, what I mean by this isn't the extreme philosophical skepticism of doubting everything. Granted, I can't prove (by the nature of the claim) that I don't live in The Matrix, with everything I'm experiencing being an illusion, but it seems pretty freaking unlikely. Skepticism is really about testing claims to see whether they stand up to scrutiny, and changing ideas as available evidence comes in - which is pretty much the basis of science. Or, at least, it is in an ideal world, because scientists are as fallible as anyone else.

At any rate, I mention this because of the Centre for Inquiry, a skeptical think tank which opened its London branch early last year. I was able to attend the opening event, which was quite interesting, but was followed by what was pretty much silence. Well, they finally got around to organising their first proper post-opening event on Saturday, and I went along. This was an all-day event, with four speakers holding forth on the general topic of "Weird Science", and very enjoyable it was, too.

First we had Richard Wiseman, describing his work in the weirder realms of psychology, performing simple magic tricks to illustrate perceptual illusions and so on. It's pretty much the same talk he always give at these sort of events, and its probably as well that it has been several years since I last saw it (since it has evolved in that time, as he's done more new things), but it is very well presented. And, of course, it included the Colour Changing Card Trick - and, if you haven't seen this, you really should.

Next up, Chris French, talking about his work at the Anomalous Psychology Research Unit. Unfortunately, there were a number of technical hiccups during this presentation, but as always, it was interesting and informative. Who would have thought Haunted Homes would present a mysterious sound as being unexplained (and implying it was made by a ghost) when they knew perfectly well what it actually was? It's almost enough to make you distrust what you see on TV...

After lunch, we had philosopher Stephen Law on the verifiability of Creation Science. I've only seen him once before, but he was an effective speaker on that occasion, too, and certainly somewhat provocative! And, lastly, Ben Goldacre gave a talk called (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) something like "The Lies That the Media Tell About Science and Which are So Fucking Incredibly Wrong that they Just Make Me Want to Slam My Cock in the Door and Revolving Especially Around Instances When They Had an Opportunity to Teach Something About Real Science But Didn't Because They Would Rather Just Tell Lies I Mean Why Would Anyone Want to Do That, Why?". Which was pretty much what it sounds like, and both passionate and entertaining.

After which, we all went down the pub, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Skeptics in the Pub. I attended the very first of these, way back when they were on Fridays, making returning home after 1 am not so unreasonable. I haven't been for a long time, and this was just a pub meeting, rather than including a talk as they usually are (which would have been a bit redundant on this occasion, obviously...) A good evening, giving me the opportunity to talk a bit about evolutionary theory, as well as lots of other things, and to meet (albeit briefly) Rebecca Watson, one of the presenters of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, the only weekly podcast that I never miss.

All of which goes to show that Doubting Stuff can be fun! Especially when there's beer involved.

HarnMaster Barbarians

2009-01-08T22:56:00.003Z

One of my earlier books (on which I worked with a number of other writers), HarnMaster Barbarians, has recently been released as a PDF on DriveThruRPG. The original was a loose-leaf product, not a bound book, so, with some decent quality paper, the PDF really isn't that different from the original hardcopy - and it's cheaper, too.

I have updated the Writing Credits page of my website with the direct link to the purchase site, and with similar details for any other books I've contributed to that remain available.

The End of Tentacles

2008-12-07T17:50:00.002Z

I did say that when the official announcement about Tentacles came through, I'd post about that. So here we are.

Tentacles was a great gaming convention held in scenic Schloss Stahleck overlooking the Rhine in Germany. From my perspective, it was particularly significant as a convention specifically dedicated to Glorantha, Call of Cthulhu, and other related games. The location simply can't be beaten, to be able to game in such a beautiful place must have been the highlight of the year for many attendees. But the 2009 gathering will be the last.

I can understand their reasoning; it has become increasingly difficult in recent years to get sufficient Guests of Honour from America to attend (this was particularly noticeable last year, and reading between the lines, they anticipate similar problems in 2009). Of course, we can all have good fun without the Guests, but it's going to be increasingly difficult to keep the convention at a sufficient stature to fulfil the organiser's legal contract with the owners of the castle. As they've said on the website, they don't want this to turn into a Bachelor Beer and Karaoke Quest, and I can see how that might be the fate if they drag it on too long.

All good things must come to an end, and Tentacles will most certainly be missed by the Gloranthan community (and Cthulhu fans, etc., for that matter) . I only managed to attend twice myself, with the difficulties of getting to Germany, but I do hope to attend their one last hurrah. I wish I had been able to go more often, because the experience is truly wonderful, but such is life.

But Glorantha is bigger than this. We're not a dying community - yet.

(And, yeah, as I predicted, that 'by the end of 2008' schedule for publication of Heroes of Malkion is looking pretty shaky, isn't it?)

Heroes of Malkion Update

2008-11-12T22:39:00.003Z

The latest update on progress on Heroes of Malkion indicates that artwork is still in progress. Moon Design hopes to have it out by the end of the year, which indicates that it will probably be out before the new edition of HeroQuest. (Nonetheless, it does duplicate a lot of information in the main HQ1 rulebook, in order that it can be used by those who only have access to HQ2).

Personally, I'd take the 'end of the year' estimate with a bucket-load of salt; these things are always statement of hope rather than any definite publication deadline. But... well, hopefully by Tentacles, eh?

In the meantime, here's a wordle from chapter 2 of the book (for the uninitiated, a wordle is an artistic representation of which words appear most frequently in a piece of text):

The Death of Pyramid Magazine

2008-11-07T10:10:00.003Z

I've been reading Pyramid magazine ever since issue #1, which I believe was about 15 years ago. It's a gaming magazine, published by Steve Jackson Games, and focussing on GURPS, which was the basis for the homebrew system that I played in those days. (The rest of the homebrew system came largely from Pendragon, but the stats were easy to convert, and the ideas fitted what I wanted back then).

Around 10 years ago, it switched from dead-tree format to webzine format and, with a little reluctance, I continued my subscription. I'm glad I did; there has been a lot of good material published in Pyramid over the last decade. I've even contributed three articles to it myself, two on Glorantha, and one on, of all things, astrophysics. Subscription also got me access to playtests of SJ Games products, and, in particular, I helped out with the testing of the Vehicle Design software, and of GURPS Cops. Perhaps best of all, at least in the long term, were the NNTP discussion forums that the magazine ran for subscribers, where I have had all sorts of cool discussions with a wide range of people.

As of today, the Pyramid webzine ceases publication.

Oh, the magazine will continue as a monthly PDF release, with slightly less content for five times the price. But, oddly enough, that's not much of an issue for me. Because, over the last couple of years, since I no longer play GURPS, the NNTP forums were my main reason for paying the annual subscription anyway - everything else was an added bonus. Since those forums are being closed down, I will be cancelling my subscription forthwith, to claim the refund for the rest of the year. It's understandable why they're closing, of course, at least from SJ Games point of view. For myself, I don't really understand why NNTP is no longer popular as a format - it's so much more flexible than the message boards that seem to have replaced it. Sometimes, newer isn't better, and, while message boards are great for some things (hence the MBRPG I help to run), general discussion isn't one of them. A lot of functionality has been lost in the name of progress - but isn't that often the way?

So I'll miss those discussions... but change goes on, and one can't blame a company for closing down something that just isn't profitable for them. A fond farewell to Pyramid, then, and on to something else instead...

(Addendum: If you're wondering why I'm mentioning this, but not the more Glorantha-relevant news from Germany of a similar nature - I'm waiting for the official announcement before commenting on that).

If I were a cat...

2008-10-20T22:55:00.003+01:00

One of the players on my MBRPG posted to say that if I were a cat, I would look like this:

(You probably have to know about LOLcats to know what this is actually a picture of... but still, I thought it was rather cool).

Valind's Tale

2008-09-18T08:35:00.002+01:00

As promised, the third audio file of my Vadrus stories is now up at my website. It will appear in text form at Mything Links later.

The Voice of Vadrus

2008-09-14T18:53:00.002+01:00

Or, at least, the voice of me channelling Vadrus.

As promised some time ago, I have posted two of my Vadrus stories in MP3 format to my website, where you can hear them in all their glory, as they were meant to be heard. (Warning: contains naughty words!)

A third story will be following shortly

Wizard-Knights update

2008-09-07T10:20:00.003+01:00

This morning, I finished the first complete draft of Lords of the West 3: Wizard-Knights. As I write this, the draft has been submitted in full to Moon Design for editing. Obviously, this book will not be available for a long while yet, but it is out of my hands now!

Like the other books in the series, this will be 100,000 words, which is the same length as Blood Over Gold. It covers the Kingdom of Loskalm, describing its society, government, religion, and magic in unprecedented detail. It includes a large gazetteer of the Kingdom, and a chapter describing the fractured realm of Junora that lies immediately east of Loskalm. The sketch maps I used to create the gazetteer will be available on my website, and the Issaries website, as soon as enough details have been confirmed to render that a worthwhile exercise.

I have also submitted revised drafts of Heroes of Malkion and Kingdom of the Flamesword, complying with the new rules in HeroQuest 2. The last I heard, HoM is still the next book scheduled for publication by Moon Design, although, presumably, they will have to re-do the layout to fit the new text.

Magic in the West

2008-08-30T10:16:00.004+01:00

You may recall that, at Tentacles and Continuum, I (among others) said that Heroes of Malkion would work just fine with HQ2. You may also recall that, in this blog, I was unclear as to how that would be the case. Well, it turns out that it isn't the case; the rule sets are not really compatible at that level. (This, incidentally, doesn't mean that, for example, Blood Over Gold or Thunder Rebels can't be used with HQ2 - just that you'll also need a copy of HQ1 to make full sense of the rulesy bits).

But, fear not! I've spent the last weekend going through the draft of HoM, making sure that, when you get to see it, it is fully compatible with the new rules. There was quite a lot more to be done than at first appeared to be the case. This is because the HQ2 rulebook has very little information on Glorantha and its workings - understandably, because it's a generic rulebook, not a worldbook. There are a lot of things about the West, and Glorantha in general, that were in HQ1, but won't be in the second edition. All of that information had to be repeated, for the book to be stand-alone with the new ruleset.

However, all of that is now done, and what I suspect many people will be interested in is how Western magic works with the new rune-centred approach of the second edition. Here's the quick run-down:

Knight, noble, and to a lesser extent, commoner heroes, typically gain their magic by following a saint. This gives them access to one rune and one grimoire (spell book) associated with that rune. For example, a follower of Saint Xemela has the Harmony rune, and a book containing healing spells.
Members of the clergy practice their magic through holding religious services. This gives them access to one rune, and a set of community-based spells contained in one or more holy scriptures with that same rune. For example, a Rokari vicar has the Law rune, and uses the communal blessings and curses found in the scriptures of his Church. Bishops, incidentally, can further boost their magic by accessing the total devotional energy of their diocese.
Professional wizards use exactly the same magical rules as followers of saints, but they have up to three runes, and at least one grimoire for each rune.
It is generally possible to follow more than one saint, or be both a clergyman and follow a saint; but you cannot have more than three runes in total.
The majority of non-heroic people gain magical benefits from the blessings of the clergy, and use individual spells learned from folk wisdom, or the like. They usually don't have specific runes.

Note that 'adept' and 'mage' are now magical levels, not professions. Whether you're following a saint, a scripture, or a school of wizardry, you're still an adept - and, with study, you can become a mage. Your Church might not want to let you do this, of course, but the option is there. Basically, the same rules apply to everyone, and those of you confused by the first edition wizardry rules will hopefully find these easier to follow.

In short, quite a lot of work for me, in updating it all, but the end result should be simpler magic rules that are easier to use.

Silos

2008-08-22T20:36:00.004+01:00

At work, we all received a letter this week informing us that our department was "often seen as a silo composed of smaller silos".

Now, a 'silo' is, according to the Concise OED, a tall tower or pit used to contain grain or silage, or, alternatively, an underground chamber with guided missiles in it. Personally, I rather like the idea of being thought of as a missile bunker... perhaps we get to bomb the clinicians when they fail to fill in their paperwork properly? However, our immediate thought was that were being called a pile of silage.

There was, as you might imagine, some discussion on the letter at work, in particular about what the heck it actually meant. That we're some sort of storeroom? If so, what of? Nothing springs to mind, even trying to think metaphorically. And it seems unlikely to be a snide remark about the building's architecture. This is obviously an example of incomprehensible suit-speak, completely failing to get its point across, as usual.

I eventually felt compelled to look it up, everyone I know having drawn a blank in translating the letter into English. And it turns out that the concept is, in fact, perfectly easy to get across
in plain English: it means we don't communicate much with other departments. (In what sense this is actually true, I have no idea, but that's another matter). So why the heck say 'silo'? Suits are always doing this sort of thing: inventing jargon where plain English will do just as well. We had a letter a couple of years ago announcing a "blue sky symposium" - which, so far as I can tell means that some suits will sit down in a room together and suggest things to each other. Surely this is not a difficult concept to get across? Why obscure your meaning with strange words that nobody else understands?

I can only imagine its some sort of collective inferiority complex. In science, we use plenty of jargon that nobody else understands, and lawyers (for example) do much the same. But this is because there is no really good way of saying "adenocarcinoma" without using quite a lot more words. Or because it really matters what the difference is between the specificity and the sensitivity of a given medical test. Sure, sometimes we go overboard, and I'm sure lawyers do the same. But in general, there is a purpose to it. In suit-speak, its frequently the case that the concept could be described in plain English without any lengthy explanation.

Suits must look at science, law, and other such academic fields, and think "ooh, we need to sound as clever as them". If you "suggest things to other people", that sounds a lot less impressive and intellectual than "conducting a blue sky symposium". I'm sure that high level management is a pretty difficult thing to do well, and they are not, in fact, all trained chimpanzees, even if some of them happen to look like it, but it's as if they don't think anyone will realise this if they can be understood. So they make up pointless terms that sound clever, trying to elevate themselves to the status of a high priesthood that they perceive more academic professions as already having attained.

And, if you're going to speak gobbledygook that nobody else understands, when perfectly good English would suffice - don't put it in a letter that you circulate for general consumption. At the best, nobody will understand you, and at the worst, you'll look like a tit. Even a silo isn't much use if nobody can use the grain you feed into it...

Continuum Podcast

2008-08-09T23:17:00.003+01:00

A podcast from Continuum is now available online here. I'm on for around five minutes out of 90, and there's probably not much new here, either. But the podcast is generally worth listening to, as an update of what the HeroQuest writers are up to as a group. Kudos to Darran Simms for producing this.

The Post-Continuum Post

2008-08-04T17:33:00.005+01:00

Over the last three days I attended the glorious collection of gaming fun that was Continuum 2008. I didn't seem to have as much planned for this year as usual, but I still managed to enjoy myself, and get quite a few things done. And quite large quantities of cider[1] were consumed, including some Weston's Old Rosie, which was certainly a pleasant change from the usual draught stuff. Aside from Glorantha and related matters, topics ranged through Doctor Who, prog rock, some stuff about computers that I really didn't understand, and cricket. Some of which, at least, just goes to prove that we're thoroughly British! And even just socialising, there is definitely something to be said for a place where someone can not only use the word 'chalcolithic' in casual conversation, but where everybody present knows exactly what it means...

I spent much of the first 24 hours answering the question "when is Heroes of Malkion coming out?" which at least confirms that there is definitely interest in this! On the Saturday morning, I took part in a panel on the future of Glorantha, in which all the books currently planned for the setting were discussed. My own segment was relatively short, and added nothing that is new to readers of this blog, but you will be able to hear a recording of it all online soon, courtesy of Darran Simms. I'll post a more specific link once it's available.

The biggest announcement in that respect was the new magic system. For those of you who don't know, HeroQuest v2 (or whatever the final title will be) will be a generic rulebook, with only a few pages of Gloranthan material in the back. So, although there will be a brief summary of magic included in that, the full system will debut in Cults of Sartar. It's a simpler system than the old one, although largely compatible. Obviously, CoS will focus on theism (pfft! damn pagans!), as practised by the Heortlings. Which means that I don't know exactly how it will affect the wizardry that is the focus of my books. Because HoM, in particular, is already well past the 'final draft' stage, it will use the existing magic rules. I'm assured that this will not have any effect, and that the old and new versions are fully compatible, so far as the cult write-ups are concerned, although I have to confess to not being entirely sure how this is so.

It does, however, turn out that the maps and annotations for LotW3 that I've been working on for the last two months will have to be redone, possibly from scratch. Nuts.

Sunday morning, and I just managed to get to "Murder at the Greydog Inn" without falling asleep. A freeform at 9:30 in the morning? Hmm. I was playing a dodgy Sun Domer trying to smuggle drugs into the Lunar Empire. Unfortunately, my contact was rumbled early on by the Lunar officials, so, while I did try to warn him, we were under too much observation to get much done in that regard. Doubly unfortunately, he turned out to be the murderer, and gave me up to the Lunars after an Ernaldan (of all people) threatened to use a red-hot poker on him if he didn't. Which I guess would convince me, too.

Because the game wrapped at that point, I'm unclear whether I died in glorious battle against my cross-dressing commanding officer, or whether I got arrested and sentenced to one of those Retirement Towers that they have in Sun County. A word of advice to the organisers, though, if they're reading this: for at least half an hour out of the three hour game, non-clan members have nothing to do, except sit about in a corridor twiddling their thumbs while everyone else goes off to resolve the plot in a closed room. Although the rest of the game is great fun, you might want to fix that if you run it again.

Later on, I took part in a tabletop game run by Ian Cooper, although, sadly, exhaustion was catching up on me towards the end. We used the new system for resolving extended contests, which I'd previously tried out at Tentacles, and is, to my mind at least, a great improvement over that in earlier editions. Once again, I played a Healer, which meant a lot of use of the new "Assist" rules, especially since this game was fairly combat-heavy (or at least was before I became to exhausted to continue... I imagine that Ian had rather more planned).

And then, in the evening, came the Storytelling, which got a good audience, having been relatively sparse in recent years. I couldn't match Malk Williams' ballads for quality and sheer inherent coolness (what a pity that this wasn't recorded, like the seminars... although, as a non-expert, I'm unsure whether the sound quality of podcasting equipment would be sufficient to really bring the effect across or not). Anyway, I had the unenviable task of following Malk's first ballad, and performed my new Vadrus story. It needs a little more work, I think, but it went down well, and I'll post it to Mything Links when I have the time. Technology permitting, I may also figure out a way of recording it and posting the sound file, since, as with all Vadrus stories, it's far better to hear performed out loud than simply to read as a text file.

With a little time left over, I received a request to reprise "Enkoshons the Dragon", which I have performed at a number of cons over the years, ever since I first did so (to a shocked audience!) at Scotscon in 2003. Even those who had heard it before seemed to appreciate it, and I had some very positive comments from those who hadn't. The Storytelling concluded with a new (to me, anyway) Griselda story by Oliver Dickinson, who inspired so many of us to get involved in Glorantha in the first place.

Following that, and the obligatory Closing Ceremony, there was much more cider, plus an impromptu barbecue laid on by Charlie Krank. During that, I got into a conversation on my coming books with Michael Cule. He had a few valid concerns that, I fear, the books won't address, so I'll try and do so in coming blogs here. Even so, it was an interesting and worthwhile discussion. Or so it seemed at two in the morning, when you're full of cider and roast pork...

All in all, many kudos to the organisers, and I'll definitely be back in 2010, for what will be the 18th anniversary of the convention (counting Convulsion, but not the earlier event in Cambridge). If anyone is reading this who hasn't been, and who enjoys roleplaying, I'd recommend that you do the same.

[1] If you're American, and are thinking, "oh goody, Tibble's is a fine teetotal chap that only drinks cloudy apple juice," then... yes, of course I am. (Nods unconvincingly). :)

Voip Gaming

2008-07-27T22:02:00.002+01:00

I ran a HeroQuest game over VOIP tonight. We had originally planned this to be the opening session of a Men of the Sea campaign, but most of the players had to pull out at the last minute. I managed to dig up a copy of the scenario originally included in an early draft of the Men of the Sea book, but I only had an hour to look it over before the start of the game. As a result, I was left floundering in places, trying to remember what was supposed to be happening. It didn't help that, while the original scenario has the characters heading to Corflu, I needed to get them to Noloswal, where we'd agreed to start the campaign proper. This meant I had to make adaptations, largely on the fly.

I'm not sure how well it all worked out, although as a prelude to more involved adventures, it was probably fair enough. It left them with mysteries to solve (not least because the original scenario doesn't explain them, either), which I will now try and work into the ongoing campaign. There were only two players, one a relatively inexperienced roleplayer, which also made things a bit strange. Nonetheless, while not a lot actually happened (in the usual HeroQuest community rivalry way, or combat, for that matter), everyone seemed to have fun enough. We'll just have to see how it all turns out in the future...

Women in the West

2008-07-26T21:57:00.002+01:00

One of the biggest problems I faced while writing Kingdom of the Flamesword is that we know, from previously published material that the Rokari are a pretty patriarchal lot. The default assumption in role-playing games these days is that your character's gender really doesn't matter. What matters is that you're a paladin, or a wizard, or whatever it may be, and nobody will react in the slightest if you happen to be a female paladin or wizard.

Many cultures in Glorantha follow this principle - it's particularly true of the Heortlings, for example, who perhaps are the best described of all the cultures of the world in the existing publications. But it's not true of the Rokari. Now, granted, the Rokari rationale for this is that women 'are more perfect' than men, so they shouldn't be risked in combat... but that doesn't help much in an RPG, even if we accept it at face value.

There is a section in the book about role playing women in Seshnela, and outlining some of the options open to them - there's even a way for them to lay about themselves with swords, contrary to Rokari norms. One of the tools I used to get across Rokari culture is to have three people talking about what's important to them (if you've read by "Voices of Loskalm" piece in one of the Continuum fund-raisers, you'll know the sort of thing); one of the three is a woman, who at least gets to be quite snide about the men in her life. And, if you're happy to play a power-behind-the-throne sort of character, there should be no problem.

But, let's be honest, women in Seshnela don't get the same sort of equality that they do in Heortling lands. Of the NPCs described in the book, the great majority are male. The only exceptions are two members of the royal family, two healers, and one that's a little harder to describe. Now, all of these characters have potential scenarios around them, and two of them are powerful magicians. But, at the end of the day, Seshnela is a male-dominated land, and that's going to come across in the book.

Given the setting, there isn't a lot I can do about that, although I've tried to alleviate it here and there. I've set things up so that you can play a female character doing anything that a man could do - but not so that they can do so without people remarking on it, or devout Rokari looking askance at her if she oversteps the bounds of "propriety". If that worries you, you might want to use the book as a source of enemies to fight... or you might want to wait for the later books in the Lords of the West series.

Loskalm, for instance, is sexually egalitarian. They have female wizards, female knights, female wizard-knights, women at the highest echelons of government, and so on. In Loskalm, women can be whatever they want to be - which is all part of its utopian nature, of course. Further down the road, my view of Jonatela is that women are more or less in the same situation as men. Which is to say, female peasants are just as thoroughly stuffed as their menfolk, while Nemuzhik women get to be just as obnoxious as their brothers. Which makes sense, given that the Jonatings were Orlanthi not so long ago.

Personally, I like this variety. Glorantha is a big world, and it doesn't all follow exactly the same tropes. If you want to explore the pitfalls of patriarchy, the opportunity is there and, more importantly, so is the opportunity to go somewhere else and not worry about it. There are even parts of the world where being male is a disadvantage, after all...

Made in Sartar from Gyrdas

2008-07-19T22:19:00.003+01:00

(Appalling pun stolen shamelessly from Stu Stansfield).

As I write, there is currently a debate on the World of Glorantha mailing list about, essentially, whether anybody else can understand a word we're on about. Or more precisely, how difficult to understand are books about Glorantha, and, if the answer is 'very', should we care anyway? The debate began when someone questioned whether the word 'gyrda' (meaning, if you ask the people I've been writing about recently: "some pagan bint that claims to talk to false gods") should be used as is, or replaced with something more easily understood[1].

Myself, I'm inclined to use the simpler term, if I can get away with it. The late Ken Bulmer (who I had the privilege of gaming with for a number of years) used to say, of made-up names in science fiction, "if you can use the real world word instead, do so." I think this is pretty good advice. It doesn't take away from the richness of the world, but it does make it easier for other people to understand.

Of course, there's more to the approachability of a book than the author's choice of words. Not to mention that are many words in any fantasy world that won't have an even approximate equivalent in English - "Rokarism" and "broo", for example. And then there's a whole bunch of proper nouns. So, making allowances for all of that, I wonder how comprehensible my books are, and if they are readily comprehensible, whether that means they're too dumbed-down to get across the richness of the setting.

Some have singled out Thunder Rebels as a book that's too complicated for newcomers to understand. I can't say that I felt that myself, and I think it's a great book, but then I'm not a newcomer. At any rate, whether it is or not, I would have guessed that LotW1: Heroes of Malkion is about on the same level. Which means that if you didn't like the former, because of its level of detail, you aren't going to like my next book, either. So fair warning to you on that front.

This is partly because LotW1 covers a lot of ground. It's not that I didn't try to make it readable (obviously), but the subject requires a lot of detail, and, even then, it's going to be obvious that there's a lot more detail out there beyond that. Which is why there are other books in the Lords of the West series at all, of course.

However, LotW2: Kingdom of the Flamesword is written much more for the beginner. Now, it's not totally self-contained, because there are certain details, especially of the rules, that you'll need LotW1 for. But, as a description of the culture, I think it's fairly comprehensible. It may help that the West is easier to understand than the Heortlings, because it's closer to our own society, and the generally weirder culture of Loskalm may make LotW3: Wizard-Knights a more difficult proposition.

But then, again, there is a lot of detail in it. And there's not much in the way of ready-to-play scenarios, which may not help. It's a culture book... but I'm not sure it's any more complicated than, say, this (which, for all I know, sunk like a stone - but was at least published by a company with a pretty good track record for selling RPG books that people want to buy).

So I don't know, really; I tried to make the book easily accessible, but I'm not myself in a position to know whether I've succeeded. Or if, in so doing, I've wiped out the depth that makes Glorantha as interesting as it is. But I do generally think that the balance of detail and usability of recent HQ books has been about right, and I'd point to Blood Over Gold as a case in point. The Stafford Library series is a different case, but it doesn't pretend to be an easily usable gaming resource in the way that the other books are. To be honest, if I can be on a par with Blood Over Gold, I'll be pretty happy. If you were looking for something more like the old Apple Lane book, with its keyed locations and scenarios, you're probably going to be disappointed with most of what I write, anyway.

[1] Such as, say, "some pagan bint that claims to talk to false gods". Or you could use "wise woman" or "god-talker", I suppose.

Wizard-Knights Saints list

2008-07-12T20:19:00.005+01:00

A full list of contents will appear at the glorantha.com website in due course, but as an illustration of what I have been working on, here is the list of new cults described in the book so far:

Saint Erivies - patron of servants
Saint Gerid - patron of farmworkers
Saint Menena - patron of housewives
Saint Neuteboom - patron of generosity
Saint Raigarn - patron of artisans
Saint Sestercian - patron of merchants
Saint Bertorl - patron of missionaries (brief write-up previously included in Masters of Luck and Death)
Saint Carpattia - patron of guards and protection
Saint Merwyn - patron of those who work with animals
Saint Shalara - patron of peace
Saint Taralda - patron of justice
The Artificers' School - wizards of sacred architecture
The Order of the Companions - common magic
The Holy Office for the Protection of the Faith

In addition to these, the book will provide more information on the following Loskalmi saints already included in Heroes of Malkion, and in the current core rulebook (many of which are more directly adventure oriented than those above - it made sense to do them first):

Siglat, Elleish, Falerine, Hasterax, Herigian, Jenerin, Josselyne, Kipperly, Kyria, Lenderyn, Ongaring, Palenna, Talor, Xemela, Zemuron

Finally, although I haven't written these sections yet, Saint Tomaris the Apostle will also be included, along with at least two other non-Idealist cults relevant to the region.

Dying Computers

2008-07-11T19:04:00.003+01:00

I had some good news today: my computer at work is very nearly dead. Now, you might not think that this is particularly good news, but I use it a lot, and it's complete rubbish. A fairly critical piece of software on it started to crash on Tuesday, so I put in an IT call. With typical speed and alacrity, they got back to me today. The phone conversation went something like this:

IT Man: Can you try to use the software so I can see what happens?
Me: Sure (pause) Actually, no... it won't let me log on.
IT Man: Have you restarted it recently?
Me: Yes, but that's not something I like to do very often.
IT Man: Well, can you do it now?
Me: Sure. But you're going to regret asking that.
(Four minutes later)
IT Man: Err... what's happening?
Me: It's still restarting. This is normal: last time I timed it, it took about twelve minutes to boot up after switching on. It's got much slower than that since you installed that new monitoring software in my system tray. I told you you'd regret asking me to restart it - you've got about another ten minutes to wait yet.
(IT Man disappears, presumably to check on the specs he has down for my PC)
IT Man: This is rather old, isn't it?
Me: Yes - believe me, I've asked for a new one several times, but I was told there was no money.
IT Man: Y'know, we really don't like to work with computers that old.
Me: I don't blame you.
IT Man: Rather than fix your software problem, we'll just give you a new computer. It'll be easier for us.

So, yay, the old piece of junk finally gets the heave-ho. It shows you that the best way to get old rubbish replaced is to force a manager or someone else with decision-making power to actually use the thing themselves - they'll never replace it so long as you're the only one suffering.

Myths for Malkioni

2008-07-04T19:22:00.003+01:00

One of the many things I discussed over a beer at Tentacles this year was ILH-2: Under the Red Moon. If you're a Glorantha fan, there's a lot of useful information in this book about the workings of the Lunar religion and so on. Like my upcoming book, Heroes of Malkion, a fair chunk of the book consists of descriptions of the local cults. Now, on the whole, I was pleased with this as a set of cults, providing, as it does, a whole bunch of character options, and giving us an idea of who the Lunar gods are. The rules implementation seems a bit overly complicated to me, what with trying to merge theism, animism, and wizardry into one seemingly randomly assorted whole, but what cropped up in our discussion were the stories behind the various Immortals.

How could we make such stories interesting and entertaining? We have a good idea of many of the theist myths, and where to take their inspiration from, but the stories of most of the Lunar Immortals are rather different, since most of them used to be living people in historical time, not Gods from Before the Dawn. And, of course, the same question arises with the Malkioni saints. Where to get ideas from, without falling into the trap of endlessly repeating "Saint X was a carpenter/librarian/crocodile-wrangler who was very holy; now he is the Patron Saint of carpenters/librarians/crocodile-wranglers?"

Malkioni hagiography is rather different from the tales of Heortling deities and the like. And where better to get inspiration from it than real-world hagiography? The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches have many, many saints, and they provide plenty of good ideas for how the Malkioni saints might work. The Patron Saints Index is a very useful online source, here, and one that I have often perused. There is a rich seam of mythology to be mined from Christian and other monotheist stories, and, on the whole, they have not been used much in Glorantha.

That is not to say, of course, that you should lift the story whole from Catholic canon to Malkionism - the religions are very different, and we are trying to create fiction here, not to rip off a real-world source. But the themes can be very helpful, and we can put them into a Gloranthan context. This, hopefully, is what takes a saint cult from "hey, we need a saint for heralds" to something more interesting that feels a living part of Glorantha. It also allows us to show differences between different sects by having different types of story for saints with outwardly similar roles. For example, I made Saint Falerine, the patron saint of noblewomen in Hrestoli lands, very different from Saint Deelia, her Rokari counterpart. Falerine is more pro-active, with romantic elements in her story that fit the Hrestoli mindset, while Deelia is content to do as she's told, attaining sainthood through purity and duty.

It's also the case that quite a lot of Catholic saints, especially the early ones, died quite horribly. This too, is to me an interesting source of stories, with brave Malkioni worshippers fighting against the wicked Brithini, or whatever other enemies present themselves. There is a problem here, unfortunately, in that canonical Glorantha requires that Saints must have been powerful heroes in life (to forge the link with the hero plane), even if their eventual fate is martyrdom. So, none of those truly inspiring stories where someone becomes a saint precisely because they were willing to be martyred despite not being uber-powerful. But such is the framework that we have to work with when writing in what is, ultimately, somebody else's creation, and there's still plenty of room for some great stories of other types. Especially if, like Saint Deelia, the hero path that you took didn't involve the traditional smiting-of-thine-enemies.

Another point to remember is that they are saints; they have to be virtuous from somebody's point of view. (This is less of a problem for the Sorcerous Founders, of course). Just as Orlanth and Yelmalio and all the rest show the virtues of the pagan cultures, the Malkioni saints should do the same. Now, there's no reason why you can't have, say, a Patron Saint of Thieves. Christians do - he's called Saint Dismas, and even if you don't recognise the name, you'll recognise his story. (There's good old Saint Nicholas, too, but he's more of a Patron Saint Against Thieves). Indeed, Saint Osni the Penitent, in Kingdom of the Flamesword, is a patron saint of criminals in just this sense.

Hopefully, the saints described in Heroes of Malkion, and the further ones in the later books, provide a range of stories, from inspirational heroism, to romance, to miraculous deeds that showed new ways of living. My hope is that, after reading Heroes of Malkion, you'll not only remember that Saint Avlor is Patron Saint of Lost Causes, but remember why. Whether I'll succeed... well, I guess we'll find out later this year...

And now... a picture of a door

2008-06-27T21:09:00.003+01:00

Off to Greenwich University today, to give a talk espousing the wonders of my profession to potential Biomedical Science students. Things could possibly have been arranged better on the part of the University. For instance, it might have been an improvement if we hadn't got to the lecture room and found a workman saying "you can't come in here, they hired me to take the floor up today". It might also have been helpful if there had actually been some Biomedical Science students in the group of 70+ that they' shipped over from London to hear me speak. They were, in fact, nurses, and this came as a surprise to the full-time lecturers, too.

So... damn, I suddenly have to make a talk about Biomedical Science sound at least vaguely interesting to people who have no particular interest in it, and aren't going to take up a job in it no matter what I say. Fortunately, I had photos with me, including my secret weapon: a picture of a door.

I've done talks at University before where I've gone through what we do, bit by bit, and while they do seem to be moderately interesting (given that I'm usually talking to a bunch of students who have already signed up to do this for a living), I had, fortunately enough, decided to spruce up this version by walking around the laboratory, taking photos. Which meant instead of just saying "Biochemists work with big, shiny, machines," I could actually show just how big and shiny their machines are. So I go through the pictures, showing off expensive thingy after expensive thingy, and then there's a picture of a door. A door covered in warning signs, to be precise, but still, basically a wooden door. (Suitably crestfallen look): "They wouldn't let me in there, this is the only picture I could take..."

Which isn't literally true - I hadn't actually asked, and they might well have said yes if I had - but it got a laugh, and gave me an in to explain why what was behind the door was so dangerous. And, somewhat to my surprise, a student did actually come up to me afterwards and say she really enjoyed the talk. So it all went well, which is pretty cool, really.

Zemuron, Hasterax, and All That Jazz

2008-06-25T17:54:00.005+01:00

A significant part of Heroes of Malkion is taken up with the various cults of the West. Each of the 'big three' Malkioni cultures - Seshnela, Loskalm, and Jonatela - has five specific cults described, and many smaller ones have two or three cults. In addition, there is quite an array of cults that are widespread throughout the Western cultures. You can find the full list at the Issaries website, if you're interested.

You'll note that many are new to print (although, in fact, several of the saints originally came from the fertile mind of Sandy Petersen). So, how did I go about designing all these new cults, and making sure that they fit in the Gloranthan mythos? The first step was to find a niche that needed filling, especially if it was one useful in-game. Some niches may be useful as background material, but can be left out of a book with limited word count - for instance, Saint Jandaris, patron saint of glassworkers, gets a mention in LotW3, but he doesn't have a full write-up. (Perhaps he will, some day, if somebody really needs such a thing, but he wasn't a high priority for me). We need saints and schools to cover entertainers, merchants, scholars, and a number of other special professions, such as heralds. There has to be a good variety of warrior saints, because warriors are a popular character type, and similarly for wizardry/sorcery schools, where there are all sorts of concepts one can play about with.

And, personally, I like healers, so there are quite a number of healer cults in the book, too. Not as many as warriors, maybe, but putting people back together can be as varied an art as taking them apart in the first place, so there's a good range; Saint Falerine is fairly light and fluffy, while, at the opposite extreme, Saint Anazieta is positively scary.

The classic example of me mucking about with character roles is, as many of you probably already know, a certain pair of warrior saints. Chaos isn't quite as big a bogey-man for the Malkioni as it is for, say, the Praxians, but it's certainly well up there as a major foe, being opposed to Law and all. So we need a cult of specialist Chaos-fighters. But the last thing we want is a clone of Storm Bull, so... well, what is Chaos, really, from the Malkioni perspective? Chaos is about the breakdown of society, failure to respect the law, of allowing your baser nature to control your rational mind, replacing Logic with the obsessions of the Id. It therefore follows (said Saint Zemuron) that any move in that direction is a move towards Chaos. The result? A cult of wine-sipping, quiche-eating, frightfully polite chaps who do their best to maintain decorum. And happen to be deadly with a sword and lance, and will hack the tentacles off a charnjibber as soon as look at it.

Of course, as soon as I'd written them up, that rather left the niche filled by Storm Bull/Urox among the barbarians empty. Sometimes you just want to go nuts as a player, and not have to worry about maintaining your composure and writing clever poetry about it afterwards. If you're the sort of player who thinks that all this chivalry stuff is a bit nancy, and just wants to lay about you with an axe... for you, we have the cult of Saint Hasterax. And most of Jonatela, to be fair, but Hasterax is more widespread. Hasteraxi are single-minded nutters, and sometimes that's just what you want in a game.

OK, so now you know that you need a saint for Love, Romance, & Fluffy Bunnies, or whatever it may be. Now what do you do? I'll return to that later...

Gaming in a Utopia

2008-06-21T16:17:00.003+01:00

I recall a couple of online discussions with Peter Metcalfe, co-author of Introduction to the Hero Wars, about Loskalm. In one, he suggested Nazi Germany as one of the models for Loskalm - at least, as the Nazis saw themselves, creating a brave new age of blond blue-eyed heroes, rather than a bunch of rabid thugs. In another, he suggested that Loskalm maintains itself, at least in part, through conducting blasphemous rituals of indescribable horror out of the view of its citizens. Given my last post, it probably won't come as a great shock to learn that neither of these options fit with my own view of the country.

I mention this, not to criticize Peter (since there's no doubt that these two options could provide interesting gaming situations and conflicts), but to illustrate the point that, if some of us have difficulty seeing monotheist churches as genuinely virtuous, it's perhaps even harder to accept the existence of a Utopia that actually works. There has to be something wrong, surely? And, if there isn't, what exactly are we supposed to do with the setting? Sitting around sipping imported Kralori tea and discussing how happy everyone is doesn't, as a rule, make for a very exciting game.

There's a long tradition of this, of course. This very word 'Utopia', coined by Sir Thomas More way back in the 16th century, means, roughly, 'No Such Place'. In many science fiction stories, an apparently idyllic and perfect society turns out to have something rotten at its core. Indeed, the biggest problem any Utopia would have is that it still has to be inhabited by human beings, who tend to be fallible.

But I'd suggest that the main driving force in Loskalmi games is likely to be the clash between their high ideals and the reality of the outside world. The Kingdom of War is the ultimate embodiment of that, of course, but other groups, such as the Jonatings, also provide for a similar (if less extreme) contrast. I'll say more about this, and how to game in Loskalm, in the book, since it's an important question. For the moment, I'll address the question as to what exactly I see the limitations on Loskalm's perfections as being.

By the standards of the West, Loskalm is a very enlightened society. They believe in equality of opportunity for all men, and have a very liberal attitude towards women's rights. Loskalm has female knights, and that's not just the Kyrians (the knights-healer who will debut in Heroes of Malkion). Similarly, there are female wizards, and some high-ranking nobles. Indeed, in the current draft of LotW3, one of the principle candidates for the throne, should Gundreken suddenly die, is a woman - although not, admittedly, the leading contender.

But equality of opportunity does not, in my view, mean that the great majority of knights have parents in the commoner class, nor that half the knights are women. As Greg has said "biology always wins", and the same thing goes for human psychology. The children of knights are likely to aspire to follow their parents, while the children of prosperous and happy farmers and artisans (and most of them are happy and prosperous in Loskalm) have less reason to want to risk their lives by taking the path of knighthood. Many of them will follow the ideals of their country, and aspire to the higher ranks, and many of them will succeed, but most simply won't bother. Nick Brooke has some good points on this topic on his website, so I won't repeat them here.

And there are some downsides to the Loskalmi obsession with justice and chivalry. For one, they can be terribly self-righteous, lecturing those who don't match up to their own high ideals. In D&D terms, its like a whole country full of paladins! For another, they have a strong belief in conformity. An example of this is the existence of recusancy laws, something that is very far from our modern idea of what a Utopia should be. Freedom of religion is something enshrined in the US constitution and the European Bill of Rights, but its something quite alien to the Loskalmi. After all, why wouldn't you want to attend Church every week? Those of you who have read my Voices of Loskalm piece from a few years back will recall that one of them is from the perspective of a non-comformist, whose experience is rather different from that of her fellow citizens.

Of course, the Loskalmi don't beat you up or do anything similarly gauche when they find that you don't meet their standards. They're terribly polite about it all, and the worst you can generally expect is for your community to ostracise you. But, in Glorantha, ostracism is a pretty nasty fate, and a self-imposed exile to some community that will accept you is generally a much better option.

In general though, it's important to note that Loskalm generally is a very peaceful and pleasant society. So long as you do turn up to church once a week, it's probably just about the best place to live on Glorantha. There are public libraries, opportunities for social advancement regardless of your status or gender, a very low crime rate, enlightened and just rulers, and a healthy economy. Earlier publications about Loskalm have tended to make it sound a little more militaristic than I think it should do, so, while the military is still the standard method for social advancement, I have created other options to add to that in LotW3.

All of which hopefully makes it worth the heroes protecting when they venture off to face the dangers that threaten its continued existence.

Heroes of Malkion Update
I received notification from Simon Bray yesterday that directions should be sent to the artists some time this week. So things are definitely moving on that front!