Firepower of that magnitude: FFG, GW and licensing

Fantasy Flight's X-Wing has been causing a great disturbance in the FLGS, being unusually accessible with its well-known setting, light rules and prepainted miniatures. And soon there'll be Star Wars: Armada, for battles with capital ships.

Old school tactical roleplaying - a simple core ruleset

It may be the best time since the mid-1980s to start playing in the expansive style of the early tactical RPGs, and a new golden age for production and play.

That said, there are still barriers to entry. The range of rulesets, supplements and ideas emerging from the OSR and beyond can be overwhelming, and references to past work and debates on fine points can be confusing and may be discouraging potential players.

This post is an attempt to offer a simple starting point. Purists may dislike it, but it may help the interested potential player grasp the whole and grow the hobby. It's not a full system, more a distillation of themes and a generalisation for the early leaps. I'm using a similar approach with a drop-in campaign at a local game store and it's helping no end.

All we really need to know to get playing is how to create characters, how to explore, how to perform actions and how to resolve encounters, so that's what this will cover.

Seeing Tolkien's Long Defeat

If the six books of The Lord of the Rings gave three films, and the one of The Hobbit will give three too, what next? If Jackson et al. follow Lucas/Disney to push for a third trilogy, there's no lack of sources.

Most obviously "The Scouring of the Shire" was left out last time. By this rule of increasing bloat, could this one chapter be stretched over three more? It's not hard to imagine a spin-off mini-series, just one with less emphasis on the 'mini'. How about those Adventures of Tom Bombadil? He was also left out.

But why? What justifies such major removals? Is it as simple as overlong running time? After all, Jackson's LotR was three long films and special editions. Pacing is a better argument, but Tolkien left them in. And rightly so I think. To my mind the Scouring and Tom Bombadil are more or less the heart of it all.

Bombadil especially. Have a read of this overview if you haven't seen the arguments.

If so, maybe that's why both were cut, as supposedly unfit for a 21st-century audience.

What could that mean? There's plenty at this post from earlier today, on zombies too.

Tolkien once wrote: "I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'", and we have Galadriel verbalise the thinking in the fiction, or rather in the generally recognised fiction: "together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat." Really?

Why all the gloom? My reading of Bombadil suggests Tolkien did see, maybe even see, past. As he wrote of Bombadil: "he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely." As his Goldberry says: "He is."

Look at the feel for landscape Tolkien has, in fine distinctions. He sees the wood for the trees, and surely saw the cycles, the flow of atoms. It may be that if we spend too much time worldbuilding, a demiurge of sorts, we see a little further than the paradigm, even if we have to use the language of that paradigm to communicate this and to understand it.

If Spinoza was a bee, what is Tolkien? And what are we? Who's your Bombadil? We get to choose, and happily Jackson has given us space to do that so far, although if he has Stephen Colbert playing him (we don't know yet), it may go from one extreme to another.

So which Bombadil are you making, know it or not, as Tolkien's long defeat rumbles on?

_

Tom Bombadil and the octopus

The discussion at the post on Conan, books and movies is still going and thanks to Von and Jedediah got me thinking about two linked things. One is the octopus from The Goonies, one Tom Bombadil.

The octopus of course makes for one of the finest jokes in the movie. There was a scene filmed with the kids fighting it off, but it didn't make the final cut, quite rightly I think. But a later reference is left in, and this makes for a sharp comment on the nature of at least one character, maybe these particular individuals, possibly young people in general, or even all of us. The cut here says a lot about that world.

Tom Bombadil of course is famously cut from the trilogy of the early 2000s, and more besides. The feeling seems to be that he adds little to the narrative, that the reasonable, efficient thing is leave him out. That to me shows a poor feel for the nature of the story, specifically an aspect seen well in the return to the Shire. Tolkien put him there, and as an element possibly more essential than nearly any other. It's tragic given omission like that seems to be a core theme of the work.

Then again, as the discussion suggests, there are many readings.

_

Triffles (12) - A wrong turn

The delay since the last Triffle can be worked in here: what if a tail didn't arrive on time, or one party to the exchange failed to appear? It could be as simple as a wrong turn.

     panic, leading to haste            an inhospitable landscape /
       and basic oversights            dangerous fauna and/or flora

\             /

a wrong turn

              \

                                                  a shocking discovery

The essential point to note is that fear can stimulate a flight response even in cases of individuals becoming lost. Basic survival errors might also then be made, and I've read a claim that people sometimes even fail to check their own rucksack for supplies.

In wargaming the possibility that part of a force becomes separated in this way could be represented by a reduction in the stats of a unit or individual, marking disorientation, fatigue, hunger and thirst, and also by a delayed and random entry. For a simpler option each side could lose one randomly determined element at the start of the game.

In roleplaying the key issue could be the possible divergence of player and character response. While players themselves might stay calm and collected, the DM/GM could force tests for the characters to keep their heads, even before the most basic of actions.

Re the idea of a surprise discovery, in terrainmaking each set of themed pieces could include one element which is unexpected or out of place, completely alien even.

Writing could make use of the wrong turn concept with little or no adaptation at all, and it's clearly an excellent plot driver. Perhaps the best-known case of this is Bilbo's time alone under the Misty Mountains, in The Hobbit of course. This is a book full of inspiration, as Risus Monkey is demonstrating with his re-read; the last chapter completed also prefigures this triffle, and maybe through derivative works led to it?

Having a choice of paths, taking a wrong turn and becoming lost are metaphors which would seem easily used in music. There is a Florence and the Machine video which uses a similar idea, "Dog Days Are Over", and the lyrics, and arguably the music too, play up the idea of running. For lyrics openly suggestive of a hidden secret, try "Temple of Everlasting Light" by Kula Shaker, and those to "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin are also full of related ideas, and possibly even inspired in part by Tolkien's work.

Space words of doom!

Is naming in gaming and wider fiction dull?

In the discussion under the recent post on originality in miniature design Lexington brought the subject up, and made me realise again that it's almost as if new terms are being created from a limited pool of words. These might be terms which sound right for the setting, or cool, but in some cases they are just new combinations of familiar words.

To get relatively technical for a moment, and to be fair, the names created in this way might be understood as renderings from that strange world or distant future into a form we can understand. Even so, it does seem unlikely that naming conventions would be the same as ours or even similar to them, meaning the rendering would then anyway have to be understood as far from the supposed original.

There's also the issue of sales of course. A simple catchy name - realistic and fresh or not - may be needed to identify what is probably a product, or part of a product, to sell it.

At any rate, I think it could be instructive for the creative - i.e. all of us - to see how this might be happening, to better understand the process if we choose to apply a version of it in our own work, or to help avoid it completely.

Viva la revolución!

Happy new Gregorian calendar year! Here's to another orbit of the sun, more or less!

If you want gaming inspiration for 2011, you might start with the personal summaries of games played - or not - at Creepy Corridor, Fire Broadside!, ArmChairGeneral, Plastic Legions, Super Galactic Dreadnought and Mik's Minis, all of which cover various options.

Need your lists of bests? Lazy Thoughts From a Boomer has best bits in blogs, books and movies. Asking the Wrong Questions has opinions I trust on best and worst books, while shadowplay does movies that appeared only in alternate universes...

Papa JJ at diceRolla has something similar, a list unpublished posts. This seems to me dangerously like the approach Zanazaz took at Have dice, will travel... re iron spikes...

Resolutions abound, but the reading list at Huge Ruined Pile is a huge ambitious pile. If that helps put you in your place in time, see Slight Foxing for your place in existence.

Finally, there may or may not be an actual arrow of time, but there is an Arrow of Time at Tower of the Archmage. Impeccable timing.

With Earth history moving on, I thought you might also appreciate a few speculative timelines, elements of histories and/or info on calendars. Here they are then, by scope.

All mines?

Here's a brief list of fictional mines and other mining-related resources, hopefully useful to someone at some point for settings, scenarios or terrain, in whatever kind of game or fiction. I'll update as I find or remember more, with your suggestions too if you have any.

Have a look at the original post for a few thoughts on how these or similar places might fit into games. With the length of the list as it is, they do seem relatively underused.

Gold struck

On the subject of gifts, a brief look at wealth, specifically mining in games. One of the three wise men gave gold and mining is a real ghost of past, present and future.

The past we know about - 2010 was a year the human cost really made the news. In the present we have the battle for rare earth metals, a big one - you could easily have some of these in whatever you're using to read this. For the future, if you think Branson et al are interested only in tourism and lifting, think again - a smart investor would be growing the technology to mine the moon and asteroids. There's money in them thar belts.

How to fit all of this into a game?

Foxing Day

We've all had some time with our gifts now, and probably been thinking about presents for ourselves and others plenty over the past few weeks. Johnathan at Ostensible Cat prefers not to list and I largely agree, while Desert Scribe at Super Galactic Dreadnought has thoughts on golden oldies (for Star Wars fans years could fall away at Back in '81). But how much have you thought about gifts in general?

I've mentioned The Log from the Sea of Cortez here once before. This is one of those books that keeps on giving. In the appendix Steinbeck suggests a defining quality of his close friend and mentor Ed Ricketts may have been the ability to receive. Steinbeck describes giving as a “a selfish pleasure”, but says receiving done well needs “a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness”, “humility and tact and great understanding of relationships”, wisdom and even “a self-esteem”.

Ricketts is described as accepting a thing, but not taking it and keeping it as property, and association with him is said to have been “deep participation”. From reading the book as a whole, the authors – Ricketts included – seem to have an almost mythical view of synthesis and the non-teleological, the thing as it is.

As Steinbeck also says, giving can be “downright destructive”. We know this. In games plenty can be done with the fact. Where would Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 be without the corrupting gifts of Chaos? How about Tolkien's Rings of Power? They must have seemed like the perfect present at the time, for the lord who has everything. A DM/GM can use his or her players worst instincts against them, luring them into danger on the basis of greed or lust, or just giving them an item they can't not use...

They live among us (4) - The alien from Alien

Another part of the occasional series. So far we've had the intro, the sandworm of Dune and 'the enabling force'. All three can all be found with the series label.

Do not click on anything below this point unless you are an adult who is willing to be discomforted, possibly offended, and scared. There will be spoilers too.

It's the alien - or xenomorph if you prefer - the one from Alien. This must be one of the most coherent and discussed of all alien designs. We've probably all heard of H. R. Giger. In fact, more or less all we might expect to need for an understanding of the design can be found in this potentially offensive overview. This should be a very short post then - what can I say you don't already know?