Industry's Parting Gifts

This is a smart and funny look at the way we are producing the things we need.

The Wolfman is not a good movie

It's basically a collection of jump scares, sudden startles and violin stabs pasted together, and bolted on a woe-is-me monster plot. This film has jump scares nestled within jump scares, and apart from that, it is a pretty weak rerun of Dracula from 1992, with some added blood and guts strewn about, some fancy hallucinations and a werewolf that is about as scary as the bears on Munich's CSD. Hugo Weaving as inspector Abberline is amusing, but the namedropping just reminded me that I would rather be watching From Hell. Fair warning: People dragging their girlfriends into this movie will be punished with no less than three (!) romantic comedies.

The wreckers

The wrecker airship moves alongside the limping Cygnan Martyr. The stubbers fore and aft open up on the vessel, while wounded sailors are carried into the lounge. The defenders rake the armored cabin of the wrecker ship with lasguns, autopistols and shotguns, but to no effect. At ten yards, the wreckers fire grappling hooks into the observation decks, and a boarding gangway, propelled by small charges, crashes into the upper deck of the Martyr, into the middle of the defenders. Hooks and barbs snap into place, binding the Martyr to her attacker. Yuri, who has put bullet after bullet into the wreckers’ cabin, drops his sniper rifle and draws his two irontalons. The sailors grab heavy spanners and wrenches. A few reddots hover uneasily at the smoking mouth of the cabin. Then a pack of wreckers bursts out of the darkness and runs across the gangway, while others abseil toward the grappling hooks. The attackers are covered with bulky brown chem-overalls, patched with pieces of metal and unwholesome leathers and festooned with rusty tools and oxytanks. Their gasmasks turn their shouting into a dull roar. A few fire their selfmade shotguns at the observation deck, but the bulk charges across the gangway, brandishing boarding axes, cutlasses and knives. The first few are cut down by the defenders’ point-blank fire, but then, they are on the observation deck, and the fight becomes a chaotic melee. In a motion as natural as rainfall, Yuri puts his autopistols away and draws the two short straight blades from his back – blades made with narrow corridors and close work in mind. Drizz stands just behind him – and then he is gone. Was there a flicker, a moan? No matter, there is fighting to be done. There are shouts of surprise out of the wreckers’ ship, and gunfire, and a dull explosion. Nobody on the Martyr notices: The fight is too close and too desperate. The sailors are driven back by the furious assault of the wreckers; the decks get slippery with blood. Men drop over the railing and tumble screaming towards the acid sea. The stubbers fall silent, as wreckers storm the positions and the gun crews have to fight for their lives. All over the observation deck, small, vicious fights break out, while smoke from the wreckers’ ship and the burning thruster starts to obscure everything. Close to the gangway, Yuri and Octavia’s bodyguards form the only organized line of defense. No wrecker tangling with Yuri lives longer than a few heartbeats, his blades weaving fast red patterns, while the bodyguards cover his back and put down one attacker after another with their autopistols. While he dispatches another shape in a grublike suit, Yuri notices that the stream of attackers has stopped, as have the screams from the cabin on the other ship. Then, the wrecker ship suddenly drops ten feet, as half of its thrusters cut out. The shock hits the Cygnan Martyr, and nearly everyone is thrown on the deck, while a few unlucky souls are catapulted over the railing into the void. The Martyr starts to list; people slide over the decks towards the deep. The female bodyguard screams as she is flung overboard. Yuri sees her hanging at the railing with one hand, while both airships start to circle and sink. He flicks one blade into the floor to pull her into safety, and a steel club crashes into the deck next to his foot. He twists, whips his remaining blade around, cuts off the hands holding the club and kicks the squirming, spurting shape off the deck. He helps the armored woman to her feet. A grateful nod, then the bodyguard pulls a heavy pistol and starts to fire at the wreckers at the stubbers.
The Cygnan Martyr groans, its thrusters working to keep two ships level in the air, while the wrecker ship tears at the lines. But the presence of Yuri and the Octavia's bodyguards is telling: The fight has turned, the wreckers’ numbers have dwindled and the defenders dispatch the remaining boarders in short order. Then, the gangway buckles, bolts pop and holding lines snap. The gangway tears out of the observation deck, ripping the deck apart. Yuri thinks “Where is Drizz?” A silver-armored shape runs out of the wrecker cabin onto the tilting gangway, which now sinks fast, away from the Martyr. Drizz sprints toward the end and jumps. For a second he hangs in the air, a thousand feet over the Balemire Sea, while the gangway crumbles behind him and the wrecker ship howls into a vertical dive. Then, his armored fingers dig into the wreckage of the observation deck, and helpful hands draw him to safety. The Martyr, lightened, shoots up into the sky, while her attacker plunges into the black, roiling seas below. Yuri looks at the armored Tallarn “Where have you been?” Drizz smiles “Isn’t that obvious? I was on the other side. I found their wheelhouse. I pulled a few levers. The story’s instructive ending.” “Better be careful. It was quite chaotic over here; I don’t think anybody noticed, apart from the dead. My take: You could have killed us all with that stunt. Flashy will be the end of you.” “Don’t be stupid.” Yuri is probably talking about shooting up the wreckers’ cockpit while the Martyr was still festooned with their grappling hooks, but his reproach could also point out something infinitely more dangerous. A psyker does not have to move his legs, one tired step after another, to get to a different place. He travels with his mind, and then the body appears where the mind is, at the other side of a wall, behind the backs of his enemies. But the warp is fickle and vicious, and an airship is one of the worst places to risk its wrath.

Fallout New Vegas

Can't wait for summer. Because after summer comes fall, and then there'll be Fallout.

Arkham Horror

We played this yesterday, and had lots of fun. You play a group of investigators who rush around in H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham and try to push back the gibbering horrors from beyond the stars, before they swallow the world. The game itself is quite old, its first version was published in 1987. The new version is from Fantasy Flight Games.
A few things stand out:
- The game is cooperative: Everybody wins, or everybody loses. A bit like real life. I like this a lot.
- The game is complicated. There is a veritable cloud of counters, about a dozen card decks, a subrule to every subrule. Counters and cards are packed with info. Monsters move, or they don't, or they vanish. You might lose sanity, or not. Nothing is simple. The group has to take great care, or you will miss some details, making the game too hard or (in our case) too easy. It would be useful to have at least one certified rules-lawyer in the group.
- It takes about four hours with two new players out of five, just as advertised.
- After a few rounds, the mechanics and the make-up of the turns becomes quite natural, and you get a feeling where the certain areas of the board are and what they do.
- The game is quite gorgeous.
- The German rules are for wimps. True men use the English rules with their higher monster count.
- Being blessed is good. Being the deputy sheriff is better.
- A psychologist with a shotgun can take down ANYTHING.
- In retrospect, I thought that there would be more cooperation. In Battlestar Galactica, the cooperative element can be downright fierce, as everyone who is not doing their utmost and cleverest to save Galactica is suspected to be the traitor, and then it's off to the brig, doing the Galactica perp-walk. So everybody is very aware off his contribution to the common cause. Here, nobody starts to point fingers if you do your own thing for a few turns. But then, in last night's game the outcome never seemed to be in doubt.

Yesterday, we turned the tide against the unnameable horrors. But then, we missed a special feature of our main opponent, which would have changed our gameplay a lot. Turns out you can't just waltz down the French Quarter, killing Yig's cultists left and right without any repercussions. We'll take that into account next time.

Compassion

Compassion - another settlement in the Corridor - a House on the Rock. In German, with a map.

The pilgrims

During the small-talk, Yuri takes a look at his dataslate, to see if any of the persons present appears on his list of minor offenders. He soon identifies one of pilgrims travelling the abott as Drok, a wanted criminal who is suspected to dabble in the dark arts. The acolytes decide to take a closer look at the priest’s quarters. During dinner, Drizz rises and saunters away and up the quarters of the priest’s followers. After he passes the sailors standing guard, he pops a vox-bead into his ear and creeps up to the door leading to the cabin of abbot Tamas’ unwholesome retinue. Behind the door he hears something like prayer. Getting closer to the door he makes out a low, repetitive chant “My blood – for you! My pain – for you! Blood! Pain! Blood! Pain!” together with scraping noises, like metal on metal. Something clearly is amiss.
Drizz knocks on the door. As it swings open, he mutters a phrase under his breath and extends his mind into the Sea of Souls. Drok, a twitchy man in his twenties, looks out on the corridor. Although he glances right at Drizz, his mind, clouded by the psyker, is unable to see the man standing in plain sight. As Drok moves out on the corridor to look for his visitor, Drizz steps into his cabin. Drok shrugs, and returns to his little ritual. He closes the door, takes off his shirt and proceeds to castigate himself with a ball of iron nails, which he rolls on his chest and back, softly chanting all the while. His blood runs freely. Drizz just stands in the corner, unsuspected and invisible. After some time, the flagellant cleans himself up, puts on his clothes and leaves the cabin, firmly locking the door. Drizz is finally alone, and quickly starts to rifle through Drok’s footlocker. Under a few scraps of threadbare clothing, he finds the bloody instrument of castigation, and a knife made from a single shard of rusty steel, with a few unwholesome symbols welded on the blade. Its hilt seems to be wound with human hair. The whole thing has the stench of the archenemy upon it. The second footlocker in the cabin reveals similar instruments. Drizz is not able to make head or tails of those things, but he knows that the good abbot seems to travel with a retinue of chaos cultists! He alarms Yuri via voxbead. The voidborn leaves the lounge and frees Drizz from the locked cabin. The two acolytes discuss the recent developments and agree to stay observers, for now, although Drizz would like to flash their inquisitorial badges, shoot the abbot and his henchmen and be done with it. But the priest seems to be small fry – not important enough to reveal themselves as agents of the Golden Throne.

The night passes without incident. The next day, the Cygnan Martyr has moved far beyond the normal shipping lanes. To the stern of the ship, a large, flickering storm front has appeared during the night, but the Cygnan Martyr makes good headway. At midday, the sailors mount two water-cooled heavy stubbers on the observation decks. The weapons sport gun shields and appear ancient, but well cared-for. When Yuri asks about this, a sailor says “We’re quite on our own out here, and at times, there’ll be wreckers about. They go for lone vessels, but mostly they turn tail when they see some guns on a ship. But I’d wager that, even if there are wreckers about, they’ll stay wherever they hole up, with the storm rolling in and all. No need to worry, good sirs.” The Cygnan Martyr stays on her southward course for the next hours, while the storm approaches.

The sailor’s optimism seems to be ill-founded. Soon, as the airship passes the Southern Shard, with its spires of an abandoned hive rising from the acid sea, a small fleck comes unstuck from one of the rusting towers and starts to intercept the Cygnan Martyr. The alarm is sounded, and the captain orders this men to stand to and repel boarders. Wreckers are on the Cygnan Martyr's trail. An airship nearly twice as large accelerates out of the red tangle. It seems to be fit for scrap, a mess decaying machinery and rotten armor plating, festooned with grisly trophies and ancient replacement parts, but it rapidly gains on the acolytes’ ship, its thrusters howling under the strain. The men and women on the Cygnan prepare for conflict. The sailors grimly arm themselves with lasguns and hefty tools, Vymer and Quill check their shotguns, while Octavia Nile and her adept vanish into their cabin. Her bodyguards stay behind, all cool and professional. Nahun Grist moves up and down the deck, exhorting the men to stay steadfast. The abbot and his pilgrims seem to have locked themselves into their rooms to pray for our defense against those that would harm the pious servants of the Emperor. Drizz and Yuri prepare for battle, but keep an eye on the others – for battle is an excellent time for all kinds of underhanded play.

The wreckers’ ship is only a hundred meters away when a volley of rockets erupts from the armored compartment under its gas balloon. Someone screams “Incoming!”, and the defenders on the Martyr’s observation deck scramble for cover, as the missiles go in. One white trail passes the Martyr above, then another. The third goes under the observation deck, the fourth missile hits it squarely. Drizz and Yuri are thrown on the plating, while Vymer is smashed through the windows of the lounge by the impact. The explosion showers the stern with shrapnel, and shouts and screams fill the air. The whole airship shakes. While the fireball blows out, a fifth rocket smashes into a thruster. The thruster whines for a second and cuts out. Trailing black smoke, the Cygnan Martyr turns to meet her attacker.