Climate does its thing

Climate is strange today. Normally, these would be the days for serious indoor activities, the three-day Feast of the Shut-In: I got some modular stuff from eBay just for the occasion, it's time to construct a high-ranking member of the Adeptus Mechanicus. But now climate sits on the couch, it has a strangely sunny disposition and the mood just is not right. "Everything ok?" I ask climate. Climate fidgets and beams at me. Its eyes are all over the place. I want to say something, but I keep my mouth shut. We all have heard the stories: Climate has turned volatile. It misses whole days on the job, and when it finally turns up, its frantic over-zeal does more harm than good. Climate is no longer dependable. Climate is having a difficult time right now, it is turning or turned manic-depressive, that's what people say who know it really well. There are other stories, darker ones. Climate was involved in a home invasion. Climate has had so many "unfortunate accidents" recently its insurance premium went up, up, up. Some say that, one of these days, climate is going to kill somebody.

Climate gives me a warm smile. "Not to your liking?" "Nah, it's cool." I say. Climate's face turns clouded at once. I really hope I didn't say something wrong.

Merry Christmas!!

via BoingBoing.

Merry Christmas!

The world ends today

Well, not this one. Don't be daft. But please keep in mind that there are up to 500 billion galaxies out there, each of which is host to billions of stars. That makes for a high number of potential civilizations that have to roll against sudden existence failure each and every day. Somebody should crunch some numbers to find out the odds, but I have a feeling that on this day, at least one inhabited planet in this universe faces a catastrophic meteoric impact, catastrophic solar flares, polar shift, reversed polar shift, sudden onset ice age, zombie pandemic, rise of the machines, roving black hole, grey goo, green goo, red goo, red matter, super volcanoes, terminal ennui, doomsday device demonstration, nuclear slugfest or the irritation of the local godlike entities.
If you had this planet's demise in mind, it might be necessary to become a bit more proactive. Thank God there's an introductory primer.

Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is my ideal Christmas game, because this time of the year, I fantasize a lot about stabbing people in the neck. Far Cry 3 delivers in the neck stabbing department, and it has all the other markings of a great game, but its flaws reduce the final score noticeably

Island helladise 
Far Cry is as sandboxy as it gets. You get a huge tropical island to play with, and it is filled with pirates and tigers. The rest of the fauna is equally impressive. There are mountains and streams (full of pirates), lots of palms, ancient temples and Japanese bunkers (which are also full of pirates). But everything comes across as samey-same after a while. There are only a few distinctive landmarks which give you a sense of place. Other sandbox games give you strong visual cues were you are, but here, it all drowns in the same jungle green, so you are going around at high speeds, but you never have the feeling of arriving at a special place.
Nonetheless, Rook Island is beautifully realized, breathing a heavy mixture of undiscovered island paradise and third world hellhole: the rusty cars, the dwellings right between upscale alternative tourist destination and leper colony, and many, many micro-junkyards between the palms. And AK-47s for everyone. Ubisoft really can do tropical islands. It's just not very variable and comes across a bit bland.

Unreliable narrator
This game has a strangely weak and somewhat offensive plot. You are Jason, a douchy American tourist. You and your douchy friends went to this unspoiled island, were a lesson in skydiving suddenly became an exercise in surprise adoption (kidnapping is such a harsh word).  You got away, the nice (black) islanders crowned you their warrior king just because, and you are off fighting (black) pirates and freeing your friends.
"Colonialist subtext" is a rather mild word for what appears to be happening here. So you are the great white dope who has to set things right? And it involves shooting so many black guys that the whole American police force shakes with impotent envy? There have been attempts to color the whole experience as the view of an unreliable narrator, i.e. that the protagonist is subverting or hiding the "objective truth" of the narrative from the recipient, making the whole game a delicious puzzle, as we try to ferret out what Jason really did and why. The problem is: I don't buy it.
This is mainly a problem of the medium. A first person shooter offers a strangely unmediated access to the narrative, even more so then a first person narrator in a novel. The medium is also based upon a contract between the player and the game: You as the player are directly able to influence the world according to the rules of the game. These rules might be changed, and control might be yanked away from you for short periods of time (e.g. cut scenes), but basically you are able to do stuff, and your actions have direct consequences which are "real" in the game.
Thus it is easily possible to posit an unreliable first person narrator in a novel who boasts about liberating this island paradise from pirates while still leaving enough markers to appear unreliable, it appears far more difficult in the medium of the FPS.
Secondly, Jason lives through various hallucinatory experiences which are clearly marked as such. While his normal stay on the island is depicted in the highly realistic and physical glory that a high-end PC can render, the dream sequences stand out as such - strange colors, milky vistas, dreamlike visions, gravity twists and so on. This is also true for their beginnings and their ends: Thus, after the dream sequences, we are explicitly put back into the "normal" reality of the game. This makes it more difficult to ascertain a third, additional level, where Jason experiences Rook Island differently from "subjective reality" or where he makes up a reality of his own.
There are a lot of nice small touches which could elevate the narrative from FPS boiler plate, but some of them fall flat. Jason starts out as a whingy bro with a bro haircut: In the starting mission he is a bag of nerves and close to a breakdown because of all the violence, but the game mechanics undercut a slow evolution from nervous wreck to apex predator. The whinginess returns in some of the later cutscenes, but it feels false then, because I have been killing bears with rocket launchers for hours when that cutscene arrives.
But as said before, some subversive touches remain: Glimpses in Jason's recent past show some unsettling potential for violence and create a very unflattering image of white tourists in the Far East. The "bad" ending is apt to twist the whole perception of Jason's role on the island and the islanders who made him "king", but many players won't get that far, or will choose differently. The scavenger hunt for Japanese war letters, the communications of a drug ring and the tribal relics insinuate that Rook Island has always been a place of violence, and replacing all your starting gear with the pelts of all the animals you have slain is nicely atavistic. On this note: I think I have driven the leopard past extinction into reality deletion. I have shot so many of the big cats. I am sorry. Speaking of which:

Fun parts
Hijacking a patrol boat, going around the whole island and peppering every pirate stronghold with the turret machine gun. Running a machete-wielding pirate over with a quad bike, after the seventeenth attempt. Becoming neck-stabbing king of stabneck mountain. Running over bull sharks with a jet ski. Shooting a bear with a RPG-7. Driving a two-ton truck off a cliff. Burning down a football field of ganja plants and inhaling the fumes. Cleaning out one pirate outpost all stealthy-like, the next from really afar, and the third one by just walking up and hosing it down. Note: You can do nearly all this without entering into the plot - a real strength of the game.

Little stories
The effects of the ecosystem and the sandbox: So I drive up to river where I see a small, cozy hut and a fence between me and the river. One of the nice islander stands at the river, partly hidden by the fence. I get out of the car to say hello and look at the hut, when the islander suddenly says "ack!" and disappears behind the fence. I run up to the fence, look down on the river and see a fat crocodile. "So that's where the islander went" I think, but then there is no more fence and my screen is full of crocodile jaw. And that was the first time I died.
Or: I am busy crafting healing drugs by the road (you take so many drugs in this game) when a jeep full of pirates  rolls up. They get out, but then two cassowaries join the party and peck the shit out of them. After that, I shoot the cassowaries and turn them into a nice new wallet matching my leopard leather case for all the needles I've been using. Other players will have completely different stories to tell.

Mandatory instafail stealth mission
This game has it. One full point automatically deducted.

Vaas Montenegro
My favority madman in gaming right now. Excellent voiceacting, this guy really steals the show every time he turns up. I would like to have seen more of him. The next deathdealer hordeboss is going to be Vaas, with some new grotty paint on.

4 of 5 stabbed necks, -1 for mandatory instafail stealth mission, for an effective score of 3

Peter Jackson: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey

The good stuff first:
- It is better than I anticipated. Well, I spent the last couple of weeks lowering my expectations, but still.
- There is a bit of Jar Jar Binks around, but it is spread thinly across many figures, so it never got on my nerves. Although some scenes got pretty close.
- Gandalf levelled up and can call in air strikes now.

Some gripes to get out of the way:
- Smaug shows a bit of leg, and that's it. That was a bit disappointing.
- As an old GURPS-afficionado, I hated how the old grand dame Physics and her lapdog Falling Damage was treated

All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but the humor found the right mark with me. Strangely, the scenes I dreaded most (the dwarfes' home invasion of Bilbo and everything with Gollum) came across really well.

Bilbo comes across as a dignified bourgeois in over his head, but still with a bit of spine. While he ends up as a troll's hanky, he never loses his poise, and he is much more watchable than Frodo, who I wanted to smack right in the quivvering lips for two long, long movies. Also, apart from three or four exceptions, I wasn't able to keep the dwarfs apart. If there only was a chart or something.

It is very different viewing compared to the old LOTR-films. Those hat some kind of grimy patina which became a hallmark of them. Strangely, the Hobbit looks like a high-end TV production, like Game of Thrones, only with less tits and more midgets, or a documentary. Yesterday, I learned that Jackson used 48 images per second than the usual 24: This somehow explains the strange cleanliness of the sets and the docudrama flair. Seems that this technical gamble didn't pay off. Also, 3D - next time, I wouldn't bother.

The movie shifts between kitchen sink-drama and grand, hectic CGI-vistas, and strangely, I enjoyed those small scenes more than the big, noisy ones.

3.5 (bordering on 4) of 5 of goblinoid living SMS messages

Blessing

Blessing: A nice town just down the Vever from Holy Flame City. Enjoy all the amenities of the big city without the usual hassle, even if you are a wanted man. An addition to the scorched earth material post, in German.

Fuck Windows 8!

I say we get back to basics, back to a better time when a simple blood offering was enough to appease one's desktop. Via BoingBoing.

Sam Mendes: Skyfall

Spoilers, so many spoilers.

This is the movie you have been waiting for. Go see it, even if you are not into Bond - this is a great action movie on its own merits, while it ticks away at a lot of Bond-boxes.

Wonder slackjawed at the amazing pictures, the amazing, amazing pictures. Javier Bardem plays the Joker filtered via Bobby Peru: This alone brought tears of joy to my eyes. Learn important stuff about small island ecologies. See Moneypenny shoot Bond off a train. Marvel at our crocodile pit. Dame Judi Dench becomes the best Bond girl of them all. See the Joker pull off one jokeresque plan after another, including the mandatory "I wanted to be caught" scheme and the all-new subway train to the face. The Aston Martin comes out of the garage, only to be blown to bits by the chopper from Apocalypse Now. Voldemort now is the chief of the double-0 section. I wasn't kidding about those spoilers, it's the kind of state of mind this movie inducts in reprobates like me. Sorry. But the movie is still great after a second viewing, so nothing of value was lost.

Hacking in movies still has to take place in a haze of technobabble, but now everyone uses a PC, so it's no longer represented by flashing the word "HACKING" on the screen, but by convulsing nets and numbers, while someone blathers on about "self-obfuscating code". The IT security thug to my left couldn't hide his merriment at all the beautiful nonsense on display. But it's still nice to look at.

Monday, I'm buying two VAIO notebooks.

Five of five rats in a barrel

Joss Whedon has a point

„I’m still unconscious, right?“

Wait, the fucker sits on my chest? And I don’t get to roll?

This is a question you will never hear in real life, just like the sentence „you are still asleep“. You hear them all the time at the gaming table.

Basically, there are only two ways to deal with this.

Players of sleeping or unconscious characters are sent out of the room.  This takes some time, and you need a space to store these players. Maybe they can do the dishes or check the barricades for midgets. But they might get the feeling they miss out on the action (especially when the checked out during a tense fight). It smacks of rudeness to send a player out of the room just because he failed a health-check. It may even be perceived as a punishment: Tommy could not keep his raconteur-assassin in the fight, so he is sent out of the clubhouse, while we are having fun, fun, fun. So, this is mostly not the way it is done: Players are only sent out when something momentous happens in their absence, or there are individual prophetic dreams, or the thief is up to something very much, like stealing the distributor cap to the party’s car. Most gamemasters in “grown-up” groups trust their players to differentiate between the knowledge of their characters, and their own knowledge. So everyone gets to sit at the table, even if only one character is awake. This is much more practical, and most gaming groups I know handle it this way. But there are reasons to go another route.

The voice of the powerless (is fucking annoying)

Players are just human (dissect one, if you don’t believe me). In a tense situation, they will want to do something, even if they can’t. Because of their PC’s heavy skull trauma or exotic poisoning.  Often it is the deadest PC who comes up with the best ideas, because he is the only one at the table who can take a step back and look at the situation. Well-behaved players will keep those ideas to themselves, only to brag about them weakly after the game, but sometimes it’s just too tempting to share, and just as the party is going to do something amusingly stupid, a disembodied voice of reason pulls them back. Shut up the nagging by sending the players out of the room when their characters keel over.

Discipline is enforced by continuous physical presence of the enforcer

“While you are sleeping, I steal your stuff.” You don’t say that, it sounds crazy.

It’s easier to steal, manipulate and be an amusing jerk when you don’t have to look at the other players’ faces while you are going about your nefarious business. It seems like the little interior policeman can only do so much without outside help. There is also less interference with sudden declarations that certain items are of course firmly tied down, used as pillows or transported in a secret pouch cut into the inside of the character’s cheek: just you and the game master coming to a gentleman’s agreement that someone has a brand new full-body tattoo and a lot less silver in his purse. In any case it’s more fun to throw around accusations when you don’t know the culprit (like, for real), and it makes for a real surprise when the paladin is outed as a kleptomaniac and tattoomancer.

Spoiling the surprise

If players are only sent out when some momentous occasion is due during their PCs’ absence, you create a heavy sense of foreshadowing, if you want to or not.  It’s like when FedEx delivers big cages to your house in late December, and you just know that you’ll be fed to alligators for Christmas and you’ll have to make a big show of being surprised/ terrified. Now imagine if big, gnarly cages were coming in all the time: After a week or two of non-stop terror, a sense of false security would set in, and then, bam, it’s the alligators.

Like in children-raising, rules and predictability (and early exposure to j-horror films) are of the essence. Make it a habit to send players out of the room for certain, codified circumstances. It helps if you have a large man cave with lots of other diversions or you might tell them to get their character sheets up to date while their PCs are bleeding out – anything to keep hope alive. Then, a few sessions in, a player wises up and makes most of the opportunity. And from that moment on, simple sleep is to be feared. Still, it’s a lot of interruptions. Atmosphere might suffer.

What about little notes?

Or SMS? Or interpretive dances behind the other players’ backs? This is very difficult to do in a subtle way, at least for me; I took a few levels in klutz (we get killer talents later on). So most players see the little paper packets going around, and most of them don’t think drugs, but  “Steve is trying to fuck us again.” Maybe if you make it a habit as a game master to pass around lots of empty notes you can drown the signal in noise, but this appears as a lot of work, and also spoils atmosphere.

I think you should send players out, but use it as a precise tool to set or shift the tone of a campaign:

• Always out: harsh realism in any genre, Illuminati, spying in the Cold War mode, lots of backstabbing, Paranoia. Feels excessive to me
• Out quite often: according to fixed rules which are common knowledge. So it could be the rule that a split party is always, and I mean it, handled apart, even if they are only gone for five minutes to check the perimeter. Or you’re always away from the table when your PC is asleep and some other PC is on watch, doing whatever.  Or you, as the GM pull people arbitrarily outside, and handle the thing just like a surprise employee appraisal – “Where do you see your barbarian in five years? Do you think your clan handled the yeti-situation well? Is there anybody you would rather see as first shield carrier than Thorgrund Eisgrund?” Nothing might come of it, but the more entrepreneurial of your gamers will use the opportunity to fuck over the other guy while garnering a nice extra bonus.
• The Golden Mean. The Correct Way of Doing Things. How The Secret Masters Do RPGs.
• Almost always in: surprises coming from other party members are not that important, twists are visible for miles and miles: high fantasy – “Look, Steve had a prophetic dream again which he won’t share with us.”          
• Always in: As above, but your group actively hates party conflicts (they also might have trust issues), or you play a campaign where all characters are part of a hive mind or the various personalities inhabiting a schizophrenic’s body.

      That last one sounds like fun.

Dishonored

The mark of a good game? Simple - shutting down the computer at five in the morning. I like Dishonored very much, and there are only minor quibbles. You should try it. Spoilers abound.

The Dickensian aspect

You play Corvo, a supernatural assassin, in this first person stealth game/ shooter. Your playground is the city of Dunwall: Imagine two-thirds Victorian London and one third Blitz era London, add a large spoon of leper colony and garnish with steampunk walkers. Corvo is in service of a conspiracy hunting the conspirators who killed the Empress, so that they can be brought to justice or crown the Empress' daughter, as the case may be. There is also a plague, the whale oil powering the trains and walkers is running out, and premonitions of capital-D-doom are everywhere.  If you think this will end well, you are as naive as Corvo, a professional assassin who will suck down any drink handed to him.

The city of Dunwall is a delight to explore. While this is not a sandbox game, the single missions take place in sprawling levels which make the most of Corvo's ability to jump nearly everywhere, and every bit of location oozes atmosphere. The missions function as a kind of Gin Lane for single aspects of an imperial metropolis in final decay. So one of the first missions leads you into a large, bureaucratic institution, a nice mix between the Vatican and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. The artwork is spot on, as in all levels, creating a strong quasi-Victorian flair, with lots of brilliant details bringing the world to life, although every household seems to have the same two-by-four meter oil painting of the regent. As this is a stealth game, you get to eavesdrop and watch little scenes playing out between religious fanatics, and after you ganked them, you get to read their correspondence. Leaving the level, you have been the witness to some splendid world building, and each of the "topic" levels enforces this effect - at the end, I really thought I "knew" the society of Dunwall. There are lots of tantalizing hints about why Dunwall is in dire straits, although these are not expressly explored, and their moral (The Empire kills magic whales to power their war machines) is quite heavy handed. Regrettably, the grand finale of the game does not use this foundation, leaving you in an impressive location that, regrettably, seems quite divorced from Dunwall.

I think this is the greatest strength of Dishonored - Dunwall sure leaves an impression, on par with Rapture, and that is saying something.

The story itself is not that strong, with a big honking twist visible even behind the horizon.

Now you see me, now you don't

Dishonored is a stealth game, and normally I am not great fan of those, especially if you instafail a mission if a single guard notices you. If a stealth game is unforgiving, I unforgive right back. The stealth-aspect is very strong here, but there are always many different approaches available to you. This is not only true for the possible ways to reach a target, but also for the level of violence you want to employ. The levels are riddled with rooftops, canals and secret approaches: The careful examination a plaza from a rooftop may uncover surprising ways to get into the arch overseer's office, and all the while you get to listen to small dialogues, and the insidious artwork drips into you brain...And even if you fail the stealth, you can mostly fight your way free. A mission might become more challenging after an alarm, but if you really hate nosy guards, there is nothing here to keep you from slaughtering them all.

And there are many many ways of slaughter. Dishonored is basically like Bioshock, in that you have various weapons and powers, but here truly all powers have their uses in that you can build your style of play around them. If you liked the mechanics of Bioshock, you will feel right at home. You even heal by gulping down food, like potted whale meat  The weapons and magic powers (not gained from gene-tonics, but awarded by the benevolent Prince of Darkness, who has taken a liking to Corvo) are steeped black magic or steampunk, and although I have a bit of a dislike for this genre, playing around with the various tools handed to you is great fun.

Consequences, schmonsequences

And there is a moral choice system. There are two endings based on how much of the Dunwall police force you cut to ribbons. One is all sweetness and light (hard to believe in a city that just lost a third of its population to the plague), the other is rather dark, and, concerning the endings, there is nothing in between. This is a bit weak. But the missions also change a bit with regard to your previous exploits. If you kill with gay abandon, the street with fill with voracious rat swarms, aggressive plague victims (basically zombies) will be everywhere and City Watch will step up security. This not only changes the tone of the game, but also adapts  the missions to your play style. An aggressive player will have that much more enemies to play with, while a stealthy player can go for a playthrough without a single character killed (although this defeats the purpose in my opinion, I mean, you get all these nice toys, and you can stick a razor wire mine to a guy while you stopped time, so that he explodes into bloody chunks when time starts up again and you are twenty feet off on a rooftop, scratching your chin and going hmmm...why would you want to miss out on that?). I like it it that even the weepers, the half-zombified victims of the plague, are integrated into the moral choice system. The game counts them as people, and if you want a happy Dunwall, then you should too.

Too short

this game is.

I really like Bioshock

Yes, I do.

Four and a half tins of Pratchett's Jellied Eels

Timur Bekmambetov: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

This film has an interesting premise, and that's basically it. What if vampires - creatures defined by their ability to jump really far - were real and the Great Emancipator fought them? This sounds like something that this crew could turn into something glorious, but the idea is not enough to carry the movie for its running time, although, mercifully, it's only 105 minutes long.
There is a lot of very obvious CGI, including a horse stampede so fake it hurts and the longest bridge of the world on fire. Maybe the film would have been more interesting if it had really tried to keep Lincoln's vampire hunting business in the shadows, maybe even concentrating on the necessities to keep the war secret. Instead, there is this huge bridge, which must be the engineering marvel of the world, only now it's on fire, and the fields of Gettysburg are left littered with solid silver cannonballs. The premise of the movie (there is a shadow war against vampires, and Lincoln was part of that) is left hanging in the air (a shadow war has to stay in the shadows, or it's just your standard, run-off-the-mill war). All that remains is a guy with a manifestly false Honest Abe chin strip twirling an axe before our tech level's variant of a painted backdrop.

Bekmambetov did the fascinating Night Watch and Day Watch - look for those instead.

One and a half gloating vampires

Life is too short to be busy

Tim Kreider on the 'busy' trap. I wholly concur.

Anomalies

The 200th comic by Subnormality! Take your time.

"We are looking for anomalies." This has become a staple of RPG-parlance, it basically means that the characters have a thorough look at their surroundings, trying to note everything that is peculiar, noteworthy or simply wrong, from secret compartments, a diary's pages stuffed under the carpet to a large blood spill on the ceiling. It is a way to cut to the chase if you are just tossing some guard shack, but it is a shortcut, and harms the feeling of immersion. This especially true if you are going for some period or genre feel, which in my opinion is based in large parts on the depiction of specific details: Size and make of furniture, age and disrepair of a room, traces of a personality and their role in the world etc. Of course, details take time, but the time taken to depict a search (even of some area that is not that important or special) helps to create a clearer image of a game world that exists apart from the group and the plot.

A letter from White Tower

A road leads to Atlanta! This much I always knew, but now everybody knows that a road leads back. To think of it: The Dry Place, lost for four generations, now open to us. Two unis, corporate headquarters, one of the largest airports on the continent, two army bases. Untouched. Enough loot to build a nation, if one wanted to. I didn’t think much of their chances, when the big men of White Tower started talking about an expedition into North Carolina two months ago. At the time, I heard more or less open speculation that it was the town’s way of bidding one of their longest living servants good bye with honor and dignity, together with getting rid of assorted riff raff which any town at a crossroads will collect – destitute orphans, stranded mercenaries, the lot. They were bundled into a truck left over from some kind of gambling scam and sent towards the South.

At least that’s what the town’s ancient gun seller told me over a few drinks. Few thought they’d ever see them again.

But lo and behold – a mere month after they were sent off, the brave explorers returned, and not a day later, White Tower buzzes with stories of heroic derring do, Deathdealers on the prowl, pale critters in the metro tunnels, flying monsters, feral guardians of the necropolis walking through walls, sentient black dust and other nonsense. But the truck’s chassis ran awfully close to the ground when it made its way past Lola’s Bar, the springs creaking piteously and every piece of movable equipment packed at the outside of its freight compartment. Something was taken from the dead city, something heavy, and it has made some people in White Tower quite happy. Everyone tries to keep up appearances of business as usual, but some people stopped talking to me, because I’m the nosy guy, or try to feed me bullshit. It’s a food processor. Or two tons of DVDs. Or a box filled with that sentient black dust.  It’s a change in the weather, some tell me, and I tend to agree.

No matter.

My next missive will contain as much about the route to the Dry Place as I can find out, as well as my honest attempts to separate the truth from the legends so eagerly spun around the campfires. I would advise you to get all your ducks in a row and collect a party to get there asap – second place is better than nothing, and there will still be lots of truck loads left if you hurry. You can be sure that many others now see the Dry Place in a new light, and right now they are gathering the right people for a little exploration. Be sure to gather them first.

 I remain,

L.

Cliffhanger

So the group is on a two-masted cog, the good ship Empire of the Sunset, in the middle of a really furious storm. Sheets of rain and murderous squalls. Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening. About a quarter of the crew has already been swept overboard, which might be just as well, because the PCs are not well liked, after all that spitting into the communal stew (very public, too) and mouthing off to the first mate. In fact, there would probably be a mutiny under way by now, if the sailors weren't a bit preoccupied at the moment (or dead), because the captain keelhauled a full quarter of them, plus the first mate, on false charges. One mast has just been struck by lighting, and crashed on the deck, where it smashed open the cage of the mountain lion the Empire has been transporting. The mountain lion that has been poked with sharp sticks for entertainment purposes and was able to grievously wound a PC and a sailor while in the cage. Someone should have put up a warning sign.

This is also the moment where a fat tentacle appears at the ship's rail, belonging to God-knows-what kind of hellbeast. Maybe that's the reason the ghost ship that hounded us for the last quarter of an hour is suddenly gone.

It is also the moment where the game master says "Let's wrap up for tonight."

Well played, sir, well played.

Cry havoc and and let slip the Toyotas of war

Technicals from the Lybian revolution. Via the eXiled. The cars seem to deal rather well with all the added weight - but they seem to carry no armor at all (with the exception of the odd blast shield). They are also more colorful and cheery than the dour Mexican narcotanks.

Point Transit

Point Transit is the gateway to the Far West, or to the Desert Heart - depending on your perspective. A city of such importance has lots of secrets, which will not be spoiled in this short introduction, instead there will be a separate document taking a look at some of the dirt the people of this fine community have accumulated over the years. This will be stuff only the game master should know, or characters who spent an inordinate time digging in the backstreets, cracking safes and computers, or listening to pillow talk. An addition to the Scorched Earth materials post, with a map.

Polite society

A tool for the enforcement of nearly lost societal norms, via this isn't happiness. It's practical use is nearly zero (unless you want to get into a fight with an expectorator, and you are superfast with a marker and scissors), but it is a nice handy list concerning acceptable behavior in our urban centers. Alien infiltrators, take note!

Joss Whedon: The Avengers

Four superheroes for the price of one (plus the charge for 3D glasses, can we please stop this nonsense?), so what could go wrong? Indeed, this is a very amusing movie, even if you aren't a raving comic fan. It has a lot of Joss Whedon dialogue, so if you are a fan of Buffy and Firefly, you should have a good time on that count alone, although I found the characters unbelievably precious at some points. But it is genuinely funny, and they stopped the thing that made Ironman 2 nearly unbearable, where two characters are chattering away at the same time, so you needed to be a schizophrenic to get both parts of the dialogue.

The backstories and involvement of the heroes (Aryan Viking, Snide Toasterman, Green Butt-Naked Giant and Clean-Cut Protestant Guy, supported by the lesser heroes Sultry Temptress and Lotso Arrows, if you have been living under a stone) are deftly handled, meaning that I wasn't waiting for the big action pay-off, but really enjoying the slow bits of the movie. At 140 minutes this is a rather longish movie, but it does not feel that way.

And the action pay-off is grand, absolutely fantastic, I really think I won't see anything like it for the rest of the year. This includes the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. No shaky cam here, but a clear sense of who is doing what where and why. I don't know if you should stay through the credits, because I didn't. If there is a "surprise", it will be on YouTube anyway.

4 of 5 chair fights

Like this

Your co-worker the next cubicle over will go on a shooting spree any day now? Jörg Sprave has you covered, but please note that all these weapons take a few minutes to construct. Be prepared - build them now. Right now. Via io9.

High speed shenanigans

Sundry buffoonery recorded via a Phantom Flex highspeed camera .Via panzer's telemetry feed.

The big Paranoia LARP "London 2012" takes up steam

The term of today is "bespoke legislation". Via the guardian.

With a view of Paris

That's what you can look at in your living room on a big screen, in your own sweet vault, complete with hydroponic garden and classroom. It may only be a refurbished missile base, but the whole setup has a distinctive Vault-Tec feeling to it. I wonder what kind of sociological experiments they have dreamed up this time.

Timo Vuorensola: Iron Sky

If you are on the web more than an hour a week, you probably have heard about this film: Nazis have hidden on the dark side of the moon in a massive, swastika-shaped moon base, and now they are returning to conquer the Earth in space zeppelins and UFOs. This is played as a comedy, and the film is very amusing, although uneven in its execution. Sarah Palin is a fitness-obsessed US president, an iPad controls the Nazi invasion fleet and Führer Kortzfleisch drives a VW bug on the moon: There are tons of brilliant ideas, but sometimes the comedic timing is off, or the idea overstays its welcome or is sabotaged by atrocious acting. There are a few changes in tone which mar the overall impression. A few scenes made me wince. But at other times, there is great comedic pay-off, and like me, most of the other moviegoers seemed to have a very good time.

I find it notable that this film exists at all. Please imagine pitching a comedy about Nazis from the moon to a big-studio executive: That sucking sound you just heard in your mind were his balls retracting into his body, to about the height of his liver and you'd be out of his office before you could say Reichsflugscheibe. Instead, a lot of funding came from the net. Now I am able to watch such an utterly crazy idea realized as a full feature movie with quite reasonable special effects on the big screen, and this gives me hope that we will one day have an R-rated film about Lovecraft's mythos worthy of the name. You know, real Shoggoths ripping up real mad cultists, stuff that is to weird for the normal film industry, but would look infinitely better with a big budget. Normally, I would give this film a 3.5 of 5, but it gets a small bonus for showing that crowdfunding can lead to results that leave the standard, safe blockbuster fodder in the dust.

4 of 5 laughably long German composite words

China Miéville: London's Overthrow

China Miéville (author of the delightful Kraken) has written a long, insightful essay on London, garnished with cell-phone photography.

RUIN

by Oddball Animation, via io9.

This is why most people only grief on the net

fpsrussia is a professional Russian and showcases guns on youtube on a weekly basis. Watch him argue the point that he doesn't use bb-guns with a dictator-style golden AK.

He looks like he would be happy to come over and convince you personally if that little demonstration didn't change your mind.

Solipsist

SOLIPSIST from Andrew Huang on Vimeo.

Wipeout!

Fucking vampires, man

I posted this image once, now I'm doing it again. Behold, a tradition is formed. TPKs have many reasons. I'll try to have a look at the roots of our particular wipeout. We are talking about a classic GURPS fantasy campaign with some unique features, about a year in the running. The focus of the campaign is on escorting a wealthy lady to a big tribal feast, through a rather wild and uncivilized landscape. While the traveling was an adventure in itself, the lady had some dark secrets.

During those travels, the group chanced upon a house of ill repute which promised warm beds and good food to a group of weary travelers far from the fleshpots of civilization. Of course we barricaded our doors at night - we had been ambushed at inns twice before and basically had a thorough drill for sleeping indoors. During our first night (you see were this is going) we were attacked by vampiric servants, and while we were able to some damage to them, we were only able to flee as a group because a priest sacrificed his health and youth to drive the master vampire off. Being big damn heroes, we decided to smoke the vampires out, but our first daytime attack was violently repulsed. We were close to being wiped out, and had to put in some healing time and and spend scarce resources, but we had the feeling that we had broken the vampires' strength.

We were thinking about our further approach, with "ah fuck it, lets get the lady to her feast" being one valid option, when we were surrounded by guards from the local fiefdom, a led by quite a formidable officer, charging us with attacking a law-abiding inn. We were able to convince him that he should be raiding the inn, and not hapless travelers, and consequently had him and his thirty guards at our disposal. The troops also had some healing potions on them - basically, the party was nearly back at full strength and supported by lots and lots of quite competent fighters. Combined with our impression that we had already weakened the vampires, storming the inn during daylight seemed a foregone conclusion.

Under the inn we found a surprisingly sizable cave system, with lots of brainwashed guards, traps and other monsters. We got ambushed a lot, by opponents who always had one or two potions at hand that turned them from adequate fighters into straight up murderers. Enhanced strength, night vision, smoke bombs to negate an invisible assassin on our side, their own invisible fighters...while we were able to chip at their strength, one or two of our characters were heavily wounded in nearly every encounter. All the while, we were able to husband our thirty redshirts - in fact, up to the final battle, we only lost two to sneak attacks, two others were sent away to bring news of this vampire nest to the king - the smartest thing we did all evening.

Finally, we decided to make a push for the center of the cave system, were the master vampire was rumored to live. We entered her sanctum with two of the original characters, one of them wounded, the others being on the surface (players were not able to make it that night), and my barbarian being in such bad shape that I decided to take over the officer for the duration. For this push (which we didn't think would lead directly to the boss-monster's doorstep) we took fifteen soldiers with us. The officer, full of righteous fury and a paragon of audacity, didn't even make it through the door. In the sanctum was the master vampire and two of her minions, while to other rather powerful half-vampires tried to attack us from the other side. The soldiers were cut down in about six rounds in the Sanctum while the lieutenant (my next take-over) and the last standing original character dealt with the two half-vampires coming up from behind. We already knew that this were devilishly hard opponents, with high dodge scores, magical armor and some undead invulnerabilities, as well as very proficient with their weapons, and, due to their potions, quite able to put down a character with two swings. We held them off long enough for the last ten soldiers to hear the noise of the battle, bringing my barbarian with them, although the lieutenant didn't make it. The surviving soldiers, and the two last characters then turned to the vampire and her last two minions, which were already weakened a bit. And then she killed us. It took about five rounds. While we hit her quite hard a few times, it just wasn't enough - according to the gamemaster, we were close, but no cigar. Two characters are still above ground (and one in another dimension after a teleportation fumble), but basically, this group of adventurers is done for. So, how did this happen?

This is just a side plot

On the metalevel, I thought that this was just a sideplot on our main quest, and as such rather straightforward and comparably easy to solve. I projected this assumption on the importance of this lonely inn on the perceived capabilities of its inhabitants, which probably led to a lasting underestimation of their abilities.

Nearly there

Even when we were shredded to bits again and again and had to retreat for days to get back some semblance of strength, we always thought we had broken the the vampires' power. "Okay, we got four of her elite, she cannot have much more of those, can she?" All the while, our own power was degrading.

She plain ripped our heads off

The last encounter was obviously above our pay grade. "27 cutting" isn't something you hear very often in your standard GURPS fantasy campaign. Indeed, she landed two hits and killed two ~140 point characters. She was no slouch concerning taking damage as well, with two cutting hits doing each 12-13 base points to her leg leading to increased grimacing, but no crippling injury. She also took hits to the torso, but those just fell into a bottomless pit of vampiric unkillability.

Better tactics?

Maybe. But stealth was not really an option with those invisibility-nixing smoke bombs, and while smoking out the sanctum with burning oil might have sounded like a good idea, she probably would just have come out like a bat out of hell to decorate her lobby with our innards instead of slaughtering us inside the sanctum. We were able to ambush the half-vampires only in one case, and that surprise didn't really turn the fight.

The plan nobody followed

Just getting on with the main mission. At one early point of crawling the - for want of a better word - dungeon, we even retrieved the stuff we lost during the first night. We could have told the soldiers that we had other obligations and then got the hell away: This would have been quite sensible from a roleplaying point of view. This inn is not our problem - this possessed noblewoman is. She paid us, we have been escorting her for months, her fate seems to be entangled with our fate. But tonight we seemed to be bent on showing a sideplot who's boss.

What is ACTA?

via ByteSoup

Goats

Goats is two towns in one, and outsiders get to see not even half of it. An addition to the Scorched Earth materials post - some spoilers if you're not one of the Sheppards.

Now later than ever!

The fifty most loathsome Americans of 2011, by Ian Murphy. See it as a short, sweet introduction to the USA, and the best roundup of 2011 available on the net.

Drone Warfare gives me the blues

George Monbiot on drone warfare. John Robb has more on this topic. While the moral implications are surely scary, and the emergence of semi-autonomous drones is horrifying, it's not only the non-accountability but also the cheapness of the system that gives me pause. A drone as smart as a rat, able to make its own decisions whether to kill a target is bad enough. Lower the cost of a strike at about 1000 dollars, and that should put Seal Team Six out of business. Link this concept with total surveillance - now that is truly depressing.

One could counter that the low cost democratizes the system, but what will you do with your one little drone when the competition puts a few thousand of them into the sky? It's like voting with your wallet: You might just not be rich enough to win a war of attrition. And while everyone was hoping for a nice robocaust, it's just another wizard-level police state.

Please use the web for this, but not for that

So what is this ACTA business? It is said to be worse than SOPA, and proffering that legislation led to (maybe) the first visible strike on the internet. Now there seems to be an European version on the way, and it seems like it has proceeded quite far, in a rather sneaky way, like one of those halfling fucks lurking on the slope of your house volcano. I think we need another strike, and lots of phone calls to our representatives' offices. And letters. And creepy signboard vigils with vaguely related but really scary bible verses. Like the one about the two hundred foreskins. Other scary religions are, of course, welcome to join the fray.

Anyway: I think we are raging against the dying of the light. One day, a similar or worse legislation will be rammed through the relevant law-giving body, something like "all behavior on the net is illegal, prepare to be sued to oblivion and gitmotized if you do anything that displeases or hurts the feelings someone with more litigious oomph, or if we feel that our ROI isn't high enough. We will fuck you up. Yes, you could be face a lawsuit for posting a photo that looks like a photo that some has taken before, but from a different angle. Shut your mouth and pay up." But fret not. While articles like that cracked oldie above might no longer be possible, the net will still be there: It is useful after all, and you should use it for this, but not for that.

The evolution of narco tanks proceeds

As noted in the New York Times via BoingBoing. Note the arrangement of spotlights around the chassis, the closing embrasures and the armored glass for the driver and observer.

A Golden Age of Gaming

Robert Brockway thinks it's a great time to be playing computer games. I concur, mostly, but I find it strange that he returns again and again to his ten-year old self. Most kids are easy to impress (next time someone brings their brats over just tell them about the twelve-fingered man living under their beds if you want to check this statement) and I stopped listening to the views of people who can be fitted into an empty dishwasher. Still, he has many good points and it was about time somebody said it - we may not have our rocket backpacks, and neo-feudalism is just around the corner, but the gaming in this timeline is great.

Does talking about guns count?

The Bechdel Test. Go and read up on it. Then ask yourself the question: What about RPGs?

Watching this, I feel my vertebrae crumple

via coilhouse

Skyrim - again

I hope for the sake of my well-being that these are the closing comments on Skyrim - at least for the time being. Two days ago I finally ended the main quest, and while the game graciously allows you to go on playing with your character, I feel spent and see this as a good point to to put Skyrim on the back burner. Still, I want to correct my earlier assumptions, and while Skyrim still is a very strong game, and definitely worthy to be admitted into my personal Valhalla of gaming, a full play-through still showed some points which appear as weaknesses.

Non-optional upgrades

I feel that Skyrim - contrasted with, e.g., Fallout New Vegas - has only limited replay value (which is a good thing in a very tangible way, with just having wasted half a month on the game). A replay of an RPG is often motivated by trying out a different character type, and the best RPGs allow very different approaches to plot and gameplay. I don't see that possibility in Skyrim: While the whole setting screams for a barbarian character - a Conan, if you will - who abhors the unnatural magecraft, and this would be a nice choice for a replay, I would always end up playing a character with at least moderate magical abilities, as the gameplay forces you to use magics to deal with your opponents - especially the dragons. As your figure becomes better at what he does, and as only a handful of tactics seem to work, the pool of possible characters seems rather limited, even if you have some ten fantasy races to chose from. But a fighter-mage is a fighter-mage, whatever his ear size. And your character will get good at lockpicking, seems no way around it. At the moment I don't plan a replay (again, this is a thinly veiled blessing) because I already know how my character would develop.

A nagging sense of familiarity

Atmosphere is Skyrim's strong suit - even after dozens of hours the environment appears beautiful, and you are regularly surprised with epic views and vistas. This atmosphere (and the fact that Skyrim does not fall into the theme park trap - or structures its theme park in such a subtile way that it never becomes an issue) was my main motivation for going out an exploring. And while exploring, you find the dungeons - their symbols pop up on your compass, conveniently divided into nord barrows, nord crypts, dwemer ruins, armed camps, unspecified caves and so on.

Once inside, the feeling of being in a strictly linear haunted house ride becomes stronger with each dungeon you pass. After a dozen or so you find yourself looking for the sliding wall section close to the entrance where your treasure-laden ass will be deposited after dealing with the boss fight, and that's not a sign of full immersion. I'd rather have complex cave systems where you could get completely lost while your supplies and assets dwindle, but other players told me they where very happy with this haunted house dungeon design - getting lost is not for everyone, and it's nice to know that you don't have to walk back all those crypts, some of us have work to do etc. And the visual appeal and distinctiveness of the dungeons makes up for the linear design.

So there you have it: two minor niggles, one of which is purely subjective, while the other allows me to leave the house again. I see no need to correct my earlier rating.

5 of 5 cute little rabbits soul-trapped and fireballed