Enchantress From the Stars

by on June 16, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Enchantress From the Stars has a bit of an ambitious high concept, and pulls it off very well. The main ‘problem’ with the book is a galaxy full of inhabited planets where all the naturally-occurring intelligent life is human, or very nearly so; but paying attention to alien biology would be to miss the point of the book (and in 1970, it was still a somewhat acceptable idea).

The book is a clash between three civilizations, with a viewpoint character from each one. The ‘main’ story is given by the most advanced civilization, which has a non-interference policy that makes the Prime Directive look fairly tame. They keep keep themselves hidden from ‘younglings’: civilizations at a less-developed stage than themselves, including several star-faring ones, letting them find their own way, and assert that trying to help only leads to problems and stunted development.

But they do interfere on occasion. Such as here, where a less-developed Empire (I don’t think any other name is given) is colonizing a planet with natives that are still at a medieval level of development. The Service sends a small team to scare the Empire off the planet, and leave both cultures to evolve on their own. There are plenty of problems of course, and it makes a good YA adventure, with a certain amount of philosophy and growing up.

The main part that works is each of the three viewpoint character’s sections are written differently. They’re not announced or otherwise kept rigid enough to ordinarily keep it from being confusing, but the style changes between the three is so marked as to eliminate that problem. The native’s point-of-view is by far the most striking, being written with the feel of a lot of medieval tales, and is very successful. The Empire’s point-of-view conversely is the weakest, being in a conventional third-person, and being the least frequent, and least involved in the actual plot.

It’s a little too obvious with the points that it is making, but the novel does avoid feeling ‘preachy’, by virtue of the main character always being challenged to thing thinks out herself, so the philosophy is always a dialog. So it maintains a good flow and remains a fun read throughout, with the plot and characters always keeping center stage.

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Dungeons & Sorcery Spells 6

by on June 12, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

I’ve been off of this project for a while, but here’s another ten spells for my GURPS Dungeons & Sorcery system. Most of these deal changing form, or related ideas, but I’ve also finally included write ups for Identify, and Dispel Magic, the last basic utility spells.

Alter Self (C)
Alteration, Somatic, Verbal
20 points + 5 points/level
Casting Time: 2 seconds
Casting Roll: None
Range: None
Duration: 3 minutes

Casting this spell allows the magic-user to alter his appearance. While he cannot imitate the appearance of a specific person, he can change his apparent height, weight, race, or species.

In all cases, his new appearance must roughly correspond with his own: He can only take on the appearance of a humanoid race (well, as humanoid as he is—a dragon magic-user would have to appear as something suitably draconic), and must keep the same Size Modifier, though he could appear shorter or taller within the bounds of that SM.

This acts as replacing the caster’s racial template with a new one, but at the base level of the spell, the new racial template can cost no more that the caster’s actual one. In many cases, the caster can cheat this by just taking the cosmetic 0-point Features of the template for his new form (e.g., a human magic-user could use alter self to turn into an elf with none of their advantages—but if all elves are beautiful, and he is not, he will make a fairly ugly elf, even though he has the pointed ears).

Each level of the spell allows the caster to take an extra 25 points of advantages in his new ‘racial template’. He can use this to ignore any racial mental disadvantages (which would raise the cost of the template), and to pick up physical advantages like gills or winged flight. He will never gain any magical advantages of the race, like innate spell-like abilities.

Morph (Cannot Imitate Specific Person, -10%; Cannot Memorize Forms, -50%; Extended Duration, x3, +20%; Requires Gestures, -10%; Requires Magic Words, -10%; Retains Shape, -20%; Sorcery, -15%; Takes Extra Time, x2, -10%) [0.2×100] Each level adds 25 points to the value of Morph.
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White Mare’s Daughter

by on June 8, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

White Mare’s Daughter is technically a historical novel, but I find it hard to classify it as such. This takes place way back in prehistory, around 4500 BCE or so, featuring a pair of cultures that it is impossible to know much about. Moreover, Tarr uses a contentious interpretation, and then takes a fair amount of artistic license to build her societies. Moreover, the world is drawn in broad enough strokes that it is hard to get a grasp on, and I never got more than the vaguest notions of the landscape and geography.

So, it took me a while to get into the book. It started slow, and trades between three viewpoint characters, which helped keep the action slow as they all got established. Ironically, Danu was the one who really started to get the book moving for me, and his viewpoint nearly disappears late in the book. Once going, however, it drew me in and kept me going with a very well structured plot.

The central piece of the novel is the Goddess-worshiping culture of the settled cities, with it’s entirely female-dominated society. Much of the book revolves around the culture shock of them meeting the entirely patriarchal steppe nomads, and demonstrating the differences between them (and giving us an anchor into this society). Much of it is fine, and the archaeological record does show that they seemed to have no knowledge of war, it is presented as too much of a utopia to fully hang together. Violence is nearly unknown (though not completely), though there are still some personal conflicts; the presentation would not be off as how a society views itself (…which it effectively is at first).

As appropriate for an early period, there is a lot of spiritualism inherent in the characters, which reminds me strongly of how Mary Renault depicted Theseus’ inner workings in The King Must Die. It’s very well done, and in conjunction with the overriding ‘end of an era’ theme of the book, really lends a mythic feel to what is otherwise a fairly straightforward plot.

This also is a source of my resistance to classifying it just as a historical novel, though I have no real reason not to. I also classify it as a very good one, though again, it does take a while to get started.

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Medieval Siege Weapons: Western Europe

by on June 4, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Osprey’s book on siege weapons does it’s intended job of introducing the subject, but that’s about it. Sam Thompson’s gouache illustrations show a nice variety of specific examples of machines, but the rest of the book tends to be unspecific and feels lost in the weeds.

Now the main culprit for this is just the lack of real evidence. The book spends a lot of time looking at various terms used in manuscripts, and is good for showing region variations, but since most times its just the term with no description, it’s nearly impossible to know how technically precise any of these authors are, and therefore more than the most vague generalities. Since this was a New Vanguard book, I was wanting a fairly detailed physical analysis and description of the parts, but it just doesn’t exist here. The main chapter on throwing machines is nicely divided up into sections on the basic types, and gives some indication of when certain types were known to be in use in various parts of Europe, though a timeline for the major pieces of evidence would have helped there too.

That said,the 585-1385 time period fits with the dates of the first and last solid examples that are given, though there’s nothing else to really give a reason to those 400 years. I think I’d much prefer a book more like the Elite-series one on Roman siege engineering, which went a lot more into how sieges were conducted.

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En Garde!

by on May 31, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark and Jason came over Saturday for some gaming. Dave was unavailable, so it was just the three of us, and we went for a ‘long game’ of Blackbeard.

I went for the same pattern as our previous three-player game, and deployed two pirates at the start, one in the Atlantic and one in India. Mark put one in India with me, and another in the Caribbean, while Jason just deployed one in the Caribbean to start with. The good news is that I had drawn Edward Teach (Blackbeard) as one of my three, and kept him in reserve at first.

I managed to swoop in and take the merchant that had started in India before Mark could, and he ended up sailing for the Gold Coast. I managed to get a decent start on VPs with a couple early retirements, and brought out Edward Teach in the Atlantic. Jason had taken the lead with a very nice retirement on his Caribbean nest egg, but I managed a very good career with Teach, living up to his name by taking prizes up and down the Atlantic coast, and getting a decent amount of ransom. He successfully retired with a Notoriety in the mid-20s and a decent net worth, which shot me  up to ~120 VPs, and well past Jason (Mark had been somewhat even with me).

Further retirements pushed Mark and Jason past 100 VPs, but I was climbing into the high 100s. As the game was coming to a close, Jason’s latest captain did very well in the Caribbean, getting a good amount of Notoriety and several high-value cargoes, as well as staying too strong to be challenged by warships and King’s Commissioners. All this time, I had been holding a Duel-4 captain to possibly get someone else’s ship, but I didn’t have the Piratical Ambition card. I finally drew it in between the turn that Jason converted all his booty to net worth and bought a safe haven, and the turn where he used it. With four dice for the duel, I rolled poorly, burned a Cunning and re-rolled just about as bad, and then used his last Cunning to re-roll a 15, which Jason couldn’t match on a 3-die Duel rating. Sadly, all I got was an empty ship with poor crew loyalty, and a captain with no Cunning left, but I had kept Jason from retiring with 7900 Net Worth. Between that and double Notoriety, he would have gone well into the 200 VP range.

My previously-active captain was on the Atlantic coast, following in Blackbeard’s footsteps (wake?), racking up a decent score, but I got the third draw of the General Pardon card on the turn that he would have gone in and retired, getting me 12 points for his Notoriety instead of 24 for that and ~14 VP for Net Worth. My final score was 210 VPs, while Jason had 104 and Mark managed 111 at the end.

One really good retirement put me in a strong lead, and I managed to do fairly well for the rest of the game to keep it. Getting that duel to wreck Jason’s main chance really shows how powerful keeping the right captain in reserve can be. I think Anti-Pirate activity was overall down from our previous game, though I certainly gave it a few tries. I pretty much ended up sticking with the Atlantic coast the entire game, but there were consistently merchantmen to be had there, which made up for the poor cash value. I should probably try concentrating on the Caribbean next time, as I’ve never really done that, though it tends to get attention from everyone else.

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