Amphibious Thing

by on June 24, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Amphibious Thing is another Kindle book that I picked up on sale, though I was uncertain that I’d care much about the life of an early Eighteenth Century person I’d never heard of. Thankfully, the book is well-written and fairly engaging, even while wading through reams of surviving letters and other sources.

This is one of the better biographies I’ve read, as it does a very good job of both focusing on a particular topic, and not bouncing around much in time in order to do so.  If you have no interest in the period, this book won’t engender it, but it does provide a good look at the court of George II, and the ministry of Robert Walpole; and that latter is probably enough to get some people’s attention. Reading it with a little knowledge of the period certainly helped my appreciation of the book.

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Fool’s Mate

by on June 20, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch came over on Sunday, and we played some Sekigahara. He’d played once before, and enjoyed it more than enough to request it again.

I had Tokugawa the first game, and kept up a fairly aggressive strategy the entire game. This blew up a couple times with some expensive defeats, but I generally caused some casualties every battle (and there were a lot of them), and had some very good victories as well. I took Ueda castle early and kept it all game, but otherwise the East was a problem, with Date being defeated early, and an attempt at retaking Sendai failed.

Resources were tied at first, and then went to Patch for a couple turns, and then started going to me as fighting around Kuwana got very intense for a while. About mid-game I pushed south with a large army of Maeda, and had the cards to use it. I think this did a lot to break the deadlock in the West in my favor, and at the end of the game I had a commanding position, and was starting to mop up his armies, for an 18-9 victory.


State of the board at the end of the game.

After lunch we turned it around, and I was over-aggressive. During week 2 I pushed the main army up to Sawayama, and Patch got in behind me to attack Osaka with a decent force (I hadn’t properly credited that he could reach it). Mori’s army duly appeared, and a loyalty challenge on my second Mori card kept me from even doing any damage to Tokugawa’s army. That was the last act of turn 2, and Patch naturally won the initiative and won the siege of Osaka to win the game. (Now that I think of it, the surviving Mori blocks could have retreated into the castle…. darn it.)

We re-set the board and started a third game that didn’t go much longer. I pushed up to Gifu, but still had plenty holding things behind me. However, Patch’s nearby army had the cards, while I could only deploy a couple of units. He followed up with another fight against me before I could react, and eliminated the army, including Ishida. So Patch won that game in the second half of turn 3.

Technically, we had more time after that, but if the next game went the distance we wouldn’t have the time, so we called it there with Patch getting two wins to my one. (Sorry that none of the photos of the other games came out well.)

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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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