Anime… First Half of 2016

by on July 16, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Anime

I try to mention what I’ve been watching after every Japanese quarter-year season of anime. However, events in March conspired to interrupt easy anime watching, and I missed half of the Winter 2016 season and all of the Spring 2016 season. Smudge has been diving in again recently, and now I’ve finally caught up on anime watching for the last half-year.

Erased — This instantly became the hit of the Winter season for me. Satoru Fujinuma occasionally involuntarily goes back in time a minute or so to ‘fix’ something that just went wrong, and then ends up going back eighteen years to his own childhood. Kind of a mix between Quantum Leap and Detective Conan, it didn’t quite go where I was expecting (I was expecting a back-and-forth pattern to emerge). The ending was weakened a lot by being fairly sudden, with no real foreshadowing of who the villain was. Which is a shame because it was excellent in every other way, and I do still recommend it.

Konosuba — This is also from the Winter 2016 season, but Smudge only discovered it a couple weeks back. Our Hero is an otaku who dies and is given a chance to be reborn into a different world with his memories intact, and a single item of power. He chooses to take the goddess giving him the offer, and he finds himself in a RPG-like fantasy realm (with quests and everything). There’s a lot of fanservice in this one, but it seems that this is supposed to be part of the series’ parody of fantasy RPGs. Like a harem anime, he gets three attractive girls around him… and they’re all nearly useless. It sounds like we’ll get another season in a bit, which is good, as the plot is still just getting going, but the humor has been good.

The Heroic Tale of Arslan — I’ve finally just caught up to the previous seasons of of this. A new season’s just started, but since I’ve been watching it dubbed, I may wait for that to come out. At any rate, it continues to be a very strong fantasy story with a lot of historical flavor.

Haikyu — This was actually the first thing I ended up getting caught up on. It continues to do well with not bogging down into single games not stretching across more than a couple episodes, and the continued evolution of the team and primary characters. Now that the initial stuff is over, it’s not quite as fun, but I continue to enjoy it.

Utawarerumono: The False Faces — This… could have been a great series. A lot of the elements that made the original work are here. But it needed a smaller cast harem, more time on the political side… and a different ending.

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Elemental Channeling

by on July 12, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

A little while back Chris Rice presented an idea for a new GURPS magic system on his blog. His main goal was to use the ‘long-term fatigue’ idea from GURPS: ATE. Naturally, it immediately gave me an idea that didn’t use that at all. Instead, I turned to the concept of tally from Threshold-Limited Magic in Thaumatology.

The world flows into existence from the commingling of the four elements: Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. All magic is the process of letting the power of one of the elements flow through the caster to affect the nature of the world around him. This, however, pushes him out of alignment with the universe’s balanced state, sending him down a destructive path that can consume him if left unchecked.

This system uses two tallies (or four if it’s easier for you to think of it that way), one for the opposed elements of Fire and Water, and the other for the opposed elements of Air and Earth. Casting a spell incurs tally in that element as given on T76. This should also use the Auras optional rule; anyone who can see magic will be able to see the unbalanced state of the caster’s mystical makeup, and very possibly a non-magical physician should also be able to see this through observation of the four humors in his patient. I would also recommend allowing the Automatic Maintenance option with free ambient energy. The main way to reduce a tally is to cast a spell in the opposite element.

In terms of actual spells, instead of using the standard spell system’s elemental colleges (which each have a standard attack spell, etc.), the elements are effectively Realms as in Syntactic Magic (T188). Each element has its own role to play, and mages don’t get to just alternate between Fireball and Water Jet in combat to stay balanced.

  • Fire: The realm of energy and destruction. All methods of directly damaging something come out of Fire.
  • Air: The realm of movement and thought. Travel and divination spells come from Air.
  • Water: The realm of renewal and change. Healing and transformation spells come from Water.
  • Earth: The realm of stability and resistance. Defensive spells and many ‘buffs’ come from Earth.

Part of the point here is keep combat-useful spells from being on both ends of the same tally scale. There’s still potential for multiple ways to get something done though; Heat Room would be a Fire spell and Resist Cold would be an Earth spell…. From here, there’s a few different routes that could be taken. A complete reorganization of the standard spells as per Changing the Colleges (T41) would work (and be a lot of work), but the concept seems well suited for Syntactic magic as mentioned before, or use as an alternate structure for Ritual Path Magic. (Here’s a question: Taking a glance at Realms as Powers on T190, is there any established mechanism for having abilities rack up tally?)

An extra possibility is for each element to differ slightly in casting. Earth spells may last longer, but be shorter ranged (say by adding one to the Margin of Success for time, but subtracting one for range when using Parameter Effects, T181), while Air spells are longer ranged, but have shorter durations. Water may take longer to cast, but have a wider area of effect, while Fire is faster but must be tightly focused.

Ignoring the details of actual spellcasting, there’s other details that need looking into. This is meant as a fairly difficult/dangerous form of spellcasting, so I figure every spell costs one fatigue point as well as the tally to keep mages from just casting their way to zero after racking up a large tally (no, energy reserves and external sources of FP are not normally available). Tally recovery is slow and my initial thought is for it to be zero, and all recovery is through actually casting opposing spells. However, if you want mages to at least have the option of being specialists, recovery of 1-4 tally per day would be better. Another option is recovery by prolonged exposure to the appropriate element: sitting under a waterfall to reduce Fire tally. (I seem to remember a vague mention of just this type of thing somewhere in one of the Thaumatology books, but can’t find it.) This could lead to the seemingly counter-intuitive situation of fire mages running a water temple, or earth mages congregating on windswept mountaintops….

Each element would have its own Calamity Table (T77), though they should closely mirror each other, and can probably be put into one table with a column for each element’s particular effect. In opposition to the problems of the rest of the system, calamities are less immediately aggressive here. Use the normal threshold of 30 and +1 to the table per 5 points of tally over threshold, but only roll 2d6 on the table (this probably needs more rework, but the idea is that the current tally drives the results more than in the standard). I’d be looking at a table progression like the following:

2-10 Nothing
11-12 Quirk related to appropriate Humor
13-15 Threshold reduction
16-18 5-point disadvantage
19-20 It becomes more difficult to cast opposite-element spells
21-24 Caster has an elemental aura around him (always raining, increased temperature…)
25 10-point disadvantage
26-30 Caster is Terminally Ill
31-39 Caster death by turning into an element (gust of wind, exploding in flames…)
40+ Permanent elemental locus where the caster was

As a final note, while initially discussing this with my roommate Smudge, she came up with the idea of using a five element system (such as the traditional Chinese elements) where the goal was to stay in harmony with all five. Effectively, your tally would be the difference between the element where you’ve used the most magic, and the element where you’ve used the least.

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Full-Spectrum Powers

by on July 8, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses is an interesting project. Technically, it looks at all the possibilities for perceiving the universe, and shows how to represent them in-game by re-packaging the existing abilities. In actuality, it mostly limits itself to what is biologically plausible, and leaves much of the truly fantastic to other products; this still covers a fantastic amount of ground.

Since this is a Powers book, it starts with a look at Sources that (with Foci—generally senses or a sense organ here) define a Power in GURPS. This ranges from ‘natural’ enhanced senses, to hypercognition (concentrating your brain to nothing but the information already coming in), to implants, to actual superpowers. I’m a bit leery of the 5% cost break allowed natural biological passive senses here; this is given for “technological countermeasures ranging from TL0 herbs to advanced nanotechnology”, but since Perception rolls (including opposed ones for hiding, etc.) are part of the game definition of how senses work, this makes me a bit uncomfortable. But it does meet the system definitions for getting a such a break, and it’s a pretty tiny one.

There is then a good discussion of different qualities of senses, from Vague, to Discriminatory, and Precise, and other terms that have already been in use in GURPS. It’s a very good discussion, but stops short of being great in two ways: First, I’m not entirely happy with how the hierarchy works out, especially when Basic splits into three separate paths. But this is caused by working inside the structure of advantages already given. Second, I find the discussion, and the following section of modifiers easy to mix up. The general description of what a Precise sense is is in the middle of page 7, the modifier to make something a Precise sense is near the bottom of page 8, and I usually find myself looking for the former when needing to reference the latter. I think it would have been much better to put all the information about a particular term, what it means, and the modifier used for it, all in one place. Also, I think a short ‘under the hood’ box, spelling out in one place the definition of each standard human sense, would help with thinking about how modifying them works (i.e., ‘Hearing is a Basic sense, with intermediate-range in a 360° arc’). Of course, there’s already a couple of boxed sections in here, which do not help with the sense of a jumbled presentation.

Along the way, there’s still more useful information, such as a treatment of senses that can deal damage (an electric eel is mostly sensing his environment through his electric field; the shock it delivers is an extra). Active Electroreception (eels again) gets a write up under Vibration Sense, Infravision gets split into near infrared (modern active IR equipment) and thermal infrared (poor resolution, but you see radiated body heat), and a couple more. There’s even an entire page of skill bonuses from various sense types.

And then we get to the bulk of the book. I count about 85 ability write ups categorized by what they sense: electromagnetic radiation, electricity and magnetism, acoustics and vibrations, and the ever-popular ‘miscellaneous’ (which goes far afield, from chi to gravitational waves). This is the worked-out part of the book after the first parts establish the tools to be used. Most of these these are counted as ‘supersenses’, not really possible, but tend to show up in fiction, with almost equal numbers of ‘sensor implants’ (electronic devices) and ‘enhanced senses’ (modeled after actual abilities seen in nature, plus some that are obvious how they’d work even if they haven’t been seen). It’s a very impressive list, and I doubt I’ll ever touch the vast majority of it. Those parts I do end up using will be very handy though, and the fact that they’re part of a larger set of possibilities makes it easier to understand their niche.

As a focused product, you are generally going to be interested or not, but GURPS players not wanting to worry about outre senses may still be interested in the extra crunch given to the existing hearing distances (giving their equivalent decibel levels as a way of generating modifiers at different ranges), and the table showing just how much light corresponds to the various darkness penalties. The crunch focus keeps its usefulness down for the non-GURPS player, but the extensive listing of biological and superscience abilities could be inspirational for anyone writing up aliens and the like.

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Out of the Pass

by on July 4, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: D&D

The Bloodstone adventure series came to a conclusion with H4 The Throne of Bloodstone in 1988. While nowhere near as elaborate a production as H1, with its thin box, BattleSystem counters and 3D-Adventure buildings, it was still more elaborate than the usual module with a 96 page book, and a poster-sized sheet with various maps, including a sprawling one of Orcus’ citadel in the Abyss. At this point, it went fully over to Forgotten Realms trade dress with the standard narrow frame around the cover, and the large gold-and-stone logo.

Taking ‘high level’ to new heights, the module advertises as being for levels 18-100, which brought it in for a fair amount of knee-jerk criticism. However, as an introductory section rightly points out, at least if you follow the AD&D rules as written, there’s just not a lot of difference between a level 100 character and a level-25 character as the various ‘to hit’ and saving throw tables shut down in the late teens to twenties, and past the level 29 limit of the spell tables, the only thing that continues to go up is hit points, at a somewhat modest +1 to +3 per level. Of course… that is assuming that the people playing games that have characters going that high didn’t just extend the various tables as they went. But as an official TSR product, the authors have the luxury of assuming use of the official AD&D rules without variants. There’s actually some good advice for high-level play that recommends paying attention to the rules for magic item destruction and the time for magic-types to recharge their spells (70 hours for a Magic-User to get all his spells back…). Also, several fights in the later parts of the module are actually scaled to the party’s levels.

The module begins right where H3 left off, with a war between Bloodstone and Vaasa that has stalemated at the Ford of Goliad. The Vaasan army is too big to fight (short of unexpected clever PC ideas… though that’s pretty well sledgehammered away) and can’t get past the ford (too far away from its base of power to keep all the undead going). So the DM is to present the players with the idea of sneaking into the citadel of the Witch-King Zhengyi to destroy his base of power. Since he is obviously backed by Orcus, this will also entail finding a way to confront and defeat Orcus as well.

(Warning: I keep descriptions very general, but if you wish to avoid knowing anything at all about the contents/plot of the module, skip down to the Conclusion.)

The Witch-King’s citadel is actually fairly small, and unusual in form. The DM is invited to show the players a full-page illustration of the citadel, but unfortunately it’s not very good as the artist didn’t get a description to go with the cutaway view of the citadel and drew it as the cutaway showed it (i.e., among other errors, it shows a pair of small towers to either side instead of a wall surrounding it). There’s only about 20 areas split across several levels (not the administrative hub of a large kingdom…), but is designed to present the party with a stiff mix of tough enemies (Zhengyi himself is a 30th level M-U Lich) and deadly puzzles. Once successfully negotiated, the party is confronted with a gate to the Abyss, which should look familiar after the end of H2, and a deus ex machina to egg them on to the Abyss to challenge Orcus and take and destroy the Wand of Orcus so that he will be unable to interfere with the Prime Material Plane for the next hundred years.

This  is where the module gets frustrating. The party gets dumped on the first layer of the Abyss, the realm of Pazuzu, “Palace of 1,001 Closets”. Or at least 665 of them, as there’s conduits to all the other layers of the Abyss scattered around, and the party is left to try them at random until they finally find their destination. So… Orcus is influencing the Realms through the gate the PCs just came through, and there’s no signs of traffic from his conduit to the gate? No trail? No command posts? No checkpoints on any of the conduits, letting things go through Pazuzu’s realm at will? Pretty close. Going through a conduit is somewhat difficult, and the party may encounter Pazuzu himself (along with random patrols of demons), but they’re mostly free to try things at random until getting it right. Worse, there’s no immediate way to know when they have reached Orcus’ realm (though the increased numbers of undead encountered should be a good clue).

Wandering around the Abyss and Orcus’ realm serve two purposes: exhausting the party, and challenging them with the trap of steady alignment change towards chaotic evil. There are some possibilities for a group to gather some allies (there’s a good number of demons who’d like to pull someone as powerful as Orcus down), but not nearly as many as might be thought, and they generally lead to the alignment change problem (there’s a certain amount of Lawful Stupid in force in the module).

The map of Orcus’ palace takes up the bulk of the poster sheet, making it inconvenient for the DM to lay out and refer to. However, much of what’s presented is visible to the outside, so there’s a pair of pages in the module designed to be overlayed on the map to present a full outside view to the players (not as good as could be hoped, but an interesting idea). Again, the design is inventive, and straight down the gonzo sensibilities of AD&D (hey, it’s the Abyss!), and does a nice job not telling players they can’t dodge obstacles, just that it’s tougher than it looks. I’d say inventive players will both be rewarded and suitably frustrated.

There is both more and less than might be expected after dealing with Orcus, including a pit arena fight against Tiamat, and then because two evils make a good, evil destroys evil, uh… well. The party gets to plant the White Tree of Gondor Bloodstone to protect the valley from Orcus even after he reforges his wand. There’s a very nice pair of pages at the end giving different ideas of where to go from here for further adventuring, including some that deal with native Forgotten Realms concerns, and one that concentrates on running the kingdom trough the D&D Companion Set rules.

Conclusion

The module has a lot to recommend it. The design of the various places the party goes to is inventive, major monsters/NPCs get ‘capsule’ descriptions that give the DM ‘hooks’ into running them, and if they aren’t utterly devoted to ending the PCs lives, describe how they might be negotiated with. I’ll also note that any reference I see to the module from people who played it is very positive. The climax of a high-level AD&D story deserves to be over the top, and the module not only delivers, but presents a nicely alien environment. Players who go through this should rightly feel they’ve done something special.

But I will note that despite being larger, it feels more confined than the previous modules. H1-H3 all feature a relatively straightforward story, but have sections where the players are free to find their own way to reach the goal. H1 has the players finding ways to gain the confidence of, and train as militia, the residents of Bloodstone Pass. The battles are more-or-less scheduled, but what the players meet them with is up to them. H2 is largely dungeon crawl, but turns the party loose a couple times to deal with life in the pass and explore the Underdark. H3 has a fairly scripted war, but with just a little effort, it can present them with rich options of maneuver. Better yet, that module starts out letting the players loose to solve the challenge of converting mined bloodstone into cash, and deciding what to do with this budget. Even H2, with it’s large dungeon crawl eating up much of the module, felt like it had a bit more going on than this.

The tendency of the H-series to highlight the latest major release continues here. This time, it is the Manual of the Planes. It is pointed out that demons are more powerful on their home plane, and that Orcus is much more powerful where he’s the Prime Power, and stats are noted as being adjusted to match. There’s a nice bit of using player knowledge as PC knowledge, where the DM is invited to let the players look through relevant sections of the Manual of the Planes during the initial briefing, and after that what the players remember is what the PCs know. BattleSystem does not even get mentioned in the blurb or introduction to the module, though it gets suddenly recommended to run a couple of the larger fights.

In all, it’s a good, if frustrating, end to a good, if frustrating, series. The original Bloodstone Pass is easily the highlight of the series with its attempt at doing something truly different. Throne of Bloodstone completes the series’ transition back to regular adventuring, running full-tilt away from the political realm of running the kingdom that is put together through the series, but H1 and H4 are the modules in the set that need the least playing around with to run well.

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Blenheim: Battle for Europe

by on June 30, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Charles Spenser is certainly correct in his assertion that the Battle of Blenheim is one of the more important battles of history that is not well remembered today. This is more surprising in the English-speaking world since it was an English commander in charge, and English troops played an important part in the battle.

I’m not so sure how much I can go for his subtitle, “How Two Men Stopped The French Conquest Of Europe“, however. It’s not just a tag put on by the publisher, as it is certainly an idea present in his book, but it’s not that well supported. The immediate consequences of a (likely) French victory in the War of Spanish Succession are obvious enough, but after some good analysis of  internal French troubles one wonders just how well they could have done. Finally, I felt through the entire book that the story of the second man, Prince Eugène of Savoy, was not very well served by the narrative.

In fact, Blenheim suffers most from being too close to typical English accounts of the battle, instead being much more about the story of Marlborough than anything else. There are good reasons for this, but I was hoping that the book would move its center of gravity a little further away from the instinctual ‘how great our man is’ mode.

Thankfully, the book is at the same time much more than that, and very handy for the casual history reader. Spenser does spend quite a bit of time laying the groundwork, presenting the career of Louis XIV as whole, as well as William of Orange’s resistance to his territorial aims in the Low Countries, and an account of the War of the League of Augsburg. So the background is very good, and takes up a fair chunk of the book.

The War of Spanish Succession itself is centered around Marlborough’s campaigning, and isn’t an account of the war as a whole; coverage after Blenheim drops off dramatically. That said, as with much else with the book, what is there is well done, and the Marlborough’s move from the Low Countries to the Danube is handled very well.

As a casual history book, centered around Marlborough, it’s very good, and other viewpoints from contemporary diaries are included to good effect, and I recommend it, but on that basis only. Prince Eugène’s story is given, but not in as much detail. As a history of the War of Spanish Succession it fails from not giving proper attention to the rest of the war, and as a history of the Battle of Blenheim, it spends too much time on the rest.

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