Barbaricum

by on August 29, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Writing

[Repeated from a post on RPG Geek, as I’ve been meaning to explore the concept further.]

What further accounts we have are fabulous: as that the Hellusians and Oxiones have the countenances and aspect of men, with the bodies and limbs of savage beasts. This, as a thing about which I have no certain information, I shall leave untouched.
—Tacitus, Germania

One of the beliefs in the ancient world was that civilization made the man. Those peoples removed from civilization were not only barbarians, but as they became further removed from the civilized world, they became more savage and alien and bestial, until just past the limits of the known world, the men took on the appearance of beasts.

An idea I’ve been kicking around since last winter is a fantasy world where ‘civilization makes the man’ is true—at least in some respect. It’s the basis of what I hope to be an upcoming campaign world, and this post is as much to start forcing me into doing something about it as anything else.

The general idea for the setting is a fantasy world taking a lot of cues from Earth around the 6th Century. That is, I want to borrow a lot from history without feeling the need to do a lot of research to get it right. 🙂 Two of the first things I need to do is start coming up with new names for all the historical analogs so they can start taking on their own character, and working out the geography. The part I’m really working with in my head is the equivalent to Western Europe.

No one, not even the scholars of the Empire, know where people come from. ‘People’ come in all sorts of forms. But it is known that the more ‘civilized’ a people are, the more they look the same. Moreover, a people that becomes more settled, more advanced, in technology, philosophy, and any of a number of other things, in time begin to look more… ‘human’, where as less advanced peoples continue to resemble the animals from whence they presumably sprang [which is to say, they’re furries].

The Empire was founded by a people who had only recently become ‘human’ themselves, and early on adopted a citizenship requirements that looked for these traits. As the Empire spread, and the system became entrenched, various peoples were accorded rights within the Empire based on where on a scale of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ traits they fall.

The glory days of the Empire are long past, and today many lands are no longer administered directly by the Empire, though various invading tribes maintain the forms of the Empire, even though none of them would have the ius homii [human/ruling rights] under the Empire’s rule.

Peoples such as the [Romans] are fully human (though that’s only been true for about 800 years), while long-term subjects of the Empire such as the [Gauls] more resemble an anime-style furry—animal ears and tail and little else. Peoples from outside the barbaricum are more traditional furries, with all sorts of mixes with digitigrade legs and long muzzles (which tend to be the first to go), and then all sorts of shadings in between for more transitional peoples. [It is possible that various centaur-like creatures also exist, but I haven’t made up my mind on that.]

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O2 Blade of Vengeance Session 1: Act 1

by on August 22, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Posted In: O2 Blade of Vengeance

I’ve been kind of meaning to get back into RPGs for many years. Even when I wasn’t paying attention to much else, a few important books stayed out of storage, and I bought most of the GURPS Traveller line. When RPGGeek came out of beta a year ago, that temporarily went into overdrive.

One of the problems is that the logistics angle of getting more than two-three people (including me) into the same room at the same time on a regular basis is a problem (I’m burning most of the available points for that on wargaming meetings, and that is still more important to me). But Smudge has some free time, and needs to get away from the computer more, and I have a couple modules built for one DM and one player. Sadly, while I had plenty of free time in December, I didn’t get around to using it.

But we got started today on the old Expert ‘one-on-one’ module O2, which is much more plot-driven than the puzzle-driven O1. This involved a bunch of hunting through rulebooks for the last few days to find that one elusive rule that would be needed once the adventure got started.

Neither of us has played D&D in ages. In fact, I think the last time would be a memorable session when she ran X12: Skarda’s Mirror around ’88. Skarda got away, we were all hot to go after him; sadly the sequel never came about.

Anyway, things went fairly well mechanically. The main problem is that the level-7 elf the adventure is built around has a lot of options. Remembering those options, which are necessary, can be a problem for a beginner. I managed a TPK (okay, so one death = one party here) in the nastiest battle of the opening. We restored a ‘saved game’ and tried again.

Smudge was definitely having fun, which was good. I was having a lot of anxiety. Running something for the first time in forever, worrying about how it’s going, what should be next, have I forgotten something (yes, twice, I hate having to go back and mention something I’ve forgotten). All the dreams of knowing just what to do go up in smoke when I open my mouth. @_@

Spoilers start here, by the way.

So, Erystelle came home to Doneryll from years of adventuring to find it in flames, his family slaughtered, and goblins and hobgoblins everywhere. He ran off the outer guards on the road, killed the two ogres at the bridge across the Greenflow to his home and found the corpses of two of his younger siblings. Working towards Doneryll, he came across the scene of what had obviously been a great fight, with several members of family lying dead amidst the corpses of several goblins and hobgoblins. The apparent leader of the hobgoblins and his bodyguards were also there and started to move off without noticing him, and he attacked from behind, sending in his wardogs, and firing at the leader with his bow. The dogs kept the bodyguard busy while the leader charged to get inside bow range. One of the dogs was killed and the bodyguard charged forward to aid his leader. A couple of strong blows later, and our hero was dead.

The apparent leader of the hobgoblins and his bodyguards were also there and started to move off without noticing him, and he attacked from behind, sending in his wardogs as Erystelle fired off a lightning bolt aimed to catch the leader and one of the bodyguard. It was a powerful bolt, and both hobgoblins immediately died from it. The remaining hobgoblin charged, only to be cut down.

Looking over the scene, Erystelle found the remains of a letter from his great-uncle Druinder warning that something was up, with both a human and dwarven settlement destroyed recently. Between it, and the evidence on the ground, it was fairly obvious there was a red dragon involved. Erystelle moved off towards where the stables were, only to run into a group patrolling around the edge of the clearing. Five hobgoblins and two goblins on wolves. Sleep took care of all but one goblin and the wolves, who fought at first, but quickly took off. One wolf stayed and was killed, but the other and the goblin got away with a magic missile not enough to down the escaping wolf.

Continuing to the stables (which were also on fire), Erystelle found the goblin arguing with a pair of hobgoblins about a 10-foot-tall murderous elf roaming about. A quick fight saw all of them dead, and the mounts they had been holding for the leader and his guard not spooked enough to immediately bolt. A look through the saddlebags turned up a fair amount of treasure—this is where most of the loot that the hobgoblins had gathered had been put.

It seemed like that was probably the last of the monsters in the clearing, and it was getting to be late, so Erystelle decided to head immediately to Druinder’s for help and rest. Arriving late at night, he roused the household, and gave an abbreviated account of the day. Druinder recalled the legend of Gallanor Nightflame, an elvish hero who single-handedly killed the red dragon Gorkalk nearly 2000 years ago, and who was promised to return when needed again.

We ended the day there. Other events were scheduled, and act 1 (my immediate goal) is done. Now for the much more varied act two, which will start with a return to Doneryll to properly take care of the dead. I certainly needed a break, since the constant worry of ‘does she like it’ was getting to me. I need to remember how to relax and let it flow as the GM, I’m reacting more like I’m doing public speaking, except that that doesn’t quite hit me like this any more.

Oh, and Erystelle is turning out to be something of an ass.

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What a Week it Was

by on August 16, 2010 at 10:29 am
Posted In: Life

It all started on Monday. My dad called Monday night with a computer problem. This, quite thankfully, is quite rare. It was also in the middle of me being online with Patch finishing off my latest defeat in ASL. >.<

Anyway, he had picked up a really obnoxious scareware program, that had also locked off access to the internet. It was very easy to find out which one it was, but the recommended cures did not get it back on line so the program could rooted out with a dedicated utility. (The settings that it changed were easy to reset, but it still didn’t get back online.) Eventually, I thought to have him revert to recent restore point, which put the system back in a state before the scareware was installed. This thankfully worked. Two hours gone, I stayed up a bit late, and really dragged on Tuesday.

Getting home, there was good news, packages from Amazon and NewEgg had arrived. Amazon was a couple of books, which I don’t get to buy too often. NewEgg was my new mouse (I have been struggling with a mouse with an intermittent left button for entirely too long) and Smudge’s copy of Windows 7. About four days is a nice improvement over the three weeks that the last package from NewEgg took.

And then Smudge’s machine, Micca, died Tuesday evening. It was technically operating, but suddenly it was taking forever to load programs, and there were a lot of slowdowns inside of programs (like changing zones inside of WoW); all the while, the CPU was sitting at 1 or 2% activity. The file system had finally blown up again, and it was taking forever to retrieve data off the drive.

Micca had died less than two weeks before I had blocked out time to rebuild Micca—hopefully into an all new machine. I had recently inherited some some parts (motherboard, processor, RAM) from a friend at work, and about I knew about them is that they were on a more modern platform than Micca’s (Socket 939 to AM2). Sadly, the parts had spent some time just hanging from a doorknob in a bag (on an active door…). So, I traded out the parts (including a more modern graphics card that we inherited elsewhere) and started it up. The power came on, the fans started up. But nothing else happened, and I could hear a fan constantly spinning up and down.

Something was wrong.

Trading out video cards for a more primitive one got rid of the problem with the fan (was probably the video card fan, then) but still nothing else. The motherboard was quite likely dead. I contemplated just buying a replacement board, but the first thing to do was to find out just what kind of CPU was under that heat sink. Sadly, it turned out to be a single-core Athlon 64. It’s a more modern chip, but at a lower speed, and with half the cores of Micca. So, it’s back to the old hardware. What to do with 4 GB of DDR2 RAM…?

So, Micca is back with a new video card and Windows 7. Same hard drives, with a wipe and rework, so that will bear keeping an eye on. Win7 did mention that the data drive (the one with all the blowups) had an unsupported version of NTFS. Yeah. Okay, no more third-party partitioning software, even if the OS is refusing to see the entire drive (the original problem that led to all this frustration).

The hardware took up Wednesday, and Thursday was the initial install of Win7 on Micca. Friday night was raid night on WoW, which went smoothly, though the microphone wasn’t working yet.

Friday was also when we found out our rent check bounced. Everything had gone exactly as it should, except my deposit into the house account had gotten a 10-day hold on the check. Saturday had a fair amount of time wasted with me going back and forth, trying to figure out what happened, and getting a money order made and delivered to the landlord. Wells Fargo says the money went out of the account on schedule on the 4th. Chase is saying that Wells held it. >.<

Considering that I saw the money go out of my account on-line during this period, and the records are in accordance with Wells, I’m believing them over Chase at the moment.

Oh, and I spend three hours on Saturday trying to get Smudge’s Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro to work properly. I eventually found someone on the Creative forums has been working with the installers and getting all the old driver packages to install properly on modern systems. That got a lot of more detailed control panels, and some utilities I’m not familiar with active. The ports on the external box are active, but the controls, like the volume knob are not working. *sigh*

But the rest of the hardware is active and working now. The software install is still going on. And I need to find time (real soon now) to get her Mozilla profile fully active (including email).

Sunday was wargaming with Mark. Partway through the morning, my dad called again. Internet access was out for both my parents. Thankfully, it was pretty simple, and a reset of the cable modem and router sorted it all out.

This morning, I’m dealing with the fact that my work has moved from Outlook to Gmail en mass. I can’t say I’m happy with it, but there are some logical reasons for it. Hopefully, this will be the end of the computer emergencies.

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The Great Illyrian Empire

by on August 9, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Got the gang over for gaming yesterday. Had a full house—6 people! Went for the group’s fifth game of Advanced Civilization, which is always appreciated.

I had considered taking Babylon, as I haven’t played that position yet and Patch has been doing well there. But I drew fourth for pick order, and it went to Jason. The northwest was unoccupied, pushing me towards Thrace, Illyria or Italy. I took Illyria to grant Africa (Patch) some room, while making Italy untenable, while they might show up if I took Thrace. Mark took Assyria and Zjonni (running slightly late) took Crete; Dave had taken Egypt first thing.

I went my usual grow to maximum potential and delay the initial cities style, which is aided by the late Early Bronze Age barrier for Thrace and Illyria. I headed south into Italy, and east to the Black Sea early, expansion into Greece took a while longer. Crete split its attentions between Cyprus, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Greece, so that worked out well for me. Jason ran Babylon on a dense, small model that stalled territorial expansion and left a lot of area up for grabs. Africa sailed north and took Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, while we battled for control of the southern half of Italy for much of the game.

I was the first target of calamities, drawing Volcanic Eruption first, and then getting hit by it again a few turns later, where it killed Rome a second time, and Patch got in to build on the site for the third try, which stayed there for the rest of the game.

I was free of the big disasters after that, though I was the primary on Famine twice and Epidemic once. I got up to eight cities early on, and then stabilized at seven for most of the game, getting back to a fairly stable eight right at the end. This was just behind Egypt, which built up well, and was stable at nine cities for a good number of turns. Seeing Dave as the primary threat, I picked on him with disasters for a couple turns, which weakened him nicely. Then he drew Flood which kept him down for the rest of the available time.

The previous Flood hit Babylon, which was still centered on the starting flood plain, and this knocked him down enough that he never recovered fully. Everyone else did okay, mostly staying at around six cities. I did fairly well by trade, and was one of the first into the Late Bronze Age, despite a relatively late barrier for it. At the end, I was starting to turn up the discount machine, having gotten Engineering and had really good bonuses in orange and green to power my way to nine cards. I still needed to get a red Civ card though. Zjonni bought Architecture, which we haven’t payed much attention to, and was showing the value of building cities from out of the treasury.

In all, most things went my way, no real major fighting (good, because I was in the half of the table that didn’t have Metalworking), and none of the civ-destroying calamities came down on me. For once the emergencies more-or-less stayed with my ability to keep on top of them. Dave was doing even better in that department for most of the game until the three turns of disasters, ending with the Flood caught up with him. Assyria, Africa and Crete were all in a tight little pack, with none of them able to get a true advantage going.

Final Scores:

Side Player AST Cities Civ Cards Cards Treasury Total Place
Africa Patch 1000 200 365 0 5 1570 3
Illyria Rindis 1000 400 530 21 6 1957 1
Crete Zjonni 1000 250 260 7 6 1523 5
Assyria Mark 900 300 320 14 15 1549 4
Babylon Jason 900 200 215 9 3 1327 6
Egypt Dave 900 300 470 17 6 1693 2

Dave’s been on a good streak lately. He often worries about not being as good as the rest of us, but he won in Blackbeard last month, and put in a very solid performance for second as Egypt this month. I’m happy because I finally got a win after four straight seconds. Now I don’t care if I fall on my face next time, I’ve got my win. ^_^

We hope to get another game in in a month, before school starts up again for Zjonni. No real idea what we’ll play yet though.

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Tiger Leader

by on July 20, 2010 at 9:01 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over Saturday for gaming. It was his turn to pick the game du jour, and he for a game he’d gotten some years ago, and never got a chance to play: East Front Tank Leader. By John Hill, it is a late ’80s design focusing on the command and control aspects of tactical warfare, with platoons for individual units.

We went with the first scenario, which is supposed to be representative of the German drive on Prokhorovka. The set up is a little odd, with the first Russian force setting up within so many hexes of the victory city (determined by 2d6 roll), and alternating formations after that with the dice roll determining how far away from enemy forces you could set up. We ended up with one Russian brigade in the victory city, most of my forces south and slightly east of it on the same side of the river, the rest of the Russians in an arc around me to the east, and my last force on the road west of the city, needing to cross the river to get in.

All formations (companies and above) have a card, which is used to activate them during the turn. When a card is put down, it can be interrupted by another one with a better C3 rating. Somewhat oddly for game turns that are ~10 minutes, a platoon can either fire or move. This led to some early caution, since I wanted to move into the victory city, but was worried my PzIVs would be vulnerable in close range city fighting before they could attack.

The secret was the company of veteran Tigers that I had set up on a rise outside of town. Not only are they good tanks, but the veteran and morale bonuses allowed them to really dominate the action as Mark tried to move up to reinforce his company in the city. He was losing platoons at a rate of a little under three a turn, while it took a couple turns for me to lose anything.

I had expected that my two PzIV companies would get chewed up in the fighting against greater numbers of equivalent KV-1s and T-34s, but the Tigers had so much attention that this did not happen. I eventually lost one platoon of them, and two platoons of Panthers (oddly there was no special rule for the poor performance of early Panthers). One was lost guarding the ‘back door’ around the south end of the hill, while the other, and the Tiger, were lost to rolling a ’12’ on morale check, which puts it out of the game. (Actually, both of us got 12s more often than expected.)

By the end of the game, there were only about three Soviet companies left (out of eight), and more losses were taken on the final turn as he tried to charge in to claim some hexes of the city again for victory purposes (rules were just ‘occupy with an unsuppressed unit’—didn’t say there couldn’t be an enemy unit as well), and a final total of 3-1.

It’s not a bad game at all, and we’ll either have to give it another try, or go for one of the other games in the series (West Front, and Desert Steel). Though Mark just got in the reprint of Wilderness War and an AH copy of Hannibal, so the backlog is growing again.

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