Dungeons & Sorcery Spells 14

by on July 7, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

And now for another set of ten spells for Dungeons & Sorcery. The big standby of the bunch is lightning bolt, and the spells are generally third or fourth level. By my rarity system, fourth is when spells start getting harder to find, so we’re seeing a lot more semi-common, and named ones will go to uncommon.

Chill Shield (SC)
Evocation, Somatic, Verbal
47 points
Casting Time: 4 seconds
Casting Roll: none
Range: None
Duration: 10 minutes

The caster is wrapped in a veil of blue or green flames that do no damage, but are cold to the touch. All fire-based attacks are reflected by this shield—the caster takes no damage, and the damage is dealt to the attacker instead—if it can take damage from such an attack. However, all injury from cold-based attacks is doubled.

This is the twin of warm shield, and is usually found in spellbooks together with it.

Static (Fire; Extended Duration, x10, +40%; Reflection, +100%; Requires Gestures, –⁠10%; Requires Magic Words, –10%; Sorcery, –15%; Takes Extra Time, x4, –20%; Temporary Disadvantage: Vulnerability (Cold), x2, –30%) [1.55×30]
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The Rites of Peace

by on July 3, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I had thought Zamoyski’s book was just on the Congress of Vienna, but I should have taken a better look at the subtitle, which is accurate.

Zamoyski starts the action in December 1812, with Napoleon racing into the Tuileries just after news of the disaster in Russia. From here, you get, over the course of several chapters, a bare outline of the fighting through Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814.

Instead, Zamoyski looks at the peace process during this time. Both sides would rather not go through the expense and destruction of nearly a year and a half of fighting, but neither side was willing to give everything that the other desired either, so the fighting continued, until Napoleon’s shrinking army could not control the situation any more.

The Peace of Paris stops the fighting, but brings questions of what post-Napoleonic Europe is going to look like. The past quarter-century had seen conquests, annexations, partitions, and whole new political entities galore. The new potentates wanted to keep what they had been given, and the old wanted what had been taken away back.

So, a congress is scheduled in Vienna to sort this out, with the main focus of attention being Germany since the old Holy Roman Empire is gone, and it isn’t coming back. There is a stopover in London, which isn’t nearly as edifying as hoped, and points to the fact that nothing will be easy in Vienna.

From there, we get a real blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. With a host of nobility and their upper-crust representatives present, the full story is an entitled soap opera that could turn into a comedy if the subject wasn’t so serious. Zamoyski dives into the steamier (and seedier) side of the proceedings, giving a fairly well-rounded picture of the social scene, and how the emotions opened up by this affected the congress itself.

The thing that comes up during this, but doesn’t quite get enough immediate emphasis is that this isn’t—and isn’t really supposed to be—a fair-minded body of statesmen trying to get the fairest result out of a host of unfair history. This is the four biggest powers (five, once France gets into the proceedings) largely dictating to everyone else. Of course, it’s not like the major powers could easily agree to much of anything, which causes the entire process to become protracted and generate high feelings in everyone involved. This is the bulk of the book, and feels a bit interminable, but nowhere near as much so as the actual was for those involved.

Eventually outside events that everyone is aware of intervene again, and Vienna watches as Napoleon is found to slipped his exile on Elba, and heads to France rather than the expected Naples. After the Hundred Days, there is a renewed round of wrangling—France is potentially on the chopping block again, and does indeed loose a few bits of territory. But, the major problems had already been worked out, so the main work is merely to keep the more aggressive allies (notably Prussia) from doing too much damage.

All the way through, this is told in an entertaining style, and very clearly. It is as clear a book as you will find that has such a large primary and secondary cast. Zamoyski’s conclusions are a bit surprising. At the time, the congress was considered something of a failure, and certainly pointed up the vanity of people involved to their public detriment. Zamoyski agrees with this assessment, and fights against the later perceptions as having guaranteed European peace for most of a century. And he has some very good points, though I think he doesn’t give enough credit to how stable Europe was in the period compared to the 25 years previous. But, he does say that if the congress did not live up to its promises, there’s also no clear alternative that would have necessarily been better. And, it did pave the way towards better models such as Versailles (which at least, with major exceptions, tried to reference what the actual populations wanted), and the United Nations.

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Anime Spring 2024

by on June 29, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Anime

So it’s the end of another anime season (cour), and there a bunch of stuff I haven’t even started yet. But, plenty has been watched too. Here’s the general rundown, most recommended first, though everything here is actually very good:

Vinland Saga — We’re just finishing up the second season of this. It’s been a very interesting ride, with a lot of themes of Christian pacifism in a violent world working out. Presumably, the third arc will again be a very different story than the first two, which points up just how much the creator has to say through the life of one individual.

Frieren — And a bit late, we’ve finally finished this one up too. I have had the feeling for much of the series that a lot of the point is Frieren’s slow realization of just how important a ‘brief’ ten years has been to her, and dealing with coming to that point a bit late. At any rate much of the later part has gotten into the technical parts of magic as we deal with the first class mage certification (really, must humans change the criteria so often…?). It’s a great cast of characters, where all the major characters are very understated  instead of being psychotically over the top, which is really nice to see.

Delicious in Dungeon — The second act kind of suffers ‘middle of story’ syndrome, but carries through it very well, with some amazingly entertaining episodes. And of course, we end with a new solid goal in place. An extremely challenging meal.

Made in Abyss — Don’t binge this. There is a lot of body horror in this series, and it’s especially prevalent in the second part. That said, there is a lot going on, and it’s really good story, sadly undercut by bits in another language subtitled in Japanese, but not in English. Thankfully nothing big, but the series is already hard enough to understand.

Apothecary Diaries — Just finished up catching up on this too. The second part leans into the format of a series of mysteries, but of course they all tie together at the end for a satisfying story arc.

Jobless Reincarnation — This is one of the ones me and Smudge wanted to get to immediately, but we only started it partway through, though we’re nearly caught up now. The giant arc started by the mass teleport is now about resolved, and we have continued to see some good growth in Rudeus. Now there’s a whole other major plot still dangling over him….

Konosuba — Smudge and I watched the Explosion on This Wonderful World side/prequel and the movie. I wasn’t sure just how well a story just staring Megumin could do, but it actually worked. Certainly, she’s probably the only one who could support a prequel. At any rate, the movie (Legend of Crimson) also is helped by seeing the prequel first, and we just got around to seeing it. Both recommended for isekai hilarity.

To Your Eternity — And the group finished this off too. I think large sections of it dragged on longer than strictly needed, but the overall story is good.

The Fire Hunter — Sadly, the first season of this was a bit limited on the budget side, and it feels like this one got an even smaller budget. The production experiments with some interesting ideas to carry the smaller budget, and I think they did a better job this time, but the lack of budget elsewhere really told against it. Still, a great Japanese Shakespearean tragedy.

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Perchance to Dream

by on June 25, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This TNG novel is set in early fourth season (an actual stardate is given at the end), and was written in that period. The series had settled down into a long haul of success, and the novels are doing better.

This isn’t a great novel, but it is a good one. This contrasts sharply with the first season batch. We have a couple major MacGuffins here: A planet that is home to a completely unknown form of life, and a unknown intelligent species of the more conventional type which has claimed said planet.

We get two parallel main plots out of this, each of which have a cluster of sub-themes. That last is the only place the book really falls down, as many come up for a conversation, and then don’t continue past that. One of these unexplored themes gives the novel its title, as teenagers try to grapple with the still-distant country of mortality.

For one main plot, we deal with Troi, Data, Wesley, and two other new-for-the-novel teenagers on board the Enterprise. The latter two (and Wesley, of course) are involved in studies to get into Star Fleet Academy. The shuttle used for an expedition gets into trouble, and plot follows. Sadly, after a good start this does largely dead-end with few opportunities for the characters to move things forward, except on a personal level.

The second plot gets going slightly later, and ends up doing the heavy lifting as Picard deals with a prickly Teniran captain, and tries to figure out just what is going on with this planet.

In general, it’s all handled well, and flows through to the end well. The real troubles are the dead-end co-plot, the reader knowing more than the characters, and suffering through watching them fumble around, and an overall lack of explanation of how these energy creatures are so different from all the other energy creatures seen in Star Trek that the Enterprise‘s sensors don’t seem register them at all. On the other hand, the entire cast is present, and each get a meaningful scene, but the discarded themes bit keeps some to no more than that.

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Synthetic Intelligence

by on June 21, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fourth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Stellaris. See the previous reviews here:
Stellaris: Paradox Among the Stars
Leviathans: There Be Dragons Here!
Utopia: No Place Among the Stars

The third Stellaris expansion was a second story pack, this time focusing on the role of robots and AI within the game. Synthetic Dawn was announced on August 3, 2017, and released, alongside patch 1.8 on September 21. My initial review was about a patch after this one, so I’m mostly concentrating on the actual expansion features.

Tinkering

One of the patch features was reworking species so that you could modify a species’ traits and the game would understand they were still related (this has been the system ever since). There are technologies to research to allow it at all, and to allow a species to have more traits than is allowed at start. You can establish a new template, and then apply it to the population of one planet as a special project which requires biology research points to complete.

This can be done to get rid of negative traits, add new positive traits, or change a population’s planet preference for colonization purposes. These can also happen on their own. Either way, as long as you have some population of the new template, they are eligible for being used with colony ships.

Machines also use the same system (swapping engineering research for biology when applying a new template, and with separate technologies to be able to modify them). Robots can be constructed as soon as the Robotic Workers technology is gained, though they’re limited to the lowest-level jobs. Further technologies let them go up the scale of society (depending on the empire’s policies), and also allow further trait points, opening them up to modification into more advanced models.

Networked Intelligence

Machine intelligence is a new authority type allowed by the expansion. Like hive minds in Utopia, it will always use the central gestalt consciousness ethic, with an immortal ruler, and has its own set of fifteen civics (plus a few more available in combination with other expansions). They technically use machines instead of robots as population, but that is a difference in origin and possible policy rules on them; mechanically they’re the same, including traits and how to apply new templates.

Machines and robots have their own species traits, separate from the normal ones, and can inhabit any kind of world that has a habitability rating. Machine intelligences also start with an extra pop in their colonies, so they can expand very fast, as long as they can get to inhabitable worlds at all. However, their drones are incompatible with normal species, so expect a number of empty worlds after territory changes hands in a war and species get purged.

One exception to this is the rogue servitor civic, where the machines have taken over from an organic species that they still pamper and care for, letting them build unique buildings for taking care of them (these replace all the normal unity-generating buildings), though this comes with a higher upkeep.

Less friendly versions of rouge servitors are driven assimilators (to emulate the Borg), and determined exterminators (terminators, Berserkers, and numerous other SF examples), which are in the ‘galactic threat’ category of governments that don’t use the usual diplomacy rules. The exterminators are the machine version of fanatical purifiers, but will actually get along with other synthetic civilizations.

Three new default empires are made available with the expansion, showing off the new machine traits and features. The Tebrid Homolog are driven assimilators with extra research and a strong secondary species. XT-489 Eliminator is a determined exterminator with combat-oriented traits. And the Earth Custodianship is a third alternate ‘human’ start, with the machines pampering the human race in an organic sanctuary on Earth.

New Features

When origins were introduced in patch 2.6, Synthetic Dawn got one available with it: Resource Consolidation. It is only available to machine empires without the rogue servitor or organic reprocessing civics, and the homeworld will be a machine world (which can otherwise be gotten by an ascension perk), a special habitable world type, which are only habitable by machine species, with this one guaranteed a few nice planetary features, as well as a +10 deposit for the home star, but the rest of the system will have no resources.

A new mid-game crisis was added (there’s a few now, but I think Paradox should look into adding more). The game steers you to having servant synthetic populations; if you build robots for extra population/workers, early on they’re not capable of being sentient/free, and freeing them later leads to unrest and high maintenance costs.

Sentient Combat Simulations is a dangerous technology upgrade to ships computers. It gives an extra level of bonuses to ships equipped with them. But there is a chance that the ship AIs will rebel, causing a powerful civil war to erupt. This isn’t a “true” crisis, as it isn’t a galaxy-wide event, but it can be one of the more dangerous things to happen to an empire.

And it may not even be your fault. I’ve had to deal with an AI rebellion caused by conquering systems from an empire that was in the early stages of this event. It certainly made that game much more dramatic!

Conclusion

I’ve never gone hard down the robot/synthetic path, so this is an expansion that has meant much less to me. However, I certainly appreciate having the machine empires around as more exotic contenders for galactic power, and has been worth the price on that level.

And as mentioned, the AI rebellion can disrupt things even when not going down that path. While annoying, and dangerous, it was nicely dramatic as I struggled with ongoing wars and the rebellion. It is a bit forced as it will spawn powerful fleets as well as taking over some of yours, but it works as a major challenge, even to a well-developed industrial empire. Overall, I consider this a lesser expansion, though still well done, and well worth picking up if you do want see robots grow from simple menial machines to citizens equal to everyone else.

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