Month: September 2018

Rules for the OSR (Old-School Renaissance)

Housekeeping note: I'm still too busy with programming on the new Perilar, and some other things, to get back to my tabletop and/or online chat games regularly, but I'll be moving all my RPG stuff over to this blog from Mark Rolls Dice, I'd like to have one site to maintain which I own.

So, start with basic principles. How do I run games.

I'm a caveman from the '70s and '80s, so my Old-School is literally old and from school, as noted in Five Games. The Old-School Renaissance is my frozen caveman ass being thawed out to do it again.

There's a bunch of guides to how to do this, but they're kind of bullshit. Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming is close to my view, and has gameplay dialogue examples which can be read in funny voices, but it goes on too long about irrelevant stuff. Principia Apocrypha and a bunch of other bloviating diatribes just go on forever, I started to nod off, make a little hand-puppet with my hand and flap its mouth up and down.

Here's my OSR principles:

  1. Let the dice fall where they may. ( Knights of the Dinner Table's Law )
  2. Be excellent to each other. ( Bill & Ted's Law, the inverse of Wheaton's Law )
  3. The Referee is always right, but the players can choose to stay or leave.
  4. Rules are just recordings of what we've previously done. We can change them at any time.

Like the Three Laws of Robotics, each principle is tempered by the ones previous: The Referee can override new rules. But, be excellent to each other. But, don't cheat and take away risk.

What I'm Watching: Game Night

I was hoping for another The Game (not Fincher's best, but a good tricky movie). Instead we get the insecure lead couple, saccharine black couple, idiot & random date, and annoying brother, in a painfully obvious scenario. Occasionally funny, but so dumb. I am sad I paid a couple bucks to Redbox to watch this.
★★☆☆☆

AI Just-So Stories

Couldn't remember a story reference, so collecting a few of these to make finding them again easier.

Bruce Schneier r/IAmA, and Five Eyes Backdoor Bullshit

This "just give us a secure backdoor!" bullshit is just infuriating to anyone who can think.

Any programmer can write a new crypto program without the officially mandated backdoor. Even if the Stasi5 banned all existing interpreters and compilers (and watch the economy burn when we can't write any programs), we could rewrite a crypto program in assembly, type character codes into a text editor, save it and run it with a buffer overflow, and now we could communicate securely, while everyone else was completely exposed. Banning all computers? You'd also have to ban all electronics that could be used to make a new computer. Starting a new Dark Age with a Butlerian Jihad burning all computers is literally the only way to stop people from having strong cryptography.

The only purpose of the "secure backdoor" is to let governments spy on law-abiding citizens. It can serve no other purpose. Time for us to end the "intelligence" agencies and set up something new.

That_one_Pizza: "Your opinion on pineapple on pizza?"
BruceSchneier: "The 1973 Council of Naples authorized fourteen pizza toppings, and pineapple was not one of them."

Hawaiian Pizza: The pizza of rebels. Never let the Man tell you what you can have on your 'za.

What I'm Watching: Bosch

I watched S1 when it came out in 2014, was somewhat annoyed by the Hieronymus Bosch name gag (but the actor is named Titus Welliver, so… ludicrous historical names all around), all the jazz (not even music), and some of the inappropriate workplace relationship bothered me, but it was a competent murder show. Little scattered in plot, personal drama, and side-plots that go nowhere.

Picked back up S2 and now working thru S3, and I'm more interested. The jazz is sometimes overbearing, especially when smug asshole Bosch preaches about how great vinyl is, or how every restaurant he goes to is "best X in L.A.", he's a super punchable prick. He's like House or Sherlock Holmes without the genius or charm. As a villain, he'd be fantastic. As a protagonist, he's much less charming than Dexter Morgan or Walter White.

But J. Edgar the partner (Jamie Hector, aka Marlo Stanfield on The Wire) and other competently-acted characters (several also Wire alumni), and better plots and writing, make up for a lot.

S1's a cold case murder. S2 is more of an LA Confidential thing with a murdered porno producer and hot blonde wife named Veronica (not Lake) as a film noir femme fatale. S3 has a couple parallel veteran murder stories going on; I assume in the books these are Vietnam, there's something about how they're written that doesn't fit the desert war that never ends.

★★★½☆ solid but rarely amazing.

RT @vishae

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How to Read a Peter F. Hamilton Book

There's a new PFH book, Salvation, I'd like to get to reading. Before that, I have a tsundoku in iBooks. So now's the time to read the Dreaming Void trilogy; these are sequels of sorts to Pandora's Star (excellent book about a really horrible alien, read long ago), and Judas Unchained (remember less than nothing about it; did I even read it? Maybe I was drinking a lot).

But there comes the rub: You can't just read a PFH doorstop. No, you need to study it, and take notes like a college class, because the concept of focusing on one protagonist and telling a linear story isn't his thing. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read, is his philosophy.

At 17% through The Dreaming Void, I have the following notes (in Apple Notes so I can edit them anywhere); probably SPOILER, but a good example of my process. For dead tree books I made longer notes on everyone, with page refs, but since you can search iBooks there's no need anymore.

Dreaming Void

Places, Reality

Centurion Station: Near the Void
Ellezelin: Living Dream planet, Makkathran2 city.
Arevalo: Central Commonwealth planet, Higher. Daroca city.
Far Away: Base of the Starflyer
Lytham: Central world far from Earth
Oronsay: External world 100LY from Central
Fandola:

Places, Void

Querencia: Void planet
Makkathran: Main city
Ashwell: Smaller city

Species

Human: Higher, Advancer, Natural
Prime, Starflyer: Mind-controlling aliens
Anomine: Trapped the Prime
Golant: Humanoid
Ticoth: Predators, herds of prey
Suline: Aquatic
Ethox: ?
Forleene: ?
Kandra: ?
Jadradesh: ?
Raiel: Ancient, discovered the Void
Ocisen: BEM. Opposed to Pilgrimage
Hancher: Protected by Humans, enemies of Ocisen

Groups

Commonwealth:
ANA: "Advanced Neural Activity", mind pool of dead Highers
Free Market:
External:

People, Reality

Ozzie & Nigel: wormhole inventors
Inigo: First Dreamer
LionWalker Eyre: director of Centurion Station
Aaron: Blank on Makkathran2
Ethan: Conservator of Living Dream
Lady, Bad News: ?
Chief Cleric Phelim: Ethan's secretary
Corrie-Lyn: Inigo's former lover
Marius: ANA representative
Troblum: Starflyer fanboy, Higher
Mykala: 
Eoin: 
Yehudi: 
Kazimir Burnelli: First Admiral
Delivery Man:
Justine Burnelli: ANA representative
Gore Burnelli: ANA, old boss
Nelson Sheldon: ANA, security, Gore's co-conspirator
Araminta: Waitress, Niks, Colwyn City

People, Void

Waterwalker: Entered the Void
Skylord: ?
Akeem: Eggshaper
Edeard: Eggshaper apprentice
Salrana: Priestess