The Windkey and the Lamplighter

The Bad Astronomy Blog, at
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/07/22/nasa-decides-theres-no-place-like-home-and-home-is-no-place/
has noticed that NASA’s mission statement no longer includes the
phrase "understand and protect our home planet."

Is this because NASA wants to prevent potential future claims of bias
against outworlders from the residents of Mars or Luna colonies? Not hardly. The going rumor is that
it’s much more likely because of all the trouble global warming
research is causing NASA.

Yargh. Things like this only make me more certain that we’re not
getting anywhere with a national space agency. The Shuttle, for all
its faults, has my heart, and I’ll follow every launch with interest
and childlike excitement, but my real hopes for human exploration of
space lie with SpaceX, Scaled Composites, and the other
commercial space companies. They haven’t shown interest in Earth
Science, either, but perhaps they will when they see that NASA isn’t
doing it anymore. (I assume, perhaps naïvely, that there are
people who will pay for things like climate data and weather
satellites. I don’t think I’m wrong, but I could be.)

href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/17/opinion/main1808436_page3.shtml">Hamas
will not take responsibility for traffic lights, never mind for its
military and terror operations.

"Israel’s experience since withdrawing from south Lebanon in 2000 and
Gaza last year suggests that terror groups do not ever concede
defeat. Victory for the jihadists means one survivor left to describe
it as such. "

Both these quotes make me wonder. How do you win a war where the
enemy recruits all the time, hides behind civilians—and, really, is
so integrated into the hearts and minds of the society that it’s hard
to even say who are the combatants and who are the civilians. We’ve
certainly seen that today’s civilian teenager may be tomorrow’s
suicide bomber…

I think we need to seriously consider that this war may not be
winnable through military action. (Israel is, in fact, already saying
this—NPR quoted someone, though I now forget whom, saying that they
were softening up Hezbollah for a diplomatic solution.) However, I
suspect diplomacy with the Lebanese or Palestinians isn’t going to be
too effective, either.

So how do we win? Well, either through genocide (not okay) or by
winning the war of ideas. The problem is, I don’t think we know how
to fight ideas. Why are Palestinian teens who see a cousin die in an
Israeli raid becoming suicide bombers and American teens whose parents
died in the WTC bombing not? Why aren’t Israeli teens suicide bombers?

When we can answer this, maybe we’ll have a way to win the war.

Building openafs modules for Debian has always felt a bit clunky. It
was nice when Debian shipped them, but I understand what drove them to
stop. The new module-assistant package is a great solution. This is
so easy that I can talk those not really competent to build a kernel
through the process. Thanks to Eduard Bloch for writing and packaging
it, and to all who contributed ideas.

My Earthdawn test game is running swimmingly. But it’s always been
declared to be of finite length, running until I can figure out what
works and what doesn’t. I’ve got a couple of ideas about what to do
next:

1. Gritty fantasy-adventure. Might be nominally in the Exalted
   world, but if so it’s in a shunted off little corner that looks
   more like the Black Company or Bungie’s Myth. System is
   likely GURPS, with extensive support for culturally-specific
   systems. I like what HeroQuest and The Shadow of Yesterday did
   there. So I’d like to see stock GURPS Magic, Contemplative Magic,
   Unlimited Mana, Ritual, etc. all facing one another.

   I do have some more setting ideas for this one: I know I want a
   river, with an empire in the floodplains. I know I want the
   emperor to have some sort of contemplative, oracular, enchantress
   corps. I know I want a split kingdom, with each half claiming to
   have inherited the mantle. I know I want a city-state satrapy of
   a distant empire. I know I want a handful of outcast
   downtrodden peoples as sources for heroes: a tribe of brickmakers
   in the river empire, a rough and surly race of barbarians. I
   don’t have a lot more to say about horselords, but I’m not
   particularly opposed to them either.

   I do know I want an almost-all human setting. If there are
   serpent-men, they’re alien and inimical NPCs off in the jungle. If
   there are elves, they lived and died before the Sun rose on Human
   cities, and their places do not love the tread of younger feet.

   Howard’s Conan, Nifft the Lean, Fafrd and the Grey Mouser,
   Asprin’s Sanctuary and the Books of Exodus, Judges, and Kings are
   all good sources for this.

2. Conspiracy Theories II. I greatly enjoyed running the first
   Conspiracy Theories in the 1998-2000 timeframe. It had some
   of the worst mechanics I’ve ever written, but managed to teach me
   a lot about good gaming and leave some excellent stories on the
   table. I’ve been thinking about doing this in GURPS, and I’ve
   been thinking about doing this in Feng Shui.

   Even if the FS system, it would not be on the default Feng Shui
   setting—though it might look like that at first, I’ve got some
   fun ideas in mind for who’s really behind the Jade Wheel society.
   I’d be inclined to avoid the 4-junctures split, and start the
   characters out mostly unaware of the background setting. They’ve
   been melodramatically hooked in, but haven’t really come to
   understand it yet. So they may have seen sorcery, but probably
   aren’t Sorcerers. They may be Transformed Animals, but don’t know
   what that means besides funny food preferences and powerful kung
   fu.

   My inspirations are mostly Baen authors here: Mutineer’s Moon and
   some alternate versions of the Darhel war.

3. Masks of Nyarlethotep. I’m told it’s one of the best packaged
   modules ever written. I’d almost certainly run it against Feng
   Shui or Adventure!, since it benefits from a pulpy feel over the
   brooding death of the BRP or d20 Call of Cthulhu.

You’ll notice GURPS and Feng Shui figure prominently above. GURPS has
a lot more tactical depth, but Feng Shui has a better universal
mechanic, and appears to scale better. GURPS 4 fixes a lot of the
problems I had with GURPS 3, too—and I’ve got a better idea of which
buttons not to push. Turning on all the combat options turns the game
into Advanced Squad Leader. You can get a great gritty game with
plenty of tactical meat using the Basic Combat System sometimes, the
Tactical Combat System if the players care, and one or two
setting-specific options.

But which setting to run? That’s hard. I’m tempted to compromise,
say that one is the cyberspace of the other or something. Then I
really am back to running Shadowdawn! By current best thought is
to try fleshing out one or both settings with a game of lexicon
(some variant with slightly looser alphabetics, I think). By adding
material to the settings, I and potential players can better predict
what’ll be more fun.

I think we can play two games of this, today.

1) Who’s to blame for the Big Dig getting UnDug?

I had a conversation with coworkers, all engineers, while we were
waiting the results of some shock and vibration testing in a
lab. One, a retired guy who is now back as a contractor, was
lamenting the idiocy that would convince someone to screw up
ceiling-mounting concrete panels in the way they so clearly did.
But the technical issues are going to be small, compared to the game
of point-the-finger that’s about to start.

I really wish they’d let the NTSB
do the investigation…

2) Who’s supplying the Hamas and Hezbollah
In the car, NPR tells me they’re Iranian rockets. Yesterday, someone
was telling me they’re Syrian rockets. Either way, I wonder what will
happen when we find out whose they really are…

href="http://mfile.akamai.com/18566/wmv/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/wm.nasa-global/sts-121/right_forward_srb_camera.asx">This
shuttle takeoff footage (apparently from a camera onone of the booster
rockets) is so cool.

"Dressed like a rootin’ tootin’ Texas cowboy
But this lone ranger’s never seen a horse

He wanna be Americano Americano, Americano
He wants to drive a Cadillac
Now he’s chasing showgirls smokin’ Camels, whiskey and soda
Now he’s never goin’ back"
— Brian Setzer Orchestra "Americano"

I should’ve been a Cowboy
I should’ve learned to rope and ride
Wearing my six-shooter, riding by pony on a cattle drive
Stealing a young girl’s heart, just like Gene and Roy
Singing those campfire songs
Oh I should’ve been a cowboy
—Toby Keith "Should’ve Been a Cowboy"

So why is the cowboy the ideal of America that we’ve exported?
What’s so cool about the cowboy?
And what other American idioms are pervasive outside the US?

I want to provide two new mechanics to Earthdawn. First, I want to
set up a way for players to flag interesting things and get LP from
those. So a player might have written down "Never refuses a duel,"
and gets LP from doing so on-screen. Other examples: seeking wealth,
protecting a ward, defending a faith, building renown, or establishing
a particular relationship with an organization or character. Oh, and
seeking the six-fingered man who killed your father. The Shadow of
Yesterday has a good version of this, and is free online.

Second, I want to let players flag particular conflicts as important.
The second shows up in lots of systems as
Hero/Fudge/Victory/Fate/Willpower/Karma points. ED’s Karma points are
actually close, but aren’t broadly usable. It’s not clear to me how
much oomph this system should have: a +1? +10? A reroll?

I think these mechanics can be unified, though. Let’s say that you
can buy your character a Legend Thread. A Legend costs as
much as a first-Circle Talent: so 100, 200, 300, 500, 800… Legend
Points. You might buy a Legend of Treasure, or Valor, or Vengeance.
When you achieve something related to the Legend, you receive Legend
Points back: a number equal to the cost of your Legend-2, -1, or the
full cost. So if you’ve spent 800 LPs on a Legend, you receive 300,
500, or 800 LPs for fulfilling its conditions. If you finish the
Legend—say by killing the six-fingered man, or renouncing
violence—recover the cost of L+1 ranks of Legend (1300, in the
example above). You can’t ever have that Legend Thread again. It’s
assumed that you’ll want to sink most of that into new Legend threads.

If you’re in a circumstance where a Legend Thread matters, you can
check off a rank of Legend and reroll some dice. I’m not sure how
often these refresh: never, encouraging you to buy up Legends, use
them up, then move on to new ones? Once per session, but you lose the
rank of Legend if you still fail the roll? Once per session, but each
use also costs a Karma point?

Alternately, once per session you can add your Legend Thread rank to a
Step for a roll?

Both of those are larger than what a Karma die grants you, but Karma’s
pretty cheap.

Old people are strange. Some of the houses we’ve seen have funny
decoration, but this is the weirdest yet: a small artificial deer
head, some plastic holly, and a number of plastic lobsters. There
were more lobsters on other walls of this room.