There’s nothing that can’t be improved by baking under a
yogurt/egg/cheese mixture.

Slice and fry three Italian eggplants while boiling 4 oz green lentils
in a few cups of vegetable stock. Remove the eggplants from the oil,
then fry an onion for five minutes with a couple cloves of garlic.
Chop a large tomato, a pound of mushrooms, 2 tbs tomato paste, and a
can of chickpeas. Pour the veggie stock and lentils over all that,
then add it to the onion-garlic oil. Add marjoram, oregano, thyme,
rosemary to taste. After ten minutes fried up, remove it from the
heat. Alternate layers of eggplant and fried-mix in a big casserole.
Whisk together 3 eggs and 5/4 cups of yogurt—use no-fat at your own
risk. Pour that over the layered stuff, then grate on a few ounces of
cheddar. Bake for 45 minutes at 350. Serves 4, not 6. 2050 kcal.

If you’re not picky, skip the frying of the eggplant. It does make a
slight textural difference, but with fresh eggplant you don’t need the
extra stiffness.

Burning Empires didn’t work out too well for my group. More on that
at a later date, perhaps—I’m reluctant to write about stresses and
tensions until I’ve thought about why that game failed for this group.

One bit that everybody agreed worked was the World Burner, a
collaborative mechanism for setting design. Kasumi, a regular poster
to rpg.net, wrote a variant called Apotheosis for use with
advanced Exalted games. It’s wonderful. The important part to look
at there is Step Two, where everybody’s nominating important
components: factions that are involved, can’t be involved, etc.

I’d like to do something similar for a campaign I’m working on. A few
years ago, I ran a game called Conspiracy Theories. It was quite
successful. I wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but I learned a great
deal from the process of running it. I and most of the players seemed
to have a very good time. I liked it so much that I haven’t run
anything in that genre since. Now I’m reading Harry Dresden books,
and would like to do something like that again.

These, therefore, are thoughts on how to construct such a setting.

Publicity

How public is magic, sorcery, the otherworldly, in this setting? Do
vampires appear in People, like the Anita Blake books? Are they
hidden, as in Dresden Files or Buffy? Is there any public
supernatural activity at all, like Dresden’s yellow-pages ad as a
Wizard?

If the magic is occult, why? General agreement? A faction of
guardians protecting it and killing anyone who might step out of line?
A natural force, like Paradox? The flavor of the occult, like GURPS
Voodoo, where magic never has definite effect? Collusion between the
aliens and the opposing government, both of whom find secrecy to their
advantage?

Magic Style

What is in the world, and what’s available to the PCs? Collectively
figure out what might be there.

• Dresden-style sorcery, immediate and powerful in its application?

• Bob Howard (Atrocity Archives) magic, with slow rituals and lots of
  reading ahead of time?

• Advanced technical gadgetry, requiring some skill and significant
  infrastructure, but usable by those not able to replicate that
  infrastructure (see the old Conspiracy Theories for some of this)

• Psychic powers

• I’m missing many things here: hereditary shape-shifting powers,
  sacrificial summoning… it might be best to start by letting each
  player throw in something in addition to those above.

It’s very possible that only some of these will be available to the
whole PC group, and that others will be used by particular factions.
If you’d like some to not show up, ban them in the "Factions not
Present" section below.

For any that are present, it’s fair game for a PC to buy into them:
the one PC psychic, alien, witch, whatever. See Giles and then
Willow, for example.

Backing and Cohesion

Are the PCs lone occult investigators? Backed by a government agency?
Cooperating agents of different governments? Part of a supernatural
conspiracy, like the Illuminati?

Allied Factions

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction allied to the
PCs. The group should sketch out a leader or point of contact for
that faction, and his relation to the PCs, before proceeding to
nominate the next faction.

For each such faction, one PC should either have a tense and
conflicted relationship with the named NPC member, or should have a
hostile history with the faction itself.

Opposed Factions

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction opposed to the
PCs. The group should sketch out a leader or point of contact for
that faction, and his relation to the PCs, before proceeding to
nominate the next faction. This doesn’t mean nobody else will show
up, but narrative conservation will ensure these are the most common
antagonists.

For each such faction, one PC should either have a friendly
relationship with the named NPC member, or should have a friendly
history with the faction itself.

Principal Opposition

Together, decide on one Big Bad—Lo Pan, the Bat Thing, the Grey
Aliens, the Vampire Queen Bianca, the Mind—this can be an
individual, a faction, or a faction with a named proponent as above.

Note: this part’s not well done yet. It may be best to have
surprises, and I’m not sure how to handle that.

Factions not Present

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction or plot
thread which will not appear in the game. For example, those playing
in my games might want to know that Lectroids will not appear, nor
will this turn out to be a game of Mage: the Ascension.

Today is the 3rd anniversary (3 Earth years = 1067 sols) since
Opportunity landed at Victoria Crater. Planetary Weblog has a
great picture of the crater and Opportunity’s path so far around it.

height="400">

(Thanks to Bad Astronomy for pointing out something else on the
Planetary Society blog, since I hadn’t noticed it.)

ed: fixed to unbreak the picture, so this isn’t really today.

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg)—McDonald’s Corp.’s new coffee tastes
better and costs less than brew from Starbucks Corp., Burger
King Holdings Inc. and Dunkin’ Donuts Inc., Consumer Reports
magazine said.

"We compared the rivals with Starbucks, all in basic
black—no flavors, milk, or sugar—and you know what?
McDonald’s beat the rest," Consumer Reports said in its March
issue.

Consumer Reports’ "trained tasters" visited two stores of
each company, the magazine said.

Now, this isn’t quite useful to me. Starbucks’ brewed coffee is
burned and not very good. Their beans are roasted to make good
espresso, well past the point where they still make good coffee. So I
order their Americano went I want a cup of coffee. But just the news
that McDonald’s is serving better coffee that Starbucks brewed is
interesting.

John Goff has a neat column up today on rpg.net about PIs in
fantasy and the real world. He’s a real-world PI, which may give him
some authority on the subject.

Xinhua and other sources less public about their biases have
published a number of articles this week with sentences like this:

A quarterly audit by the special inspector general for Iraq
reconstruction reveals the U.S. government has wasted tens of millions
of dollars in a reconstruction effort that has cost American taxpayers
more than 300 billion U.S. dollars and left the region near civil
war.

That’s astoundingly good news, and should not be ignored. It’s not
clear exactly how much this all adds up to, but we do see quotes for
about $86 million. Let’s call it a hundred million wasted, for a
wastage of one part per three thousand, one thirtieth of a percent. I
would love to see a reliable way to run major development projects
in the third world with a waste and corruption rate of 0.03%. I’ve
been awfully skeptical of the no-bid contracts handed out to
Halliburton and friends, but this makes me reconsider. This is
unbelievable performance.

Normally xkcd is just a very funny, geeky web comic. In some ways
it fills the holes left by The Far Side and PLIF. His most recent
text post is worth reading for reasons having nothing to do with
humor.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular
issue or another, so you’re gonna want to support them, but I bet the
guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes
who want to run everything.

I’d read Washington’s Farewell Address before, but it’s hard to get a
sense of the scope. Individual paragraphs make sense, but the rhythm
of political dialogue has shifted somewhat.