Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

If you like flawed, sometimes seriously flawed, protagonists, Joe Abercrombie is good. I discovered The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007), and Last Argument of Kings (2008) at the Lower Early Public Library in England. Best Served Cold, set in the same world, may be my favorite. My wife really enjoyed it BSC as well.

Originally Posted by Bren

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The feeling that "Things fall apart" or that "the centre cannot hold" is not by any means new or unusual. Written records of the old despairing over the young go back at least to the ancient Greeks. And if we don't have Babylonian and Egyptian examples, it's only because we haven't found the right clay tablet or papyrus.

Beautiful. I like Yeats. I used to read him at university. I should go back and revisit him.
BTW, the ancient Egyptians also complained about this. I remember as an undergrad reading an account from an 18th Dynasty scribe bemoaning the young. I was floored about what his complaints were. It could have been written today. The young are rude, they drink too much beer, they are not dignified in dress, they stay out too late and don't concentrate at work. I wish I could remember which book it was in or what the scribe's name was!

Shemek.

Originally Posted by Bren

The new series is by Glen Cook.

I'll have to check these out on my next trip to the used book store. Thanks for the tips.

Shemek

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

That sounds very interesting... He wouldn't even have to completely hollow it out, only the passenger/crew compartment. What diameter sphere would be required for this? I believe you used a 6" one for your model.

Shemek.

Sorry I missed this the first time around! Wouldn't need a sphere; it'd be part of the design, and the machine would make it - in two half-domes, but everything would be 3-D printed. It's amazing to see the models - the way the machine works is liquid resin goes into a tank, and then three lasers on the XYZ axis converge where the programming indicates; where the lasers converge, and only where they do, the resin cures. The liquid is drained away, and there you are. I've gotten several hollow buildings, done as shells, and the process will allow for things like locking pins and moving parts. You'd probably get a kit of two 'domes' and a deck with details that would lock together as a model and which could come apart for play.

Originally Posted by AsenRG

It seems like a rather busy day, full of family matters. Maybe we should use it for inspiration for "a day of the family life of a Tekumeli scholar"?

Oh! Right! Should I do something like this - my 'daily diary', or something similar?

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Well, firstly, I've lost count of the number of times I've said that Dave and Gary's fundamental mistake was assuming that the players were smart enough to shit unassisted. Then again, my disdain for my fellow man is my besetting sin. I'm getting better but I still have SO very far to go.

Secondly, the 13 year old kids TSR started marketing to in the late 70s DID need a lot explained to them, and that has carried on in rules ever since.

Thirdly, I think an unforseen side effect in the increase of secondary education is that people overanalyze stuff, and expect everything to be subjected to academic style analysis.

Fourth and lastly, and perhaps most important, after letting the parts of the TOR series that I read percolate a while, my chief impression of them is "We have a deadline and need to write something." Honestly, I see a LOT of that all OVER the web.

Of course, that's an old problem... Robert E. Howard, in his letters to friends, used to complain about how in order to pay the rent he would take his own stories, rework them a bit, and resell them, and that people just wanted more of the same, not anything new or different.

Um, okay, understood. It just seems to me that we used to do things rather differently; could be just that we were different as a game group...

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

I've got a "dumb" question as well: what's OSP?
Seeing as this is the only forum I'm on I can't say that I've noticed this trend, but I sincerely hope that this is not the case. For what it's worth the mechanics have always come second for me, but a couple of my guys have, in the past, been strong mechanics advocates. I largely use "official rules" to appease them, but to be honest 99% is resolved behind my screens on a d20 or d100 roll vs an assigned difficulty rating. I just go through the motions as far as rulesets are concerned to make it look like I'm using a rule book.

I think this might be endemic of the current generations approach to life in general. I hate sounding like the old man, but I'm used to seeing this at work everyday with recent grads and co-op students. They really need to be spoon fed, and getting them to "think creatively" is like pulling teeth sometimes. I know I'm generalising, but your observation seems to support this view. Now in all fairness the youngest member of my group is 44 so I don't know if younger gamers as a whole are like this. I really hope not. I don't think your perspective or world view is obsolete in the slightest. I wish more people had this mind set.

Shemek

My fault or being in a hurry and not proofreading. It's 'OSR', as in 'old school rules' or 'old school renaissance'; I've heard it both ways. I'm not trying to start a fight or anything - what I'm trying to do is get a feel for what modern gaming is like, and how people play. I've gotten the impression from quite a few people that more rules are the best way to simulate what is assumed / presumed to have been what game play in RPGs was like back in the beginning of the hobby, and I'm trying to get more of a grip on this. It's like the quote we often make hereabouts: 'anything not explicitly allowed by the rule is forbidden' vs. 'anything not explicitly forbidden by the rules is permitted'.

(It's like the 'Gygax didn't use miniatures / Arneson did use miniatures' thing; equally valid play styles, as far as I'm concerned, so what's the issue with my using miniatures and models? I've had some very negative reactions to them, over the years, and I think it's mostly a reaction to their handling in D&D 4th Edition.)

No idea if this is a 'generational thing' or not; I've never come across this in my younger gamers, but then that sample might be skewed because none of them were what could be described as serious or experienced gamers. I've found that when people like them try what I do in my games, they really enjoy then and go on to other games and rules. Like the EPT game at Gary Con, last year. I thought that it went really well, and people seemed to enjoy themselves.

Think of this as a 'market research' question, if you will.

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Beautiful. I like Yeats. I used to read him at university. I should go back and revisit him.
BTW, the ancient Egyptians also complained about this. I remember as an undergrad reading an account from an 18th Dynasty scribe bemoaning the young. I was floored about what his complaints were. It could have been written today. The young are rude, they drink too much beer, they are not dignified in dress, they stay out too late and don't concentrate at work. I wish I could remember which book it was in or what the scribe's name was!

Shemek.

I have a copy of this papyrus! Somethings never change, I guess...

I'll look it up for you. Watching Cleo at the moment.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Um, okay, understood. It just seems to me that we used to do things rather differently; could be just that we were different as a game group...

No, I think there have been cultural shifts that go beyond gaming and some of these trends in gaming reflect those cultural shifts.

Like Star Wars, for instance (the first original one.) 5 years after the film first came out, VCRs became fairly cheap and readily available... and a subset of fans proceeded to subject the film, a ten million dollar cheapie, to a bloody frame by frame analysis. It can't stand up to that. NO film can stand up to years of detailed frame by frame analysis, there are technical and continuity flaws in every film. But whereas in our day we'd chuckle quietly about the red R2 unit being seen by the sandcrawler between shots of it being over by Luke, nowadays you see web articles with titiles like "15 Unforgiveably Huge Errors in the Star Wars movies!" Yeah, it's real, and most of them were "In this shot, if you freeze it and blow this tiny corner up to fill your entire screen, you see a jagged edge on the matte for 3 frames."

Nothing can stand up to year after year of that sort of obsessive examination.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

No, I think there have been cultural shifts that go beyond gaming and some of these trends in gaming reflect those cultural shifts.

Like Star Wars, for instance (the first original one.) 5 years after the film first came out, VCRs became fairly cheap and readily available... and a subset of fans proceeded to subject the film, a ten million dollar cheapie, to a bloody frame by frame analysis. It can't stand up to that. NO film can stand up to years of detailed frame by frame analysis, there are technical and continuity flaws in every film. But whereas in our day we'd chuckle quietly about the red R2 unit being seen by the sandcrawler between shots of it being over by Luke, nowadays you see web articles with titiles like "15 Unforgiveably Huge Errors in the Star Wars movies!" Yeah, it's real, and most of them were "In this shot, if you freeze it and blow this tiny corner up to fill your entire screen, you see a jagged edge on the matte for 3 frames."

Nothing can stand up to year after year of that sort of obsessive examination.

Ah. I think I understand this; I was taken out to see Episode I, back when it came out, and people were doing it in the theater during the movie, much to my amazement. Not frame by frame, but the detailed analysis part. And what I thought was funny was that they were missing all of the jokes that Lucas had put in - went right by these people. I just sat there and wallowed in the fun, and had a big bucket of popcorn. It was a very good night, and I enjoyed myself. Like we did at the Bell Museum, the night we first watched Alex save Great Lord Novgorod from the evil Teutonic Knights.

(At this point, it's usual for everyone in the room watching the movie to stand up, salute, and toast Great Lord Novgorod.)

I think this has been around a bit, too; remember when Phil used to get letters and phone calls with stuff like this? I have to admit being baffled by it; we just used to accept Blackmoor or Grayhawk or Tekumel for what it was, started playing, and generally got on with the adventure. I've seen discussions go by on the Tekumel Yahoo group where they'd spend days having debates over the productivity of farming areas, because they think Phil's estimates of population density didn't fit the proper historical models.

I dunno. Back to the workbench, I think...