Ian Absentia

Edward R. Murrow had a similar lament about television. It seems that every development in technology is co-opted as a delivery system for spam advertising and porn. !i!

Yeah, I did look past that and straight to Difficulty Grades for vehicular maneuvering. A common car is 11/28/44 meters per second (street/cruising/full throttle) vs a common human at 1.2/3.6/6 mps (walk/jog/sprint). Agreed that the type of vehicle is going to dictate the interface with a pedestrian, though I reckon your ox cart example might default to the Trample creature ability if it's the oxen that make contact before the cart and wheels. !i!

I haven't actually dealt with vehicles at speed in Mythras yet, that's an interesting question that I'm going to have to address soon. My thought, and i doubt this is remotely original, is to list a safe Cruising Speed (fast, but still maneuverable at Standard difficulty grade) and a Top Speed (full capable speed, but with significant shift in difficulty). For instance, a common passenger car might be listed as 100/160 kph. In fact. I might even consider increments of speed corresponding to successively higher difficulty shifts to the Drive skill, perhaps 60/100/130/150 (Standard/Hard/Formidable/Herculean). Appropriate mods for improved mechanics that aid maneuverability, etc. Wait, but the title of the thread mentions meters per second, more or less the scale used for strategic movement on foot. Did I miss something? !i!

I have a friend who tried his hand at forging short swords out of old railroad spikes. As it happens, a single spike was just about the perfect amount of steel to forge a blade and tang. It also took a massive amount of effort to re-mill by hand. Balance, though, was the real challenge. Unsharpened, it makes one hell of a billy club. !i!

Though it has some serious kerning issues. !i!

With judicious application, it'll treat you right. !i!

Timestamp 15:36. "So, for better or worse, lawyers exist for a reason. And programmers are really, really bad at planning for contingencies. And they're also really bad at understanding contract law in general." Ha. !i!

A sort of artsy-fartsy way of describing it, in RQG terms, would be to say that you play a character who has donned godform and is acting in accordance to that deity's Runes rather than their normal human motivations/awareness. But instead of Runes, every Nephilim is composed of varying degrees of five fundamental Elements, superimposed on their normal physical/mental stats: Air / Earth / Fire / Moon / Water And this is where I saw the overlap with your nascent EffyQuest -- sub out Moon for Darkness, and the two are a close match. As I mentioned above, way back in the day, others introduced emotional Traits to pair with a Nephilim's Element ratings, but they didn't set up the dynamic tension of a positive vs negative expression that you suggested. !i!

This is, of course, the nature of any rule variant or addition. It either solves a problem that existed before (which, arguably, Passions and Traits would not) or they add a feature that effectively changes the emphasis and possible the direction of a game (which, I think, Passions and Traits would). There's a middle path, too, paved with the decades-old complaint of "What do I do with this character?" that might combine both solution and direction by providing a more inspirational mechanic for guiding players through the psyche of a very different character who will do things very differently. I think back to one of the very early publications of Greg's Traits rules in Wyrm's Footprints No.14 that were provided to help GMs (though, notably, not players) portray the inhuman nature of dragonewts. The Nephilim are similarly not human (let's all take a deep breath and say it together: "Nephilim are not awakened humans"), but I think we've come far enough, in terms of both game mechanics and conceptual complexity, to make the most of mechanics that help show us how to portray a different character differently. As far as adapting established adventures, yeah, this might not help -- see Paragraph 1, Sentence 2 above. Either it'll help make sense of things as written, or require adaptation to make it work. Or junking them entirely. !i!

Over in the RuneQuest forum, we kicked off a discussion of our experiences with how Passions and Runes in RQG actually work in play. Of particular interest, Eff suggested the following as a way of expressing or manifesting the natures of Runic elements that I thought looked awfully appropriate to a reimagining of Nephilim's elemental pentacle. As Eff admits, this is a formative thought, and it's not unlike other ideas that have been floated for Nephilim in the past (see Revised Metamorphoses, Personality Traits from Chronicle of the Awakenings). The paired Traits potentially dovetails nicely with ideas I've long had about pairing Shouit (identifying too much with the mundane) against Khaiba (identifying too much with the magical), and how the Nephilim lies in the dynamic tension between the two. I'm interested to see where one might take it from this dive board. !i!

Possibly. Specifically because he's of Japanese descent? Not necessarily. !i! [Edit: To be fair, Glorantha is full of real-world cultural borrow-words (and some pseudo-linguistic gobble-di-gook) that appear un-tethered to the people who used them.]

Yeah, I think you gave voice to a lot of my feelings about marrying the Augmentation meta-wager to Passions and Runes and what I described earlier as a "self-fulfilling prophesy". In KAP, Passions and Traits always felt like they were a vehicle for taking my character someplace, or even an obstacle to grapple with. In response to the typical complaint that they undermined player agency, I often likened them to making, say, a Strength roll to break down a door -- while people wouldn't blink at the idea of physical resistance, they chafed at the notion of emotional resistance. Your point about the transient (or sometime chronic) "madness" of Malory's characters is on the nose. An appreciative player lets the ball roll and enjoys being part of the show. In RQG, Passions and Runes are instead a carrot-and-stick. The gamble of the multi-tiered Augment, I realise, is supposed to reflect this same sort of pagan mainline to the mythic, and thereby reinforce the cosmic structure of Glorantha. But in practice it instead underscores a fickleness of the spiritual component of the game. Players generally do it because it may benefit themselves in play, not out of sympathy with their character. Generally -- I realise there are exceptions. This can be alleviated somewhat by taking the gamble out of it and opting for a straight 1/5 Passion or Rune bonus, but it still misses the mark of how Passions and Traits are arguably the central mechanics of KAP, and everything else peripheral. If it's supposed to represent the vagaries of the Olympians pushing Achilles across the game board, then that's the game I want to play. And then there's the issue I've mentioned elsewhere of having a multitude of often inconsistent Passions at scores upwards of 80%. I feel it dilutes a character's personality rather than defining it. This. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy I referred to. For the record, with my RQG character, I purposefully split my best Rune scores between his cult's ideal Rune and the ideal for a conflicting cult. Because the fun is in the dynamic tension, not in maxing out a particular Rune because it gives me the best buffs. !i!

Would you please spin this out into a thread of its own? (if you haven't already) Because, much as I've appreciated Traits and Passions in both KAP and RQG as a meta-mechanic, they do strike me as self-fulfilling prophecies in play. !i!

The real issue that I've experienced is the restricted directionality of vision and hearing. It's straight forward, and everything else around you becomes a guess. In any situation where you're concerned about being ambushed, blind-sided, or cold-cocked (or crushed by a track hoe), it's hoods-down or penalties-up. !i!

After two decades of field work in all manner of weather, particularly while wearing a hood in the rain, I invoke significant penalties to perception skills for wearing enveloping headgear. Especially for hearing and peripheral vision when wearing a hood. A bull (or a bulldozer) could be charging at you and you wouldn't know. !i!

And yet, here you are. Welcome to the party. Boggles the mind, doesn't it? I don't know if it was cherry-picking on his part, or cognitive dissonance. Maybe the doomsday scenario that he proposed for Earth to give rise to Tekumel in the far future killed all the right people in his mind. So, when people say they don't care about the politics of authors engaged in fictional world-building, I say think again. !i!

Two things, and then you can get back to burnishing both sides of the coin. First, perhaps I should have been clearer in referring to Barker's apparent affection for totalitarian, military dictatorships, or "ethnofascist states" as Shannon Appelcline referred to them in the article. Second, yes, I know about the Aryans. And regardless of the quality of scholarship, they're sometimes invoked to evoke nostalgia for a mystical, lost, pure ancestor. Maybe his wry joke was in re-casting the Aryans for his world using better scholarship. And there are plenty more dots that might be connected where the Nazis' fascination with "Oriental" mysticism is concerned. The point I was making is that everything is open to second-guessing now. Thanks, Phil. 😛 !i!

Fuck, indeed. I wish I was more surprised, though. Well, if you discount the extremely authoritarian military dictatorships he proposed for his imaginary world. And that the primary cultural influence he leaned into corresponds to the actual historical Aryans. And I've never been comfortable with his ethnic portrayal of the Salarvyani. Yeah, it'll be hard to not make closer comparisons now. !i!

Definitely veering off-topic, I once ran into a llama hired out to do the same task. One day I stumbled onto a llama tethered to a post on a bend in a country road, just laying beside a ditch munching on tall grass. The next day I was out along the same bend in the road and the llama was gone...but so was all of the tall grass, and you could now see on-coming traffic on the other side. Clever, if initially startling. Please don't ask me about the goats. !i!

Which, let's face it, is where the real horror lies. Not what the alien monster looks like, but the effect they have on the people around them. And the sinking anticipation that, no matter how deep you've dug, you've never quite gotten to the root of the problem. !i!

Going farther off path (maybe?), it's not unheard of for real world shepherds to keep a guard llama among sheep. They're known for their attentiveness, high vantage point, and protection against lone predators. That said, they don't actually herd the sheep so much as cohabitate with them. !i!

"The Sun Dome is committed to the stability of commerce along the Zola Fel and the prosperity of all peoples of Prax." Well played, sir! !i!

Arguably, yes. Though it is problematic, isn't it? The tone can trend toward other cinematic or historical sensibilities, of course. That's in the nature of any GM. If the extended timeline is any indication, it's waiting for Argrath & Co. to re-establish the White Bull Brotherhood and turn the genocidal tables on the Lunar settlers*. !i!

Or, more generously, a case of schismogenesis. A cultural trend (or conscious decision) to not utlitse every resource available isn't necessarily to a culture's disadvantage, particularly with comparable options available. Nor is a trend to not use them in a singularly consistent, "optimal" fashion. I'm on record as generally agreeing with you that the mythology don't quite wash, but if Praxians get on about their herding affairs without the benefit of dogs, as many real world cultures do, then the critique that they're "doing it wrong" is largely subjective. Even biased. !i!

The collected The Books of Earthsea is perhaps more a thing to be had than a thing to experience. What illustrations there are are awfully nice. !i!