In Space No One Can Hear You Gush

I've borrowed Battlestar Galactica from Adam since he swears by it and insists that it's brilliant sci-fi. Richard also praises it. Also, since it's one of the few (read: two) science fiction films/series that my mum can sit through without falling asleep or losing the plot, I figured that it must have some kind of merit.

Well, it is really good. Really, really good in fact.

I've gotten through most of the first series. Adam ensures me that by the end of the DVDs he has lent me, the program has evolved into something much different from that which it started out as. That you would not be able to recognise it as the same series if you watched the initial program and the final program. He also said that after watching it all he needs more. I don't know if there's a fifth series out or being produced in DVD format, but I've still got loads to go through so right now that isn't bothering me.

Like I said; I think it's really, really good. The characters are well developed and avoid common cliches. That or they pull old cliches off so well that you could be forgiven for thinking that Battlestar Galactica created such tropes.

The action sequences are well choreographed and the writers have obviously done their homework into the appropriate sciences that relate to what is going on around their characters (e.g. decompression, military life, zero gravity, psychology and philosophy, space, planets, etc.). So, for example, ships aren't bumping into each other (space is big, no need to pack ships in a fleet like sardines), people aren't exploding as soon as they experience hard vacuum (space doesn't make you explode, inflate, deflate, or freeze), and ship-to-ship combat isn't engaged at rediculously short ranges.

I'm really enjoying the series, almost to the point of omitting anything else I might do on my PC (i.e. computer games).

On an unrelated note, I've had to cancel Dark Heresy this weekend. No, seriously, it's unrelated. I wouldn't skip role-playing for a science-fiction DVD series.

Morality

Richard asked me an interesting theoretical question the other day.

It was about draining life from someone to restore your own. I will try to explain it as clearly as possible and avoid any stupid loopholes. After all, the objective here is not to win or do something fiendishly clever. It is simply a question of morals.

The question was something like this:

If you could steal some one's life force just by touching them, and restore your own life by the same amount, at a speed of one year per second... what would you do?

We explored this question and expanded on it:

The life drained is measured in years. Draining one year from someone will shorten their natural life by one year while extending your own; essentially restoring a year to you. E.g. if you were seventy-five and drained ten years from a thirty-year-old, you would be restored to the age of sixty-five and your victim would be accelerated to the state of a forty-year-old.

• You only have to touch your intended victim
• There is no obvious or flashy effect other than accelerated ageing in your victim and rejuvenation in yourself
• You drain life at a rate of one year per second
• Draining too many years from someone can kill them, leaving them an empty and withered husk
• You cannot drain more life out of someone than their naturally remaining lifetime
• The amount of years someone has left is defined by their natural lifetime and death by natural causes (i.e. oxidization and the natural breakdown of major organs)
  
• If you were heavily wounded you could regenerate yourself by draining life from a victim - the rate of regeneration would be equal to that of natural healing; to heal something like a severed limb you would have to drain a great deal of life force from a victim, potentially killing them
• Your mind and mentality would be restored along with your physical body; so you would not become a senile teenager if draining many years from someone after becoming senile due to ageing, but you retain your memories and mental ability unless you revert yourself to a young child or infant
• You don't have to drain someone just because you're touching them - it's a conscious and deliberate act
  

So, theoretically, you could just drain a single year out of a random person in the street on an annual basis... and live forever. Or at least live until you run out of people to drain. You could still be killed by normal means (being shot, falling down a cliff, being set on fire) and being left without a chance to restore yourself. In essence you'd be some kind of super-creepy vampire, but you can be slain by methods that would kill a normal human being.

When asked if I'd implement an ability like this, my knee-jerk reaction would normally be "No way!" or "Of course not!" but I took a moment to think about it and, to be perfectly honest I have to say that I'd be very, very tempted to use a power like that to extend my own life and vitality. At some point I think I said something along the lines of "Shit... I think I'd end up using a power like that!"

I don't think of myself as someone who is afraid of mortality. Something as unavoidable and certain as death is nothing to be afraid of in my book because you can't do anything about it. But suddenly, presented with this theoretical predicament... I found that I might actually implement an ability that might prolong my life almost indefinitely. To be clear, I wouldn't go around taking years and years of life off people and leaving them to wither away into nothing. Maybe just a year here and there from people I'd arbitrarily judge as having enough to share.

What scared me the most about this question was my answer. No reason to avoid it or deny it. I said I would end up using a power like that. Damn.

To further this, I consider myself to me a person of high morals. And I would take this twisted vampirism for no other reason than the selfish promise of eternal life. Because right now I view the continuity of my own life as preferable to death. So what if that offer was made to someone with much more flexible morals? You might see a madman willing to decimate populations in order to attain immortality!

I mean... what would you do?

Life Outside

After returning to my flat and then work for one day in the half term, I just thought to myself screw it and why sit in a dingy three room cell when I could be back in Hawkhurst relaxing properly? So I went back to visit my mum at her sit. And more relaxation took place. We walked the dogs, sat and talked, and I managed to get some notes drawn up for Dark Heresy. Not many though.

There is a huge field just outside of the village. Actually, there are lots of huge fields. But there was one in particular that I wanted to visit. So I did. I met a couple of deer on the way and the weather was both warm and sunny. It was a great break and I do feel refreshed for it.

In case you didn't know already, Eragon is a terrible film.

Speaking of film, I made a short GTA IV video and posted it on YouTube.



With the bare handful of notes that I wrote for Dark Heresy I actually managed to piece together a game. And it worked. I gave everyone new characters to start a side-story linked to the main plot. Matt trundled over from Tenterden and participated in his first RPG game. I gave him some background to the lore (although there is more lore and background to Warhammer 40,000 than a human mind might comprehend) and a character. An assassin called Varn who was armed with a hunting rifle, a composite bow, and a phobos stubber pistol.

As far as I could tell, he enjoyed the game. The more we played, the more pro-active he became. He made suggestions and came up with ideas that the others did not, and even had his character perform incredibly daring stunts while managing to keep his actions within reason.

The stunts included, but were not limited to, leaping from one landspeeder to another while they roared around the upper levels of an up-spire hab dome on a hive world. Then he managed to get into the cockpit and grapple with the pilot, an assassin and acolyte of an Inquisitor the guys are trying to track down. The landspeeder, already damaged by a shotgun blast to the engines, was spluttering out black smoke and many large sparks. The landspeeder went into a steep, uncontrolled dive. Sam's techpriest character wrestled with his own (requisitioned/borrowed/stolen) landspeeder, trying to stabilize the one heading for the ground by bumping into it. Nick's character used a clip harness as an insurance policy and also leaped to the rogue landspeeder, kicking the pilot in the face and knocking him unconscious. After that, there were several tense moments as the craft grazed buildings, rolled left and right, and finally stopped just short of a large rockcrete wall.

This is all after making trouble in a gambling den, fighting off gangsters intent on monopolising an empty cargo bay, and causing a lot of trouble in a cathedral (yes they leaped through a stained glass window).

After giving Sam a lift home, I got back to the underground car park where I store my bike and found a fox (male or female, I couldn't tell), sitting half asleep on top of one of the cars. I thought it would have run off when my bike approached, but it didn't look in the least bit bothered. It didn't even bat an eyelid as I stood ten feet from it, staring in disbelief. It was just sat, curled up, muzzle tucked under its tail, on top of a car which bore a rain-cover. If only I had a camera on me, or a phone with a camera built-in. The fox opened its eyes and looked up at me periodically, but wasn't bothered at all by my presence. It had blue eyes, large ears, and very tidy, clean-looking fur.

I know that a lot of animals like foxes and seagulls have become more or less accustomed to life in human villages, towns, and cities; but this fox was acting like a domesticated cat or dog rather than a wild scavenger.

Priviledge

So far the half term has been spent at Hawkhurst in the huge house that my mum is house-sitting for a friend.

When I say huge, I mean huge. I've probably mentioned this before. It used to be a school, and now it's home to a family of four... five? Six? Something like that. It's mah-hoo-sive.

I've been swimming in the pool, training with my bokken in the garden, chilling out and watching Hancock in (one of) the lounge(s), and eating lots of food that was past its sell-by date from the enormous larder. Seriously, these people have so much food that half of it has gone off or is so close to going off that it will be gone off by the time they get back from wherever it is that they're staying. So they told my mum to eat or throw out anything that wasn't going to keep.

I don't know why they leave the country for a holiday - I'd live in their house for my holiday! In fact I was doing so until yesterday afternoon when I had to bike home to meet the maintenance man who was coming to look at the damp in my kitchen and bedroom. And then his van broke down so instead of turning up at 14:00 he managed to limp in at 19:00. These things happen, I know, but being stuffed back into my box studio flat with nothing to do instead of enjoying the countryside from a mansion is just cruel.

And today I'm back at work. I've already done virtually everything I had planned on doing. I've cloned a problem PC and got it working, repaired damage to some computers in the ICT suite, and cleaned almost all of the projector filters. After finishing this blog entry (this is my titular lunch break) I'll find someone who can give me the keys for the blocks/rooms that are locked up so I can clean the projector filters in those rooms. Then I've done everything. I mean, I could start running Windows Update on some PCs that don't get much TLC... I suppose...

Of course, Dark Heresy is scheduled for this Sunday and I haven't got anything planned. Ha, ha, haaa! Well, nothing concrete so far at least. I have a few ideas but I don't have any stats or anything written down. At some point I'll have to actually work on the campaign. Nick and Sam are getting more and more paranoid about the NPCs they work with in the game. Their mysteriously-silent pilot just died (gruesomely), the Inquisitor stinks of corruption, and their handler/sponsor seems to be deeply schizophrenic! The guys they're chasing aren't much better so it's not like the acolytes can just switch sides. Oh how we love the varying tones of grey associated with 40k rather than the black and white morality of other popular fiction.

Money worries!

Flashy

I've been trying my hand at some Flash animations at work. We've got Adobe Web Standard CS3 you see, and students at the Geek Club we're running wanted to try something a little more advanced than Pivot.

So I made a few animations to introduce them to Flash. One was just a stick man running on the spot; the other was a short Madness-style person vs. zombie animation. The stick-figure animation is just a load of frames, each drawn from scratch. The madness animation utilises layers, motion tweens, and all that jazz; the efficiency of which can be seen when comparing their file sizes of 21kb and 4kb respectively.

They were actually quite fun to do; but I don't know how long I might get away with just sitting around all day making Flash animations. And if I went down the Madness route then there would be a lot of blood and killing and guns and swords and the like which wouldn't really be appropriate for the workplace. I'd also like to use my tablet and maybe even Photoshop or something to draw accurately; so Flash-for-fun probably won't happen in the workplace.

I tried "The Price of Neutrality" which is an extra quest for The Witcher (Enhanced Edition) since I was getting nowhere with "Side Effects". Since I completed the game on Normal mode I wanted to try these two adventures on Hard mode so that monsters cause more damage, potions and oils are required for survival, and timing attacks in combat is that much harder.

But I'm already getting destroyed by Kikimore warriors (Kikimora in the book, and I preferred the way they were described in the novels rather than their graphical interpretation in the game). Perhaps it's because I'm used to fighting on Normal mode. I'll try again with four potions (Swallow, Tawny Owl, Thunderbolt, Cat) instead of just two (Swallow, Cat). But that will put my toxicity through the roof, surely; and I cannot be certain that I can make enough potions with Albedo in them to manage my toxicity. In fact, relying on potions with Albedo, Nigredo, or Rubedo in them is going to be virtually impossible because of the ingredients available to me.

I realise this will sound like gibberish to someone who hasn't played The Witcher; but trust me, alchemy is very important in this game - especially on Hard mode.

In other, kind of related, news; I've been trying to figure out a tabletop RPG system that incorporates things like The Witcher's combat styles and alchemy (with a bit of The Elder Scrolls' alchemy added in). Other things I've tried to add include Call of Cthulhu's experience system (Chaosium's CoC, not the d20 version); Arx Fatalis' magic system; and maybe a little flavour from WFRP in terms of economy and darkness (not so much the background or prevalence of magic and Chaos).

Ultimately I'd want combat to be fierce and deadly, with players gaining the upper hand thanks to good decision making and tactics rather than good dice rolls; I'd want it to feel organic and natural; and magic should be fairly rare. I also want to introduce new ways of solving problems outside of combat. PC/NPC interaction and role playing. I think I should look at as many RPG rule sets as possible and see what they have on offer, of course. As far as I know there will be the perfect rule set out there already. I've got a lot planned for the setting too although I suppose you could use the setting with any low-magic fantasy RPG rules.

Endorsement

This morning the choice was either a) shave or b) lube my bike chain. Since removing the negligible weight of my facial hair doesn't give me peace of mind on the roads, I decided to omit the razor in favour of the automobile maintenance.

I now endorse Silkaline chain lube. I've been using WD-40 and the like before now, borrowing off Richard or Adam, or using chain wax instead of just lubrication. This Silkaline stuff really made a difference. The ride into work was very, very smooth. The only parts of my bike that are still really suffering from the bad weather are the tyres (urgh, not much I can do other than replace them - and right now, financially, that's not an option), and the clutch which has gotten progressively tougher; but then, that's to be expected and after it's next service it should get a little lighter.

Yesterday's Dark Heresy went pretty well. It was a short session because I didn't want to go into overtime. I put the players into the boots of some pre-rolled characters who would, in any other circumstances, be NPCs. About half the session was a drawn-out combat in which the two new characters were ambushed by a pair of unidentified gun-toting hired killers. There was a fully-automatic firefight cut short only by an autogun jamming when Nick tried to unleash a full-auto burst on one of the mysterious assailants; there was a long chase down a fire escape stairwell; some melee combat in which a healthy amount of critical damage was dealt out; and even a pursuit through and over a speeding monorail subway train.

At the encounter climax, I turned the tables and revealed that the mysterious assailants were Sam and Nick's characters. The new characters Sam and Nick had been playing became NPCs (one of them was actually dead by now, thanks to several volleys of shotgun shells), and the players took their original roles back.

I think both of them enjoyed the switcheroo. Sam said it was an eye-opener seeing the world through an NPC's eyes (especially being on the other side of combat with the acolytes). The guys got some experience points and some nice gear from the combat. The rest of the session was role playing and storytelling.

Again, I have to think of a way to follow a session like that. I'm striving to make every session memorable. You can't make each one as exciting as the last, or as important as the climactic ending, but I don't want there to be any filler. No travelogues, no sessions composed of GM-wall-of-text or NPCs talking to one another with the players just sitting around listening in.

The Diocletian

All of a sudden I feel a pang of loss as I remember The Diocletian in its rapidly decaying orbit around Cobalt004/Tephaine. No matter, the adventure went well and the players have something they will remember for many sessions to come. I think.

There was the zero-gravity exploration, the "waking dream" in which none but the mad could see the acolytes, there was the psychic frost, there was the herding, there was the apparition, there was the psyker child, there were illusions and strange alien creatures that could survive and "swim" in vacuum. There was the survivor that turned out to be quite, quite dead. There was the crewman desperate enough to turn to a damned tome in order to save himself. There was the added intrigue of things found in the ship's Inquisitor's quarters.

By the end of the adventure, the players were almost desperate to get their characters out of The Diocletian. When rescue came, they jumped at the chance to escape.

So now that they have seen The Diocletian, I can post the illustrations that I made of it.

The Diocletian is one of the Black Ships of the Inquisition. Not the nicest place to be when it's fully functional, but when it has been cracked in half (the players haven't discovered what actually broke the ship yet) and it's hanging in space... it becomes something of a nightmare.

Which is exactly what I tried to put the players through. Or at least their characters.

The thing is, I think this adventure went so well that I might have trouble following it with this weekend's game. There were some other (hopefully) memorable events in last weekend's session. We started off with a flashback of one character's traumatising past, we had an "introduction" to the Inquisitor and some of his staff (although the acolytes only learned two new names despite all the new faces they were introduced to), and someone made a deal with an exceptionally creepy astropath and only learned a few minutes later that he had been talking to a psyker (one of his pet hates).

If you can get your players to talk about your campaign outside of game-time, then you're doing a good job as a GM.

Snow Day Mk. II

Alright, so yesterday I was already on the train and waiting for John (my co-worker) to ring me and tell me that the school would be closed due to the inclement weather. Eventually he sent me a text message saying "We're open!!!" shortly followed by another saying "We're closed!!!"

Apparently the head only declared that we'd be closed when the catering staff couldn't make it in. The snow was piling up, cars weren't getting out of second gear (even on national speed limit roads), and the trains were running only as far as Tonbridge; even then they were only coming and going every half hour.

So I jumped off the train at Crowhurst and stood around for a while taking in the scenery. I really love snowfall and the muting effect it has on everything. Then I got a call from John confirming that the college was closed. I just walked around the station for ages (well, half an hour judging by the trains) watching the snow drift lazily down onto the white landscape. Crowhurst is only a small village as far as I understand it, and there was virtually no one around. Someone was walking his dog and said good morning, and someone else drove their four-by-four away down a lane (skidding and drifting because he over-revved)... other than that it was just me, some rabbits, and some magpies.

I almost walked home. There's a field outside of Crowhurst that I've seen from the train. It has the remnants of an old road or railway bridge in it that isn't connected to a road or railway. It's just standing there, half demolished, getting overgrown. But, as John reminded me, the school website needed updating to declare the closure.

By the time I had arrive home I had completely forgotten about the website. I don't think I updated it until some time in the afternoon. Bummer. Well I updated it on time this morning. The college is closed again, despite the lack of snowfall. There's snow on the ground, sure, but it's not falling from the sky and it's not scheduled to fall until at least an hour after midday. I think we may get heavier snow towards the end of the week.

I wasted a lot of time browsing the Internet and playing computer games yesterday. I really should have walked home through the woods and fields that stand between Crowhurst and Hastings. I was apprehensive about it because of the website (which I didn't end up doing) and because I didn't have time that morning to pack a proper lunch. Y'all know that you need to burn calories to stay warm, and I didn't have any calories to replenish my energy if I got hungry, dizzy, or cold out in the middle of nowhere. Still, I should have done it. Especially after hearing Sun Screen.

Snow Day

Hell yeah!