A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

I have spent some time discussing Trappings, in various places.  Trappings are, at a fundamental level, the thing that take a generic system like Savage Worlds, and make it specific or, ideally, iconic .  To use another setting's example, the Glitter Boy from Rifts is at its heart a power-armored suit that has a single big gun.  That description could be dropped in Starship Troopers (novel) for the Mobile Infantry and pass just as effectively.  Part of the problem with d20-based games is that, over years of play, they all developed a certain... sameness.  There wasn't much to differentiate Abeir-Toril from Greyhawk from Golarion from Krynn.  Oh, there certainly were exceptions - d20 Rokugan was different, Athas was different, Ravenloft was different, but there were a lot of Generic Fantasy Setting games out there, which was part of what led to the d20 OGL Collapse of the late-2000s; the market was just saturated.  We'd seen the same things, over and o...

It's an energy field created by all living things.  It surrounds us and penetrates us, and binds the Galaxy together.     - Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope   Classical gaming "magic," for lack of a better word, divides arcane systems into one or more categories - divine, arcane, psionic, et cetera - and gives these things sources.  Even in literature, we see similar concepts in, for instance, Robert Jordan's saidar and saidin .  Star Wars, as a franchise, does not take that route.  Instead, every incidence of magic in Star Wars is traced back to one of two sources, the Force, or something approximating the behavior of the Force.  Sometimes, this results in some truly dissatisfying approaches to the Force, where the Sith are shown acting more like classical wizards with artifacts, talismans, and tomes of power, or an approach that I personally find fairly egregious - the Ones.  The Ones are supposed to...

For a while, I was writing a haiku a day, minimum, and while most, as with most art, were in fact forgettable, a few were pretty good.  However, there's a problem with haiku as an SCA art form: the haiku, even in its rudimentary, early form, is a post-period development.  The man most associated with its early development, Matsuo Basho ( note - Basho, Bashou, or Bashô is a poetic name; the Japanese have historically been very fond of nicknames; his adult name was Matsuo Munefusa) lived from 1644 to 1694, thus placing him firmly in the post-SCA period. This led to a further exploration of Japanese poetry.  It turns out that haiku specifically evolved from what was essentially a party game, very similar to the SCA bardic circle, practiced by all literate levels of society from at least the mid-1300s.  This form is called renga (linked verse); the first published renga known is the Tsukubashu ("Tsukuba Anthology"), an imperial publication dated to 1356 and collected b...

Ever since the mid-90s or so, the trend in gaming has been to include systems about what sets your character apart - whether that was AD&D2 kits, or D&D3+ Feats, or Advantages/Disadvantages in GURPS and Merits/Flaws in Storyteller games, it was a fairly sharp deviation from the early D&D way of handling those either as one-offs with GM-arbitrated mechanical effects, or as nonexistent.  WEG's d6 Star Wars didn't really get into this - with a couple of notable, species-based exceptions like Noghri martial arts - but probably would have with a couple more years' development, as the use of Feats by the same writing team working for WOTC on d20 Star Wars demonstrates. Savage Worlds uses the terms Edge and Hindrance for these; I discussed these very briefly in the Chiss conversion.  To be honest, the Savage Worlds philosophy of "just adjust one that already exists to fit circumstances" works really well, so that very little additional material needs to be w...

Star Wars has a lot of aliens.  A ton of aliens.  There are so many species that there are serious issues trying to include them all.  The obvious problem for a role-playing game is that every species that gets included needs to be statted out.  The first filter therefore is which species get included. There are certain species which, regardless of era, are so iconic they must be included.  These include humans, for obvious reasons (and their statistical duplicate, near -humans, a WEGism that I really liked and therefore keep), Wookiees, Twi'leks (the "tail-head people," as my daughter calls them), Rodians (think Greedo, who accosted Han in the cantina), and Gamorreans ("pig-men," according to her).  That's not even an exhaustive list of the "iconics," but they all get enough screen time in the films that they need to be included. Then there are the species which make a specific era stand out - Gungans for the Clone Wars, for instance.  For our pr...

Before I get into a detailed discussion of eras and philosophies of play, because I do not actually have a target audience for this blog, I am going to discuss calendars in Star Wars.  It is common in the Star Wars fandom to use the Battle of Yavin as a reference point - either BBY, or Before the Battle of Yavin, or ABY, After Battle of Yavin; thus, Revan flourished about 3950 BBY, and the Battle of Hoth was about 3 ABY.  Dates used throughout will be BBY and ABY, even in eras where "the Battle of Yavin" means a completely different event if it is known at all.  I should also point out that none of what follows is particularly revolutionary or exciting, but putting it down on "paper" allows me to codify some of my thoughts for my own reference later. Star Wars presents a unique problem, at least in my experience, in gaming - there are four to five distinct eras of play, where technology should reasonably be radically different, which are reasonable choices for play....

The setting which I have run more games in than any other setting is Star Wars, across a variety of times and places in the timeline.  I have very strong feelings and a sense of attachment where that universe is concerned, and can still put together an entire game in the old West End Games d6 Star Wars system, which was, to my mind, the best system put forward for Star Wars, and probably featured more loving care than any subsequent iteration.  There's a reason that LucasArts once handed Timothy Zahn a stack of WEG sourcebooks and said "here, these are a pretty good start."  The Expanded Universe owes its eventual shape, in many ways, to WEG's Star Wars. Unfortunately, WEG lost the license during a period of financial upheaval, and since it hasn't been kept up, WEG Star Wars has not aged well.  Oh, it's still playable, still plays well even, but it was never really intended to play a wide scope of games, and it had a real "linear fighter, quadratic wizard...

Today we laid down the first mead of 2021.  Generally we lay down one or two batches a year, largely because we are terrible at pulling them and bottling them, and it's just as easy to pull mead into a glass from a dipper as it is to pull it off into bottles. The basic recipe for all of our meads is three parts water to one part honey, with two cups of brewer's yeast slurry divided between two pots of four gallons each.  Typically we do one pot plain and one pot not-plain; last not-plain was orange chai, the not-plain before that was cranberry, and this one's orange ginger.  We used approximately a pound of fresh ginger, peeled and cubed, six large juice oranges, peeled and sliced, and about two ounces of orange zest peeled off the oranges.  It will be consumable in about March, and it will be ready for bottling between March and June, at which time we may start another batch - or we may just forget to bottle it, as we've done occasionally before. Basic steps: 1. Gat...

It is traditional for the first program by a new programming student in any programming language, or the first program run on a new platform, to be a simple declaration of text: Hello World.  It may be fancier, but it will not be simpler. So, without further ado... Hello World.