Where Worlds Collide

Some Game bloggers get to be invited to the best parties. Not that I’m jealous, of course.

So said the bowl of petunias… In an earlier post I made reference to disfunctional egroups, particularly railway modelling ones. There is one group in particular, that’s been renamed twice following major flamewars, and has burned out so many moderators I’ve lost count.

Now we have a prominent member (and onetime moderator) feeling he’s being forced out of the group because of the backbiting of others. I’ve never known any other net community based around any subject that’s been as political as this one. While there are plenty of good people prepared to discuss aspects of railway modelling, there seems to be a minority that are only interested in causing trouble.

What in Ed Burkhart’s name is wrong with you people?

The engineer’s possession is now complete. There were few glitches caused by the fact the MT database files hadn’t migrated properly, and some more caused by the fact I needed to change some configuration parameters because some directory names had changed.

Further engineering work is scheduled, probably this coming weekend, while I convert the database from Berkerly DB to MySQL.

This website will be moving to a new server sometime tomorrow (Wednesday). Knowing the length of time it normally takes for DNS changes to propagate, you may experience problems accessing the site over the next few days.

The good news is that the new server supports MySQL, which should be a lot more robust.

Need a unarmed self defence technique to defend yourself against evil lubruls? Learn Rumsfeld fu.

Warning! Rumsfeld Fu is a specialised martial art practiced by highly trained and skilled neo-conservatives. If practiced by the untrained, it can be dangerous.

It’s also not to be confused with Rummy-Thump, which is not dissimilar to the ancient Lancastrian martial art of Eckythump, except that instead of a black pudding, you use a priceless vase looted from the Iraqi national museum.

Game WISH 85 is all about Character Inspirations

What inspires you to create characters? Do you have partially-developed characters in mind for use when you get into a new campaign? Do you shop characters around, or do you come up with new characters when you get into a campaign? Why? If you GM, are you bothered by receiving a solicitation for a “generic” character, or does it enthuse you to get a solid proposal even if it’s not closely tailored to your game?

Short answer: it varies.

In games set in detailed fantasy or science fiction universes, I like characters to mesh in with the campaign’s setting in some significant way. I believe characters should have some sort of context; if the campaign setting is filled with all sorts of cults, guilds and megacorps, it’s a good thing to incorporate at least some of those into the character’s backstory.

As a player, sometimes I’ve had more than one idea for a campaign, and had asked the GM which one he or she would prefer before spending too much time fleshing any of them out. Unfortunately other times, I’ve just found the creative juices refuse to flow, and I’ve actually had to pass on some online games because I’ve been unable to come up with a decent concept in time.

I’ve seen a lot of batting of ideas back and forth between player and GM from both sides. For example, a recently a new player joined my ongoing Kalyr campaign with a character with ‘extensive underworld connections’. I sent the player a list of ongoing underworld NPCs, with the question “so what’s her relationship with these guys?”. Things like this help to plug the character into the gameworld, which to me is always a Good Thing. I did much the same thing with the GM of my last major face to face campaign, with Javin the river pirate of Pavis.

On the other hand, a ‘generic’ character should be able to fit somewhere into most gameworlds, although it might not necessarily fit into a narrowly-focussed campaign. One interesting case I had was the submission of a character possessed by a ‘demon’ (Who I’m told was based on a character from a David Gemmell book). I had to put in a bit of though to work out where this ‘demon’ fitted in to my gameworld’s cosmology. Quite what it is would be a spoiler for any of the game’s players that might be reading this, so I’m not going to say.

I’ve only ever created one PC based on a character from fiction; Karl Tolhurst, of whom I’ve written about before, and will probably write about again. He was based on Dan Ward, the central character from Iain Banks’ Espediar Street, a former rock star who’s band had ended in tragic circumstances.

I’ve also done a little bit of develop-in-play, from a very basic starting concept. Vandal the space pirate was an example of this. Basic concept was “big, tough and dumb as a rock”, and I just took if from there. I had a lot of fun playing that that character; he was quite different from the archetypes I usually tend to play.

This afternoon I heard the amplified tinny tones of “Lily the Pink” (I’m showing my age here if I can remember that!) coming from what was presumably an ice cream van.

It’s currently 4 degrees centigrade with a considerable wind chill factor. Don’t suppose he did much trade.

This is what I call a rant! The Sociology of Model Railroading (Link from Cold Spring Shops)

It’s about the American scene, but a lot still seems familiar. I’ve generally avoided the British ‘grotmeet’ scene, but I haven’t heard anything about it that contradicts this:

A Weberian, rationalistic approach to swap meets would assume that they are meant to be efficient local markets for second-hand merchandise. They would, for example, be a means for hobbyists or those leaving the hobby to liquidate unneeded supplies in a fast, informal way, without the potential heavily discounted effect they would see by trying to sell them back to a hobby shop. Some swap meet vendors are able to negotiate with heirs to purchase the model railroad assets of estates and then sell these assets at swap meets.

The rationalistic assumption would be that the consumer goes to a swap meet expecting to find a lower price for merchandise that she may find acceptable, though it may be outdated or in imperfect condition. One might also assume that a seller, finding price resistance to goods at a particular level, would be prepared to negotiate in order not to have to carry the goods back from a swap meet unsold.

A major factor that contradicts these rationalistic assumptions is the fact that many hobby goods of the type that are offered at swap meets have simply lost all economic value — while hobbyists are fond of calling swap meet merchandise “junk”, much — probably a lot more than half — of what appears at swap meets can’t realistically be sold at any price. It is literally trash, kept from the landfill by the expectations of the putative sellers. Often it’s dusty, broken remnants of merchandise that was already schlock when it was new in the 1970s or earlier. The effort to restore it to operation, if it’s practical at all, is greater than the still-low cost of new, better-quality merchandise, and the original junk hasn’t even got sentimental value.

I’ve also seen the dysfunctional clubs and egroups plagued with constant flamewars. But I’ve also been a member of clubs and egroups that don’t suffer from those problems.

One thing in his rant I don’t recognise at all is the description of the exhibition circuit, which is the major difference between the American and British railway modelling scenes.

In America (if magazines are anything to go by), the best layouts are huge, permanently installed basement-busters. Except for the occasional open day, the public never gets to see these layouts. Meanwhile, portable exhibition layouts revolve around modular layouts made up from disparate modules, sometimes with with ill-matching scenery and different standards of modelling.

The British scene is totally different. I believe this is a result of a combination of two factors, our smaller houses (without those gigantic basements), and our more compact geography. Here, many of the biggest and best detailed layouts are not permanent installations, but portable exhibition ones. Quite a few are too big for the owner to be able to set up and run the whole thing at home! As a result, it’s only at public exhibitions that these layouts are ever set up and operated. Combine this with the fact that many British cities are only a couple of hours drive from a dozen other large cities, and you get a thriving exhibition scene, with a large number of high quality layouts, many of which have multiple public outings a year. For just about every model railway club, the highlight of the club’s year is the annual show; all the better shows showcase not just the best of the club’s own modelling, but many high quality visiting layouts as well. And for trade support, with a few exceptions (Doncaster?), the grotmeet junk dealers are conspicuous by their absence. Instead there are a lot of small cottage industry business selling their own products, often obscure items the average model shop doesn’t stock.

Overall, I think the British model railway scene is in pretty good shape.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | The Darkness dominate Brit Awards

Glam rock sensations The Darkness have dominated the Brits, winning three awards at the UK music industry’s annual ceremony.

The band took best British album, best British group and best British rock act at the event in London.

And they deserve it (Although I liked Muse’s “Absolution” even better)

Sometimes I think The Darkness are a sort of 00s equivalent of the Sex Pistols. Although it’s not a direct comparison, the way hardcore indie fans hate them with a passion is remarkably similar to the way prog rock fans hated punk more than 25 years ago. I just hope much of the tuneless boring pretentious ‘indie’ which has effectively become what passes for mainstream rock gets swept away into the cutout bins on history where they belong.

I’ve participated in a weekly meme for one of my two hobbies in Game WISH, this attempts to cover my other hobby, railway modelling, in the much same sort of way. It might crash and burn after just a few weeks, but let’s give it a try. I’ll see what sort of response the first one gets before making this a regular permanent addition to the Working Timetable.

I’m also stuck for a snappy title or corny acronym. Suggestions are welcome.

If you’ve got your own blog, post your response there, and either use the Moveable Type trackback facility or leave a link to your entry in the comments. If you don’t have your own blog, just post your response in the comments.

The first one’s inspired a bit by Iain Rice’s “Mainlines in Modest Spaces“, and is a development of an earlier idea of mine. Imagine you are building a model of a main line or secondary route with a reasonable variety of traffic. Rather than a generic ‘somewhere in central England’ or the equally generic ‘on the border between Switzerland and Belgium’, the layout is either a specific location, or at least a specific route, and set in a fixed year.

You have space for a fiddle yard (or staging roads, if you’re on the left hand side of the Atlantic) with six roads, giving you a maximum capacity of six complete trains.

What are those six trains? They have to represent both a representative cross-section of the traffic on your chosen location, and represent some of the ‘signature trains’ that will identify the area and period to any casual viewer that’s familiar with the prototype. A good example would be a blue class 37 on a long train of clayhoods representing Cornwall in the mid 1980s.

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