Where Worlds Collide

I’ve going to be out of town for a few days, with some gaming at Gypsycon in deepest Cambridgeshire. I hope to run the GURPS Kalyr adventure I’d intended to run last year. There’s also going to be an Ars Magica LARP, which sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun. A lot of other interesting-sounding games including Mage:Sorceror’s Crusade and Cyberpunk, although I don’t yet know which of those I’m going to be playing in.

I’ve pre-emptively disabled comments and trackbacks so that I don’t come back to find the weblog buried in comment spam. Normal comment service will be resumed in about a week’s time.

Slacktivist is on a roll at the moment. This is what he has to say about the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth propagated by some fundamentalists, which hit the headlines a few years back and caused a lot of genuine human suffering, not just in America, but in Britain too.

The strange thing about believers in “Satanic Ritual Abuse” is not just that their belief persists despite an utter lack of evidence, but that they seem so eager for these things to really be true. They seem to want it to be the case that a vast, secret, predatory network exists that abducts, abuses and murders tens of thousands of children every year as part of its ritualistic worship of Satan.

This is not a healthy thing to want to believe is true. And yet, despite the fact that no actual practitioners of Satanic Ritual Abuse have ever been found, thousands of people believe in it because they somehow want it to be so.

I suspect some of these fundamentalists have fallen into the heresy of Dualism, their worldview, especially the obsession with sex, seems very, very Manichean. It also ties in with the Premillenial Dispensationalist heresy which circulates in the same circles.

And these people, holding beliefs I consider to be deeply and dangerously heretical, are the first to screech “Heresy!” whenever a mainstream cleric suggests that some detail of The Bible might be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally. What was that line about motes and beams again?

One of the more economically illiterate members of the Samizdata collective quoted this ridiculous passage from rightwing troll P.J.O’Rourke.

The Heritage Foundation says, “There isn’t a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides.” Heritage cites the Minneapolis “Hiawatha” light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.

With nonsense like that it’s hard to know where to start. Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops, who cannot be accused of being any kind of left-winger, but who does know a bit about economics, points out the obvious mistake.

This comparison is a common canard from the highway lobby, particularly from those individuals who perceive the trolley service as “public,” hence tainted with socialism, and the private owner vehicle as “private,” despite the public spending on roads, which are congested in part because there’s been little construction of new roads. The comparison presents the full cost of the trolley service, including some share of the spending on the permanent way (is it amortized correctly) with the incremental cost of another sport-ute, without contemplating the full cost of providing sufficient capacity for additional sport-utes.

Fortunately the Samizdata post is getting thourougly fisked in the comment sections the poster’s fellow Libertoids.

It’s actually very difficult to compare the economic efficiency of different transport modes because of the huge externalities, both positive and negative. The trouble with a lot of these externatilities are that they’re so difficult to measure that it’s tempting for those with vested interests or ideological axes to grind to pretend they don’t exist. I remember reading that the increase in property values along the corridor served by the new light rail system in Dublin was greater than the cost of constructing the thing. But good luck expecting the road lobby to admit that.

It’s also true that things are very different in most European cities compared with the suburban sprawls typical of large parts of America, a landscape created by and for the private car. The population density there is so low that it’s very difficult for any form of public transport to be economically viable. The consequence (which never seems to occur to many Americans) is that it’s simply not possible to survive in these sprawls without access to a car. That’s not true of any larger towns and cities in Britain.

I have to keep repeating this. Public transport advocates such as myself are not anti-car. We just don’t want them to be made compulsory, as has already happened in large parts of America.

There are so many 70s bands on the road with just one or two original members nowadays that the dividing line between an original band and a tribute act is getting just a little blurred. To take a random example, is a Thin Lizzy fronted by Jon Sykes really worthy of the name?

Both Barclay James Harvest and Asia are down to just one original member, bassist and vocalist Les Holroyd in the case of BJH, and ex-Buggles keyboardist Geoff Downes in the case of Asia. (To confuse things further, there are now two competing BJHs on the gig circuit!) Are they really ‘genuine’ bands? And how much does it really matter anyway? Manchester Academy 2 on Friday night was the place to find out.

Dare were the first of the three bands on the bill, playing a brief 30 minute set to warm up the audience for the double headliners. The set started with an awful muddy sound mix, although thankfully it got better after the first couple of numbers. To be honest, Dare never really rose about the level of a pub-rock band, which probably explains why they’ve never had much success even though they’ve been around for years. Nothing spectacularly bad about them; the playing was competent, but with one or two exceptions, most of the AOR-ish songs were rather ordinary.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from BJH. I’m only familiar with one of their albums, the live one recorded in Berlin twenty years ago. Sadly they played all of one song from it. The numbers they did play, which I gather was a mix of some songs from their 70s heyday and some much never material was more guitar-driven than I expected. In an interview Les Holroyd had stated that the setlist concentrates on songs he had written, which confirmed the impression I was getting; this was not so much Barclay James Harvest, as Les Holroyd plus a bunch of anonymous session musos. They were musically competent, I have to say, especially the guitarist. They just didn’t seem that tight as a band, and too much of the material sounded the same, and came over flat and uninspired. The biggest single flaw was Les’ vocals, desperately weak in places.

Disaster struck towards the second half of the set. Just as the show began to show a few signs of life, the power went out on stage; no amps, no mikes, no keyboards, nothing. After a few embarrassed minutes, they got the sound back, only for the power to fail a second time after about a minute of song intro. A much longer pause followed before the problems were finally fixed, and BJH were finally able to complete a now somewhat truncated set. But by now it was too late; they’d completely lost momentum, and any atmosphere had fizzled out. They’re going to have nightmares about this show for months.

And so to the headliners. Asia have a strange history; a supergroup accused by some of having been put together by the record company, who nevertheless produced one classic album. Then the original supergroup dissipated following a disappointing second album. In most cases, that would simply have been the end of the story. In Asia’s case, the least well-known band member recruited a bunch of relative unknowns, and carried on.

Asia’s current lineup is Geoff Downes on keys (Formerly of The Buggles, and then Yes), John Payne on bass and vocals, Chris Slade (who’s played with Tom Jones, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Uriah Heep and AC/DC) on drums, and Guthrie Govan on guitar.

Asia opened with barnstorming versions of “Wildest Dreams” and “Here Comes the Feeling” from that classic 23 year old debut. Asia had the tightness and unity of purpose that BJH had lacked; this was clearly a band, not a bunch of random musos on stage. But all four of them nevertheless have amazing chops. Frontman John Payne is very much the visual focus now, and someone not knowing their history would assume that he, not Geoff Downes, was the founder member of the band. His voice is a little more gravelly than that of John Wetton, but he’s nevertheless made the older songs his own. Guthrie Govan cuts a frail-looking figure on stage, but there’s nothing frail about his guitar playing, some of which is just amazing. And Chris Slade drumming is just monstrous.

The set naturally drew heavily from that first album, with I think six of the eight on it songs being played. Quite a bit came from their most recent effort, “Silent Nation”, which I have yet to hear. John said that they’ve given up on album titles beginning and ending with the letter ‘A’ (Asia, Alpha, Astra, Aqua etc.) because they’ve run out of usable words; “Angina” or “Asthma” would not have worked! In the middle of the show they played an acoustic set, with some incredible duelling flamenco licks from John and Guthrie. And Chris Slade even managed to play a drum solo which wasn’t boring! The only weak spot was the semi-instrumental version of The Buggles’ big hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star” in Geoff’s keyboard solo. That didn’t really work; if they are to include it in the set at all, perhaps they should rework it as a rock number and get John Payne to sing it.

The finished as they began, with “Only Time Will Tell”, and the encore “Heat of the Moment”.

Overall, Asia put on a great show, clearly well-rehearsed and professional, although still very much enjoying themselves. The fact that they only have one original member left is only an incidental detail; the current lineup has very much gelled as a band, and were firing on all cylinders. But when it comes to Barclay James Harvest, I’m afraid I can’t really say the same thing. To describe them as one has-been backed by anonymous sidesmen sounds cruel, but it’s pretty close to the truth. A genuine tribute band would probably have put on a better show.

Official Asia web site www.asiaworld.org

Fred Clark of Slacktivist explains how different fundamentalist sects interpret this very old joke.

So this gorilla walks into a bar. The gorilla slaps a $10 bill on the counter and says, “Give me a beer.”

Bartender figures what does a gorilla know? So he gives him the beer, but only gives him $1 in change. It’s a slow night, though, so the bartender figures he should make some conversation. “We don’t get many gorillas in here,” he says.

Gorilla says, “Yeah, well at $9 a beer I’m not surprised.”

I’m inclined to concede one point to Fred’s Literalist; the joke does sound pretty antideluvian…

Electric Nose has some new toys:

Every home should have at least one SD70MAC, in fact in some areas of Cornwall it’s believed that local bye-laws require you to own a couple of dozen…

I do not have any SD70MACs. I don’t intend to get any either; I have enough Kato quality with their SBB Re460s and Re6/6s. And if I started buying American stuff I know wouldn’t be able to stop with one loco! However, I do have a Danish GM Nohab, and a CJM class 66 (with a second one on order). Do they count?

I’ve just finished the player characters for the game I’m scheduled to be running at Gypsycon at Easter. I already had the pregenerated GURPS characters, since I wrote this adventure for last year con, but due to illness (not mine, one of the players), I didn’t get to run it.

But now Steve Jackson Games have gone and released a new version of the GURPS rules. Since the new rules are a big improvement in a number of areas, I plan to use the new 4th ed. rules. Hence I needed some conversion work. The exercise also helped me get to grips with some of the rule changes.

It also demonstrates that point values are not the same between the editions. The original characters were all 125 points, but on a straight conversion, they varied from 135 points (the combat grunt) to 230 (the psi). The other three came out between 160 and 180, so I fixed the point value at 175 and adjusted them accordingly. This means Frenn the combat specialist is now a lot tougher, and Isana the psi has gained some additional disadvantages, including Motion Sickness. I realise that that would have been fun in the adventure I played with those characters two years ago.

I’m looking forward to running this; it will be the first time I’ve GMed anything for something like nine months.

The popular meme is that the second album is the hardest one for a band to make. It’s said that they have umpteen years to write the first one, and then must write the second from scratch in the space of a few months.

I’ve always been sceptical of this meme; looking at most of the great bands in rock history; those who have successful multi-album careers, in almost all cases the second album is stronger than the debut. Compare Led Zeppelin II with their first one, for example.

I think the survival of the meme is a consequence of the media’s and record industry’s habit of over-hyping bands of limited talent. Most of them only have one album’s worth of ideas. Their first album contains not only all they can do, but all they will ever be capable of. Their second merely proves this, and in most cases there’s never a third; the record company drops them, and they all get jobs as accountants.

I have long believed the music press do this on purpose; since they depend on breaking new ‘talent’ rather the writing about established artists who have better things to do that talk to some talentless hack. So they deliberately hype bands they know will have no staying power, and will safely fade away to make way for whoever they hype next week

The Mars Volta’s debut, “Deloused in the Comatorium” was one of the most amazing albums I’d heard for years. It somehow managed to combine the raw energy of punk with the complexity of full-blown prog-rock to produce something that completely transcended genre boundaries.

The followup pushes things even further. All the ingredients from “Deloused” are still here; soaring vocals, frenetic instrumental sections, incomprehensible song titles like “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus” and “Plant a nail in the navel stream”. But they’ve added more; now alongside the machinegun drums and Frippesque guitars we have string sections and mariachi trumpets.

The 75-minute running time is split into just five tracks, with lyrics as strange as anything by Jon Anderson or Pete Sinfield, but an order of magnitude darker; twisted and disturbing, they’re not the things audiences are going to sing along with. But this album’s not really about the lyrics, it’s about the music.

And what music! This disc is far varied that their debut. There’s “The Widow”, at seven minutes the shortest track on the album, strongly bluesy in a way that recall’s Muse’s version of “Feeling Good”. Elsewhere we get fleeting glimpses of the improvisational King Crimsons of the mid 70s and mid 90s, flashes of psychedelic-era Pink Floyd and blasts of anarchic sax and sci-fi noises that recall Hawkwind’s “Space Ritual”. Some might label the lengthy instumental sections of the epic “Cassandra Geminni” as self-indulgent, but I just can’t agree; there’s a hypnotic quality about them, and the quiet bits break up into instrumental anarchy just before the overstay their welcome.

Overall, a superb album, and proof that “Difficult second album syndrome” simply doesn’t happen to great bands.

I’m a big fan of alternate histories. The two GURPS Alternate Earths books published a few years back for the old 3rd Edition of GURPS are among my all-time favourite RPG sourcebooks. Still, it rather surprised me when I first heard that Steve Jackson Games had chosen to make this meta-setting the core background for the fourth edition of GURPS 4th Edition of the Generic Universal Roleplaying System. Although the previous AH books were superb pieces of work, Alternative History and Time Travel games have never been hugely successful commercially.

Genius conspiracy theory expert Ken Hite took on the task of taking the existing hard-SF Alt-History of Alternate Earths and adding some of his trademark ‘high weirdness’. Hints over the internet in the preceding months promised the addition of sinister occult conspiracies and terrifying extradimensional Things Mad Was Not Meant To Know (think Lovecraft minus the seafood) and just about everything else. This would give us a game setting which encompasses swashbuckling adventure, hard science fiction, high fantasy or dark horror, or all of these at once.

In the hands of a lesser author, there’s a grave danger than it would turn into a cheesy Abbott and Costello style monster mash. But has Infinite Worlds managed to avoid that fate?

Chapter One, Infinity Unlimited describes the world called Homeline, a world not unlike our own, but a world where a physicist named Paul van Zandt discovered the means of travelling between worlds, and ultimately founded the Infinity Unlimited, a corporation chartered by the United Nations to explore these alternative worlds.

The bulk of the chapter is given over to the Infinity Patrol, a likely employer of player characters. They’re described as a supranational paramilitary agency, under Infinity’s control, dedicated to protecting Homeline, ‘The Secret’, Infinity itself, and the unknowing innocents of other worlds, in roughly that order. ‘The Secret’ is the knowledge of parachronic travel, which must never be revealed to the inhabitants of other timelines! The chapter describes the mission and goals of the Infinity Patrol, their structure, technologies, and something of the physics of dimensional travel. As well as the Patrol, there are other timeline-hopping outfits licenced by Infinity, from the interdimensional White Star Trading, who actually provide Infinity with much of their revenue, Time Tours, who send parties of tourists to relatively ‘safe’ timelines, and the interworld mercenary company Alternative Outcomes.

Chapter Two, Enemies Everywhen describes the principal villains of the setting. It starts with two parallel worldlines that have discovered the secret of parachronic travel.

First is the technocratic and vaguely communistic Centrum, seemingly intent on taking over every parallel world they can get hold of. Their parachronic technology works on similar principles to those of Infinity, albeit with subtle differences. Centrum are not completely evil, but they are totally ruthless and believe the end justifies the means. They tend to operate in the shadows, taking over existing power structures from within rather than using brute force. For a shades-of-grey cloak-and-dagger style of game, they make a worthy adversary for the Infinity Patrol. It’s even possible to make Centrum the good guys, with a darker version of Homeline becoming the villains.

For a far nastier enemy, there’s Nazi-dominated Reich-5. A world where the axis powers won World War II fifty years ago, and an aggressive high-tech Germany and Japan now rule the entire globe, they’ve gained access to a limited number of other worldlines with the aid of Aryan occult mysticism and some psionic bio-tech that’s unpleasant enough to warrant being called black magic. Now they’re slowly spreading their reign of terror across other worlds. Unlike Centrum, they don’t go for subtlety when brute force will do the job, and have no qualms over unleashing high-tech firepower on the inhabitants of primitive worlds. The only thing slowing them down is that their form of dimensional travel won’t let them move a great deal of heavy equipment from world to world, so their offworld stormtroopers tend to be relatively lightly armed and equipped. They’re the foe for games when you want an old-fashioned morally unambiguous Good versus Evil slugfest.

Then there’s The Cabal, a world-spanning alliance of enigmatic entities such as immortal sorcerors, vampires and other assorted supernatural beings. The Cabal make an opponent for a game focussing more on horror or dark fantasy. Finally Homeline has villains of it’s own, from corrupt corporations to organised crime syndicates extending their tentacles beyond one Earth.

And I haven’t even mentioned the parachronozoids or the reality quakes yet.

Next, Present at the Creation is a toolbox for creating your own parallel worlds. It gives a lot of advice on creating plausible histories. First it describes the various kinds of infinite worlds; from Echoes (copies of homeline at an earlier point in time), close parallels (like Homeline but with a few minor social or cultural changes), further parallels (with major changes in history), high inertia parallels (changes in history centuries or millennia ago, but which still retain recognisable cultures), and myth parallels (those that resemble mythologies, or even popular fantasy fictions). I personally find the last of those rather silly, and won’t use them in any Infinite World games I ever run! Your mileage my vary, of course.

It contains a random world generation system, in which you roll in turn on tables determining technology, number and type of major civilisations, and the government structures of each. To test this, I came up with a world of modern-day technology, dominated by a caste-based West African empire, and a bipolar Japanese/Chinese civilisation, comprised of a dictatorship and an oligarchy.

Worlds Enough gives a couple of dozen ready made parallel worlds; each described in a couple of pages. Many of these are old favourites from the two Alternate Earth books. Examples are the improbably Aztec-dominated Ezcalli, the steam-powered Roman Empire of Roma Aeterna, the futuristic high-tech Moslem-dominated Caliph where the industrial revolution took place in 10th-century Arabia. These brief descriptions don’t replace the two AE books, to which GMs wanting further information are referred. Alongside these we have plenty of all-new worlds, including Bonaparte-1, the post-Napoleonic cyberpunk one I remember Ken Hite discussing at Gen Con UK a few years back.

Slowly drained and ossified, the French Empire has become a globe-spanning banana republic. The secret police is in bed with the Union Corse, the computer network links to nothing but government propaganda and posturing student movements, and the maglev trains never run on time

Chapter Five covers the related genre of time travel rather than dimension-hopping. It’s made up largely of material reprinted from GURPS Time Travel, and feels somewhat out-of-place in the book since nothing much in this chapter can really be used in a game focussing on Centrum vs. Infinity vs. Reich 5. (The boxed text “Infinite can of worms” states this explicitly!) I feel the 19 pages it takes up would better have been spent on some additional timelines or dimension-hopping enemies.

Chapter six, Infinite Characters unsurprisingly covers character generation, with some notes on the use of skills and abilities, and a whole load of GURPS Character templates. These templates cover likely PCs, such as I-cops, White Star Traders and Alternative Outcomes mercenaries, along with some stock villains such as Centrum Agents and Reich-5 Raven Division stormtroopers. This is something I’d really like to have seen in the original GURPS Time Travel.

Chapter Seven covers campaigns, and gives a lot of useful advice to running dimension-hopping games, with notes on power levels, campaign modes and genres.

Chapter Eight is a bit like chapter five; again it’s material reprinted from Time Travel, and covers three alternative campaign frames; the psionic time travelling “Order of the Hourglass”, the gentleman’s club-cum-dimensional nexus “The Horatio Club”, and the SF time travel setting “The Time Corps”. The Time Corps is a good time-travel setting, but again it’s pretty much useless for the cross-parallel setting that takes up the rest of the book.

Finally, like all good GURPS books, there’s several pages of bibliography.

Overall, this is great piece of work which doesn’t disappoint. Not quite perfect; the time travel stuff feels tacked on and should have been saved for another book. But the good bits more than make up this; It’s good to see Infinity fleshed out, the extra alternate worlds are well thought-out, and the timeline building system is an excellent game-within-a-game. Infinite Adventures await!