Where Worlds Collide

Last weekend I’ve broken the four month drought of live music by seeing a kick-ass performance by Hayseed Dixie, for which I still haven’t written a review.

Next up is the always wonderful Mostly Autumn at Rhyl, for which I’ve now got my accomodation sorted. I’ve got a front row seat, so this should be a good one.

Now I’ve got to decide whether I’ve got the stamina for the DEMU Showcase, Queensrÿche and Journey on three consecutive days in June! So far I’ve got a ticket for Journey, but not Queensrÿche. There’s also Zappa plays Zappa two days earlier, for which there also still seem to be tickets available. That would make three gigs and one model railway exhibition in five days. Can I cope with this without needing a week off work to recover?

Update: I’ve managed to get a seat in row D for Zappa plays Zappa, and on the basis that Owen and Mike Foley are probably going to Sunday’s Queensrÿche show, I’ve just ordered a ticket for that as well.

There’s been some discussion recently on the ModMod mailing list about what makes a good exhibition layout. While different people have different tastes, I can sum up what appeals to me in four words.

• Atmosphere
• Verisimilitude
• Movement
• Distinctiveness

Layouts that appeal to me always have a clear sense of time and place. They should have a good but consistent standard of modelling. They don’t have to be huge monsters, sometimes small but well-detailed layouts can be inspirational (as in ‘I could build something like this’). But they do have to work, and need operators that know what they’re doing.

I have some pet hates as well. There are too many layouts that feature some or all of the following ‘features’:

• Layouts that look good but run badly.
• Architecturally impossible structures, especially bridges.
• Obvious anachronisms.
• Layouts where 50% of the locos is one-off depot specials or short-lived prototypes, which would never have been seen together at the same time and place.
• No attempt to run prototypical train formations despite the correct stock being available off the shelf (N gauge layouts seem to be bad offenders at this; how many malformed Virgin Cross-Country locomotive-hauled sets have you seen?)
• Unpainted brass kettles (I’m surprised how often you see this on finescale kettle layouts)

These are some examples of layouts I’ve liked, all of which display differing degrees of Atmosphere, Verisimilitude, Movement and Distinctiveness.

Dewsbury Midland
The Manchester Model Railway Club’s massive 00 gauge slice of urban West Yorkshire. It alternates between 60s steam and 70s blue diesels at different shows, but the big draw is the superb architectural modelling.

Chee Tor
The MMRC again, this time 2mm finescale. Set in the limestone hills of Derbyshire in the mid-60s, it’s the sort of thing you can only build in a small scale, where the scenery dwarfs the trains.

Dduallt
Yes, I know it’s a narra gauge kettle layout, but it’s an actual prototype, well-researched and well-modelled. Just about the only really good model of a preserved line I’ve ever seen. Set in 1988, it represents the Ffestiniog’s famous spiral.

Acton Main Line

One of the first really high quality diesel era N gauge exhibition layouts, now retired from the exhibition circuit, sadly. It’s a very well-researched and well-detailed model of the real location in west London circa 1989. With six running lines there’s always something moving, making the layout a crowd-puller.

Hedges Hill Cutting

A prime example of minimum space N inspirational for people who didn’t think they had space for a layout. It’s very small but extremely well-detailed slice of south London that just oozes atmosphere.

Woodhead

Another example of the minimum space N genre, this one evokes the bleak hills of the Pennines, on the now closed Woodhead line, featuring the distinctive 1500V DC locomotives that were unique to this line.

Shaweport

Another smallish N gauge model, representing the North Staffordshire main line in the early privatisation era. Although it’s not a model of any specific real life location, it’s firmly anchored in time and place by the rolling stock.

Därlingen
Being into Swiss-outline modelling myself, I have to include a Swiss N gauge layout, and this is the best one I’ve seen on the circuit. It’s a model of a prototype location, a small passing station on the single-track branch from Speiz to Interlaken.

Europ 3
Another big all-action crowd-pleaser, a large HO layout based on an Italian electrified main line. I don’t know enough about Italian prototypes to know how accurate it is, but it certainly looks impressive, with a high standard of scenic modelling and plenty of movement.

Stoke Summit
This is one of those layouts where it’s the stock rather than the scenery that makes it. The layout is set on the East Coast Main Line between Peterborough and Grantham, and consists of a long straight line in a cutting fed by a massive set of off-stage storage roads. The owner clearly loves building coach kits, and has gone to a lot of effort researching accurate train formations. It really captures the experience of watching the trains go past on a busy main line, never knowing what’s going to turn up next.

After the of doom and gloom of last months Out of the Box, Ken Hite speculates on the likely future of the RPG hobby

One silver lining of the sclerotic distribution system is that more and more fans are apparently coming out to shows to buy products; likewise, the community-building powers of the Internet help drive convention attendance as friends who know each other only from forums or LiveJournal plan meetups at shows. I’m not sure what kind of hobby we’ll have in another ten years — hundreds of boutique “indie” games and a strong network of local conventions anchored by regular D&D tournaments? That sounds oddly familiar — maybe we’re heading back to the 1970s. But hopefully, with better hair.

Interesting that a lot of the new ‘indie’ games seem geared towards one-shots, typical of convention gaming, rather that the extended campaigns of yore.

Well, my booking for Stabcon at the end of June has just been confirmed, and the realisation that it’s only two months away means I need to start thinking whether or not I’m going to run anything. I’ve got one Fudge Kalyr game I ran several Gypsycons ago, and I’m also tempted to dig up “El Tigre and the Pyramid of Destruction”, which makes a great convention game. Alternatively there’s the Ümläüt Call of Cthulhu game I’ve had lurking sqamously in my head for the last few months.

I’m not sure about the DnD tournaments, though. After Gypsycon, I’ve come to the conclusion that DnD isn’t for me any more.

Update: Ken has posted a lengthy followup on his livejournal, closing with this quote:

The “better hair” thing is just the triumph of hope over experience.

If the age profile of Stabcon is anything to go by, Ken subscribes to the “Less is More” philosophy

Is this why fundies call heavy metal The Devil’s Music?

On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons.

But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil’s Interval by medieval musicians.

A rich mythology has grown up around it. Many believe that the Church wanted to eradicate the sounds from its music because it invoked sexual feelings, or that it was genuinely the work of the Devil.

It is a mythology much beloved of long-haired guitar wizards.

When will the fundamentalist loons start demanding that the theme tune of The Simpsons be banned?

According to an interview I’ve read (can’t remember where), Tony Iommi came up with the riff of “Black Sabbath” while the band were rehearsing next door to a cinema showing horror films. Someone suggested that if people were paying to see scary films, they’d pay to hear scary music. So he picked up his guitar and played some tritones.

Meanwhile, Finland’s Eurovision Entry appears to be upsetting some Greek fundies who really need to get a life.

A group of Greek protesters known as the Hellenes have called on the Finnish government to intervene: “We ask the Finnish Commission of the Eurovision Song Contest to cancel the procedure and choose another song. This evil and satanic Finnish band is not welcome in Greece.”

Not sure whether their song “Hard Rock Hallelujah” contains any of the dreaded tritones.

I’ve been meaning to link to Slacktivist’s excellent post about the brittle nature of extreme fundamentalism for a couple of days, but I didn’t have one of those round tuits.

That’s part of the fundamentalist “worldview” — to use one of their favorite words — that only these two options exist. Option No. 1: Total and unquestioning belief in the God of the fundies’ literalist text. Option No. 2: Nihilism.

Her three young children are being taught this binary worldview. What will become of them? I’ve seen this story play out before, dozens of times. The only way to preserve the fragile faith they are being taught is to keep it sheltered from the world, like John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble — they have to be sent to fundie school, or to be home-schooled, until they are old enough to attend Bob Jones University. In the meantime they must be kept away from Bill Nye, and the Discovery channel, and NASA.gov. They can’t even be allowed to watch The Boy in the Plastic Bubble lest they begin to ask dangerous questions about Buzz Aldrin.

Some few of these kids will somehow manage to maintain this soap-bubble faith all the way through to adulthood. They’ll marry within the bubble and teach this fundamentalism to another generation of children. But those cases are the exceptions. Reality is too hard and pointy a place for soap bubbles to survive very long and most of these kids will end up being forced by reality to reject Option No. 1. Unsurprisingly, they tend to turn to what they have been taught is their only alternative.

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.

It does make you wonder how fundamentalism manages to perpetuate itself long-term. I can only assume there’s a two-way traffic between fundamentalism and self-destructive nihilism.

Gypsycon 2006 was the eighth annual face-to-face meetup of the Dreamlyrics community, held at the teeming metropolis of Pidley, Cambridgshire, where just over a dozen people met up for four solid days of gaming. Although we only meet up once a year now, it’s the nearest thing I have to a regular gaming group. The format is to run day-long one-shots, typically running for up to ten hours in length. Usually there are two or three different games taking place each day.

Neil Marsden and the Chaos Spiky Bits

Friday’s game was a Neil Marsden’s Warhammer 40K game, the first time I’ve played in one of his Gypsycon games, although I’d heard very good reports of his games of previous years. The system wasn’t based on any GW mechanics, instead Neil adapted the very simple d6-based Powergame system.

While my mind has associated Warhammer 40K with the adolescent-targetted marketing of Games Workshop, which seemed to emphasise munchkinism, grossness and Chaos Spiky Bits, Neil managed to turn it into a more grown-up setting, with PCs as regular soldiers rather than Imperial Space Marines. It started out as a straightforward military SF game, but we eventually ran into genestealers, and finally chaos entities. We defeated the chaos monster with the help of the noble sacrifice of one PC, who jumped sword-first down the things throat saying “I know I’m going to die, but I’m going to take this thing with me!”.

Neil makes the players care about NPCs. A nice touch was when one of the NPC grunts died in a firefight, and he had another NPC grunt retrieve his last letter to his mother before we left his body.

Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!

Saturday was an Ars Magica freeform, run by Andy Montgomery with a little help from Mark “L’Ange” Baker. This took the same general format as last year’s freeform, set around the seven-yearly Stonehenge Tribunal, but this time Andy had created his own scenario. Plot threads involved a murdered Jewish sorcerer, multiple disputed sources of Vis, questions about a missing mage from Anglesea who may or may not have been done away with by the covenant leader, the fate of some covenants that had fallen out of contact, and disturbing dreams about tortured faeries.

There were three phases of the game. First there were several hours of freeform information gathering, conspiring and deal-making. At the very end, my Covenant head collared me, most pissed off about me concealing my membership of an organisation called “The Seekers”, despite my protestations that I would have freely told him if only he had been bothered to ask!.

Then came the formal banquet, an in-character meal (Someone who shall be nameless commented that potatoes were anachronistic, to which I responded with ‘Just pretend it’s a turnip’). Finally we had the formal part of the tribunal, with votes on more than a dozen issues.

After the game, we had a debriefing, where HH revealed that he’d managed to conceal the fact that it was he who’d been torturing faeries with cold iron.

But I don’t have that many d6!

Sunday’s game was D&D, and reminded me why I generally don’t play DnD any more. When I roll 36d6 of damage, and my reaction is not “hey, kewl”, but “Oh bollocks, I’ve got to add up all those bloody numbers to find out whether or not I’ve managed to kill the thing”, then you can tell DnD isn’t the game for nowadays. Still, the other players seemed to enjoy it well enough; I think I’ve just grown out of number-heavy systems as a player.

Attack of the Unholy Moonbats

Monday was a modern-day conspiracy game run by Steve “Abbadon” Morley, a playtest of Steve’s own system, intended as a rules-lite system for realistic and deadly modern-day combat. The PCs were a group of British covert agents working for MI6. Our first mission was to eliminate an Al-Queda training camp in Pakistan; the premise behind this one was that Al-Queda had formed an unholy alliance with moonbat neo-Anarchists and was training the sort of idiots that fill out the ranks of the Animal Liberation Front as terrorists. Our heroic PCs slaughtered the whole lot of them. Then we were thrust immediately into another mission; a hostage situation at a pub in Newcastle. This time things didn’t quite go to plan. We did managed to rescue most of the hostages, and took some of the terrorists alive. Unfortunately we failed to spot that the terrorists had set up several webcams around the pub, and were webcasting the entire thing.

While our mission itself did go rather pear-shaped, we still managed to give Steve a lot of useful playtesting feedback!

The only trouble with Gypsycon is that we have to wait a whole year for the next one. Hopefully I’ll be running something next time.

Dave notes that Erich von Daniken’s “Mystery Park” in Interlaken, Switzerland, is going pear-shaped.

The park, set up by the author of bestsellers such as “Chariots of the Gods” and “The Gods were Astronauts”, has failed to attract enough visitors and needs 4 million Swiss francs (2 million pounds) in cash to stay in business.

The park’s attractions — which showcase giant drawings in the Peruvian desert that may once have been signs for visiting spacecraft, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and more — may close forever if the group does not find the money.

The place was under construction the last time I visited the Interlaken area. At the time, the Bern Lötchberg Simplon had a locomotive carrying an advertising livery promoting the place. Kato even made an N gauge model of it.

Note that having this locomotive on the roster of the Wöminseebahn does not indicate an endorsement of Von Daniken’s crackpot beliefs.

Dave adds cynically that the only problem was that it was built on the wrong continent.

I’m sure he could make it profitable again if he repurposed it to prove that angels visited the Earth in eras past, and relocated from Interlaken to, say, Kansas

But I don’t think it died of bird flu. The fact that it’s little corpse is badly mutilated, and that there are feathers everywhere suggests that it died a violent death.

This fellow is the prime suspect….

Unlike the flurry of gigs at the tail end of last year, I’ve gone three months without any live music, which is three months too long. But now I do now have some gigs to look forward to. So far I’ve got tickets for Hayseed Dixie (recommended by Ginger) in Manchester on 23rd April, Mostly Autumn in Rhyl on 5th May, and Journey (how long since they last played the UK?) at Manchester Apollo on 5th June.

Currently listening to Journey’s new album “Generations“. Some great material, and a lot rocker than other more recent releases, but why does new vocalist Steve Auguri only sing half the songs?

As for Hayseed Dixie, the only music of theirs I’ve heard is their fantastic cover of Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”, which appeared on a recent cover disk of Classic Rock magazine, and completely blew away everything else on that CD. Anyone recommend which is their best album?

Trouble with big model railway exhibitions is that I turn into Igor. Last weekend’s Alexandra Palace show was no exception.

At the top is a new Bachmann class 46 “Peak” for my next British layout. In the 1970s Plymouth Laira had a sizable allocation of these locos. Bachmann’s N gauge offering looks like a scaling down of their 00 gauge model, which Electric Nose was very scathing about. Scaled down to half the size, any faults are far less apparent, resulting in a more than satisfactory model as far as I’m concerned. One compromise is the bogies are somewhat overwide, but this results in a model that will negotiate 8½” curves. Running qualities are excellent, great slow running out of the box without any need to ‘improve after running in’.

For my current layout rather than the next one, I also picked up a Lima Minitrain Swiss NPZ set. (There are actually a pair of intermediate coaches too, converted from loco-hauled stock). These are now getting hard to get hold of, since Lima are no longer in business, so I was pleased to find one on sale. There’s some scary-looking sprues of detailing parts I have yet to add, including cab-to-shore radio aerials, windscreen wipers(!) and assorted gubbins around the pantrograph. Hours of fun await!

Since I’ve travelled south, I’ve taken a few more of my British outline stock out of storage. These three are all modelled as running in 1988, all the work of CJM. In the foreground is 50149 “Defiance”, the one-off experimental class 50/1 freight conversion, which spent that year working based at St Blazey, working china clay trains. Behind are a pair of 47s, 47508 “SS Great Britain” in “banger blue”, and 47500 “Great Western” in Great Western green. Both were named as part of the 150th anniversary of the GWR in 1985, and both were allocated to the Inter-City sector in 1988. 50149 and 47508 are detailed and resprayed Farish shells on CJM Saturn chassis; the third loco still has a Farish chassis.