James L. Cambias's Blog, page 39

An Ancient Dessert

In the course of a recent bookstore raid I got a copy of Arcana Mundi by Georg Luck. The bulk of it is a compilation of writings by classical authors on occult topics. While reading it I stumbled across a passage translated from Homer, describing how the enchantress Circe turned Odysseus's men into swine. To get them nice and cooperative before she started throwing polymorph spells around (Circe obviously understood that casting a spell can provoke an attack of opportunity), she prepared them a little snack:

". . . a dish of cheese and barley, clear honey, and Pramnian wine."

That stirred a recollection of something I'd read in a different book, Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, by Anne Grossman and Lisa Thomas. It's a "gastronomic companion" to the sea novels of Patrick O'Brian, and so naturally focuses on 18th-century recipes. One of their recipes is for Frumenty, a breakfast or dessert dish which originated in France and was popular in England. It's a kind of porridge of boiled cracked wheat mixed with sugar, milk, egg yolks and heavy cream, and the authors mention that it was often served with a generous dollop of rum.

Or, perhaps, Pramnian wine. If you remember that Homer's "cheese" might be more like modern cottage cheese (or even yogurt or clotted cream) then the similarity becomes a lot more apparent. (It also starts to sound a lot like the yogurt-and-granola goo sold in plastic cups to people who think they're eating a healthier breakfast that way.)

Clever Circe whipped up a spiked dessert dish to put her victims at ease, and almost the same dessert was still being enjoyed in a land Homer never even heard of, far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, more than two thousand years later.

Another version of Circe's dish is the Kykeon consumed by the initiates into the Eleusinian mystery cult. From the description it was "runnier" than Frumenty; more like Syllabub (a blend of wine, cream, and spices). It may have had psychoactive herbs in it as well ��� which suggests that when Circe mixes drugs into the dish for her guests, initiates in the audience could have exchanged knowing glances with each other. This also suggests a much more allegorial interpretation of the whole episode.

Now I'm tempted to try making this some time. I'll report back when I do.

 

Circe lived on an island, surrounded by fierce creatures. An island of monsters, if you will. So obviously she would have enjoyed reading my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Commercial Holidays

One feature of American life during my half-century in it has been the annual complaints about commercialization of holidays. The primary subject is Christmas, of course. Christmas gift buying is such a key part of our economy that devout believers have given up trying to keep the focus of the holiday on its religious or even cultural role. Buying stuff is now the whole point of Christmas: not just gifts, either, but giant home decorations, antlers for your minivan, holiday cards, seasonal clothing, candy, travel ��� almost anything you can buy will have a Christmas-theme version. (I don't know about industrial supplies or pharmaceuticals, but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if Kobe Steel tried a special "rolled sheet metal for the holidays" promotion.)

But never mind about Christmas. What about other holidays? Some have been successfully commercialized, but others resist. I've identified four main criteria for commercializing a holiday.

Booze. You have to be able to sell liquor, especially at lame "parties" at bars and nightclubs. (Christmas is an oddity here: there are plenty of Christmas parties, but they're all privately-hosted. Christmas in a bar is the grimmest thing you've ever seen.)
Candy. You have to be able to sell candy, preferably candy shaped or colored for the occasion, so people have to throw it away afterwards. Other seasonal foods are nice, but since groceries are a low-margin business, selling some extra hams or turkeys isn't enough to warrant commercializing a holiday. People will eat food no matter what day it is.
Decorations. It's not a big-league holiday if you don't decorate your house. Christmas is the clear winner here, but Halloween has been gaining steadily, to the point where they are nearly neck-and-neck. The other holidays are way, way behind those two.
Dressing Up. Not as in "dressing nicely" but as in "wearing special clothes or disguises." The opportunity to temporarily take on a new identity is a powerful draw for kids and adults. This is Halloween's strong suit, although Valentine's Day now features a lot of special "sexy" outfits, some of which are literally Halloween costumes in different packaging. Christmas has Santa hats and ugly sweaters, but I think there's still plenty of untapped potential for "sexy elf" outfits.

So how do the others rate?

Halloween has come to rival Christmas. It has all four categories locked down. I have a roleplaying game supplement, Warehouse 23, by S. John Ross, which is a compendium of weird and paranormal items found in that legendary Big Secret Warehouse where all the weird and paranormal stuff is hidden. One item in a table of random "throwaway weirdness" is an object from some parallel reality: Halloween house lights which play cheesy seasonal music, just like Christmas decorations in the real world. Yesterday I saw those lights (they were purple and orange) in one of those pop-up Halloween stores, down on Route 9.

Apparently we have shifted into an alternate reality since that book came out.

Halloween now includes candy (which appears in the supermarket in August!), costumes (including the whole panoply of costumes for grown-ups ��� and the inevitable line of "naughty" adult costumes), home decorations rivaling Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, Halloween-themed booze for your party, bars and restaurants holding Halloween "parties," Halloween cruises and vacation packages, Haunted Houses, and almost certainly some things I'm afraid to Google.

It's a far cry from the days when my grandfather celebrated Halloween by dismantling someone's buggy and reassembling it on the barn roof.

Valentine's Day is now almost a mirror-image of Halloween. It has a solid lock on three of the four categories. Tons of candy, costumes, and depressing "parties" at nightclubs have surged. Decorations seem to be limited to a few cardboard hearts. And what used to be the core of the entire holiday, the Valentine's Day card, is sliding into obscurity as people have shifted away from mailing things.

Easter has never really gotten beyond chocolate bunnies and candy. People did once "dress up" in the nice-clothing sense, but with the decline in annual clothes-buying, the old tradition of a fancy new outfit for Easter has disappeared. A few years ago I did see some ambitious candy-maker trying to repurpose the Hanukkah-gelt production machinery to make Easter-themed "Bunny Money" ��� but I only saw it once. I guess someone pointed out that you really don't want to be giving your kids thirty pieces of silver for Easter, even if they are filled with delicious chocolate.

There are some Easter house decorations, but they're relatively restrained, and it's been ages since I've seen really elaborate candy eggs. Apparently Christians have been able to reclaim Easter so the marketers are wary.

Saint Patrick's Day has some minor house decorations ��� the odd shamrock for the door or Irish flag ��� and it's way ahead in the booze department, but I can't think of any St. Paddy's Day candy, and dressing up is limited to the odd green bowler or boutonniere.

Thanksgiving is all about the food. It's a grocery holiday, and not much more. That may be why it seems the least tainted by commercialism. I know some restaurants have Thanksgiving dinners for people who can't get home (or have no family), and there are probably some sports bars open, but those are definitely substitutes for the "real thing" and everyone knows it.

July 4 has decorations and fireworks, and a certain amount of beer is consumed, but marketers haven't been able to come up with any "signature product" which people are expected to buy. Seems as if the candy companies are missing an opportunity here. It's in the middle of summer, so the only dressing up most people do is to put on swimsuits.

New Year's has booze.

Memorial Day is like a dry run for July 4: summer, patriotic theme, emphasis on barbecues and outdoor activities. But other than the inevitable radio station "Top 500 countdown" (spoiler: it's gonna be "Stairway to Heaven" again) there isn't much in the way of observances.

My conclusion: if you want to make a ton of money, start making candy and costumes for July 4 and St. Patrick's Day, or Valentine house decorations. The market is waiting.

 

Halloween is coming! The perfect opportunity to give someone my new ebook Monster Island Tales.

An Age of Wonders?

I grew up in the post-Apollo era of space exploration. Skylab launched when I was in elementary school, and the Shuttle made its debut when I was a freshman in high school. What this all means, among other things, is that I have spent most of my life hearing ambitious plans for space exploration which never happened.

I recall a book in my elementary-school library called Space Station 1980, about the permanent, nuclear-powered orbital station we didn't launch then. I remember how the Shuttle was supposed to make access to space affordable. I still have a copy of Tom Heppenheimer's book Colonies in Space, about the permanent orbital colonies and power satellites we didn't build during the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the cheap and reusable "Delta Clipper" rocket, which didn't become operational in the 1990s. I remember the missions which didn't go to Mars in 1987, 2004, 2007, 2016, 2011, and probably several other years as well.

And yet . . .

A month ago I was visiting a friend who was an early investor in Planetary Resources, the startup which aims to begin asteroid mining within a decade. He was telling me some of the amazing discoveries they've made, of orbital-mechanics tricks to ship payloads back to Earth with almost no fuel, and of ways to use the electrically-charged surface of asteroids as a tool for mining.

Two weeks ago at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Adelaide, Elon Musk gave a talk about his company's new "BFR" rocket, which will be bigger than a Saturn V Moon rocket and fully reusable. He said it will be able to put more than 100 tons into orbit for $10 million a pop ��� that's $100 per kilogram! That's about what it costs to ship the same mass to Singapore by FedEx. Musk claims his company is already tooling up to build that rocket, and it is the keystone to his business plan for the next decade.

Last week I was in Huntsville for the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, listening to scientists and engineers talking about interstellar probes which could launch within this century (though probably not my lifetime). The notion was so far from crazy that two U.S. Congressmen showed up to discuss the idea. While I was at the convention, the National Space Council released a new set of goals for NASA which explicitly included expansion into the Solar System.

The result is that now I'm wondering, has the future I was so eager about in 1976 finally arrived? Will I actually see humans ��� Americans, even ��� return to the Moon, land on Mars, and perhaps send our first ships to the stars? Is the age of zero-sum thinking and "Only One Earth" finally giving way to looking outward again?

I'm torn. I want to be excited about these developments. I want to hope. But I've seen too many failed dreams and unfulfilled big promises in the past forty years. Will Elon Musk be able to retire to a city he built on Mars? We'll have to wait and see.

 

Or we can just curl up and enjoy a good ebook like Monster Island Tales.

Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 3

Friday, the final day of the conference, opened with a very high-powered panel discussion on current space policy and future directions for NASA. The participants were Dr. Paul McConnaughey of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Representative John Culberson of Texas, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama (who represents Huntsville in Congress), and Lieutenant-General Steven Kwast, of the Air University at Alabama's Maxwell Air Force Base.

This panel definitely put things on a whole new level: the Workshop really is more than just a glorified science-fiction convention science programming track. Real decisions involving real money are influenced by what goes on here.

I expected to be mildly bored, but the speakers were anything but dull. Rep. Culberson engaged in what can only be described as "geeking out" about the prospect of life in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus ��� and he wasn't shy about mentioning that he managed to get a Europa probe enshrined as one of NASA's Congressionally-mandated goals.

Rep. Brooks also exceeded my expectations, with an encouragingly hard-nosed discussion of the problem of expanding debt ��� and how money devoted to debt service and entitlements isn't available for space exploration. Gen. Kwast took a very long historical view: if humanity does establish a presence off Earth or beyond the Solar System, do we want that spacefaring civilization to embody American values ��� or someone else's? He also pointed out that the cost of any activities (including military ones) in space has a high initial cost but low "opportunity cost" ��� in other words, doing anything in space is costly, but once you've got a presence there, doing additional things doesn't add much.

The frankness and actual knowledge on display were really encouraging. One gets so tired of hearing bumper-sticker slogans and sound-bites.

That was followed by a presentation by Dr. Phil Lubin about the limits of various means of interstellar travel. He broke down the methods mathematically, showing that for any kind of rapid (10 percent of lightspeed or better) interstellar travel, the only known methods of propulsion which are physically capable of accomplishing the task are antimatter rockets and beamed launch systems like the ones people have been discussing since Wednesday. He also reported very encouraging results in building a large-scale phased-array laser (a bunch of lasers spread over a large area which nevertheless remain in phase with each other).

Dr. Slava Turyshev of JPL discussed the possibility of using the mass of the Sun as a giant gravity lens telescope to obtain images of exoplanets with extremely high resolution and magnification. But Geoff Landis followed with a very skeptical analysis of all the obstacles such a gravity telescope would have to overcome.

And then . . .

Then I and some of the other SF writer guests snuck off to play hooky at the Marshall Space Flight Center, with a guided backstage tour. We visited the shop where they make focus elements for X-ray telescopes. It's a fascinating process involving sub-microscoping polishing of the mold, and then electroplating the actual mirror onto the mold. The same method is used to make focus elements for neutron microscopes, as well.

We got to see the International Space Station's Payload Control Center ��� the facility which acts as "Mission Control" for all the science and engineering experiments aboard the ISS. (I asked why that show is run from Huntsville rather than Houston, and the answer was that since many of the experiments are built at Marshall, it makes sense to put the controllers within shouting distance of the engineers and technicians.)

The group visited the historic test stand for the original Redstone rocket ��� the first American ballistic missile, which also launched America's first orbital satellite and powered the suborbital Mercury flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. A short drive away was the titanic test stand for the mighty Saturn V rocket, which was also used to test the Space Shuttle's engines. This is the gritty, concrete-and-rusty-steel part of the space program, built to withstand the incredible energies of large rocket motors.

From there we drove over to the fabricating facility and put on clean-suits to look at the stage connector sections being built there for the Space Launch System rocket, due to fly some time next year. We even got in a little autographing: we signed one of the panels! This was part of the upper stage, so my signature will orbit the Sun for decades.

I'd say that qualifies as one of the coolest things I've ever done, up there with fatherhood and last summer's eclipse.

The final stop was at the visitor center so we could have a look at the rocket engines on display, including the sole remaining NERVA nuclear rocket.

We got back to the Workshop in time for the final session of my museum exhibit working group. The much-reduced group managed to assemble a nice-looking report/proposal. This project is not going to end here . . . stay tuned for further developments.

After a dinner break I got up on stage with an awesome crew of science fiction legends. Toni Weisskopf, editor of Baen Books, was the moderator, and the panel included Gregory Benford, Geoff Landis, Allen Steele, and Larry Niven. One might feel a bit intimidated in such company, but thanks to my magnificent ego that didn't happen.

And that (except for some private socializing) was the end of the fifth Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. I'm writing this before my flight home, so my conclusions about it will have to wait.

If you want to see cool stuff I've made up, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 2

The first day of the Interstellar Workshop featured the Starship Century and Breakthrough StarShot groups. On Thursday the Tau Zero Foundation took center stage. The Tau Zero group aren't as wedded to a single goal or mission profile. Instead they've put a lot of effort into identifying key technologies which will benefit any interstellar exploration, and have tried to support research in those directions.

The opening talk was by Marc Millis, chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation, explaining their modus operandi, and discussing some of the motives for interstellar voyaging and how those affect the specific mission plans ��� if you want to colonize other star systems, you'll have to work on extremely long-duration missions, but if you want bragging rights for the first interstellar probe, you should work on a StarShot-style flyby.

One obvious key technology for any space exploration is launching things off Earth and making use of resources in near-Earth space. So Jonathan Barr of United Launch Alliance gave a talk about their new Vulcan booster and the adaptable ACES upper stage, which could become the workhorse of cislunar space. ULA wants to sell more rockets, so they're trying to come up with ways to increase the number of people in space; the goal is 1,000 humans living and working off-Earth by 2050. Amazingly, Mr. Barr managed to get through the entire presentation without ever uttering the dread syllables "SpaceX."

He was followed by Jeff Greason, the Chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation, formerly with XCOR and now the head of Agile Aerospace. He had an amazing presentation about the possibilities of plasma sails, inspired by research done by John Slough of the University of Washington. With only 10 kilowatts of power, a spacecraft can gnerate a "virtual" magnetic sail to capture the charged particles of the solar wind. In the inner solar system, this allows for some remarkable velocities ��� up to 400 kilometers per second, which is 20 times faster than the New Horizons probe to Pluto. The chief drawback is that like all sails, the thrust only goes away from the Sun ��� so you can use a plasma sail to zip over to Mars in a week, but you can't stop when you get there!

But the prospects of a drive allowing such tremendous speeds for a relatively low power requirement and no propellant at all are still incredible, and everyone including Mr. Greason was astonished at how the plasma sail technology has been overlooked.

After a coffee break we saw some presentations about antimatter. Marc Weber of Washington State discussed how to store antiparticles (answer: with great difficulty, that's how). Then Gerald Jackson, late of Fermilab, talked about how to make antimatter in commercial quantities. The current goal is to get production up to 2 grams per year of anti-Carbon; over 8 years that would generate enough to launch a probe to Proxima Centauri.

George Hathaway finished up the batting roster for the morning, with a discussion of all the issues involved in testing "advanced propulsion concepts" ��� in other words, busting frauds and crackpots. Proper testing of radical new technologies means the testers have to be obsessively methodical, considering and compensating for everything from seismic vibrations to the tides.

After lunch I attended some shorter talks. The first was a presentation about alien life and how unlikely it is that even a life-bearing planet with an oxygen atmosphere would be ready for settlement by interstellar pioneers, simply because of chemical incompatibility.

The second short talk was by Ore Koren, a grad student from the University of Minnesota, who discussed some important issues about minimizing social strife aboard a "generation starship" traveling for centuries.

And finally Dr. Giancarlo Genta spoke about some experiments he and his team had done in creating computer simulations of a spherical laser-sail interstellar probe, to investigate potential issues of stability and dynamics. Professor Genta was careful to point out that his work was still preliminary, more of a proof of concept for the computer modeling than a definitive answer about the ideal sail configuration. That headed off what looked like a scientific slap-fight brewing among partisans of other sail designs.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to my Working Track group, brainstorming museum-exhibit ideas. At the end of a couple of hours we had covered half a dozen large poster-pad sheets with potential exhibit items. I hope at least some of them eventually get built.

That evening, all of us carpooled over to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center museum for what has to be the most "Huntsville" event possible: Biergarten Night at the Saturn V exhibit. A good-sized crowd gathered to enjoy bratwurst, schnitzels, red cabbage and potato salad, along with some excellent beer ��� all served up underneath the hanging bulk of the museum's historic Moon rocket.

As a finale to the long day we gathered in the museum auditorium for a lecture by Dr. Andrew Siemion about SETI research, especially the Breakthrough Prize Foundation's "Breakthrough Listen" project he's connected with.

And so to bed. Tomorrow: the final day!

 

It's October, and that means it's the right time to read about scary monsters ��� so buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 1

Why "Tennessee Valley" for a conference in Alabama? Look at a map. The mighty Tennessee River meanders into northern Alabama on its way west. What with Knoxville, Huntsville, and Oak Ridge, the upper Tennessee River valley is quite the high-tech corridor. Just the place to plan how to send a probe to Alpha Centauri some time in this century.

This is the fifth year for the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, and this year marks a unification of sorts, since the TVIW is hosting the Starship Century project and the Tau Zero Foundation ��� two other groups with the same goal. All three organizations have decided that actually planning, building, and launching a real starship is more important than infighting and turf-guarding, so they're joining forces.

We began Tuesday night, with a welcome reception hosted by Baen Books, one of the sponsors of the conference. Science fiction luminaries present included Gregory Benford, Geoff Landis, Larry Niven, Allen Steele, Mary Turzillo, and Toni Weisskopf. (And MEE!) That was fun, and there were probably some private gatherings afterwards, but I was too wiped out from a day spent on planes, so I knocked off at the end of the reception and went off to bed.

Today began promptly at 8 a.m. with welcome addresses by Les Johnson, the conference chairman, and James Benford of the Starship Century project (which was hosting today's program). We then heard from Pete Cooper of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, who gave us an overview of the Breakthrough StarShot project. He was followed by Kevin Parkin, who provided a more detailed breakdown of how much the StarShot is likely to cost, and how the mission architecture was largely determined by what could be done on a budget of ten billion dollars.

Ten billion is a lot, but it's not an impossible amount. That's an aircraft carrier. That's about an eighth of Bill Gates's fortune. Get a couple of dozen Silicon Valley tech billionaires excited enough, and that becomes a reasonable sum.

In the case of StarShot, ten billion gets you a giant laser launcher (which can double as a huge telescope) capable of firing off ten-meter sails to Alpha Centauri, hauling payloads about as massive as your phone's processor chip. Doesn't sound like much, but think about all the things your phone can do. Now imagine doing all those things in an alien star system: taking pictures, sending messages home, and piloting itself through a flyby.

Best of all, the really expensive stuff stays on Earth, so you can keep launching probes as long as you like. Their "cruise speed" would be something like 20 percent of the speed of light, so you'll only have to wait about thirty years to get the first data back.

After that optimistic start, we took a sobering look at some of the technical hurdles. Robert Fugate, a laser expert, talked about the tricky job of getting the giant laser to work properly (and by giant, I mean really giant: an array of lasers and optics about half a kilometer wide, pumping out 100 gigawatts with each shot). He was followed by Jim Benford, describing the still-unanswered questions of whether a sail could actually survive the laser launch at all, and stay centered on the beam long enough to accelerate up to a fifth of light speed. Finally David Messerschmitt described the difficulties of getting any data back across interstellar distances from a probe with about as much onboard power as your watch.

The conference broke for lunch, then we split up to watch some shorter presentations in two tracks. I watched Richard London discuss the hazards of interstellar gas and dust, and possible strategies for coping (short version: slender, streamlined spaceships are due for a comeback).

After that I saw a talk by Stacy Weinstein-Weiss, a NASA planner involved in devising the agency's own interstellar probe mission concept. If you thought the visionaries and geeks in Huntsville were the crazy ones, you're mistaken. The real wild-eyed maniacs are at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They want to use a laser-powered sail to send a half-ton science lander to some suitable exoplanet within 15 light-years, and have planned for a launching laser using petawatts of power over months or years of acceleration. A petawatt is a quadrillion watts, and right now the world's electrical generating capacity is less than one percent of that. Obviously more research is called for.

(By contrast, the StarShot requires a relatively modest $8 million's worth of electricity, delivered in a single 20-minute pulse.)

In the late afternoon I joined my "Working Track," led by Scott Guerin and Ken Wisian, discussing how to educate the public about SETI and interstellar exploration by means of a museum exhibit. The team came up with some neat ideas, and only occasionally drifted off into philosophical debates about the nature of life and intelligence.

After a quick dinner at the Schnitzel Ranch up the street, I attended the art show, featuring drawings, prints, and paintings by Chris Wade. His work shared space with some science "poster sessions," and a string quartet.

I've got twelve pages of notes and that's just the first day.

 

If you prefer to read about something completely unrelated to starships, check out my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Epiphany

Throughout the history of roleplaying as a hobby, there have been attempts to remove the dice from the games. The argument usually goes something like this: real life isn't random, at least not on the scales at which humans act in day-to-day life. Events have causes. So why do we roll dice to see if a skilled warrior can hit someone with a sword?

A second argument comes from storytelling: if the events of the story are determined randomly, then what's the point? (Signor Calvino, please sit down and stop trying to interrupt!)

So ever since the 1970s there have been attempts to create "diceless" roleplaying games. They have met with mixed success. The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game system works pretty well and has a dedicated fan base, but even fans of the game agree that its system is tied to a specific type of fictional subgenre (fantasy intrigue), and wouldn't be as useful for something like Conan-esque sword and sorcery adventures.

The big problem is overcoming the inherent determinism in a diceless game. In the Amber books by Roger Zelazny, the character Benedict really is the greatest warrior ��� not just in the Universe, but in all possible universes. So in that setting, it's perfectly right and proper for the Gamemaster to resolve a battle between anyone else and Benedict with "You fight. He wins." Contrast that to the duels between equals or near-equals in The Three Musketeers: the question of who will win is always in doubt, a source of tension. Having the GM simply state "Rochefort has a higher Fencing rating so he beats you" would be unsatisfying.

So the big question for game designers is how to create a diceless system which still preserves uncertainty and tension? Well, that question was answered more than twenty years ago in 1995. It's called Epiphany, by Greg Porter.

Epiphany looks like a throwback to the first generation of roleplaying games. It's a 48-page stapled softcover with decent interior art (though more nipple-rings are on display than one would have seen in the original Dungeons & Dragons). The typeface is slightly goofy, in the tradition of mid-1990s desktop publishing, but one can actually read it, so no points off there.

The setting of Epiphany is pretty neat: it's set in the warm Arctic lands surrounding the giant hole at the North Pole which leads into the interior of the Hollow Earth, at some time during the last Ice Age. The entire region is called Hyperborea, and encompasses the kingdoms of Atlantis (inhabited by sorcerous quasi-Aztecs), Lemuria (Vikings), Mu (kind of intermediate between the two). All of them have a mix of pulp-fiction super-science, magic, and steampunk technology. Adventurers can travel to remote regions in their flying machines, but defend themselves with swords and muzzle-loading firearms.

Given the small size of the game book, setting information amounts to only ten pages or so, and is necessarily done in broad strokes. To actually run this game one would have to borrow liberally from Phil Masters's GURPS Atlantis, M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, and Jeff Combos's Hollow Earth Expedition.

But that's not where Epiphany really shines. The strength of this game is in its diceless mechanics.

Characters start with one Attribute and two Abilities, and can gain more by taking Burdens. Attributes are chosen from a list of a dozen, grouped into Physical (Strength, Physique, Agility, and Endurance); Mental (Perception, Intelligence, Charisma, and Will); and Spiritual (Aura, Insight, Faith, and Serenity). These are not at all "granular" ��� if you have even 1 point in the Strength attribute that means you're notably stronger than other people.

Abilities are more free-form, like "Good Looks" or "Swordplay." The player relates his Abilities to an Attribute, though it's up to the player to justify which Attribute controls the Ability: a cunning thief could have the "Lockpicking" Ability linked to Intelligence, while another rogue could attach the same Ability to his Agility.

Characters can also have Boons, which are either social advantages or supernatural abilities, and can have Tools, which are pretty self-explanatory.

When resolving an action, the player totals up the Attributes, Abilities, and Tools his character is using. If that total is higher than the difficulty of the task (as set by the Gamemaster) then the character succeeds. Simple enough.

But when there's someone opposing the character, then it's a Challenge, and that's when things get interesting. Combat is an obvious Challenge: the players both total up their relevant advantages (Strength, Agility, swordsmanship, armor, a sword, and perhaps some situational advantages like "fighting with the sun at my back" or "ambush").

The two combatants allocate their respective advantages between attack and defense. This is done secretly, then both sides reveal at once. If one character's attack is greater than the other's defense, he scores a hit and the loser must abandon one advantage. So if my character is using his Agility, his Fencing ability, and a sword, I must decide which one to lose. I sacrifice Agility (the fight is wearing my character down), so the next round the character only has two advantages to use instead of three.

What makes it interesting is the secret allocation step: you don't know in advance if your foe is going to fight defensively, go for an all-out attack, or try to balance between the two. And he doesn't know what you're going to do, either! So an incredibly good fighter, with all the personal and material advantages, could still get hit by a novice if the rookie puts all his advantages into offense. Sure, the rookie's going to get hit, too ��� ability and equipment do give one an edge, after all ��� but the outcome isn't preordained, so there's still a place for tension.

It's a really neat system, and would adapt very easily to live-action roleplaying games as well, especially games where one-on-one combats are an important element, like The Three Musketeers or feudal Japan. Unfortunately, I've never seen any copies other than the one I bought directly from Greg Porter one year at Gen-Con. It's one of the greatest advances in roleplaying game mechanics and nobody's ever heard of it.

Maybe this 'blog post will change that. Maybe people will suddenly wake up and realize what they've been missing. Maybe they'll have an . . . Epiphany.

 

If you want to see my own works about strange creatures in exotic lands, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Tales of Gargentihr

This may rival Droids as the most obscure game on the Island of Lost Games. Tales of Gargentihr was published in 1994 by Sanctuary Games, a startup game company based in Scotland.

Unfortunately, that meant that Tales of Gargentihr hit the market precisely when the initial success of Magic: the Gathering sucked all the oxygen out of the game business. Distributors and retailers weren't interested in anything but card games, and for a while it seemed that customers didn't want anything else, either. Some roleplaying game publishers managed to ride out the crisis ��� and a handful profited handsomely by making their own card games before the bubble burst ��� but there were a lot of casualties. Game Designers' Workshop, the publishers of Traveller and a host of superb wargames, bit the dust in 1996, and even the mighty TSR itself wound up getting purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

The collapse of the roleplaying industry in the mid-1990s was especially sad because that era was one of great creativity and innovation. The first generation of gamers who had grown up playing D&D were out of college, ready to start publishing their own ideas. The availability of personal computers and the rise of what was once called "desktop publishing" meant that anyone with a cool idea and not enough capital could (and did) publish a roleplaying game. There were dozens of small game publishers, and they all got swept away as the card games vacuumed up all the money and then the distributors and retailers who had over-expanded went out of business.       

But back to Tales of Gargentihr. I bought that game as the result of a review by Phil Masters in a little magazine called Interactive Fantasy. Phil has very nicely reposted that review on his own Web site, with commentary. I don't remember if I ordered it through my local game store, or direct from the publisher (there was no such thing as Amazon or RPGNow in those days).

The actual product is substantial: a 344-page softcover book, printed on European A4 paper so it gets crushed when you store it in the same box as your 11-inch American products, with the traditional page-losing British paperback glue. The color cover art is not bad, while the interior black and white drawings are at least competent. (One of the often-overlooked benefits of our online culture is that it used to be really hard for a small publisher to find competent artists. That's why so many old games look like they were illustrated by the author's friend from high school. You couldn't go to Deviantart or wherever and look for someone with talent.)

In those pre-Open Game License days, every new game had to have its own game mechanics, so about a third of the book is devoted to character generation, combat rules, and general game mechanics. The rules are rather clunky: if you're using a particular skill, you have to cross-reference your skill level with the difficulty of the task on a table (with white numbers on a black background, no less) to find the target number; you then roll a die and must get equal to or less than the target to succeed. Combat uses the same mechanics, with an interesting wrinkle: the attacker chooses the difficulty level of the "task" of attacking, which then affects how hard it is to defend against that attack and how much damage it does.

Character creation is history-based: the player rolls attributes and then works through the character's past life, going through family background, apprenticeships, travel, and employment. The result is that starting characters are seasoned adventurers with connections, plot hooks, and backstory firmly in place.

The greatest aspect of Tales of Gargentihr is its unique and original setting, which spills over into character classes. There are no wizards; the closest thing are "Kyromancers" who look like the Borg from Star Trek and rely on magic crystal technology to keep themselves from fading out into the spirit realm. There are steampunk/clockpunk scientist-engineers, but a lot of their "science" is effectively magic, too. And there are herbalist-shaman types, but their magic seems to rely heavily on knowledge of obscure plants and animals.

The game setting takes up most of the book, and is so weird and interesting that I can barely summarize it here. We're on the continent of Gevuria (and continents in/on Gargentihr float on seas of silt, constantly moving together and then drifting apart), which is currently dominated by a kinda-Victorian, kinda-Elizabethan nation of colonists called the Karro. They in turn lord it over the kinda-Japanese natives, the Ha'esh (and let's just state here for the record that this entire game would be vastly improved if someone had removed the apostrophe key from the author's Macintosh). As the Karro home continent drifts away, the two races have to build a hybrid society of their own.

Vast chunks of the continent are still unknown, home to various humanoid and non-human races. You can do Great White Explorer adventures in the wilderness one week, then switch to Dickensian London intrigues in the coastal cities of the Karro the next. Player-characters are all assumed to be members of a secretive do-gooder organization called the "Clondis," but it's unclear exactly why that should be so.

There is a strong "because it's cool" aspect to the world of Gargentihr. We've got pirates and urban Mafia types in beat-up top hats, priests and cyborg-wizards, gladiators and boffins, with a mix of Victorian and Elizabethan technology. Now, "because it's cool" isn't a bad rubric for creating a roleplaying game world, and Tales of Gargentihr manages the remarkable feat of actually being cool.

But my Tolkeinian soul is a little irked by the odd mix of familiar and strange. Why not just call these top-hatted steampunk/clockpunk colonialists "Englishmen" and have done with it? And then you can call their swords "swords" and their pants "pants" instead of using setting-specific neologisms.

Tales of Gargentihr could have been a great game, but it came out twenty years too soon. It would be perfect as a contemporary e-book, possibly using the Pathfinder rules to allow for a bigger pool of customers. I don't know who owns the rights to it nowadays, but it wouldn't be hard to bring Tales of Gargentihr back, and I think it would find a surprising welcome.

 

If you want stories of explorers and lowlifes, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

We Have A Situation Here

Most roleplaying games display a curious paradox. The player-characters, the ones controlled by the players, are literally the only people in the game setting with free will, yet they tend to show a crippling lack of agency. Player-characters are forever getting hired by bossy patrons, handed orders by their commanders, or being assigned quests by passive-aggressive wizards.

There's the so-called "sandbox" style of play, in which the player-characters wander around a setting having encounters, but in practice that often devolves into either a series of muggings, or desperate flailing as the players look for some obvious adventure hook. Many game systems have "random adventure generators" but most of those could more accurately be called "mission generators" ��� ways to randomly determine what the bossy NPCs are telling the heroes to do.

Surely there must be a way to create adventures which aren't pre-scripted, preserving player agency, without leaving them with nothing to do except kill everyone they meet. I decided to come up with a way to randomly generate situations in the game setting, situations which could then be used to create adventures.

I began with George Polti's famous "36 Dramatic Situations" and then reduced the list based on what kind of physical actions the characters are likely to perform. So Polti's situation 3 (Vengeance for a crime) is physically the same as his situation 4 (Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred): both involve killing or punishing someone.

Some of Polti's situations seem more like "backstories" to me: his situation 16 (Madness) isn't really a situation in itself but rather the potential cause of others (perhaps 2: Deliverance, or 19: Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized). The same applies to his 17 (Fatal imprudence) or 32 (Mistaken Jealousy). So those get dropped.

Since players make the moral choices for their characters, some of Polti's situations involving self-sacrifice or the consequences of bad choices don't really apply. My players may want to sacrifice themselves to save another . . . or they may run away. So those drop off the list. (Note that self-sacrifice is a theme of games like Delta Green, but that still can't be the hook for an adventure. Rather, it's an "emergent property" of the setting and the situation.)

Once you start this kind of reduction it's hard to stop. I finally managed to boil Polti's list down to a dice-friendly list of six situations.

So: how do we apply this list to a roleplaying game? Simple. Pick one non-player character or creature in the setting ��� if there's a random encounter table, just roll a die. That's person or element "A." Roll on the Situation Generator Table below. For additional elements (B, C, etc.) roll again on your encounter table or pick from the list of NPCs. Inanimate objects (represented on my table by "X") can be whatever seem appropriate, or possibly rolled on whatever "random treasure table" your game system features.

Now, notice that these aren't "missions." Simply because A wants object X doesn't mean A is going to hire the player-characters to get it. Maybe A is trying to steal it and the heroes have to protect it. Maybe the heroes learn of A's desire and can use that as leverage to get something they want from A. Maybe they will try to rob A's lair while A is away trying to get X. Whatever.

Generating situations rather than missions means the players can decide how to react. This puts more agency back in their hands ��� and frees the Gamemaster from the drudgery of shepherding the players along the path of a scripted adventure scenario.

Situation Generator Table (roll 1d6):

A desires B: Someone wants to win the love, loyalty, or services of another; or help that person escape from danger. There may be a guardian (C) who wants to keep B away from A, or a rival who also desires B.
A wants to capture B: Someone wants someone else alive, but that person resists. There may be a person C who wants to prevent this, or a rival who is also trying to catch B.
A wants B dead: Or ruined, or exiled, or whatever. Again, there may be guardians for B, rivals who also want B dead, or someone who wants to take B alive.
A wants to go someplace: This is either an escape (in which case there's some person B who wants to keep A from leaving), a journey (in which case there are encounters along the way), or an intrusion or attack into a place (in which case B may be guarding the destination).
A wants to solve a mystery: There is a secret A doesn't know; possibly some person (B) is trying to keep A from finding it out.
A wants X: Someone wants a thing. Its location may be unknown. It may belong to someone else (B). There may be a rival (C) who also wants it.

Worked example: to show the Situation Generator in action, let's turn to the venerable Dungeon Master's Guide for the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, by the mighty Gary Gygax himself. Consulting the random encounter tables for Rough terrain in a temperate climate*, I roll a 63: a Gynosphinx. Then rolling on my own Situation Generator I get a 2: A wants to capture B. I roll again on the random encounter table and get a 73: a Troll.

So the Sphinx wants to capture a Troll. How does this affect the player-characters? If they encounter the Sphinx she may bargain with them, asking if they've seen her quarry or demanding their help. They may simply see the Sphinx searching. If they run into the Troll it may beg for help hiding from the Sphinx, or offer to pay the heroes for protection. Perhaps they'll decide to capture the Troll themselves and trade it to the Sphinx for treasure or information.

Things can get very interesting once the Gamemaster has generated multiple situations in the same area. A second set of rolls for that same patch of Rough terrain indicates that some Orcs are looking for a magical Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, which is currently guarded by a Wraith (evidently in a tomb). The Sphinx might know where that tomb is hidden. And why do the Orcs want the bowl?

I'm probably not the first person to take this approach to adventure generation, but I've made good use of it in games I've been running, and as always the random table makes a good spur to creativity. I'd love to hear feedback about this ��� has anyone else used a similar method? Are there situations I missed?

*God, this takes me back . . . 

 

For more situations from my brain, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Kitchen Report: Sous Vide

I know, I know: I'm about ten years late to the party on this one. Sous vide cooking techniques have become universal in the restaurant business, and probably half of the "foodies" in North America have a sous vide gadget sitting in a kitchen drawer somewhere. I'm a late adopter: I prefer to let other people get the bugs out of things before I take them up.

If you're even later to the party than I am, sous vide is a method of cooking which uses food vacuum-sealed in plastic bags (though you can do a perfectly adequate job of vacuum-sealing with a zip-lock bag and your lungs). The bag is then immersed in a water bath which is kept at a precise temperature. (The availability of cheap electronic thermostats in recent years moved it from high-tech cookery to something you can do at home.)

The process allows for very long, slow cooking of meats to exactly the desired level of done-ness. When meal time arrives, the meat can be quickly seared in a pan or flash-broiled to give it a proper Maillard-reaction exterior crust. You don't have to balance time and temperature to get the interior properly done without overcooking the outer layers.

One reason I was late to the party is that sous vide is always promoted as a way to cook steak. But since my preferred steak is essentially "beef sushi" I never saw the point. It's already done as much as I want inside; it comes that way straight from the cow.

Nevertheless, my tech-loving wife gave me a sous vide cooking device (it's a thermostat, an immersion heater, and a circulating pump, but there's no good name for the whole thing) for our anniversary. Events intervened this summer, so we only really got to start playing around with it in the past couple of weeks.

She used it to prepare a hanger steak, but neither of us could tell the difference between a "vided" hanger steak and a regular one. (See the remarks about "beef sushi" above.) I was starting to think it was all hype, but resolved to give it a fair test. So I bought a four-pound chuck roast, put it in a gallon ziplock back with a couple of minced garlic cloves, some salt and pepper, and some rosemary, then put it in the water bath at 135 Fahrenheit for six hours. Shortly before dinnertime I took it out of the bag and seared it, then cut slices.

I was expecting something like pot roast, but the interior was still quite pink. Effectively I had a four-pound steak on my hands. The long low-temperature soak had converted most of the connective tissue to gelatin so it was quite tender (though not "fork-tender" as one of the recipe sites I looked up claimed). The fat was mostly un-rendered, so it was wonderfully moist. (Indeed, after six hours of cooking there was no more than a couple of tablespoons of juice in the bag.) Delicious, really. I'd guess that among the three of us we must have put away a third of it ��� though I must point out that one of us is a growing fourteen-year-old.

We discussed other things to cook in the same way. Vegetables don't seem to be high on anyone's sous vide list, if only because you really do have to get close to boiling to make most of them tender, and long low-temperature cooking doesn't really do much for the flavor. It would also be tricky for any stew-like dishes (boeuf bourguignon, ragout, curry, etc.) since they also contain vegetables. Although it would be great for keeping a pre-cooked dish like that ready at serving temperature . . . which of course is what many restaurants do nowadays.

It seems that it's better to think of sous vide not as a cooking method but as a pre-cooking technique, analogous to marinating. Use it to prepare the meat before you actually cook it. I've got some ideas I'd like to try: cooking a leg of lamb in the water bath all day and then finishing on the grill with some aromatic woods, or possibly a pork loin. I'm very nervous about using this method for poultry, however. It may take me a while to work up the nerve to try that.

So, the final verdict: cooking meat sous vide works very well. I'll be doing it again.

 

For stories involving beings made of meat, buy my new ebook, Monster Island Tales!