ianslife

08:59 pm: Thoughts on playing weekend-length role-playing games
I think I made a couple of mistakes in 1897 (see previous post), and if I did things differently I'd have enjoyed the game more. To help others along a similar learning curve, and to expose my opinions to challenge, I present ...

How I'll play the next weekend long game

Accept that players will focus on the events of the game

Despite aspiring to not use Out-Of-Character information, I've found that if you're going to enjoy a game that lasts a weekend, you have to accept some concessions to the players (as opposed to the characters). I started off playing Salisbury as if he could count on professional and personal relationships which had lasted years rather than hours, and as if we were worried about a future general election. Players are more concerned with their immediate objectives, and the horse-trading is going to be a bit more blatant than real life.

For example, had I been roleplaying strictly then my character probably wouldn't have talked to many women. Although the historical Salisbury was open to the possibility of women having something interesting to say (eg his wife, or the Queen) he never really expected them to. Playing this wouldn't make the game better for me, or for the women playing it.

Find out what everyone wants

As one the players told me over Saturday lunch, much of the game side centres around finding the person with the item which is going to help you whether it's the telegram which implicates Cecil Rhodes, someone with journalism skills, or plans for a submarine. This is the plot on which the brilliant improvised drama hangs.

Prepare

Nathan Richards' comically Victorian speeches against Home Rule and Women's Suffrage went down very well indeed, partly because of his delivery but also because he'd prepared them in advance. It didn't hurt that he switched at the last minute to supporting Home Rule, and went through his entire speech keeping all the rabble-rousing in but reversing every sentence. ("... should Britain face conflict, Ireland would *not* be a dagger poised to stab Britain in the back").

Another error was not having a single well-organised place to put the cards which represent items and special abilites. Next time, I shall get a small holder. I'll also get some blank cards and put some adhesive coloured tabs on them, so that I can easily separate my objects, my abilities, and other game aspects like money.

In the event, I spent too long reading a long biography of Salisbury (despite being PM for 13 years over 3 separate stints, no-one seems interested in him) and not enough time preparing speeches and bon mot, let alone learning the rules and my own character.

Memorise major characters' names and forms of address

In this story there were a group of characters with a reknown ability to take offense, and a direct line to my main ally. They were the royalty of Europe, half of whom were descended from her majesty, and that would prove my undoing.

Check clever schemes with the GMs first

I passed a bill to release what turned out to be an immense amount of money. The GMs told me I was only able to access a small part of it - which I'd already promised to the tender care of Unionist factions, thus leaving me with absolutely no patronage.

Tags: games, storytelling

01:26 pm: 1897: Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
Last weekend I played Victorian prime minister Lord Salisbury in a re-enactment of a fantasy version of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Another sixty people took the great roles from Victorian history and literature in a vast piece of interactive storytelling.

What Happened

Prime Ministers don't do particularly well in this game - in the 1997 run, I'm told Salisbury lasted 17 minutes.

The vultures began to circle when Queen Victoria got reports that Salisbury had been rude to the Kaiser (not true), Tsarina Alexandra (I kept forgetting her name and stepping on her dress) and that worst of all the government helped Audrey Beardsley produce his scandalously explicit illustrations (coalition partner Jo Chamberlain had accidentally published a good review). I suspect Cecil Rhodes had something to do with it, if only because he turned out to be posessed by a man from the future, intruiging against HG Wells to cause a nuclear war in 1917. When she made her displeasure publicly known, and started actively moving against Salisbury, he didn't stand a chance.



Rhodes had forced the Kaiser to be humiliatingly rude to the Queen, thus bringing Britain to the brink of war with Germany. He used his imperial faction of Tory MPs to bring down the government, started the short-lived Cecil Rhodes government, and was about to pass a motion in Parliament which would have enabled him to go to war with Germeny. Salisbury crossed the floor to speak against him, and defeated the motion.

The Kaiser confronted Rhodes and made him confess the truth; right in front of Neillie Bly, who duly reported it. On the advice of a seance which claimed to channel her beloved Albert, Her Majesty asked that "nice young man" Jonathan Harker to form a government. Salisbury decided that he would rather provide some proper opposition than play a minor role in an all-party government.

It's an enormous game ...

... with an awful lot going on. This summary stops on Saturday afternoon. For example, in a completely separate storyline in which I wasn't remotely involved there is a confrontation between Nemo and Dracula which someone kindly put on YouTube. For another example, Salisbury nobly tried to save the Queen from a Golden Dawn ritual, unaware the Golden Dawn ritual was actually saving her from something far worse.

Eventually, the truth came out about the backstabbing coalition colleague and he finally had to resign over the Jameson affair. Salisbury became the Foreign Secretary again one hour before it all eneded.

If you've liked this you might like ...

• The website of 1897: Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee

Tags: externallink, games, storytelling

11:19 pm: Dragonmeet: Game Night, Dad's Army & Doctor Who
I spent Saturday in Kensington Town Hall at Dragonmeet, London's one day roleplaying convention. As well as catching up with people I only meet at Dragonmeet, I saw my friend launch a book, played an interesting Dad's Army game, and saw a big new RPG announcement.

Most importantly: Game Night is finally launched. If you also read jonnynexus's blog, you'll know about all this, but otherwise; he's a friend, he's written a novel, he's self-published it, it's really rather good. The concept: gods sit down of an evening to roleplay, and they're really rather bad at it. I'd like to say that the appalling roleplaying in the book is based more on the roleplaying games that Jonny takes part in than the ones I run, but I'd be lying. There was champagne, cheering, he sold an impressive number of books for a stall at an RPG con, and a combined novel/T-shirt/poster lot sold for £120 in the charity auction.

One of the best things about Dragonmeet is the chance to try interesting and different themes for roleplaying games. This year, someone had decided to produce an improvised episode of Dad's Army. Despite playing us an episode first, I still didn't get the Captain quite right, but there were a couple of moments that felt straight out of the series. The Walmingon-On-Sea platoon had to, as the Germans, approach the Windmill from the defending larger Eastgate platoon without being spotted. But how best to make sure no-one could see out of the windows? We spent five minutes discussing ladders, greenhouse whitewash, and paint before Frazer pointed out that they should all be blacked out anyway.

I also got to play half a game of Fluxx Zombies, which is even more diverting than regular Fluxx ("the card game where the rules keep changing"), and has a bit of a narrative about fighting zombies this time. I prefer games to have a narrative :). I had to dash out to the Dr Who meeting - so I suppose that means I died before the end. (Apropos Fluxx, I did once prepare a customised Fluxx as a leaving present for a gamer colleague. It was a project where the rules really did keep changing - and no, I'm not going to say which employer - so Fluxx was a good fit.)

Plus, someone has the Doctor Who RPG license. From the discussion, they seem to know what they're doing commercially and how to make games which are fun for everyone. The usual problem with improvised Doctor Who stories is that the Doctor can do everything that everyone else can do, and then some. I've got some faith that they know how to balance the super-capable Time Lord with the interesting mortals he keeps trusting his life to. I'd almost forgotten that since the early history of the web (and well before my *fnord* at Auntie) I've run a Dr Who roleplaying web page. I guess it'll be time to update it soon :).

Tags: externallink, games, life, reviews, storytelling

05:36 pm: Is licensing killing small independant festivals?

(A feature I produced for Green Radio)

Europe's largest environmental event, the Big Green Gathering, is appealling for funds to stave off bankruptcy. The festival blames license conditions for £120K of increasing costs. I'm Ian McDonald for Green Radio. We transmit at the festival and cover its benefit gigs - like this one in Bristol - online. So - red tape or essential protection? And will small independant eco-festivals be able to continue? We talked to the organisers, to Mendip council, and other festivals.

We spoke to ...

• Brig Oubridge and Roger Smith of The Big Green Gathering


• Sun Bird of Sunrise Summer Celebration


• David Farrow of Beatiful Days


• Margaret Robinson of Mendip District Council

Produced and presented by Ian McDonald. Additional reporting by Matthew Edmondson.

• Is licensing killing small independant festivals? as MP3


• Is licensing killing small independant festivals? as ogg

Tags: externallink, greenradio, politics

06:37 pm: Do not buy from PC Next Day
I've had long problems with PC Next Day; in short, I cannot recommend them. Rather than post a long exchange, I'll post a short one which conviently includes a summary. To be fair, I've found their technical team friendly and helpful (even if it's occasionally taken them a few days to reply). But their customer support staff have a habit of refusing support. Plus, they use the phrase "I can confirm that ..." whether what they're saying has anything to do with the question you actually asked.



Dear Dawn,

This is the completion of a repair which PCND have already agreed to
do.

The PC was not fit for the purpose for which it was sold - the USB
ports failed within a few months. PC Next Day only agreed to repair the
USB when I threatened legal action. When PC Next Day returned the PC, I
realised that the fan was loose in the box and (once that was repaired)
the parallel ports did not work.

Please confirm that PC Next Day will complete this repair.

Thanks,

Ian

>----Original Message----
>From: customerservices@pcnextday.co.uk
>Date: 16/10/2007 11:01
>To: "Ian McDonald"<ian@mcdonald.me.uk>
>Subj: RE: Parallel Port does not work (CUST ORDER 150579)
>
>Thank you for your email, I would like to confirm that your order number
>is
>CUST ORDER 150979 order date 2/12/2005 and your order was despatched
>8/12/2005 and supplied with a 1 year warranty. The warranty commences
>from the date of receipt and expires 1 year after that date.
>
>As the warranty has now expired we are unable to offer you a repair
>service.
>
>If you require any further information or assistance, please do not
>hesitate to contact the customer services department.
>
>Regards
>Dawn Tinson
>Customer Services Manager
>PC Nextday Limited
>customerservices@pcnextday.co.uk
>http://www.pcnextday.co.uk
>
>



Tags: computing, life, reviews, shopping

12:41 am: The Beggar's Tale
I went to Highbury Corner to borrow a friends bike to practice cycling. (After enjoying it in Stockholm and Karlstad, I've decided to get a bike. But I'll learn to cycle competently - signally, looking behind me, et cetera - first. I won't know what bike suits me until I'm riding properly, so in the meantime I'm borrowing H's.) We had a long chat, so it was almost midnight by the time I was walking along Old Street.

A man approached, looking a bit rough, the way beggars approach you all the time in London. He pulled up his thin waterproof jacket to show a deep gash in his lower arm. "I'm sorry to bother you. I need to get to Homerton Hospital. Could you give me a pound for the bus?."

It was a deep gash. There was an open, diamond-shaped wound about eight centimetres down by three or four across, with interesting shades of pink and red inside. I think I saw something more pale. There was a lot of dried blood round the edge, and his arm was swollen just above the wound. I did wonder why it wasn't bleeding, but I don't know that much about cutting your arm open.

I did a first aid course last year, so I offered to help look at it. He said he needed bus fare. I said that if he was refusing my assistance as a first aider, I couldn't do anything. (I am a stone-hearted man who has been in London far too long.) So he said that I could take a look at it if I liked, but he really needed to get to hospital.

(Why didn't I call him an ambulance? Because in London, at least for the walking wounded who aren't a priority, the bus is quicker.)

I still wasn't completely sure whether he was simply a beggar with a more dramatic story than usual, so I said I'd pay for the bus when he got on. So we went to the bus stop. I rinsed the wound with water from my platypus. He told me that he'd ripped his arm when he had been cycling down an alleyway and not seen something sticking out to the side. I thought he smelt of drink, but that alchohol could explain either a wounded cyclist or a beggar. He told me that he felt that I was treating him like a child, and showed me that he already had a pound, and just needed another one. He emphasized that he was being honest, and was very clearly injured, and that I could give him the pound and go. I told him that the inside of his jacket probably wasn't sterile, and it would be better if he kept it off. 

He started asking other people for a pound. I pointed out that that wasn't going to make the bus arrive any sooner. He put his jacket on, and pulled it up (a little theatrically, I thought) to show the wound. At one point, he commented that his injury was surely worth a pound, but not that that was why he'd done it, of course, he was genuine. I apologised for the way London has made me see people asking for a pound.

He asked a woman walking her bike past, a thirty something man standing by the bus stop, and a group of asian women. Most sped past, although there was a longer conversation with the man. I kept waiting, still willing to put his behaviour down to alcohol. Finally, a man with dark tousled hair and a hat said of course he'd give him the pound, and got out his wallet.

"Ah well." I said afterwards as a goodbye which didn't really disguise my distrust. "You've got your two pounds."

"I'm still a pound short" he said. He said something about why he'd shown me his, but I was already walking away.

Tags: bricklane, ethics, life, london

06:00 pm: When in Karlstad
I've just had a fantastic peaceful relaxing and exciting couple of weeks in Sweden, during which I spent a little time campaigning with some Swedish vegans. This is their blog about the day. It's in Swedish, so unless you understand Swedish (you don't? shame on you!) you'll just have to take my word for the fact that Hilda-Maria (the writer) thinks I'm wonderful. :).

http://djurensratt.webblogg.se/1187898037_23_augusti_estaterece.html

(Has pictures.)

Tags: ethics, externallink, vegan

11:00 pm: This is Green Radio, on 87.7FM and on the internet.
The Big Green Gathering was fantastic. The main annoyance from last year - very open sale and use of drugs - was gone, and the festival radio station were kind enough to let me join in. I interviewed, recorded, gathered news, and presented programmes - great fun. And ate a lot.

I'll post links to some MP3s if and when I can.

Tags: ethics, life, reviews, vegan

06:20 pm: The Buddhists know how to throw a party
Buddhafield

A very small three-field veggie no-drink no-drugs festival run by some people from the Western Buddhist Order.
Clientele: Veggies, vegans, new agers, yogi, Buddhists, families.
Food: A good range, including some of the best vegan cake and pancakes, but oddly the main courses weren't quite as good as Brighton / London / BGG.
Music: Two smallish tents - the favourites Triban Stage and Small World, and the Lost Horizon sauna.
Drugs: Smelt the odd whiff of cannabis and heard the odd mention of alcohol, but pretty much as drug free as they intended.
Toilets: A loo seat over a heap of faeces. And straw. I'm even getting used to this.
Weather: Mud, mud. Mud into which flip-flops sank and didn't return. Mud which squelched when you tried to walk through it. Having "no shoes" areas within tents to keep them dry, only for them to get wet anyway and to spend the rest of the day walking around with damp socks. Lots of regulars wondering why the universe has turned on Buddhafield.
Irony: The occasional stallholder who obviously didn't care for the ethos.

A fab time was had running into lots of old friends I know from real life and quite a few people from other festivals. I'm wondering whether I have time to go to the Big Green Gathering.

07:13 pm: War on Terror: The Board Game
There's a very good board game out there, but none of the game fairs will touch it with a barge pole, and the distributors have been doing their level best to force the publishers out of business. It's a little bit like Risk, in that it's about global supremacy, but this is about the way global politics is *really* fought.

And it's very, very funny.

Empires compete to develop oil-rich countries whilst funding terrorists as a cheap but unreliable way of destabilising the compeition.  Money comes from a roll of the oil dice; if you're lucky, then not only do you own the countries that spew forth but you've already highly developed them. Two packs of cards (one Empire and one Terrorist) give you the ability to wage war, incite terrorism, and other nefarious deeds. Losing players don't drop out; they switch to controlling the terrorists, and "liberate" whole continents from the alternative liberation of empires.

So it's a very interesting game, with plenty of interesting choices, lots of laughs, lots of chances to upset each other's plans, and if you're not going to win at least you can switch sides.

The only problems with it as a game are that (i) the rules are occasionally confusing and (ii) turns are quite long, and there's only so much time you can spend wheeling and dealing while you wait for your turn. If there's any demand, I might post some unofficial errata.

In the event, I only mentioned to muster two other players, but it was more fun than I expected. The government in Indonesia switched loyalties to J and back to me. J's empire repeatedly lost Pakistan to the terrorists and rebuilt it. I threatened M's oil wells in Libya with a dirty bomb if he dared continue his attacks on my village in West Nowhere from the Falkland Islands. M failed repeatedly to conquer Iraq. J pulled out some UN Weapon Inspectors and confiscated my dirty bomb, at which point M started attacking again.

So, not at all like the real world then.

The other reason to buy the game is that the makers have been treated abominally badly by organisations where someone suddenly decided they didn't like their sense of humour. I don't mind so much when someone doesn't want their business - that's fair enough. It's the distributor who allegedly claimed to be delivering the product, turned out to be lying about it, and would only give them their boxes back if they paid suddenly-much-higher "storage" fees. And the folk who suddenly change their minds, making it much harder to do business. To be absolutely clear, I've got many friends who grimaced when they heard about this game and wouldn't want to touch it with a barge pole, and I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. But I used to run a small business myself, and it's not big or clever to mess a newborn small business about.

www.waronterrortheboardgame.com

Tags: externallink, games, life, politics, reviews

11:39 am: Short version: don't use 118 118
I was at a friend's birthday party last night (which, if she's reading this, I thoroughly enjoyed) and no-one knew when the last train back into central London was. (It was in Kingston, which is where London begins to blend into the commuter belt.) I didn't have the number for rail inquiries on my PDA, and my mobile's internet browser is unusuable, but successive adverts have embedded "118 118" into my skull. So I called them and asked them for the time of the last train.

I know what you're all thinking. You're all thinking that if Ian had any sense, he'd have got the the time of the last train on the way to the party, or even before he set off. That's completely true, of course, but I'm writing this post as a public service on the basis that sooner or later, all of us need to ask for a random piece of information, and tempted to phone up a memorable number and ask.

118 118 were completely wrong, and I had to spend 2.5 hours bussing it home.

Tags: life, london, reviews

03:28 pm: Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century
I played an entertaining game of “Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century” with copperbird, her husband, and a couple of other friends who don't have livejournals on Saturday. (1980s. Board game. Risk, but across a whole solar system and more complex.) After some frustration at some of the rules (it's very easy to lose half your units in the first turn and be on a losing streak thereafter), it settled down into quite a strong fight for the finish in the last round, with T and I throwing ourselves (and our “leader” units) into an attack on a suddenly undefended Venus. But when both our leaders were killed, victory passed directly to copperbird, who had the last leader still standing.

The game is out of print. But if you found this in your attic / a second hand shop / Brick Lane and have now found this blog post on a search engine, I say:

• It's much more complex than Risk. It claims to be for ages 10 and up, but we were grown-up gamers, and we made mistakes with the rules. (Although we'd probably have all done a lot better when we were 10, and more likely to spend time memorising rules).
  
• Despite the above, I suggest if you are going to play you look up the “pass-through fire” rule in the advanced book and use it in the first game  you play. Otherwise, battle always goes to the player who moves last.
• Playing time was around 5 hours, and we didn't chat as much because we knew someone would have to leave on time. Leave a lot of time for this.
  

All in all, a fun but flawed game with good components faithful to the pulpy setting.

Tags: games, life, reviews

04:56 pm: Raving about Food: Injera in Spitalfields
Several months ago my favourite Spitalfields stall, Bethlehem Desta, stopped doing Spitalfields. Which meant that I couldn't get my Sunday injera - although I usually gave myself a more practical excuse, often the real reason for a wander through the markets. Injera is a soft, fluffy half-bread half-pancake wrapped around a variety of hearty (but thinly spread) stews, all or almost of all which happen to be vegan. It's tasty without being too spicy, and filling without being heavy, and just the thing to warm you up on cold day. (Sadly, though, the Miso soup stall wasn't there.)

I went today to stock up on vegetables, and found that In the mean time, the Ethopian Coffee stand have diversified into injera, and Bethlehem Desta have returned. So now we have an injera cluster, competing directly to produce the best. And although I'd pay much more, it's only £3-£3.50 for a plate.

So go to the Sunday Upmarket, and give it a try.

Tags: bricklane, externallink, reviews, vegan

05:19 pm: Open House
Enjoyed Open House Day with copperbird, her husband, and two other friends. Jo blogged it.

Tags: externallink, life, london

12:33 am: Full Council Meeting, 13/01/2006
I went to see the local council Tower Hamlets meeting on Wednesday, because of the discussions on the Mildmay Mission Hospital Building, the Leaseholder Service Charges (inexplicably rising by vastly more than inflation - again), and Cllr Louise Alexander's campaign to improve safety at an accident blackspot where Brick Lane crosses Bethnal Green Road.

The council started (by my reckoning) around 20 minutes late, and spent (I guess) half an hour hearing tributes from every group leader (including from ones who had never met them) to deceased ex-Councillors and a departing Chief Executive. This is important because there's only one meeting every three months, it is only allocated 3 or so hours, and it predictably ran out of time, even with a few votes to extend the deadline.

Rather than have a proper visitor's gallery, the council chamber has two rows of viewer's seats in the chamber, and an "overflow room" next door where people are meant to follow things on (very bad) CCTV. It was never clear who was speaking. For a while, it wasn't even audible, and staff refused to so much as open the chamber door to let people listen. There was no openness about why it was taking more than a minute or two to turn up the volume.

Importantly, there's not much point in being in the next room; if you've come to the council meeting, it's probably because you want to cheer (or boo) and hope to influence how the councillors vote. And, to my surprise, I think the gallery probably did have some effect.

Labour has a one-vote majority over the Respect, Tory, and LibDem opposition, so there's a real hope of the opposition winning votes. Which they did; campaigners to save a Victorian primary school from demolition succeeding in getting the decision referred back to committee, on the backs of several Labour abstentions (Louise blog). This was a division - a vote by calling names and asking, rather than a show of hands, and the gallery shouted please to every councillor in turn as they came to vote.

I was genuinely appalled at how the Labour group tried to keep things off the agenda; I'd expected that amongst the many new faces, some would stand for the right thing. Cllr Alexander (blog entry) asked for the campaigners against the contraversial Urban Village project (which has generated a lot of local opposition) to present a peitition about the Local Development Framework, instead of her presenting her the road safety petition. Clearly, the Mildmay building is a more strategic issue and a better topic for a council meeting (as she blogged, she complained that bringing up the road safety issue in the complete council meeting had been needed at all). But the procedural motion to let her do that was voted down 26:25 on party lines. Pointlessly blocking debate.

It was almost 11pm when the council finally discussed Leaseholder issues. Andrew Coles gave a barnstorming speech, describing the shock of massive 20-40% service charge increases, and their impact on the less well-off homeowners who can't afford to pay them. Google tells me that this isn't described anywhere for me to link to, and perhaps I'll have time to dig the numbers out soon. Council staff claim that a new more accurate way of accounting has told them that they've been charging too little. (They also said that when I received a similar rise back in 1998. Oddly, there have been no accounting changes producing a drop in service charges.)

The Councillor in charge of housing, Rupert Bawden, had struggled with questions from councillors, reading the written answers aloud and not answering any supplemntary oral questions. Some of the louder members of the public sang the Rupert the Bear song when he stared speaking; and he'd face criticism with a friendly self-effacing smile, as if not knowing his brief was okay just as well as long as he didn't pretend to be any better than he was.

Back at the start of the meeting, five of the opposition councillors had declared a prejudicial intrested and said they would not vote on the leaseholder issue. None of the Labour group had been as ethical (Louise blog entry), but the Tory leader whom I stood against in Millwall, Simon Rouse, presented a motion supported (again) by the whole opposition to remove the Mayor as chair, on the basis of his conflict of interest. Simon is a virtuoso public speaker in the debating society tradition; he apologised for taking his jacket off and confidently threw barbed jokes across the chamber, where they landed to loud applause. But this isn't Parliament, only twenty-or-so people will ever hear the jokes, and the united opposition wasn't going to win over Labour defectors with party politics. The council split on party lines, and the Mayor stayed in place.

Then the opposition presented a motion to freeze the service charges and put them back to cabinet (edit) independant review and proper examination. The minutes ticked away until ten past eleven, and as Labour councillors talked of irrelevancies, to accusations of filibustering. Rather than end the meeting, one of the opposition councillors called for a vote on going for a vote. Then the Mayor went directly on a vote on the procedural motion. Not.

Five minutes of shilly-shallying followed, in which we weren't clear whether we were going to get a vote on whether to go to a vote, or whether the Mayor was going to declare the meeting closed. After the third or fourth confused attempt to vote on whether to go to a vote, it became clear that the Labour group was planning to vote down even the idea of having a vote on the motion. There were catcalls from the gallery; I shouted out "and you call yourself democrats?" and received a few surprised glances back. (If you thought I'd been through the whole meeting silently, then you probably found this through search engine.) Then a few hands went up to the motion to go to a vote, then the whole Labour group (realising they were going to have to vote on it, and should do so with good grace).

So the vote happened. It was a division, going through the councillors one by one, to a quiet chamber, this time Respect councillors (and possibly a few others) shushing the public gallery when we spoke up. One Labour councillor, Alibor Choudhury, gave no answer. But the others voted against the motion to a woman and a man, and it fell.

Much of the time in politics, the fury exists for the cameras and the journalists; but on Wednesday, it was real. To the faces of the leaseholder's organisation, Rupert claimed that the motion was silly and irresponsible; and I think he sincerely believes it. (That doesn't mean he's right; you may well expect that he's been briefed by the same staff who decided to send out the bills.)

Tags: bricklane, life, london, politics

10:25 pm: Game Proposal: No Covenant

The angel of Yahweh came up from Gilgal to Bochim. He said, "I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you to the land which I swore to your fathers; and I said,'I will never break my covenant with you: and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.' But you have not listened to my voice: why have you done this?"

Judges 2:1-2

I enjoy roleplaying in authentic mythologies, and played a wonderful game of Tsars, Rusalka, and Father Frost several years ago. Sadly, I've only played in Ars Magica - the poster child of settings based on what people believed at the time - at conventions. So when Green Ronin published their Testament setting, based firmly in the biblical bronze age, I bought it. It's good. The writers did their homework, thought about the genre conventions of the fertile crescent mythologies, and did a very good job of modelling them. (They also provide many different ways of killing things, which is what a lot of roleplayers want. It uses the rules for Dungeons and Dragons, after all.)

And if I enjoy settings based around authentic mythologies, then I want to go straight to a heart of my societies' deepest and strongest mythology, and see what stories spring out of it.

The Problems

Slavery and misogyny are not only accepted in the setting, but unquestioned.

The setting is largely about wars over who gets to live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, which is still a live issue today. Not only that, but - as the above verse shows - YHWH seems to be entirely on the side of straightforward wars of ethnic conquest. (I read the book of Judges, and the above quote is the strongest statement of his/her consistent line throughout. The best qualification I can give is that when the Hebrews fail to do that, and start worshipping other gods - as they do repeatedly -
he doesn't rain down fire and brimstone so much as withdraw his protection and watch them find out how much they need him.)

I enjoy games where the overwhelming aims of the player characters are heroic, in the sense of trying to make the world a better place. So do my players, although they sprinkle a good few selfish piratical schemers into the mix. And this obviously clashes with several parts of the setting.

Alternatively, I could set characters against the ethos of (in modern terms) ethnic conquest. There are problems with this.

Religous players who follow one of the Abrahamic religions might identify very closely with the bronze age Hebrew culture, and not care to see it portrayed as too warlike.

Also, it can sound like an allegorical criticism of contemporary Israel, which - being the real world rather than myth - is a more complex situation. That's not my intention. (Not that I don't have criticisms, but they are specific, and belong in the context of a proper detailed discussion of the modern Middle East.) Worse, the more allusory a criticism is, the vaguer it is, and the vaguer it is, the less it looks like a foreign policy criticism, and the more like anti-Semitism.


And finally, if YHWH *is* an omniscient omnipotent world-creating deity, then I don't want to pick an argument with him.

My Solution

Some of these problems, I plan to simply accept. I believe in role-playing games as an important medium, able to deal with important topics. I want to embrace the fact that the topics of ethnic conflict and religion are core to the setting, not run away to Gondor.

But that doesn't mean I pretend that this story is about a particular present day conflict; the mythic bronze age is a very different place. Everyone takes slavery for granted. The Philistines are a more urban society than the Hebrews. There are dragons. And somewhere to the north, Troy.

The YHWH of the game is the tribal Lord of Israel, and not the omniscient creator-God of Christianity, Islam, or moderan Judaism. (If you believe they're the same person, then the game's YHWH character is one of it's fictional bits. Just like the Magic Missile spells.)

The player characters are good people within the constraints of their society; they own slaves, but treat them well; they support traditional gender roles, but accept women who break them (Deborah, anyone?); and they war without mercy, but wish for peace. This solves the problem of too closely identifying with the modern world, and gives us a unusual, gritty, and dramatic setting.

I don't want to pretend slavery didn't happen either. I expect that roleplayers of the future (if any) will look back on something our century does with abject horror, just as we look back on slave-owners. Perhaps roleplayers of the twenty-sixth century will play their cold war RPGs but look back on how we treat animals and all insist on playing vegans. But that would not just be very silly but a failure of imagination; people are not good or bad but complicated.

I think that slaves - including of other PCs - can work as PC concepts. Obviously, as part of defining workable relationships between all the PCs, we'd have to make clear that these happen to be well-respected slaves awarded a lot of latitude, but it is a strong way of including Caananite and other characters. (Some of which have different interesting powers than the Hebrews).

I accept that some people won't want to play because of the last point, or intrinsically because I am treating their profoundly held beliefs as mythology rather than religion. I am, though, genuinely interested to read comments from folk who think I should be reading the Book of Judges in a less critical way.

And mythology holds one hope for the PC group. The Lord can sometimes change his mind. He can sometimes be convinced.

The Pitch

In the Bronze age, life for most is a struggle for survival, against disease, war, and the supernatural alike. The grit of Deadwood meets the magicfest of Dungeons and Dragons. Strong characters pursue their own goals, and they lead to strange creatures, devils, and soap-opera melodrama. Your god will go into battle with you, but sometimes he asks too much. It is the world of the Ark, of the Seraphim, and of Troy.

You are the heroes, praised or unacknowleged, of an Asherite (Hebrew) community - one of several in a mixed Caananite valley. Your community has suffered in previous wars, and is likely to suffer most in future ones. An informal hierarchy includes the judges who take command in moments of need, the Psalmists who cast spells by singing praises, the hermit who lives out in the desert, the champion warrior of Israel, the grandmother who remembers the Exodus, and the farmer who - so the whispers say - does whatever his Qedshot concubine tells him. Spies, wise folk, and even trusted slaves join your counsels.

Year by year, a strange array of challenges face you. Sometimes you need to confront your neighbours, and sometimes you need to bring down a shared menace. And occasionally, you need to beg the god who lets you make no covenant.

Tags: ethics, games, storytelling

03:34 pm: The WOMAD Crowd

A photo of the crowd at 2006 WOMAD. To go with my review.

Tags: externallink, life, reviews

02:03 pm: Womad, Big Green, and Small World: I start going to festivals
August has been a busy month, partially because water came through the ceiling, and partially because I started going to festivals for the first time. Because there's already a lot of information about both of them on the web, I'll write less about Womad and Big Green:

Womad

A big 20,000 strong commercial festival with lots of acts thrown in the from the world.
Clientele: Guardian readers, with a large young crowd, and quite a few from work
Food: A fair amount of good vegan food
Music: 4-5 big stages, with bid and small world music names: the Berber poetess Cherifa was amazing, and I could have listened to the music jokes of Japanese group Pascals for a lot longer.
Irony: Although I didn't recognise any of the performers walking around the festival, one of them still recognised me. From everyday life.
Toilets: Trailers with long queues.
Dates: Best bands on the last night, so stay into the morning after the official end.

Big Green Gathering

A big 20,000 strong not-for-profit family-friendly festival concentrating on ecologically sound living
Clientele: Veggies, vegans, new agers, people looking for a party
Food: Fantastic. More really good vegan food than in New York or London.
Music: Countless smallish tents, with lots of festival circuit acts like Martha Tilston, and some unscheduled gigs. Quite a lot of fantastic music I forgot to take notes on, like the song "Nothing Happens Overnight". Does anyone know who sung it?
Drugs: First time I've seen people take cocaine. Occasionally felt like the only person who didn't do cannabis.
Toilets: Chemical toilets.
Irony: Chemical toilets.

Small World

A small one field festival of small scale semi-professional music run by the Small World stage.
Clientele: Hippies, musicians, and the people who run the other festivals. Very very friendly.
Music: 4-5 small tents with semi-pro musicians doing sets and jamming together. Recommend Gadjo & Tarantism for lively dancing, and Miss Maude's Folly for quiet listening. The music carried through the night, and someone was playing on at least one stage until 11am.
Food: A very good Carribean stall, but otherise vegan food is passable and unreliable.
Dates: Advertised to start on Thursday, but not much is set up, and no choice of food, until Friday. Ends slowly on/after Monday.
Toilets: A wooden construction over a large pile of faeces. Straw.
Irony: (My friend chatting to men:) Yes, we met on a dating website. Yes, we're going to the festival together. No, we're not going out. No, we're not at it like rabbits. Why do you look surprised?

I enjoyed being able to wander between tents and listen. Its friendliness is partly down to its small size, and stallholders we chatted to thought that the organisers wanted to keep it that way. Certainly, although the website announces it and lets you watch the remaining tickets count down to zero (it took less than half an hour to sell the 86 returns), there was very little (about featured stalls, or where it is) information on it, and my emails to their contact address didn't get a reply.

The friendly atmosphere extended to the music. The five cellists at the festival kept turning up to jam with the bands. Being amongst so many really good musicians made me want to improve my own to the point of creating stuff, rather than simply see how well I could perform other peoples'. Alas, that will take a lot of time.

By the way, the organiser is known as Pony, reputedly because he invented My Little Pony. Which (assuming it's true) is not a bad retirement.

Tags: life, music, reviews, vegan

09:35 am: Gelert Tent at Small World (an internet experiment)
I left my tent in the car of the family who kindly gave me a lift from the Small World festival to Headcorn train station, and have no means of getting in touch with them. I wonder whether I can construct a blog post which will turn up on google if the driver types in the right things. Obviously, she's not going to think that I'll be trying to reach her through putting up a post on the internet, but it will be interesting to see if this can be googled in a month's time.

It's a Gelert Nakia Plus tent.

The lift was to Headcorn Train Station.

She was going, ultimatley, to home in Brighton. And there was a chickpea called Josh.

Tags: life, web

07:33 pm: Travian
I played Travian for 2-3 months before getting bored, after hearing about it from Alice's Wonderland blog. My interest is partially professional - I've worked on web-based MMOGs, and wanted to see how it compares to mine.

Travian is a browser-based massively multiplayer online resource-management game, built by enthusiasts in Germany. Without being Halo, it looks perfectly acceptable, using layered graphics to pictures village, and javascript countdowns until builds finish and attacks arrive.

I used the advice in some strategy guides on the messageboards to slowly build up my kingdom to a decent size, without getting involved in any major wars. When I was big enough, I chose a village I wanted to conquer, and joined an alliance purely to provide myself with a pretext for attacking them. (This came in useful when I suddenly discovered they'd just joined one of the largest networks of alliances in the game, and I convinced them not to counter-attack by claiming that I was acting purely defensively.) With that done, I built up a large cavalry force on the conquered village, ready to throw my weight around. It was wiped out attacking somewhere who had sneakily gone and got friendly reinforcements. Then I went to WOMAD, where I occasionally ran my kingdom from the free Cybercafe and the Big Green Gathering and didn't touch the internet once. That showed me that I'd completely lost interest, and I gave my account to someone else on Freecycle. (Uruk, if you're playing on server 5.)

Gameplay is based around short visits to the site a few times a day (usually once every few hours, but a lot more often if you're beginning to build up a new village or in the middle of a war), so it can be a pleasant distraction from whatever you're meant to be doing without in theory taking over your life. The problem is that the only way to do well in the game is to let it take over, to be constantly launching attacks and making sure that new building is lined up as soon as the old building is finished. Victory depends equally on skill and your willingness to sacrifice your real life. I've heard this is normal for MMORPGs, but this is the first time I've played in a game where this is true; and I didn't like it.

The game was most fun when I picked a fight with another player and tried to conquer their village. I spent a weekend calculating move and countermove, being bluffed and counterbluffed, and convincing his allies not to attack me. It was fun, and the slow speed of the action (it would take two hours for the units which could damage his defences and convince his citizens to switch sides to reach him) reminded me a little of news reports and made the unfolding fight much more immersive and involving. Most of the tactics ended up boiling down to maths (when do I have to send the powerful cavalry to get them to arrive just before the weak-but-vital catapults?), which I'm geeky enough to enjoy. But not many people are that geeky, and most people probably want to get out at some point during the weekend.

Because the game often boils down to being in the strongest most active alliance, you can spend a lot of time chatting to other players and trying to corall them into joining a plan. Many of the alliances are based around particular nations, particularly the smaller European nations. And Poland. I once accidently attacked someone without realising they'd joined a large Polish Alliance, and wrote to them with sympathetic noises about the UK's failure to achieve its main war aim in WW2 and the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. I don't remember a German or an English alliance, for which I'm very grateful. (Although there was a Yorkshire one. So if no-one was refighting WW2, there is still potential for the Wars of the Roses.) The software has several functions to support alliances - such as fora and listings of who is allied or at war with whom. Unfortunately, alliances are often too important - the sheer scale of the game often means that success or failure depends less on your tactical choices than on whether your alliance gets into a large war or not.

Unfortunately, this problem with the scale of the game overwhelms other chances for interesting decisions. The degenerate strategy is too obvious, and relies (notice a theme?) too much on sacrificing your real life. When the first game closed, the winner (simply the player with the most points) thanked the many people who had helped them, largely by pitching in and sharing the running of the account so that whilst one person is busy or sleeping, another is making sure that no move is missed.

As a piece of software, it is sometimes slow, and occasionally processing stops. But given that it's a large game funded entirely out of a few euros a month for optional extra features, I'm quite prepared to tolerate that level of faults. I didn't notice any bugs which affected game rules, and there was good communication on the fora between admins and players.

For the kind of game it is, it's very professionally put together and successful - the game has over 75,000 active players (roughly as many as Second Life). But purely for me, I'd prefer something with a dozen players, a defined endpoint, and rules slightly tweaked to make it possible to win without spending all my time on it.

Tags: games, reviews, web