Where Worlds Collide

Most of the online RPGs I play are versions of the traditional tabletop RPG were you play one character. But there are other ways to do things, especially online

The Phoenyx is running a Lexicon Game, where the ‘characters’ are a bunch of (possibly revisionist) history scholars, and the actual gameplay revolves around their historical writings; it’s essentially a collaborative worldbuilding exercise.

Meanwhile, on DreamLyrics, Just John has a much stranger idea:

Would anybody here be into a game where your player characters hold jobs in a corporation-like organization, and where power is exercised in the traditional bureaucratic ways of deliberate obstructionism, backside-covering, slander and empire building?

And if you’re into that, would you be into having your PCs build an actual website? As players, the fun could include embellishing your corner(s) of the site with opaque jargon, badly-implemented forms, ridiculous HTML, irrelevant help screens, irritating slogans and all the other things that make corporate web sites such memorable experiences.

To top it off, the gag would be that to an innocent outsider surfing the web, this would look like a real site! My vague notion is that we’d run a standard game section here on DreamLyrics to coordinate stuff and roleplay staff meetings, but nothing on the site we’d build would link back to the game section.

A lot of scope for evil fun with this idea. I can imagine an incomprehensible (and impossible to comply with) policy on linking, and players should be responsible for sending equally incomprehensible cease-and-desist letters to any blogger than dares to link to the site.

Dapol have revealed that their new N-gauge D&E model is to be a class 73 electro-diesel. I’m not sure how popular a prototype it will turn out to be; on the plus side, the prototype carried an awful lot of different liveries. On the minus side, they were very much restricted to a narrow geographical area, which cannot be modelled effectively without an awful lot of accompanying models, none of which are commercially available.

From a pure sales criteria, I don’t know how much that matters. I’ve long suspected that prototype modellers are a minority; there are many people that mix and match all sorts of stock from different eras and regions with no regard to prototypical verisimilitude. And then there are the dreaded collectors, who aren’t even bothered with layouts at all. And even hardcore prototype modellers get tempted by the odd model that runs nowhere near their chosen prototype, be it a Danish GM Nohab or a New Haven freight motor.

Unfortunately, the specification for this class 73 appears to be 15 years behind the times. According to Dapol:

• It will have a 3 pole motor, and won’t have a flywheel.
• No low-friction mechanism.
• It will have directional headlights, but no tail lights
• No provision for DCC
• No NEM coupling mounts.

Unfortunately for Dapol, for everyone who compares it with 20 year old Farish products, there will be someone else who will insist on comparing it with the latest release by any one of the major continental or American manufacturers. And the latter group are likely to find it wanting.

There’s an attitude amongst British modellers that we should be grateful for anything a manufacturer produces, and we shouldn’t complain when something’s not up to scratch; just in case the manufacturer decides to take their ball and go home. I firmly believe that attitudes like that, and the sycophantic ‘Don’t upset the advertisers’ attitude by magazine reviewers (“It looks OK at normal viewing distances and will improve with running in ^TM“) is holding British railway modelling back. That and the extreme price sensitive nature of the British outline market; if I ever state on a mailing list that I’d willingly pay Fleischmann prices for Fleischmann quality British outline models, I always get a chorus of complaints from people complaining that I want to price them out of the hobby.

I won’t be buying a Dapol class 73, no matter how wonderful it may or may not be. My British modelling is focussed firmly on the south-west of the country, an area the 73s never visited. Perhaps if Dapol were to learn lessons from the 73, and later releases include things like a 150 DMU or 122 “Bubble Car”?

Update: It appears the initial reports were inaccurate in at least one respect; it will have a flywheel after all.

Electric Nose has completed his upper level return loop. Now continous running is possible thanks to the dumbell layout.

The layout is an end-to-end design, but with return loops at either end any train left to it’s own devices will eventually end up back where it started if nothing is in it’s way. Once I obtain the required track-circuit modules, this upper level loop will effectively become a linear fiddle-yard, enabling through traffic to be more convincingly portrayed. But for the last couple of hours I’ve sat back with a glass of wine and just watched a couple of trains circling the loft, something I’ve not been able to do before. I was suprised to find that a train moving at a typical freight speed will take 20 minutes to return to it’s starting point in the fiddle-yard. Nice!

Last time I had space for a decent-sized layout (a 12′x8′ outbuilding at my parents’ place in Slough), I had a layout with a dumbell formation. It certainly gives the best operating potential compared with the more traditional end-to-end or train set oval formations; trains appear to go somewhere and come back, but without needing to be remarshalled first. Unlike an oval layout you don’t need two of everything to make up a realistic operating sequence.

The trouble with this formation is the twin return loops take up quite a bit of space, so it’s not such a viable option for a layout that’s got to fit in a spare room or along one wall of a room used for other purposes.

Game Dream 11 asks us:

In every campaign, there are memorable scenes. Often, this is due as much to player participation as it is to GM flavor and skill. This week, I’d like for us to share quotes that stuck with you down through the years. What did you or your cohorts say during the game (in or out of character) that made a lasting impression?

The trouble with most in-game lines are that they’re of the ‘you had to be there’ variety; I have no idea whether any of these will be funny to anyone who wasn’t part of the game.

Still, sometimes a GM gives a golden opportunity to drop a corny joke straight into the game, especially when the mood of the game is meant to be humourous. Such a game was GODS (Guardians of Dimension). The PCs were a team of interdimensional troubleshooters, led by a telepathic horse, which also included a troll and an 2″ sentient insect, Bug. In one adventure, we landed in a tropical island, with, in the best jungle movie cliché, tribal drumming in the background.

GM: And suddenly, the drumming stops
Bug (my PC): Oh no! You know what this means!
Another PC: What does it mean?
Bug: Bass solo!

In a later game of GODS, we landed on an Old West style world, where the villagers were threatened by ‘The Banditos’

“They’ve come to steal the houses, burn the women, and rape the cattle!”

and later, once we’d defeated those banditos….

“We have saved the honour of the cows!”

Then there was a Castle Falkenstein game, set in Scotland. We captured some Prussian spies, by ambushing them as they slept. The ‘grunts’ got ordered abruptly to “Hande Hoch!”. But we woke up the commanding officer by pointing a big and scary looking firearm at him and saying:

“Did you order the continental breakfast, or the elephant gun”?

In a recent GURPS Time Travel game, when we’d slipped into what we assumed was an alternate parallel universe, and needed spare parts to repair our broken time machines. We’d found a consumer electronics store, and one player’s reaction was “You realise this is probably the local equivalent of Dixons” (For non-British readers, Dixons are a high street retailer notorious for having totally clueless sales staff who understand nothing whatsoever about the goods they’re selling).

GURPS Transhuman Space, at GenCon UK 2002, GMed by Phil Masters. I was playing Derek Repton, the ship’s engineer with a severe attitude problem. Constantine Thomas was playing the AI in the ship’s computer. The following exchange took place in a bad French accent (the AI was French)

Derek: “You stupide French Algorithme!”
The AI: “You’d better watch out next time you want the pod bay doors opened”

Finally, the Firefly game, where we had some damaged cargo pods which were starting to defrost. Fearful of some kind of biohazard, we opened them inside the cargo airlock. They didn’t contain quite what we expected.

GM: “You’re in the airlock, you’ve got a naked woman, a horse, and a large quantity of cocaine. Now what?”

I’m sure there are others.

Cold Spring Shops has recently mentioned a brief history of the Milwaukee Road Electrification, and a 1923 National Geographic article predicting electification as the furture of American railroading.

Interesting question as to why European railways electified their main lines on a large scale, but this didn’t happen in America. Virtually every European main line in mountainous territory is electrified, and many of them have been electrified since the early years of the 20th century. American electrification seems limited to just the Northwest Corridor and some commuter lines. For long distance freight haulage, the diesel reigns supreme. The Milwaukee is dead and gone, and the Great Northern abandoned their electrification even earlier.

Why is this? Is it because of fundamentally differing traffic patterns on opposite sides of the Atlantic? Europe’s higher population density means cities are closer together, and inter-city passenger traffic is still important. It’s worth noting that the one important American intercity route is electrified. Or is it because America had abundant domestic supplies of oil, while most European nations have plenty of coal? How much is the fact that European railways are largely state-run, while American railroads remain privately-owned?

Sad to note that the first freight railway through mountainous terrain in Britain to be electrified, the Woodhead line across the Pennines, outlived the Milwaukee by less than a decade, closing in 1981.

Game Dream 10 asks us:

During games, how do you keep track of the various plot hooks, hints, and people? Are you a master of the arcane memory arts and keep them in your head? Or, are you a mere mortal who must put them to paper? How much notekeeping is too much? Do you find you are more or less organized in game than in real life?

It’s a long time since I’ve GMed a long running campaign; all my gaming nowadays is either online (PBeM/PBmB) or convention one-shots. In the online games I’ve got the advantage that a lot of the threads are still archived online, so I can (and frequently do) search back two or three years to find the name of that NPC. Of course, if a game lasts long enough it’s likely to outlast both online venues and home computers. I don’t have access to the older threads of KLR dating from before the game moved to Dreamlyrics, for instance. They do still exist as OZWIN archives on my old desktop PC that somewhere in my parent’s house, should I really need to access them.

I also maintain an extensive database of NPCs; a lot of these predate the online game and date back to the FtF game I ran ten years ago in the same setting, on the basis thatyou never throw anything away if there’s a chance it might come in useful later. A lot of this information is also online on the Kalyr Wiki, which is mainly full of wider game setting material, but does contain some lists of the names of significant NPCs.

For the last FtF game I played in, we kept a campaign journal. But rather than putting the book keeping workload onto the GM, we delegated this task to one of the players. Since we only met once a month (and sometimes not even that), some record of game sessions was essential, because nobody could remember exactly what happened six weeks before. Were I to run another FtF campaign, I’d do something similar, but maintain the journal online using a Wiki or blogging software, to which all the players have access.

And I’m late answering this one! Game Dream 8: I’m Late! Rewind! asks us:

How have the games you’ve been involved with dealt with the passage of time? Has it been primarily linear, skipped around a lot, or even reversed?

In face to face gaming, I don’t think I’ve seen anything other than strictly linear time, except for one game which was explicitly about time travel. Whenever the players have split up, I’ve handled the two groups by jumping back and forth between the two, not letting either group get too far ahead of the other. Just about every GM I’ve played under has done the same.

In asynchronous internet games (PBeM and PBmB), things have to be a bit more flexible to cope with different posting rates. Often players will respond to something another character said or did several posts ago, and as GM I often have entertaining hours of fun editing it all together to make coherent sense. Quite often we’ll go into what I call ‘timeslip mode’ (A term first used by my first online GM, Maughn Matsuoka), where I will start a new thread without closing the previous one. A rule I always enforce here is once I’ve started a new thread, nothing may happen in the previous thread that has an impact on the later one. A good example of this is when I had an extended conversation thread in the evening, and started a new thread with the party setting out the next morning. The ‘no change’ rule here would prevent a brawl breaking out which killed or injured anyone already mentioned in the later thread.

With multiple players in different threads, I try to keep them within sight of each other timewise, unless they’re widely separated geographically. In the worst case scenario this can lead to a player getting stuck in limbo for extended periods waiting for other threads to catch up; unfortunately this has happened to one PC in my Kalyr game. In contrast, I haven’t needed to keep the Calbeyn and Filgeth games in synch with each other; not only are the two games run on totally separate forums so that many of the players are probably not even aware of the other game, but they’re set in two cities more than a week’s travel apart. This limits the scope for anything in one game to have much impact on the other. At one time the Filgeth game was running about a week ahead of the Calbeyn one, but the Calbeyn-based party did a lot of travelling, and the two timelines are now more or less running in parallel again.

For a more extreme example of parallel timelines and the potential for continuity confusion, I’ll have to mention a game I neither GMed nor played in. It’s the semi-legendary Highlander: The Gathering run by David Edelstein. In the original game the dozen or so players were scattered throughout history, some as early as Roman times, others in the early twentieth century. Although most of the time each player had their own thread, immortal NPCs cropped up in different threads at different times, which gave mind-boggling continuity headaches. If so-and-so was alive in 1915, it means another PC can’t kill them in a duel in 1491! I’m not sure how David managed to keep the timeline consistant, although I remember a complete thread for a player who’d faded away getting removed from the continuity because events in other threads overwrote it. The present game is set in the present, but has “Flashback” scenes set in the past, which I think work in the same way as my timeslip threads: i.e. Nothing may happen in them to contradict the present-day storyline. (No duels in which the PC might die, for starters)

There’s no way I could run a game like that. Trying to keep the continuity consistent would make my head explode.

I’m amused by this story.

Railways bosses have drafted in engineers from India to work on five Victorian signal boxes in Stockport.

Twelve men have been flown in to make sure refitting work is finished on time.

Network Rail says there are not enough British workers to do the job. And the Indians are particularly well qualified because railways there still rely heavily on Victorian signal boxes built by the British.

Perhaps we should get some WP class streamlined pacifics to pull the trains, instead of the Pendolinos?

The signal boxes in the Stockport area were an anachonism in the 70s. While much of the newly-electrified West Coast Mainline got shiny new power boxes with state-of-the-art 1960s panels, in Stockport they just connected up the new colour light signals to the old Victorian lever frames. They even retained mechanical worked points! Where else in the country is a four track main line still operated by absolute block?

This survey has been propagating round the Blogosphere recently. Via Blogcritics.

First Record Bought: Pink Floyd, The Wall
First Concert: Hawkwind, supported by Vardis
Favourite Music Movie: This is Spinal Tap
Favourite Music Book: The Real Frank Zappa Book
Favourite Songwriter: Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser
Favourite Record Label: Harvest
Favourite Magazine: Modern Railways (Hey, you didn’t say it had to be music magazine!)
Favourite Bassist: Geddy Lee
Favourite Album Cover: Some Enchanted Evening, Blue Öyster Cult
Least Favourite Album Cover: Lovehunter, Whitesnake.
Favourite Teen Idol: If I was an American I’d take the fifth amendment on this one.
Artist Who Broke Your Heart: Phil Collins, by selling out.
Artist You Will Always Believe In: Marillion
Singer Who Makes Your Skin Crawl: Elvis Costello. Don’t know why, but his voice just grates badly with me.
Singer Who Makes You Swoon: Anja Orthodox (Closterkeller), Rannveig Sif Sigurdardottir (The Icelandic soprano guesting on two albums by Luca Turilli), Jon Anderson.
Favourite Sound: Mellotron or Hammond organ
Album You Will Always Defend: Drama by Yes
Album You Own That No One Else Does: Just about everything really obscure I can name, I can think of someone else who’s got it - even albums by Polish goth-metal bands or Hungarian prog-rock acts! I do have some LPs of train noises; do they count?
Classic Album You Own but Don’t Like: Layla by Derek and the Dominoes
Artist You’re Supposed to Like but Don’t: The Smiths
Song You Can’t Stand by an Artist You Like: Goin’ Through the Motions, Blue Öyster Cult
Band That Should Break Up: Oasis
Band That Should Re-form: Genesis with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett
Guilty Pleasure: Rhapsody. Although why should I really feel guilty for listening to operatic pomp-metal with Dungeons and Dragons lyrics?
Favourite Music DVD: Don’t have a DVD player
Concert You Wish You’d Seen: Rainbow with Ronnie Dio
Dream Collaboration: Ronnie Dio and Yngwie Malmsteen

This is a bit of a bummer.

Karnataka were a six-piece British female-fronted band that combined atmospheric progressive rock with celtic sounds. They had steadily been building up a reputation on the live circuit, spread largely by word-of-mouth. After listening their very impressive recent live album “Strange Behaviour”, I was very much looking forward to seeing them on their planned tour this Autumn.

Sadly, it’s not going to be: this is the message posted to the band’s website, www.karnataka.org.uk.

Karnataka regret to announce that for personal reasons the band is no longer able to continue. We would like to thank all of you who supported us from our early gigs in 1998 up to the present, it is largely you who have made this journey so worthwhile for all of us and we hope that the music we have made together has been something that will continue to live on after the band.

So far, they’ve given no reason for the split.