Where Worlds Collide

I’m slowly getting somewhere with the Kalyr RPG. Parts of it are almost ready for playtesting. Other parts still need to be written, of course.

The character generation chapter is taking shape, and it’s proving hard work. I’m starting to wonder if I’m making my template-driven system more complicated than I need it to be. I’m going to present subjective character generation as an alternative, and I bet most hardcode Fudge players will probably just use that. I’ve had to retool many of the templates when I started ‘unit testing’, and realised that my sample characters were coming out with too few skills. I’ve now upped the number of skills in each template, so starting character will have 32-38 skill levels rather than the original 26-30. Of course, I’m now wondering if all my Talents will still make sense, or whether some will need to be merged because I can’t think of eight related skills.

On the other hand, I’m getting some positive feedback on the Fudge mailing list to my proposed way of handling faults.

Dave “Blimp” Jones of N-Thusiast Resprays have put some pictures of his new class 121 “Bubble Car” railcar online.

Like earlier kits of his, the body is cast in resin. I have to say it’s an improvement on his earlier class 22 diesel, but I’ll reserve judgement until I see a fully painted and finished model in the flesh. It’s promised for December’s Warley exhibition.

The chassis uses Lifelike motor and bogies. I’ll be interested to see how robust and reliable it proves in operation. I don’t know whether it’s cast in resin or metal; if it’s resin it looks a bit on the fragile side.

Just because I don’t have a cat doesn’t mean I can’t do cat blogging. I shot these two on my trip last month to Switzerland, in both cases while I had time to kill waiting for train connections. I didn’t manage to identify the name of either cat, but both are believed to be of class Ca4/4i

I spotted this fellow sitting in a front garden towards the end of a baking hot afternoon in Capolago in the Ticino. I had been up the Monte Generoso rack railway to escape from the heat, and had half an hour’s wait for the local train back to Lugano.

This cat resides in the restaurant opposite the station in Glovelier. It’s demonstrating the irrational feline desire to get onto or inside anything strange and new, in this case my camera bag.

They’ve redesigned Blog Explosion yet again. This time they’ve added a ‘surf by category’ option which is intended to give a higher chance of serving up blogs you might actually be interested in.

I wonder they should try some kind of Bayersian analysis (the same method as used by spam filters) to compare the text of the target blogs to that of your own. Then I might see only blogs that mention the words “Mellotron”, “Cthulhu” or “Re4/4″.

It’s still running into the perennial problem, most of the blogs it serves are still crap. I think this is because blogs as a whole obey Sturgeons’ Law, only squared. There appears to be an unlimited supply of vapid personal diaries or angry rightwing ranting. Where do all these people come from? And why can’t they find something better to write about?

As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of York’s Mostly Autumn. If you’ve read some of my previous postings and want to check this band out, I strongly recommend you try to get to see them live. You won’t regret it, I promise you.

If you want to hear them on record, they’ve released seven studio albums, of which five are considered ‘proper’ releases. I’ve written brief reviews of all seven, which should give you some idea where to start.

Mostly Autumn’s debut album, 1997′s “For All We Shared” was a pretty diverse affair. If anything, it was a bit too diverse for it’s own good, with Floydian epics like “The Last Climb” and Uriah Heep-ish opener “Nowhere to Hide” sitting uneasily with folk-rock jigs such as “Shenanigans” and “Folklore”. Although patchy in places, it nevertheless contains some real gems, most nobably the anthemic “Heroes Never Die”, and the spine-tingling “The Night Sky” with a fantastic violin solo from Bob Faulds.

1999′s “Spirit of Autumn Past” continued in a similar vein, displaying the same diverse set of musical influences, albeit with some slightly stronger songs, and a bigger role for Heather Findlay’s ethereal lead vocals. It’s the first album to feature flautist Angela Goldthorpe, who’d previously appeared as a guest musician, as a full member of the band. Sadly it’s also the last to feature violinist Bob Faulds. Although there’s still a bit of filler, the good ones more than make up for it; from the rousing electric folk-rock of opener “Winter Mountain” to the symphonic rock closer “The Gap Is Too Wide” with it’s massive choral finale. Other highlights are the title track, a anthem in similar vein to “Heroes Never Die”, and Heather’s “Evergreen” and both of which are still favourites in the band’s live set.

2001′s “The Last Bright Light” marked a significant step forward. With the band slimmed down to a seven-piece, this album had a far more unified feel. Where the two previous albums had been a bit of a jumble of disparate sounds, now they’d managed to streamline the different influences into a distinctive musical identity of their own. The Pink Floyd influence was still there, as was a very strong celtic feel. The songwriting is stronger, the arrangements tighter, and there’s much less filler. This is the album where Heather Findlay really comes into her own as a lead vocalist, on ballads like “Hollow” and “Shrinking Violet”, and harder-edged songs like “Never the Rainbow”. The album closes with the epic “Mother Nature”, which has become the band’s signature tune. If you’re into celtic rock, this is probably the one to get. Their live set still draws heavily from this album.

“Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings” is a minor affair. Some might even say that releasing an album with a title like that was a seriously bad career move. The band don’t really consider it as their “proper” fourth album, and this largely instrumental record was written and recorded in a very short period after they’d seen Peter Jackson’s film. It contains reworkings of two instrumentals from earlier albums, “Out of the Inn” from their debut, at “Helm’s Deep” from “The Last Bright Light”.

“Catch the Spirit” closes the first chapter of the band’s history. It’s a double album consisting of re-recordings of the best material from the previous three and a bit albums. Worth getting as an introduction to the band, and some of the recordings and arrangements improve on the originals, most notably “Half the Mountain”, originally from “The Last Bright Light”.

2003′s Passengers was their ‘real’ fourth album, and marked a major change in direction. The production was far richer, giving a big, rich sound, and the songs were less celtic and more commercial hard rock mixed with lush ballads. Heather Findlay handled the bulk of the lead vocals, with Bryan Josh singing just a couple of songs. While celtic rock fans expecting a rerun of “The Last Bright Light” might have been slightly disappointed, there are still plenty of great songs on this disk. My favourites are the hard rocking “Caught in a Fold”, the acoustic “Bitterness Burnt” (perhaps the only remnant of their celtic sound), the sweeping ballad “Another Life”, and “Simple Ways”, with the huge symphonic instrumental section. The only thing missing was an epic closer; although the closing number, “Pass the Clock” was lengthy, it lacked the epic grandeur of the “Mother Nature”, “The Gap Is Too Wide” or “The Night Sky”.

I’ve already written a track-by-track review of 2005′ “Storms Over Still Water” here, so I’ll just give a summary. Storms is very much an album of two halves; the first half is made up of short, fairly commercial songs in the same vein as Passengers. The second half consists of longer atmospheric pieces that echo the Floydian epics of earlier albums. Both halves are equally superb; they’ve reached the stage when they don’t do filler any more. It’s as good as anything else they’ve done. Still, I’d hesitate to name it as their best album, because that would imply that “The Last Bright Light” and “Passengers” weren’t as good.

Making Light quotes the whole of Patrick’s introduction to the anthology New Magics, which wrestles with the perennial question, what is fantasy? This quote tells us why the genre cannot be defined simply by what it’s not:

Here’s another: fantasy is tales of things that never were and never could be. That hardly narrows things down at all. Along with fantasy, it scoops up folktales, fairy tales, allegories, utopias, and loosely imagined historical novels. Admittedly, many of those do have a strong family resemblance to fantasy literature. Unfortunately, the definition also takes in 95% of the dramas ever written, 96% of the political memoirs, 97% of the spy novels, 98% of the real-estate brochures, 99% of the comics, 99.5% of the operas, and a great many bad novels that were supposed to be realistic, only their authors got things wrong.

I suppose it’s almost impossible to define a rigid definition of what is and isn’t fantasy; just about any such definition will end up excluding at least one major work that’s definitely within the genre. It’s even harder trying to decide where to draw the line between fantasy and science fiction (especially when some mainstream critics use the two terms interchangably). Is Dune SF or fantasy? What about Star Wars? It’s got magic, knights and princesses in it!

But does it really matter?

Another music meme, from FilteringCraig.com

Explain, using ONE SONG ONLY why someone should go see this band live in concert. In some cases, you should pick the most popular song. In some cases, you should pick the most exciting song. In some cases, you should pick the most emotional song. Some bands you probably shouldn’t go see at all, but that isn’t the point. You don’t have to like the artist at all. 20 people’s answers might be different. The only wrong answer is no answer. If you had to convince someone to go to a show or concert by one of these bands/artists/singers, what ONE SONG would you use to convince someone to go?

I’ve chosed the last ten live show’s I’ve attended. Since I’ve seen one band (and you know which one!) more than once, this list also includes one or two support acts to make up the numbers.

Apocalyptica: Master of Puppets
Asia: Only Time Will Tell
Blue Öyster Cult: Astronomy
Fish: Brother 52
Marillion: This is the 21st Century
Mostly Autumn: Mother Nature
Porcupine Tree: Shesmovedon
Rammstein: Reise, Reise
Uriah Heep: Between Two Worlds
Yes: Roundabout

All but one of the above songs was in the setlist on the night, several of them as encores. That one exception is BÖC’s Astronomy. I’ve seen the band several times, and I’ve never seen them play it live. I believe they alternate it nowadays with “Last Days of May” on successive nights, and I always seem to catch them on the ‘wrong’ nights.

Consternation is the latest of a series of RPGs held every other year in New Hall in Cambridge. I attended the previous event, called Conjuration, in 2003, and that was a whole heap of fun. This one was even better.

The focus of the convention was RPGs, with a lot of tabletop games covering just about everything except d20 and World of Darkness (somebody described the convention as ‘a bit elitist’). Nobody was running Skyrealms of Jorune this time, though. I wonder when someone’s going to run Tales of Garghentihr? The convention’s special guests were Alan Varney (of Paranoia fame) and Marcus Rowland.

As well as tabletop RPGs, there were several LARPS, some of them sounding quite surreal, such as a Paranoia/Cthulhu crossover called “Will All Elder Gods Report for Termination”, and the even stranger “Gamer’s Wives”, billed as “Footballer’s Wives” with gamers. There were panels running throughout the con, one or two of which I’d like to have attended had they not clashed with games I really wanted to play.

As is typical of college venues, the rooms were spartan but clean. One very welcome change from Conjuration was that the college refectory was serving meals this year. Last time there was just breakfast, and we had to subsist on takeaways the rest of the time, which meant I suffered the worst Chinese meal I’d ever had in my life. This time they served dinner on Friday and Saturday, and lunch on Saturday and Sunday. And the food was far, far better than the ‘skool dinner’ fare I’ve had to endure at some other college venues.

Over the course of the weekend I played in no fewer than six games, the most I’ve ever managed in a single convention. I also managed to cover most bases genre-wise, with the exception of costumed superheroes, a genre I don’t care for much anyway.

Friday Night was Call of Cthulhu, a game I always try to play at least once at every convention. This one had the PCs as an elite British commando unit parachuted into the Swiss Alps, where a high-ranking general’s plane had been shot down. Although Switzerland was supposed to be neutral, this town near the German border was crawling with Nazis. Our mission was either to rescue the general, or failing that, make sure any battle plans contained in his head couldn’t fall into enemy hands. Naturally we ran into squamous and rugose Mythos entities, gruesome deaths and failed SAN rolls almost immediately. It ended up with us disrupting a unspeakably blasphemous ritual, featuring tentacles and an 83% PC mortality rate. In the end, my character was the only survivor.

First game on the Saturday was the current game of the moment, Dogs in the Vineyard. I signed up for this largely to see if the game really does live up to all the hype. The theme is psuedo-Mormon religious police in 1850s Utah, and the system involves buckets of dice. Not just d6s either, it can also use lots of d4s, d8s and d10s! In this game we ended up having as many conflicts between PCs as between us and the NPCs, caused by the fact that one PC was a little too fond of summary executions (“You’re a sinner!” Bang!) Interesting game, even though the focus is bit narrow, and I wonder whether it can sustain a long term campaign. As a one-off one-shot, though, it’s fine.

Second game was “Diana: Warrior Princess”, run by Marcus Rowland himself. This one was the spin-off series, “Elvis, the Legendary Tours”, with the PCs as Elvis and his band, including Vlad Lennon, Senator Joe McCartney, and the Roadie Bob “The Builder” Marley. As you should have gathered by now, this not a remotely serious game. My best line was, when confronted by a werewolf in Memphis was “I stun him with a bass solo”.

Final game on Saturday was classic Traveller. We were the survivors of a starship crash on an ice planet, a mixed group including a general, the ship’s first officer, a big game hunter, a nun, and a Duchess’ secretary (me). Our first problem was to avoid dying of cold, and our next problem was to get off this forsaken planet. The complications were that not only was the planet inhabited by nasty squid-like creatures, but we eventually discovered that the we were deep in Zhodani space; it was a very bad misjump before the crash.

I played two shorter games on the Sunday rather than the more usual one longer one. First was a World War Two schoolchildren game run by Mark “L’Ange” Baker, using Unisystem as the game system. Being a Mark Baker game, it came with his usual vast amount of research and reams of handouts. What were the mystery lights on the cliff? Is the German master really an enemy spy? Can the children save the day? All with lashings of ginger beer!

The final game was Ars Magica, the game of medieval magic and Latin nouns and verbs. This was an introductory adventure, in which the player characters were a bunch of apprentices sent out to the Summer Fayre with a shopping list, and a collection of things to trade for them. Naturally we weren’t told what any of the things we were supposed to buy actually were, or the true nature of the things we had to sell. That we had to find out for ourselves!

Overall, it was a great convention, thanks to Phil Masters and the rest of the convention committee. Roll on the next one in two years time!

Update: Ozzy has some photos online. There are even one or two of me…

This is the second time I’ve seen MA play at this small club in Crewe. Last time was the Christmas special before a packed crowd. This time it wasn’t completely sold out, but there was still a good attendance for a Thursday night. With the retail release of the new album “Storms Over Still Water” just four days away, there was an atmosphere of anticipation. I was unable to make the launch gig in London in June, so this would be the first time I’d heard most of “Storms” performed live.

Just after half past nine the six of the seven band members trooped on stage and Bryan Josh struck up the opening chords of “Out of the Green Sky”, the hard-rocking first number from “Storms”. It’s difficult to fit the whole band on the Limelight’s small stage; this meant bassist Andy Smith and second guitarist Liam Davidson were half hidden away at the back on the edge of the drum riser, and anyone on the right hand side of the hall would have had trouble seeing flautist Angela Gordon behind Iain Jennings Wakemanesque mountain of keyboards.

Heather Findlay made a dramatic entrance just in time to sing the soaring chorus, looking as stunning as ever, even though we didn’t get to see the spray-on red catsuit she wore in London.

The band were both tight and enthusiastic, and gave the crowd two and a half hours of stunning music ranging mixing rousing hard rock with floydian soundscapes and celtic atmospherics. They’ve very much got their own sound, and longer sound like a jumble of diverse influences. Heather’s singing has a lot more power now, and she can belt out hard rockers as well as the softer ballads. Bryan’s gravelly lead vocals make a good counterpoint, and he too is much improved. His guitar playing is great two, with a nod to Dave Gilmour and Richie Blackmore, but his solos are never quite long enough to outstay their welcome. I’d like to have heard a bit more of Angela’s flute playing; she’s now playing keyboards a lot of the time.

The setlist mixed a lot of new songs with plenty of older classics, although they’ve now reached the stage where they’ve got so much good material that there’s not room for everyone’s favourites even in a set of this length. I believe they’re rotating a lot of songs, both new and old, in and out of the set rather than playing the same show each night, which probably explains the mix up mid-set, when Bryan and Heather had different ideas over what the next song was supposed to be! They played the obvious standards such as “Heroes Never Die”, “The Spirit of Autumn Past”, “Evergreen”, “Caught in a Fold” and “Passengers”. The celtic/folky/Tolkien era wasn’t completely ignored with a rousing version of the instrumental “Out of the Inn”. There were even a few surprises, such as “Winter Mountain”, from 1999′s “Sprit of Autumn Past”, which I’d not heard them play live before.

The “Storms” material focussed on the shorter songs, “Heart Life”, which they’ve been playing live for a while, the Uriah Heep-meets-Oasis rockout of “Black Rain”, and the lighter “Broken Glass”, which I found much more impressive live than on record. The only longer song featured was “Candle in the Sky”. I would have liked to have heard “Carpe Diem” or the title track, but we can’t have everything unless they play for four hours.

They finished, as they always do, with the epic “Mother Nature”, stretched out to 15 minutes, building up from a gentle beginning to that magnificent sweeping chorus, followed by the atmospheric instrumental section before the rousing finale, which ended with Bryan teasing us with a few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”.

Mostly Autumn really deserve to be playing bigger venues than this. Put them on tour with someone like The Darkness or Coldplay and they’d blow them off stage. Their commercial success has been limited by the fashion-driven nature of the British music scene, where you don’t get a look in unless you’re the right kind of three chord poseurs to impress the clique of London-based psuedo-intellectual music press scribblers. Hopefully things are beginning to change; there are signs that real music played by real musicians is making a comeback.

Tellenburg castle, a mile south of Frutigen in Switzerland, is a superb place to watch trains when the weather is good. It affords a splendid view of the kander viaduct on the north ramp of the Lötchberg line, with a steady procession of passenger and freight trains grinding up and down the 3% grade. For most of the afternoon, the sun is right behind your shoulder, making the light perfect for photos of the viaduct. It’s ideal if you’re an N gauge modeller, because the trains appear to be N gauge sized from this vantage point as they head up and down the valley.

As you should be able to seem from the pictures, there are actually two viaducts. The elegant masonry structure in front dates from the original construction of the line in the early years of the 20th century. The uglier concrete bridge behind dates from the late 1970s when the route was widened to double track in order to handle the ever increasing volumes of traffic. The line is now very busy indeed, with a train every 10-15 minutes at busy times.

One of the hourly “Pendelzug” trains from Brig, propelled by an SBB Re460 locomotive. This is the only train I saw with the entire formation in the new black and white livery. From the most recent timetable change, SBB have taken over all passenger workings on the line from BLS, and BLS blue and cream trains are a thing of the past on the Lötchberg proper.

Despite losing the passenger traffic, BLS continue to operate plenty of freight. Here, a pair of their “Browns”, the BLS’s distinctive Re4/4s head a northbound “Hangartner” Intermodal.

The Reggio to Limburg clay empties headed by a pair of DBAG class 185s. These locomotives have four pantographs to enable them to work under both German and Swiss electrification.

An SBB Re10/10 combo (one Re4/4 and one Re6/6) head a southbound wagonload freight made up mostly of steel wagons.

One new type of train in 2005 is the international workings to Italy operated by Cisalpino, with coaches in a striking blue and silver livery. This six coach train appears to need the power two SBB Re4/4s

BLS’s Re485s are much in evidence in the attractive lime green and silver colour scheme. Here a pair of them slog up the grade with a southbound wagonload freight, made up mostly of timber wagons.

The “Rolling Road” trains are a great success, carrying lorries (and their drivers) across the Alps, keeping their vehicles off Swiss roads. It’s headed by the odd-looking combination of an Re465 and a “Brown”, which was the power on all rolling road trains I saw that day.

Larger versions of these pictures can be found on my fotopic site