How do we increase IR's circulation? I have a thought, but I don't know how practical it is. I've seen on the Boston area BBS service Channel One a couple issues of a shareware magazine, zipped. Would it be remotely possible to zip a whole issue of IR in such a why that when unzipped one would end up with the all the zines as separate files? If the IR's were available on the web page and were circulated to various and sundry bulletin boards and web sites and whatever we'd certainly increase readership and would possibly attract new contributors and maybe new subscribers wanting IR in it's natural form.
Just a thought; it's probably wildly impractical.
[And as it happened, IR continued for two more issues before going into indefinite limbo. The better solution would be a Web Ring or "virtual IR", perhaps.]
The adventurers had fought through hordes of Chaos monsters, hostile bandits, and enemy cultists. They were all tired, and needed a rest. The village they had found seemed perfect; peaceful, with friendly people. Oh, they were a little odd; they all covered their heads and greeted them with the phrase, "Peace and bliss upon you". They were probably members of some unusual pacifistic cult; one party member overheard something about "the bliss of Paxis" which probably referred to their god. But after all they'd been through the adventurers were glad to be amongst peaceful people no matter what their deity. They gladly accepted the villagers hospitality and the feast in their honor. They thought nothing of their sudden drowsiness; it had been a long time on the road after all.
The leader of the party, a battle hardened warrior awoke the next morning in a mental struggle. He felt the most incredible, deep satisfying peace, and a bliss like nothing he had ever experienced. Yet, he also knew that there was something wrong; he was being controlled by some outside force. He struggled against the thing which strived to possess him, and failed.
A villager came to him. The villager pulled back his hood revealing the orange moldy slime covering his scalp. "Welcome to the Bliss of Paxis", the villager said. "We apologize for drugging your wine, but you can see that it was for your own good."
"Yes, yes. Of course," the leader said. He saw that the rest of his party had small bits of moldy slime on their heads, and sensed that he also the slime. But it didn't matter (although a tiny voice in the back of his mind screamed in horror), the Peace and Bliss of Paxis was his.
The Slime God is inspired by a story I saw in an Analog from the late Sixties; the title and author escape me. The basic story involves a planet where the natives put a sort of slimy mold on the heads which gradually grows over their heads and to their shoulders, imparting a sort of peace and contentment. Eventually, they go to a cavern where there is a large mass of the goo and immerse themselves in it; slowly being consumed.
A long time ago I used this thing in a campaign. It went pretty well, if memory serves me correctly. I decided that with a little work the Slime God would make a good Critter Fitter. I've worked it out for RuneQuest, with some comments on using it in Call of Cthulhu.
The Slime God isn't a "god" as such; it is a chaotically mutated fungus. In its primitive form, the slime attracted prey to it by projecting a sense of pleasure and contentment; creatures would bury themselves in the slime and would be slowly consumed. The slime would spread by small bits of it occasionally being carried off by some creatures who would eventually be covered and then absorbed by the slime, leaving only a blob waiting to lure new victims.
Eventually, some really large slime blobs attracted humans and other intelligent creatures. Once the slime absorbed an intelligent creature, it changed. It usually didn't immediately absorb its prey, but put a portion of itself onto the creature where it would gradually grow over its head and shoulders over the course of several years. The creature protects the growing slime, finds new "hosts" for the slime, feeds it magic points (slime hosts have two magic points lower than their POW would normally indicate; the magic points are consumed by the slime god) and sometimes spreads new slime centers.
Any creature that gets within thirty meters of a slime center will have to resist a mental attack with a POW of 16. If they fail to resist, they will rush to the slime center. If they are unintelligent creatures they will dive into the slime, suffocate, and gradually be absorbed. If they are an intelligent creature, they will place some slime on their head, and the slime will begin to meld with the skin and flesh of the victim. Such slime can be removed by physical means, but unless it is done within two days the victim will take a D3 + (number of years as a slime host) in damage to the head.
Slime hosts do get some benefits from their relationship. They are in continual bliss and contentment, and are immune to disease. They can live up to forty years as hosts, and then go to be absorbed by the slime center.
Slime hosts think that they go to join their god, and in a sense they do. The spirit of any host who dies before he would be absorbed into the slime goes into the slime instead of to whatever afterlife they'd normally receive, as do the spirits of those who are absorbed by the slime. But it isn't a heaven; their consciousness is suppressed as their spirits feed magic points into the slime. Slime gods have such high magic points because of this and the points that they draw from their living hosts that they are effectively immune to direct magical attacks. Spirits absorbed into the slime cannot escape unless the slime is destroyed.
While the slime is effectively immune to magical attack and isn't hurt by physical blows, it is vulnerable to fire and some acids. If the slime is attacked, it will give out a mental call to its hosts who will come to its defense, fighting to the death. A slime center requires 8 points of damage per square meter of slime to destroy, but the slime is quite flammable and setting the whole mass a flame should destroy it. However, surviving slime hosts will simply move to a new location and start over.
In Glorantha, the Slime God would probably have a full cult, with the Priests being "elders" in their thirties who will go to the slime center in a few years. While there are no rune spells, the Priests have access to all the spirit and sorcery magic of everyone who has been absorbed by the slime center, and could draw on the magic points of the Slime God. They do not have access to sorcery manipulations, but could do enchantments. Spirits will go nowhere near a person who is a slime host, as the slime has a chance to capture the spirit.
The cult spreads when an area gets overpopulated. It's a bit like bees swarming; several of the cultists feel an urge to pack up and leave. Once they find a new home, they live without a slime center until one or more of the elders are mostly covered by slime. The elders then settle into an appropriate dark place (a cave, for instance) and are fed by the other cultists until they cease to exist as humans and have become the core of a new slime center.
It's possible that the Lunar Empire would actually encourage Slime God infestations in outlying areas; the cultists are peaceful and hard working, just the sort of subjects you want. The Lunars might even attempt to set up slime centers in rebel areas to weaken them. It would likely be kept out of the Lunar heartland, as slime hosts cannot worship the Goddess or her pantheon.
In a Call of Cthulhu setting, the slime god would be found in one of those remote villages nobody ever goes to, or brought to a city by somebody who found the slime someplace and became a host. Perhaps the investigators notice that there's an absence of homeless people on the streets and new, bizarre communes. In CoC the slime god is probably an alien organism from a meteor or maybe an ancient ruin.
I suddenly realized another reason for aliens to "conquer the Earth for fun and profit" (see IR#23); test subjects! I was watching an odd new television show called Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal which features stories "inspired" by the files of some organization called The Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. The show is hosted by Dan Aykroyd (yup, him), and after one story that almost assuredly was mostly fictional concerning a boy and some animals that got duplicated by extraterrestrials Aykroyd said something about the child helping the aliens in their cloning experiments. It didn't hit me at the time, but apparently I thought about it subconsciously and realized that I'd missed a somewhat obvious alien motive.
Of course, our aliens probably don't need to conquer the Earth to get test subjects for biological experiments or even psychological experiments. But what if our aliens want to do long term sociological experiments? They'd likely not overtly take over but do little things behind the scene so as to test social theories without risking destroying their own society.
How about time travellers, alien or from a far future, messing with history to test a theory or just to see what would happen? Why, doesn't that explain the major assassinations of the sixties or the utterly pointless Watergate break-in? One could go mad if one takes that idea too seriously.
I was mulling over Collie's [Collie Collier, another IR contributor] comments about how elected officials often do not do as they promise and how they fail to deliver for the constituencies that got them into office. I realized that part of the problem is that our officials are not only the representatives of the people who voted for them but also those who didn't. The President is the President of everybody, not just the Democrats or the liberals or whoever. Same for Senators and Representatives. We also have the problem that some people are only represented in this indirect manner. For example, my representative in the House is Joe Kennedy. My district is one of the most Democratic in the nation. There's no way a GOP candidate is going to beat a Kennedy in this district. A Republican is effectively disfranchised here. If one is inclined to one of the other parties, like the Libertarians or Socialists or Greens or whatever, there is little chance that your party's candidates will be successful and you are even more effectively disfranchised.
My partial solution: Replace our present House of Representatives and its mass of Gerrymandered districts with a system of proportional representation. Every American citizen, including those in the territories, votes for a party instead of a specific candidate for representative. Each party that gets more than a certain amount of the vote gets that percentage of the representatives in the House. Minor parties get a chance to actually have a place in government, and people can have at least a few representatives that are relatively close to their own views as opposed to the lesser of two evils.
One problem I see with this is the potential for increased division in our society as minority viewpoints become more effectively expressed in our political system; Demos and the GOP generally eventually work towards a sort of compromise near the middle but that might not happen with little parties that are more ideologically pure. I think this danger should be moderated by limiting proportional representation to the House; with the President (indirectly) elected by all the people and the Senators still elected from specific states there should be an adequate safeguard against excesses.
The other problem is that the necessary Constitutional amendment would never be proposed in the Congress or rise up from the state governments. The two major parties would never want third parties to have that little opening that might put them in a position to challenge their dominance.
[modifier: I now would advocate allowing two votes for the parties; one could vote for two parties or cast both votes for one party.]
The RPG connection here is that I gave the expanded Commonwealth of Massachusetts a proportional representation type House in my "Shifted Lands" setting; background stuff.
This is inspired by Elizabeth McCoy's suggestion that government is too big. I have a standard challenge for that: What service that benefits you would you have cut or reduced?
You see, it's easy to point to a program that helps somebody else and say "That's Government Waste! Cut that!". And if it happens to benefit a group that generally doesn't vote, like the poor or resident aliens, the nice people in Congress are likely to do it happily. This isn't wise government, or fair government (and I'm inclined to whack anybody who argues "well, life isn't fair"; that's a garbage argument and I'm sick of it); it's passing the hurt to somebody else other than oneself.
This is not to say that there isn't government waste, although one should keep in mind that during the Clinton administration we now have the lowest deficits (both in cash terms and as a percentage of GNP) since 1980 or so and we have the fewest government employees since the late 1960's; something that Republicans naturally don't note much. I'm suggesting that this is less a problem of the size of government than the efficiency and wisdom of government, and that if we're going to talk about more cuts we should be willing to partake in the pain. I also strongly suspect that people do not realize that they are benefiting from various government programs and services and would be mightily upset if they were cut.
So, here's the challenge: What program that benefits you would cut? This is open to folks from outside the US too. Put responses in your zines, or send them to me at klyfix@aol.com; I'll make a stab at including them in a future zine.
My response to the challenge is cheap, I'll admit. I'm willing to pay a bit more in taxes rather than have stuff cut. I'm willing to pay $1 for a subway/trolley ride than $.85. I'd be willing to pay a fair bit more in taxes for universal single payer health care.
The RPG connection? Well, as a player whose character has arisen to a point where he rules a territory (a knight with serfs, or higher) what do you do when the money's short? How much pain can your subjects take. As a GM, try government cutbacks that promote rebellions that the PCs can participate in or suppress, or that effect the PCs.
[Of course now we have a supposedly balanced budget; if we separated Social Security from it I'm not sure that it would be. And of course the politicians on both sides (but particularly the GOP from what I've seen) see the "surplus" and want to spend it rather than use it to actually reduce the accumulated multi-trillion dollar debt that is the lasting heritage of the Reagan years. Go figure.]
FUDGE is a somewhat basic but very flexible system that can be made to fit whatever sort of game a GM wants to run. Actually, there's so many options that I had a rather hard time coming up with a coherent review. I'll instead give some impressions.
FUDGE measures "trait levels" (any described aspect of the character) with words as opposed to numbers; Terrible to Superb are suggested, but the exact terms can be varied to suit the setting. It is also possible to have skills that go off the scale; Heroic or Superheroic levels. The levels are relative to species/group types, so a superbly strong rabbit isn't stronger than a greatly strong elephant (a good idea). These can have number equivalents from -4 to +4 which work well with the suggested FUDGE dice that have -1, 0, and +1 on the faces; you can make them from d6s or you can purchase FUDGE dice from Grey Ghost Games. You use 4dF (F=FUDGE dice), or you can use 4d6, 3d6, or even percentile dice; this is an example of it's flexibility, perhaps to an extreme, as you can do pretty much whatever you want. Success depends on the difficulty level vs. a trait or a trait plus a die roll; the author suggests keeping die rolls to a minimum, which is not a bad idea.
Skills can be defined to be as precise as the GM sees fit; for example from a broad physician skill to every aspect of medicine. A positive thing, although not unique. There's also a section of optional rules for magic and psionics and such, although you can just use whatever system you like.
Character generation can be done with random stat generation, a point system, or by just having the player write up a description using Trait Levels and submitting it for GM approval. Examples and tips are given.
I rather like the idea of describing skill and attribute levels with descriptive words; it helps when trying to speak and think "in character" if you're not describing yourself as having a 75% sword skill but instead say that you're a great swordsman. Also, there's an optional diceless rule set (written by Relman Behrends) which in my opinion would work better than the one presented in the Amber RPG.
I will note that FUDGE is not the ideal system if you want in depth descriptions of skills, combat, weapons, and so on. That's largely left up to the GM and I think a FUDGE GM would need to print up a world/setting guide for their players. Many of us already do that sometimes. One of the unique things about FUDGE is that you can modify it t suit your campaign and setting and print it out the whole rules set and give it to your players as long as you include their standard disclaimer; you can even sell it (!) as long as you first get a royalty-free license from author O'Sullivan.
In my opinion pretty much everything you can do with FUDGE can be done with a little work in pretty much any skill based game. FUDGE requires a fair amount of GM work to use, but perhaps no more than any game where you're not using The Official Game World and the Official Modules. There's conversion tables so you can make characters from other systems fit FUDGE and conceivably you could run a campaign with characters from several different game world which strangely appeals to me. And it is possible to get it free over the Internet from a few sites; free is an appealing price. :) If nothing else, you can always pick it up for ideas, particularly on alternate forms of character description.
Grey Ghost Games also distributes a FUDGE based game called Gatecrashers (author Michael Lucas, $18.95) that features a future setting with magic and technology. It's pretty wild; magic and technology usability varys depending on the planet or moon you happen to be on; places strong in magic resist technology and vice versa. Fantasy creatures now exist, and many can be used as player characters. One can also play a cyborg or robot. For all that it's based on FUDGE, it's sort of at the opposite level of details; there's information on about everything including a magic system, psionics, tech, weapons, and all that. Actually, it's pretty good overall; if nothing else one can get ideas for a magic and tech world that's not Shadowrun. :)
$8.95 for a starter deck, $2.95 for a booster
I will make a prediction: Twenty years from now, Mythos cards will still be collectable; almost no other CCG cards will the least bit of value. This is because the work of H. P. Lovecraft and his "Disciples" will endure and Mythos portrays it well even if only for the art. And the art is good; while some of it is straight from S. Petersens's Guide to the Dreamlands some is original and pretty much all of it is good.
Mythos is a bit like playing "Theme Decks" in M:tG but with the victory earned by fulfilling the theme rather than by crushing your opponents under your iron-shod heels. You have Adventure Cards that require having played certain cards to gain the points and of course gain Sanity. As in Call of Cthulhu one must struggle to keep one's Sanity as the game progresses, but any decent Mythos deck will have a hoard of sanitariums, churches, temples, and mosques to help your troubled mind.
The Dreamlands allows for adventures in, well, The Dreamlands of such stories as The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. It's a different sort of world from the waking world of other Mythos cards, perhaps less horrific. The adventures are pretty neat; my favorite is "The Meow Compact" which mostly involves the events in "The Cats of Ulther". There's also some cards and adventures for Innsmouth, and it's possible by using certain places and artifacts to move between worlds. Some things can be found in either world, and certain tomes and artifacts allow the use of Dreamlands things in the waking world. Some Dreamlands cards are variations on waking world cards; for instance Shantanks can be used to fly without using a control spell and HPL can give you a sanity point and allows you to draw an extra card if he's your ally.
The Dreamlands seems short of weapons cards; actually I've not seen a Dreamlands weapons card. There's also a shortage of transportation cards but some are really cool; the Sky Galleon allows you to travel by sea or air (including space), and the Yak which allows you to lose phobia for no reason that I'm familiar with. :) Also, you get new Investigator Cards which show both the waking and Dreamlands personaes; they're pretty entertaining, actually.
Overall, it's a decent game, but to make a workable deck you'll probably need some cards from the regular set. Oh, and if somebody has a "Cats of Ulthar" card or two I'd like to trade for them.