Wordpress Update

 It's been the first full month of Wordpress. If you haven't transitioned, here's what you might have missed!

• A Backer-Only Post on my Pitfighting Document (Streetfighting as Power-Ups)
• Scope Creep and the Peril of Sandboxes, wherein I explore how my tendency to plan for more than the players can do tends to result in bogged down games as players insist on exploring every inch that they can, and thus the importance of setting firm boundaries.
• Books and Libraries in Ultra-Tech: Wherein I discover a data-storage table and GURPS Basic, and then explore the implications of it for having an entire city library in your ultratech pocket computer.
• How Mailanka Plans a Session: Based on a request for the GURPS blogging community to talk about how they plan sessions, I outline how I tend to approach my personal session planning.
• Going Back to English Class: Someone commented with surprise that I referenced the power of English class in session planning, and this resulted in this post, which explores what benefits being a student of literature can offer you in session planning, and what things you might be better off unlearning.
• Behold the Power of the Tyranny! A long-awaited backer-only post, this discusses four ancient ships of the bygone Ranathim Tyranny.

That covers everything I posted in April.  If you haven't updated your bookmarks or subscriptions to the new blog, remember to do so!

Migration and Mothballing

 

Mailanka's Musings is moving! I've already migrated my blog posts over to the new location at wordpress:

• mailanka.wordpress.com
  

I've wanted to get away from Google for awhile, and this was my last tie. However, because the new blog doesn't have quite the same functionality as the old one, I'll leave this one up for awhile for archival purposes. Once I figure out how to more easily search and reference things in the new location, this location will close.  I'll try to run links between blogs for awhile for those who are late to the party, but after this month, there will be no more posts to this blog.

Why is Psi-Wars Armor So Heavy?

 

Mavrick pointed out on the Discord that Psi-Wars armor seems a bit heavy for its description, and asked why this was.

Generally speaking, Psi-Wars matches Ultra-Tech pretty closely, assuming a Battleweave armor is roughly on par with Energy Cloth with 2/3 the DR for the weight. An Energy Cloth suit is 8 lbs, and a Battleweave bodysuit is 8 lbs. There's a bit of a discrepency in that the Energy Cloth suit covers "all" while the Battleweave body suit covers "body and limbs" and so is slightly heavier, but this is because the values in Ultra-Tech are a little generous when you work out their actual values in the armor design system (they're likely Optimized despite their descriptions depicting them as Fabric), which is what I eventually did. So that's the short answer: based on Ultra-Tech, the values are close enough to correct to not worry about the discrepancy.

Sci-fi "Armor"

But in the conversation, he raised a more interesting point: what does this have to do with clothing? I tend to picture battleweave bodysuits as skin-tight garments that super-heroes or super-spies often wear, that's inexplicably tough because it's the future! This hearkens to works like John Wick, where he can wear what looks like a perfectly ordinary suit yet is magically armored "because technology." This allows the character to blend fashion with protection, which is a hallmark for Psi-Wars, especially maradonian characters.

(As an aside, I worry about this sometimes. There are a few elements in Psi-Wars, such as how Extra-Effort works with psi abilities, and the fact that anyone can have DR "for free" but only if you know about it. They represent little complexities that make sense, but are easy for a newbie to miss, and I hate creating "newb traps" in design. But on the other hand, I imagine most people will imagine their sci-fi character, at least those outside of the planetary romance realms of the Umbral Rim and the Sylvan Spiral, as wearing a full covering, and might be pleased to learn that this provides DR).

Psi-Wars Wiki Highlight: February Progress Report

 As usual, I've neglected the blog in favor of the wiki and the discord, as I tend to get a lot of immediate feedback on the discord (plus I'm winding this blog down as I prep to move it to Wordpress, which looks to be stable so far, so I may take the plunge sooner than later).  So the lack of content here doesn't mean I've stopped producing material.  So, let's get into it.

The March of the Slaver Empire

One of the most important, and popular, Psi-Wars races are the Ranathim, and one central conceit is their dead empire. They once ruled a dark part of the Galaxy known as the Umbral Rim, but today, they have been enslaved by another. That's the premise of the Ranathim.

So what is this other race, and what empire do they run? I had tagged them as "Slavers" in my drafts, and the name has stuck around, but I often refer to them as the Temkorathim. They obviously had to rule the Umbral Rim now, right? What were they like? Probably not a major threat, but morally repugnant enough that you'd want to kick them around, even if you never got around to it, but dangerous enough that player characters would find them interesting to adventure in while rescuing Ranathim damsels from a fate worse than death and battling in the gladiatorial arenas of the Slavers. I suspected they would look something like the cinematic depiction of the third-world dictatorship/kleptocracy, like Doctor Doom's Latveria, or Vilena of the Expendables, though probably with even more inferior technology (though not so inferior that characters could steamroll through opposition).

So, in continuing the slow rollout of the Umbral Rim, I released the Oligarchy of Vech, and a Backer-Exclusive supplement that rounded out four of the Council of Seven, including their minions. These were generally well received (though not without some light edit notes). These are follow-ups to last month's Slaver Cartels and the associated backer release. Between them, you should be able to work out quite a lot of Umbral politics, at least between Slavers.

It's not enough to know what they are, but we need to know how they fight, and this section of space is unique enough that we expect a very different technological infrastructure, so I worked on that too!

This month I released Lithian Tech, with is a rolling, unfinished release. This includes weapons, armor and vehicles available in the Umbral Rim, including materiel from Redjack, Orion Arms (which has been around, but is greatly expanded now), and the new Rath Industries, unique to the Oligarchy of Vech. These aren't finished: I need to release the capital ships and ground vehicles from the Umbral Rim, but a highlight of the new vehicles available now are:

• The Flanker-Class Fighter (Orion)
• The High-Roller-Class Battle Yacht (Orion)
• The Pirhana-Class Fighter (Rath)
• The Hammerhead-Class Strike Craft (Rath)
• The Skirmisher-Class Torpedo Corvette (Rath)
• The Toad-Class Heavy Corvette (Rath; really a destroyer)
• The Kodiak-Class Light Cruiser (Redjack; not new to you, but new to the Wiki)

I still need to release ground vehicles, the Mauler, the Spire and the Fugitive, and there's some drafts floating around. I should get to them soon.

Drugs are Bad, Mmmkay?

The Umbral Rim is filled with vice, and drugs are certainly one of them. The Slavers excel at the creation of drugs to addict their victims, and they equip their soldiers with addictive, performance-enhancing drugs. This was an important part of the the Lithian tech release, and something that required some careful balance for future releases (especially since once you have performance enhancing drugs, someone is going to want to use it, and we'll need alchemy/potions at some point for our Inevitable Space Witches).

This also required expanding the Krokuta, who have a special relationship with these drugs. I have all of their unique power sets except Amberdine, which is still in a draft state.

In Memory of the Phoenix Cluster

The backer-led project of the Phoenix Cluster carries on.  The Umbral Rim dominates my attention at the moment, but I did release the last poll result regarding the first Westerly Clan of Phoenix Cluster. The trick here is that I need to write them up, and the other clans, and I'm trying to balance that with this rollout of the Umbral Rim.

Game-On

Both playtests move forward. I did not run Undercity Noir in February, as I was quite ill, but we look good for March.  The other playtest set in the Umbral Rim collapsed under the weight of conflicting schedules, so I recruited a raft of new players for the one player would could consistently make it, and rebooted the campaign.  The Wastes of Dhim now has:

• Raitha Temos, Mithanna Satemo (Ranathim Space Knight), 
• Null Entry, lost Syntech medical robot
• Rena, formerly enslaved Keleni psion afflicted with a dangerous split personality
• Milathum the Devourer, Saruthim Bounty Hunter

 They played through a much more detailed retreat of the first session with quite some success, though naturally some of them required some additional work.

Marching On

For the next month, I'll carry on releasing material. There's obvious things that simply need to make it onto the wiki, such as Krokuta power-ups associated with Amberdine and the remaining Rathian ships. I've been expanding the cultural details of the Umbral Rim and I can edit my material on gladiatorial fights. I also need to clean up what I have on Lithian technology.

I've got some work on Tyrannic space craft which would be nice to get out as a backer release, but it's very much in a draft state (as it involves a lot of new technological design and a rather unique sort of write-up).

I'd also like to do a poll on one new Slaver Cartel for the backers to explore, so you can get a sense of how to build your own.

And finally, I need to write up the five Westerly clans of the Phoenix Cluster, which also involves settling on how I want to write them out.

All of this is tentative, of course, and depends on how much time I have, but we'll see how far we get.

Mook Passed Away

If you're on the forums or on the GURPS Discord, you've likely already heard that the author of How to GM GURPS, the creator of the GURPS Discord server and fellow Blogger William "Mook" Wilson passed away suddenly. If you want to help with funerary and medical expenses, there is a fundraiser here.

Organizing the Psi-Wars Organizations

 So, I paused my grand Umbral Rim rollout to write up some basic corporations, because I've noticed people sometimes ask questions about them and I have those answers and it would be nice if they were on the wiki.  Also notice that despite my best efforts to keep Psi-Wars from devolving into Cyberpunk, it's definitely taking on some elements of that, and that means giant megacorps.  I suspect this is because I "let GURPS be GURPS" and Ultra-Tech + Action skews heavily towards Cyberpunk, and even Star Wars does, once you ditch the movies and go to the EU (which even introduced hackers slicers).

Then I found myself staring at the Patron cost for a Corporation and the rank levels.  And this has been bugging me for awhile.  Way, way back in the day, I argued that Psi-Wars should aim at the 15-point Patron and the 8 Rank structure.  Why? Because this is how Action worked: the Pulling Rank request numbers line up at the 15 point patron level, and GURPS typically settles on an 8 Rank structure by default.  But does this actually make sense?

One of the things I learned from discussing Psi-Wars melee with my community is they tend to like Psi-Wars as full on GURPS Ultra-Tech space opera, where all the numbers are big. People don't wield swords because of a handwave about how it looks on screen, but because they have some sort of crazy, over the top technology that will absolutely destroy you from up close.  They want the aesthetic of space opera, but they want some sort of excuse for it so it has the veneer of plausibility, preferrably in a way that sounds comic-book-awesome.

So ages ago, I whipped up a Patreon special on the scale of the Empire where I muddled through how large the Empire would be. I tend to downplay things from literally millions of stars with trillions of people per star to "just" thousands of stars with millions of people, but you still end up with crazy numbers like multiple fleets of 5-25 multi-billion dollar dreadnoughts, and when I say that, the response is not "Wow, that's unwieldy" but "COOL!"

The question then becomes can Psi-Wars handle more extensive organizations, and should it handle more extensive organizations?

Ugh; Social Traits are the worst when it comes to world building!

The Million Year Man

You arrive, as planned, to the base of Mount Everest with your friend.  After a brief interaction with the locals and settling your mountaineering plans, the two of you begin your long trek higher up the mountain. Higher and higher you climb into the chilly heights with your friend until the wind picks up and threatens a dangerous storm.  Night falls, but mist and swirling snow hide the stars.  Between the failing light and the rising winds, the two of you seek shelter in a cavern.  After stepping within, you notice that it goes far into the mountain, and a strange light beckons from within.  The two of you explore, and find strange artifacts of seeming alien origin.  You stand on a curious platform to play with a control panel and your friend suddenly calls out when a light flashes and then...

A million years pass. You are, of course, trapped in a Stasis Field, but you don't know it. To you, an eyeblink has passed.  What happened in that million years?

Because ten billions years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness. -- Now and Then, Here and There

Scale fascinates me, mostly in how little I understand it, whether it be size, distance or time. I watched a rather depressing anime quoted above and noted the desire to explore such remote deep time, and I understand it: the creator wanted to explore the expansion of the sun and its desolate imagery on the world. Of course, such an expanse of time has some issues, namely life will likely cease on this planet within a billion years. Numenara does it too, putting the setting many billions of years in the future with a handwave about something extending the life of the sun (plausible!). But I wanted to narrow my scope down from such a gargantuan number, and I had already explored millennia. I wanted to explore what a million years looked like. I figured that was more than enough deep time to explore some interesting concepts. 

I've explored specific concepts of deep time, such as some exploration of geology or evolution, but I wanted to bundle it together to get a sense of what that world would look like, what the totality of the change would be. Now, I'm not an expert, and this post is the result of the most superficial exploration: I ask myself a question and then try to answer it. So don't expect high level analysis of geology of biology. Most of this is just a quick read of Wikipedia and some basic internet searches.

So, what happens in a million years?

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Carnivorous Plant

The carnivorous plant litters the bestiaries of fantasy and space opera gaming, likely due to its association with early 20^th century adventure fiction, from which nearly all RPGs eventually draw their core inspiration from. The carnivorous plant typically shows up in jungles, where it signals that the jungle is so hostile and so predatory, that even the plants try to eat you. They also signal a truly alien landscape, because while carnivorous plants exist, they absolutely do not do so on a scale that could threaten a jungle hero.

Functionally, they typically behave like traps rather than monsters, though some will simply act like immobile monsters that lash out and grab people and try to drag them to its sap-dripping maw. Of course, some just haul themselves out of the ground and go rampaging after their prey, but that’s not what interests in this particular post, because what I’m looking for, a the end of the day, is a sessile predator, because, in part, I want to explore the idea of space monster as trap.

How realistic is a sessile predator? Well, of course, carnivorous plants exist, but they tend to rely on natural geometry and stickiness to trap something no more intelligent than a mayfly and slowly dissolve it. Heroes tend not to be that stupid, and so we need things like grabby tentacles and chomping mouths to actually make this work. Do those exist in biology? Sure! There are, for example, carnivorous sponges, but the best example are probably sea anemones. So all we need to do is extrapolate some sort of larger version of these. This means that what I’m talking about probably isn’t a “plant” at all, but “Land Anemone” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Wiki Highlight: Slaver Cartels

 I've been hard at work on the Umbral Rim and the organizations, technology and monsters native there. I've finally worked out detail on the Slaver Empire and the sort of organizations the Slavers, aka the Temkorathim, naturally form, which I call "Slaver Cartels."  I've described them in detail on the wiki.

For Backers, I've offered up additional details for four sample Cartels, the ones described in the wiki entry itself.  I may eventually release these to the wiki as well, but I feel like the wiki has enough of an information overload and I'm not sure how necessary this level of detail is. But in any case, as a thank you to all $3+ Backers (Fellow Travelers) I have uploaded the Book of Hunger

• The Book of Hunger -- Subscribestar
• The Book of Hunger -- Patreon
  

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Parasite

 

Generic Space Parasite

I’ve done most of this series based on real world creatures and while this one is no exception, this was more driven by my curiosity for the sorts of creatures I don’t often explore or often see explored. Bestiaries brim with the equivalent of lions, tigers and bears, but mosquitos, blow flies and leeches are pretty rare, and Space contains some modifiers and options for parasites. So what does a “generic” GURPS Space Parasite look like?

As has been the case in many of these posts, I’ve learned that Space doesn’t actually support me all that much, offering just a few paragraphs and a scattered handful of modifiers, so we’re left largely in the dark. So I had to my own research on some elements and narrow down exactly what I wanted and what I meant. And what I want, of course, is gameable, a “monster” that players can fight back against with more than “Roll HT to not get worms.”

And in this research and exploration, what I discovered is… there’s no other word for it, I suppose, but “horrifying.” I won’t share some of the stuff I found, or some of the images I found, other than to say that some people should consider seeking counciling… or an exorcist. I also won’t share some of the images I found. There will be no images in this post. What didn’t really occur to me while I conceived of this post is that parasites are essentially the core of all body horror. Parasites are the thing of nightmares.

This post is not for the squeamish. Turn back now if you’re bothered by anything remotely related to body horror. I’m not going out of my way to make this topic horrific, it is just, by its nature, a horrific topic.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Space Dragon

 

So, we have our space megapredators, but they don’t seem exactly like dragons, do they? They’re massive and they’re terrifying, but are they dragons? We could be more explicit with our dragons, couldn’t we? We could take actual dragon stats and apply them to space, right?

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Mega Predator

 

 We like big space monsters, and we cannot lie. The Tyrannosaurus Rex fills the minds of children with a terrified glee because monsters are real, and we never really lose that. I suspect few Psi-Wars players wouldn’t love to trigger their force sword and charge at the largest (reasonable) space monster possible. What is a space knight without a space dragon?

Of course, then we run into some problems with our space dragons because they’re not especially likely. While the Tyrannosaurus Rex is a real, genuine creature that roamed the Earth, there wasn’t really a creature much like it before the era of the dinosaurs, nor one like it since, though some of the ice age megafauna get close. Indeed, most giant animals are herbivores rather than carnivores. Furthermore, a giant predator doesn’t necessarily have the physical might to bash through the sort of extreme, collapsitronium hyperarmor that most ultra-tech characters wear, nor the sort of armor necessary to stand up to their smart-tracking assault death beams.

So while the results of this will likely disappoint excited space knights in diamondoid armor hoping for a good fight, pondering what a giant predator might look like acts as a starting point for some genuine space monsters. After all, we can take such a monster and make it a psychic mega predator, or a cybernetic mega predator, or a mutant mega predator.

Five Years of Psi-Wars

 It's a new year, so time for a new retrospective!

Oh, and yes, I did get my Wordpress Blog unsuspended.  I'm debating whether it's worth leaving it there.  On the one hand, it's all already there.  On the other hand, eventually I'd want to pay for that.  And do I want to pay for it given the hiccups I've already seen? I'll keep my eye on it. As a friend suggested: given the various stresses in my life, it might be better to worry about what relaxes me (writing posts) and maintain my energy for what needs my attention most (my family, my work) and once that eases up, then I can focus on the proper migration. 

Migration Woes: Mailanka's Musing is Suspended

 My apologies for being behind on my "the State of Psi-Wars" post, and pretty much everything else, as "vacation" has been rather intense this year.  But I tried to use the time to finally migrate the blog away from blogger.  After looking at a bunch of complex solutions, I decided to keep it simple and try Wordpress.com.  I would do a simple import of my blog posts on a free version, see how it felt, and then if I liked it,  upgrade.  I had it imported, it looked okay, and it just lacked some functionality.  Given that I'm pretty sure I'd be crucified for not having the index up properly,  I wanted to find a way to implement a sidebar similar to the one Mailanka's Musing already has. I couldn't get that to work, so I parked it and went to bed.

When I woke up, my new blog was suspended.  Why? For violating terms and services.  Which one? Well, I could message them if I felt this was in error.  I scrutinized the terms and services and found nothing that I could think of as a violation (this is hardly a porn or gambling blog), but why should I guess at why they banned me?  Shouldn't they tell me? If blogger didn't ban me, why did they? So I sent them not one, but two messages. Nothing back.

And to think they want $50 a year for the privilege of throwing me off their platform with no explanation.  This is why I didn't pay upfront.  I wasn't even on there for two days, and literally the only content there was the content you see here on this blog.

I cannot recommend Wordpress.com.  We'll see if they reply.  Perhaps it's "just a mistake" but I don't think I'll be using their services.

After stressing out about it to a friend, he suggested I park the migration.  Any existential threat posed by Blogger itself for an arbitrary ban like this (which, to be sure, is keeping me up at night now, because if Wordpress.com somehow found something objectionable, is there something Blogger would find objectionable?) is mitigated by the fact that I've backed up the blog several times, and most of the posts still exist as raw files on my computer (not all of them, but I could completely recreate, for example, the wiki if I had to).  He pointed out that with all the other stresses in my life at the moment, if blogging relaxes me, to just focus on that, and worry about the migration when I'm more relaxed and have more room to maneuver.

So I'll park it for now, unless Wordpress.com returns with a sufficiently humble apology, though I'm not holding my breath on that (my experience watching the tech world is that sites like these just let the algorithm rampage across their platform, and if hundreds of innocent users get caught in the crossfire, well, they have tens of thousands, so they don't care). Even if they get one, I expect I won't use a service this shoddy and this prone to failure and miscommunication. So I wouldn't expect to see a migration soon. My eventual solution will likely involve either self-hosting, or hosting on a remote server with a self-configured version of wordpress; the latter is less vulnerable to banning because the configuration will just exist and I can just find a different host if there's yet another rogue algorithm.

Still, I needed to vent my frustration. Happy New Year!