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!