Cavalorn

Palestinians dress up as Avatar aliens Na'Vi to protest West Bank occupation

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:26:56 GMT

The most WTFish thing I have seen this month.

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:39:53 GMT

Battlestar Galactica MMO coming.

Well, people do keep saying they want more SF and not so much 'high fantasy'.

Meanwhile, we finally get to find out what Shepherd Book's deal really was.

fun stuff to do for free

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:27:20 GMT

Robot Unicorn Attack.

Because galloping through the sky on a rainbow-trailing unicorn while Erasure sing in the background is every bit as awesome as it sounds.

And there we go.

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:16:31 GMT

http://aperturescience.com/

See also http://store.steampowered.com/news/3559/

squee

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:03:55 GMT

Interior transmission active
External data line active
Message digest active
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
System data dump active
User back up active
Password back up active
Beep beep beep beep lol

London's oldest esoteric bookshop goes into administration

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:55:54 GMT

Watkins clobbered by Capital Gains Tax bill of half a million pounds, on top of slow trade.

Glove

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:47:13 GMT

This is Steven 'Glove' Glover, back in the days when I knew him. I didn't know him for all that long - only three or four years, all told. But I owe him one fuck of a lot.

There are some rites of passage that are too small and subtle to be considered rites at all, but without them you wouldn't have had the experiences you've had. For example, shortly after I met Glove I was listening to something amazingly jangly and resonant at his flat, and asked him what it was. It was the Velvet Underground. I went on to ask if he had any Men Without Hats, which at that time was a bit like being offered your first proper hardcore porn magazine and asking if your host has any Star Wars Weekly.

There were other formative moments, such as this:

'You're wearing all that fantastic gear and you've got trainers on your feet? Get yourself some Chelsea boots, mate.'

and this:

'Are you high? I've got an album cover to show you. It's called Headache.'

I just found out that Glove died last year. They held his funeral on New Year's Day. And I hadn't really thought about him for years; and now I wish I had.

oh yes

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:41:45 GMT

I do rather fancy the Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, Queen of Hearts, 10 year Anniversary, Your Death Has Torn Our Lives Apart, Fairwell Dear Princess Queen Of Hearts, Forever In Our Thoughts, Memorial Afternoon Tea.

Good old Chesterton

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:05:04 GMT

TO A FAT LADY SEEN FROM THE TRAIN

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?

Frances Cornford. 1886-1960

THE FAT WHITE WOMAN SPEAKS

Why do you rush through the field in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves as such?
And how the devil can you be sure,
Guessing so much and so much,
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

G. K. Chesterton. 1874 - 1936

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:17:21 GMT

U 8 L D π?

diddly dum

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:42:09 GMT

oh no. oh god no.

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:08:56 GMT

Civilization 5 is coming.

I haven't even beaten Civ 4 on Monarch yet!

in me shed

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:37:44 GMT

bit late for christmas but who cares

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:47:16 GMT

My brother's band The Stabilisers have put more stuff up for listening, including their cover version of Stop the Cavalry.

Tumalumalum tum, tumalumalum...

'Playing D&D with Porn Stars'

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:09:30 GMT

It is a blog that is getting quite famus on the intertron. Here it is. It is not quite SFW of course.

This has given me the idea for a new blog - it is genius I tell you, genius![1]

'Making Porn with D&D Players'.

[1]Caution: actual level of genius may vary from that advertised

AUGH!

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:28:20 GMT

Want to buy the Torchwood SUV? Or David Tennant's blue shirt? How about Kylie's waitress outfit from Voyage of the Damned?

I'll just be over here thinking of Freema's leather jackets. And Billie's cosy jim-jams. ohchrist.

A devil put aside for me: deriving content from unlikely sources

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:46:08 GMT

There are plenty of books which purport to extrapolate generic, universal Plots from the great sea of stories in the world, and in so doing identify key stages in particular types of story. You'll know the kind of thing, I expect; the approach also shows up a lot in books about how to write fiction.

The idea that there really is some sort of fundamental and instinctive Basic Story with which other stories (albeit unconsciously) comply is a comforting one, if only because it suggests that all we need to do to write a good story is to take that skeleton and clothe it with words of our own. We can come up with our compelling protagonist, give him an obstacle to overcome, break the whole thing down into a three-act framework, determine the antagonist and the antagonist's helpers, and so on. In theory, that ought to come up with a winner every time, so long as we introduce some elements that aren't too predictable.

Given the limited and recognisable array of roleplaying situations that we have to work with, something similar could be expected in that area; first choose your story type, then encrust it with detail. In practice, at least where writing engaging scenarios is concerned, I find it doesn't often work like that. I find that if I consciously set out to create (for example) a Rescue the Prisoner type of scenario, what emerges will be flat and one-dimensional. The very obviousness of the premise renders it just another one of those sorts of scenario, regardless of the incidental details with which one may have dressed it up.

That's not really the GM's fault, by the way. The player's gaze is often reductive. If the players are to achieve their objectives, it makes sense for them to boil things down to simple terms and come up with solutions. This has been the case ever since the earliest reports filtered through of players who just wanted to 'kick the door in, kill the monster and take the stuff'.

Boiling the meat of a thousand stories down to the bare bones of archetypal plot does not mean the bones can be reassembled and made to live. Besides, real life isn't like that. I'm not saying that roleplaying scenarios ought to aspire to realism in the sense of there being no such thing as dragons, but pushing for scenarios that have multiple layers to them, and a messy, lived-in, plausible feel.

Why on earth would we want a scenario to be 'messy'? Because we don't want our players exploring a world that feels neat, constructed and polished. That just turns our scenario into a series of initiative tests, problem solving exercises and glorified boardgames in a narrative vacuum. No - we want them exploring a world of undisclosed potential that feels like various forces have attempted to impose structure upon it in various ways. Players should feel they are engaging with a situation, not a scenario.

One of the ways to do that is to grab a chunk of information that already exists, force it into the role of a story and extrapolate the various dynamics that could be involved in it, rather than taking one core dynamic and trying to flesh it out. The starting 'conceptual map', as I've pretentiously decided to call it, doesn't have to have anything to do with roleplaying or even with stories. By taking a rough sample of something from the real world that has its own 'texture' and building upon it, we can bring its lifegiving irregularity into our game world.

Think of it as if we were architects building upon a pre-existent natural landscape, rather than a geometrically flat plain. Imagine finding a tree stump that's washed up on the beach and turning it into a city for tiny people by adding cable cars, windows, streets and houses. Some holes will be shelters, some roots will be towers. We take that raw stuff and use it as the catalyst for an imaginary structure. (Do please go and look at http://www.amanita-design.net/samorost-1/ if you haven't already.)

This will make a lot more sense if I give you an example. Let's start with something we'll all almost certainly be familiar with: Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Although it's familiar to the point of cliche and SEEMS to tell some sort of a story, we'd be hard pressed to explain what that story actually is, allusions to Camus aside. (Yes, I know Ben Elton supposedly turned a whole load of Queen songs into a 'story' with We Will Rock You, but frankly the result was a bag of cold wank unworthy of an 8 year old. I mean, Galileo Figaro and his girlfriend Scaramouche?)

It's my belief that with persistence, thoroughness and imagination you can turn something like a Queen lyric into the basis for a roleplaying scenario, and in so doing get better results than you would if you'd just tried to graft details on to one of the standard adventure plots. Let me show you what I mean.

What the hell seems to be going on in Bohemian Rhapsody? Let's ignore the obvious band-playing-music bits and look at the more stylised parts of the video, along with the lyrics. From that we can get a bullet point list of elements and themes, along with a third highly subjective category of 'associations' which we can then (with luck) string together into a story.

Elements – what we actually see & hear
Flames. Lots of flames. An ambience of strong light and darkness.
Four humanoid shadows, which become disembodied heads lit from beneath, arrayed in a diamond pattern. Strangely static, as if they were official figures making some sort of a proclamation.
A gaunt, cheekboney bloke in the spotlight – identified as a poor unloved boy who nonetheless rejects pity.
Hands held crossed over the breast, like corpses in coffins (the position the Golden Dawn called 'the sign of Osiris Risen).
Silhouettes, making human figures seem theatrical and monstrous.
A chorus of voices that seem other than human.
A fly's eye view of the four faces, breaking them into even more images.
A bare-chested sweaty man banging a gong.

Themes – what seems to be going on
The murder of another man.
Ongoing petition to a 'mother' figure.
Uncertainty about whether what is happening is real or imaginary.
Indifference – dissipation - loss of a sense of moral import. Easy come easy go. Nothing really matters
An approaching deadline or critical moment, heralded by physical collapse – 'my time has come' – 'I've got to go'. Perhaps the narrator's own imminent death, or perhaps something worse?
A horrible fate that the narrator begs to be released from, possibly identical to the above. Spare him his life from this monstrosity.
Petitions back and forth, arguing that the narrator should or should not be spared.

Associations – what the sounds & visuals make me think of
The setting seems to be Italy: not sure why, but the cries of 'mama mia' and reference to 'Galileo' suggest it. That immediately conjures up an atmosphere of Commedia dell'arte, giving a context for 'Scaramouche'.

'I see a little silhouetto of a man' is strongly reminiscent of 'Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman'. It's the ogrish declaration that a puny little human being is somewhere nearby. The speaker is thus something much more powerful than a human being, and not benevolent towards 'the little man'.

The atmosphere of the middle section, what Freddie Mercury used to call 'the operatic bit', is that of a trial. One set of powers is arguing that the petitioner be released, the other for condemning him to his fate. The outcome seems to be against the petitioner.

The four faces surrounded by flame seem to evoke a macabre, Grand Guignol sense of the Satanic. In fact, the dread of the narrator regarding the approaching deadline plus the looming Satanic figures looking down on him as a little manikin whose fate they hold in their hand is, in a word, Faustian. This would illuminate the nature of the narrator's fate: the powers of Hell are coming for him, to collect on their contract. The finishing scream of 'Baalzebul has a devil put aside for me' is parallel to Marlowe's 'Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer, I'll burn my books, ah Mephistopheles!'

Spare him his life from this monstrosity, indeed. According to one particular grimoire, the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, there are 'four great Princes of Evil' overseeing the powers of Hell, being Lucifer, Leviathan, Satan and Belial. One could perhaps spend an enjoyable rainy afternoon assigning these identities to the various members of Queen, but that's a matter beyond this elementary treatise. (Though Pope Gregory IX did once describe Lucifer as 'a pale, black-eyed youth with a melancholy aspect', which instantly casts one of the four.)

Playing with ideas
What if we identify the story's central character as a dissipated young man who has somehow been drawn into a Satanic covenant? His only remaining protector is his mother, who is also presumably the contact point for the player characters.

We know that the narrator has just killed a man (and admits it) so that could be a possible starting point. Not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit – the young man is in prison, having been caught red-handed at a murder scene. His mother is convinced there is more to this story than the authorities think, and begs the players to investigate.

The players find him strangely indifferent to his apparent fate. In private torment, he awaits the moment when the infernal powers will claim him. Ultimately, the players decide the fate of his soul by contesting with Lucifer himself.

This opens up the intriguing possibility of a scenario whose final confrontation is played out through courtroom debate rather than by conventional fighting. (This isn't new by any means: the videogame Wing Commander 4 has such an ending, as does the Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands scenario The Land of Lost Dreams.)

Conclusion – a rough draft
This is an investigative adventure set in post-Renaissance Italy, or a fantasy setting much like it. Young Fortunato is languishing in jail, following the bloody murder of the revered scholar Lucarelli. The city is abuzz with the story of how the dreamy-eyed youth offered no resistance as he was brought from the University towers and thrown into prison.

When asked why he would commit such a horrible deed, he reportedly shrugged and declared 'Did I kill a real man? What is flesh and blood, in this world of illusions? How are we to know what is real, and what fantasy? Nothing is truly important; this world means no more to me than the aimless wind.'

Fortunato's mother, who has become wealthy by unknown means in the last few years, begs the players to intervene on her son's behalf. Surely they can discover the reason for his horrible acts? She has gold, gold in abundance, if they wish a reward! (Fortunato's success in alchemy was one of the early fruits of his Satanic compact, and naturally he sent his newfound riches to his dear Mama.)

Through talking to Fortunato in his cell and investigating the circumstances of the murder, the players can begin to piece together the real story of what happened. Lucarelli was no mere scholar, but a student of the black arts. Fortunato was his favourite student at the University, and together they made progress in the study of magic of which Doctor Dee and Edward Kelly would have been envious. Eventually they were able to summon up a potentate of Hell, and pledge both their souls in return for worldly reward: Fortunato gained wealth, fame and a bevy of mistresses, whereas the drier Lucarelli acquired books he had only dreamed of, and gained insights into science and medicine that Leonardo da Vinci would have envied.

But Lucarelli came to dread the inevitable result of his researches, and to regret the bargain he had made. Young Fortunato had his life ahead of him, but Lucarelli was already old, and would soon be swallowed up by the fires of Hell. Perhaps there was some way to perpetuate his damned life, and cheat death for a few years more?

Consulting the blackest of their black tomes, Lucarelli and Fortunato decided on a plan. An ancient Roman ritual laid out the means whereby an aging sorcerer could transfer his soul into a young body. They kidnapped a ragged orphan from the streets, drugged him and prepared the rite. At the crucial moment, Fortunato would cut the throat of Lucarelli's old body and allow the soul to escape into the child's.

But Fortunato, who had immersed himself in a thousand perversions and lecherous defilements, chose that moment to develop a conscience. He botched the ritual on purpose, slaughtering Lucarelli on cue but allowing the terrified child to escape. Now, unable to confront reality and baffled as to his soul's true condition, he has retreated into a dreamlike state.

Hell may be unspeakably terrible, but it is still governed by laws. A passage in one of Lucarelli's books gives a clue to the scenario's possible resolution. By using the proper ritual at the proper time, one can demand a Court Infernal be called, in which matters of hell's law can be decided upon.

To uncover the full truth, the players must investigate the labyrinthine University (still haunted after dark by Lucarelli's membranous-winged demonic servitors), explore the criminal quarters where beggars and thieves live in search of the orphan child, interview Fortunato's drunken companions and courtesans, and ultimately summon up the infernal powers in order to debate whether he - a corrupt soul who has done a good deed, or seen in another light, prevented a fugitive from escaping Hell – should still be condemned to everlasting hellfire or not.

(If time and space permit, there is also a possible subplot involving one of Fortunato's lovers who he expected would stand by him, but who has betrayed him instead, condemning him to the authorities as an amoral wretch who deserves the full fury of the law. This woman, who has 'loved him and left him to die', will be the first to suffer if Fortunato somehow escapes his fate!)

The final climactic scene involves the whole prison (and its various occupants) being translated into a grotesque, puppet-theatre-like parody of itself; hellfires dance all around, the jailer is an ogre-like behemoth, the judge has a hideous distended beak-like head, the jury is a single eyeless multi-headed entity like a Jerusalem artichoke. Off to one side, the infernal prince Baalzebul - Lord of the Flies - is waiting, with a rancid-toothed female devil put aside to torment Fortunato through eternity.

Generic news report. Not entirely safe for work.

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:54:42 GMT

bean again

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:56:07 GMT

Sabrina goes ghostbusting in the Natural History Museum from Adrian Bott on Vimeo.

everyone's at it

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:11:44 GMT

If you can get BBC Iplayer where you are

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:48:49 GMT

... then I really recommend you listen to this.

Haitian Relief

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:36:56 GMT

In case you haven't seen it already, there's a spectacular deal on RPG PDFs available in aid of Haiti Relief: about $1500 worth of PDFs for only $20. Some real gems in there too.

Details here.

Oh bugger.

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:42:56 GMT

Fox apparently readying US version of Torchwood.

Hope this isn't true.

STEAM TREK

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:27:07 GMT

From here.

Bean singing

cavalorn@yahoo.co.uk — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 23:08:15 GMT

Just over here, ladies and gents