Meme-Free Zone

I've come across a couple of formatting errors and a misplaced image in my etext of The Lost World. A corrected version is now on line:

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff3/lworld.htm

I didn't post about Dragonmeet yesterday on Saturday because I was dog tired by the time I got home and I spent Sunday getting caught up on other things and trying to sooth a VERY sore throat.

The new venue (the Ibis hotel in Earl's Court) is a reasonable alternative to Kensington Town Hall. Food was mostly surprisingly cheap, though soft drinks were a bit expensive. But it felt a bit crowded, especially since they apparently had 1500+ people there, and the Open Games area (where I was running my sessions) was perpetually short of chairs. A lot of people seemed to have trouble finding the games they'd signed up for, which really didn't help.

The morning session was Forgotten Futures: the second part of Pyramid Scheme, in which the adventurers tracked Mad Empress Margaret's movements after her faked death and escape from her tomb under London. I really don't want to say more about that one since it will be in the next Forgotten Futures release, except that there was a reasonably happy ending.

The afternoon session was Custodians of the Cosmos, a cinematic adventure using modified Diana: Warrior Princess rules.

That one began about three or four months ago when the con organisers asked for people to run games - I put my name down for a couple, one of which I described as follows:

Custodians of the Cosmos
A motley assortment of adventurers join forces to visit strange new worlds, seek out new life and civilizations... and terminate anything that seems a threat to interstellar peace and harmony. Needless to say they _are_ a threat to interstellar peace and harmony, but hey, nobody's perfect. Especially when there's a big bar bill to pay, and someone's offering a reward of 500,000 credits for the Dread Space Pirate Robots...

Then, of course, I more or less forgot that I actually needed to write the damn adventure. Until earlier this week, when panic set in. Fortunately the solution was obvious - since I'd wasted a lot of time playing Oolite and that's quite a well-developed universe I set the adventure there, more or less. In this setting starships can't carry more than 7 LY worth of fuel, and can only jump between solar systems. But when a ship travels through hyperspace it briefly opens a wormhole - another ship can follow it without using any fuel.

There's a region in one of the galaxies which is divided by "The Great Rift," where all possible system-system jumps are 7.2 LY or more. There's a way to cross it, but it's difficult and involves another ship which may well be destroyed. So I decided that this was a natural region to encounter pirates. That let me use the galaxy map rather than having to invent my own - I printed it out across three sheets of A3 paper them got the players in the morning game and various random strangers to add cryptic notes to the map before I ran the adventure, e.g. "here be dragons," "Best burger bar in galaxy," a note in Japanese that I have no idea about, and so forth, to make it more interesting.

In the event I had three players so I asked the players to choose famous SF characters and come up with some simple stats; this gave me the elderly Obi-Wan Kenobi, Tegan from classic Dr. Who, and Buck Rogers (and the little robot Twiki) as the team.

The plot was actually dead simple - an alien businessman offered the adventurers money to eliminate pirates who were attacking ships along the edge of the Great Rift. They guessed fairly quickly that the pirates must be based on the other side. They also learned that the pirates (who only communicated by radio) claimed to be robots, and were stealing things that would be useful to them - computers. machinery, precious metals (useful for components), gems (useful for lasers etc.) and so forth.

So they came up with a plan - they found a hacker and got him to sell them a deadly computer virus, guaranteed to take out any computer know, loaded up with computers and started trolling up and down the edges of the rift.

Eventually a freighter followed them into their wormhole then did something that caused a misjump which crashed them out in interstellar space, and transmitted a message: "Be ye Turing-competent AIs, or human scum?"

As it happens the adventurers did have a robot with them - Twiki.



So they told Twiki to say they were robots - the stranger then transmitted a coded signal that made Twiki go berserk and start hitting Rogers. Fortunately Twiki was too small to do much damage, though Rogers' knees took a pounding. The stranger then demanded that they yield their cargo of computers to the "Thought Collective." Needless to say combat then ensued, which led to the attackers using their hyperdrive to escape across the Rift (at this point the nearest system was 6.8 LY away). The adventurers followed them through their wormhole, and resumed slugging it out on the South side of the rift. This eventually left both ships damaged, the players' ship out of fuel, and the attacker fleeing on fuel injectors (which give extra speed in normal space). By the time the adventurers limped to a Rock Hermit (asteroid base) the pirates had been and gone. The adventurers got Twiki rebooted and went on the hunt again.

After another inconclusive encounter the Collective decided to take out the threat. One of their ships pretended to be an innocent freighter dropping cargo and fleeing from the adventurers' ship - they naturally went to scoop it up, taking aboard three tons of radioactives and two of computers. A couple of minutes later alarms started sounding from the hold, and they went down to find that the five crates had assembled themselves into a large robotic bomb (stolen from Dark Star) which screwed itself to the floor plates, with a 300-second countdown. It then asked them to prove that they were Turing-competent intelligences, with the countdown starting up whenever they stopped talking. The adventurers solved this one by feeding the computer virus to the bomb, which promptly started to sing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" - the virus had rickrolled the bomb! While it was distracted they used Kenobi's light sabre to cut out the floor plates, dumped the bomb, and put the pedal to the metal. A BIG explosion then ensued, but they got away.

Finally the adventurers worked out the most likely location of the pirate base, and went after it. This did not go entirely to plan - when they navigated to that system's navy base, it turned out to have been replaced by a Borg-style cube, and they were promptly boarded by another robot which cut through the hull; the dreaded "Blackturret" (a Dalek - yes, I know real Daleks aren't robots, exactly, but bear with me). The adventurers claimed to be aware of secret government anti-piracy plans that they would only reveal to the pirates leaders - this got them in to see Long John 3PO, their leader. They tried the virus trick again but 3PO just downloaded it and sneered at them... except that it started to tap its foot as they were being dragged away for execution. The adventurers guessed, correctly, that things were about to go badly wrong for the pirates, and made a break for it as "Never Gonna Give You Up" began to play over the cube's speakers. They then ran for their ship and escaped as the cube finally imploded, triggering a Queridium blast (Oolite's WMD) and eliminating the robot pirate threat once and for all. They escaped into hyperspace seconds ahead of the blue sphere of death.

Fadeout to a happy ending, apart from the sudden realisation that they didn't have an address for the alien who had sponsored them, or any way to claim the reward...

I was actually pretty pleased with the way it went, and I think a lot of the credit for that was that I knew the Oolite universe well enough to explain technology, the way its hyperdrives and jump drives worked, etc. so well that I never had to grope for an explanation. The robot pirates were the only real invention, and they worked well in the fairly silly context I was creating.

Finished that about six and went along to the game auction at 6.30, that took more than an hour and raised £1600+ for charity. I didn't manage to win any item, and some of the prices were insanely high, but it was all for good causes. After talking to friends for a while I headed home. Hopefully I'll be feeling more human and will actually be able to talk properly in a day or two...

Suddenly remembered I have a mosaic tool in one of my graphics programs which let me quickly add a hint of an underlying block structure to the version I thought I'd finished late last night - quite pleased with this one, but let me know what you think.

( pictures )

I've already printed and laminated the "before" picture for Dragonmeet, which is a little annoying, but which would be better for the actual game, bearing in mind it may be reduced to a fraction of a page?

Later - forgot to say that the program that had the mosaic tool was Microsoft PictureIt! Photo 7, which used to be part of the Microsoft Works bundle, I think. It has some nice easy-to-use effects I occasionally find very useful, and Works often turns up bundled with computers or very cheaply elsewhere.

I've done a new version of this image I'm much happier with, see the previous entry:

http://ffutures.livejournal.com/1071780.html

These are the scenarios I'll be running at Continuum 2014 at the end of July - I've run both before at other cons, so please don't sign up if you've played in them before.

Saturday Morning
Adventure title: Pyramid Scheme
System: Forgotten Futures
4-6 Players, pregenerated characters
Summary: In the aftermath of the Sirian invasion there are some unusual opportunities for entrepreneurs. Some of them seem too good to be true... but why on Earth would the government pay anyone to dismantle and ship a pyramid to Mars? This is a test of a new setting and scenario and some delays and problems are possible.

This is another test of the setting for Forgotten Futures XII. I previously ran this at Dragonmeet 2013.

Sunday Afternoon
Adventure Title: Monster Mash
System: Diana: Warrior Princess
4-6 players
Adventure Description: America, the 1950s. You just want to meet with your friends, chug a few beers or some blood or brains, and maybe go out and terrorize the neighbourhood a little. But the locals seem to have weird objections. Well, that's what being a monster is all about, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but somehow it always hurts. But not as much as you're going to hurt the locals...
Note: this is a play-test of a system variant and adventure still in development, occasional rough patches are possible. I've run this once before at Dragonmeet 2012.

This is my second attempt at an editable PDF Forgotten Futures character record form. I'd be grateful if people could give it a try now and see if anything seems to be dodgy about it, if you can make it do weird things, etc. It looks a bit nicer, I think,

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/blank_record.pdf

All boxes are now text fields - I've set the ones that should be numbers to numerical only. There's a second overflow page, just one big text field.

You'll probably need to download it and open it in e.g. Adobe Reader - Firefox displays it but doesn't let you edit it, not sure about other browsers and readers.

update 23/12/13 - tidied it up a little, and got the file size down considerably. Please download again if you are looking at an earlier version.

In a comment on my last post i_kender pointed out that the British Library has put a shedload of illustrations from books on line for free use, as a huge flickr set.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

For example, one of the first I found was a larger version of this:

an illustration from The Angel of the Revolution - I have larger versions on the FF CD-ROM, but there isn't room on my web site.

At the moment the quantity is vast and tagging is minimal, actually finding anything is difficult. But if enough people take an interest it ought to eventually be a very useful resource.

An early attempt to develop a long-range death ray.

( big picture )

Anyone care to guess what this really is?

I think colourised, and with a nice green beam, it will be rather cool...

I've made a few small changes, fixed a last couple of typos (I hope), and added page numbers and bookmarks.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff1/nm-abc.pdf

About 4.29mb now.

If nobody has found any problems I'm going to put links on my web site etc.

later and as if by magic I've just found the November 1905 McClure's magazine on line, and need to make some changes to the PDF and my web site to reflect that. All minor though - a little more information on the different versions of the story, and illustrations, unfortunately not incredibly well scanned; a coloured version of the girl on the overhead ramp thing, and a different illustration of the rescue, which I had already but in a very poor scan. I'll probably put them on line but won't add them to the PDF, I think. Revisions should be on line in an hour or two.

6 pm - Revised PDF is now on line - file size is reduced to 4.15mb (forgot to do it earlier).

7 pm - Revised art page and With The Night Mail are on line.

The Aerial Board of Control's official logo, as found in the chapbook for With The Night Mail

Not sure it quite works - I read it as CAB, and the lettering style is a bit fussy, but it's the nearest we're going to get to an official logo.



Unfortunately I didn't have this when I was writing Forgotten Futures 1, and I gave the ABC a completely different logo, as here:



or just big blocky A.B.C. letters.