Where Worlds Collide

Just when a proper rock band were on the verge of a major breakthrough in indie-dominated Britain, this happens. It appears that Finnish symphonic goth-metal band Nightwish have parted company with singer Tarja Turunen. In this Open letter posted on the band’s website, keyboard player and main songwriter Tuomas Holopainens speaks in no uncertain terms

Equally certain is the fact that we cannot go on with you and Marcelo any longer. During the last year something sad happened, which I’ve been going over in my head every single day, morning and night. Your attitude and behavior don`t go with Nightwish anymore. There are characteristics I would never have believed to see in my old dear friend.

People who don’t talk with each other for a year do not belong in the same band.

I’m hoping this doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road for the band. I never got to see them in their UK tour earlier in the year, because it sold out three months in advance. It’s been suggested on their website’s message boards that they’ve already found a replacement singer. Let’s hope this is correct, and Nightwish continue.

I’ve been spending far too long reading essays and threads on The Forge recently.

The site is a great resource for ideas on game design. There’s an attitude that game designers should take an engineering approach to designing RPG rules, rather than simply relying on trial-and-error or copying things that appeared to work in earlier games. They do have a really bad problem with jargon, such that the site needs a glossary to explain what they’re on about.

In challenging assumptions, though, some Forgeites seems to be far too willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They have developed a lot of games where they’ve thrown out virtually all conventional rules defining character abilities, and replaced them with very abstract meta-game mechanics allowing the players to affect the narrative. They also believe in redefining or reducing the role of the GM, which for me sucks a lot of the fun out of GMing. Some games even eliminate the GM entirely.

A case in point. There’s a current thread on The Forge about doing a Forge-style version of Call of Cthulhu. If I’ve understood it correctly, the proposed games has an ‘Investigation stage’ where you collect rather abstract ‘Plot Coupons’, and at some point trigger the ‘Endgame’ where you spend those Plot Coupons to defeat the monster.

I’m afraid all I can say is “Ugh!”. I find the original Chaosium Call of Cthulhu (I’ve managed to avoid the d20 version) works perfectly well for me, and I just don’t see how this pseudo-boardgame approach is an improvement. I’m told it’s very like the second edition of the boardgame “Arkham Horror”. Why not just play Arkham Horror?.

A post in this thread succinctly sums up their approach.

In most games, there is Rules Stuff (where the rules arbitrate what happens) and Soft Stuff (where players co-create what happens, using a variety of social dynamics, but with multiple options all equally valid under the rules).

In Task Resolution, “What you do” is mostly Rules Stuff, while “What it means” is mostly Soft Stuff. The dice tell you that you slay the giant. Then the group decides whether you free the kingdom from tyranny.

In Conflict Resolution “What it means” is mostly Rules Stuff, while “What you do” is mostly Soft Stuff. The dice tell you that you free the kingdom from tyranny. Then you decide that you slay the giant to do it.

OK, So I can see what they’re trying to do. But I don’t think that style of gaming is really for me.

Someone once asked if so-called ‘Indie games’ had any parallels with Indie music. I know I’m biased as a diehard classic rock fan, but Indie music seems to be based around reduction in instrumental complexity, an awful lot of angst-ridden navel gazing, and music which is more interesting to write about than to listen to.

I’ll leave it to cynics to decide whether there’s any valid parallel. But one of forum founder and moderator Ron Edwards’ posts in the thread I quoted from earlier had implied that once you’ve played these games, you’ll never want to play conventional style games again. Which is too close to comfort to the “Once you’ve heard The Clash, you’ll never want to listen to Pink Floyd again” line I used to hear from punk fans in 1980. I still love Pink Floyd today, and have never ‘got’ The Clash despite wasting money on a couple of their albums.

There’s one big difference between The Forge and the punk and indie music scenes. Punk and Indie were both thorough reactionary, rejecting sophistication and devolving into cruder, more primitive forms. The Forgeite scene is at least trying something new. Like anything experimental, some ideas and games will work, and others will fail. I would expect some of their games still to have cult followings many years after the majority have been forgotten. Perhaps one or two games using Forgeite ideas will become major hits. And maybe the next generation of more mainstream games will incorporate some of their ideas in combination with tried and tested features of more traditional names.

I’m certainly finding The Forge useful for clarifying my ideas, even if all I’m trying to write is a Fudge port.

Update: Carl Cravens has some related game thoughts here, here and here.

I’m not the only person who into both RPGs and Trains. Here’s what one of my PBeM players has been up to. It’s currently got as far as a working chassis. No boiler yet, and five more installments to go.

I think I’ll stick to N gauge. Though with the invoice I’ve recently had from CJM, I don’t think it’s any cheaper in the long run.

Many preserved locomotives have been damaged or destroyed in a disastrous fire at a railway museum in Nuremburg.

This shows news photos of the fire at it’s height, and this railfan site shows the aftermath. Both sites are in German, but the pictures are pretty much self-explainatory. It’s a sad sight.

Some of the steam locomotives looks to be recoverable, but many of the diesel and electric locomotives appear to be totally lost.

Update: A post on Trainnet gives more detail of what happened.

I’m getting sick of comment spammers.

I’ve had the idea of whipping up a PERL script to throw up a page of spoof mailto links, all containing fake email addresses, but using domains taken from my MT-blacklist banned domains list (purged of ones like niu.edu and wikipedia.org). I’ll put an invisible link to each page, make sure my robots.txt tells legitimate spiders to keep out, and wait for address-harvesting bots to slurp up the addresses.

I like the idea of using spammers to spam other spammers.

The comment spammers are now spamming me with the URLs of www.wikipedia.org and www.niu.edu. I can only assume this is a crude attempt to degrade the usefulness of MT-Blacklist by filling people’s blacklists with legitimate sites.

Remind me to remove those two URLs from my blacklist as once they stop appearing in my rejection logs.

AMG of Live from the Third Rail links to a very silly article in Rupert Murdoch’s Times. It starts with this risible line:

Tracks on branch railway lines are to be torn up and replaced with concrete channels, under plans to attract people out of cars by replacing trains with buses.

Needless to say, AMG gives it the fisking it deserves.

Guided busways are one of those silly technologies that gets periodically trundled out by those people who entertain fantasies of concreting over the whole of the nation’s railway network. These people always seem to originate from the lunatic fringe of libertarianism. It reality, guided busways are a cheap and nasty substitute for light rail that has all the disadvantages of buses and trains, and none of the advantages of either. I wish I knew where that sort of visceral hatred of steel rails comes from. Is it just an extension of popular distain for train spotters?

The Times ridiculous article suggests than many miles of branch lines up and down the country are about to be replaced with this useless system. But nowhere does it say there’s any specific proposal for this. It mentions the Dunstanble and Cambridge-St Ives-Huntingdon proposals, both of which are on lines disused for some time, and have been talked about for years. Nothing ever came of the Dunstable scheme, and the St Ives plan has met serious opposition from those who want a rail-based solution, such as Cast Iron.

The only worrying one is the Bristol to Severn Beach line, on which there’s supposed to be a “study”. There’s no mention of the results of this study; hopefully it will prove such a scheme is impractical. I note that the last few miles of the Severn Beach line share the main line tracks into Bristol with main line trains. The guided buses won’t be able to do this, and therefore will have to negotiate Bristol’s congested roads into the city centre.

The financial black hole in the railway network is real, and things do need to be done to make things more efficient. I’m sure there are economies which can be made. I’d favour Swiss style light rail for many self-contained rural line, with modern lightweight railcars specifically designed for such routes, and independent local management who will be in a better position than some faraway bureaucrat to determine the needs of the local customers.

I’m currently working on the game mechanics chapter, which will (probably) be chapter three. I wrongly assumed this would be easy to write, because it would just be a cut-and-paste job from the Fudge SRD. I was wrong.

As well as deciding which of the myriad combat options I wanted to use and cutting out the ones I don’t, I also had to make sure I’m using consistent skill names compared with the existing character generation chapter. And then there were all those examples. Every one needs to be at least partially rewritten to be about Kalyran characters and situations rather than the varied genres in the Fudge examples. No Old West or Robin of Sherwood allowed! For the first draft I’m using player characters from the online games, and one or two actual situations that have come up in play.

It seems that editing is as much effort as actual writing.

Another meme, from Norm

Directions:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

This takes me right back to 2002, and gives the final line, “And they got them!”, from this post. So much for English teachers insisting that you should never begin a sentence with a conjunction. It will be split infinitives next!

Appropriately for a meme from a cricket fan, it’s one of the very rare sporting posts on this blog, about the finale of the England vs. Sri Lanka Test Match. Norm will be horrified to learn that I have no recollection whatsoever of that match three years later.

I’ll pass the baton to anyone reading this who wants to pick it up.

What’s been OMS for the past week or so.

Leaves Eyes - Vinland Saga
I picked up this album after seeing them supporting Paradise Lost. It’s an excellent example of symphonic Euro metal, even if Liv Kristine Espenæs Krull’s operatic soprano vocals are possibly an acquired taste. It’s a concept album about Vikings, and the lyrics and music certainly evoke images of longships and horned helmets. There’s an equal mix of power metal and keyboard-driven ballads, including some atmospheric material sung in Norwegian. I can definitely recommend this album.

Octavia Sperati - Winter Enclosure
Norwegian six-piece Octavia were Paradise Lost’s other support band. Unfortunately this album is a bit of a dud. The overall sound is a mix of melodic goth rock and metal, vaguely reminiscent of Poland’s Closterkeller, but it suffers from a serious lack of memorable songs. Silge’s vocals are too often buried in the mix, and the instrumentation rarely rises above the mediocre. If you like this kind of music, there’s a lot of better stuff in this style around.

Paradise Lost - Believe in Nothing
This is not Paradise Lost’s best album, marking the point were it seems they couldn’t make up their mind whether they wanted to be Depeche Mode or Black Sabbath. Suffers from a lack of good songs as well as a lack of direction, and was weaker than it’s predecessors. I’m told their two more recent albums are better, but I have yet to hear them.

Porcupine Tree - In Absentia
This is one of my favourite PT albums, in that it includes just about every element of PT’s diverse sound on one disk. There’s the Led Zeppelin riffs of “Blackest Eyes”, the melodic atmospherics of “Trains” and “The Sound Of Muzak”, and the haunting melancholy of “Heatattack In A Layby”. This is a good place to start if you want to check the band out.

Blackmore’s Night - Shadow of the Moon
A while since I’d spun this disk, and I’d forgotten how good it was; far stronger than later releases. BN’s renaissance/new age/soft rock melange can be cheesy and twee in places, ‘a high Camembert factor’ as HippyDave has said. But on this first album the good material outweighs the bad. Blackmore’s guitar work is a reminder of why I liked his music in the first place.

Uriah Heep - Salisbury
The Mighty Heep’s second album, recorded all of 35 years ago. Naturally the production and some of the arrangements sound a little dated, but the singles Bird of Prey (with the famous ‘Norwegian Fjord vocals’) and the acoustic chant ‘Lady in Black’ still feature in the live set. Highlight has to be the 17 minute neo-classical title track, with Ken Hensley’s Hammond organ duelling with brass and woodwind sections.