tcpip | RPG Review 8, Fox Magic and Other Gaming Events

Being a old-school tabletop RPG gamer is not very cool. It's rather like admitting you're an ELO fan. It is not, of course, wrong as such, but it is going to have you marked as rather seriously nerdy and perhaps lacking in refined taste. It is possible of course to redeem oneself depending on other expressions of taste, in which case such aesthetics is treated with a nod and smile.

So this said I think that Time is one of the best LPs ever released; a rather appropriate way to announce the release of RPG Review Issue 8 (after two very late nights finishing it off), which has a strong (but not exclusive) science fiction orientation. I am rather happy with the range of games this issue covers, but as the editorial states, I pretty mcuh had to exclude the entire transhumanist orientation; traditional science fiction is now a literary genre, transhumanism has become the mythology and I just didn't have space to include both.

I have also been delighted to receive my copy of

tashiro's game, Fox Magic. I reviewed this some months ago and noted some style and substance issues. Almost immediately after the review, the author pulled the product and the new version has been revised with much better layout and extra text, including my own chapter on using Nihon as a setting. My densely written material covers geography, history, politics, religion & etc and is about as exciting as reading Talcott Parsons. Nevertheless I am quite proud to have so much included in the book.

In the past several days I've several good actual gaming experiences; on Monday night I introduced some people to HeroQuest using the Flying Kites scenario. The players grasped the rules quickly and enjoyed the unified, simple and yet adaptable mechanics. On Sunday I ran a session of RuneQuest, the beginnings of the Haunted Ruins setting. Finally on Thursday I GMed a session of Mouse Guard using The Enemy Within story from Warhammer.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A Great issue of RPGR. I was happy to see the Terran Trade Authority RPG competently reviewed. I really enjoyed your retrospective of Traveller. As a veteran of the game I liked taking the trip down memory lane, it was the first game I purchased as a teen gamer, I acquired the set in 1982 and still have it. I recently re-read Asimov's Foundation series and it dawned on me how much to the Traveller official milieu seems sourced from that series, right down to the Imperial sunburst. Well if being a PnP RPG gamer is uncool then brand me uncool, especially after that Asimov comment. Good work.

Thanks MOB, you love for Traveller is certainly notable and the game deserves its muchly, and I really appreciate the praise for this issue. I do feel that there is something quite special about it (even if there was nada on Star Wars or Star Trek... Another time!)

And yes about Asimov. It's been decades since I've read Asimov's works... But something did always strike me about Traveller.. Where are the robots? There's so few of them! Given how central they were to Isaac...

For some reason, Asimov didn't put robots in his galactic-scale story series. The attempt to fix up the Foundation books with the Robot books practically gets tennis elbow reaching for a contrived explanation, though nowadays we would just say "smart" robots were discarded because it was too easy to rules-lawyer them into bad failure behaviors, like facilitating but not actually committing crimes or taking over human governments.

Traveller also borrowed just as much from robotless sources like Anderson's Nicholas Flandy stories and Piper's Space Viking et al, with some Niven and Pournelle.

Robots (by the catodon)
I have the Robots book for classic traveller. THey retcon three reasons for robot sparcity. First AI is difficult to do requiring a good TL, second cultural bias, and third the robots have actually always been there but a member of a high tech society would no more note them than we would spend pay much attention to a toaster.

I think all those points are a bit of a furphy.. Firstly, robots don't need good AI, secondly cultural biases just don't last that long and nor are they so homogenous and as for the third, they certainly gave plenty of time to other technologies...

RPG Review 8, Fox Magic and Other Gaming Events

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Re: Nerds Of The World Unite! We Have Nothing To Lose Except our D20!

Re: Nerds Of The World Unite! We Have Nothing To Lose Except our D20!