tcpip | Various SF and Fantasy Explorations (Reply)

Recovering slowly from my illness (and I'd better be, I have teaching tomorrow and the day after), I've had a bit of a foray into the old hobbies in science fiction and fantasy. On Thursday night, courtesy of Google Hangouts, I joined our regular Megatraveller game whilst dosed up and rugged up. The plot led us to discover a great ancient treasure - which turned out to be weapons of mass destruction - and our unhinged ally had demanded his 20% share of the take; this could be a problem. This is trouble enough, but on Sunday things went a level higher in my Eclipse Phase story. Confronted with a psychotic alien on one hand, and an AI attempting to turn Mercury into a Dyson Sphere to steal the sun, and the Factor aliens threatening to supernova the sun, the PC Proxies and their Sentinels managed to save the day, in a manner of speaking by destroying Mercury. Eclipse Phase is always a game of horror and existential risk so perhaps it is no surprise that as a story comes to an end, everything gets turned up to eleven. Also during the past few days managed to put together my character for a new RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha story; a durulz (cursed humanoid duck), named Rowena Wigeon.

RPG Review 42 has just been released (astoundingly late) with an emphasis on The Wilderness and the Wilds. My own articles are reviews of Outdoor Survival (old boardgame from the 70s), AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide, D&D 5e Wilderness Survival Guide, Eclipse Phase: Sunward, and Eclipse Phase: X-Risks. Sunday evening was also committee meeting time for the publishing cooperative, and on Wednesday night we'll be attending Twilight Zone: The Movie. Further to all this, Continuum, the national science fiction convention, was on this weekend. If I had been of better health I would have liked to go along for at least part of it. Nevertheless just returned from a dinner with some attendees on Lygon St; R, J, and