Teaching, Learning and Europe, and Fantasy Adventures

[tcpip]

In a hat-tip to the previous journal entry (which referred to SF adventures), there is a certain degree of similarity in this one. The weekend, apparently, is similar to the week prior which explains why I feel that I haven't had a weekend yet. Today however I was teaching mainly immunological doctoral researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute. I was planning to do an Introduction to Linux and HPC but after listening to their explanations of existing genomics workflows, I switched my presentation immediately to my Bioinformatics for HPC course which combines the general courses with the Date Carpentry course on genomics (so yes, two courses squeezed into one), with most of the first part being completed. They were a pretty switched-on group, with a number having good levels of previous experience, and with some challenging and insightful questions.

Out-of-hours what spare time I have has been largely spent on working on an assignment for my final course for my MSc in Information Systems, with the dissertation to follow. With a few stuff-ups in my residency enrolment, I am now booked to go to Zurich in November. After missing winter for two years in succession, it will be a pleasant change to get two in a single year, although I imagine it will be quite a shock to the system returning from the onset of a European winter to the beginning of an Australian summer. Still, the practical upshot of all this will be the completion of degree number five, and with six and seven in the wings as well. It will, of course, be another opportunity to visit Europe which will require mapping out something will include visits to friends and family as well as trying to expand the scope of places to include new areas.

On the weekend played a session of the new edition of RuneQuest, having wrapped up our third edition game that made use of various "gateway" settings (Questworld, Griffin Island, Elderaad). This is set in the deep, weird, and mostly consistent fantasy world of Glorantha which in some many ways has a mythic structure that is stronger than most real-world religions, but that's what you get for a fantasy world designed by a practicing shaman and mythologist. For my own part, I took the role of the most comic species in the setting, the duck-like durulz (and with an appropriate pun, named her Rowena Wigeon, a trickster cult member). The curious thing about these beings is that even though they come across initially as quite ridiculous (image of Donald Duck come to mind), they have an extraordinary depth of character. Cursed, flightless, they live in a swampland inhabited by a demi-god vampire and his minions. As a result, they may seem initially to be ridiculous, but they carry with themselves a level of surly seriousness and are savagely foul-beaked as a result. Strange, deep, but consistent? That's Glorantha for you and that is why in the past I have described it as the greatest fantasy world ever created.

Comments

[dorchadas]

I've had a copy of The Guide to Glorantha sitting on my coffee table for years, but I've never played any game set in Glorantha and the only edition of Runequest I own is the setting-neutral Runequest 6, it seems almost too dense to get into. It's really the only fantasy world that could support an encyclopedic guide like that.

I'm sure I'll read it eventually.

[tcpip]

The Guide to Glorantha (both volumes!) is an incredible pair of books, and certainly a good coffee-table book. It's the sort of thing that a complete stranger could pick up, have a bit of awe at the sheer size and artwork, start reading from a random page, and just immerse themselves in an incredibly strange and beautiful world.

RQ6 is a pretty good game :) My preference is still with 3rd edition, but heck, that's grognard stuff. I mean it came out in 1984..

[dorchadas]

I feel like RPG development is more like novel style development than technological development. A lot of Victorian novels are clunky and grossly overwritten by today's standards, but it's not because they're objectively worse, just that our tastes of changed. A lot of my favorite RPGs are 90s/early 00s era, like Vampire or Exalted.

...some of that is also because that's when I had the most time to play, of course.

[tcpip]

The novel-like changes have been evident in a change in emphasis or "creative agenda" in game systems, where it has been RPG as a game, or as a simulation, or as a story.

But I've noticed that there's technological development as well, in particular in the game systems. They've also had an interesting correlation in programming styles.

For example early games were very much like BASIC programs, where an issue was encountered and a rule was written specifically for it. (O)AD&D are examples.

There there was a long period where game systems were increasingly structured and procedural, like Pascal. There was a search for consistency in the system. Traveller, RuneQuest, D&D3e, Pathfinder come to mind here.

Now a lot of games make use of object-orientation. There is a desire for inheritance and polymorphism in the game system. A core rule with many applications and extensions - BRP as a whole, GURPS, and the latter editions of D&D, are a good fit here.