Lev Lafayette's journal

On Saturday caseopaya and I attended another part of round #2 of cheesequest with hathhalla and ser_pounce; I made liptauer, but I suspect the wensleydale/stilton with cranberry will win the round. We also played Pandemic a great cooperative game - the disease defeated our collective efforts twice, along with Nuns on the Run, an impressively well-themed 'hide and seek'.

In the world of the Ingress augmented reality, have picked up a rather impressive Enlightened hoodie courtesy of agent ozmusic. It has a battery powered glow-trim, which is quite amusing. Hit level 11 in the game today, which has been quite a wait. However due to the achievment requirements, I'm expecting to hit level 12 next week, and 13 by the end of the year. After a year of play, I have will be considering how much more I continue with it. For a long time it has been more habitual than anything else.

Although the timetable is habitual, roleplaying is anything but in content. Last Thursday was another episode of Masks of Nyarlathotep where the foreign investigators did much better than the previous session in piecing together various leads in their journeys in 1925 Shanghai. Sunday was GURPS Middle-Earth, where we flushed out a demon. My character's overconfidence led to to try to challenge this creature in single-combat on top of a peaked tower; my strategic sense led me to duck away whilst it was peppered with missile fire. In other roleplaying matters, I somehow completely neglected to mention my review on rpg.net last month of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. Tonight, have just finished a review of a Yaquinto classic from the early 80s, Pirates and Plunder.

Spent the first three days of the week running the usual trilogy of courses in Linux and High Performance Computing for researchers, including a head of department. It was a difficult group in some ways with highly disparate background abilities and my tiredness didn't help. Following this spent some time putting the finishing touches on my up-coming presentation in Cairns next week at the International Conference on Computer Science as well as putting together a related paper for eResearch Australasia, as well as an initial investigation for the education workshop for the world supercomputing conference. In between all convened an excellent meeting of Linux Users Victoria on OpenStack and Docker.

Last Sunday played in Karl's Space 1889 Ubuquity game which involved some fine stealth by the good British imperialists against the dastardly Hun imperialists in the Victorian-fantasy concept of Venus. The game is going quite well, especially for an episodic story that lacks an overarching narrative. Despite the setting-centered orientation the Ubiquity component has added a lot for character focus as well. On Thursday night ran Masks of Nyarlathotep (excellent fan trailer linked) which featured a classic set-piece scene in the Egyptian scenario, involving a grand rescue of NPCs from the midst of massive cultist ritual (think of the Indianna Jones Kali Ma scene), followed by a chase scene underneath the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. This rather epic set piece is derived from H.P. Lovecraft's Underneath the Pyramids, and despite a little bit of help from the Goddess Bast, it really was their own bravado, planning, and luck. Lovecraft's story describes well the "Children of the Sphinx" who gave chase:

I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak . . . but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches . . . men should not have the heads of crocodiles. . . .

Over the past week have enjoyed three excellent RPG sessions all based around historical fiction, being a preferred genre. First was a session of Pendragon which continues the mythic story of the Fisher King. The PCs failed, of course, and now have to take the long, but more adventurous, path. Appropriately I have just finished Malory's second book of Le Mort D'Arthur; Rex quondam, Rexque futurus. It remains, of course, not just a flurry of ideological resistance by the Romano-British to the Saxon invasions, or a canonical example of fifteenth century literary style, but an entire legend across multiple authors as mythology. Not only that I have also completed listening to the lectures on early medieval history kindly offered by Yale University; not much new content from my perspective, but it was certainly enjoyable to listen to. Likewise, I was provided by Bill A., and have completed, Bernard Cornwell's The Burning Land, which whilst an excellent and evocative read, did lack the magical realism despite several opportunities.

The second session was a continuation of the occasional story of a group of early Korean diplomats and their bodyguards (the PCs) seeking to establish a treaty with the Chinese emperor who has disappeared, and has ended up somewhere in Tibet. It's mostly based on the period of Emperor Shun, but with some historical flexibility for narrative purposes. Even with this interest, my knowledge of early Chinese history is still woefully inadequate in comparison with that I have with the European. The third, of course, has been our sessions of Horror on the Orient Express at the former asylum that is home. Whilst the story line has completed Milan (an operatic horror), I have finally managed to do a write-up the first chapter by a "young Hercule Poirot".

Finally, is the release of RPG Review 17, a GURPS special issue. Particularly happy with the interview with Sean Punch, the line editor, the GURPS Dinosaurs Designer's Notes by Stephen Dedman, and the review of Dark Knight Rises by Andrew Moshos. My own contributions on that content are an essay on the development of GURPS, and the initial steps towards narrativist creative agendas in said system. As a brief hint to the next issue (a Cthulhu special) there is Sandy Petersen writing on his favourite dinosaur, and Jonathan Korman writing on RPG Cultural Appropriation, especially some of the more questionable racial themes that are in H.P. Lovecraft.