Lev Lafayette's journal

A few days ago (August 13) Steve Perrin passed away, aged 75. It has taken some time for me to compose my thoughts on this.

Steve Perrin was the lead author of RuneQuest by Chaosium, the first roleplaying game I participated in, and one of the most influential books in my life. His wife, Luise Perenne was responsible for the iconic cover of that 1978 book. Unlike other FRPGs that essentially provided late 20th century life transported to a fantasy setting, with RuneQuest there was a greater fantastic and immersive quality of a premodern worldview. The game design was firmly based on the principles of "playable realism", and the writing was a superb example of clarity, depth, and brevity.

Steve Perrin was also the author or co-author of several other RPGs, including Worlds of Wonder, Stormbringer, ElfQuest, and Superworld. Overall, he contributed or wrote almost one hundred publications for a variety of roleplaying games and publishers. Superworld has been cited as the game that inspired the famous Wild Cards series, edited by George R.R. Martin, and Perrin was the creator of three of the characters in that series. He was also a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) in 1966, and worked in the console/computer game industry in the 1980s, doing game design and writing manuals.

If records serve me correctly, it was in 2005 that Steve and I started to correspond, initially through a playtest mailing lists for the Mongoose edition of RuneQuest, and then with other RuneQuest mailing lists, the Deluxe Basic Role Playing list, and the Quest rules mailing list for his own (never finished) game that effectively combined RuneQuest and the Hero System (which he'd also worked on) called SPQR (Steve Perrin Quest Rules), which I used for the Questworld by Chaosium.

Steve was kind enough to be an interview subject for the first edition of the online RPG 'zine that I founded, RPG Review, in 2008 as well as writing an article for that issue on how RuneQuest was designed. Ten years later, when I organised the third RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under (the first in some twenty years!) he wrote an article in RPG Review issue 40 on how RuneQuest happened, which included the revelation that Glorantha's Ducks were effectively the Hobbits of the world, except with a fatalistic and even morbid personality.

We were friends on Facebook, of course. Whilst I never met the man in person, what I did know of him was that he was always considerate, open-minded, creative, clear-headed, and polite. These are good qualities for a person to carry even most of the time, but Steve did so without variation. He was incredibly influential during my formative years, and it was an honour and a pleasure to correspond and work with him over the past sixteen years.

I have even started looking at the correspondence we shared SPQR. I'd like to revive that, in his honour. For aesthetic reasons, I think it should be set in the late Roman Republic, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus. It's the least I can do.

In paradisum deducant te Angeli, Steve Perrin. Thank you.

I guess it was inevitable. After a 24 hour sleepless flight, followed by two days of teaching, jumping from temperatures from just over ten to mid-thirties and back again, I would, of course, come down with a cold. Sunday I struggled through a session of RuneQuest Glorantha with a bit of a headache and sneezing, that evening I was utterly smashed and completely incapable for work the following day, and today I'm coping a bit more but not moving much. My strategy for dealing with colds has become, over the years, one of annihilation. Get wrapped up, drink several litres of water, sleep a lot, and down plenty of cold-and-flu medication. Trying to fight it through force of will does not work.

Fortunately, just prior to succumbing to this I did manage to write most of the two-part scenarios for the upcoming RuneQuest Glorantha Convention. Justin A., has done an excellent job most of the initial concept and invited a few other to whiteboard some notes, and I went a bit nuts and basically hammered it into the requisite two three-hour scenarios. I'm pretty satisfied with how it's all coming along. As usual, people are leaving registration to the last fortnight which from an organiser's point of view is a little challenging, but I'm pretty sure It'll sort itself out OK as long as I rally the troops. The games are organised, the speakers are organised, the Convention journal is in production, the scenario is in production, and the swag bags have been ordered. Just have to ensure that the auction items and catering happens.

As a moment of aesthetics, I've realised that my Nexus 6 is dying after four years, which seems terribly appropriate. I've sent a tweet to Huawei, which is generating a bit of amusement. Ah, humans, we love finding and creating narratives. And, on a completely different tangent, I've only just realised that the LP I am currently listening to, The First Feast, was an Australia-only release. The rest of the world, you missed out. This thing is superb; I still remember how impressed the bus driver was in '89 as we took the coach from Perth to Melbourne and recommended this as a driving album.

It is November 2019.

I have a Nexus 6.

It is four years old.

It's starting to die.

That's a hell of an Easter Egg, @Huawei #BladeRunner

— Lev Lafayette (@lev_lafayette) November 4, 2019

The week after the RuneQuest-Glorantha Convention has, unsurprisingly been a lot less exciting, but still with a fair bit of gaming activities after hours including a session of Megatraveller last night, and some tinkering on Papers & Paychecks. I've also sold off a good half of my Cyberpunk 2020 collection which is well over fifty books. I've also picked up Mark Morrison's latest gem, Reign of Terror which is surprisingly short (96p) although the production qualities are very impressive. Clearly, because we haven't done enough RuneQuest in recent weeks this Sunday we'll have another session. Actually I'm also planning a RQ session with nephew Luke; last week was his birthday and we went out to a local Thai restaurant (as we did last year, being creatures of habit).

Apart from that it's been plodding along with Duolingo with various "German to X" lessons. I'm finding myself quite stuck on Das Gerundium. I completed French-to-German recently, albeit with some difficulty, but I'm finding it a lot harder in the other direction. Pourquoi? Ich wisse nicht. In addition, I've made a start on my MSc assignment, specifically on suggested improvements to the Square Kilometre Array sensor systems. Workwise, there has been a lot of software installations this week particularly in the realm of various R and Python packages, neither of which are really enjoyable in the HPC space for reasons of sanity (an issue I have raised in the past). Today I spent a good portion finding out which projects were over-quota, or had a special quota, and applying a script to set a normal quota for the rest.

Election fever is in the air, and of course in the United States, the election-night pundits have proven to be more than a little wrong with the "blue wave" actually being quite real as the weeks have worn on. Here, the Victorian state election is coming in up just over a week, and whilst current Premier Daniel Andrews should win in a canter (popular, socially progressive, economically successful), the opposition under Matthew Guy has made undeserved mileage out of law and order issues even though offense rates per capita are roughly the same as four years ago and are declining. The matter wasn't helped by a lone-wolf madman. Among Liberal leaders of the past, Guy really is of the hard-right variety, the party now thoroughly controlled by religious nutters. It would be an absolute disaster if he was to be elected. Hopefully, Victorians will have the good sense to give Andrews a second term.

In my massive amounts of spare time that I have available, I've started my MSc in Information Systems Management and have completed the first two major online components (a reflective biography based on Drucker's argument of self-management) and a review of technological innovations of the past decade. Plus, of course, there has been a small mountain of reading. I have hoped that the course would be more agreeable thus far, much of the material is heavy on the business and observational side of the equation and less on the empirical. I've dragged as many conversations as possible in the course forums towards the latter, especially comparing predictions to reality. The first marked assignment will be on Sensors: exploring the opportunities and challenges for business. I suspect I'll do something related to the Square Kilometre Array, as that satisfies the criteria of being related to physical sensors, has the challenge of data processing, and I can even argue business opportunities, all of which are criteria for the study. Plus I have a few connections to the project.

The past few days saw the formal preparations for RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under fall into place; a total of 53 registered attendees, which is a pretty good number and a surprise last-minute game added to the schedule by a local Pendragon author, Garry Fay (Blood & Lust, The Spectre King), so that means RuneQuest Glorantha, 13th Age Glorantha, Pendragon, and Khan of Khans, all providing a pretty solid gaming stream to go alongside the panels, castle stream, auction, trollball, keynote and freeforms. Of course, I doubt very much that I'll have much opportunity to do anything of the sort myself. Still, I have managed to get a game of Megatraveller and RuneQuest Questworld in this week. The latter was particularly good fun with a new player in the group who named his Dwarf character Mark Almond; the obvious pun has already lead to some character development.

In work-related events I had a little win this week with an DNA application software project, pychopper taking up my suggestion on having numbered releases. There is many, too many, software projects these days which don't bother with old-fashioned things such as numbered releases, which make it a little annoying to track changes in application development. Yes, one can, and sometimes has to, track by commit ID. But who enjoys doing that? Plus, I've been meaning to post about IBM's recent purchase of Red Hat, but needless to scale of the purchase is pretty epic. Finally, and completely off-topic, today I finished the French to German tree on Duolingo. Most probably next course will be German to French.

I've spent the entire week at eResearchAustralasia at the Pullman Hotel, and after five days of lectures and workshops my brain is a combination of full, fried, and tired. Actually, this year's conference was pretty good, with a good balance between technology and collaboration. Attended the pre-conference workshops; one the first day there was collaboration between AU and the EU, which made me realise that the people of the continent are preparing for a hard Brexit and want us onside, which suits me fine. The second day was more of a sysadmins and HPC day which was almost like an AA-meeting of how we all have the same stories of dealing with users, data etc. From the main conference program balanced my attendance between technical tools, eresearch engagement in training. My own presentation, on the use of GPUs for marine population samples went well. Was a little surprised and disappointed at the end of the day by one eResearch provider's CEO claiming that they had to keep their training material private for their business model. They apparently haven't thought hard enough about this.

Whilst on the topic of thinking hard about a subject I have been accepted into the London School of Economics for a Graduate Diploma of Economics, because clearly having four degrees is not enough. I'll be doing this concurrently with a Masters of Higher Education at the University of Otago (I enrolled in the wrong course three years ago and it's taken me that long to get things together to give it another shot). On top of that, I'll consider an offer from another British University of a Masters in Science, specifically on Information System which sadly will require two weeks on-campus in Switzerland (or Manchester). Obviously, it is not too crazy to do three postgraduate degrees simultaneously, especially when I have this overriding meta-narrative consideration of the relationship between higher education, information technology, and political economy. I think in the long run I will be satisfied with ten degrees, although I know that sometime within the next five years or so I'll be due for a change in intellectual orientation towards more aesthetic issues that combines my pre-existing studies in legal and moral regulations, followed by organisational and factual inquiry. Maybe when I'm in my seventies I'll do a Divinity and History double-major and upload my brain just in case I've forgotten to write anything down.

In the vast quantities of spare time I've had this week I've worked primarily on RuneQuest Glorantha DownUnder and the RuneQuest system review article for RPG Review, which now has hit a remarkable nine-thousand words. At this rate I could do an honours thesis on RuneQuest! Further I've translated the Le Monde article on Greg Stafford for RPG Review and was pleasantly surprised to be told that my translation was "perfect". Perhaps my French, at least in written mode, isn't as bad as I think it is? I have been heavily helped in this forthcoming issue on a massive article from Zoe Brain on the Mucky Ducks (yeah, RuneQuest is "that duck game") along with an equally-sized piece from William Noble on Australian prehistorical animals for RuneQuest. In actual play this week our regular Megatraveller game was cancelled so, for the first time is twenty-five or so years, we cracked open the old MARS Illumanti set and cranked up this delightful game of conspiracy. It was a close affair with all players being one turn away from their victory conditions, but with my Discordians making it to the cut first by managing to control a sufficient number of groups, although it was a close call when the Servants of Cthulhu running the UFOs failed to destroy the convenience stores via the Semiconscious Liberation Army. Crazy situations, well-balanced, easy-to-play. No wonder we used to love it so much.

It appears that I have moved into end-of-year meeting mode. Just yesterday arranged for professor Clinton Fernandes, to the guest speaker at the Isocracy Network Annual General Meeting, slated for October 20 at the Kensington Town Hall (probably clashes with a LUV meeting, but timetables are tight). Clinton will be speaking on Australian foreign policy with a focus on East Timor and Witness K (not to be confused with Agent K from the film Men In Black, although correlations could be noted). For my own part I have just completed some 1700 words on an article Isocracy Profiles: Martin Luther King Jnr, which the second in this sporadic series (following Albert Einstein.

RuneQuest Gloranthan Con has had a couple of updates recently mainly behind the scenes. After a bit of poking around for my own alternative I discovered the joy of Drupal Webform and Webform Report, which has allowed me to put together a couple of pages for the auction. I can't believe that I'm selling my first print of White Bear and Red Moon form 1975, the game which launched Chaosium. Further, it will make an ideal template for the RPG Review store which has been offline since Quicksales closed its operations. I'm planning to have that at least partially in place by the end of October, as per the RPG Review Newsletter which I released yesterday.

In other gaming news went to see ser_pounce and hathhalla for our irregular day of cheeesequest and Mice & Mystics. After a year or so of play we actually finished the basic scenario, Sorrow and Remembrance, and did so with relative ease courtesy of a succession of very beneficial die rolls and the availability of some handy magics. The night previous ran a game of Exalted Journey to the Far West where the travelling band discovered that a local village had been taken over by shapeshifting demons of seduction and gluttony. Credit to funduntheupfield for recognising a key theme from the original Journey to the West. Tomorrow will be Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels have found themselves trapped in a medical facility on Earth with various robots banging on the door that want to cut their stacks out.

Courtesy of a neighbour relieving themselves of a particularly large bookcase I've spent a few hours re-arranging a good deal of the furninsings around the house in an effort to save space. Somehow, despite the fact there is an additional item in play, I've actually managed to create more space and better space, with our sizeable liquour cabinet now in the lounge room along with a display cabinet holding the fish tank and turtle tank and various indoor pot plants. The bookcase itself will be gobbling up a stack of "do not sell" RPG books which will allow some of those which are currently in boxes to join a real shelving unit. I suppose it's spring (of sorts) so the idea of a spring clean does come to mind, but it also reminds me that my love of RPGs has resulted in a collection larger than most specialist game stores.

I've had several late nights in succession this week and it all came to a head today when I was running my Introduction to Parallel Programming course. By the time I got to the debugging section (right at the end of the day) my head was in a complete fog and I found myself making trivial mistakes. On a related topic had an video interview with the University of Otago concerning my enrolment in the Master of Higher Education degree; they seem very keen on having me and especially as I already have a GradCert in a related subject, have many years of teaching experience, and involved in the International HPC Certification programme. Unusually for someone who spends a good portion on their time in the operations and administration side of the equation, I cracked out some old-fashion HTML/Javascript work this week as well, building all sorts of complex options for a fork of bjmoran's jobscript_generator, before falling back to a simpler version.

Which reminds me, yet again, that I really should get around to doing the Javascript programs for ship and world generation for Megatraveller. We played a session on Thursday night which went well for our team once again as we convinced a charismatic religious leader to take the opportunity to take control of a collapsing church and a society which had lost its faith in church, because there will still be such things in the far, far future. I'm looking forward to seeing how GM handles the rebellion, as we've managed to avoid it so far, and especially Hard Times, which must one of the most depressing RPG scenarios ever put into print. In other RPG-related activity, ticket sales for RuneQuest Con DownUnder 3 have slowed down to a crawl, which makes me nervous again about reaching the required number. At the same time I've asked a few of the old guard to contribute to the special issue of RPG Review whilst composing a couple of pieces myself.

I've had a couple of disappointing product experiences this week; actually one has been running for over a month, namely a purchase from laptop.com.au, which turned out to have the wrong specificiations (and broke shortly afterwards) and now the owner is insisting on a replacement rather than a refund. I've summarised the experience and have initiated proceedings at Consumer Affairs Victoria, along with the bank for a chargeback. The retailer in question has had form for years. The other product issue has been Ingress, which I recently noticed broke my 800+ day streak whilst I was in Perth. This is impossible as I hacked every day, several times a day, with glyphs and received items. Niantic support have been reading from a script making remarks about poor network connectivity etc (I'm on Optus Mobile). What is especially annoying is their insistence is that their software is perfect; despite the fact I suspect that they do not log hacks. It might prove the kicker for me to finally retire from Ingress - or kickstart my idea of "Operation Declare Victory".

It's been a busy week on the gaming front, with the most important even being the launch of tickets for RuneQuest Con Down Under III. It's shaping up will with guest speakers, panels, auctions, gaming sessions, larps, and all the Kryal Castle events, plus lashings of food, but I am of course in a mad panic until the requisite tickets are sold (I am hoping to hit the half-way mark by the end of the weekend). In addition to this there was our regular RuneQuest game on Sunday, plus my Exalted China on Thursday - and I finally caught up on a few of the write-ups which I had hitherto been neglectful. One very nice RPG-related event was a youngster in the US naming some dragons (FB link) after me as they were designing a world for Megatraveller.

Today was a class for Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC, and next Friday will be the same for Parallel Programming. I have also revived two old enrolments which I didn't follow through with a couple of years ago - one for the University of Otago for a Master in Higher Education, and one for the University of London for a Graduate Diploma in Economics. It's been a few years since I've picked up a degree and I really want to do these. I have this funny feeling that around my 60th birthday when I have ten degrees, speak eight languages, and have a financial buffer of several year's income I'll have sufficient self-confidence to seriously push myself forward in the workplace. In the meantime I just soldier on, hope that my ridiculous levels of productivity are even vaguely noticed by the powers that be, and have forlorn hopes that the people who make architecture designs are the people who have to work with the decisions. For what it is worth, went to the NTEU post-campaign celebration for our new agreement which was mostly a victory (direct action delivers the goods) at the Potter Museum of Art, which appropriately had an relevant exhibition on unions in the workplace.

Australia has had an absolute political circus of a week with the bourgeois-liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeing off an attempted party-coup lead by hard-right minister Peter Dutton on August 21st, only to experience a second leadership spill two days later. This time Turnbull stepped down and surprisingly Scott Morrison has now taken up the role of Prime Minister of Australia; a more thorough account is provided by the good folk at Wikipedia. Turnbull had always been too willing to compromise with the crazy right-wingers of the Liberal Party and was so ignorant of the economic pain of ordinary people to ensure public support. It was, briefly, impressive to see how he fought back in the last days but it was all too late. As for the contenders, Peter Dutton is an obvious extreme-right dullard who is widely loathed, and Scott Morrison whilst slightly more pragmatic but has no public appeal, and also comes from the far-right of the party and comes with the same economic baggage. So whilst the liberal and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are at open war with each other (and the latter winning), the public are increasingly annoyed at a party that has no concern with their increasing levels of inequality, increases in the cost-of-living, wage stagnation, and their virilent anti-unionism. People are furious as their behaviour and the Tories are going to get smacked for six when the Federal election is finally called.

Whilst the circus was unavoidable, there were other events to participate in over the past few days. Notably delivered a training day on Parallel Programming on Wednesday which was well attended by an interested class. The evening beforehand I went wrote a couple more code debugging examples for Valgrind and the GNU Debugger which are appropriate for the class and will fine-tune those even further for the next classes - four have been set up for the coming month of September. Thursday started with yet another hearing at VCAT where an application was made to sell Rick B's house; given that there is no argument about the need and no opposition, it surprises me that this requires a court case rather than simply being an administrative procedure. Later that day participated in a session of Megatraveller where the PCs finally caught up with a nanite distributing scientist-gone-wrong only to discover that they were doing the right thing. The GM added in some major player-created plot elements as part of the chase which worked quite well. Finally, today attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria today with Wen Len presenting on Dual-Booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu, which was appropriately sub-titled "the fun, the pain, the joy". As he pointed out that actual process itself is reasonably easy - it's the planning that's painful. It's quite a busy few days, and next week in Perth will be busy as well. Still, perhaps one of the happiest moments of it all is that I received confirmation a short time ago that Kyral Castle will be available to host RuneQuest Con DownUnder on November 11th - so that's official. And guess who will be leading the organisation of that event?

Went to see the Buzzcocks on Saturday night at the Corner Hotel. They played enthusiastically with a good selection of old classics and the crowd (mixed, but leaning heavily towards an older set) responded in kind. The mixing however was quite substandard; I'll readily admit that the Buzzcocks are probably not the easiest band to mix to given their selective use of feedback, others seem to be able to manage. It was a bit weird listening to guys in their fifties singing/playing "Sixteen Again" or telling us that they're an "Orgasm Addict". In the next few weeks will be seeing The Church at the same venue. Must get around to writing these up for Rocknerd.

Wrote an article for the Isocracy Network which has been reprinted on Left Focus Of State Borders, Wars and Refugees. One of the key elements of the article is the argument that significant climate change can lead to climate change refugees, who are not recognised under the Convention or Protocol. Tangentially, the Prime Minister minces no words for his justified contempt of deniers in an address to the Lowy Instutite. The opposition is in complete disarray on the subject, with a split forthcoming. Denial seems more the part of factional quest for power rather than science.

Have been playing a fair bit of a RuneQuest and HeroQuest as both my current campaigns are nearing their end; will be dedicating a fair bit of the next issue of RPG Review to said games and to Glorantha in general. Greg Stafford has agreed to an interview and there will be a range of rules options for RQ such as Divine intervention, character improvement, an extended HeroQuest 2 review (yes, extended from this) and conversion notes between the two systems.