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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Need Time to Recuperate

We're back after unplanned and unexpected emergency gallbladder removal surgery. We're taking the next week or so for recovery. We will resume posting when we are able.

Monday, February 14, 2011

D-Total

The D-Total. It's a monster die from Gamescience. We'd like to hear from someone who has actually used this particular die in a game. It sounds intriguing...and it just might be fun to work into our current RPG efforts...

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Resource Links: B

Last Updated: February 9, 2014


Loads of good real-science stuff written by a guy who isn't boring.

We read this newsletter every day.

Yeah, the guy who did Fritz the Cat, Wizards, and the first rotoscope version of LotR...and that Fire & Ice movie that we just saw at the Trylon...

The Best Bio of E. A. Poe ever. At least until we find a better one.

The Best Copyright-Free Photo Libraries is a handy reference over at the Dor Gov Watch site and details a bunch of online, public domain photos that are all yours for the low price of free.

This dovetails directly into Best Photos site, where besides the nice collections of flowers, mountains, etc. they have over a thousand uncategorized photos that might be more useful for potential RPG-type usage...just saying...

I was researching Beowulf at one point. This site is particularly good, if you're likewise digging into this hoary old classic.

From the site: "Beyond Victoriana is the oldest-running blog about multicultural steampunk and retro-futurism--that is, steampunk outside of a Western-dominant, Eurocentric framework. Founded in 2009,Beyond Victoriana focuses on non-Western cultures, underrepresented minorities in Western histories (Asian / Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, First Nation, Hispanic, black / African & other marginalized identities), and the cultural intersection between the West and the non-West."

This is an amazing blog that will let you while away the hours looking at all the pretty pictures--there is a very high Rabbit Hole Index on this one!

A site that has over 2,000 ebooks for you...

This site will give you plenty to ponder.

All the cool French pulps, comics and more--translated into English.

Essential information on the copyright realities of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction that we wish a lot of people had read/known about long, long ago...

The ultimate repository of Blackmoor Materials on the net.

This is a site that will give you access to all sorts of blueprints, diagrams, etc. You can request vector-versions of some of the schematics and diagrams as well. A thoroughly useful site. 

One of the coolest robots you not have ever heard about. go here and find out all about this amazing specimen of mechanical manhood.

Packs a lot of interesting stuff into their website, and it is well worth taking a look at, especially if you've never spent a few hours reading through everything ...

If you write, then read this blog. Really.

a treasure trove looted from across the world during the height of the largest and greatest empire in history (so far), and it's all made available to anyone, anywhere with the click of a mouse.



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Monday, February 7, 2011

From Minnesota...Tether



This was shot in Minnesota, in Stillwater, by graduates of Stillwater High School. Local kids done good. Very cool.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

It Is Pitch Dark

We just discovered a wonderful blog that delivers some great gamer-oriented humor. It is called It Is Pitch Dark and it is very, very funny and we recommend it highly. The link: http://itispitchdark.blogspot.com/

Friday, February 4, 2011

Random Caverns Produced by Gozzy's Random Cave Generator
http://www.gozzys.com/article.php?cm_id=11
Over at Gozzy's Cartographic Emporium, there is a nifty Random Cavern Generator that we used to produce the map up above. The generator gives you a few choices in terms of number of openings, background, floor type, whether or not you want an overlay grid, and size. It's a very nice, and very handy tool, and it's free, so why not give it a try?

Resource Links: A

Last Updated: February 9, 2014



A Blog About History
We love history. So do these folks. Loads of good history-stuff here.

A Hard Look at D&D is an article from The Forge site that really peels back the rose-colored glasses and challenges some cherished OSR notions. The points raised are valid, as far as they go, but at the same time they do tend to gloss over the continual allure of the older systems. It's an opinion piece. It could easily serve as a straw-man for someone else to knock out a few blog posts about...

Academic Info
A serious list of online subject guides from academic sources. This is a treasure trove of research possibilities. the list of Zoological Museums was kinda handy just recently...

Acronym Required is a website that delivers well thought-out articles on science and technology that doesn't shy away from economics or politics. You may or may not agree with them on some things, but they will give you something to think about.

Action Squad
Modern-day adventurers who operate out of Minneapolis.

Airship Ambassador
a handy site that divulges all the secrets of what steampunk is all about. Just in case you were wondering...

Art, Context & Enquiry. If that doesn't throw you, then maybe it might appeal to you. It is a research and publishing organisation that focuses on contemporary art through Afterall OnlineAfterall Journal and Afterall Books.

Alchemy
THE Alchemy Site.

Alchemy: Names from Alchemy
A compilation of names derived from Alchemy texts.

Alt Hist
A magazine devoted to Historical Fiction and Alternative History.

Alternate History
Discussion forums devoted to Alternate history

Alternate History Weekly Update
A blog devoted to Alternate History.

Alternative Dictionaries
A guide to alternative dictionaries that cover slang, etc. Fairly handy for digging into etymologies and derivations of swear words and other fun stuff.

Ansible
A science fiction fan-site that has a lot to offer. A lot. Digital tons of great links, reviews, and much, much more.

Antique Words
A selection of old words that have lost tehir meaning, gained new interpretations or just plain don't get much use any more as compiled and presented by none other than C. J. Cherryh.

Arador Armor Library
An impressive online resource for all things medieval-armor-esque. Highly recommended! We also posed at it here.

Archive-Org
The Internet Archive. Probably one of the single most useful websites in existence. Here you can browse through millions of Texts, Audio Clips, Moving Images, Live Music, and even Software. This is also the place to go if you want to make use of the Wayback Machine to search defunct websites. The Open Education Project is another thing to take a look at sometime...

Arcosanti is the real-world effort to build an arcology started in 1970 by Paolo Soleri. The Wikipedia entry for Arcosanti is also useful.

The Armour Archive
A place to learn all about Armor that you can try to make. Mostly aimed at SCA-types, it can still come in handy. They have a ton of Essays on Armoring, A Pattern Archive, and lots, lots more.

Atmosphere in Weird Fiction
The timeless essay by Clark Ashton Smith is a brief, but very cogent essay on how to evoke a suitable atmosphere within fiction calculated to have a weird edge to it--the Eldritch Dark site where this essay is hosted is another incredibly useful resource for anyone at all interested in Clark Ashton Smith.

Atomic Rockets is your one-stop shop for all things having to do with Atomic Rockets, literally. Really.

Authorlink
A site that might be useful for authors, but we're still investigating it--if you know anything or have some experience with these folks please drop us a line!

Authorama
A site that offers a bunch of free, downloadable ebook versions of various public domain titles. You can find Aristotle's Poetics, under A, for example.

Avalon Project
Scanned copies of old documents from as far back as we can hope to go without a time machine. A great site for doing some historical research, especially in terms of law and diplomacy. Thanks Yale!



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Resource Link Clean-Up

So, what do you readers think about our taking all those random piles of resource links we've accumulated along the right-hand side of the blog and sorting them into a series of regularly updated posts arranged in alphabetical order and linked to from a single box over on the right instead of the messy piles that are there currently?

Any thoughts?

Testing...

RPG Brainstorming: Weird Archaeology


Bosnian Pyramids anyone?


Oh yeah, those old things--they've been lying around for ages...

Artistic Influences: Odilon Redon


Odilon Redon. Perhaps Huysmans says it best:
"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium."

A Rebours (Against Nature / Against the Grain), J.K. Huysmans, 1884


Cactus Man
Some Odilon Redon Links
Some samples of Odilon Redon's work:

Redon winged-man
The Winged Man by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon.cyclops
Cyclops by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon.eye-balloon
Eye Balloon by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon spirit-forest
Spirit of the Forest by Odilon Redon

and...

Oodilon Redon - Die Ursprünge
Die Ursprunge by Odilon Redon

and...

Evocation Odilon Redon
Evocation by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon crying-spider
Crying Spider by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon mystical-knight
Mystical Knight by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon smiling-spider
Smiling Spider by Odilon Redon

RPG Brainstorming: Bad News Rising

The popular Law & Order franchise likes to feature stories that they refer to as 'Ripped from Today's Headlines.' That seems to have paid off nicely for them. It's a nice approach that delivers readily-accessible and immediately identifiable fare for their TV audience. It's also a strategy that can be adapted to various genres of role-playing games, and not just Cthulhu-derivatives or gaudy morons-in-tights games. They had celebrities in the 1400s-1600s (mostly they were called Royalty, but a few adventurers made the grade), and they had their share of scandals (Inquisition anyone? How about all those wives of Henry's? The whole Catholoc-Protestant squabbling...there's plenty there if you want to go digging. We'll even have a set of links just for this kind of research shortly.) But what if you went past the screaming headlines and dug a bit deeper into the murky underbelly of modern news reportage? We live in incredibly interesting times. What sorts of stuff can we find lurking just past the hype, glitz and endless parade of reality-drivel?  Let's take a look, shall we?

Taking The Long Term Viewpoint
Discover Magazine has an article on Which Nations Think Over the Long Term that opens-up some interesting possibilities to consider and maybe adapt for an on-going campaign.  The concept of time preference isn't exactly anything new, but the research into it is very interesting and rife with implications that could help to suggest some strategies that extremely long-lived or even undead beings might develop.

Some Examples of Villains with a Long-Term Viewpoint
  • Sax Rohmer's insidious villain Fu Manchu was a consummate master of this sort of long-term preparation, even though inspector Nayland Smith still managed to thwart those best laid plans of perfidy and peril. You could do a lot worse than to develop your own Fun Manchu-style uber-villain. And no, not the lame movie villain, but the terrifying genius who makes Moriarty tremble.
  • Even worse is Bram Stoker's Dracula, a character that just about every comics publisher, myriad TV-programs, and countless authors have appropriated and re-interpreted to the point that it is almost expected that the Count should make at least a token appearance in every fictional universe. So long as the Count gets enough blood in his diet and avoids a stake in the heart, he can quietly out-wait and out-wit his opponents. The strategic genius of a great warlord such as Dracula has almost always been given short-shrift in order to facilitate the victory of weaker heroes. A great monster like Dracula demands better heroes. He also would never stoop to doing penny-ante stuff first-hand--he would have a vast network of minions and disciples. Dracula isn't a moron. He's potentially the single most dangerous being you'll ever run up against, and the real terrifying part of his power is not his physical strength or any of his showy powers--it's his ruthlessness, his coldly calculated logic, his vast knowledge, and his followers. You don't get to fight the Count until you've learned enough, grown powerful enough, or finally figured out just who was behind all those other encounters, disasters, assassination attempts, etc. Then you are in a world of hurt beyond imagining, because he's Dracula, and you're either going to serve him or suffer a fate worse than death, like being bankrupted, excommunicated, black-listed, slandered in all the papers, shut-out from all grants, cut-off from all financial support, and dropped from the social register...and then it starts to get nasty...
  • The Abominable Doctor Phibes, as portrayed by the one and only Vincent Price, is a truly classic villain who discovers a way to cheat death itself in order to wreck vengeance upon his enemies with a series of execution-style killings inspired by the Biblical Plagues. If you knew that death wasn't the end and that you could take your time to get things right, and you were half as smart as the bad Doctor himself...you wouldn't waste time on small-time antics or easy-to-spot or foil capers. You'd build things up in the background, carefully orchestrate everything like a machiavellian chess match and have the so-called good guys out manuvered ten moves ahead. One good way to simulate this is to have a set of options at hand such as ten major schemes currently in the works, so that if the players mess up any one of them, the villain can shift over to another one. Always keep them guessing and always try to use the players as lab rats, test subjects, or unwitting dupes. Not only will it motivate them to go after the villain, it'll give them a real sense of investment, and of accomplishment once they do topple the villain once and for all...or at least until they return from the dead one more time...
  • Ardeth Bey...The Mummy...as portrayed by Boris Karloff in the original Universal movie. Old Ardeth not only removes all of his accursed bandages and dons a snappy fez, he takes up residence in the older, less well-policed parts of town and quickly asserts himself as a major underworld/cult leader of considerable power and influence. He uses obscure knowledge, old pacts and ancestral blood-oaths, possibly even spells to get the descendents of ancient slaves to serve him even as he wages a psychic war upon all those who oppose him. If he weren't so obsessed with the supposed reincarnation of the one-time love of his life, he would have taken over a sizable portion of the Middle East in a matter of months, but just like King Kong, 'twas beauty that killed the beast, and in the end it is Ardeth Bey's obsession with the femme fatale that ends his career of terror, assassination, and worse. Just imagine what would have happened if the girl had been killed accidentally, or if the forces of Ardeth Bey had managed to spirit her away from the heroes--and then either co-opted, misdirected or killed those same heroes--the world would have entered a new dark age indeed.
There are other examples, maybe we'll revisit this notion again in the weeks ahead. Villains who really do plan ahead and strategize for the long term are incredibly difficult challenges, and not exactly suited to the casual one-off scenarios, but for a campaign that lasts a few dozen session-episodes or more--they are priceless.

Surrealist Composition as Blogging Technique

Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft.
Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind's concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be tempted to read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come of itself; and this is self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but some sentence alien to our conscious thought clamors for outward expression. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so the other sentences, if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have involved even a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run matter little, because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream of absolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should particularly distrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there is a forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line that has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any letter, l for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow.

From: What is Surrealism? an essay by Andre Breton

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Local Currencies?



Berkshares is a 2009 finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge and you can find their entry in the Idea Index for the BFC. Berkshares is part of the E. F. Schumacher Society and is part of the Relocalization and so-called 'slow money' efforts of people who want an alternative to what is already in-place and that they see as failing.

Whether they are right or wrong doesn't really interest us. What does, is the notion of an alternative, local currency -- a decentralized form of currency that enables an old fashioned sort of cooperative/communal capitalism rooted in personal relationships on a grassroots level -- that is absolutely fascinating and will definitely find a way into Riskail, one way or another...

Grid-Beam Construction-Kits

Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Grid-Beam Construction is a form of DIY backyard engineering and design that sort of took off in the Seventies and might, maybe, possibly make something of a comeback one of these days. It is a lot like a grown-up version of those old fashioned Erector Sets with an IKEA vibe that makes it seem like a possible big-deal in the wake of such things as MAKE magazine and the whole resurgence of the DIY movement.

A system much like the Grid-Beam Construction Kit is at the heart of the Monarchist colony-saucers in Riskail, enabling these groups to disassemble and reassemble various elements of their vessels to establish their base-camps, settlements or proto-towns.

Here are a few links pertaining to Grid-Beam systems that you might find useful.

Three Timely Things

Time keeps on ticking...

The Timebank project by eflux. A very interesting project that gets people to re-evaluate their relationship to time/money. This might just have some implications for how certain segments of Riskail's economy is handled, especially amongst the underclasses and those lacking in Inheritance...

Speaking of time, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe has been a major success and the compiled results of this seven-year program are now available for free at the WMPA Results page. The results are fascinating reading, and full of inspiring ideas for fiction, gaming and other applications. We now have sufficient data to begin testing for dark energy, there are definite signs of cosmic inflation, and these results have considerably tightened up the Standard Cosmological Model. For science-geeks this is cool stuff. If it sounds like so much gobbledygook-babble, you can skip it, though there are some pretty pictures available at the site and the Build-a-Universe tool is a lot of fun even if you don't give a fig about the science involved.

Here's a guy who claimed to have done some time travel back in 2007...what's he been up to since then?

Quick Read on Ebook sales...

If you are at all interested in ebook sales, then this recent article might be of some use to you. We thought it was very interesting that Amazon now discloses that they are selling 3 ebooks to every 1 hardcover.

Healthier, Smarter, Happier: Really?

Transhumanism has seemingly coalesced around the banner of the H+ slogan 'Healthier, Smarter, Happier.' There are other slogans, other viewpoints, for sure, but this is one that is getting a fair amount of press and media coverage, and that makes it more likely to leak over into mainstream consciousness than say the debate over personal-level integration of nanoassembly processes or some of the more out there Extropian stuff.

Who can argue with a movement that wants to empower all of us with the best possible health, eliminating most forms of disease and promoting a massive upgrade in overall levels of intelligence and education as well as promoting happiness as an attainable and desirable immediate outcome, not something to be endlessly deferred in subservience to outmoded medieval-era slave-scripts? Quite a few people. With good reason.

Letting tiny machines loose inside people's bodies is scary stuff. For many lay-persons, the notion of nanoscale manipulation is emotionally loaded and confusing if not outright terrifying. It's uncomfortably close to manufactured plagues and germ warfare experiments, for one thing. It also crosses the line between treating illness, rectifying defects and performing enhancements or making drastic changes. Who determines what features or traits are defective or need to be replaced? Who decides what level of enhancement is enough? Remember the so called racial hygiene programs of the Twenties & Thirties that morphed into 'clinics' in the US and elsewhere? Sweden, for example, had a race hygiene program in operation until the 1970s. What sorts of things would a clinic adopting invasive nanotechnology get up to if it could operate under the aegis of a particular political party, ideology or religion? Scary stuff? You bet.

When we gain the ability to erase unwanted traits...what traits become unwanted? If we gain the ability to enhance physical ability, raise intelligence and prolong lifespan, do we do this evenly, across the board and with equality for all, or do some get it and others get the shaft? Do we get a very different sort of Haves versus HaveNots dichotomy that leads to a very messy and quite literal type of class warfare?

Will those who wish to abstain be able to remain untainted by the swarms of nanomachines let loose into the biosphere by utopia-seeking first-adopters? Will the various systems come into conflict? Is it all going to be one massive hyper-Darwinian nanoscale slugfest betwixt and between the various competing schemes? Will we get the option to be dual-booting, using more than one modality simultaneously? Or will we get colonized by the outfit with the biggest and best marketing budget?

Synchronicity

Carl Jung's concept of Synchronicity as a relationship between ideas/concepts
Synchronicity is a fascinating concept that C. G. Jung gave a lot of consideration to, and Arthur Koestler did a lot of development in regards to. So have quite a few others who've followed after these intellectual titans.

In a nutshell, Synchronicity is all about a sort of quantum mechanics-like spooky action at a distance sort of process that takes place within/among human minds/consciousness whereby ideas and concepts can manifest simultaneously in multiple places at once. Consider the invention of radio and whether it was Edison or Marconi or whomever who really got there first. Some ideas are so powerful and dynamic in their own right that they are going to happen with or without the cooperation of those who are attuned to them or supposedly acting as a receiver or channel for them. Concepts, ideas, these abstract things that come into manifest expression via human agency might have a will, even a form of consciousness of their own--they might well be players in their own right, and not just sterile commodities or passive psychological resources.

Ideas may have their own ideas. Ideology might well function within an abstract ecology that we have yet to really fathom, let alone appreciate or begin to effectively explore and exploit meaningfully.

Can Synchronicity be harnessed to serve as a strange new form of technology? Can we initiate a dialogue with the abstract forces that impose ideas upon our minds and perhaps enter into a more effective, more mutually beneficial sort of collaboration with these things instead of relying on the stone age level of hoping for inspiration, courting Muses and madness? Can creativity become a factual, quantifiable science? Should it?

Intriguing territory for speculation, don't you think?

We Didn't Make This Up...But We Wish We Had...

There is a Buddhist Temple in Thailand decorated with images of Superman, Keanu Reeves-as-Neo, and a host of other Western Pop Cultural Icons that simply has to be seen to be believed. You can see a few pictures of it at the FEELguide site. You can also catch the Re-Post of it over at Boing-Boing if you like. It's not Swarovski's Kristallwelt...but it is just as mind-blowing in many respects...and you might also want to take a look at Jefferey J. Kripal's article: PsiFi: Popular Culture and the Paranormal over at Boing-Boing as well. Anyone who name-checks Arthur Koestler and offers up the Library Angels right out of the chute is okay by us--and the article is a fun read--as well as a wonderful bit of synchronicity.

Planet Algol -- The Austrian Franchise?

Click on this link to see the Swarovski Giant...he's a little shy...
Swarovski Kristallwelten - Travel Photos and Pictures - IgoUgo

The homepage for Swarovski Kristallwelten is a tremendously bizarre, yet very intriguing artifact of ostentation, ornamentation and incredibly overdone ...stuff... that has got to be worthy of at least one level in a megadunceon, say on Planet Algol, perhaps? This place is even more surreal that anyhting you'll find in Alphaville...or the Winchster Mansion...combined.

Austria Time explores Swarovski's Kristallwelten...watch out for that drooling Tyrolian giant...


A quick visual survey of the interior of the Museum...


If anyone does a scenario or dungeon level or even an RPG based on Swarovski's Kristallwelten...it would be mind-bendingly bizarre without having to change a thing...it just needs a few stats...

Buckminster Fuller Challenge


The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an amazing contest dedicated to the memory of Buckminster Fuller. The Challenge is an annual international design competition awarding $100,000 for those designs/strategies that deliver quote "...the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems. It attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world's complex problems." end quote.

They provide a Quick Facts page, a good Bio on Bucky, and a nice selection of Fuller-oriented/derived Resources that just might come in handy for anyone interested in bringing a bit more of Buckminster Fuller's ideas, concepts or designs into their fictional or gaming efforts.

You can find the winners for 2008, 2009, and 2010 at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge site.

They also provide a rather interesting Idea Index that holds over 460 ideas/designs/concepts that have been submitted to the competition. There are some amazingly cool things in this Index...and many of them deserve to be considered, discussed, and even supported. Some of these ideas will definitely be part of the future, one way or another. Just like Geodesic Domes or the Dymaxion-Trolleys in Riskail...

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Kepler-11

"Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth." For more details go to the Kepler Mission Pages over at NASA.

Incredible stuff. Kepler-11's six planets are all larger than Earth and most are in much closer to their sun than anything in our system. This solar system challenges a lot of conventional thinking about how planets form and how they take up orbit around their stars.

What an interesting arrangement this system has, with very large bodies orbiting in really close like that...some of these planets might be worth a bit of exploration. Who knows what all might be lurking down in the cooler depths of a vast, rocky canyon-world just at the edges of the Goldilocks-Zone like Kepler-11g?

The Herculoids Next Door


Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Scanners (1981) - trailer



Scanners. One of David Cronenberg's earlier, more kind and gentle horror pictures. This is the sort of psionics to bring into a game...

Geomorphs: A Guide to What's Out There


Being a Hopefully Somewhat-Useful Compendium of Links, Posts, Articles and Resources pertaining to the High and Noble Art of Geomorph Design, Construction and Ultimately their Actual Utilization Within an RPG Environment

  
What are Geomorphs Good For--How Do I Use Them?
Who Actually Makes Geomorphs & Where Can I Find Some Geomorphs?
What Can I Do With Geomorphs?

This is by no means complete and will get periodically updated as new Geomorph-makers arise and new developments shake the very foundations of contemporary Geomorph making.