An Index Page for our 2011 A-to-Z Challenge Posts

As you may have noticed, we participated in the 2011 A-to-Z Challenge and we completed the Challenge at both of our blogs that participated, Old School Heretic and Zalchis. We posted 35 monsters, at least one for each letter of the alphabet, as part of the Challenge over at Zalchis. There is a handy Index Page of all our Monsters there as well. Here at Old School Heretic we posted a few bonus posts and only had one major loss--the Elementals of Another Color post has gone missing and is presumed to have been eaten by Blogger. We didn't discover its loss until after E was long past, since it had been a timed-release post. We'll try to rebuild it later, after the next big project--overhauling the blogs to make them more navigable, accessible and useful.

All in all we feel that the Challenge was a very worthwhile thing to have participated in, and we're still reading through everyone else's entries--that will take at least another week to get through. We've discovered a few new blogs, noticed a few very popular tropes/memes amongst Rpg-bloggers (Jabberwocky, Yeti...) and we had a lot of fun. It was also a great way to get things a bit more organized and to clear-out some of the back-log of posts that have been waiting for their chance to get posted, like the completion of the Forbidden Planet two-parter.

Now we can turn our attentions to Astrology, Alchemy and some other fun stuff that has been simmering in the background for more than a year...

Here are our entries for the 2011 A-to-Z Challenge:

Atom Age Classics: Atomic Horror: The Genre of Atomic Horror and some fun clips.

• Bonus post: Arador Armor Library: A new entry into our Resource Links A-to-Z Indexing Project.

B-Movies on the Brain: We love B-Movies, and we'll be doing more posts inspired by classic (and not so classic) B-Movies, possibly even going so far as to dismantle them for salvageable parts for use in a game or scenario much as we did with Hammer's criminally-neglected Vampire Circus.

Chocolate in History, Chocolate in RPGs: A look at the very real and very intriguing impact and influence that chocolate has had in the 'real world' and how it could affect a game or other fictional setting. Part of the on-going RPG Brainstorming series.

Dubious Prophecies: Not every prophecy is 100% true or even divinely inspired. Avoid the sweeping-generalization approach that tends to stunt Fantasy and truncate plot-line arbitrarily. Embrace ambiguity and give things like Prophecy a bit more perspective...

• Bonus Post: D is for DM Muse
• Extra Bonus Post: Best D Ever--D is for Dinosores by Joesky the Brawler

Ellis Nadler's Cards of Wu
(Blogger seems to have swallowed up our post on Elementals of Another Color. We'll try to re-build this later, once we get caught-up...)

Forbidden Planet (Finally): The second-part of what we began in the Return of the C-57D post, all about our favorite Science Fiction movie of all time: Forbidden Planet, the ultimate Superscience Megadungeon of them all.

Gargantua: This incredible book offers a lot more than just a cornucopia of insults, mustard references and strange genealogical fiction that predates Philip Jose Farmer's spurious (pseudo)biographies and the entire  Wold Newton Universe by centuries. It's a funny, irreverent book by a witty, irascible monk who really knew how to skewer nitwits. We'll be mining this book for RPG-tables and such for some time to come, like this Table of Fictional Works cited in Gargantua that you could use for figuring out what might be Inside The Tome, whenever someone comes across an obscure book in a treasure hoard...and then there's that Brazen Tomb of Gargantua that leads off into all sorts of strange and wondrous places that we intend to explore.

H is for Historically Hardcore: A wonderful bit of charitable graphic design wasted on ingrates that has found a new life for itself, as all such wonderful projects deserve to do. This story is a great example of how not to let the ungrateful schmucks get you down. Some people just make it practically impossible to help them or to do anything resembling an honestly positive or altruistic act. Instead of letting obstructionists and a**holes block you or your work, just go another route, try another approach, and keep busy, it isn't like they actually do anything other than act like inert rocks...

Instrumentality of Mankind: Cordwainer Smith deserves to be much more widely read and appreciated. This was just one more small effort in that regard.

Jabberwocky: A wonderful poem, a great source of inspiration, and a movie by Terry Gilliam...

Kalvan: Not the Hobbes-kid, the Otherwhen Guy --We are big H. Beam Piper fans (remember our post on Space Viking?) and the Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen stories are incredibly inspiring, especially if you thought that fire-arms were too messy to introduce into a fantasy setting. Let Piper show you how it's done.

Lumiferous Aether: Superceded Scientific Theories are great fodder for fiction and gaming both. We'll be coming back to Luminiferous Aether as a resource to be cultivated and exploited within a fantasy & pseudoscience setting where our old friend Gnosiomandus serves on the Board of Academic Review...and it's not steampunk dammit.

Metals, Minerals & Materials: A massive collection of substances for use in building golems, making magic weapons, erecting Fuller-domed asteroid-castles, and just about anything else. Soon to be expanded and converted into a set of supporting sub-tables at DM Muse.

• Bonus Post: Monetizing the Orgasm. Ahem.

Nuclear Nightmares: Three of our favorite Nuclear Nightmares--what's yours?

Old Books: The Lost World: Taking a look at the book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and testing the waters in terms of how one might adopt or adapt bits and pieces from this classic work into ongoing fiction or game setting design, or just giving Professor Challenger a guest appearance...and this might be leading to something more detailed and involved now.

• Bonus Post: Organic Tags 

Post-Modern and Apochryphal Barsooms: An intriguing look at alternative versions of Mars that blend, combine or mingle Burrough's Barsoom with Wells' Mars and others.

Principles of Martian Technology: A Survey of options and approaches for further developing your own Martian Invaders, Wellsian-Tripods and the sorts of things that go along with them for your setting or game. Includes a Random Ray Weapons Table linking to resources that can help you develop dozens of nifty new death rays for your aliens, atomic mutants and what-not.

Public Domain Wargames: A detailed look at the wonderful resources and fun games available at the Web Grognard site.

• Bonus Post: Public Domain Clip-Art--Karen's Whimsy
• Bonus Out-of-Order Post: Picking Seeds From the Pulps: Gladiator

Quintessence: A look at this essential core concept of Alchemy & Alchymistry, both of which are things that you'll be seeing more of in the months to come at Old School Heretic & Netherwerks both. This illustration is from a deck of Alchymical Cards being developed as part of the Alchymystry project.

Revisiting the Public Domain: The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen: The first in a series of posts picking up where Old Books left-off, focused on developing cool magic items and the like from public domain fiction. Most of the items discovered and developed via this series will wind up in Schroedinger & Cave's Curiosities & Antiquities Shop in Wyrmspittle, just like Mr. Wells' Crystal Egg. Revisiting the PD will focus on scenario ideas, and characters, etc., while Found Objects will focus on the items, weapons, etc. Both will definitely feed into Wyrmspittle.

Superman Versus Wonderman: Nothing spoils creativity quite so much as litigation, except maybe for predatory IP Poaching, like Fox got caught doing. Isn't it interesting that the people most likely to talk in terms of free markets and free enterprise and letting the market sort things out are the very first people to call-up teams of lawyers to intervene on their behalf? It's a curious phenomenon all through every form of publishing we've been able to investigate so far...

• Bonus Post: How to Think Like Shakespeare at Big Think
• Bonus Post: Strange Maps--Octopoidal Prussia

Tons of Tesla Links: The jumping-off point for looking into Mister Tesla's works and writings in order to bring more of his style of Electricity, death rays and other fun stuff into your setting or game. We'll certainly be coming back to Tesla and his devices very soon...


The Time Travelers (1964): A real Atom Age Classic that deserves to be watched on fast-forward by anyone wanting to avoid the inevitable slow-bits and silliness. Fire Extinguishers are deadly to irradiated mutants if wielded by a centerfold...this is the movie that might have set that particular trope into motion...

The Time Tunnel: An Irwin Allen Megadungeon of Unspeakable Horrors: The classic Seventies TV series has some disturbing implications and connections to both Altair 4 and the Mythos of HPL, thanks in large part to Derleth and some bad taste creative pseudo-Wold Newtonry.

U is for The Ultimate Warrior: Not all apocalypses need be nuclear, the lowly pathogen, be it Martian-killing bacteria or some upgraded version of the Flu or even the Plague itself could destroy modern civilization just as well, if not better, leaving all those skyscrapers to rust and collapse into ruins for our descendants to go exploring...just hope they can hire-on some mercenaries like Yul Brynner to watch their backs...

Versimilitude: It's not just for Lovecraft's breakfast anymore.

Wonders of the World: Doesn't your world deserve a few Wonders? Who wants to adventure in a boring world devoid of Wonders, unless it's some really dreary radioactive wasteland like in The Time Travelers. But even then they had the launching pad inside a crater and maybe some other stuff we just never got to see. But then a major league Super-Scientific Wonder of the World would probably be kept secret and buried deep beneath the ground...like the Tic Toc Organization's Time Tunnel Complex.

X...The Amazing Mister X: A classic Turhan Bey pot-boiler that deals with an unscrupulous spiritualist-medium who fleeces his clients until things get, complicated, in a film noir-ish way. Not a bad movie at all, really. And you can watch it for free.

• Bonus Post: Xerophytes...plants that you'll see playing a major role in the ecology of places like Ain 4 for Humanspace Empires.

Y is for Youth: A Troublesome Thing: The inaugural post for the Troublesome Things series that looks at certain things like ESP, Reincarnation, Resurrection, or Youth within the context of Fantasy/SciFi and /or Gaming, and ways that it could be handled differently, so that it doesn't have to be a painful experience, a deal-breaker, or a DM's nightmare.

Z is for Zymurgy: After all the posts we did for all the blogs in April (over 150 posts), we deserve a beer and a break. Except that our new schedule kicks in with May and it's time to re-vise and re-design the blogs a bit, like we've been doing with Old School Heretic. What do you think of the ABC-itized links to the alphabetized Resource Links Index Pages along the lefthand sidebar?

Zymurgy

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Quote attributed to Ben Franklin

(Even if it does turn out to be a mis-quote, it's still a great quote that ought to have been said by Franklin anyhow.)

Zymurgy is the art and science of fermentation. It gives us beer, wine, cider, mead and stuff like perry or metheglin. It makes a lot of things possible. It saved civilization when you couldn't drink the water without catching typhus or worse stuff because hygiene hadn't been invented yet. It also facilitated a lot of socialization that would never have happened without getting some beer into the bellies of hunters and gatherers--it may well be the reason people began to raise grain, hops and so forth. Or not. This is a hypothesis that makes more sense when one is imbibing a few brews, and often doesn't stand up to close scrutiny without the benefit of a few good beers...much like a lot of people you can meet in places that dispense this stuff.

Ahem.

Zymurgy is also behind pickles and sauerkraut and Kim Chi--anything that is a product of the fermentation process. Pickling food not only cooks it, it is a way to preserve stuff for long periods of time. Cabbage, in one form or another has been a staple in the human diet for millennia, and sauerkraut likewise goes back a long, long ways. But instead of doing yet another really long and detailed essay on all this stuff, we've decided to go and enjoy a few beers, brats and kraut at our favorite local happy place of beer-ness.

If you want to have some fun, take a look at the Fantasy Brewmasters site. This is a project that is well worth toasting with a few well-chosen beers.

Youth: A Troublesome Thing

"Youth is wasted on the young."

George Bernard Shaw

Everyone grows old, they might not ever really grow up, but they do succumb to the effects of aging. We are all under the tyranny of the spectre of death. The one thing that all living things have in common is their certain, eventual extinction. Some find this comforting, others are fighting it tooth and nail with every conceivable scientific technique, newage mumbo-jumbo, and everything in-between.

Longevity is the aim of most of this research. Life Extension. Living longer. Keeping your wits about you as the inevitable still happens, only at a slower rate. It seems like a lot of wishful thinking to counter entropy, the way most of the research is being described. But that might be the fault of the media and various experts not wanting to trouble the public with too many things above a third grade reading level. A lot of unfounded claims have been bandied about, tons of new products, mostly snake-oil, are aimed at the ageing population. It's hard not to become jaded or cynical, but probably is a good idea to remain somewhat skeptical of it all.

If you dig deeper, there are some rather intriguing things coming out of the various clinics, labs and research facilities focusing on aging, longevity and how to make the most of the biological hand that's been dealt us in the great poker game of life. But hey, at least it isn't just a big crap shoot. Or is it? Was that Lovecraft again--shut up HPL. You're dead. Get back in your box. Man, is he starting to smell again.

Ahem.

Here are a few Longevity Links for you:

• Longevity Described and explained at Wikipedia
• The Longevity Game from a company that wants to handle your money and sell you insurance
• Simple Steps to Increase Your Life Expectancy so you can keep on keeping on
• One of Hundreds of Very Earnest Longevity Websites that seems aimed right at a fearful and vulnerable population--marketing 101 in a nutshell; find a need/fear and exploit it
• The International Longevity Center
• Longevity Advice from Everyday Health
• The Stanford Center on Longevity; includes an interesting article on The New Realities of an Older America
• Fight Aging!
• World Health Net's section on Aging/Longevity
• Kronos Longevity Research Institute, with a name like Kronos you know they must be serious about using their time wisely or else they have serious issues regarding offspring, not to mention indelicate dietary habits...
• Dr. Freidman's Longevity Page
• The National Institute on Aging; the US Government has noticed that people tend to get older
• Proto Mag: Is Aging a Disease?
• Maybe we can trick our genes into stopping the aging process?

Longevity is interesting. Life Extension is alluring. Both have a lot of promise and we probably ought to do some of these things, like eating right, getting more exercise, and all that stuff. Brush your teeth too. Wow, do a lot of people think that some spritzed-on spray is equivalent to bathing/showering--and you'd be appalled to learn how many people don't brush their teeth, let alone don't wash their hands after going to the rest room. But hey, we all want to live forever. Right?

Maybe not. Immortality has some serious downsides. But it does kinda beat the snot out of mortality, as long as we can dictate terms. No one wants to live out their lives as an elderly geriatric for ten thousand years, at least not voluntarily. Though it might be the sort of thing that happens when meddlesome hackers exploit terrifying viruxive weapons. We want to live longer, but not get older, after a certain point. No one would want to be locked in the perpetual hormonal hell of a thousand-year-long puberty.

Getting old sucks. The whole process of senescence is frightening and a major component of most monstrous beings across nearly all human cultures are tell-tale references to the characteristics of aging, senescence, decrepitude and dementia. We've been afraid of growing old possibly even longer than we've been afraid of dying. And that makes sense. Death is an end that might lead to some unknown something beyond it, while aging has no positive outcome other than death, with a whole lot of helplessness, frailties, vulnerabilities, and humiliations that just get worse and worse as the process continues. It's a horrifying, one-way transformation that changes us into things that we could never see ourselves being as children or young people.

Sure, it's unfair, wrong-headed and cruel to have this attitude, but it is ingrained within our culture. We not only worship youth via the advertising efforts of megacorporations, we villify aging--was the Wicked Old Witch a hot young babe? Nope. Dirty Old Man. Groddy Old Troll. Unless you visit Midwich or Dunwich, it's not the pretty children who are the monsters, but the old things. The Old Ones. Damn it HPL, I told you--get back in there or I'll get out the cattle prod again.

Good.

A clam can live for 374 years. A frikkin clam. You can look over the list of Long-Lived Organisms at Wikipedia. Biological Immortality might not be all that far-fetched, if one were able to reduce the number of accidents, disasters and unforeseen circumstances surrounding and impinging upon our lives. But that'd take a control freak even mightier than Dr. Forbin's Colossus, even with the upgrades that went along with merging with Guardian.

But even if we do eliminate all of that sort of spontaneity, chaos and involuntary change from our lives, what then? Toxic boredom. Endless millennia of narcissistic ennui that'd turn even Elric's stomach.

Longevity isn't the answer. It's a red herring. A grail-shaped beacon, if you will.

The answer is Youth.

Yeah.

Being young, not prolonging the onset of gradual decrepitude. We don't want to grow old slower, we want to remain fresh, young, vital and fully alive for a long, long time. Maybe for hundreds of years, thousands...millions?

Restoring the vitality and vigor of youth to an aging population is far more dangerous, seductive, and certain to become culturally obsessive than just letting people live for a few centuries in crowded tenements eating dogfood and watching gladiatorial soap operas on the vidwall.

Yick.

We don't want to grow old. We don't want to live next-door to the crazy cat-lady for a thousand years. We want to be young again. We want to be young in a way that most of us never were when we were young. Idealized. Remodeled and restructured from the stem-cells on upwards into perfect specimens of bright, young things. A million Marilyns and James Deans cruising along the avenues of continent-straddling cityscapes built from a warped sense of nostalgia and retro-style.

The future belongs to the young, because love is a battlefield.

But like Pat Benatar says--No Promises...

X...The Amazing Mr. X

The Amazing Mr. X, also known as The Spiritualist, is a Public Domain movie from 1948 that deals with an unscrupulous and manipulative Medium known as Mr. X and how he and his nefarious schemes are all bollixed and brought low by getting too involved with his victim (played by Lynn Bari). The film stars Turhan Bey which is worth a few bonus trivia points to those of our readers who are familiar with a certain 'Lost World' of the far future where our scaly friends maintain a significant, if often overlooked Empire...

You can find a copy of the film -for free- at the Internet Archive, or just watch it below, like we're doing. Hey, who took the popcorn?

Xerophytes

This photo has been made available via Wikimedia Commons

There are plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Most people think of desert-rooted cacti or aloe, but there are other forms of Xerophytes out in our world. The photo above is of the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary and Forest in Kerala, India, home to Giant Grizzled Squirrels, Mugger Crocodiles, Hanuman Langurs, and over 156 types of butterflies, amongst other interesting creatures and nearly a thousand different kinds of plants. It's a World Heritage Site. It's an incredible place, filled with bio-diversity and even some old dolmens from way, way back in time.

It is in Chinnar Forest that you can find a Xerophytic plant that doesn't play by the same rules as most of its brethren. Mixed-in with the thorny scrub forest are specimens of  Acacia arabica, the gum arabic tree of India. Acacia is also known as Wattle, Yellow Fever Acacia, Umbrella Acacia, Thorntrees, and Whistling Thorns.


Acacia grows along rivers and flourishes within the Sahel and Maghreb deserts, along the Nile, through the Middle East to India, Burma and Australia. Unlike cacti or sage or aloe, Acacia trees thrive in places where they tend to get periodically flooded, not just baked, they prefer both riverine and riparian terrain and generally tend to get spread farther and farther from their original native range by livestock more than anything.  Cattle and chicken devour the leaves and seed-pods. In fact the acacia pods are a fairly important staple feed-source for farmers raising poultry and cattle, wherever the tree can be found.


People eat the seed-pods, and some other parts of the Acacia as well. In Mexico you can get Guajes--acacia seed-pods--that are used in a number of dishes. You can find the pods on the menu in various Asian dishes, and if you look closely you'll find acacia listed as an ingredient in various sodas as well.


The very first (mostly) vegetarian spider (bagheera kiplingi) was discovered dining on the fleshy-tips of an Acacia. Weird, huh?


The bark contains astringents and tannins that are useful in ayurveda and herbal medicine.  Dioscorides found the Acacia a medically useful plant and recorded it in his Pharmacopeia/ Materia Medica books that have remained in use for over a thousand years -- indeed Dioscorides' works survived the Medieval period and continued to be referred to well into the 16th century. You can download a copy of Dioscorides, or a number of other, related Renaissance Medical Texts over at The Renaissance Man. You can also find a bunch of historic surgery texts and stuff on falconry there, so it's definitely worth a visit.

Xerophytes are interesting plants. They're not just crappy thorn-bushes or prickly cacti. They have a ton of uses and in the case of Acacia, they've been part of the human diet and pharmacopeia for thousands of years. Gum Arabic, perhaps the number one product derived from Acacia, has been traded and transported across the world for centuries. It's one of those natural resources that people never give a thought to, even though it is ubiquitous and in all sorts of things. Like in your favorite softdrink or sport beverage. Or anything else that requires a cheap emulsifier.

Just think what a bunch of unscrupulous terrorists or politicians might be able to accomplish if they really did monopolize the world supply of Gum Arabic...and then tried to with-hold it from the Coca Cola folks. We'd see some real-life Cola Wars then, wouldn't we? Who knew Billy Joel was a prophet?

Wonders of the World

Antipater of Sidon and Philo of Byzantium are the two most famous writers of travelogues credited (blamed?) with coming up with the earliest lists of the Seven Wonders of the World. Others were quick to jump into the mix and offer up their own lists, but these are the two dead old guys who tend to get mentioned most often.


The pretty-much definitive list of the Seven Wonders of the Classical/Ancient World goes as follows:

1. The Colossus of Rhodes
2. The Great Pyramid of Giza
3. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
4. The Lighthouse of Alexandria
5. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
6. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
7. Zeus' Statue at Olympia

Of all of these Seven Wonders, only the Great Pyramid of Giza still stands. It'll be here to watch the rise and fall of Humanspace Empires most likely.

from Wikimedia

The Colossus of Rhodes was toppled and broken during an earthquake in 226 BC and has yet to get rebuilt, stories about Arab armies knocking it down and melting the bronze scrap to make cannons or selling it all to some unnamed Jewish Merchant, not from Venice, but instead from Edessa may well just be the ravings of an apocalyptic monk trying to spread metaphor and anti-semitic propaganda whilst reframing things in terms of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. But what if an army did topple the gigantic bronze statue of a deity in decline and melt the consecrated metal down to make cannons or other weapons? It is also remarkable that the people of Rhodes never rebuilt the Colossus, which many sources attribute to the fear and paranoia that some vapor-whiffing oracle stirred up by way of Dubious Prophecies. Well, despite the old shrew's dire imprecations, Helios will once again straddle the harbor of Rhodes, but this time it'll be a Colossus in the form of a Light Sculpture, not a big, bronze hazard to aircraft. Let's just hope this has nothing to do with Dr. Forbin's cybernetic prodigy. That would be a real Nightmare.

from: Wikimedia

The Great Pyramid of Gizah is the oldest and largest pyramid within the Gizah Necropolis, which is already a fairly exclusive club. Did you know that the Great Pyramid has five boat-pits situated around it? It does. Two of them were discovered to be intact, so of course they yanked everything out of the pit and restored it. After all this time, and after all those RPG scenarios and bad novels that used the pyramids as a setting or backdrop, not once have we seen one mention the boat pits. (If you know of one, let us hear about it.) Likewise, you always see the Great Pyramid on this list, but not The Sphinx. Why is that? Oh, right. It didn't get excavated until they started digging around 1818, or 1867, or 1848 depending on whom you ask and which sources you check. But that's before Napolean's Scientific Expedition to Egypt. Yep. Old Man Bonaparte only got to see the Sphinx from the neck upwards. The rest was buried in the sand. In any case, you can get a copy of a truly well-drawn map of the Gizah Necropolis from Wikimedia that just might give you some good ideas for how to set-up a classical necropolis, complete with basalt roadways, boat-pits, queen pyramids, mortuary temples, etc. Or you can go map-up your own version of the Valley of Kings, if you dislike the crowded conditions of an urban-style necropolis such as the one at Gizah.

Right now we know of Three Interior Chambers within the Great Pyramid. A lot of people speculate that there are others, so far undiscovered. Just like the tunnels that are supposedly beneath the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid is the only one to contain both ascending and descending passageways. It has an unfinished Subterranean Chamber. The place fairly screams with potential as the site of some serious dungeoncrawling.

Would a high-powered Pharaoh-Lich build a pyramid? Probably. But they wouldn't leave the surrounding necropolis empty or deserted, would they? Imagine the pomp and ritual of competing undead dynasties carrying on their antiquated rites out in the desert. Would these dessicated potentates withdraw from ruling over the living, or would they try to preserve their power for centuries as tyrants, despots or enlightened god-kings?

Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Dutch artist Martin Heemskerck. 

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were named after a legendary Assyrian Queen, Semiramis, who managed to impress the ancient Greeks pretty thoroughly, which wasn't easy for a non-Greek, and especially for a woman. Like Arthur amongst Celts, but to a slightly lesser extent, Semiramis is sometimes considered to be a legend or some actual queen (like Shammuramat, wife [widowed] of King Shamshi-Adad V), sort of like how Boudicca gets mythologized out from under the very real historical person until we're no longer quite sure where the real-life warrior-woman ends and the comicbook fantasies of Xena begin. Of course with Semiramis we don't get the Hammer-ized Viking Queen, but we do get Mr. Hislop blaming her for inventing polytheism and goddess-worship. Though that whole bit about barbarisms and passions enflaming a pagan pleasure empire does sound kind of fun...

ahem.

The Hanging Gardens were either a poetic fantasy that has persisted over centuries, or a truly amazing technological marvel that ought to get a lot of people to re-think the engineering capabilities of Classical Cultures from Antiquity...and what that implies for builders of pseudo-ancient dungeons. Piranesi isn't the only model we can work from, and we're rather intrigued with the idea of running a Roofcrawl through a place based off of the Hanging Gardens...

A drawing of the lighthouse by German archaeologist Prof. H. Thiersch (1909).

The Lighthouse of Alexandria is cool, we like lighthouses and all, but really, why wouldn't you include the Library of Alexandria in this list? Oh. It's not an architectural marvel, not a monument. Okay. Maybe it should have been, and then it might not have burned. Or not. At least the Library of Alexandria has been rebuilt.

Lighthouses like the Pharos at Alexandria deserve some consideration, especially from those who are looking to further expand the Seas of O'SR Adventure Path with loads of islands, atolls, and other hazards to navigation. What kinds and sorts of lighthouses will players encounter out upon the Seas of O'SR?

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, thanks to Wikimedia

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is that stupendous tomb that gave us the word mausoleum, for which thousands of undertakers, revenants and ghouls are plenty thankful. There's a miniature model of the mausoleum in Istanbul. Architects are still inspired by this long-gone wonder of the ancient world. Like the Taj Mahal, it has a peculiar fascination for those who have come after, though the Taj Mahal is still standing and still quite striking. What sorts of mausoleums would great wizards, patriarchs, and mighty lords erect within a world filled with magic? Would they be content with damp, dank, holes in the ground, or would they create massive, towering edifices that reached upwards to the stars like the now lost Mausoleum at Halicarnassus? Tombs need not be buried beneath the ground. They can be just as gaudy and richly decorated as any temple or palace, and if the undead have any power or standing within a society, the Mausoleums might well transform into necro-thrones and worse. Mausolus ruled from Halicarnassus for about 24 years, building a Greek-inspired kingdom that promoted democracy and other Greek virtues along the coastline of Asia Minor. What could an undead king accomplish from his throne within a great Mausoleum?

Artemis of Ephesus

The Temple of  Artemis at Ephesus was built upon a very, very old sacred site that might have belonged originally to the Amazons. Much like how Notre Dame was constructed over an ancient pagan worship-site, the Temple of Artemis was built over the foundations and lingering traces of previous temples that we know very little about, really. Various expeditions and excavations have turned up signs of floods, amber and ivory-plaques carved with griffins and depictions of the Tree of Life. Experts might argue, fight or discuss the various findings and artifacts, and especially their significance, but they pretty much all agree that the site itself is very, very old.


What stuff lies beneath the older temples and cathedrals of your setting? What secrets lie beneath the marble walls of the currently active holy places within your world(s)? Have these sites switched hands like Hagia Sophia, or have they ever been re-built over their own ruins, or were they deliberately set-up to take advantage of some peculiar quirk of the prevailing ley-lines, interplanar geometries or some pre-existing site saturated with divine energies? Or were some of these temples erected over terrible things that have been shackled, chained, barred and locked away within the ecclessiastical vaults below like demonic parodies of Edmond Dantes or Barker's Rawhed Rex? Cthulhu isn't the only preternatural being with delusions of godhood wallowing about in the primordial slime. 

Things could get...complicated...digging about in the basements and sub-levels of old temples...

As a bonus, with the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, you get Heros--that guy whose name we're never to mention ever again. You know; the bright fellow who thought it would be a brilliant bit of self-marketing to set fire to the temple and by destroying something so beautiful his name would forever be famous. The putz. The unnameable putz.

Statue of Zeus at Olympos

Zeus' Statue at Olympos had to have been truly awe-inspiring. People are still talking about it, and the thing has been destroyed for quite a long while. The thing was over 40 feet tall, making it very close in overall size to Athena's statue in Nashville. They found Phidias' workshop in the 1950s and people have recreated most of his techniques. Like iron chisels and hammers, the basic tools employed haven't really changed a whole lot. There are new tools, but the same old tools that Phidias used are still in use today. It makes one wonder what  things might be like in a setting where clerically-indentured or hired sculptors are prevailed upon to build huge 40' tall mega statues of the various gods. How would Michelangelo have fared in such a trade? What would become of those artisans who botched a job, or offended the priests? Would competing sects vie for the most accurate or 'doctrinally correct' depiction of their deity? Would the gods themselves get involved?


Could get interesting...even...wonder-full.




ouch.


Fine.


It was one of those things that just needed to be written at the moment.


Ahem.


Here are a few more links to Wonders that you might find interesting or helpful in developing a few Wonders of Your Own World

• Athena in Nashville, really
• The site of the 'World's Leading Wonder Authority.'
• The Un-Museum has a page on Wonders of the World that includes a tour of the 7 sites plus a few extra.
• The Official New 7 Wonders of the World.
• The Travel Channel has some nice stuff on the Seven Wonders of the World (both old and new).

And Sanne Smit made this wonderful photo of the reconstructed Zeus at The Hermitage public domain, so you can use it too:

You can find the file HERE

Tons of TESLA Links

A Machine to End War

"It will be possible to destroy anything approaching within 200 miles. My invention will provide a wall of power," declares Tesla.

Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war. Like other inventors, I believed at one time that war could he stopped by making it more destructive. But I found that I was mistaken. I underestimated man's combative instinct, which it will take more than a century to breed out. We cannot abolish war by outlawing it. We cannot end it by disarming the strong. War can be stopped, not by making the strong weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself.Hitherto all devices that could be used for defense could also be utilized to serve for aggression. This nullified the value of the improvement for purposes of peace. But I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea and to perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense. If it is adopted, it will revolutionize the relations between nations. It will make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other means for attack. My invention requires a large plant, but once it is established it will he possible to destroy anything, men or machines, approaching within a radius of 200 miles. It will, so to speak, provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression.

If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in war. My discovery ends the menace of airplanes or submarines, but it insures the supremacy of the battleship, because battleships may be provided with some of the required equipment. There might still be war at sea, but no warship could successfully attack the shore line, as the coast equipment will be superior to the armament of any battleship.

I want to state explicitly that this invention of mine does not contemplate the use of any so-called "death rays." Rays are not applicable because they cannot be produced in requisite quantities and diminish rapidly in intensity with distance. All the energy of New York City (approximately two million horsepower) transformed into rays and projected twenty miles, could not kill a human being, because, according to a well known law of physics, it would disperse to such an extent as to be ineffectual.
My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. This wonderful feature will make it possible, among other things, to achieve undreamed-of results in television, for there will be almost no limit to the intensity of illumination, the size of the picture, or distance of projection. 

I do not say that there may not be several destructive wars before the world accepts my gift. I may not live to see its acceptance. But I am convinced that a century from now every nation will render itself immune from attack by my device or by a device based upon a similar principle. 

At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.

From: A Machine to End War

One hundred foot tall towers set along the perimeter of a country, each one capable of sending out a terrifying wall of coruscating electrical power that vaporizes enemy soldiers, tanks or planes at a range of 200 miles or more. When the Towers aren't blasting enemies into ashes, they provide power to domestic industry and light up everyone's house. It's an interesting scenario. If everyone has the ability to blast everyone else into smithereens, then perhaps they might look for some better ways to settle their differences--that's the line of reasoning at work here. It doesn't hold up. Consider the 1970s scifi movie Colossus: The Forbin Project that we recently featured. The US put its trust in a machine that would handle all the nuclear arsenal. Then the Soviets did the same. The two machines joined forces, became one integrated machine consciousness and used their total control of the nuclear weapons to institute a hyper-Orwellian dystopic tyranny that was far worse than the irrational craziness that preceded it. When people have the means to hurt one another equally, or to kill one another instantly, it will not level the imaginary playing field. Far from it. What it will do is usher in a terrifying era that will make the wild, wild west look like a Frankie Avalon & Annette Funicello beach movie. There will always be people who want to cause pain, or who desire to lash out, who are irrational and willing to transgress--even driven to transgress the boundaries that most sane or rational people would consider uncrossable or unassailable.

Like many idealistic scientific explorers and  inventors, Tesla was far more rational than most of the human population. That can be a real problem. It can also lead to conflicts and tension--and that makes for great stories and scenarios.

Teleforce

"I have made recent discoveries of inestimable value... The flying machine has completely demoralized the world, so much that in some cities, as London and Paris, people are in mortal fear from aerial bombing. The new means I have perfected afford absolute protection against this and other forms of attack. ... These new discoveries, which I have carried out experimentally on a limited scale, have created a profound impression. One of the most pressing problems seems to be the protection of London and I am writing to some influential friends in England hoping that my plan will be adopted without delay. The Russians are very anxious to render their borders safe against Japanese invasion and I have made them a proposal which is being seriously considered"

Tesla, in a letter to J. P. Morgan, dated Nov. 29, 1934

Equip a really big Van de Graf generator with some of Tesla's unique Open-Ended Vacuum Tubes and you get the workings of a weapon that uses electrostatic repulsion to accelerate tungsten particles 48 times the speed of sound--or even faster, potentially. Tesla saw this as a defensive weapon, to be used in stopping the bombing of cities like London in WWII.


So what happens if some one of Tesla's correspondents in the UK funds his scheme and they roll out a set of prototype Teleforce Anti-Aircraft Weapons and suddenly the Luftwaffe can't come within a hundred miles of London without suffering horrendous casualties?

How long would it take Churchill and company to order the new Teleforce Weapons to be adapted to use in the field, perhaps mounted on tank chassis and sent into the field? The British could start planning to invade France from across the Channel under the protective fire of batteries of Tesla Coil Towers that sweep the skies entirely clear of German aircraft--the enemy planes literally melt in mid-air. British battleships could blast gun emplacements up to a hundred miles inland with coruscating sheets and fireballs of electrical mayhem produced by oscillation weapons tuned to the resonant frequencies of large masses of steel, allowing them to cause the munitions stored in their magazines to explode. There might not be any need for the US to get involved. At least not right away. Of course, Tesla had also been talking to the Russians...




Oscillation Weapons: Fireballs and Ball Lightning at a Distance

A fireball is a strange phenomenon associated with lightning.  Some of the energy of the lightning stroke appears to become locked into a ball shaped structure which may be of any size from a couple of inches to a foot in diameter.  It looks like a perfect sphere, brightly incandescent and floats like a bubble, being easily carried by air currents.  They may last for a short time, from a fraction of a second to many seconds.  In this interval, during which they stay fairly close to the ground, they may come close to many objects without damaging them or being damaged by them.  Suddenly, for no known reason, the ball explodes doing as much damage as a bomb, if close to structures, and no damage if in the open. 

The fireball looked to me like a gigantically enlarged model of the tiny electron, one of the building blocks of matter, which acts as if it were just a spherical area of space in which an amount of energy was crystallized to give it structure.  I felt that if it were possible to discover how a large amount of energy was stored in this fairy bubble structure of a fireball a new insight might be gained into the structure of the electron and other fundamental particles of matter.  Also this method of storing energy could be applied to a thousand useful purposes.

and

Tesla became familiar with the destructive characteristics of fireballs in his experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899.  He produced them quite by accident and saw them, more than once, explode and shatter his tall mast and also destroy apparatus within his laboratory.  The destructive action accompanying the disintegration of a fireball, he declared, takes place with inconceivable violence. 

He studied the process by which they were produced, not because he wanted to produce them but in order to eliminate the conditions in which they were created.  It is not pleasant, he related, to have fireballs explode in your vicinity for they will destroy anything they come in contact with.

Both quoted sections are from Tesla Tries to Prevent WWII


Being able to create fireballs that destroyed everything they touched was a major hassle for Tesla during his experiments in Colorado in 1899. He spent a lot of time and effort trying to eliminate such phenomena. But what would have happened if Tesla's Oscillation/Resonance Weapons and/or his Teleforce weapons were mounted on some of Preston Tucker's 'Tiger' combat cars and given to George Patton's 2nd Armored Division...talk about some serious Hell on Wheels...

Great Balls of Fire

It is but a step, from learning how a high frequency current can explosively discharge a lower frequency current, to using the principle to design a system in which these explosions can be produced by intent.  The following process appears a possible one but no evidence is available that it is the one Tesla evolved: An oscillator, such as he used to send power wirelessly around the earth at Colorado Springs, is set in operation at a frequency to which a given warship is resonant.  The complex structure of a ship would provide a great number of spots in which electrical oscillations will be set up of a much higher frequency than those coursing through the ship as a whole.  These parasite currents will react on the main current causing the production of fireballs which by their explosions will destroy the ship, even more effectively than the explosion of the magazine which would also take place.  A second oscillator may be used to transmit the shorter wavelength current.

From: Tesla Tries to Prevent WWII

Consider the impact of a defense system that uses oscillation-type weapons to cause ammunition to explode at up to several hundred miles distance. In fact, according to some of Tesla's experiments and papers, he thought that it might be possible to cause an oscillation effect at any point on the Earth if one could just calculate and attune the pulse to the proper resonance. It's not quite a death-ray, nor really a force field, but it combines the nastier aspects of both into a powerful curtain of electrical energy that would necessitate a whole new kind of arms race to develop some sort of counter-measure or way to defeat or beat the oscillation-weapons. Burrowing torpedoes? Completely non-metallic zeppelins filled with harmless inert chemicals that form toxic clouds of killing gas when mixed? Counter-oscillation devices that set-up destructive dissonances within the defense-broadcasters?

Whatever form they might take, there will be counter-measures. There will be war. Weapons always have a way of getting used, just like secrets have a way of getting revealed.

Some Tesla Links

• Teleforce at wikipedia
• Electrical Oscillators--has some photos and diagrams
• One of the very, very best places to find Tesla's articles or articles about him & his work is Twenty First Century Books -- Includes The Tesla Canon
• Beam to Kill Army at 200 Miles
• Known Tesla Publications at Tesla Coil Builder's site
• Tesla Tidal Wave?
• Three Death-Ray articles Here, Here and Here (okay a fourth one)
• Zenneck Waves?
• Tesla's Egg of Columbus
• Wardenclyffe Tower at Wikipedia
• Wardenclyffe Tower at Wordsoup (nice photo)
• A Museum at Wardenclyffe?

Ten Tesla Publications

1. A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers (Delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888.)
2. On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena (Delivered before the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, February 1893, and before the National Electric Light Association, St. Louis, March 1893.) [Includes: On Electrical Resonance]
3. Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions (Century Magazine, April 1895, pp. 916-933.)
4. Plans to Dispense with Artillery of the Present Type (The Sun, New York, November 21, 1898) [Includes reference to: telautomaton: see picture here.]
5. Tesla Describes His Efforts in Various Fields of Work (Electrical Review - New York - Nov, 30, 1898/The Sun, New York, November 21, 1898)
6. Earth Electricity to Kill Monopoly (The World Sunday Magazine — March 8, 1896)
7. Electrical Drive for Battleships (New York Herald, February 25, 1917)
8. The Wonder World to be Created by Electricity (Manufacturer's Record, September 9, 1915)
9. Mister Tesla's Vision (New York Times, April 21, 1908)
10. The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires (Electrical World and Engineer, March 5, 1904)

[Bonus Link: The Problem of Increasing Human Energy]

Some Random-ish Tesla-ness to spark some ideas...

A Terrifying Thought:

"When I spoke of future warfare I meant that it should be conducted by direct application of electrical waves without the use of aerial engines or other implements of destruction.  This means, as I pointed out, would be ideal, for not only would the energy of war require no effort for the maintenance of its potentiality, but it would be productive in times of peace.  This is not a dream.  Even now wireless power plants could be constructed by which any region of the globe might be rendered uninhabitable without subjecting the population of other parts to serious danger or inconvenience."

From Mister Tesla's Vision

Communicating With the Martians

"At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars, nor would there be any great difficulty in recording signals transmitted to us by the inhabitants of that planet, if they be skilled electricians. Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid. Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number "four," say, in reply to the signal "one, two, three." The Martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signaled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. To convey a knowledge of form by such means is, while very difficult, not impossible, and I have already found a way of doing it.

What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come? For that it will some time be accomplished must be clear to every thoughtful being."

From: Talking With Planets

Electric Gun

The present international conflict is a powerful stimulus to invention of destructive devices and implements. An electric gun will soon be brought out. The wonder is that it was not invented long ago. Dirigibles and aeroplanes will be furnished with small electric generators of high tension, from which the deadly currents will be conveyed through thin wires to the ground. Battleships and submarines will be provided with electric and magnetic feelers so delicate that the approach of any body under water or in darkness may be easily detected. Torpedoes and floating mines will direct themselves automatically and without fail get in fatal contact with the object to be destroyed - in fact, these are almost in sight. The art of telautomatics, or wireless control of automatic machines at a distance, will play a very important role in future wars and, possibly, in the later phases of the present one. Such contrivances, which act as if endowed with intelligence, may take the shape of aeroplanes, balloons, automobiles, surface, or underwater boats, or any other form according to the requirement in each special case. They will have far greater ranges and will be much more destructive than the implements now employed. I believe that the telautomatic aerial torpedo will make the large siege gun, on which so much dependence is now placed, utterly obsolete.

From: Wonders of the Future

Ulivi Ray  (click here for more on Guilo Ulivi)

"The 'Ulivi ray' really was transplanted from this country to Italy," asserted Dr. Tesla. "It was simply an adaptation of my ultra-powerful high-frequency phenomena as carried out in Colorado and cited previously. With a powerful oscillator developing thousands of horsepower it would become readily possible to detonate powder and munition magazines by means of the high frequency currents induced in every bit of metal, even when located five to six miles away and more. Even a powder can would have a potential of 6,000 to 7,000 volts induced in it at that distance.
"At the time of those tests I succeeded in producing the most powerful X-rays ever seen. I could stand at a distance of 100 feet from the X-ray apparatus and see the bones of the hand clearly with the aid of a fluoroscope screen; and I could have easily seen them at a distance several times this by utilizing suitable power. In fact, I could not then procure X-ray generators to handle even a small fraction of the power I had available. But I now have apparatus designed whereby this tremendous energy of hundreds of kilowatts can be successfully transformed into X-rays."

From: Tesla's Views on Electricity and the War

Dashing Cherished Scientific Illusions

"I resumed the work very much encouraged and from that date to 1896 advanced slowly but steadily, making a number of improvements the chief of which was my system ofconcatenated tuned circuits and method of regulation, now universally adopted.  In the summer of 1897 Lord Kelvin happened to pass thru New York and honored me by a visit to my laboratory where I entertained him with demonstrations in support of my wireless theory.  He was fairly carried away with what he saw but, nevertheless, condemned my project in emphatic terms, qualifying it as something impossible, "an illusion and a snare." I had expected his approval and was pained and surprised.  But the next day he returned and gave me a better opportunity for explanation of the advances I had made and of the true principles underlying the system I had evolved.  Suddenly he remarked with evident astonishment: "Then you are not making use of Hertz waves?" "Certainly not," I replied, “these are radiations”.  No energy could be economically transmitted to a distance by any such agency.  In my system the process is one of true conduction which, theoretically, can be effected at the greatest distance without appreciable loss." I can never forget the magic change that came over the illustrious philosopher the moment he freed himself from that erroneous impression.  The skeptic who would not believe was suddenly transformed into the warmest of supporters.  He parted from me not only thoroly convinced of the scientific soundness of the idea but strongly exprest his confidence in its success.  In my exposition to him I resorted to the following mechanical analogues of my own and the Hertz wave system."

From: Famous Scientific Illusions

Cheapness of Gasoline

Some experts, whom I have credited with better knowledge, have for years contended that my proposals to transmit power without wires are sheer nonsense but I note that they are growing more cautious every day.  The latest objection to my system is found in the cheapness of gasoline.  These men labor under the impression that the energy flows in all directions and that, therefore, only a minute amount can be recovered in any individual receiver.  But this is far from being so.  The power is conveyed in only one direction, from the transmitter to the receiver, and none of it is lost elsewhere.  It is perfectly practicable to recover at any point of the globe energy enough for driving an airplane, or a pleasure boat or for lighting a dwelling.  I am especially sanguine in regard to the lighting of isolated places and believe that a more economical and convenient method can hardly be devised.  The future will show whether my foresight is as accurate now as it has proved heretofore.

From: Famous Scientific Illusions