Strange Maps: Octopoidal Prussia

The above map is from Strange Maps, a sub-blog at Big Think. It is from the recent post: War is the National Industry of Prussia.

It's a very nice map. Now just imagine, for a moment, that those tentacles stretching outwards from Prussia were actual tentacles spreading out across the landscape from a cyclopean prehuman monstrosity dredged-up from the bottom of the sea by bent Prussian scientists who probably went to medical school next to Baron Frankenstein's kid Victor. What other European or Colonial Kaiju might be lurking in the depths of the oceans or in some uncharted territory like Maple White Land?

Something to think about on a drizzly day...

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.

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.

• The Pop-Up City site has a piece on how to build an upgradable future using the Grid-Beam approach.
• They also have a page devoted to Ken Isaac's How to Build Your Own Living Structures, a real classic, and it's free.
• Amazon has a book on Grid-Beam Construction.
• And you might want to check out the website of the guy who wrote the above-mentioned book on Grid-Beam Construction.
• There's also a nice, handy and free PDF that talks about just what Grid-Beam Construction is and how to do it.
• And Greendump has a reprint/repost of the article referenced up above, but their site is worth taking a look at if any of this sort of thing appeals to you at all.

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?

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?

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...

Picasso Trove

A trove of hoarded Picasso artworks has recently been revealed in France.  The works are apparently all legitimate original pieces done by Picasso, but there is some skepticism as to how the current owners came to possess these 271 never-seen-before and completely-uncataloged items of incredible historical and artistic value.  You can find out more here, here, here, here and here.  (There's a slideshow here.) This is so very much the kind of thing that I want to have happen in Riskail...