Another Weird Yule

Yesterday, the several members of my G+ Weird Adventures group reunited for a holiday-themed adventure. It was Yule-time in the City, and the "Team Victory" Detective Agency was holding an office party with Cornelius Doyle, Erskine Loone, and Boris Borofsky in attendance. Their secretary Lola DeWytt was also there, and she'd brought a new friend the "lovely and mysterious" Sara Snow.

The festivities were interrupted in short order by the kid gang known as the Hardluck Hooligans. It seems the Grumpf had not appeared to bedevil them, and the Hooligans suspected foul play. Why the concern? Well Da Brain (brainy kid with glasses) surmised that a Grumpf-less Yule would also mean a Father Yule-less season: something that just can't happen!

At Lola's urging, the gang takes the case with Sara tagging along. They start with investigating the place where Da Brain calculated the Grumpf should have appeared--and where the kids saw a out-of-place truck bearing the logo of Ardmann Commercial Displays. There is no sign of the Grumpf or the van, but they do find a amateurishly made flyer for Ardmann's.

Going the address listed, they find an old warehouse on Wharf Street along the Wyrd. The buildings got a freshly painted sign indicating it's Ardmann's. Sara and Loone go in to pose and potential customers, while Boris circles around back and Cornelius climbs a drain-pipe to the roof.

The interior has the necessary accoutrements of a commercial display business in the season: plyboard standups of reindeer, sleighs, and father Yule, and also some ceramic statues of what they take to be Father Yule's elf assistants. The two guys working there seem more like goons than salesmen, though, and Loone's power reveals they really just want the two customers to go as soon as possible.

There are other suspicious things. Boris finds the truck--and chains welded to the floor in the back of it. Cornelius peers through the skylight and sees something unusual (hidden from the view of Sara and Loone by stacks of crates): a big hole in the floor.

After comparing notes, the group enters the front door again, after Cornelius sees the two guys climb down a ladder into the hole. The investigation soon turns into a brawl, as the "elves" come to life and attack. The stone creatures are slow moving, but tough to harm, and our heroes are soon fighting a battle on two fronts as the goons start to climb back out of the hole.

Cornelius and Loone manage to force them back down while Boris methodically shotgun blasts the gnomes (as they now reveal themselves) to pieces. Unfortunately, Loone is pushed into the hole by one of the gnomes before they're all done in.

In the cave beneath, Loone discovers the missing (and irate) Grumpf, inside some sort of glass dome that looks like a giant snowglobe with metal antennae pointed at it. And seated on a throne, there's also the apparent mastermind of this plot: the maniacal Gnome King!

An attempt to move the antenna gives Loone a powerful arcane jolt of holiday spirit energy, so the team concentrates on trying to break the glass dome. Weaving through would be assailants in cat form, Sara is able to cut off a switch, which seems to make the energy inside the globe to begin to build up.

As he and his minions attack, the Gnome King explains his plan in true villain fashion: He planned to capture the Grumpf and Father Yule (two sides of the same coin, really) and siphon their holiday energy to imbue himself with. With the cosmic reset coming at the end of the year, the power would be granted to him forever.

He hadn't reckoned on Team Victory and Sara Snow. The rock-hewn Gnome King is too tough for bullets (as Cornelius finds out), but thrown rocks and a couple of gunshots, combined with the energy overload since the siphon was turned off, leads to the Grumpf breaking free, stomping the Gnome King into the dirt, then giving Cornelius a sloppy kiss before bounding out into the night.

The Gnome King's crying and Yule is saved, thanks to our heroes...and the Hardluck Hooligans are the first on the Grumpf's list for whupping!

A Weird Holiday Adventure

This weekend I plan to run a Weird Adventures holiday themed game. Through the magic of Google+, I hope to have players from my original G+ game, my ongoing face-to-face game, and the game run by Lester B. Portly (in which I'm a player). This will be the first time the various campaigns have collided met.

Last Yule, catching the Grumpf took a great deal of effort on the part of the Hardluck Hooligans and not one but two groups of adventurers. This year (5889, for those keeping track), the Grumpf is conspicuously absent and Da Brain of the Hooligans has a theory that Father Yule is also missing--and the holiday season itself is in peril! Hopefully, a group of adventurers can get to the bottom of it.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

The Warlord is taking this Wednesday off for the holiday.

I hope everyone has a Yule that's cool!

Everybody's Waitin' for...

...the man with the bag.

Fragmentary Cartography of the Zuran Expanse

I've been asked before for a map of the Strange Stars. While I don't have a map of that whole area close to ready to share by any means, I was playing around with some hexographing software last night and was able to duplicate relatively quickly the part of the Zuran Expanse I've discussed on the blog. Since I tend to jump around a lot in my posts, even this area is a bit sparse.

The Zuran Expanse, you may recall, is a region of space in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way without central authority and containing many isolated or damaged worlds. It occupies territory that was once the nexus of human and transhuman civilization. That is until the event known as the Great Collapse.

The map is scaled to 1 hex=1 light-year, so distances are approximate. The numbers next to the stars are the z-axis. A plus and green color is above the galactic plane; a minus and red is below.

The location of Sol is speculative. This system is quarantined by posthuman entities, so its status as the origin of the human phyle can't be verified.

The map uses the names travelers would most likely use. Some are a planet (Gogmagog) or station (Aurogov or the Library), and others are legitimately the star pictured (Sirius). Many of the star names we use today will be lost by that time, though Eridanus (our 82 Eridani), the primary of Aygo of the zhmun, and Sirius (lair of the ssraad) endure.

A Brief Guide to Space Habitats

In most mature future cultures (particularly ones without terraforming), it's likely the majority of the population will inhabit artificial habitats rather than planets. The main reason (though there are others) is space: orbital habitats can be placed order planets or directly orbiting stars. They can be place in systems that never had planets form or even around brown dwarfs.

Here's a good article on the science behind orbital habitat design. Here are some of the designs that have been proposed over the decades:

Asteroids: provide a ready source of materials for habitat building. The "bubbleworld" or Cole habitat was proposed by Dandridge Cole in 1964. It's creation involves using solar heating to melt the interior of a iron or nickel asteroid and reshape it into a hollow tube. This can be spun to create gravity and soil and water placed on the inside.

Asteroids could be hollowed out in other ways to create habitable space, of course, but given their irregular shape it would be difficult to figure out how to create spin gravity.

Bernal Sphere: It's shape is optimal for retaining atmosphere and providing radiation shielding. If spun, gravity would be generated in a strip along its equator. Gerald O'Neil calculated that a sphere 1800 m in diameter could house 140,000 people comfortably.

Stanford Torus: From 2001 to Elysium, this is the classic habitat design. It has the advantage of a "wheel" with artificial gravity and a zero-g hub.

O'Neill Cylinder: A large habitat, with the maximal amount of habitable area for it's size, cylinders can be several kilometers in length and rotated on their central axis. Large windows can be placed in the walls of the cylinder that would provide day and night in rotation. Long cylinders will tend to tumble in rotation, so O'Neill proposed linking cylinders in counter-rotating pairs to stabilize them.

Bishop Ring: A torus, but much larger than a Stanford thanks to the utilization of carbon nanotubes in its construction. Bishop's original proposal describes a habitat would approximately 1,000 km in radius and 500 km in width, which would contain 3 million square kilometers of living space--something like India. Because of its size, it wouldn't need to be enclosed like the Stanford, either. It would be able to hold in atmosphere with a combination of its spin and tall (200km) retention walls.

The Robots of Rome

Middle school World History really left out some crucial bits--like say, the robot building expertise of ancient Rome!

The Lokapannatti (an 11th-12th Century Pali cosmological text) tells the story of Ashoka obtaining Buddhist relics from the underground vault of King Ajatasatru. Like all good dungeon treasures, this one is guarded--by robots; bhuta vahana yanta, literally "spirit movement machines."  What's more, these robots are based on stolen Roman technology!

The thoroughness of this ancient text is such that it just doesn't drop a bomb like "Roman robots" and leave it at that. No, we get an origin story. See, Roma-visaya ("The Kingdom of Rome") has a class of skilled bahulayantakara ("machine-makers") who build these wonders for "commerce, agriculture, capturing, and executions."  These engineers are kept under close watch so that Roman technological secrets don't fall into the wrong hands. If they leave the city, they're chased down by a flying beheading machine!

An Indian entrepreneur from Pataliputra wants to get ahold of these marvels so bad he vows on his deathbed to get reincarnated as a Roman. Amazingly, that is exactly what happens! He then marries the daughter of a Roman inventor and when the time is right, snags some blueprints from his father-in-law. This is where his plan gets really complicated: he writes the secrets down and has the paper sewn into his thigh. Then, he tells his son to have him buried back in India when he dies. He leaves Rome and the robot executioner gets him.

His son takes his body (and the stolen secrets) back to Pataliputra and goes into the robot-making business for the king. The robots are still active a hundred years later when Ashoka shows up to reclaim the lost treasure. Lucky for Ashoka, the Roman that built them is somehow still alive and tells him how they can be disabled.

I got this story from Relics of the Buddha by John S. Strong, and with further details from here. Not that something so rife with gaming potential needs solid academic sourcing! It's just one step from this legend to a robot arms race between India and Rome and mecha battles across Afghanistan! 

Bhuta vahana yanta, go!