Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (again)

Or, what I read on my hols, part 3…

My children bought me this as a present, and I read it over a couple of days at the seaside. It’s a fun read, although I wouldn’t class it as great literature. But what can I say about it? It’s Pride and Prejudice, with zombies and wuxia. The bit that amused me most was the mock revision notes at the back, as if it were a set book for English Literature. (“Can you imagine what this novel would be like without the zombies?”)

Earth Abides

Or, what I read on my hols, part 2…

Earth Abides is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1949 by George R Stewart, who amongst other things seems to have invented the template for the disaster movie.

We follow the protagonist (a graduate student of geography) from his return from a field trip to discover that humanity has essentially died out, to his meetings with other survivors, to his old age some decades later.

The book has aged surprisingly well, I suppose since once civilisation collapses there is nothing obviously out of date. Althought Stewart glosses over the initial apocalypse (and the protagonist never does find out what happened in any detail, other than a mysterious disease arising and nearly erasing humans from the globe), he does focus on the Secondary Kill – people who survive the disease, but are unable to cope with the new world, and implode under the stress. We then follow the protagonist as he lives alone for a while, eventually links up with a few others, and essentially becomes a tribal elder.

The novel speaks well to what technical and social concepts can survive this, and which can’t. It also discusses what would happen to domestic and wild animals, although I’m not entirely convinced that sheep would die out. I can see romantic love being a lost luxury; in a community of say 20 people, there are not going to be many choices of a partner near the right age and the opposite gender.

It’s a book which is likely to haunt me for some time, especially the hero’s steadily declining expectations of what level of technology his tribe can actually maintain.

Overall, Earth Abides reinforces what I’ve felt for a while on this topic: Once the electricity goes out, we’re back in the Stone Age, and precious few of us know how to live there any more.

The Tekumel Novels

(Or, what I read on my hols, part 1).

Finally I got around to reading the last three of these, and since it’s so long since I read the first two, I reread those as well.

The books are all travelogue fantasies, each taking the reader through a specific area of the world of Tekumel, created by MAR Barker and the setting for the Empire of the Petal Throne RPG. The first two were published by DAW, and seem to have benefited from better editing; the last three are published by Zottola. Roleplayers interested in the EPT RPG will find some (but not all) of the milieu’s questions answered; I also noted that coins and ancient technology are much more common in the novels than in the game backgrounds. Dates in parentheses are the year the novel occurs in the setting.

1. The Man of Gold (2360?). Chiefly of interest because the hero saves the world without ever knowing it, and feels like a failure as a result, despite his material rewards. That was genuinely novel for me.

2. Flamesong (2361). The only one of the novels in which the priest Harsan does not figure as a central character; the most memorable feature for me was the unusual nature of the magic weapon.

(Here Prince Dhichune’s grab for the throne and the resulting civil war occur, offstage. There should have been a book covering this, I feel, even if neither Harsan nor Trinesh – the two principal characters – were involved.)

3. Lords of Tsamra (2363). Very interesting to me as an EPT roleplayer, not so good as a novel; a tale of mediaeval fantasy biowarfare, explaining who the real Lords of Tsamra are, and their surprising connection to the ancient subway system.

(Here the Mu’ugalavyani invasion occurs, offstage again.)

4. Prince of Skulls (2372). Dragons and demons and priests, oh my! Prince Dhichune reappears, and in a surprise plot twist he and his old foe Harsan are compelled to work together.

5. Death of Kings (2373). This reads like the first half of a much longer novel. I found the ending disappointing, in particular that all the major romances except one are broken up, for no very obvious reason; and the plot doesn’t feel resolved. One of the main characters is Captain Harchar, the character run by Dave Arneson (RIP) in Professor Barker’s own EPT campaign.

The books, especially the last three, rely heavily on deus ex machina and on critical events occurring far away, to other, more powerful characters, which shape the world dramatically but which the novel’s protagonists only find out about in passing, weeks or months later. For me, this makes them dissatisfying as novels, although the world of Tekumel and its history remain fascinating as a complete break from the usual Dark Ages mediaeval milieux.

I would, however, read another one of the series if it appeared, because I still want to know how and why Tekumel dropped out of realspace into a pocket universe. Some hints are dropped, mostly in book 5, but I’d still like the correct answer at some point; I think I know who did it now, but not why.

Dollhouse

We’re watching Dollhouse now, Mr Whedon’s latest. It will, of course, be cancelled and not renewed – that happens to anything I enjoy watching, it seems. (Maybe I should write to screenwriters and threaten to watch their shows unless they buy me off?)

The premise is that a group of people, kept in the titular Dollhouse, have their personalities erased, and are used as programmable slaves – the client specifies a task, and the Dollhouse programmes someone to carry it out perfectly. After the mission, the programming is erased, so the agent retains no memory of it.

This started me thinking. If this technology were to exist, how do I know I have not been programmed with fake memories? Which of the many personalities who have used a physical body would have the best right to keep it permanently, and why? An interesting variation on the simulationist hypothesis.

The 15 Books Thing

A challenge from Facebook; list the first 15 books you think of in 15 minutes that will stay with you forever. Here are the ones I came up with, and this will cross-post to Facebook so it should turn up there too…

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• How to Make War by James F Dunnigan
• Secret Service: 33 Centuries of Espionage by Richard Wilmer Rowan and Robert G Deindorfer
• Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
• The Empire of the East trilogy by Fred Saberhagen
• The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien
• The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley
• The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• The Star Fox by Poul Anderson
• The Winds of Gath by E C Tubb
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Interestingly, unlike Anna (who generally doesn’t read anything written after 1830) I see all of mine are post-1930. These are just the first 15 I thought of; I notice Conan, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula are missing, despite also being tales that will stick with me forever.

The Last Colony

This is the final part of John Scalzi’s trilogy, at least so far, about the Colonial Union and its unending battles with a myriad alien races. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other two, possibly because the focus is largely on political intrigue, which reminds me too much of the day job.

The protagonists of the earlier two novels are now married (to each other) and are manoeuvred into leading an expedition to found a new colony, which is then cut off from the rest of humanity. To reveal how and why this happens, who is responsible, and their motives would give away too much, so I shan’t explain. Suffice to say that the infighting amongst the colonists reveals a darker, seamier side to the Union – one that the soldier protagonists drafted from Earth have been largely unaware of, and which tests their faith in the Union’s principles and purpose.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Specifically, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Jane Austen’s Bennett girls as kung fu zombie slayers in Napoleonic Britain. I see they already have a ninja, so now we just need pirates, dinosaurs and giant time-travelling robot assassins for the perfect popcorn flick. Oh, and a car chase, obviously. I can feel a roleplaying game scenario coming on… or possibly a movie script…

Ghost Brigades and Screwtape Letters

This week, I have been reading C S Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades.

The Screwtape Letters, for those not familiar with it, dates from the 1940s, and is a collection of short essays on how to be a good Christian, couched in the form of letters from a senior devil to a junior one, advising him on how to tempt his ‘patient’ from the path of light. I’ve encountered it before, and found it even funnier this time; but as an adult, especially having just read the same author’s Mere Christianity, I can see layers of philosophical meaning that passed me by the first time. It is now thought-provoking as well as funny. One of those books that has to be read in short chunks so one has time to digest the ideas.

The Ghost Brigades is the second novel in John Scalzi’s Colonial Union series. The first one, Old Man’s War, is reminiscent of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and outlines the CU universe by following a recently-recruited soldier through his training and early missions. The premise there is that every other race in the galaxy is fighting all the others for access to the limited number of habitable planets, and humanity has emerged in the midst of this. The book explores how far humanity might go in terms of modifying its soldiers to fight such a war, and what it would do with them afterwards; in this it covers similar territory to Timothy Zahn’s Cobra stories.  Towards the end it involves the Ghost Brigades – CU Special Forces, genetically engineered from scratch and literally trained from birth to be soldiers, with no other culture at all.

The Ghost Brigades explores what it would be like to be one of those, and also the question of how a being might be made to turn traitor to his entire species, both from the human and alien viewpoints. The overall storyline also progresses, as the simplistic CU politics outlined in the first book turn out not to be the complete truth. This feels like a middle book in a series, and like an exploration of interesting questions, not answered in the first book because they were tangential to that storyline. I did manage to put it down once, so can’t say it was impossible to put down; but it nearly was.

We Have Hunted the Zargot

Like many UK citizens of a Certain Age, I spent many happy hours as a child immersed in the saga of the Trigan Empire in Ranger, and later Look & Learn, which as “educational magazines” were exempt from any parental bans on comics (which to be fair were not imposed on me).

One of the legacies of this time is my habit of announcing my arrival not with the insipid “Hi honey, I’m home” but with the more robust “We have hunted the zargot, and now we return home!” This has puzzled many guests and family members over the years, but  thanks to the above website I am now able to show them what a zargot looks like…

Hunting the Zargot

Slipstream

A review of the Slipstream Plot Point setting for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game.

Summary: 8/10. A very nice space pulp setting. Not quite good enough to make me drop my current campaigns and start this one, but definitely good enough to go in the queue for when the current ones finish, and a lot of ideas I can steal right away.

Slipstream aims to capture the feel of 1930s pulp serials such as Flash Gordon, rather than that of realistic hard SF. (I can understand that; to paraphrase Winchell Chung, the more you learn about realistic spaceship combat, the less interesting it becomes.)

Like much of the Savage Worlds line, this is written by Paul “Wiggy” Wade-Williams, and is a 162 page book – or in my case, PDF download. (I tend to check things out by buying the PDF online, and then splash out for the hardcopy version if and when I decide to use it in anger.) The PDF comes in two flavours; one in full colour throughout, and a printer-friendly one with no background images. The pair of them set me back $24 or so, and are available from Studio 2 Publishing, who offered fast, friendly service once the Paypal transaction had cleared – the delay in clearance was my fault really, as I’d allowed my Paypal account to run dry, and it takes 9 days to refill it with a bank transfer.

Chapter by chapter, this is what we find inside. I’ll assume you already understand Savage Worlds, as you’ll need a copy of those rules to play Slipstream.

1. Welcome to Slipstream: This is an overview of the milieu. The premise is that all black holes in our universe have a route into a pocket universe called Slipstream; if you fall into a black hole and are sufficiently lucky, you wind up here. The pocket universe is full of fragments of planets that fell into a black hole and were torn apart; it is bathed in a perpetual twilight, and there is thin but breatheable air in the gaps between fragments.

2. Characters: These are created using pretty much the standard Savage Worlds rules. Unusually, there are dozens of alien races, not just a handful; 9 are presented in detail, 37 with capsule descriptions, and these are backed up by a race generator if none of the standard ones appeal. Note that cheesy names for races and their homeworlds (e.g. the Lion Men of Simba) are de rigeur, and a conscious part of the approach. I applaud the inclusion of five pre-made characters, enough for a group to try out the game without having to learn all the setting-specific details first.

As ever, the Edges and Hindrances are the core of character creation, and a number of new ones are listed. I especially liked “I Have One!”, which allows your character to produce from his pack or pockets whatever mundane item the heroes really wish they had brought with them.

3. Gear: Rayguns, rocket packs and rocketships predominate here. If you saw it in Flash Gordon, the chances are it’s in here. Personally, I feel that the pulp hero needs only his wits, his sidearm, and a communicator, so I tend to skim the equipment chapter in RPGs; it’s rare that I feel the need to stray beyond the items in the basic rules. The Gear section includes descriptions of 10 standard rocketships and 5 stock vehicles.

4. Setting Rules: Slipstream follows the pulp convention that heroes and major villains rarely die, and there are adjustments to the usual Incapacitation rules that make it almost impossible to kill a Wild Card without deliberately setting out to finish him while he’s down and helpless – the hallmark of a villain. Henchmen are introduced, as an intermediate step between Extras (standard NPCs) and Wild Cards (PCs and major villains). It’s also suggested that GM remove Shaken status for hordes of Extras, making them easier to defeat in large quantities (“Conservation of Ninjitsu“), and consider making the villain’s sidekicks fanatically eager to take a bullet for him. Actually, come to think of it, that might be appropriate for some good guys, too.

There are rules for flying rocketships both in and out of combat, and trading with them between fragments. Those easily offended by deliberate and casual sidestepping of the laws of physics should look away; picture them as being like aircraft in the basic rules, which is much in keeping with the pulp approach. The pocket universe has a spiralling gravity wave called the Slipstream, which can throw your rocketship off course, and this is also covered.

Finally, there are 8 new psionic powers, including Mind Reading and Telepathy – these were left out of the basic rules as a conscious design decision, in case they made detective scenarios too easy; but one can’t really have pulp psionics without them.

5. Gazetteer: This is what Traveller players would recognise as Library Data – capsule summaries of what the PCs know about their world, notably four pages of short paragraphs on the major fragments and other common knowledge. As and when I run Slipstream, I would make this section available to the players. In fact, the players could read anything up to and including this section.

6. What is Slipstream? This chapter is advice for the GM on how to run a space pulp campaign, including the black-and-white morality, cliffhangers, and other conventions of the genre, as well as an explanation of the Forces of Evil and their dastardly plans.

7. Fragments: This is the GM’s version of the information on assorted fragments in the Gazetteer. Each fragment is listed with a terrain type (this is pulp – only one terrain type per planet), a few paragraphs of information, and often a cross-reference to a scenario in the Savage Tales chapter, so that when your heroes land on the fragment, you know what adventures are available for them. There are also a number of generic encounter tables.

8. Season 1, Death Clouds: This presents a complete campaign in 10 scenarios (“episodes”), pitting the heroes against one of the main Forces of Evil in the setting. It’s hard to describe these without giving away the plotline, so I won’t. I will say that I liked the maps and deck plans, but found them hard to read because of their colours and small size. I could just about make them out by expanding the PDF images to 200%, but then the text became too blurry to read. A minor nitpick, this, it’s not like I have a shortage of deckplans.

The 10 episodes are followed by a Season Generator, explaining how to create (if necessary, by die rolls) further series of adventures for the heroes, each with their own nemesis, villainous henchmen, exotic locales, alien artefacts and so forth.

9. Savage Tales: Here are 21 scenarios, some of which can be used more than once, stand-alone adventures intended to fill in the gaps between the major “story arc” episodes of a season. Many of them occur on a specific fragment, and are referenced in chapter 7.

10. Encounters: The obligatory bestiary section, containing a number of alien creatures, stats for both major (named) and stock NPCs, traps, and environmental hazards; and advice on customising all of the above to create more varied threats to your heroes. One thing I do like about Savage Worlds compared to (say) D&D is its realisation that the standard Mk 1 human at various experience levels constitutes a goodly proportion of the typical group’s encounters, and should be present in the rules as such; the stock NPCs include a wide range of guards, bounty hunters, concerned citizens and so forth. Finally, we have character sheets both for your hero and his rocketship.

Conclusion: I’ve been looking forward to Slipstream for a while now, and I’m not disappointed. The presentation is good. It integrates tightly with Savage Worlds, and is detailed enough that I could run it easily under a number of other SF RPG rule systems. There’s enough information here to run about two years’ worth of face-to-face gaming sessions at my current rate, or to see me through to retirement if I use them for a play-by-email game. Things like the race and season generators would continue to be useful for long after that, and the season generator in particular would be easy to merge into my current game.