Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

[From AsenRG:]I'd be really grateful!

I'll see what I can do for you!

Thank you in advance, Uncle!

Same objection here.
Complainer: "Waah! Asen's being mean to meeee!"
Asen: "No, I'm mocking you. If I start getting mean, everybody would notice the difference."
Bonus: it's a new player and everybody else in the group looks at him or her and nods. "He's saying the truth, you would have noticed!"

(Variant: "You're abusing your GM powers."
Asen: "If I wanted a PC dead, I'd declare you got sudden cardiac arrest. And it's what would happen. Now can we play this scene where you actually would have had a chance, if you weren't trying to play me instead of the game?")


Yeah; I'd agree with this approach. Clear and to the point!

Thank you. I try to be clear and to the point-glad that it works most of the time.

Well, you get a breeding program and life vats even in Dune...

Phil really enjoyed Dune, he said; it was the kind of 'hard SF' he liked.

Yeah, same here...

I like them. They seem like something some nasty people would use as a honour guard.

Like some of the people in the Temple of Dlamelish that I know...

Like those.
And who says they aren't subcontracting?

If they're used by the temple of Dlamelish and a population is possible, you can bet there would be both males and females!

Either that, or they grow more in the vats. Either way, I really don't want to know...

I just thought of something that might give you the creeps...
They're neither eternal, nor really born in a vat. The temple of Dlamelish, however, knows the process that was used to create them, and recreates it every generation for a new batch of servitors.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Um; could be. The 'life vats' were a pretty stock item in the Fifties, so I think that's where they came from. The hospital at the South Pole R&R center has them, which is always good for laughs as the players panic...

Even I remember seeing "life vats" in a movie.
Hospital, South Pole, you say...
Scribbling in progress.


Also, my players are going to hate this thread unless I botch it all!

Originally Posted by David Johansen

I can't recall if the big reveal was at the end of Heretics or the beginning of Chapterhouse. The other big spoiler would be that the Honored Matres are the descendants of Leto II's Fish Speakers, which makes a lot of sense. They were already an offshoot of the Bene Geseret methods that was more focused on sex as diplomacy. The last two books aren't bad but the setting changes a great deal over 10000 years with human optimization in conjunction with computers and computerized FTL drives. But the broader setting never seems as rich. I'd argue it all makes sense but I'm a bit disappointed we never saw the genocidal sentient robots that Leto II's "Golden Path" was supposed to deflect.

Well, if we saw them, the Golden Path would have failed, right?

A few pages back somebody was asking about promoting Tekumel during the 80s and 90s. Not feeling energetic enough to see who.

In the 70s and 80s at least, Phil was actually genuinely worried about his professional peers finding out about Tekumel for fear it would damage his credibility. Even his historical wargame figures were too outre. I think this might have played into why he listened to those who wanted to make RPGS A SERIOUS NARTFORM; it's OK to say "I'm doing research on group improvisational storytelling," but not to say "we play a game about pretending to be heroes in an alien world."

And considering what I've learned in the intervening years about what a fucking snake pit professional academia is, he may well have been right.

[From AsenRG:]Thank you in advance, Uncle!

You're welcome!

Like those.
And who says they aren't subcontracting?

Wouldn't surprise me; Lady Misenla was always very 'political'...

I just thought of something that might give you the creeps...
They're neither eternal, nor really born in a vat. The temple of Dlamelish, however, knows the process that was used to create them, and recreates it every generation for a new batch of servitors.

Yeah, probably, or they just order up a new batch every now the then from the Temple of Ksarul to replace losses, like the way the Temple of Ksarul orders up new Qol...

Happy thought, this...

Even I remember seeing "life vats" in a movie.
Hospital, South Pole, you say...
Scribbling in progress.

Cool. The base at the South Pole is run by an AI, which in turn acts through a staff of what amount to Yeleth / androids and a pretty good sized staff of repair and security robots like the Ru'un. One normally arrives by tubeway car at the smaller station, and in you go. One time, we arrived via one of the larger troop carriers, and were greeted by very polite Yeleth on the station platform.

Once in, you get assigned barracks, and turned loose to pretty much do what you want - the place is like any large military base, with all the usual installations. There's a pretty nice 'shopping plaza', where the replicators will produce anything you might want - but it all gets debited to your payroll account and you can wind up getting your enlistment time in the Space Marines extended by quite a bit. Which leads us to the hospital...

So my players are poking around in the base, and get themselves into the hospital complex. The AI senses that one of them is injured in some way, so the medical 'bots' collect her and separate her from the rest of the party; they get ushered into the 'famly / friends waiting room', and they look through the transparent wall as she gets placed in a transparent tube by the 'bots.

Panic erupts as the tube slowly fills with a viscous pink fluid; neither she or the party can do anything but have screaming fits as the fluid climbs higher and higher in the tube. I had a good half-hour of really panicking players, before the fluid finally closed over her head. In desperation, she took a deep breath, and found out she could breath quite easliy.

The rest of the party got dosed with tranquilizers by the 'bots. She came out of the vat feeling quite good, and missing the old injuries and scars she'd gone into the vat with...

All good F/SF tropes, and a great game!

Originally Posted by AsenRG

Thank you in advance, Uncle!

Well, if we saw them, the Golden Path would have failed, right?

No, the Golden Path made humans that could survive the inevitable genocidal presentient robots but the robots remained an inevitable outcome of developing thinking machines.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

A few pages back somebody was asking about promoting Tekumel during the 80s and 90s. Not feeling energetic enough to see who.

In the 70s and 80s at least, Phil was actually genuinely worried about his professional peers finding out about Tekumel for fear it would damage his credibility. Even his historical wargame figures were too outre. I think this might have played into why he listened to those who wanted to make RPGS A SERIOUS NARTFORM; it's OK to say "I'm doing research on group improvisational storytelling," but not to say "we play a game about pretending to be heroes in an alien world."

And considering what I've learned in the intervening years about what a fucking snake pit professional academia is, he may well have been right.

Well, you can contrast this with Hy Berman, who was a long-time miniatures wargamer as well as a very popular history professor. In Hy's case, though, because it was historical gaming it may have been seen as acceptable - eccentric, but acceptable.

With Phil, of course, he'd gotten started in early F/SF fandom, which tended to breed a certain cultural paranoia amongst the fan population; getting involved with RPGs early on - before he'd gotten tenure - would have been a career problem with the administration as it would have been seen as a certain lack of gravity and dignity befitting a full Professor and a Department Chairman.

The 'Serious Nartform' stuff came in with the needs of several of his later players for the enhancement of their own professional and artistic reputations. Quite a few of them wanted - and still want - to be seen as serious and respectable 'players in their fields'. (See also the Big Name Player who posted a sign on his office door with his name followed by the titles "Writer - Poet - Performer", or the one who insisted that "only a Bi-sexual Person Of Color can properly interpret Tekumel!")

And since a lot of these same people are very worried about their status, dignity, prestige, and position you get a lot of emphasis on just how serious 'interpreting Tekumel' is for these people and how much it has to be seen as a Serious Nartform in the process.

>Shrug.< Me, I push little toy soldiers around, just like I play with toy trains...

Originally Posted by David Johansen

No, the Golden Path made humans that could survive the inevitable genocidal presentient robots but the robots remained an inevitable outcome of developing thinking machines.

I knew I shouldn't have put away my slide rule.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Panic erupts as the tube slowly fills with a viscous pink fluid; neither she or the party can do anything but have screaming fits as the fluid climbs higher and higher in the tube. I had a good half-hour of really panicking players, before the fluid finally closed over her head. In desperation, she took a deep breath, and found out she could breath quite easliy.

The rest of the party got dosed with tranquilizers by the 'bots. She came out of the vat feeling quite good, and missing the old injuries and scars she'd gone into the vat with...

All good F/SF tropes, and a great game!

Jeez, hadn't any of them seen "The Empire Strikes Back?"

"Do not take carts past this sign..."

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Jeez, hadn't any of them seen "The Empire Strikes Back?"

"Do not take carts past this sign..."

Apparently, not. Or they'd forgotten. Or something.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Apparently, not. Or they'd forgotten. Or something.

I bet you put safety railings in your med center. A building with safety railings immediately tells any savvy Star Wars aficionado that they are not in a galaxy far, far away.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I knew I shouldn't have put away my slide rule.

You mean you haven't reduced it to hyper cognitive mmemonic structures in your mentat awareness yet?

For shame!

That sucker's gonna hunt you down and kill you one day.

Though actually, the society in Dune is a rational, intelligent, machine using society that has put tight social controls on a range of technologies from nuclear weapons to genetic engineering to permit the continuation of a cohesive society. It's a much better thought out setting than its inbred descendant Warhammer 40000 which is a construct of absurd extremes and the rule of cool.

Originally Posted by Bren

I bet you put safety railings in your med center. A building with safety railings immediately tells any savvy Star Wars aficionado that they are not in a galaxy far, far away.

The new movie shows that railings have been invented in the years after Return of the Jedi.