The Gaming Outpost

I sat across from a collection of men who had kidnapped me at gunpoint, and for a long moment succumbed to self-pity. Expecting, congratulations and smiles at my heroism, I walked into a trap set by men who thought me a villain. I’d been in worse states, but like Elijah, I was tired, and so laying my head down, I began to dream.

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I woke in the world standing on my feet which I’d heard happened to experienced versers. So, I’d travelled something like fifty worlds, and I guess you could call me a veteran of this universe-hopping.

In my last world, I’d helped some intelligent dinosaurs fight off an invasion of Earth by aliens. What wonders awaited me here?

I gathered my stuff, and hiked toward the glinting lights which soon revealed themselves as towers in the light of the twin suns.

Walking in, I saw people much like humans except cuter, and shorter by about half a foot. They looked a bit childlike, but a sureness of manner betrayed maturity, I thought.

A universal translator functioned, thankfully, and it soon gathered enough data to make a chip that I inserted in the back of my skull.

Presto, I could speak Tynkilear.

(My current awareness wondered where I had lost the chip insert, and the universal translator, but then the dream took charge again.)

Listening, I found we were in a festival time. Games, food, drink were offered for free to passerbys.

I took advantage of this to nibble and try a variety of things. It all tasted quite fine, and then I hit on some hot chocolate, and I forced myself not to dance in the street. It’d been at least ten worlds since I’d had some.

The cause of the celebration surprised me. The Tyn had joined Galactic Civilization, or the first rung of it. Over a year had passed since any act of violence had occurred on their planet.

I began to get worried. Non-violent is not a word commonly used around me. What if I messed up things for these hospitable people?

“Don’t worry.” I heard from behind me in English. I spun around and saw four aliens, each of a different type. But more, I saw myself standing there with a smile on his face.

“Brother!” He cried, and hugged me heartily. “The precogs calculated a high probability of this, but I just could not believe it possible.”

“Doppleganger?” I asked weakly.

“Yes, but I prefer ‘brother’.” He said looking down on me from a good four inches. I also could not help but notice his ease of manner, and his physical good looks that surpassed mine.

“You’re…” I waved at him, and the whole package while the aliens patiently looked about, evidently sight-seeing.

“Genetically engineered to remove most problems. This is what you would look like without any major genetic flaws (you’d probably call them minor) Plus, I’m over a hundred-fifty years old even if I look your age.”

We chatted and for the first time that I can remember, a dop totally controlled the situation in nearly every way. Usually, I’m the more experienced and wiser and tougher one, but not here.

It turned out that Earth was two rungs up the ladder, and he led the Tylinklear delegation. The other aliens were a step below him, and the Tyn were one further.

So, he took me to a speech, and told very funny jokes in Tyn language, and even punned in it.

Afterward, when the party was done, I met him again.

“I’d feel jealous, but…”

“Of whom much is given, much is required.”

He continued.

“I have a problem. Tnere are several places I need to be, and this is one of them, but lower priortiy. We’ve broken the cycle of violence by getting everyone to accept conditioning except those who refuse it, and they are exiled behind a forcewall, or recruited for the Expeditionary Force. We don’t see violence as inherently wrong, but stopping it is the quickest way to make a world safe for entry. Later, their culture can be re-normalized once they have developed a clearer understanding of the downside of certain courses of action like destabilizing wormholes.
But they need someone who can be violent to be here as security, and yet is not of them. You’d be perfect.”

I still don’t know if he was playing a game partially with me to help me calm down, but no doubt it was true.

So, I became a Planetary Guardian. The job was a sinecure. No threat got within five lightyears of the system before Deep Space Fleet #42 intercepted it. What I really was was a trustee. I did nothing except when it all fell apart, and then I was supposed to protect my people.

So I came up with battle strategies, and got the Fleet to implement certain boobytraps in outer space. And I did not tell my plans to anyone on the planet because such talk would only distress them.

And in my spare time, I read, road bycylcle on the steep hills and flat paths, played role-plauying games which were very big (the violence in them was considered cathartic).

Just sitting by the Bay, in one of my favorite chairs while cute Tyn brought me food and drinks, and reading either Tyn literature, or the 21st centuries contributions to print which had been donated by my “brother” felt swell.

Years past, and I learned little things hear and there. I learned to speak Tynliklear without a chip, and took classes in telepathy, and telekinesis. I once messed up so bad that I had “acquired” a pet rock, so to speak. It floated around behind me, and I thought I could hear it talking to me in my head. I messed up my tk and my telepathy, big time, and paid for over a week.

Finally, everyone on the planet was working, and at a job they enjoyed. Their jobs were vocations, and not the work of employees. So they ascended to the next rung of Galactic Civilzation.

So I had no job.

I found one as a test subject for a dimensional gateway program they were starting. Working with it, I learned how to close gateways with the power of my mind; unfortunately, the effort created kilotonne level explosions. But I survived the explosion, and so I continued on in the program.

After a while, I jumped through the gate to another world. No big deal, I thought, and then found out it was a one-way gate. They’d made a mistake in the fourth decimal I decided after studying it.

Oh, well, another world to explore. At least, I’fd gotten a nice long vacation in the last one.

Tadeusz

  Dang.  It’s Halloween.  What are the odds that a weekly column would land on Halloween?

  Before you tell me that it’s one per year in seven, it’s more complicated than that.  Because of the complexities of leap year, date shifting creates some very odd results.  I’m told that centuries can only begin on certain days of the week (although I’m not sure that information accounts for the fact that the last year of a century the number of which is not also divisible by four is not a leap year, if I recall correctly that trivial bit that isn’t going to matter in any practical way to me in the course of my life).  We’ll suffice it that it didn’t have to happen in the life of the column, but it did happen, and we’ll go from there.

  I’m not big on holidays.  Most of them are a burden on my finances and my time.  However, this family has always made a big deal of Halloween in particular.  One of my sons at one point did not much care for Christmas because it tended to overshadow Halloween.  I have no clue what, if anything, we’re celebrating (unless it’s our Celtic heritage in a family so ethnically diverse that from mere oversight our children’s birth records probably don’t report the same combinations of European ancestors), but we do celebrate it–costumes, candy, decorations, sometimes parties, once a pit-barbecued leg of lamb.  So, seeing as it’s a holiday, I’m going to give out treats by passing on some of the oddities I’ve collected as game ideas which have not bloomed into articles despite being planted on my desktop for more than a few months.

  Ages ago, Seth Ben-Ezra wrote an article in which he mentioned Ascians.  These were apparently some race of people from some fantasy series of which I was unaware; but I tried to determine the meaning by using what I knew of the word and by looking it up in the dictionary.  I was nowhere near it.  The usage to which he referred had so little to do with the ordinary meanings of the word that it could not be derived without knowing what it meant.  This eventually put my mind off on a tangent of things that aren’t what they sound like, or aren’t what we think.  I thought of the Pentagram, that geometric shape which was originally thought to be magical not by European cultists but by Greek mathematicians, because of the relationships of the sides of the internal shapes.  From there I went on to all those unfortunate misprints in advertisements and church bulletins.  We always enjoy these.  There’s the piano for sale by the lady with fancy carved legs, the dog that eats anything and is especially fond of children.  I hear that the ladies auxiliary have cast off clothing of all kinds, and you can see them in the fellowship hall if you’re interested; also, the church has a young mothers’ meeting once a week, and anyone interested in becoming a young mother is encouraged to visit the pastor in his study.  There’s a wealth of potential in all that for giving someone the wrong idea.  I particularly grimace when people quote the old King James Bible verse that we should abstain from every appearance of evil, thinking that that means we should avoid anything that even looks evil, when it really means we should avoid everything that is evil no matter how it looks.  Just this past week one of my sons mentioned a video game in which you “shoot men out of a helicopter”, and I had to get him to clarify whether that meant you shoot from a helicopter at men, or you shoot at men who come from a helicopter, or possibly you use men to target something by ejecting them from of a helicopter on planned trajectories.  A lot can be gained from statements that are for one reason or another easily misunderstood; phrasing can be very important to misdirection.

  I wanted to commend J. K. Rowling for her use of Diagon Alley (as if my commendation mattered to her at all).  She must have gotten the name by splitting the word Diagonally, but I find myself wondering whether she gave it that name in the first book already knowing that she was going to have Harry mispronounce it in the second (and so wind up in the wrong place), or whether she just used it when the opportunity presented itself.  It could be a good example of planning ahead, or it could be a good example of those Bits we talked about a year ago, little things that you throw in on the fly knowing that you can do something with them eventually.  I do a lot of pieces about language and misdirection, though, and I can’t say much more about this one without duplicating something.

  Here’s a weird one, suited to the occasion.  Every night when the youngest two of my sons head for bed, I grab a book to read to them and sit on the bed of the elder to do so.  It began a few years ago, when I was reading Verse Three, Chapter One to the youngest almost as quickly as I was writing it, but it has continued beyond that to include the first drafts of its first two sequels Old Verses New and For Better or Verse, the first two of the three books in C. S. Lewis’ space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), Prisoner of Zenda, Ivanhoe, and more recently Treasure Island.  And, each night as we go into the room, the dog comes in and lies down between the beds (or sometimes under one and sometimes on one) and stays there while the story is read and the lights are turned off and I sing the short good night song I wrote for their brothers near a generation ago now.  I have no idea why the dog is there; invariably she complains within the hour that she’s locked in the room (they close their door when they sleep).  I’ve not found an explanation that really makes sense.  If you close her out during story time, she whines at the door to come in.

  Paul McCartney is alleged to have said in a recent interview that The Beatles were the most successful band of the sixties because they were the best.  I find that begs the question.  Don’t get me wrong; I think they did some wonderfully creative things musically (but also some really forgettable ones), and demonstrated significant talent (although people still joke about Ringo’s drumming, and no one has ever said that any one of them was the best in the world at his instrument).  My question is, the best at what?  It is said that they set out from the outset to capture the American market, and they succeeded.  Were they the best at marketing?  Were they the best at showmanship?  What was it that really made them so successful?

  Oddly, had anyone else said that The Beatles were arguably the best band of that era, I’d probably have conceded the point.  That it was said by one of their own gives me pause.  I’ll agree that they must have done something right; I just don’t know what it was.  Maybe that doesn’t matter.  Our characters might be successful for reasons they can’t guess themselves.  We don’t have to know why we succeeded, as long as we can do it again next time.

  I’ve got a new monitor.  My wife got tired of hearing me slam Coca-Cola bottles on top of the old one to get the picture to come back while she was trying to sleep, and so took pity on me and insisted on getting this for her birthday.  I had joked about my computer reverting to twentieth century Earth technology.  That’s a reference to a Tom Baker Doctor Who episode (the one with the vampires in E-Space with Adric and Romana Two).  The rebel humans, descendants of a stranded space crew, had gathered many bits of computers and monitoring equipment from the wreckage of the ship and tried unsuccessfully to make it work.  The Doctor looked at it, commented that it looked like twentieth century earth technology, and gave it a sharp rap on top with his fist.  As the entire bank of monitors and indicators lit up, he said, “What do you know?  It is twentieth century Earth technology.”  It’s a priceless moment.

  Our technological gadgets can be so finicky at times.  Some days my mouse works fine, and other days no amount of cleaning can get it to respond well (one of the reasons I really dislike mouse-driven software).  How often do our games take this into account?  I do it when I’m running Multiverser, but always in a rather subjective fashion:  when the dice say that the character failed to make the thing work, I look for some excuse to color it that fits with how badly the character failed (relative failure system–you’ve got a continuity between missed it by that much on the one end and chance to botch on the other).  I’m still looking for a way to do it more objectively that doesn’t result in overly complex game systems.  It feels like a part of the simulation that has never worked quite right in any game, and I’m interested in seeing something that fixes that.

  Trick or treat?  I don’t know whether that was originally trick for treat as some of my elementary school teachers claimed, that children used to go around performing to earn their goodies, or whether it refers to an ancient Druidic tradition of expecting hospitality or doing mischief to those who are inhospitable, as is sometimes reported, but it doesn’t matter.  This week we’ve thrown a batch of ideas out there, with the hope that something here will be useful to you.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Last week’s article was originally published on October seventeenth.

  I suppose that everyone really is superstitious about something.  We can’t escape it; it’s in our nature.  I have several things in my life that make me uncomfortable.  I have struggled to get over my fear of driving in Woodstown; I had three cars die within half a mile of each other in that tiny village, all within maybe ten years at the outside.  I am uncompromising about keeping the dashboard clear of all papers and objects, as I was in an accident over thirty years ago in which school books flying in front of my face as I went around a turn prevented me from seeing the road.  My step grandmother was paralyzed in an accident because she had braced herself against the dash with her arms, so no one is allowed to put arms or legs up while I’m driving.  I have my perhaps unreasonable fears and concerns; the number ten seventeen, last week’s date, is one of these.  It is probably, as you may in a moment conclude, the most unreasonable of them all.

  I graduated college just in time for a recession; no one was hiring–in fact, I had companies refuse to take my resume.  Even the personnel director of a company where I, working as a security guard under contract, had prevented a robbery, was unable to get me into his workforce.  Finally I got a job at a contemporary Christian radio station.  I was underpaid, certainly, and it was a long commute at the beginning, and there were tensions of which I’d had no expectations at all; but it was a job, and I had some wild hope at the time that I would be able to build contacts in the Christian music industry that would lead to opportunities to record and perform, and maybe make some decent money doing something I enjoyed and knew I could do.

  That part didn’t happen.  There wasn’t enough money to make demo tapes, even when I did finally meet some of the right people.  I worked there for five years, and rose from announcer/disc jockey to assistant program director to program director.  I struggled to keep the good music on the air against the pressures of a management who thought that only very old people listened to “religious broadcasting”.  I fought with my wife who thought I should get a good paying job somewhere else.  I struggled to survive on pay that was grossing about half what I had estimated I would need to earn net to meet basic needs.  I burned out several times while pushing forward at that job.  When it was over, I stopped listening to music radio entirely for over a decade, and rarely listened to tapes, and had little hope of ever doing anything with music again.  I took a series of short-lived jobs, and then went to law school.

  That radio station was contemporary Christian radio giant WNNN-FM; it was at one-oh-one-point-seven on the dial.  While I was there, we pushed the envelope of what we were allowed to play by creating a special show just for the cutting edge music.  I suggested calling it Studio Ten Seventeen, and for several years I hosted it.  Since then, that number, one oh one seven, ten seventeen, in whatever form it takes, plagues me.  Last week’s article on Foliage was published on ten seventeen, and I cringed when I happened to check the date to see how far into fall we would be when it posted.  My recent Bible reading has been in Nehemiah and Ezra, and both books report a census including the entry, among maybe thirty families, one thousand seventeen sons of Harim (not his sons, but his descendants).  I see it on the clock far more often than I like; I notice it in phone numbers and addresses and random number sequences.  Sometimes it’s the amount rung up at the register.  It appears everywhere.

  I would wager that not one of my readers has ever noticed that number before; and unless this article has a deeper impression on you than I expect, you’ll never notice it again.  It’s not an important number to you.  I would also be willing to bet that even in my life, the number ten seventeen, in all of its forms, does not really appear more frequently than is statistically predictable.  It isn’t that I’m plagued by an increased number of appearances of this number; it’s that I notice it every time it appears.  I even notice if the time is ten sixteen or ten eighteen, that I almost hit it.  After all, any time you looked at the clock and saw that it said ten seventeen, you would think, it’s ten seventeen.  I see it, and I think, IT’S TEN SEVENTEEN.  It’s not the number; it’s me.

  On what is really the same subject, everyone knows that the full moon makes people crazy.  Everyone knows that when the moon is full, emergency services are all going to have a bad night.  Emergency rooms will be busier, and with the more bizarre sorts of problems.  Police will have more crazy and violent cases on their hands.  Ambulance and rescue personnel will be on a lot of calls.  Everyone knows this.  You know this; I know it.  The problem is that it’s not true.  Studies have demonstrated time and again that the phases of the moon have absolutely no impact on reports in emergency rooms, police encounters, or accidents.  It doesn’t happen.  Yet most people who work in those professions will tell you that it’s true, and there are theories put forth in all seriousness about the impact of tidal forces on the fluid in the brain.  Why do they think this?

  They believe it for exactly the same reason that the number ten seventeen bothers me:  they notice the correlation and don’t notice conflicting data.  I don’t remember the thousands of times I look at a clock in a month, but I do remember the one time in something approaching a thousand it has that number on it.  I remember few if any of the values in that census table I read, but the sons of Harim hit the right number.  In the same way, any time there’s a wild night for emergency services personnel and it’s a full moon, they remember that.  If it’s not a full moon, they either don’t notice or they comment about how much worse it would have been if the moon were full.  If it’s a quiet night with a full moon, again they don’t notice it or they comment about how lucky they were to get away with a quiet night under a full moon.  The only data that’s really remembered is that sometimes there are crazy nights that have full moons, and sometimes there are quiet nights that don’t, and the rest gets blurred into the mix so that the myth gets repeated.  In short, people believe that full moons bring out the crazies because they expect that, and so supporting data confirms those expectations and conflicting data is ignored.

  So how can you use any of this in a game?

  These are invalid correlations which spring from sensitization.  That is, I think that the number ten seventeen is plaguing me because I notice it whenever it appears; emergency personnel think full moons mean bad nights because they notice full moons when they occur on bad nights.  So to a large degree, this is about what we notice.  Yet as referee, you have a great deal of power over what the players notice.  The very fact that you mention the sky is gray today sensitizes them to the possibility that the weather (which we mentioned in discussing Foliage last week) might be important.  If you keep mentioning the guy in the trench coat and derby who always shows up at all these disasters, they’re going to be very suspicious of him even after they learn that he’s a crime reporter with a police scanner in his car.  I remember one old GammaWorld module in which our characters were instructed to remove the necklaces we’d worn since childhood and place them on the table just beyond the edge of the village.  We must have spent half an hour of game time examining that table from every direction we could, looking for any hint about our assignment; we completely missed the fact that our necklaces were different colors, a vital clue to what lay ahead.  Most players attach importance to anything the referee says is there; creating invalid correlations in their minds is rather easy–in some ways it’s tough to avoid doing so when you don’t intend it.

  All of this can lead to misdirection, superstition, plot hooks, and surprises.  Lead your players down the garden path sometimes, and then when you pull the rug out from under them and reveal the truth, they’ll kick themselves for having missed it when it was right in front of them all the time.

  Just over two years ago we talked about superstition, how to create it and incorporate it into play, in Believable Nonsense.  Finally we’ve expanded on that with ways to get players to create their own.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

I woke feeling penned up, and with a vibrating noise rattling in my ear. Upon opening my eyes, I saw a black doctor’s bag at my feet, and canvas walls framed by bamboo all about me. It took a bit of awkwardness to set up, and then force my face into the slipstream.

“You’ll never get away with this!” I heard a very attractive voice from behind me say.

“No? Well, I have a plan which should resolve all of my supposed difficulties. Too bad you chose not to be part of it.” The creepy voice trying to pass for suave irritated my ears.

“Never. I’d rather die.” Her clarion voice jerked me alert with its vibrant sincerity, and I finally got fully sat up and turned around to see a three-seater bi-plane with a beauty tied up in the front seat by a lariat rope about her manicured hands, and a leather-capped and Luger wielding jerk in the seat behind her.

“Your choice, doll.” He sounded regretful, but not too much so. I pegged him as a man who had killed women before, and had not been overly traumatized by the experience. Grinning because he had no idea I was behind him about to land a karate chop to his neck, I caught the girl’s eye.

She looked startled, and then said.

“Look behind you.”

“Please, not that one, Miss Carlyle.” He groaned. She shrugged having done her duty by honor, and her complacency must have alerted him. Before my blow could land, he flipped the plane, and we all fell out. Miss Carlyle and I hung onto the edge of the cockpits by our fingers, and the villain just let himself drop away to sprout a big white mushroom of a parachute that drifted toward earth.
But we flew upside down, and started to tilt downward. I feared we would arrive on the ground first in a vertical dive into the ranchlands below us. I started to lift myself back into the plane intending to try something with the controls, but the fabric I held started to rip.

“Wait, just wait!” Miss Carlyle shrieked over the battering wind, and I did, and soon the plane had gone vertical, and it was much easier to step sideways into the plane than to pull ourselves in from below. It unnerved me to see her loose a black leather pump, and have it drop six inches into the propeller blade. But she pulled her legs up, and we both got in.

“I can’t fly.” She told me, and I gulped, and climbed forward across the exterior of the fuselage to the second seat where a control lay. This shouldn’t be too hard, I told myself ignoring the sarcastic comments of the instructor who had first trained me on a crop duster which could not be too different than this, I hoped. I’d managed to land without help at least half the time. I would have gotten better, but some nastiness had intervened and cut short my practice.

Pulling back on the stick had the opposite effect I wanted. We went inverted to the ground again, and I realized that this reality had their airplane controls rigged the opposite way from most worlds. Shouting to hang on, I took it further inverted trying by main strength and luck to force the open biplane to do an outside loop.

In my peripheral vision, I kept seeing the ground getting closer, and I heard Miss Carlyle praying the Lord’s Prayer at high volume. At “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who…” we leveled off, and shot straight across a field low enough to throw rocks at cows if we’d had a rock.

My passenger was jabbing a finger forward, and I could not see what got her so excited, but she had to know the countryside better than me. Sure enough a telegraph line ran straight across our path at the field’s end. I could try to flip the plane over, but I’d likely get caught in the ground effect, or a wingtip would hit a cow (yes, we were that close to the ground.), and that jerk would win. Or I could try to pull up straight, but I was not at all sure this biplane had the power to climb inverted.

The biplane wobbled and tried to skitter out of control as I raised it a little to be sure of clearing a bush at the edge of the field, and yet go under the telegraph line. A gust of wind hit us at the last second, and I could not alter its course because I lacked the delicate touch needed. I could only spare a thought for help from God, and we skimmed close enough to the telegraph wires that I was sure we had hit, but we did not.

With shaking hands, I urged the vehicle into the sky, and then flipped it.

Phew.

Beneath us, Miss Carlyle pointed out her father’s humongous ranch (about the size of an Easterner county she said), and the airstrip, and a giant zeppelin moored next to it by an anchor tossed around a lodgepole pine left there for that purpose. It looked extra difficult to land with the zeppelin blocking my preferred path, but I had no choice but to try unless I chose to fail utterly.

So I began to bring it in, and we wobbled over the sky like a kindergartener scrawling on a piece of paper with his crayon. Someone on horseback waved us off, and grimacing, and tired, I pulled up to have another go at it. The second time, he waved us off even more sternly pulling a gun out and firing it in front of us. Then he made these odd charades with his hands that left me puzzled but increasingly worried.

“Oh, I know, I got it.” Miss Carlyle said with good student glee, and then her voice sunk. “He’s saying we don’t have any wheels.”

Both of us looked over the side, and sure enough, we had only the stubs of spars. Miss Carlyle began to curse the villain for nearly a minute, after which she apologized for her unladylike behavior.

I nodded, and studied the field. It was rocky, and I was afraid if I tried a belly landing that I’d rip things open, and kill us both.

I gave the wheel to the lady, and asked for her makeup compact. Taking a pencil and a notepad, I sketched out a plan, and put it in the compact. Then I climbed high, and dive-bombed the man on his horse hoping that he would be able to control his horse, but I need to get this thing as close to him as possible without any wasted time. We had a lot of fuel, but my plan required quite a bit of time.

Dive-bombing, like the dam-busters in the Royal Air Force in WWII, was probably the most accurate method of delivering a bomb short of having a really good bombsight, or a GPS guided system, or an expert system trained to analyze the battlefield in picoseconds and choose its own target.

The “bomb” landed about twenty feet in front of him with a puff of makeup dust, and the horse started, but he was an expert horseman who kept his mount under control.

Soon enough, within thirty minutes, I saw the zeppelin rising into the air with a small crew aboard, and push its speed to a maximum. The found a wind current, and I saw the great beast jolt as five more critical miles per hour were added to its speed.

I came up from below it trying not to fly the plane, but to be the plane, and let my intent guide the plane rather than a conscious plan. A weighted rope ladder fluttered from above as I climbed at a fourty -five degree angle losing speed as I went.

The plan was simple, I’d climb slowing to near stalling and matching speed with the ladder fluttering in the air, and they would push to their maximum speed, and Miss Carlyle would get off.

There was a problem. Some people, particularly female people, have a tendency to get scared and freeze up which heightens the danger. I would have no time to talk her into the good sense of doing this; it would have a very tiny window of maybe twenty seconds.

So I expressed my concerns to her. She turned around and stuck her tongue out at me.

“Perhaps, I should tell you about the seven-foot rattler someone, couldn’t have been a girl, killed with her butter knife and soup spoon while her brother froze with fear.”

I looked properly chagrinned.

“Men are such pigs.” She flounced back around, and I grinned to myself. One way to motivate a man is to call him a girl; and one way to motivate a woman is to suggest that females are constitutionally incapable compared to men. Gender rivalry runs deep.

She would do.

The slow trip upwards kept getting slower as adrenaline surged and distorted our time senses, and as the plane fluttered approaching stalling too early. I gave it some more gas, and the ladder fluttered madly out of our reach, but a prayer to the Almighty, and it nearly fell across her hands. She grabbed it like life itself, and scrambled up the ladder with a ferocious enthusiasm only matched by her athletic grace.

My plane’s engine conked out, and we fell groundward while I uselessly wondered if a biplane could stall. I knew a Rutan canard could not, but this? Meanwhile, my fingers and hands kept punching the start switch until reason pointed out that I needed a spinning propeller to get the engine going again.

So I nose-dived it again. Punching it did nothing. And I began to worry. Maybe, I had flooded the engine. So I waited really long, and the whole plane started to sing as we exceeded its design limits for speed.

I could literally tear the wings off doing this, I remembered from a book. Still, forcing my self not to touch the start button, until the ground had gotten awful close and the whole plane wailed, I jammed it as authoritatively as I could.

Sweet music. The cranky thing started, and now I began the difficult balancing act between pulling it out quickly enough to keep me from diving into the ground, and ripping the wings off so that I could go plop into the ground.

Wires snapped, and an aileron stopped working, and I think the whole wing frame bent very slightly, but I pulled it out. Heading back up, I saw Miss Carlyle being pulled into the cabin attached to the underside of the zeppelin.

A grin split my face.

Now to see if I could rescue myself. I pulled upward, and had to make adjustments since my aileron did not work, and the whole plane handled badly. But fluttering and dancing about like a fallen leaf in a parking lot, I got close.

But I could not get the plane to get close enough to the ladder. Finally, I decided that Miss Carlyle’s experience had been a subtle miracle, and none seemed in store for me. I almost heard a slyly amused voice in my head suggest that I did not need one, I was perfectly capable of handling this with the gifts I already had.

I took the plane above the bottom of the ladder, and flipped the plane like that jerk had. This time I did not grab on, and I flipped it slowly. I fell headfirst straight for the rope ladder, and it did not flutter aside at the last second of my twenty foot fall.

Wrenchingly, I caught the ladder, and it jerked me up tight. This universe receded for several seconds, as I got back my nerve and my wind, and various body parts reported back in to my brain. These body parts seemed to say in a very surprised tone that “they were okay.” Even my own body had thought that a lame brain stunt, I informed myself. My self snapped back that it had the greatest virtue of any plan. It worked.

Now could I get up, and get moving?

Groaning and whipping about in the wind, I began to climb the ladder. By the time, I arrived at the top, I was quite tired.

After being lifted inside, I did not meet the enthusiasm I expected. Instead, I saw the horseman with a black eye, and Miss Carlyle tied to a chair, and a .38 revolver pointed at me.

“No funny stuff, buster, or I’ll ventilate you.”

“What’s this?” I cried to the encircling crowd of mistrustful faces.

“They, a bunch of misbegotten louts, my father just hired claim that I am not Miss Carlyle. They say she is down at the ranch now, and I am obviously some dolled up impostor involved in some evil scheme.”

I looked about, and saw a rough, but fundamentally honest and decent crowd. They were not part of some conspiracy, and neither was Miss Carlyle for she would consider such beneath her dignity. So someone had duped them, and we needed to find out who. The cowboy stirred, and it looked like he had given better than he got considering the signs of swollen jaws, and bloodied noses. That made the cowboy, a likely ally.

“How do you know this is not the real Miss Carlyle?” I asked as part of my campaign to win them over.

“Because her father is with her now. He’d know his own daughter wouldn’t he?” The man with the .38 spoke. “Now no need to get desperate, we’re going to drop you folks off who we rescued so I figure you owe us something. We’ll drop you off in Salt Lake City.”

“That’s a good couple hundred miles away.” Miss Carlyle protested.

“Yep. I mean, yes, ma’am, it is.” The spokesman said. I asked for a drink, and sat down to wait it out.

Tadeusz

In the days after the incident with the terrorists and the nuclear bomb, my life began to settle back into a routine. One crisis was averted; now, I had some time to relax, train, and wait for the next one.

I used some of that time to start turning this apartment into something that felt like home. My collection of books had grown considerably, and when I wasn’t training, I was usually lost in one of Shakespeare’s plays or a fantasy novel. It struck me as truly ironic that now, as a spy in London, I was doing what I had meant to do as an English major in Philadelphia: losing myself in a sea of words. This was better than being an English major, even if it was lonlier than being a college student. I read what I chose to read when I chose to read it, with no papers, no pressure, and no post-modernism.

I had also started decorating a bit. I kept most of the furnishings that came with the place, since they were nice enough, and buying furniture isn’t the sort of shopping that appeals to me. What I did buy was pictures. Most of what I chose had a fantasy or Medieval theme, like the prints of “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Acolade” that I hung in my living room.

The picture that still held the spot closest to my heart, though, was one I brought with me. Through three worlds, I’d carried that little photograph of my boyfriend, and I now had it framed by my bed. One could say, I suppose, that I wasn’t coping well with losing him or with losing anyone else. Most nights, I dreamed about my family or my friends, even though I’d been gone from their lives for quite some time. There had been more than a few mornings I’d woken up to a sharp pang of disappointment that I was still here, that the verse wasn’t all some insane dream. I wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed since I left my old life, but it had to be close to a year now. I’d already spent more than four months in this world.

One day, I was absorbed in a book of Christina Rossetti’s poems when I read one that brought me to tears. She’d always been one of my favorite poets, but, although I’d read this one before, I hadn’t remembered that it was one of hers.

“I guess it’s time to give it up,” I said to myself, “and stop wishing for what I can’t have.” I walked up to my room and sat on my bed, holding the framed photograph in my hands. I brushed away a couple tears before taking it out of the frame. I set it on the table and got out a piece of stationary to write a letter.

It was, in all likelihood, a letter that wouldn’t ever be received. I’d never scriff-mailed anything to anyone before, and I didn’t think it could be done with someone who wasn’t a verser. Somehow, I hoped, there had to be a way.

At the top of the page, I copied the sonnet I had read:

“Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

–Christina Rossetti”

“You may not believe this, dear,” I wrote, “but I’m not dead. That’s the good news; the bad is that I’m worlds away from where you are and not likely to ever find a way back. I couldn’t tell you everything that’s happened in one letter, so I won’t try. Just know that I’m alive and all right, in what I guess you’d call a parallel universe. It’s not heaven, not hell, just another world. I don’t know when or if you’ll get this, but I wanted to say goodbye properly. I hope you’re happy and that your life is good. I hope that you find someone else who makes you as happy as you made me. Whoever she is, I hope she knows how lucky she is to have you. You’ll always be my first love, and if I live a thousand lifetimes, I’ll never forget you. Tell Matt and Lara that I miss them and my mom that I love her. I’d ask you to say the same to Dad and Andy, but they won’t believe you could’ve talked to me. I love you.

Love, Kelly”

I paperclipped the picture to the letter, trying to keep my tears from falling on the paper. At that moment, I paused. This was all a very nice sentimental gesture, but the truth was that I hadn’t the slightest idea how to get this to him. I knew that to scriff mail something, a verser had to disown it, usually verbally, and give it to someone else. Nothing would happen until one of them died and moved on to the next world. But, this could only work between versers. If I disowned it without giving it to someone else who could receive it, it would stay here when I left this world, probably getting thrown away to clean the place up for the next person who would live here.

I chose my words carefully, hoping that they’d work. “This picture and this letter aren’t mine. They belong to Matt Keck, not the one who lives in this world, if there is one, but the one I used to know. If he can’t get them, then I’ll keep them until I find a way to deliver them to him.” I hoped that saying those last words would keep the letter from getting lost if he couldn’t get it. If scriff mail wouldn’t do it, maybe some magic spell or psychic power could. Maybe someday, I’d learn such a trick. Either way, I felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest. I tucked both picture and letter into a dresser drawer and walked out of the room and into my new life.

  As I write, Summer is drawing to its last days and Autumn is upon us; a quick look at my calendar tells me that this article will go up in the middle of October (and today’s date inspires next week’s article), so Fall has fallen for certain.

  Looking back on my notes for future game ideas columns, I note that last year I’d noted the possibility of doing an article about fall foliage.  Last year’s foliage, the note reminds, was rapid and brilliant.  We had had a severe drought during the summer, and the trees went dormant quite swiftly when they went.  This summer we have had rain and more rain, a very wet summer after a winter marked by several serious snows.  We got very little use of the pool (although the kids got more than we did, and I suspect that some of their neighborhood friends spent more time in the water than I), were rained out of several hopes to go to the shore, and cooked inside more than once when we had planned to use the grill.  It has been wet.  That causes me to wonder what sort of fall foliage we’ll have this year.  I had noticed before that in New England, where the seasons change much more swiftly than they do down here in this southern section of southern New Jersey that is south of the Mason-Dixon Line, fall foliage is always brief but vivid.  Riding through the hill country of southeastern Pennsylvania is beautiful, but almost always more subdued than my memories of shooting up from the North Shore of Massachusetts into the brilliant rolling countryside of New Hampshire.  If my theory is correct, the cool wet weather we’ve had this year will run into a very slow and subtle color change as fall slips into winter.  But I’m guessing.

  I’m not exactly digressing to tell you this, but this summer has given me an entirely new insight on all those years of so-called drought we’ve had recently.  It seems every year the state is declaring water shortages, putting everyone on restrictions, making every effort to conserve.  Last year we were on odd and even watering (a goofy plan in my mind, because the obvious thing to do is if you’re on the odd day, water your lawn just after midnight and again just before midnight when it’s your day); we were on it the year before as well, and maybe part of the summer the year before that.  Last year the complaint was that there wasn’t enough rain in the spring to bring in a corn crop for July; this year it was lack of sunshine that delayed south Jersey’s most anticipated crop.  Last year I had actually asked, rhetorically, how many years you could have “below average rainfall” before it pulled down the average so far that it had to be considered normal.  This year I have seen how it works.  This year there was no rationing; the word drought seems to have vanished from the vocabulary, and everyone has more water than we could possibly use.  I conclude that a couple times each decade we get drenched, possibly even flooded; the rest of the time, we have considerably drier years.  Those drenching years pull the average up.  Getting five times as much rainfall once every five years means that the other four years are going to be significantly “below average” even if they’re the real norm.

  All of which shows me how very vulnerable we are to the weather.  Little has changed since Mark Twain quipped Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.  We have become better at predicting it, certainly; and our ability to predict has resulted in improved abilities to respond, to build dikes against the floods that have not yet risen, to evacuate coastal areas while the hurricane is still over the ocean, to get snow removal crews to their equipment so they can dig themselves out instead of having to dig their way in.  Yet we can do nothing about the weather, and it can do everything against us.  Man against nature is usually listed as the first of the three great story conflicts (the other two being man against man and man against himself), and while that includes more than battling the weather, it certainly does include battling the weather.

  Yet time and again, the weather is just so much color in our games.  No one ever asks what it’s like, and even when they do it doesn’t usually seem to make a difference.  Yet struggles against the weather can make great stories and memorable game moments.  One of the clearest memories I have of the first party for which I refereed was the time they went on a forty-five mile trip to the nearest city to sell some of their accumulated valuables, only to get caught in a snowstorm which covered the roads and threatened to bury them completely as they fought their way forward.  That party must have killed a hundred goblins, orcs, trolls, and other vermin; I don’t recall the combats half so vividly as that trip in the blizzard.

  A game can be all about the weather, particularly in the right climate.  The New Ice Age is set in a place where the ground never fully thaws; it’s about survival in a harsh environment, and although there are hungry wild animals the real threat is the weather, which can freeze you to death in a few hours if you can’t counter it.

  On the other hand, even if the game is not about the weather, weather can be a significant factor at times.  Whether you play The Mary Piper in its seafaring or spacefaring version, you will sometimes encounter storms which can drive you off course and damage the ship, possibly leaving you lost and dying.  Great tension can come from this; even in the future, no one has complete control of the weather.

  Give some thought to where your characters are, and what kind of weather they might have there.  Someone once said to me that every part of the world has its own specific disasters, the worst thing imaginable which only happens there, whether it’s the tidal wave, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, volcano, flood, or something else.  Some have more than one.  Figure out what can happen wherever you are, and have it happen once in a while–in mild versions most of the time, but always threatening to be serious and sometimes being truly devastating.

  After all, it’s one more challenge for the players, something they don’t face very often, and since there’s not much they can do to stop it, just trying to survive it offers something different.

  And as I always say, next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

Sprinting across the metallic cavern toward my multi-megaton mech, and the pilot buried inside it who wore my face and my name because in some alternate universe he was me, I wondered what had turned me into a traitor and a stupid one at that.

The mech saw me, and swooped me to the catwalk near the head with an automobile sized hand. I clambered in, and through the tunnel, and the last hatch did not open.

Instead I heard my voice over the loudspeaker in that claustrophic smooth walled esophagus.

“Who, what are you? Why are you here?”

I sounded frightened, yet determined. And I knew without a doubt that my other had a finger over some instant death device that would send me spinning out of this world faster than I could react.

Still, I spun up my Lekostian cyberware with a mental command.

“I’m …”

“Are you an alien from The Base?” He said “The Base” with audible caps interrupting me.

“No, I’m you.” I said flatly trying to calm the situation down. “Alternate timelines and weird stuff like that.”

“A warning from the future?” He asked hopefully. “Am I doing the right thing?” He, or I sounded pathetically needy, but then this was me in a lot of trouble, and not immortal and several centuries younger than me.

“What are you doing?” I shouted back. He opened the hatch, and I looked into a gun and a sweat-streaked face.

“Trying to save democracy.” He said with a ferocious exaltation, and a fluttering nerviness, and I noted the gun stayed on me rock steady. I think I’ve met one alternate me that was not an ice cold killer, but this was not the second pacifist alternate that was for sure.

“By betraying your unit to those yahoos?”

“I’m going to doublecross those yahoos, and take the mech from them after a suitable bit of embarrasment. Put these on.” He tossed me a pair of handcuffs which I slipped on. Too late, I realized they were not steel, but some odd metal.

“Mech armor metal. Strongest metal in all human space in the Year of Our Lord 2005.” He laughed a bit relaxing, and I got bound into the copilot’s chair.

“Where too? And 2005?”

“The Town, Landing Town where we are going to embarrass the Mechs out of existence. Of course its 2005; what would it be?”

“Thing is Tad Prime…”

“Call me Pilot.” He interrupted me with casual ease. I nodded.

“Pilot, and you can call me Verser as in multiversal traveller, I don’t remember my people having the tech to control black holes and build mechs and fly to the stars when I left.”

“Well, we didn’t either until we found the Alien Darkside Base in ’68.”

He told me of the Apollo Moon Rocket program which had discovered a fully functional and abandoned alien mech factory on the dark side of the Moon. An emergency program put a moonbase up in ’70, and American mechs landed in Red Square in ’73. Opposition to the formation of the United Nations as a Western dominated world government with republican institutions ended except for diehards by ’75. In ’80, it was discovered that a mech could tow a ship through an artificial jumpgate. And there were terraformed worlds scattered all over the place empty of sentient life.

The only limit was that there was not enough mech pilots. It required years of training, and a mech tended to bond with its pilot, and the black holes needed as propulsion and power source for the heaviest weapons were only slowly produced, and the mech’s still cost an enormous amount of money. Then the aliens came, and the only truly effective force was the mechs at driving them back.

The whole thing started to sound vaguely familiar.

“I met the Nobel Prize mathematician, Isaac Asimov at a cafe’. Pure accident. He showed me his pschyohistory calculations and his prediction sphere. I’ll let you look in it in a moment. First, I want you to …” He released me into Landing with a list of experiments to run.

I had a mech pilot jacket on. I stole an apple from a vendor. Got obnoxious in a restauraunt, and forced myself to leer at a girl while her boyfriend fumed nearby, and stared down some local peaceforcers who came to investigate reports of problems. They got out of my way.

I also saw the janitor who I was supposed to be conspiring with to, I guess, steal a mech. He ran off quickly.

Ill at ease and unhappy, I got back into the mech.

“I did what you asked, and no, no one raised a finger. So?” I snapped.

He showed me the crystal ball which held a sophisticated computer and a vision screen. I saw a projected vision of the future.

I was old, and my grandson rode a mech down to Landing to get food for me. What I wanted was rare because the trade routes all over the galqaxy were uncertain, and I was part of the reason why. Because, I took whatever I wanted. My grandson did likewise, and people bowed to him calling him “Ser” and “Lord”.

The mech pilots had killed democracy, and replaced it with an interstellar feudalism.

Another vision followed, and in this one my grandson labored in the fields by hand while an arrogant twit walked a mech by without once considering how much sweat five minutes of that mech could save his “peasants”.

That one was even worse, and it made me grateful, I had no children in this world.

My alternate did.

“Okay, I understand, but its not as simple as that. There are a lot of factors that could intervene…”

“Really? Aren’t these overwhelming factors?”

“Keep the faith. Have faith. There’s always some threat…” But it was hopeless. My alternate had seen a very compelling vision of the future, and he lacked enough experience to realize how unstable such predictions were. And truth to tell, this looked like a remarkably stable prediction for one of its kind.

Arrgh.

He started shooting up the city being careful to miss people, but he shredded buildings rather thoroughly.

I could see in the long-range scanners a spaceship, and the janitor and some others across the town. He intended to walk it across town, and trade the mech for the ship, and get out of here. Probably the mech would have a self-destruct charge because he did not really want to give those idiots a mech for whatever their cause was.

And then the mechs came from the rest of the battalion, and he braced himself.

“I should, I should, but I can’t fight them.” He said with hands hovering over the weapons arming switches.

I had no clue what to do at this moment.

“Hey, Tad, you’re a little early, but ya’ got the right idea. Lets teach those idiots in the Planetary Congress who is number one around here.” His and my commander’s voice surged over the circuits, and my alternate and I shared a hopeless look. We had only managed to move the coup d’ etat up by a week or so.

He cried, and begged God for some way to stop this horror. No answer came, and I had no clue how to stop this train wreck.

“Time to leave. Tad, hey, Tad!! Pay attention. Get your wife and kid, and some friends together over the next few days.”

I explained and we made plans as the day went on and as we conducted our coup d’ etat near our comrades who despite their warm words did not completely trust us.

Three days later, he had gathered two mechs, and a half-dozen cargo ships, and a small horde of refugees. The mech pilots were enjoying their new status with wine, woman,and song, and doing a few good things, and mucking more things up in a ham-handed way as they tried to run a planet like a battalion. They particularly enjoyed the rescinding of low level flight restrictions. The city got buzzed very low at least once an hour.

We had picked a planet out, very far away and off the beaten track. I told him the cure for this disease. Riflemen. He needed to found a university nation which would eventually research the finest rifles ever built. Guns held by infantry that could shred a mech, and turn the mech from knights in shining armour and into big fat targets were what would save him.

The Asimovian crystal ball agreed which alternately worried and comforted me.

The only problem left was that he could not escape. So he left for the battalion hq with his entourage, and I called the commanders over for a visit to my ‘new’ house we’d stolen from some industrialist. Acting drunk, I tried to get on “my” mech, and “panicked” I forgot the code to get in. The mech killed me with gas, which I hated, and then the mech got melted since that was what my doppleganger’s will specified.

Meanwhile he snuck off planet with some old and balky mechs (but he was truly a gifted pilot), and fled the new tyranny for a new democracy farther among the stars.

I fell out of that world wishing I’d been more equal to the tasks before me, and that I could have done more than simply save a few people from such a disaster.

Tadeusz

I still lay in the hospital bed wondering what to do next, and considering various ploys to find more data when another memory of another world came back to me. It had followed that world where I got shot for being a square peg in a very round hole.

===============================================

I woke laying in a street, and people in suits and dresses stepped around me, averting their eyes not with judgement but with pity. Maybe they thought I was a drunk, and instead of cursing me, they wished to help me if only they knew how. Or something…

The street was paved in bricks, and two story tall buildings with an occasional three-story one to break the monotony marched up both sides of the street past the plenteous sidewalks.

I got up, and was about to consider this a pleasant world when I heard the chatter of machine-gun fire. A sandbag fort atop the Ace’s Hardware store was spitting tracers into the sky at something that came down awful fast.

Lights flashed underneath the skyfalling dot, and then the Hardware blew–inward, and then outward. Glass shards knifed across the street slashing and dismembering.

I saw one five foot long and six inch wide piece of glass fly by my head, and bury itself in a guy ten feet away from me.

The casualties were surprisingly light considering that the “lights” must have been a bomb, but everyone within ten feet of the Hardware was paste, and as many as twenty others had serious wounds.

My skills in life-saving were not that great. After all, I was a verser, that which killed me merely sent me on to a new and probably more friendly world. But I knew a few things, and started applying pressure and enlisting even more clueless help than mine to hold the pressure bandages on.

An hour later, with the blood of a braver man than I running down my arm, the last of the seriously injured were bundled off to a local hospital.

I asked the brave man what was going on, and he stared at me in wonder and worry as I tried to guess the best way to splint his arm without dislodging the bandages on his forearm. He gave me a weird look, and so I evasively said he could consider it as a check on whether he was going into shock.

He took the red herring, and ran with it. The enemy attacking America, and the whole world were aliens from another star system. They had all sorts of advanced weapons, like “air-to-ground missiles” and computers small enough to hold in your hand, and the American hi-tech propeller planes were no match for the alien landspace fighters or even their transport shuttles.

I asked what their name was, and he shrugged, and then winced as he got up off the ground. No one knew. They came busting into the solar system without a by-your-leave, and they started attacking only pausing to call for the immediate and unconditional surrender of all humans.

They were called Jaxons because they came from a star a very long way away, and the named star closest to their flight path was a star named for Andrew Jackson, so Jaxons they became. The powerful telescope at Mount Palomar Observatory had picked up their drive tail in earlier pictures which seemed to support the theory that they had crossed ten thousand lightyears in six months. This was not good news to me since I had some idea of the tech base needed to mount such an invasion.

Frankly, I was surprised that the humans were not already enslaved.

I put that thought from me as I looked at the street with its dead bodies, and a fury bubbled in me. We would get these aliens, and teach them a lesson.

The brave man, “call me Mr. East” liked my words, and asked me for my nickname since members of the Resistance went by secret names. “Ghost” I replied thinking back so many worlds to my execution of Bethleham.

He showed me to a cell of fighters hiding in a basement under a school, and I frowned a bit, and moved on. The group had a hard-edge and they were full of men willing to die for their cause, or so they said.

Its my experience that it is always that way. Talking is easier than action, so more talking than action gets done. Its probably not just human nature, its probably true for all bipeds.

Still, looking at them, I found some truly hard men, and I found some organizers who had plans. It took me over a week, and several attacks on Jaxon outposts in the city with my hunting rifle, but I was soon acclaimed as a Hero of the Human Race by this small subset of it.

I was not so certain because none of the Jaxon had bothered to fire back at me. And I was quite sure, that I had not killed any of the orange-skinned humanoids with their freakish double pair of arms. They had a manipulator set and a brute force set of arms.

Talking to the organizers, I mentioned this difficulty, and they nodded. One produced a Jaxon pulsar pistol, and handed it to me saying that I had proven myself.

It took me several hours to go from “dangerous” to myself to “pretty poor shot”. The gun was designed for someone with incredible precision of touch and movement. It was a manipulator arm weapon.

Later I saw Jaxon carrying two guns. One a pulsar pistol, and the other a plasma cannon in their brute force arms.

I asked Mr. East how they got the gun, and he grinned. It seemed that the Resistance had offered to meet the Jaxon, and the aliens had foolishly agreed. Result was one dead Jaxon and some good weapons.

Wrinkling up my face, I went upstairs, and saw that school was in session. Mr. East was behind me. We ghosted through the hallways, until I got to a quiet spot.

Then I interrogated East.

“I thought the school was out of session.”

“They started back a week ago.”

I cursed myself for being so blind and oblivious. We needed to get out of here. For all I knew, the Jaxon could have a tracer in their gun, and a landspace fighter could be targetting the school right now.

Mentioning this worry to East got me a clap on the shoulder. East was not worried. The Jaxon did not attack schools, or churches, or even historic landmarks unless they absolutely had to. That Ace Hardware store had been picked for being a historic preservation site, and people had been surprised at the attack. Still, East averred, it worked out well. They had a lot of new recruits after the atrocity.

Then the first grade teacher and her class started to walk out of their classroom, and I saw up close in the midst of them, my first Jaxon. He was ugly. Orange, scaly skin which flaked in patches, and orcish teeth extending behind the jawline. Something about him, his arrogance, his easy way moved me to fury, and I felt myself pulling up the pulsar pistol. Then I stopped, as I saw him bend over and start handing out the matchbox sized Jaxon version of the XBox with a holoscreen out to the kids, along with a gene therapy that would stop ear infection, and a polio vaccine, and of course, candy.

I stayed my hand, and backed up into an empty classroom as the strangely gingery smelling alien and the class of eager first-graders and their charming teacher passed by.

“Why stop? Do it. Are you scared?” Mr. East asked, and I turned to him, and saw that he truly did not understand. All he saw was an alien that had to be destroyed no matter the cost.

I shook my head which was spinning with worries,and that allowed East to jump me. We struggled for the pulsar pistol, and it went off, into my chest.

Slumping down against the concrete block wall, I prayed because I had done my best, and the dart had finished me. Such a little weapon, and I had a gigantic hole in my chest. Most of my ribs were not connected anymore, and I think one of my lungs was vaporized, but frankly, in the condition I was I could not muster the energy to look.

East went to the door to be met by the alien who used no weapon but his natural claws, and skill. It looked like a gangly armed Bruce Lee with the strength of Schwarzanegger stomping on a ten-year old. East was on the ground and trussed within twenty seconds.

“Assasin.” The Jaxon hissed at us both. It turned toward me, and smiled cruelly. “You shall live human. We shall fix you up so that you may be executed.”

With that heart-warming news, I passed out.

I woke in a cell with a black-and-white television, Saturday Morning Post magazines, and a football, and a Bible, a Talmud, the Koran, and at the bottom of the stack, the Wall Street Journal. So I was set if I worshipped Jesus, or just Yahweh, Allah, or Mammon.

I read some, watched some, prayed a bit, and considered the events of the last week. There was little question in my mind. We should not have been basing ourselves under a school, and banking on the decency of the Jaxon. It was not a safe bet, and besides, it was not right.

Smacking myself on the head for being so stupid as to not notice it, I began to seek refuge in prayer and tossing the football up and down repetively.

About an hour later, a Jaxon, possibly the same one, they all looked equally hideous to me, came down the corridor with several guards, and put a chair down outside my jail cell, and he sat down in it.

I should mention that I was held in the police station which Jaxon invaders had captured in the last week. They held most of the social centers in small dots all over the nation. It seemed random to most, but I could just barely see a pattern to it. This pattern made actions against the Jaxon subtly difficult. The best escape routes always seemed to be cut off before we planned an attack on any point.

“Greetings, human.”

“Why do you have the guards? To intimidate me? Not going to work. And I know you can best me hand to hand.”

The interrogator looked down at his wrist, and made a hiss of surprise I think.

“You do not lie human. You are barely afraid. I am certain if I were in your feet coverings I would be more so. We have them because you humans expect us to have them. But since there is no need, they can go back to more productive labor.”

The guards left with some relief I think at having skated out of that boring duty.

“So human, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“I’m a member of the Resistance, and I will die before I stop trying to rid this planet of aliens. Do your worst.”

“Indeed we shall. Tell me human, are you fond of using your young as shields in war?” He hissed his amused contempt at me, and I sputtered out that that was a mistake.

His nose flattened, and he said.

“Mistake for you if the machine speaks true, but not for your people.”

I started cursing him, and inviting him to come join me in the cell, and trying to reach through the bars to wring his pebbly neck. He stepped out of range, nodded, and walked away.

The next day, he came, and took me from my cell. We took a tour around the town, and then the region. First by jetcopter, and then by landspace fighter. Over and over he pointed out sites where, the Resistance hid themselves in churches and graveyards, and “protected sites”.

“This is our charge against your Resistance. They break their own laws of war. If they do not stop, we shall visit enormous destruction. We are in our rights to destroy these sites, but we are not yet angry.”

“Not angry?” I said turning to the sickening countenance of my pilot. Considering they had come ten thousand lightyears to wage agressive war and conquer our world, that seemed a lie to me.

“Yes.” And the fighter landed while he showed me pictures of other wars against other species who had angered the Jaxon. Spacestations swallowed by gravitational vortexes, precision laser strikes with terrawatt level lasers on bases, cities turned into a fine brown powder, and worse he showed me.

“These people, the Tehthani refused to be peaceful. They claimed only peace would come when we were removed from their reality.”

He showed me a picture of the Tehthani home system being engulfed by a supernova.

“We removed ourselves from their reality.”

“Why us?”

“Humans are an agressive, and expansionistic species. You are much more innately capable than the Tehthani. In a very few centuries, you would be knocking on our door. We could deal with you then with all the consequent risks of hi-tech interstellar war, or we could mould and shape you now while you are still in your infancy so that the better aspects of your species retain control over the worst aspects. We saw your broadcasts, and it was clear that the better aspects needed help. Also on a purely kindly basis, we intend to stop this tendency of yours toward the mass murder of certan groups of your people.”

“How is that different than your xenocide of the Tehthani?”

The Jaxon stared at me hard for a long moment, and for the first time I was afraid of him.

“Its different, and you know it.” He grated out.

Then he tried to smile, and he relaxed with startling quickness.

“Time to leave.”

“Back to the jail cell?”

“No, time for you to leave.”

He kicked me out, and set me free. I was back on the streets of my town near the Ace Hardware which was being meticulously rebuilt minus the machine gun on the roof.

Thing is I figured I was not really free. There were so many ways they could keep track of me. Miniature bugs, and sattellites were the two I was familiar with.

So I wandered aimlessly. Unfortunately, the other Resistance members were not so up on the capbabilities of hi-tech. They thought a radio was hi-tech.

A car pulled up, and I got dragged off the street to a party. Mr. East was already there, and he and I were feted. Evidently, the Resistance had threatened to attack the dam above town, and flood the whole town unless we were released. They were jubilant, and I figured it was a matter of moments before the commandoes rolled into the room.

Upstairs I could hear a choir singing, and I tried to make for the door to avoid a double tragedy, but East caught my arm, and whispered to me.

“Not so fast, you gutless wonder.” He pulled me with a smile on his face to the podium to adress the crowd.

“Upstairs, the Fourth Lutheran protects us with their prayers, and” He sneered. “Their bodies. The Jaxon lack the stomach for true war. We’ve proved it. Now we shall take it to them, and take their stuff, and drive them off the planet, and then chase them down to their rathole and burn them out.” Wild cheers by drunken men met this oration.

“Yes, we are hid by our own people at …” And here I began to list all the spots the Jaxon had showed me, and I had not believed. People around the room nodded at each one. And I grew sick. I had allied myself with some filthy war criminals. And worse, I was testing the Jaxon’s patience which was evidently according to the Powerpoint-like presentation, a very bad idea.

“No, my friends. Let’s not. Lets take the war to them indeed. Blow up their outposts. Gun down their patrols. Poisen their food, and cut their hideous throats, but from behind trees and rocks, not from behind our own people.” My speech provoked mostly chuckles at my naivete. I made to leave, and East did not let go.

“You’re not going anywhere, gutless wonder.” He said softly into my face. “I should have died in that street rather than let a punk like you help me.”

He’d used up the last of my patience.

“I am Tadeusz, the Hammer of Tyrants. Let go.” I spoke from within some cold space inside myself, and he let go, only to rare back for a punch. I spun, grabbed a punch cup, smacked it on the table edge to shatter it, and turned back to get punched in the gut. However, my improvised shiv rested above his jugular.

“I should have let you die in that street, East. I really should have.” He trembled and paled because he knew I was serious.

“I’m leaving these barbarians. Whose with me?” About a third walked out the door with me, and then we heard a pop on the other side, and I saw gas seep under the door. We ran as far and as fast as we could.

Over the next week, I worked up several clever plans to use my steadily shrinking patrol to attack the Jaxon, but I could never get myself to finish them. Finally, I asked myself why.

Because, they are not such bad people, my heart answered back.

Stung, I went for a walk into the local village, and I saw cars being retrofitted with solar cells, and a long line of kids getting polio vaccines, and microwave power being beamed from orbit to replace the nasty coal-fired electric plant. I also saw the White and Black drinking fountains ripped out, and replaced by one very pretty new one.

Sure the Jaxons were still as ugly as sin, but that did not bother the kids, and if I did not look at them, they seemed downright reasonable. Besides, I knew the Jaxons were capable of nova bombing our sun if they felt it was required.

I did the responsible thing. I went back to my crew, and told them what I thought. Most agreed.

Then we took advantage of the general amnesty, and turned ourselves in.

I became a figure of some fame, and notoriety over the next several years. It seemed that I was one of the most technically advanced humans on the planet, and a good fighter. Some people called me “collaborator” and “traitor” on one day, and the next they asked for my help with conncecting up some alien-designed food processor.

We continued to fight the Eastenders seeing as East had escaped the raid. Probably by tossing others in his path as shields, I thought. They turned against humanity out of frustration at our lack of following them and their ineffectiveness against the Jaxons. Also, they were, as terrorists do, they were trying to kill off the moderates on their own side. In the end their hatred drove them to trying to find a way to destroy the Earth.

And so twenty years later, I walked into my office, and saw Mr. East, prematurely solidly gray and stooped but with a pulsar pistol aimed at my chest.

“Traitor!” He breathed along with many other harsh words. They took me to their secret place, and the decades had taught them professionalism, but it was still not enough.

Then they showed me the bomb. A q-bomb stolen from the Jaxon, and capable, maybe of destroying the whole planet.

“Just wait, we’ll be there in a minute.” I heard whispered in my ear from the expected source. See I had been dangled as bait to help us find the last of the East Enders.

Mr. East looked at my face, and shrieked “Do it now; he’s in converse with them.”

He dove toward the table and the control panel, and I kicked him in the head. As blows rained down on me, and others slipped past my squirming and manacled upper body, I screamed.

“Now. Now. No time.”

“Vaya con dios, verser.” I heard, and I wondered how they knew since I had never told them. I spun to dove over the panel, and keep the fatal code from being typed in.

It worked, the room smoked for a second as microwave beams from orbit fired, and flashfried us and the q-bomb before it could be set off.

I was out of there with a plasma cannon which had been specially modified for my use. It was a gift of the Jaxons to “a friend from far away.”

=================================================

In the hospital, the memory faded. I felt fine, and the nurse came in, and told me cheerfully to get my lazybones out of bed. They were releasing me.

I walked out, and down to the Mech chamber, and my chief mechanic looked at me with surprise.

“I thought you were already in the mech. How’d you get finished so quickly?” I heard trailing away as I sprinted toward my one hundred twenty-eight foot tall mech, and a meeting with my doppleganger.

Tadeusz

I went to Constellation SF Con 2003 which was Pegasus, I think. (you don’t know? ed.. //It was some mythological beastie on a t-shirt, who cares?// Some people do. ed..// Good point.). The City of Rednecks and Rockets, Huntsville, Al, hosted the event, and a very pretty Holiday Inn Express was the site.

However, as one noted SCA fencer put it upon hearing the rather cheap (which they did not pass on to the consumer) site price of 200-300$ if hotel rooms in the bloc are filled–”And its so close to the Super 8 hotel where there hasn’t been a shooting in at least a week.” I do hope he was exzaggerating.

The day pass for Saturday was $25 for me, and free for Corwin (until he gets to be four, and then I may stop going to cons.) But the consuite was very good and kept me and the “must run out of gaming room, and giggle by the door at the end of the hallway” child of his mother (me too) well stocked in food so that we didn’t have to hike down the street (away from the Super to the McD’s. (I bet that helped ease the sting. ed.//)

The very hot spiced chili (only for me), and the ham and hard white cheese sandwhich were good. Corwin had more cookies than in three regular days.

We started out with a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization based on the PC game which in turn was based on the board game. Very high quality board and tons of neat plastic pieces and a good bit of different card types. Game play seemed easy; maybe too easy. We got through three turns until a player got called away to play in a Spades tournameant. Grrr.

An hour and a half later, J. started a D&D game. He broke some basic rules of GMing, but it was okay anyways. We got captured in the first scene, and escaped prison in the second, and bargained our way past the dragon guarding the tunnels under the prison in the third.

Then it was Multiverser:

I had four players with an average IQ of about 2@5 which made me the dumbest person at the table. I had a MBA with a law degree, a graduate physicist working on his master’s theses, a genuine rocket scientist, and a fifteen-year-old kid with a 169 IQ.

We started in Naja World after an X-box got scrambled by a large coke being knocked into it, and versed everyone out. They took a semi-rig on the plains of Naja World, and took it down the road toward Umak Tek. Unfortunately, none of them had much experience driving a big rig, and so when they saw a large clam on the track, they flipped the rig.

This killed one player, and versed everyone out since I was using rules for everyone to be associated with each other. This seems to work better with con games. Non-associated works good on-line, and non also seems to work well with regular campaigns although a campaign founded on associated travel would be a nice experiment.

Then I sent them to Libertarian World. A 10 MM was a “girly-gun”, and a .75 magnum was a light pistol. George Washington was the “Great Enemy”, and “Hamiltonians” or “statists” deserved to be shot on sight. Americans landed on the Moon in 1940, and Mars in 1950, and small commercial spaceports are fairly common by 1981 (the date of the game). Marijuana is offered as an after-dinner dessert in respectable cafe’s. There’s very limited government in most areas, and some areas have none.

So they landed in a museum describing American history, and got apprehended by a security guard driving a hovercraft armed with a recoilless rifle. He traded a ride for to the nearest town, K.C., for a knife. One player tried to offer him a dollar, and he saw GW’s picture, thought “Hamiltonian’s!!”, and went for his gun. J. got him, but he got J..

A bit of patching at the local nurse’s house in her garage, and in a week he would be mostly fine after having a fist size hole punched in his shoulder.

They tried to sell the guard’s stuff to a pawn shop, and it was working good until they tried to sell the car. Now, they’d had ample warning that everyone recognized the car. The pawn shop guy called the rent-a-security, and in order to escape the versers stole a hovercraft and ran away from armed hovercrafts.

They headed South, and got to Muskego Starbuck’s Cafe and Spaceport in the Ungoverned Region in “Arkansaw”. The rocket scientist got a job as a rocket mechanic. The kid started teaching the cute waitress some karate, and the lawyer watched tv in the cafe. A bounty hunter caught up to him, and sent them all on to …

Philly 2007 with vampires. They met Gavin and Jackson. One person opined this was a dream, and they could just shoot anyone they felt like. So Gavin tried to offer them a chance to shoot his enemy for money, the priest.
So gunshots got sent at the vamps. J. had quickly surmised they were vamps, anyways. It was four versers with one a decent martial artists, and him with a bo staff (wooden) versus two poor vamps. And the versers had armed themselves if needed in Libertarian World. J. managed to bless the bullet that killed Gavin, and the kid staked Jackson.

They had a little more adventure going to the hospital because the kid had four broken ribs (Jackson punched him once), and the rocket scientist was spooked by meeting someone mentally controlled into claiming a serial killer had attacked her when she had classic vampire wounds.
The scientist shot J. to get out of the world because he did not like horror worlds.

They went to the Many-coloured Land, shot a brontosaur, and fought some aliens. The game ended at two in the morning.

One thing, I noted was that the kid, like in another con game, thought he could run the game without buying the book.

And I think that MV has some extra appeal to brainy people.

And then I drove home…

I had a great time and my adventures continue.

Eric

  During the first year of our marriage, my wife announced that she had made a discovery that had eluded historians and archaeologists for centuries going on millennia.  She had identified the material that had been used to construct the pyramids of Egypt, such that they had withstood centuries of wear and weathering and still existed perhaps four or five thousand years after they were originally built.  This marvelous substance which defied all efforts to dissolve or destroy it, she asserted, was dried corn grits.

  Obviously, that’s one of those jokes that has a serious aspect.  She, born and bred of people whose families had lived in the Philadelphia area suburbs of New Jersey since colonial days, had never eaten the hot cereal which I, son of a southern gentleman whose father (that is, my grandfather) was a Mississippi banker and cotton landlord and who (that is, my father) graduated from Georgia Tech, had come thoroughly to enjoy in my youth, and having attempted to prepare this for me for the first time was daunted by the effort it took to clean the pot when we were finished–and she, raised on Maypo™-brand oatmeal and farina, was never much impressed with the food so prepared.  I suppose that there is something in each of us that asks whether the meal we might prepare is worth the trouble, and in this case she concluded it was not.  Since then, my grits have been of the Quaker™ instant (just add hot water) variety.  Yet this same designation, that of which the pyramids were built, has since been given to overcooked scrambled eggs, burnt hash brown potatoes, and several other substances which clung to the pots and pans like Juliet to Romeo when we attempted to part them.

  Yet one day I might just design a world in which the locals are building huge monuments out of corn grits or flour paste or oatmeal, which for some reason stand the test of time.

  That thought causes my mind to wander over to NagaWorld, E. R. Jones’ quirky alien world published in Multiverser:  The First Book of Worlds which is the usual starting point for most versers, that is, Multiverser player characters.  It’s not the glass city that draws me there, nor the pleasant monotone singing of the nagas themselves.  It’s the orange tangerine-scented Astroturf™-like grass.  More specifically, it’s what happened when I, as a player character, started experimenting with the grass.  I had found an electric generator driven by a gasoline powered engine, and I believed that I could adjust the carburetor to run on alcohol–if I could make alcohol.  I knew that the grass tasted sweet and was edible and at least nominally nutritious, so it must contain sugar.  I knew that in our world, yeast spores were so prevalent that unleavened bread was not considered kosher for Passover if it the dough had been exposed to the air for more than fifteen minutes before baking.  Those spores must have been in my hair, my clothes, everywhere.  I had water, and a few tools, and so I mashed up the grass, attempted to contaminate it with yeast, and hastened to ferment and distil it into fuel.  It all worked, and I had electricity.

  I had something else, too, though.  There was a black goop in the bottom of my pot, the residue from the grass.  This I scraped out and dumped on the ground, needing to make another batch of alcohol sooner rather than later (and trying to keep my fermentation process active so I wouldn’t find myself without yeast).  Yet I kept an eye on the stuff, and I noticed that it dried or solidified into something hard and resilient, something between plastic and steel, yet harder than either without becoming brittle.  I began to make things of this–larger fermentation and distillation tanks first of all, tools to cut grass, tools to work with my new building material, defensive walls around our camp, looms and spinning wheels and pottery furnaces and paper screens and a water tower and I’ve forgotten all I made as I built a city of it all.  You really could have built the pyramids of this stuff, and they would have stood for thousands of years.  I know.  I built Umak Tek.

  Looking back, though, I have always wondered whether E. R. Jones always had that in mind when he created that world, or whether he devised it on the fly to see what I would do with it.  He never gave the slightest hint that it had not always been in his design; yet in half a decade of running that world, he had never had a player attempt to do anything like that.  As I was helping put the world to paper in the years that followed, it was evident that there were some secrets to it which had been part of it from the beginning, which I had been first to uncover; some which were still undiscovered by any player; and some which were known to me because other players had done things before or after me.  Yet whatever I attempted, he always provided results without ever hinting that this was not something that had always been in his mind, part of the world from the beginning.  I managed to make a flammable Sterno-like fuel which I hoped I would be able to use for our truck’s diesel engine, and to create glass which was psionically active as so many of the objects we’d found in the glass city had proven to be.  I still don’t know what things were his improvisation of the moment and what things were my pioneering discoveries.

  Perhaps that doesn’t matter.  Perhaps it’s sufficient that the world came together, a bit at a time, and always felt as if it was of one piece, even when there were disjointed aspects.  It’s that poker face, that ability to roll with the punches, to make it seem as if everything was set in stone forever even when it wasn’t there until the player asked the question that inspired it.  I remember when I was playtesting The Dancing Princess with Chris Jones, he asked what was on the mantle above the fireplace in the princesses’ room.  My notes on that room at that time said only that it was fully furnished sufficiently for three girls, and that there was a throw rug on the floor in the middle.  It had been a spur of the moment decision that there even was a fireplace there (as opposed to a brazier), and I tossed knickknacks on the mantle because I’ve never seen one that wasn’t so accoutered.  I named several items, including three silver goblets engraved with the names of the princesses.  These he took, thinking they would be a nice memento of his soon to be ended visit (the princesses had vanished, he had no clue where they were, and the guards were chasing him as he had escaped their efforts to execute him).  Those cups became a significant object in the stories ahead, and wound up in the published version of that world.

  They also became the inspiration for a game tip I wrote some years back:  make it seem as if the world is fully formed; answer the players’ questions as if you have always known the answer to that one and were just waiting for them to ask.  Nothing really exists until you say it, not even the pyramids of Egypt even if they were made of plastic steel.  Yet once you have said it, it should be as if it had always been there.

  It might be different for me.  After all, so many of the worlds I run are worlds I’m still writing, and by playing them I discover what I need to include or add or remove to make them work effectively.  That was what I was doing with Chris in Princess, and may well be what was happening with NagaWorld when I was a player within it.  Yet even the most complete published worlds and modules have a few holes in them, if you’re in the wrong place.  Patching those holes is one of the key tasks of the referee, and one of the reasons our games don’t do as well when modeled by computers.  Patch the holes; do it as if they had never been there.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.