The Gaming Outpost

Before I get to the latest batch from the sometimes prolific Eric Ashley, I want to announce the beginning of a new temporal anomalies series at The Examiner, beginning today with A Sound of Thunder part 1:  a story.  It’s going to be one of those tearing apart the disaster series, but those can be fun, particularly when the fans start arguing.

Eric has posted thrice since my Thursday posting, and I’ve been able to keep up on his work with some effort.  The most recent addition is Practise Bits:  Mistakes and Need, which paints an image of a sort of psionic vampire who steals the minds of his victims.  I can see that moving into horror, except that the vampire is the perspective character and my sympathies, at least, are against him.

  Before that is a delightful bit, Practise Bits:  The Pub, in which the character is kicking back and relaxing.

That reminds me of a completely different topic which I should have mentioned.  I’ve got a question that relates to a scene in Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, because I am not a frequenter of pubs and have never been to England.  It might be that this is an expression used in bars all over the world and I don’t know it; or it might be peculiar to England, as so many expressions are.  At one point, two of the three friends leave the table together, and almost as soon as they are gone the bartender asks the third, pointing at their unfinished drinks, “Are those two dead?”  I watched it twice, and decided that this must be a way of asking whether he should clear the glasses, whether the people drinking them had abandoned them; but I would rather have someone tell me of their own knowledge that it is than simply guess at it.

Now, that brings me back to Eric’s remaining article, and I must admit that when I saw the title Practise Bits:  Mary Piper Rho, it was with some trepidation that I approached the article.

The Mary Piper was a world idea I presented in Multiverser:  The First Book of Worlds.  In my vision of the thing, there was a skeleton of essentials and an overlay of window dressing, and a significant part of the concept was to show that you could run exactly the same world with entirely different flavor.

That which formed the skeleton included

1. That there was a ship named Mary Piper;
2. That it was a trading vessel on a cargo route, trading this for that and making a profit;
3. That the ports all had the same names, and the same kind of cargo was traded in each;
4. That the names of the members of the crew were all connected in a way that made them “the same names in a different milieu”;
5. That everything that happened on the route was analogous–milieu-appropriate pirates and storms and problems;
6. That the numbers were always the same–the same times, the same money;
7. The core product of the trip that made it profitable was a green something obtained from a primitive port that was called by the locals “emerald” and was highly valued in the civilized ports.

That which was different was, to my mind, the color–things which had everything to do with how the player perceived the adventure and nothing to do with what was happening on it.  There were two such milieus detailed, the one a masted sailing vessel plying the oceans of an early gunpowder swashbuckling setting, the other an interstellar spaceship.  The concept was intended to be adaptable to many other settings, although at this point I cannot honestly say whether a desert caravan was in my vision (think it was), or a western wagon train (that probably was not).

I must commend Eric, because he ran with the idea, and there were Mary Pipers filling the Greek alphabet very quickly (I had produced “alpha” and “beta”).  What always irked me, though, was that some of these were not The Mary Piper as I conceived her.  There was a passenger liner, a hospital ship, a plague ship, a ghost ship–ships that obviously were not trading vessels.  I always felt that the only legitimate Mary Piper variants were those that maintained this aspect of being a trader.

That said, he has produced some wonderful variants that really are traders, and although a part of me wants to laugh still at my stint aboard furry steampunk version in which the ship leapt from one planetary fragment to another propelled by fans blowing wind into its own sails, it was a wonderful creation in which I would have liked to have stayed longer.

And so, too, it looks like Mary Piper Rho is true to the source material, at least as far as I can ascertain (although the owners technically should have been at Sardic, not New Haven); it’s also connected to the earlier article, Practice Bits:  Shiptree, in the last batch.  So now that I’ve expressed my concerns about Mary Piper variants, let me commend the article to you.  Although I doubt any verser will ever make a Mary Piper captain playing in Eric’s rather more deadly games, it was good to imagine one doing so.

–M. J. Young