Doctor: Alright, we are save, you wanna know why? She sent for backup!

Emilia: I didn’t send for backup!
Doctor: I know, that was a clever lie to save our lives. Okay, yeah, NO backup, and that’s why we’re save as long as we don’t threaten you. If we HAD backup then you’d had to kill us.

Booming Voice: Attention Prisoner Zero! The Human Residence is surrounded! Attention Prisoner Zero! The Human Residence is surrounded!

Emilia: What’s that?

Doctor: Well, that would be backup. (to alien) Okay, one more time! We do have backup! And that’s definitely why we are save.

Booming Voice: Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated.

Doctor: Well, save for, well, you know, incineration.

David Tennant was in his best moments a truly brilliant choice for the Doctor. I think there is no arguing about that. And Russel T. Davies was a wonderful producer, able to make the series into something special again. Nevertheless the last few episodes both seemed to be crushed by their success, the half-season of specials we got treated with the last year was good, but not overwhelmingly so, and the 10th Docter seemed to become more and more unstable and unlikeable as time progressed. Even if it progressed in a rather wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sort of way. One could say that the show started to be more navelgazing than storytelling when the big finale came around.
It is too early to say if Stephen Moffat will do it better, now that he has taken over as producer. All the episodes he did in the series so far were brilliant, but those were individual episodes, not a whole series.
Me, I just watched the first episode of the new series.
I now could make it easy for myself and just tell you the new series is brilliant. But I won’t. There are another 12 episodes to go, but it does look promising at least.
On the other hand: if they keep it around the quality of that first episode it certainly will be an entertaining ride.

Spoilers after the jump:Synopsis
The Doctor (900something, time-travelling alien in a blue police box looking space/time machine with the ability to regenerate bodies), just regenerated at the end of the last Christmas special.

Now being played by Matt Smith he (crash-)lands in the backyard of a young girl who just needs someone to look at that mysterious crack in the wall of her room. The Doctor gets through his typical post-regeneration antics (thankfully rather quickly), finds out there is an alien prison at the other side of that crack and a prisoner just escaped into the girl’s house, then hops off in his time-machine again to fix some things, to come back in just 5 minutes. Of course we know the Doctor. The next time he appears in that backyard and tries to warn the girl he just missed the 5 minutes by a mark of 12 years. and young Amilia has grown up into an attractive young woman with a boyfriend and a Doctor fixation. Can you already see where this is getting us?
We do not get to think about that too much, even though the whole episode is longer than usual it has to telegraph the regeneration, the meet and greet between the main actors, and a storyline about alien cops surrounding the fugitive alien and threatening to blow up the human residence if he doesn’t leave. The human residence in that case of course means Earth, what did you think?
Yeah, he wins. After all it was the first episode and there are another 12 coming. It’s not like we would be surprised.

The Plot
The whole thing then is more of a character study than a serious episode. Yes, the world gets threatened, again, and there is a fugitive alien on earth, again, and he meets a new companion. But that’s not important. Just like “Rose” did so many years back, it mostly shows us the Doctor and his new companion. And Matt Smith is the Doctor from the first time he climbs out of that crashlanded police box. He echoes Tennant a few times, but his whole shtick seems to be less the machinegun-mouth lunatic that was the Tenth Doctor, but more of a suave traveller with more gravitas and balance than both his predecessors. Smith actually pulls off something quite fantastic in those moments. In some scenes he appears to channel Tennant almost perfectly, only to move back to his own interpretation of the character within seconds.
Karen Gillian is… ah well, let’s say it: she’s male bait. A redhead with thatthat body, that face, and that accent? Do we even need characterisation? Yes. yes, actually we do. Luckily enough we get some: She also has a Doctor fixation from the one time she met him when she was a small child. Also she has a wedding on exactly the day after he whisks her away at the end of the episode. You remember all that soap opera in the other seasons ever since he first met Rose? Yup, it’ll be in the new series as well.
The Tardis actually got quite a nice overhaul into something resembling a mad scientist’s laboratory. The Doctor even lampshades it in the end. Quite nice actually, even if the change itself seems to be a bit forced. But the production team obviously wanted a new look.

The aliens are new as well, and a bit bizarre at that: Prisoner Zero seems to be your run-off-the-mill shapechanging alien snake, but the Atraxis, the other side, are giant eyeballs in spinning ships. Yet, although they are bizarre, totally unscientific, and as of yet unseen on the show, they are oddly conservative considering the usual Moffat-aliens. Maybe he’s saving that for later episodes.

And then the style of the episode itself: subdued, but quite powerful in that. It uses it’s effects for full effect and while it is noticeable that it hardly is on the same budget as American Science Fiction-shows it uses it’s effects much more effectively. The alien ships might not be looking as realistic as the Galactica, but they are bizarre enough for us not to notice. The pacing is decent, sometimes even a bit too fast. We want to know more about the background, about Amy, the aliens, anything really, but we never have time to learn anything. There is a time limit of 20 minutes in the episode. As always in TV this is stretched horribly in the end, but there still would be room for more background. This might be a good sign.
There are some references to the old series in this episode, more so than in Davies’ run of the show. We see not only footage from the new series, but of the old series as well. All the Doctor’s are shown on screen, making the painful guessing game of earlier seasons moot.¹ On the other hand Moffat seems to try to establish a new myth arc, just like Bad Wolf or Torchwood in earlier seasons, but this one falls a bit short with Prisoner Zero doing all but proclaiming “Hey, write that down! This is going to be important for the season’s finale!”. This actually would be the second worst thing in this episode.

The worst? The new theme. Hardly as bad as it is reviled as over the whole internet it changes the one thing in the series that did not need changing at all. There was something in that old theme that made you come back for more. This one is as bland as it gets.

All in all: a good start. Not the best episode of Doctor Who I have ever seen, but one of the, if not even the, best “firsts” of a new Doctor. This special kind of episode often feels a bit lackluster due to the introduction of the replacement Doctor,² even though the last two incarnations pulled it off rather well.
A solid, good first episode that makes one want to see the rest of the series.

—-

¹ for the uninitiated: the new Doctor Who needed three seasons to acknowledge on screen that the old series as well as the 90s TV-movie are all canon.

² the worst was most likely Colin Baker’s first appearance which made him into a lunatic buffon. Something the whole series suffered from until it got cancelled

Even the rulebooks seem to go for that most of the time. If it’s not Gandalf it’s either the enchantress (think Circe), the young and dynamic mage (think Dr. Strange), or even the fat and clumsy Discworld mage (Pratchett might be a parodist, but the archetypes he uses ring tabsolutely true).
On the other hand we  should really be thinking of the classes in the game as something more basic I guess. A wizard is a magic-user. But so is a summoner, an enchanter, a necromancer. And a witch.
These specialists were of course detailed in later editions, all of them specialists with maybe a limited set of spells, but more power in what they were good in. That’s one way to do it I guess. But I’m not sure that I really want to give up the catch-all magic-user for that.
On the other hand, what is it exactly that I want from such a class? I mostly would like to give it a certain flavor with some of it’s spells. I would like to make my campaign’s witches and warlocks something sinister and occult and downright scary, so I would give them a combination of mostly necromancy and nature spells. Both areas actually kind of fit together if one thinks about it. Death always is part of nature.

And I would like them to be able to curse somebody.
That is atually an idea which I, again, kind if gleamed from DSA: “cursing in hot blood”. Now I don’t know exactly how that was solved in the earlier editions of good old DSA, I really was only using the very most basic starter rules of 1st and 3rd edition, and then later the arcane complete ruleset that was 4th edition.

The basic idea is that if a witch is enraged enough (her blood is boiling so to speak) she can, with less effort than usual, put a curse on somebody. Think about this: a witch gets driven out of a village by the local populace, she is furios as hell and curses the town. So all the crops around her start to wither and die. Or the local watersource gets spoiled.
That basically is the idea I had, and I guess it’s actually pretty easy to do if one takes into account that old rule about clerics: They can drop a spell they prayed for and replace it with a healing spell if they need it. Now let’s see…

Cursing in hot blood: If enraged enough by something/someone the magic-user can drop any spell he learned for the day and replace it with one from the list of curses. The curse must be of the same or lower level.

A special list of curses would have to be written for that sort of thing. A list of spells to use  in case of cursing.

It might be a bit overpowered though.

Actually no, it for sure would be overpowered. Especially in mid-level range the ability to just drop and replace spells might be a complete gamebreaker.
So how to concile this one special ability with the magic-user without totally debasing it from the coherent class system?
The solution I came up with so far would be even more in tone with the class: a corruption table. One does not wield wild magic like that without the magic doing something to one’s self. Maybe some madness?  Maybe some physical corruption?

I’m not really happy with it so far. I don’t really want to drag out the Mutant Future mutation table. That would be overdoing it a bit. But I would like my witches to have that ability to curse someone.

I always wondered about that: Not really that many people seem to know even the most basic swear words in German, even though everybody knows some in Spanish or French. Which is even worse because Germans are… well… potty-mouthed would be lacking as a description.

We hardly go by in any talk without using words that would cause an uproar in American media.¹ I guess there is a bit of a cultural thing going on here, together with some linguistical quirk. You know, swear words are not swearing in German. So even from a deeply Christian point of view (which often is used against it in English speaking countries, the “No Swearing” commandment in the Bible) if we are using foul language it’s not actually touching any religious feelings in most cases. There are some words like “gottverdammt” (god damn it) which would be, but those hardly are the morst poignant or popular ones. They actually are considered quite mild.

Of course it is the most deeply catholic part of Germany (southern Bavaria) which loves to use these words in speech. On the other hand this is considered ethnical identity nowadays (everybody EXPECTS them to behave like that), so they actually get free passes on insult charges if they use those. Seriously. Using bad language is part of the Bavarian national identity.

So, why is it actually so hard to get a few words right? We swear all the time. And yet every time there are some aggravated Germans in any medium it’s always “Schweinhund”. Even worse writers don’t seem to notice that this the word is not even grammatically correct. (it would be “Schweinehund”). But yeah, I know… German is hard…

No, that word is not really used in German that much. Actually, it’s not used at all. One could say it’s one of the aforementioned Bavarian quirks. It could be used to insult, but generally it’s more used as an endearment.

Yes. I know how weird that sounds.

I might sound strange but sometimes I just wish people would take one or two minutes to actually research their stuff. It’s not that hard! the thing is just, every single time “Germans” appear on the screen in foreign media they might be presented badly, they might be assholes and Nazis (and for some strange reason they’re also all blonde), but I just can’t see them as Germans. I’m not even insulted by presentations of Germans anymore. I don’t understand the most basic sentences they wharrgarrbl on the screen (because it is so hard to find any German to write you a few basic sentences for your multi-million dollar script…), I don’t even recognize their most basic utterances. They are from some mythical quasi-European country with a language that sounds sorta like Dutch.

Just without any proper “ch” in there…

——–

¹ to be fair: America is a nation that STILL talks about seeing one nipple for a split-second SIX YEARS AGO,but they do have the world’s largest porn industry

The Imp has meanwhile been presented marginally different in the Advanced Edition Characters book for Labyrinth Lord. Not too surprising, they, as I, just converted from the SRD… So here they are, not really the most brilliant of new monsters, but keeping with the atmosphere I desired.

Cavebear Skeleton

No. Enc.:    1d2 (1d2)
Alignment:     Chaotic
Movement:     120’ (40’)
Armor Class:     3
Hit Dice:     8
Attacks:     3 (2 claws, bite)
Damage:     1d3/1d3/1d6
Save:          F3
Morale:     12
Hoard Class:     None

The enormous heaps of cave bear remains in caves all over the land are a welcome source for any necromaniac puzzle afficionado. Even better, a cave bear skeleton listens to it’s master far better than any real bear, and it is immune to charm and sleep spells, as all the other undead.

Reanimated Ogre
No. Enc.: 1d4 (2d6)
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 90’ (30’)
Armor Class: 5
Hit Dice: 5 + 1
Attacks: 1 (club)
Damage: 1d10
Save: F4
Morale: 12
Hoard Class: None

Sometimes killing the beast might not be enough. One has to completely destroy the body before it loses it’s will to kill. That, or some necromancer was not satisfied with the power he had over human bodies and wanted something… bigger. Whatever it is, an undead ogre is nothing if not scary, and where a normal ogre can be a scourge on hte land, this one can be even worse, killing indiscriminately, trying to gorge down anything he comes across without being able to hold those things in his decaying body.
Undead ogres are susceptible to ordinary weapons, but are immune to charm and sleep spells.

Imp
No. Enc.:  1 (1)
Alignment: Lawful
Movement: 60′ (20′)
Armor Class: -1
Hit Dice: 3 + 1
Attacks: 1 (sting)
Damage: 1d4 (Poison)
Save: F3
Morale: 10
Hoard Class: None

Sometimes appearing invisible or as a monstrous spider, raven, rat, or boar this little devil often is summoned to serve as a familiar to dark magic users. It’s normal form is, impish so to speak, a small hoofed and horned devil with a tail ending in a poisonous sting. An imp sees nothing in attacking from behind if it can get something out of doing so, and will flee as soon as it sees itself overpowered.

So of course some people get a bit creative when trying to dodge fares without getting punished for that. One case that has just gotten out of courts actually had a fascinating reasoning behind it: the legal terminology for dodging fares in German law is “Leistungserscheichung” which might be translated as “obtaining something surreptitiously”.

Now everybody always was kind of sure that meant any kind of fare dodging. After all, if you were going to dodge a fare, was there any way but doing it, well, in secret? Surreptitiously as the dictionary says?

Turns out yes, technically there is a way: Seeking refuge in audacity. Tell the conductor beforehand that you are going to go without a ticket. Show openly that you are not paying and still ride the train.

That theory was put to test in court a few days ago. One guy decided to try the idea and rode on the subway wearing a t-shirt saying “Ich fahre schwarz” (I’m fare dodging). And then tried to take it to the court when he got caught.

He lost though. The nice idea aside, the court said, but just wearing the shirt was not enough (the conductors said they didn’t even notice it), but he would have had to tell the ticket vendor at the station AND the conductor when he boarded the train. Then of course he could have used the train without paying the fare. If both of them had let him do that at least. Which they were pretty unlikely to do.

So the reasoning obviously was valid (he would have been allowed to ride without paying IF only…) but the execution was flawed.

This design paradigm is normal for The Dark Eye, as most gamemasters notice pretty soon how hard it is to write extraordinary creatures and plots without completely breaking the whole setting. I kept myself mostly to usual fantasy fare with the monsters in that module. A few were not in the Labyrinth Lord basic rules (which I used as reference); that won’t matter, I will post writeups on those the next few days.

The map was created with Dungeon Crafter v1.4.1 (the free one), then finished off in GIMP. I noticed that at least when using it under WINE I cannot turn tiles in Dungeon Crafter, or even save a map, for reasons unknown, so the mapping took longer than I planned and still is lacking something. Anybody got a better mapper that’s also usable on a Linux system?

Update: Feb 26. 2010 – replaced download link with slightly corrected version

Download: Under Oak Hill

Related: New Creatures

How much story and adventure can one relate on only one page?

A lot.
Building a dungeon becomes minimalistic art: short sentences, only the most needed of comments, and the dungeon’s map as part of this storytelling. Is it a 70s style TSR-blue dungeon? Is it handdrawn? What’s on the map, what isn’t? And so these dungeons can range from bad to good, and sometimes they move into sheer excellency (look at this guys OPDs for example!).
So why the sudden interest in this kind of dungeon? The One Page Dungeon Contest 2010 has it’s submission date this weekend, and I want to take part. I would have liked to playtest the dungeon before handing it in, but well, that will have to wait until next week or so.

———-

¹ There is actually another contender for the title “dungeon as art”: Megadungeons. Where OPDs try to limit itself megadungeons go into baroque splendor with dozens of levels, hundreds, if not thousands of rooms and a living, breathing ecology in them, but that is for another article…

Labyrinth Lord

Now, I’m obviously not part of that age group that seems to be so fascinated by those old-school games. Not as much as those people in their 40s and 50s are who played D&D back when it was fresh and new. I’m not even close to that. My first experience with roleplaying games came in the mid-90s with Germany’s very own “Das Schwarze Auge” (The Dark Eye), although I can relate to them desiring simpler and faster rules than what is current now. The new version of D&D (4th edition) appears to me a as a bloated, overdone try to rip off World of Warcraft. Even the 3rd edition, which I used for a long time and had lots of fun with, always appeared to me as overly complicated. Maybe the reason for that was that the first time I played DSA back then I was using the Beginner¹ rules, which were the rules of it’s 1st edition: fast, easy, and a lot of fun. They had their very own problems. but I never lost the feeling that roleplaying games should be played like that: fast and loose, story over rules, a quick decision in favor of hour long battles.

On the other hand there is a certain dogmatism in the retrogaming community: as much fun as playing the old games just like they were played 30 years back might be, many of those adherents to the old school also want something else: reliving the old days. And so they try to simulate the old times as closely as possible.

Why am I putting that much thought into this? Because I plan to use LL for some games, that’s why. it turns out that there are a few people  interested in playing pen&paper roleplaying games. I haven’t really played for years now, but let’s see if I still got it…

———–

¹ and lo! there actually is a retroclone of those rules as well, in English even…

“Two days ago I discovered something that stunned me: Using Anki WHILE walking on my treadmill was enjoyable. I easily did it for an hour and the next day (yesterday) did it for an hour again. The time goes by quickly. Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.” -Seth Roberts

I think Seth might be onto something with that. I noticed that while I can’t stand listening to audiobooks anymore (it was different when I was a kid), during long travels I actually enjoy listening to audio lectures even on topics that do not really interest me (and those topics normally are a bit weird because there are not that many free online classes available to download and listen to).
I dislike sitting in some of my lectures because the topics don’t interest me at all, yet I cherish listening to lectures about rhetoric when travelling between Poland and Germany? It’s weird, isn’t it?

I too should try using flashcards when working out next time. Actually I should try working out again…

Until now I have been neatly organizing those manuscripts that I needed to take a look at into folders and subfolders. At least I have been trying to. It is a kind of tedious process that always seemed a bit too bothersome to me to be taken for granted. Still, there seemed to be no alternative to that problem lately, while I always figured that reading those letters in one single file might be a bt more comfortable, the most obvious of alternatives to the bunch of multiple .jpgs  would have been the everpresent .pdf file format. A wonderful format in my opinion, only very unpleasant to use for larger series of pictures: When used as a way to present facsimiles of graphics and pictures pdfs tend to become uneccessary large and bulky, lose the ability to interact with the pictures inside more directly (like cutting and copying parts of pictures) and are very limited to navigate. Pdf has been introduced as a format which appears on every system just like it is supposed to appear, without any shifts in the documents formatting; the use as a picture archive was not one which was intended.

Then I realized something else last week, when preparing a presentation about the history of sequential art (read: comics) actually: I had had that problem already, a few years before, when first looking into the history of comics. Public domain comics from the 30s and 40s often were made available for free by enthusiasts on the net, only, just as in my experience with the handwritten sources from medieval times later, it was really bothersome to download them and then keep them in different folders just to make sure I could easily find the story I was looking for. Keeping them in one single folder didn’t make it easy either.

A few years later someone found a solution to that: the so called Comic Book Archive, which is basically a bit of a glorified hack. Maybe even using the word hack on it would be kind of glorifying it, but as Lifehackers do that all the time it might be okay. What the people who got the idea for this first did was simple, yet strangely effective (and it actually is so simple even I understand it): they just put a sequential series of comic book pages into an archive (like .zip or .rar) and renamed the resulting file into .cbr or .cbz. What they had then was a file that could be read by a special program (there are a few dozen of those around nowadays) as one single comic book. Basically the program was nothing more than a picture viewer that could decompress achives. Also, because it is nothing more than a zipped archive one can easily open it up with any zip-program,  and use the contents as one wishes.

So, can this be useful? I still am wondering about it. Modern CBR/CBZ-readers have a multitude of different features which are supposed to be help in reading the comics in those archives, in some cases going so far as to actually enable the reader to adjust the colors of the current pages or magnify especially hard to read parts of the pictures.

As something as a proof of concept I hereby present: the cbz-ified Treaty of Tordesillas from 1494, the treaty that divided the world into a Spanish and a Protuguese part, back in the days when those two nations were the ones which actually were powerful and ballsy enough to divide the world amongst themselves. To use this file properly you have to download one of the many CBR-readers [link] and open it. I don’t have any special reason to use exactly this document, it was just the one I came across first after a quick search. The pages of this treaty have been taken from Wikimedia Commons and are lacking the high definition one would wish for real work on such a document.[1] That might not be too much of a problem in this case, as the writing is more or less legible anyway, other documents, especially cursive handwritings or the scribblings of some 14th ct. merchant might need a better resolution to be of use in that case. It works, more or less, but everything depends on the resolution of the pictures used. But the same problem would be there if we just had looked at them like that. Here we can see them in the sequence they were written in.

[1] just as I am finsihed writing this I get the message that the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg now is online [link] in it’s completeness. How fitting… For many more online documents from the middle ages there is a whole catalogue of online sources out there…