Author Archives: James - Page 124
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The Atrocity Archives
A friend put me onto this book, saying that he was sure I'd like it. So I sneaked a copy of Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives into one of my orders of Christmas presents. My only regret is that I didn't know about these stories before. Charles Stross has taken some lovecraftian horror, added geekery and then put it into a British civil service context for the conspiracy cover-up, although it is much more a case of hiding the cock ups as on a low The basic premise is that magic is just about doing mathematics, which makes using computers a serious occult capability. It sort of puts the sysadmin up there with sorcery, which given the jokes about getting SCSI to work needing black candles and a blood sacrifice makes some sort of sense. I certainly could identify a…
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Five Day Week – day one
This is my first official five day week for almost five years. Until now I've been working full time hours over four days, nine hour days (plus lunch) as standard. Now that Alexander is at school I need to be able to start work after dropping him off. So I'm on the train in right now (0857 from Merstham, although it actually left at 0910). Wonder how late I'll get in. I'm used to a late start being 0835 when the train after the one I normally get arrives. Right now it looks like a 1000 start (0950 actually).
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The Other Side of the COIN
Today was the September CLWG meeting. My game used the whole session and was looking to explore some of the things that might drive farmers to becoming insurgents in modern Afghanistan. I'm not quite sure that I achieved that, but it was a fun session and mostly worked as a game, although the economic model was quite broken. I'll leave it to some of the players to tell us the story of what happened. I had Jim, Mukul, Dave & Daniel as ordinary farmers, John R was the leading farmer and the acting Governor of the valley (not that he managed to persuade the others to do what he said much). Nick Luft was the local Chief of Police and Rob Cooper was the local cleric, and also a Taliban representative. On the whole the things I learnt from today…
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Kings of War
Kings of War is a blog written by faculty and research students at King's College War Studies department. A very interesting blog with lots of articles on a variety of different aspects of warfare, both modern and historical. I came across it when looking for things to help develop my insurgency game. I am enjoying reading it. Related articles by Zemanta 10 Non-Fiction Books To Inspire Role Playing from RPG Musings ()
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Thoughts on an Insurgency Game
An article I read in the New Scientist on why people got involved in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia triggered some ideas about trying to run a game about the locals caught amidst an insurgency campaign. Farming Today, Fighting Tomorrow? This is a game to explore why people become insurgents (or perhaps not). Most of the players will be tribal elders leading their group of peasant farmers and directing their decisions about what to grow where and making sure that they can feed themselves and afford to buy the things they need to improve their lives and farms. Loosely set in modern Afghanistan I've taken huge liberties with the agrarian system and abstracted it to a level that can play through years in minutes. However I want to play on an event based accelerated real time basis through…