Nanoo, Nanoo

In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Mork is visited by his Orkan superior, who has the body of a 10-year-old boy (for reasons I don’t remember).  They divert themselves with a game of Orkan Checkers, which is played on a board of two rectangles, black and red, with a single white piece the size of a saucer.  After thinking a long while, Mork opens by moving the piece from the red field to the black.  “Check,” he says.  Mork’s visitor makes (apparently) the only move available to him: he moves the piece from black back to red and declares victory.  [youtube]

Replace the single white disk with a gross of metal figures and you have miniatures gaming in essence.  In such a game, strategy, tactics, even luck are irrelevant.  The outcome is determined entirely by the initial placement of pieces on the field.  Miniatures gamers are animated by the same neural gangleon that motivates bug collectors, not armchair generals.  I gather that there are some who would “improve” our favorite passtime by prettying-up the figures; I can’t cotton to such a womanish point of view.

We Hereby Endorse:

It’s a good time to pick up some BattleTech products.  I can truthfully attest that after handling Handbook: Periphery I grew two inches taller overnight.  Jihad Hot Spots: 3076 cured my phlebitis, and Masters & Minions turns everything it touches to gold–fortunately the effect is temporary.  So if you want to survive another six months, I urge you to go buy these products today.  Carry them around with you because they ward ogres as well.

No goods or services were offered to Serious Blog in exchange for endorsements.

Another New Development…

Even before we read A Time of War, we knew that the folks in charge of BattleTech were long ago were replaced by evil cyborgs.  But were said evil cyborgs brilliant enough to get us to pay for the right to proof-read it?  Yes.  Yes, they were.

Let’s Play…

It’s a lot, it’s a lot like real life…

So Geoff wrote a bit for Masters and Minions, eh?  I suppose I’ll have to buy it now.

Copy, Right?

It’s too bad that the Aeneid was banished for unlicensed use of a character copyrighted by Homer, that Cervantes and Boccaccio had to excise large chunks of Don Quixote and the Decameron for infringement on Apuleus’ prior works, that Shakespeare was sued into penury and obscurity by the heirs of Sophocles, and the Gospels of John, Luke and Matthew are lost to history because of a claim by the so-called Mark, but at least BattleTech still has access to the Unseen.

Updates

• Facebook is harassing me. Today it sent me an email titled, “Five of your Friends invited you to join…” Perhaps my pale corpse can get wi-fi access from the coroner’s freezer.
• I picked up a few BattleTech novels from a local used book store, but stopped reading after a few pages upon encountering a passage about a space ship crossing the “elliptic plane.” It’s a natural mistake, of course, to conflate Kepler’s First Law with Zodiacal terminology, but it made me realize in a flash that I was reading a book for thirteen-year-olds written and edited by twenty-three-year-olds, and I just can’t bring myself to care whether Aris Sung manages to fit in with his new clique. Too bad I’ll never find out whether the Liaos retake Sarna.
• Speaking of BattleTech discontents, it has dawned upon me (at long last) that if I were picking up the game today [somehow returned to age fourteen, mind] I’d steer clear of the Combine. Whose idea was it to give us the worst attributes of Marik and Liao during the re-launch of the brand? If internal disputes and Oriental floundering in the face of lost territory brought a bounty of popularity the game would have looked very different from the outset, no? [Yes, I know that it's all a big cycle. But if the game had launched during the reign of the Von Rohrses I wouldn't have pledged then either.]
• This week I saw part of a special on ABC about the collapse of civilization in the 21st Century.  I found the windmill-and-greenhouse future-New York City quite depressing; conversely, the neo-feudal America of waning cities fighting over scraps of technology thrilled.
• Speaking of TV, there was a time long ago when I could have told you which color crystals to mash together to create flashes of light for scaring Sleestak or to gain access to pylons.  No longer.

-Tech Trek

I’m going to travel back in time to give my fourteen-year-old self a copy of Sword and Dragon.  I don’t care if it violates causality and destroys the universe as we know it.  Now, if I could only get my future self to deliver me a copy of the HKHB.

*Bang* You’re dead.

So there’s going to be a new CBT RPG with the airy title “A Time of War.” No doubt it will be much like the versions we’ve seen before. I wonder if there’s room on the market for a game in which there are no “hit points” or “saves” because if someone pulls a gun on you and fires, you’ve stupidly let yourself get killed and the game is over. A game in which you wouldn’t dream of leaving your walled estate or barracks without a bodyguard or a reliable cloak of anonymity, and the aim is to avoid armed conflict when not actually on army maneuvers. It seems as though such a game would fit our setting, but would it sell?

3076: Jihad, we hardly knew ye

It does feel like the story is coming together, doesn’t it? The writers are busily tying the bow on the Jihad storyline just as I was growing weary of all the false starts.  And they’ve added to the website an unremarked-upon (far as I can tell) button for Dark Age products.  So the story moves on, and good riddance to the Jihad, and the Inner Sphere-that-was to boot.  There comes a point where the story feels enough, beyond which adding more feels like taking away.  One hopes for relief on behalf of the characters; would you add another to Hercules’ labors?  Ben et al., pray give us a satisfactory ending and turn the page.  We’re counting on you.

Hmm…