Pentasystem - Underground Railroad

Version 0.4 of the Pentasystem is available, this time adjusted in concert with my Underground Railroad setting. (And here's a link which will always be the current Pentasystem version.)

It was an interesting - and fun - process working on the two side-by-side, and I see why designers generally work on a setting and a system in tandem from the start. As soon as I started to imagine more tangible scenarios, it became clear that there were things missing from the system.

What have I added?

First, implied attributes. These became necessary almost as soon as I started thinking about a Mage character. A Mage (in UR) needs to have a robe, a ring, a staff, several magical skills, two elemental affinities, and a spellbook - that's part of the definition of a Mage. All of those function as attributes. But can you make people spend that many attribute slots just so they can fireball something from time to time?

And then I realized it was a general problem. The example I use in the rules text is a policeman, who has various pieces of equipment (truncheon, handcuffs, maybe a gun, radio...), relationships to lawyers and coroners and private detectives and informants, a badge and probably a uniform (emblems), particular skills... So I came up with the concept of implied attributes. If you have an attribute Mage, you have all the other stuff, and unless otherwise stated it's at the same level as your Mage attribute. (You can pay resources to raise it or get them back by lowering it.)

Secondly, groups. How do you represent a plot to overthrow the government, a political struggle between gangs, a battle between armies? Groups is the answer. Originally, though, I thought of groups because I needed a way to deal with cooperation that allowed multiple mages to work on great projects together - so that you could have cool things like flying horses or permanent teleportation gates that the magic rules didn't quite allow individuals to create, but that would make the setting much more interesting. This fed into the Assistance rules.

I got Consequences straightened out, at least enough to be going on with - I'm sure these rules will change further. At some point, something someone posted at Story-Games alerted me to the fact that there were Consequences in FATE, at which my ears pricked up, I went to the FATE SRD, and - SNARF. (Actually I only pinched the first two levels of Consequences, and adjusted even them.)

Information and Secrets - how do you find out how much you find out? There's more work to do on this, but (stimulated by the question, "How do you decide if you recognize the symbolism of another mage's robe, staff and ring and hence know his level, skills and school?") I put in place some basic rules. It's down to how obscure the information is, given your attributes.

I also wrote up the initial bits of the Personal Scenes section. Personal scenes are where you take a bit of a break from the external action and sort things out in your head, heal up, prepare for future action, work on your issue or goal, or (possibly) refresh your pools. They're the bits in the movie where the music slows down and goes more strings and less brass and percussion and you have two-shots of the hero and heroine discussing What It All Means and possibly Their Relationship. (And, if it's Hollywood, probably getting into bed.)

What about Underground Railroad? Well, most of what I did was work on the magic system, back and forth with the Pentasystem. The magic system got simplified a bit; it was just too baroque for no really good reason. I couldn't think of an easy Pentasystem way to do the "Sometimes the supply of mana in an area isn't as high as at other times", for example, so I dropped it.

I'm not entirely happy with the Healing skill. I still haven't completely worked out the injury and healing rules, and everything is likely to simplify. Perhaps Healing will just become a Special Effect.

I completely rearranged the example spell tables, splitting them up so that there's one table for each skill, with levels down the side and elemental affinities across the top. I think this is easier to refer to than the old layout, with skills down the side, levels across the top (making it necessary to go to landscape format), and differences between elemental affinities crammed into the text. Damn, there's some fun stuff there; I'd forgotten about the Icy Weapon and Fiery Weapon spells, for example. Sometimes you want to address theme, and other times you just have to set something on fire. UR caters for both.

A note on the name: It's a double reference, firstly to the dwarvish system of (literal) underground railroads in the setting, but secondly to the network which helped slaves escape before the American Civil War. I'm thinking of a similar network which helps gnomes escape their dwarf oppressors. Need to put that in the text.

(There's no reference intended to the RPG term "railroad", meaning "the GM has made up the plot beforehand and will force you to stick to it." In fact, the Pentasystem, played as written, specifically does not support this. There is even a bolded statement that "the Opposition should not prepare".)

Next steps, I think, will include making some of the play aids that I have blithely referenced in the text, now that the rules are detailed enough that I can figure out what they should look like. This will include the character sheet, the group character sheet, the consequences sheet, the magic item sheet and a few others. I'm concerned that it might seem like a bit too much bookkeeping; on the other hand, the actual system is relatively simple and has few exceptions. The play aids are really to help you apply the same system in a number of different ways.

I'd like to work out a few example templates, too, not just for mages but for Earthist shamans, and Lunar-Asterist priests, and dwarvish merchants, and dwarvish craftspeople, and gnome mecha pilots, and a few others. Also some Special Effects. This is likely to have the effect of making the rules still more concrete.

And then I'd like to do it again, with a non-magical setting that so far I haven't come up with. Pirates, ninjas, pulp, it's all been done, and done well. There's a more-or-less generic space opera game based on FATE coming out, apparently, though I may just say "To hell with it" and do one anyway, or maybe a transhuman or cyberpunk game.

I do have an idea for a setting which is a ringworld, with a sophisticated space-facing civilization on the outer side dealing with the universe at large, while a naive pastoral society lives on the inside, growing their food in exchange for minor tech, and kept deliberately unaware of the greater scheme of things. Apart from what they each know, the economic thing is a bit like the dwarves and the humans in UR, but that may not be too much overlap. I don't have a name for it just yet.

Badly thought-through advertising

Advisory: Ranting.

On my commute this morning I was contemplating how badly thought through advertising is sometimes. I can't find an image on the net (partly because I don't know the product's name - you'd have to be really close to read it, and for bus stop advertising, this is stupid in itself), but there is a poster around at the moment which conveys to me a message which I'm sure the advertisers didn't intend.

The background is a waterfall in some idyllic spot. A man is standing with his head tilted back so that it's aligned with the waterfall as if he's drinking from it, but he's clearly not. Behind him, low down on the bottom left, is an ugly bottle of some yellow drink which I assume is the product.

Here's the thought bubble I imagined:

"Ugh, that looks like flourescent urine. I'll turn my back on it and fantasize about drinking fresh water instead."

I'll try to take a photo of it if I see one close to home.

The last advertising campaign I saw that was this stupid was a long, rambling poster about how some woman - I forget her name - "used to walk this way to work", but now she doesn't, because she went to some tertiary institution - I think Unitech - and got a qualification and now she's doing what she wants. (Presumably involving either working somewhere different, living somewhere different, or owning a car, or some combination.) These posters were all over the city. It made me wonder how, a), this woman ever got any work done if she was walking all over the city on her way to work, and b), how she ever had time to study as well.

And don't even get me started on the Burger King bikini girls. Quite apart from the obvious objectifying exploitation angle, those models have clearly never eaten a burger - or, probably, a square meal - in their lives.

Established religion

Advisory: Snarkiness, widely distributed.

So Brian Tamaki, the leader of the conservative Destiny Church, is protesting the National Statement on Religious Diversity (which I've blogged about before), because it says that New Zealand has no "official or established" religion, and he doesn't understand the technical meaning of the word "established religion" - that is, a religion officially adopted by the State.

He apparently consulted a dictionary for his definition: "Footnote: 'established' meaning, 'those things that have been set in place'". His education at Te Nikau Bible College didn't cover much church history, I suppose. Nor, apparently, did it teach him how to spell "formally" (his statement says, "We formerly recognise New Zealand as a Christian nation") or that the Prime Minister is head of government, not head of state (though I'm sure Helen Clark would love to be our head of state).

He also ignores the clear statement in the Statement's preamble:

Christianity has played and continues to play a formative role in the development of New Zealand in terms of the nation's identity, culture, beliefs, institutions and values.

Which is basically what he means when he says that Christianity is New Zealand's "established" religion. But he is also going beyond that, and saying, in effect, that Christianity should have first-class status and other religions second-class status, rather than, as the Statement says:

The State seeks to treat all faith communities and those who profess no religion equally before the law.

In other words, on Planet Brian, Christendom still exists and is a Good Thing, and this is an underhanded attempt by the Government to undermine it against the wishes of the majority of New Zealanders. (Whatever Brian wants is generally wanted by the majority of New Zealanders, on Planet Brian.)

On the whole, I think our habitually interfering Government should indeed not be sticking its oar in, but for pretty much the opposite reasons to Brian Tamaki. See, I see Christianity as a religion for the powerless (I shouldn't even really be practicing it myself; I'm white, male, educated, middle-class and prosperous). I think that joining up with the institutions of power was the worst and most distorting move Christianity ever made, though I suppose it did open it up more readily to people like myself, so I shouldn't be completely ungrateful.

I don't think I actually want a religion that needs to be intertwined with secular power in order to be listened to, respected and followed. I prefer one that can achieve those things on its own merits. And that goes just as much for interfaith initiatives as for individual faiths.

Now, Paul Morris's Hamilton speech (19 February), of which I can't find an online copy so I'm referring to one Brenda sent me, does say this:

The idea of a ‘National Statement’ was that it would not originate from government and be mandated from above, as it were, rather it would arise as a result of broad discussions among faith and interfaith groups and the wider New Zealand public.

And, speaking of the consultation process:

...a minority were concerned that the National Statement on Religious Diversity was a new law to be enacted and binding on all New Zealanders. Of course, this is not the case but this was obviously not made as clear as it might have been...

...and evidently still isn't. Starting out with a statement "The State seeks...", having the text primarily hosted on a government website, and inviting the Prime Minister to present the statement are not good ways to convey the impression that this is a form of grassroots initiative, and not another attempt by the Labour Government to legislate every aspect of New Zealand life into conformity with their liberal ideologies.

Technical note: label feeds

Thanks to purplemoggy, who blogged on how to add label feeds to one's Blogger template, you can now subscribe to a feed of all posts with a particular label, if some specific aspect of my ramblings should, bizarrely, interest you.

The little next to the labels in the sidebar links to the individual feeds.

(This post deliberately left unlabelled, as a very minor exercise in irony.)

Electro-neurotheology

One thing from Andrew Newton's seminar I will go into more detail about. He mentioned the Persinger experiments with stimulating the brain with magnetic fields and producing what seemed like mystical experiences, which he claimed to have replicated. He then made the usual logical leap which atheists make at this point and implied that this constituted evidence that spiritual experiences were "not real".

I've said this on the Knife Fight, but that isn't Googleable, and I want to add some speculations. Firstly, even accepting the Persinger experiments at face value (and, like many controversial pieces of science, their validity is questioned by other researchers), the fact that an experience can be produced by stimulating the brain proves nothing whatsoever about the reality of that experience when the brain is not being directly stimulated. An electrode used to stimulate the brain during brain surgery can produce an experience of smelling a rose or hearing music. Does this mean that smelling roses and hearing music isn't real? Of course it doesn't. What it means is that the way in which we perceive smelling roses and hearing music, and, presumably, the way in which we perceive anything else, involves electrical activity in the brain - which is well-known and uncontroversial.

In fact, I like to turn the question around, and say: If these electromagnetic fields are producing a perception of something which is like a spiritual experience, then, in the absence of electromagnetic stimulation (or temporal lobe epilepsy, which can apparently have similar effects), what stimulus is producing these experiences? The atheist assumption that nothing is producing them seems to me to be more mystical than my belief that something is.

Now, it needs to be pointed out (and has been known for over a century - it's in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902) that the interpretation of these experiences will tend to follow a person's already existing belief structure. A devout Catholic may experience the presence of Mary or a saint, a devout Protestant may experience the presence of Jesus, a devout Buddhist will use Buddhist terminology, and a believer in UFOs will experience it in terms of alien lifeforms. This isn't really a surprise if we are dealing with something "ineffable", that is, beyond names and forms, inexpressible in our everyday language. And that, in turn, is no surprise if we are dealing with stimulation which doesn't come through the normal sensory channels, so that any language we put to it has to translate it into metaphor, because we don't have non-sensory language available.

The interesting thing to me - and here's where speculation comes in - is that it's often mentioned in this context that the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins did not have a religious experience while wearing the Persinger "God helmet". The Wikipedia article linked to above quotes the Telegraph:

Dr Persinger has explained away the failure of this Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator. Before donning the helmet, Prof Dawkins had scored low on a psychological scale measuring proneness to temporal lobe sensitivity.

I just checked the article and found this additional quote:

Recent studies on identical and fraternal twin pairs raised apart suggest that 50 per cent of our religious interests are influenced by genes. It seems Prof Dawkins is genetically predisposed not to believe.

Which was my speculative conclusion, kind of. Could it be that some unbelievers are such, not because of logic but simply because their brains lack sensitivity to the signals coming from - wherever such signals come from?

I myself am a member of a family which is far from noted for devout belief, and I haven't ever had anything approaching a mystical experience. It would be interesting to discover how sensitive my temporal lobes are.

Two Hypnotherapy Seminars: Compared and Contrasted

Yesterday I went to a seminar with Andrew Newton, the well-known stage hypnotist, who trained Paul McKenna. It was interesting to compare and contrast it with the last seminar I went to, with Lawrence Follas.

Lawrence's seminar was somewhat dull and poorly organized, and I learned relatively little, whereas Andrew's was (as you would expect from someone who's been on the stage for almost 30 years) entertaining and professional, and I learned a lot more. Lawrence is an elderly and rather kindly man; Andrew is a dynamic man in his 50s (partly because of his accent, but also in his general appearance and manner, he reminds me of Tony Blair - a man he openly despises, so he wouldn't welcome the comparison). He has a persona (which I think is partly put on and partly real) of being cynical, sarcastic and uncaring. But there were also similarities between the two seminars.

Firstly, the amount I paid for each was about what it was worth (obviously, the Follas one was a lot cheaper).

Secondly, both of them could have productively been a lot shorter.

And thirdly, both of them were as long as they were because the presenters went on about their personal beliefs to an annoying and unnecessary degree.

Now, Lawrence Follas is a New Ager who believes pretty much anything, while Andrew Newton is an atheist who believes almost nothing. But both of these positions annoy me for the same reason, which they have in common with fundamentalist and evangelical believers of all religions, and don't have in common with me. That is, they think they understand how the universe works - not necessarily in every detail, but overall.

I don't think they understand, and I don't think I understand, either. The detail level is the only level at which I think I understand anything, and that's only satisficing.

Although I have very little respect for the content of their beliefs or the way they support them, I do respect and even admire the fact that they are passionate in them, that these beliefs are important components of their lives. It shows they're considering the important issues. I think their conclusions about these issues are totally off base, but at least they are admitting them into their mental universe rather than leaving them unexamined.

But I did learn something from both seminars, apart from the hypnotherapy techniques which were what I was there for. That was: However important my beliefs are to me, when I'm speaking to an audience which doesn't share them about another topic, I should mention them only in passing, if at all.

David Zindell's Lightstone

On the recommendation of my compatriot and fellow Story-Games hanger-out Mike Sands (thanks, Mike), I'm reading David Zindell's book The Lightstone. I have to tell you, this man's blurb writer has not done him justice.

I'm fairly sure that I've picked up his books in the library, read the blurb, and put them back, dismissing them as Just Another Genre Fantasy Phonebook - thick, full of names, and unoriginal. Assorted group quest for Maguffin to prevent dark lord taking over the world, yawn.

And yes, an assorted group is questing for a Maguffin (the Lightstone, a golden cup with magical powers), to prevent a dark lord from taking over the world. And yes, Bad Fantasy Name Syndrome (it's a really bad idea to give your hero's brother, horse and beloved names which all begin with A and differ only by a few letters). And yes, excessive Tolkein influence - mainly from the Silmarillion, which even provides a couple of the names as well as the cosmological backstory. But.

Amid all this stale genre stuff, I find the central character genuinely engaging and fresh: trained as a warrior, but blessed/cursed with an empathic power which makes him feel any violence he does to someone else as if it's done to him (which mitigates the usual crass cruelty of the genre). There's a fair bit of Buddhism (almost certainly more than I recognize; I know a bit about Buddhism but I'm not an expert), which makes for a different flavour and is well-handled. And Zindell does something I've never seen done before, which is obvious to me and which I've been planning to do myself sometime: he has the hero learning meditative practices which help him to deal with the trials he encounters.

So far, I'm enjoying it a lot - thanks again, Mike.