From: Auberon [fskln1@uaf.edu] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 4:01 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - a small suggestion Adam Lewis wrote: > > > >Hmm...I haven't found the index to be lacking at all. > > > > > Someone's on crack. The index is terriblly inadequate! > > Hmm...sorry to upset you so much there James. ;-) > > I lvoed the game, > > but let me tell you the story of the game group who couldn't find > the pages > > that tell you about the specific modi design templates becasue there > is no > > reference to it in index or (of course) table of contents It could be worse -- ever try to play anything printed by White Wolf? I think 2nd/3rd ed. Ars Magica takes the cake for worst index ever. Most of the (pitifully few) entries direct you not to the main discussion of the topic at hand, but a brief, useless mention in another section of the book. If there's any mention at all on the listed page. Fantastic game. AWFUL index. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. -- Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Tun Kai Poh [t_poh@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 12:33 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - Fanfic Ver. 2.0 Here it is again, with a few minor changes that you wouldn't be able to notice unless you were really keen-eyed. But anyway. Comments are welcome. Kai Poh * * * The Tale of the Storm Widow 1 Once upon a time, when humans were new to this world, Maya Mahsuri came with her husband and children to a small island far from other settlers. Life was not easy back then. The couple worked long and hard, braving the fierce wilderness to build a place for their small children. One day, a terrible storm blew in while the husband was out at sea, and his fishing boat vanished in the raging waves. Maya Mahsuri searched the surrounding islands for her husband for thirty days, but could find no trace of him. At last, the widow of the storm climbed to the highest peak on her island and shouted her bargain to Poseidon: "My children are but few, and your children are many. We do not ask for much from you, only what we need to survive here. Since you have taken my husband away, I will claim this small island as sanctuary for my children. And if ever you take one of mine, I shall take something of equal value in return. But never will we take what we have not paid for." And so it was that Maya Mahsuri made her compact with the world. 2 The years passed, and the tides rose and fell. Maya Mahsuri created houses, gardens, and farms for her children, who grew brown and strong under Poseidon's sun. They learned to respect the animals of the island, and the animals respected them in return. But there was a great serpent of the sea who did not respect the children of the widow of the storm. This serpent and the children hunted fish in the same bay. The serpent was greedy and coveted all the fish for itself, although it did not need to eat more than a few to survive. A murderous envy grew in its heart, and it wished the children dead. When Maya Mahsuri's youngest son was alone in the bay one day, the serpent came out of the water and swallowed him whole. Maya Mahsuri heard the cries of her child and came to his aid. The serpent dived into the deepest part of the sea to hide from her, but she followed it into the sunless depths. For thirty days, she chased the serpent and wrestled with it beneath the sea. At last, the widow of the storm slew the serpent, but her little child was dead. So she claimed in return the great kelp forests to the north, where the waters were rich with fish. And never did a child of Poseidon challenge Maya Mahsuri's claim to the forests. 3 Of Maya Mahsuri's children, the oldest and strongest was her daughter Sawari. Now, Sawari was every bit as bold and powerful as her mother, and in time, she had children of her own. Maya Mahsuri's island was big enough for all her children and grandchildren, but Sawari wanted an island of her own. Sawari's mother warned her: "You cannot take from the world unless you pay its price. That is the way of the world. To claim a part of the world is no small thing, for the price is always too high. Better to be content with what you have." But Sawari rebelled, and took her children to a great island in the north, the island of Kauai. There she claimed the island for herself, cutting the forests and hunting the animals. Poseidon was displeased, and spoke to Maya Mahsuri in a dream. "If you let your children claim a part of me, I shall have to exact my price," said the world. But Maya Mahsuri replied: "Let me be the one to exact your price. She is my daughter; she is mine to punish." So she went to Kauai to demand that Sawari and her children leave the island. Sawari refused, and for thirty days, mother and daughter waged a terrible battle across the slopes of Kauai. At last, the widow of the storm slew her daughter. "I have paid Poseidon's price," she told the children of Sawari. "Now, will you come home with me, or will you stay here to fend for yourselves on the island your mother bought with her blood?" Half of Sawari's children left with Maya Mahsuri, but half stayed to make their homes on Kauai. And so Kauai was settled by Sawari's children. 4 The years passed, and the tides rose and fell. There came a time when Maya Mahsuri was old and grey. One day, a great many strangers came in a fleet of boats. Their leader was a grey man dressed in finery, surrounded by many wives and grown children. There were also others, dark men with dark machines and many guns. And the leader met with Maya Mahsuri on the beach of her island. "I am your long-lost husband," he said, "and I have come back to claim what is mine." He told her his story. The storm had taken him away to another settlement, and there he lived for a long while. There he became an important man, a leader of his community. Now, Progress had come to Poseidon, and he was leading the forces of Progress to the distant islands to claim the riches of the world for humans. He asked Maya Masturi to join him. And she thought long and hard. At last, the widow of the storm answered: "You cannot take from Poseidon what you have not paid for in blood. That is the way of the world. I will not join you." "Poseidon cannot stop us," said the grey man. "All the world cannot stop Progress." "All the world will fight you," said the widow of the storm. "I and my children will fight you." And so our war began. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Auberon [fskln1@uaf.edu] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 4:38 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - Rough adventure idea... wil liam hindmarch wrote: > > At 02:00 PM 11/25/98 -0800, you wrote: > > Sounds like a cool plot. You may consider having GEO Internal > >Security be the ones that detain their buddy and the ones behind the > >plot. > > The disadvantage to this approach is that justice isn't so much a factor. > If the GEO, in any capacity, are the conspirators then there's no one to > bring the bad guys in front of to get justice, since the law is the bad > guys. It could, though, play out something like "Strange Days," wherein > it's just a few cops. Or as a double-blind thing -- I'm sure the Marshalls don't give a flying f*ck whether a murderer is IS or not. By the same token, GEO patrol might be intimidated by them, but Native Patrol sure wouldn't. > On the other hand, a big surprise might be if Free Poseidon! is behind it > somehow. How? I don't know, but they're certainly not the usual suspects. Martyr needed, apply within? I really like the idea floated by someone (?) that he was going to sabotage the goals, but it could be a simpler explaination -- assuming he was an effective leader, if it looks like, oh, Atlas killed him, that would put a lot of doubt on it coming out that he worked as an Atlas exec for the first 10 years on Posidon. If something like that happens, it should be clear that FP will be busily trying to rebuild their failed pinning of the event on Atlas, while Atlas is trying to help the players without any obvious involvement, for PR reasons. Of course, all this extra evidence, more than half of which is probably fake at any given point, won't make things any easier. I, incidentally, like convoluted plots too. It's also past-my-bedtime o'clock, so if that paragraph doesn't make any sense, someone post and tell me, and I'll try to straighten it out. -- Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Auberon [fskln1@uaf.edu] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 4:45 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - New players first response....and Natural Instict BIOHZD@aol.com wrote: > > Hey Adam, > > With the absolute profusion of CICADA hover drones, cetacean PCs are never > really out of the action. In fact, in our Red Sky playtest campaign (see the > website) whole sessions often go by without the PC's ever even seeing > Patterner, the dolphin PC. Yet, he remains fully involved in the game play > through his remote. In one session, deep in the interior jungle of Prime > Meridian, he was still an active and important player. All we had to do was > account for the satellite up/down link delay which ended up only delaying him > a couple rounds. > > The only real logistics problems I see you facing in running NI as written, > are 1) the jamming unit and 2) getting the the Orca player to the island in > the first place. > > 1) You can maybe forego the jammer, or maybe it is only jamming comm > frequencies, not interface frequencies. Or have some genius fiddle with the CICADA unit until it uses microwaves -- much shorter range, (meaning the drone goes dead when the orca wanders off to find lunch, perhaps to come back to life guns blazing at a later date). If the range is too short, there'd be no reason to jam the freq. If you don't want the players having comm, just don't give them more than one setup (I don't think crystals are still in) at the right freq. I don't actually know how well this will work; the only stuff I know about RF is the physics stuff, not anything about the actual operation of the radios. > 2) Remember - there are military and charter transports that are equipped to > carry cetaceans. Alternatively, you had them "arrive" by traditional shipwreck > the orca could have been simply swimming or powershelling along with the > party. This could lead to some real (unappreciated) humor. Let the Orca find the mines before the players arrive, but the jammers prevent his warning them. That could make for a great scene later, as well as the GM being pelted with dice or chips. I like to do things like this, and do the parts where the Orca finds the mines first, in another room, so that the poor suckers, 'scuse me, players, don't have any idea what's going to hit them. -- Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Auberon [fskln1@uaf.edu] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 5:04 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - Spacecraft Propulsion in BP Rnjarra@aol.com wrote: > [snip] > brink of yielding theoritically feasable concepts. That field in my oppinion > would be gravitronics. Recently several scientists have claimed to have > detected a gravitronic field [too many fields here; that seems to be my > favorite word of the night] in the vicinity of large superconducting magnets. [ka-SNIP] The other trick would be doing this without scrambling the passengers and crew; our brains are bioelectric. The presence of strong EM fields can scramble people. Don't get me wrong; I love the idea, and now I'm going to have to spend half a day reading up on it (any web pointers?), but I'm also a hard sci-fi nut. If you're going to wrap the whole ship in a strong field, strong enough to be mistaken for mass by the universe as a whole, you want to make sure you don't irreparably harm the people inside. On the other hand, you could always put equipment that wouldn't be harmed in unmanned ships, and have them towed through the wormhole. This leads to some real potential for awful violence. If one of these things goes wonky, and doesn't flip over, it's accelerating straight at Poseidon, and no living human or sophisticated robot could get close enough to manually control it. Could be some nervous moments. Spoiler follows *****SPOILER WARNING: ACCESS DENIED***** Interestingly, I can think of one thing that would stop it for sure, but everyone KNOWS there's no nukes on Poseidon. On the other hand, if it gets too close, some interesting measures could be triggered, depending on whether the Creators believed in meteor defense. Or maybe the Abos have some super-spiffy stuff that's going to scare the piss out of a lot of people. More interesting yet, perhaps they have some space-native counterparts... That latter could cause some stirrings in the asteroid belts. MAN I want some spaceships. I wanna run some space games SO bad! -- Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Leif Magnar Kjønnøy [leifmk@pvv.ntnu.no] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 6:44 AM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - Spacecraft Propulsion in BP On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Auberon wrote: [runaway ship] > Spoiler follows > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > *****SPOILER WARNING: ACCESS DENIED***** > > Interestingly, I can think of one thing that would stop it for sure, but > everyone KNOWS there's no nukes on Poseidon. Given that a ship is able to travel hecto-AUs in a matter of months, it *must* be using rather a heck of a lot of energy to do so, regardless of what the propulsion system is. Therefore, *any* fast interplanetary ship can be a potential weapon of mass destruction (I've been doing some calculations on the possible limits of fusion drives; I know whatof I speak); if it's using a high-energy reaction drive then the drive exhaust is lethal, if it's using some technobabble drive to simply go fast then (quite apart from needing weird physics that I'd rather not have in my BP game) at least it can perform some pretty horrid kinetic bombardment. In fact, at the kind of speeds (a few percent of c) that ships must be able to travel in Blue Planet, a simple thrown rock has a kinetic energy which may approach the explosive energy in a (perhaps somewhat inefficient) fission bomb of similar size. Expect that traffic control regulations near any inhabited location (such as an asteroid city, not to mention a *planet*) will be strict, and backed up by long-range offensive capability; responsible authorities cannot take the risk of letting just anyone who's somehow ended up in charge of a spaceship do whatever they please with it, and must be able to stop (i.e. vaporize) a possible rogue at some distance from vulnerable locations (it would be criminally negligent not to account for the possibility of some misanthropic kamikaze hijackers trying to ram a ten-thousand-ton ship into your planet at 5% of lightspeed, for instance -- and that would be a "dinosaur killer"-level impact). This requirement for an offensive capability may lead to nuclear weapons be routinely deployed by the *traffic cops*, so to speak (and the first one who makes any snide comments about using rubber nuclear weapons to stop riots has been watching too much Red Dwarf). Other possibilities of course exist (a kinetic-energy missile which is basically just a stripped-down unmanned ship, for instance; using the same drive technology as the intended target, this should be able to catch said target, but may in turn be intercepted along the way, not to mention that it is in itself a "generic" high-energy weapon of "nuke" levels and could be misused just like a nuke, etc). Leif Kj{\o}nn{\o}y | Skyclad: "Life's just a process of delamination, www.pvv.org/~leifmk| stripping your hopes, dissecting them gently. Math geek and gamer| I've opened my heart and to my consternation GURPS, Harn, CORPS | when I peered inside it was small, dark and empty." *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: dpink@chill.org Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 2:42 PM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - a small suggestion this is on indexes... >It could be worse -- ever try to play anything printed by White Wolf? I >think 2nd/3rd ed. Ars Magica takes the cake for worst index ever. Most >of the (pitifully few) entries direct you not to the main discussion of >the topic at hand, but a brief, useless mention in another section of >the book. If there's any mention at all on the listed page. Fantastic >game. AWFUL index. > >We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Ja, White Wolf bites the weenie on indexes. Fortunately it's light on rules so you don't need the index too much. And as for Ars Magica, I never got past page twenty, let alone to the index. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message. From: Auberon [fskln1@uaf.edu] Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 4:11 PM To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - Spacecraft Propulsion in BP Leif Magnar Kjønnøy wrote: > > Given that a ship is able to travel hecto-AUs in a matter of months, it > *must* be using rather a heck of a lot of energy to do so, regardless of > what the propulsion system is. Therefore, *any* fast interplanetary ship > can be a potential weapon of mass destruction (I've been doing some > calculations on the possible limits of fusion drives; I know whatof I > speak); if it's using a high-energy reaction drive then the drive exhaust The exhaust is a weapon all in itself, particularly against ships or perhaps small asteroids. > is lethal, if it's using some technobabble drive to simply go fast then > (quite apart from needing weird physics that I'd rather not have in my BP The reason I seized on that one particularly is that kamikaze ships can be boarded by Supertroopers, the pilots put out of their misery, and the ships course can be changed. Add an electric field possibly in the kilotesslas (I think that's the right measurement) around the ship, and you remove that possibility. > game) at least it can perform some pretty horrid kinetic bombardment. In > fact, at the kind of speeds (a few percent of c) that ships must be able > to travel in Blue Planet, a simple thrown rock has a kinetic energy which > may approach the explosive energy in a (perhaps somewhat inefficient) > fission bomb of similar size. Now mount a linear accelerator on the ship, and see what you get. Scary, isn't it? > Expect that traffic control regulations near any inhabited location (such > as an asteroid city, not to mention a *planet*) will be strict, and backed > up by long-range offensive capability; responsible authorities cannot take > the risk of letting just anyone who's somehow ended up in charge of a > spaceship do whatever they please with it, and must be able to stop (i.e. > vaporize) a possible rogue at some distance from vulnerable locations (it But balance this against the fact that no nuclear weapons of any type, for any purpose, are allowed in the Lambda Serpentis system. There may be large conventional warheads, but it would be more difficult to completely destroy a ship with one. > would be criminally negligent not to account for the possibility of some > misanthropic kamikaze hijackers trying to ram a ten-thousand-ton ship into > your planet at 5% of lightspeed, for instance -- and that would be a > "dinosaur killer"-level impact). Again, the best defense against this kind of thing would be not allowing naval lasers or missiles, and having GEO troops board and capture the craft. Could make for a SPECTACULAR Aliens-style adventure. > This requirement for an offensive capability may lead to nuclear weapons > be routinely deployed by the *traffic cops*, so to speak (and the first Yes. Absolutely. In the outer reaches of the Sol system. Probably on Luna. Possibly on Mars. But in the asteroid belt, nukes would also be problematic. It wouldn't do to knock out the ship, only to bump an asteroid onto a collision course with your base. > one who makes any snide comments about using rubber nuclear weapons to > stop riots has been watching too much Red Dwarf). Other possibilities of There's no such thing as too much Red Dwarf. > course exist (a kinetic-energy missile which is basically just a > stripped-down unmanned ship, for instance; using the same drive technology Unlikely -- you'd probably just punch a hole in the ship. You could fill the warhead with some high explosive that doesn't require oxygen, though. Cyclopropane comes to mine. > as the intended target, this should be able to catch said target, but may > in turn be intercepted along the way, not to mention that it is in itself > a "generic" high-energy weapon of "nuke" levels and could be misused just > like a nuke, etc). Kinetic energy missiles would make great anti-asteroid weapons, good anti-planetary munitions, and very poor weapons against large spacecraft. -- Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message.