Quote of the Day
You may go play video games if you wish.
Remember this: Walk away now and you walk away from your interest in history, your ability to tell a good story, your ability to translate dreams into reality; leaving the next generation with nothing but recycled, unimaginative first-person shooters, online quasi-historical strategy games, yet another multiplayer NFL game, violence-laden driving simulations, and mindless revisions of innumerable cute Japanese animations. Depart now and you forever separate yourselves from the vital gaming legacies of James Dunnigan, Steve Jackson, Gary Gygax, Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, Andrew Keith, William Keith, John Harshman, Professor Barker, and Richard Tucholka.Turn your backs now and you snuff out the fragile candles of Board Gaming, Miniatures, Fantasy and Science Fiction Roleplaying, and when those flames flicker and expire, the light of the world is extinguished because the creative thought which has moved mankind through the decades leading to the millennium will wither and die on the vine of abandonment and neglect.
— John Kwon on the Traveller Mailing List
Not all humans are weaselly Weiners
For a change of place, I came across a bit of pure awesome RPG fiction over at Leslie Bates’s Living in the Surreal World. Go read the whole thing, but here are some of my favorites:
We poison our air and water to weed out the weak. We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere. We nailed our god to a stick. Don’t fuck with the human race.
We drink poison too, and derive enjoyment from the temporary malfunctioning it causes in our higher brain functions. The higher the toxin level the greater the beverage; diluting the toxin with water is severely frowned upon.
Humans are so hardcore their first innovations were ways of making killing easier. Don’t mess with homo sapiens sapiens.
Humans consider one of the greatest career paths available to be piloting conveyances that use explosions for thrust.
The human capacity to change is fascinating.
I myself have witnessed a human military officer, who is tasked solely with the purpose of abusing his subordinates until they bond, take a group I suspected of severe genetic ailments – excess fat tissue, panic during crisis situations – and turn them into the perfect murder machines that we have come to know and fear. We have long suspected that humans in their homelands are weaker than those we regularly encounter, but it is clear that even the weak ones can become dangerous with minimal effort.
I would not advise an invasion of any human-controlled system at this time.
Not just good advice…take care not to tease the apes. They will fling more than poo when angered.
Just one more, from the page Leslie got the source material from:
“I once met a Human at a waystation on a Class 1 world. It did some kind of rough work for one of their colonies. It called itself a “search and retrieval expert” but I’m guessing the translation software couldn’t find the proper words. A few weeks later, it returns to the waystation, sans its trans-grav (rented, I might add). Apparently the people it was hunting took down its transport, but it continued on foot after escaping the wreckage and patching itself up. The scary part was that it was wearing clothes fashioned from Tharge pelts, had its targets’ ears on a necklace (DNA proof, I guess), and had fashioned a spear from a jagged piece of the trans-grav’s hull and an Iron-root. And it was honestly none the worst for wear, just sauntered over to the AENet terminal and collected on its kills.”