Sojourn in Spokane: Skippers’

Sometimes places take on emotional meaning far beyond their original purpose. For me, such a place is that former West Coast institution Skippers’ Seafood and Chowder House, in particular their Monroe street location.

It isn’t the most impressive architecture, but Skippers has excellent fish, shrimp, and chowder and a handy All You Can Eat scheme for particularly long and tiring days. It was common on Friday nights when my mom worked late for my Dad and I to stake out a table at Skippers’, order some food, and then read; he his book and I mine. One of the perks of being a book lover is that reading with another book lover is a very companionable experience, even if you never actually talk to each other (except of course when my father enacted his dreaded “shrimp tax” on my all-you-can-eat shrimp). Indeed if I could relive any one memory I have of my father, it would probably be sharing seafood and books in a cozy booth on a cold winter evening.

There were a lot of “firsts” that occurred at Skippers. My first non-Tolkien fantasy novels (R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf Trilogy). My first Harry Turtledove novel (Guns of the South). My first reading of Moby-Dick, probably the best novel ever to grace the English language (and believe me, reading it in a low-lit seafood restaurant on a cold night gives it the perfect atmosphere). My first retreats from the confusing and often painful world of adolescent relationships. And, of course, the first restaurant I visited alone after my father passed away.

With all those memories packed into one restaurant, you can imagine how upset I was to hear of the demise of the Skippers’ chain this year and the presumed closing of their restaurants. Those of you who played Wraith: The Oblivion during the previous incarnation of the World of Darkness will well understand the concept of the “fetter”: a physical location or object of emotional significance that binds a spirit to the world of the living. If my father’s wraith had a character sheet with the Storyteller System’s trademark dots, Skippers’ would be listed prominently among his fetters.

Thankfully, in driving by the restaurant hoping to get some forlorn-looking pictures for the blog, I discovered that Great Dagon had heard my prayer and brought forth his fishy bounty anew. Like the Roman Empire, Skippers’ was not so much destroyed as broken down into component local franchises: squabbling feudal remnants of a once mighty Imperium of Fish. The Monroe Skippers is under the control of one of these franchises, and they’re working to get back on their feet and restore some of the former glory. It’s like a sort of Seafood Byzantium, preserving the chowders of a happier time while the world around descends into night.

So, after all that, I suppose I ought to say something about the actual dining experience. Fortunately, Herman Melville foresaw the Skippers’ business model back in 1842 when he wrote Moby-Dick, although he called it the “Try Pots” and put it on the wrong coast:

But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship’s biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! The whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping up to the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forward again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved the name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders.” 

-Moby-Dick, Chapter 15: “Chowder”

    

Sojourn in Spokane: A Geek Shopping Expedition

Now that Christmas is out of the way and I have holiday money in the bank, it’s time to get back to aquiring gaming stuff. And in Spokane this means taking a trip back to the very start of my gaming roots…

Our first stop on this whirlwind tour of Geek Spokane is Merlyn’s.

Merlyn’s is something of a local legend, attracting gamers from as far away as western Montana (this is easy to believe when you remember that Spokane is essentially the center of a huge scrubby plateau between the Rockies and the Cascades). In part this is due to longevity: the shop’s been selling games since long before I discovered the hobby in the mid ’80s, and despite occasional competition (notably the niftily styled Gorilla Bob’s Adventure Emporium) has remained pretty much the only game in town in all that time. My first “real” gaming product, a copy of AD&D’s original Oriental Adventures book, was purchased here. So…inside:

Merlyn’s has been in their current location for around four years, and the move opened up a lot of space. Most importantly it allowed for several large gaming tables, and for the comic book aspect of the business to achieve roughly equal time with the gaming half.

 Game stores with both longevity and small-town location are a prime source for unexpected finds. My big score was a copy of the Twilight Imperium RPG, both because I’m a big fan of the boardgame and because I used to game with the author, Todd Nilsen, back in my college days. I might not use the system, but it’s certainly ripe for a T20 conversion.

The next stop on our tour is the aptly named Comic Book Shop, which gets away with it because like Merlyn’s it’s pretty much the only game in town. Despite this, The Comic Book Shop is, without reservation, one of the best comic book stores I’ve patronized, surrendering pride of place only to Cambridge, MA’s excellent Million Year Picnic.

Like a good game store, a good comic store is run by someone with a genuine passion for what he sells. An owner who is a reader will have a firmer grasp of what other people want to read. In addition, he’ll stock and direct you to titles that you might not otherwise ever pick up. While big chains like Barnes and Noble are becoming increasingly graphic novel-savvy, and generally have a decent selection, nothing beats combining that selection with a knowledgeable and easily available person behind the counter. It is for this reason that I try to support indie stores whenever I can. Plus the Comic Book Shop’s owner recognizes me even though I only come in once a year after Christmas. How cool is that?

The traditional end point for a game/comic shopping trip is one of the several Spokane Zip’s locations. Zip’s is part of a dying American breed: the regional fast food chain.

My personal favorite is the Division Street location. It’s a convenient final stop on the Merlyn’s-Comic Book Shop junket (in fact it’s right across the street from the Comic Book Shop) and thus a perfect place to appraise one’s swag over some chicken fingers. It’s also right next to Gonzaga University, where I used to take summer classes and work my summer job. A much younger me used to sit there on his lunch break from Foley Center’s media services desk, enjoying the respite from the dry plateau heat, reading the Forgotten Realms Volo’s Guides and letting his mind travel to kingdoms undreamed of… 

Sojourn in Spokane: Montage

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Campaign Design Journal – Stage 2: The Basics

After you’re all done being inspired, the next thing to do is work things around until you have the basic parameters of what you want to accomplish. In my case this is the following:

Concept: A grand Battletech/Mechwarrior campaign following a lance of Star League Defence Force ‘Mech pilots (and/or their civilian friends/allies) from the beginning of hostilities in the Periphery in 2759 until Kerensky’s departure from the Inner Sphere in 2784.

Originally, I had the insane idea to do this as one massive campaign. I’ve since decided to take a page from JMS’ book and run it as 4-5 distinct “seasons” or sub-campaigns. I tried this out in my Iron Kingdoms campaign, and I think it was a fairly sound concept.

Rules: It’s going to be Mechwarrior/Classic Battletech RPG 3e unless Catalyst’s new version is significantly different and better. I considered using D20, which I think has a cleaner system than CBTRPG, but decided against it because CBTRPG’s design is much better integrated with the Battletech wargame and its universe.

Characters: One nice thing about running an SLDF based campaign is that characters can come from any mix of the future Successor States and still be expected to work together. I’ll have to create new affiliations for the Terran Hegemony and Rim Worlds Republic (both of which no longer exist in the current era), but that shouldn’t be a problem. Best of all, the “renegade Clanner” stock character which has plagued Battletech since the Clans showed up in 3050 is not an option, what with them not existing yet and all.

Timeframe: 2759-2824. The first “season” should cover roughly the years 2759-2766.

Background: I decided to base the the campaign around the SLDF’s 4th Regimental Combat Team. In Battletech fluff/history, the SLDF formed the RCTs both as rapid “first strike” units, and as public relations frontmen in the various component realms of the Star League. The most famous of these is the 3rd RCT, the Eridani Light Horse. I chose the 4th for a number of reasons:

1. Room to Move: The Eridani Light Horse, while very cool, has way too much canon surrounding it to be an interesting choice. This left the Terran, Liao, Marik, Steiner, and Davion RCTs.  
2. Location: Battletech fiction has done a fairly good job of describing the Star League era Lyran Commonwealth, so I decided against Steiner. I also wanted refusing to leave with the Exodus to seem like a legitimate choice, which axed Marik (Ewan Marik’s “issues” with Aleksandr Kerensky translated into poor relations with local SLDF units). I didn’t think I could make the Capellans seem sympathetic enough, so I ditched Liao as well. The fact that the Terran Hegemony was a dead letter by the time of the Exodus had me heavily leaning away from the 1st (Terran) RCT and towards the 4th (FedSuns).
3. Longevity: Here’s another reason the Terrans got the boot, since the 1st (Terran) RCT had lost all but one of its regiments by 2824. The 4th, by contrast, had two regiments that survived all the way to the Exodus.
4. Concentration: The powers that be in the SLDF also saw fit to keep all four of the 4th RCT’s regiments in the same Army Corps, making for interesting roleplaying possibilities. 
5. Personal Preference: I think the FedSuns is an interesting place to start and end the campaign. It’s traditionally been one of Battletech’s “good guys” and the fluff portrays John Davion pretty sympathetically, yet at the same time the Davions completely fail to halt the breakup of the League. Also there’s the issue of John Davion’s “regency” claim, which adds to the moral question of the Exodus.

 That worked through, the PCs will either belong to the 111th Dragoons, or the 55th Royal Light Horse depending on how many of them want to play Terrans.

Focus: Personal relations and special ops. In the same way BSG handles space combat, large scale ‘Mech combat should be a rarity.

Up Next: Organization!    

Campaign Design Journal – Stage 1: Inspiration

Inspiration always strikes without warning. In this case, it struck about a year and a half ago when I picked up a complete lot of Battletech House Books on eBay. The supreme prize of this auction was the Star League Sourcebook, one of the most difficult-to-find pieces of Battletech lore (as an aside, I did a search for the Star League book on WorldCat just to see if by chance any library had it. Amazingly enough, there’s a county library in Arizona with a copy sitting in the stacks). The Star League Sourcebook is a Battletech version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and while the FASA staff lacked Gibbon’s charismatic snideness, they certainly matched his enthusiasm for their subject. It’s unabashedly one of my favorite RPG books, and almost one of my favorite books of any kind, literally packed with detail, drama, and story potential. Shortly after reading the book for the first time, I re-watched my DVD of Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (a guilty pleasure), and was struck by the similarity of the feel. Pop in some BattleMechs, and the 7th Cavalry (Airmobile) could just as easily be SLDF troops fighting Taurian irregulars in the Periphery. I knew I had to run a campaign of some kind. I began to read up.

Flash forward to the present day. I’ve got all the reference sources I need in either hardcopy or .pdf form. I have the health and energy. And after having watched Battlestar Galactica do essentially what I wanted to do for three seasons, I think I finally have the wherewithal. I have two years of running Iron Kingdoms under my belt, which taught me a lot about what works and what doesn’t in a sustained campaign. Finally, I have the ACTA campaign, which re-invigorated  an interest in Military SF that had been languishing previously. Will it all mesh together into a harmonious whole? That remains to be seen. But succeed or fail, it’ll be educational.

Sojourn In Spokane: Gold Box Glory

Another day of rooting through the remains of my past is at an end. The room I was supposed to clear out is largely complete and I can now begin moving on to the other scattered boxes around the house.

My best find today was hiding in a box of old CDs and manuals. Somewhere during my busy life, I had picked up Interplay’s Forgotten Realms Archive, thrown the CD folder, manual, and magical copy protection wheels into a box, and then forgotten about them entirely for several years. What does this mean? It means I can now relive the ’80s for five SSI Gold Box titles and beyond!

The Gold Box titles (notably Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, Pools of Darkness, and Hillsfar) were the first true licensed D&D CRPGs for the PC, and they pretty much set the standard for RPG design in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They were a pretty faithful translation of old school First Edition D&D to the PC, and have an almost legendary status amongst gamers of my generation. Thus, I was anxious to fire up the CD and bask in the memories…

…Man, it’s like my old 286 has come back from the dead and the heavenly angels accompanying it are chanting old C+C Music Factory songs in voices of unearthly beauty.

Naturally, I had to go with an appropriately retro theme for my party…

Pool of Radiance is about as old-school as you can get…so old-school that it still used 1st Edition AD&D rules in all their crazy and inconsistent glory. In particular, the 1e rules were ferociously tough on multiclassed characters, so it remains to be seen wether Hawk (Fighter/Cleric) and Baldin (Fighter/Thief) will continue to pull their weight as I pursue urban renewal in Old Phlan.

As you can see, the stunning graphic technology of 1989 has allowed me to reproduce the Hawk the Slayer cast in incredible detail…though sadly I had to take some liberties when I did the icons for the Little Sister and The Woman. SSI forgot to put some hoods and cowls in the icon builder.

One of the most old-school of old-school features, and consequently the most immersive aspect of the Gold Box titles was their mapping system. Or more accurately their LACK of a mapping system. Back in the day, painstakingly mapping out dungeons on graph paper was an essential part of the RPG experience…and if you were too lazy to do it, well, designers back then figured you were probably better off playing Frogger anyway. Here’s my map-in-progress of the ruined parts of Phlan, currently part of an ambitious gentrification (and by gentrification I mean killing orcs and replacing them with people) project on the part of the New Phlan City Council…

  

Despite being almost twenty years old, Pool of Radiance is still a strong and enjoyable game that demonstrates that both the Gold Box engine and the 1e AD&D rules were excellent designs in their day. BioWare’s Shadows of Amn will forever be my quintessential AD&D PC experience, but the Gold Box series are the giant shoulders that the Infinity Engine games perch upon.  

Edit 12/23/07: Today I found my original gold box copy of Pool of Radiance (on “5 1/4″ floppies no less)  in a box in another room. In order to confirm my O.G. cred I present the following:

Soujourn in Spokane: Cool Things From My Basement

What a day! I did some last minute Holiday shopping with my mom in the morning, and then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening going through my stuff in the basement. I’ve got almost an entire room cleared out, and I have about enough eBayable items to justify my own storefront. There were some items, though, that stood out either for nostalgia value or sheer kewlness. I bring these to you now in no particular order.

1. My Kindergarten Class Picture.

You don’t get to see this one, but interestingly I’m the only kid in the entire class with glasses.

2. Incredibly Racist Comb

Wow…can you believe I used to comb my hair every day with this thing until I was ten years old?

3. The First RPG Product I Ever Owned

I came to gaming via the Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. This is the Fighting Fantasy bestiary, Out of the Pit, which was meant to supplement their rudimentary RPG, The World of Titan. I picked this up when I was 11 in some small town in British Columbia without ever realizing there was a rulebook involved, and instead ran games for my friends on my back porch using the rules from the gamebooks. I even ran it gamebook style, giving my players 2-3 choices and forcing them to pick one. Ahh from small seeds…

4. The First Miniature I Ever Tried to Paint

 

Having, as I said, come to gaming through Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy, most of my early purchases were either lizards or skeletons (Island of the Lizard King and Fire on the Water). This is a Citadel Plague cart, now back to its component parts. I was trying to paint it with Testors paints instead of acrylics, which I didn’t know existed. I also hadn’t heard of undercoating yet, which compounded the problem. The undead ox has nifty red eyes though!

5. Empire Strikes Back Lunchbox

I carried this lunchbox to school from first grade through 4th, and I have to say it went damn well with my Milennium Falcon sneakers. Sadly, the thermos is long gone but otherwise it’s in amazingly good shape.

6. 19th Century Tanto

My seafaring great-grandfather picked this up on a stopover in Japan whilst helping to “liberate” the Philippines from Spain. The leather needs some serious restoring but the blade is still in excellent condition. Though not obvious from the picture, the maker’s mark is clearly visible just above the grip. Aside from his dress sword, this is the only one of my great-grandfather’s mementoes I did not accidentally destroy as a child.

7. Matchbox Invid Shock Trooper

This guy was the fruit of some serious childhood wheeling and dealing. Robotech was immensely popular in my neighborhood, and the poor marketing of the toys meant that they were a rare commodity. I ended up trading my friend Shane a M.A.S.K Raven for this, and I’ve never looked back.

8. FASA Battletech TR 3050 With Unseens

This doesn’t look like much, but it’s from the run of 3050 Readouts FASA did before legal issues made the Unseens persona non grata in the Battletech universe.

9. Tigana: First American Printing

This is probably one of my all-time favorite books, and is certainly the book I like that most people I’ve recommended it to seem to enjoy. This first US printing was given to me shortly after college as a birthday gift by my friend Lane, who also tops my list of women I wish I’d gone out with. She was never adequately thanked. Wherever you are, I’m sorry, Lane!

10. Hasbro Rancor

This fellow was a product of my action figure collecting phase. Hasbro really outdid themselves on this one. A lot of my figures are going on eBay, but Rancor shall forever remain close to my side.

11. Bust of V.I. Lenin

I picked this up on a trip to Russia in 1991, shortly after the Coup attempt and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet days these had to be carried in every tourist attraction’s gift shop, and when I was there they were so happy to get rid of them they were essentially giving them away. Still, you have to admit Lenin looks pretty sharp.

12.  Limited Edition Lejendary Adventures Rulebook Signed by Gary Gygax

 This book was among the swag of my first and only GenCon in 1998 and has an entire story of its own behind it. For I was on its demo team. I sat in Gary Gygax’s court and played jester to young Prince Alex. I witnessed the skulduggery and shady dealings behind the unveiling of D&D 3.0. I was there, at the dawning of the Third Age of Mankind…

13. Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium RPG

The Dune license has a mysterious and tragic history in the RPG world. Several companies have acquired it and attempted to produce a game, only to go bankrupt or experience other business-ending problems before actually publishing it. For a while, it looked like Last Unicorn Games was going to beat the odds, and in anticipation of some major sourcebook goodness I had my friend Christian ninja shop me a copy of the limited edition corebook at GenCon 1999. Sadly, right after releasing the book, Last Unicorn was bought out by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, who then quietly dropped the Dune license. The explanation I’ve heard was that they didn’t want a second sci-fi game competing with their planned release of D20 Star Wars.

14. Hasbro Darth Vader Lightsaber

 I picked this up in college in anticipation of the theatrical release of Return of the Jedi Special Edition. Somewhere there exist photos of me in Dark Jedi attire dueling my friend Mason (armed with a Luke Skywalker lightsaber, and wearing the trademark Light Side robes) with this very weapon at a Halloween party later that year. If fate is kind, these photos will never see the light of day.

15. 2300 AD Kafer Sourcebook

In my humble opinion, this is one of the best sourcebooks ever written for an RPG. The Kafers are the most believably alien alien race I’ve ever read about. Having just acquired 2320 AD and the T20 rules, I’m champing at the bit to use this book again.

16. Box of Broken Ships

This used to be a complete Star Blazers EDF fleet before my Mom put it in a box with the two heaviest miniatures I own and then carried it down into the basement. These are also the first starship minis I ever assembled and painted. Sounds like a great restoration project, eh Marc? Marc?

17. Uncle Wiggily and G.A. Henty Books

The picture isn’t very impressive, but inside those two boxes are my entire childhood’s worth of bedtime reading. My dad was a rare books librarian before he moved up to administration, and he loved old children’s books and used to read them to me. Both Howard R. Garis’ Uncle Wiggily and the works of G.A. Henty deserve their own posts. In this limited space I’ll say that Uncle Wiggily was kind of a rabbit Doctor Who, and Henty was a 19th Century British war correspondent, boy’s historical fiction writer, and vociferous Imperial exponent. You can imagine what kind of effect these twin influences had on my impressionable young mind.

That’s 17 cool things in just one day of searching…and I have at least another room to go! As a special bonus for those of you who actually made it to the end of this post, I will reveal my most astonishing find…the hidden Graveyard of the Spiders!

Sojourn in Spokane Begins

In accordance with Holiday tradition, I have arrived in my hometown of Spokane, Washington to visit family and embrace the holiday spirit, at least as much as I’m capable of embracing it when it requires me to deal with fighting crowds at Northtown Mall to obtain gifts. My fellow (and much more esteemed) expatriate Tycho Brahe has described Spokane as ”a dangerous suburb of hell”. I wouldn’t be prepared to go quite that far, given that the delicious chicken fingers of Zip’s clearly belong to a higher plane, but it is certainly a treeless, brown-and-white Plateau of Leng where garbage policy makes or breaks political careers, espresso is on the McDonalds menu, and ACTA gaming is pretty much nonexistent.

That doesn’t mean I’ve got nothing to do, however. For one thing, my mom is beginning to think that it might be time to sell the house, and is “strongly encouraging” me to go through the boxes of stuff I accumulated before I left the safety of home for the wild, dangerous, sexy world of librarianship. In practical terms this means that I have years upon years of old gaming junk to dig into.

I’m also planning to take advantage of the relative quiet of Spokane to sit down and do some serious work on my RPG magnum opus: a Battletech campaign set during the fall of the Star League.

So for a little while there are going to be two kinds of posts. Sojourn in Spokane posts will be nostalgia based…reviews of my gaming treasures and pictures of places in Spokane that have some kind of emotional association for me. Campaign Design Journal posts will be about how the Battletech campaign shapes up and the decisions I make in building it. Just as the ACTA posts chronicle the progress of an established campaign, the Design Journal posts will show the genesis of a potential new one.

For those of you worried about ACTA, don’t. Turn 5’s battles are slated for shortly after the Holidays.

The Magic Voyage of Sinbad Reconsidered

I am nothing if not thorough in pursuit of my art, and when your art is campaign design it leads to some pretty strange places. In this case (a Russian-themed Forgotten Realms campaign set in the Endless Waste) it led me to re-watch The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.

I had originally seen Magic Voyage as an MST3K episode back in my high school days, and it was actually one of my favorites of the Joel era. Sadly, I fell asleep attempting to videotape it, and since Rhino hasn’t released it on any of their MST3K collections, it had literally been ten years since I saw the movie in any form. When I discovered a non-MST3k version on Amazon while searching for a Christmas present for my girlfriend, I didn’t even think twice before adding it to my shopping cart.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad is an American dub of Soviet director Alexander Ptushko’s epic Sadko, based on an old Novgorodian legend. Brought over by B-movie god Roger Corman during the height of the Cold War, the film was re-scripted (by a young Francis Ford Coppola) into a Sinbad story and the names of all the cast and crew were anglicized (Sergei Stolyarov, who played Sinbad/Sadko became Edward Stolar, and Ptushko became Pasco). Thus you have a thin layer of the Arabian Knights over an essentially Russian folktale and unintentional hilarity ensues. Trust me. You don’t know what funny is until you hear a caftaned, beardy, and pasty white Russian merchant referred to as “Abdullah”.

Aside from the sketchy dub, however, I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed the movie, even without assistance from Crow and Tom Servo. There’s actually a good movie lurking under the greasy Corman-esque scum that surrounds Magic Voyage. The plot becomes understandable once you start mentally subsitituting Russian names for Arabian, and the visuals are spectacular. Nobody can evoke fantastic Russia like Ptushko and his crowd scenes in particular are incredible to behold (in particular the scenes where hundreds of caftaned extras dance in the streets of Novogorod/Khobasand).

Indeed having seen three of Ptushko’s films in one form or another (Magic Voyage, Ilya Muromets/Sword and the Dragon, and Sampo/The Day the Earth Froze), I’d have to say he’s a prime example of a filmmaker whose reach unfortunately exceeded his grasp. In Magic Voyage, for example, Sinbad/Sadko descends to the Sea King’s palace, where he appeases the King and his wife by playing music for them. As he does, all manner of sea creatures appear to dance in what’s supposed to be a magical underwater spectacle. Fair enough, except Ptushko’s working with late ’50s Soviet special effects technology on color film looted from the Germans. The results are, of course, underwhelming to the modern eye; the hanging octopus is nice, but the fish on a wooden arm not so much.

The more I watched The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, the more I regretted that Ptushko didn’t have access to modern CGI technology. Sure, The Phantom Menace was a crappy movie and the Gungans incredibly annoying, but the visuals of their underwater city were great. Put that kind of CGI effect in the service of an imagination as expansive and well grounded in myth as Ptushko’s, and Magic Voyage would be a classic. Ptushko would be like Neil Gaiman and George Lucas wrapped in one lovable Soviet package.

Since watching Magic Voyage, I’ve discovered that the Russian Cinema Council has released the original Russian Sadko on DVD with English subtitles. I’m looking into getting a copy of it in order to see something closer in line to Ptushko’s original vision. Until then, the Magic Voyage of Sinbad will remain a particular guilty pleasure. And my players will have to suffer through it as introductory material for the campaign. 

        

Turn 5: Day of the Dead

The ultraviolent action of Turn 4 is at an end and Turn 5 has officially begun. While this turn appears to be largely a rest and rebuilding phase after the factions tore into each other last turn, it has been marked by three important events.

First, the Drazi withdrew their claim to all the planets they had colonized in this sector and returned to their own space…but not before savage fighting between Green and Purple factions rendered the surfaces of those worlds entirely uninhabitable. In leaving they mentioned something about a “War of Light” about to take place, possibly some crazy plan John Sheridan and the rest of those wacko Babylon 5 separatists have cooked up and probably not very important.

Secondly, the Comet has arrived and the Brakiri have begun celebrating the Day of the Dead. The Great League Offensive has ground to a halt while they unload the huge boxes of skull-shaped candies and prepare to speak to relatives or friends who will arrive from beyond the grave to resolve emotional issues or impart cryptic but eerily prophetic information. EA Sociologists have yet to confirm the presence of any perky Goth girls ushering these souls back and forth, but remain “really hopeful.”

Finally, the Vorlons in their ineffable wisdom have ordered the Minbari to assault the League world of Newport for purposes unknown. Perhaps a Shadow agent or long-abandoned base lies somewhere in the system. Perhaps the Vorlons hope to disrupt the Day of the Dead. Or perhaps the Elder Races are just massive pricks who enjoy getting the Younger Races to do senseless tasks for them. Either way, disruption of the Brakiri religious festival is sure to bring a new wave of League aggression upon the sector.

So in practical terms, we’re one player down, and in the midst of random event enforced inactivity from one of the two main contenders. Day of the Dead means the League can’t attack, but that anyone who attacks them invites a Brakiri jihad and faces extra ships whenever he faces them. Thus most of us decided to stay clear…except for poor Gary who was forced by his Vorlon Imperative to attack anyway.

As you can see, the clear/white pins of the League have driven deep into Minbari territory and only the Centauri approach them in numbers of systems controlled. Earth picked up the last three neutral systems on the map, and the two Narn empires remain at the same compact sizes.

There are two battles this turn:

Newport (E10, Minbari/League): The Minbari attempt to carry out their Vorlon Imperative.

Defiance (F8, Centauri/Tza’sol Narn): A Centauri fleet attempts to seize a Narn system in reprisal for the Narn attack on Sparta Hill.

Both battles are slated for the early weeks of the New Year.