Dark Albion Won't Just Have Albion

Yesterday, in the original Albion campaign, the player characters finally made it to the lands of the Turk, during their ongoing quest to recover the various pieces of the Lance of Mithras.   They got to see the magnificent City of Byzantium, spending time in the great market, and visiting both the old Temple of Holy Wisdom and the new Blue Temple, while awaiting a hard-won audience with the Sultan Bayezid.  There were some culture clashes which led to a couple of them being arrested, but they got off with fines.

Anyways, the upcoming Dark Albion book goes into tremendous detail about Albion, but that's not all you get in the book.  There's a reason it will be including a full hex-map of the whole continent.  It is assumed that characters in an Albion campaign will potentially travel to these distant lands.

In the course of our very long campaign, the PCs have been to: Scots' Land, the distant Azure Isles, Brittanie, Burgundy, Frogland, Lorraine, Iberia, various Arcadian city-states and the great city of Arcadia itself, Sicilia, Venetia, several of the Principalities including the Hapsburg Principalities, the mighty and powerful Commonwealth, and obviously Wallachia - and now the lands of the Turk.   They did not happen to go to Hunland, the Teutonic holdings, any of the cities of the Hanseatic League, the Canton Confederacy, the Northman Lands, the lands of the Rus, the rest of the Border Principalities, or (curiously) Eire Land.

All these, and probably a couple of others I've left out, will get mentioned in the Albion book.  And of course the setting takes place in a time of tremendous interest; over the course of the campaigns you can have Hussites, Turk invasions, the rise and fall of Burgundy, the printing press, gunpowder coming into universal use, Borgias, the establishment of the Inquisition, Renaissance masters (Da Vinci, etc.), and of course Dracula.  Some areas are ruled by the same great monarch from start to finish (like the Commonwealth King Casimir Jagiello) while other places switch rulers, or even fall in and out of existence, on a constant basis.

You will get information about all of this in the book, and more: like the list of the Pontifexes of the church (and their various history-based scandals and crimes), the commanders of the Clerical Order, biographies of kings like Casimir "the great", Mattias "the Crow" of Hunland, the doomed hero Skanderbeg of Albania, the Turk Sultan Mehmet the Great, and many others of the great movers and shakers.

(with a kingly nickname like "the Crow" you just know this guy's going to be up to trouble)

There's entirely enough material in Albion that you could run a whole campaign just in the area of Middlesex if you really wanted to.  But if you want your PCs to be sophisticated continent-hopping tourists, Dark Albion will have your back too.


RPGPundit

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RPGPundit Reviews: Lowell Was Right! - A Very Different Now

This is a review of the RPG "Lowell Was Right!", published by Flying Mice games, written by Clash Bowley and Albert Bailey.  It's a softcover book with a full-color cover featuring a redheaded woman in what appears to be a Victorian dress (though we find out later that it's not), and holding a strange sort of rifle. The book is about 190 pages long, and other than the front and back cover images and some logos has only three pieces of interior art.

At first glance, Lowell appears to be a steampunk-sci-fi game. However, we are emphatically told, directly in the book, that this is NOT what it is.  The difference is apparently that Steampunk implies a kind of fantasy or quasi-science set in the 19th century.  Lowell, instead, is based on carefully researched historical study (two years worth, according to the author) of what the prevailing scientific theories of around the 1880s were, and made the game setting with the assumption that all of these ideas were actually correct.  And it's not set in the 19th century, but in an alternate present.  The Lowell in question, from the title, is named after the guy who claimed to see Canals on Mars.

Now, the game system on the whole is the same as what Bowley uses in most of his games, so I'm not really going to bother outlining it yet again.  You can go see information about that in any of the other dozen or so reviews I've done of his other books.  I'm going to focus on what's different here.

Mainly, what's different is setting: an "alternate present" game, which asks the question of what the world would be like today if victorian ideas about science were right.  It seems an odd sort of project, but then again, most of Bowley's are.

This book is, in a way, very much 'hard' sci-fi; in that the theories being dealt with were carefully researched and the rules stuck to.  What are they?  The intro to the book provides a convenient list:

Astronomical theory: the solar system is less than 100K years old.  The sun has been very gradually shrinking, and planets were created from mass it threw off. Thus, the farthest outer planets are the oldest, the ones closer to the sun are the youngest (something that was already present in Space:1889).  This allows Mars to have had an older civilization than Earth, and to now be a planet in decline.

Panspermia: Life is everywhere in the universe; developing anywhere that has sufficient gravity and atmosphere.

Atomic Theory: the atom is the smallest thing there is. It can't be "split".  There's no radioactives. Advanced technology can, however, change one type of atom into another.

Evolution: the understanding of evolution is that life evolves in response to natural environmental factors and not due to random mutation; thus, evolution happens relatively very quickly (within a few generations).

Electronics: dual current theory, meaning that things like most forms of radios, television, or electronic-based computers are impossible.

Geology: Catastrophism suggests that geological change happens much faster than in our reality.

So all of this creates a world that is very different from our own in the present day.  Without the kind of home entertainment (radio, Tv, computers) that we have, there's more of a going-out sort of culture.  Films, live shows, and books are more important.  There are still non-home computers but they're big things run by mechanical means.  There's anti-mass jet dirigibles.

Then there's aesthetic changes, which I think are a bit less based on science as on author's choice:  hats are still worn, women wear long dresses.  Popular music took a different, but not totally dissimilar direction to our own (I think the author's choice here was based on the fact that electric instruments would not work like in our reality).

And then there's the real sci-fi stuff:  panspermia means that of course, there are Martians.  Not only that, but the Martians took ancient humans from Earth as slaves, and their descendants were already all over the solar-system by the time the Earth humans began to travel to space.

The next significant detail in the book is one that, while listed as optional, I think is a lynch-pin of making the whole game worthwhile: the use of "Associations".  Players will generate not only their characters in Lowell, but also the group they belong to, using a system that combines random generation with point-buy mechanics.  Groups are generated through the use of "capital" (points), can thus be large or quite small, and can fit one of a huge variety of types (which could be either selected or randomly rolled).  Some of the types include a trading company, bounty hunters, smugglers, espionage, explorers, a martian 'house' (think clan), a religious group, couriers, a theater troupe, researchers, or a salvage company.  They can be a private group, part of a larger organization or corporation, state owned, or a number of other similar options. You use the capital points to determine things like where the group's home base is (some possibilities include an asteroid, a lab, a hollowed-out mountain, a floating tower, an undersea habitat, a spaceport terminal, a hunting lodge, or a desert oasis, among others), whether the group has guards/security in their employ, if they have spies/agents, what kind of vehicles they control, their medical facilities, if they have psionic or etheric devices in their possession, the type and quality of their library, trainees in their service, heavy equipment at their disposal, and laboratory facilities. Over time, the company can acquire profit which allows them to expand.

There are a variety of baseline races (species?), aside from Humans, to play: Martians for one, which are a kind of humanoid armadillo-people. They have a complex social system based on the fact that almost all martian births are quadruplets. There's "Mars Humans" too, who are the descendants of the humans kidnapped as slaves by martians thousands of years ago. They have become quite different from regular humans because of the difference in gravity and density of atmosphere on Mars, and can't actually move around on Earth (or Venus) without the use of an exoskeleton aid.
There are also Venusians (intelligent bipedal dinosaurs; in following with the premise that Venus is a "younger" world than Earth); and Galileani (the term for the species found on the various moons of Jupiter, who are all vaguely similar to large humanoid fruit-bats; there are subspecies for Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto).

Character creation is done very similarly to most of the other books by Bowley, though initial stats are generated based on a template depending on which race you choose (not something that always comes up in other games by this designer, since many of his are 'historical' games), and there's more structure than in most of his games in terms of choosing background skills, and a kind of skill-tree based on the type of career you choose.

The mechanics are largely similar to those of other Bowley games as well, though he includes the use of 'traits', which are personality details that PCs can choose (examples include "hot-tempered", "pious", "greedy", "poker-face", "sly", "sarcastic" and "foul-mouthed", among others).  Traits have values that are added as a bonus to actions if the GM judges that the trait is applicable to the attempt. Each trait can only be used once per session.
Characters can also have 'edges', which are bonuses based on environment, examples include things like "Extreme weather" or "Shadow", which would apply in snowy environments or in the dark.
Characters also have "spheres of interest" (which include 'domestic', 'intellectual', 'political', 'cultural' and 'religious').  These allow for checks at +0 in areas that a PC doesn't have a specific skill that applies, with larger scores in the sphere allowing for additional bonuses.

The skill list is considerably shorter than many other Bowley games, with skills being fairly broad and overlapping. Skills are general to the field up to a +2 bonus, after which a specific expertise must be chosen.

There are psionic rules as well, on the premise that in 1880 science had not yet discounted the possibility of 'scientific' reasons for mediumship, etc. Psionics work as skills but require the expenditure of "psi points" to activate. Psi powers include telepathy, psychic healing, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, dowsing, psychic sensing, precognition, psychometry, aura reading, mediumship, retrocognition, psychic stun, and illusion.  The section explains how 'ghosts' work in the setting, where it is clear that ghosts are not actually the spirits of the dead but a 'psychic residue' of impression left by the deceased (a theory that is still popular in certain spiritualist circles).


After a few different task-resolution systems that all nevertheless make use of the same stats just in different ways (a curious common feature of most of Clash Bowley's games), and the NPC rules that include some decent random tables, we get to the section on technology. We get detailed explanation of some of the fantastic Victorian-science-derived technological marvels of this alternate present; including deep space drives (which work though ether turbines, arc engines, and mass drivers), ground-to-orbit systems through anti-mass, power systems (hydrogen fuel, light panels, supercapacitors, and the aforementioned anti-mass), etheric devices (like ether vortex reactors, which are huge machines that can create artificial elements to create wondrous materials that make some of the other tech possible), and psionic devices (like psionic lenses based on crystals that concentrate psychic abilities, psychic resonators that enhance the range of psionic powers, psionic noisemakers that annul psionic powers in a limited area, and pharmaceuticals that can enhance or quell psychic abilities).
There's also enhancement mechanical devices like the martian exoskeletons, one-way glass and transparent aluminium, martian flame guns and electroguns.  Of course, we also get long lists of more standard equipment.

There's also a large section on designing and using spaceships. These are built with points, and the build system is relatively complete, but maybe doesn't go into the level of detail as one might expect from the author of the In Harm's Way series.  There also aren't any pre-built templates, which guys like me (who have no interest in building starships from scratch) would likely find annoying.

The section on the solar system covers the main area of action in the game.  The outer planets froze over as (according to Victorian ideas of how solar systems worked) they came out of the warm band of life-sustainable heat while the Sun shrank away; only Jupiter's moons retained life because of the planet's own radiation.  As per scientific theories of the time, the area that now holds the asteroid belt was once a planet, that was destroyed in a war with the Martians.  As well as Jupiter's moons, Mars and Venus are the main inhabited planets; Mars having an old and decadent civilization as that planet slowly dies, while Venus is like earth would have been long in its own past, still in the "dinosaur era".
We get decent if short descriptions of these planets, complete with planetary maps; and rules governing the effects of different levels of gravitation.  The section on the non-earth planets covers about 18 pages.

In a lot of other games of this sort, I've found that the Earth is the one planet that gets neglected.  Space:1889 had details on Earth, but mainly in its Conklin's Atlas sourcebook.  Rocket Age likewise doesn't have almost any detail on the Earth.  But Lowell Was Right manages to do something really interesting here: we get a "geopolitics generator", where you can roll a random amount of randomly determined 'great powers' that run the world in this alternate present.  Among these are "Nazi Europe", the "Pan-Arab Union", "Imperial Manchu China", "Great Brazil" and many others (including "Mormon Zion"). The idea is that after rolling for the great powers, the GM should develop a 'relationship map' explaining how these powers in particular came to rule the world and how they interact with each other. To assist with this, the GM can roll decade by decade events for the defining events from the 1880s until the present and choose some cultural traits for each great power.

This is then followed up by a section that lets you randomly generate a Martian or Mercurian house, which includes a martian name table and a table on details on martian cities and martian hinterlands (and likewise for Mercurian equivalents). There are also random tables for Martian religions, and another for Earth Martian religions (which are usually based on ancient Earth cultures, as Martian humans were taken from Earth in the distant past).  You also get tables on Venusian City-States, castes, and cultural oddities; and then Galileani cities and Hinterlands.

So to conclude about this game;  I would say that "Lowell Was Right" has an unusual but interesting concept.  If you like weird kind of alternate-reality sci-fi games, you'll certainly find it worthwhile.  It is also probably the tightest design yet by Clash Bowley, who seems to be figuring out some tricks for making his character creation process more interesting and his systems smoother.  The Alternate-Earth generation system is great.

I doubt that before Lowell came along anyone was sitting around thinking to themselves "boy I wish I could have an RPG that is set in 2015 but in an alternate present where Victorian ideas about science turned out to be all correct".... except Clash Bowley himself, of course. Nevertheless, I bet a lot of gamers, if they find out what this game is about, will find it worth exploring.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Italian Redbark + Image Latakia

DCC Campaign Archive: The Bean-Thing From the Furry Bay

The PCs started this week's DCC session mourning the death of the Cyber Redneck (and by "mourning" I mean looting the corpse).  Shortly thereafter, they witnessed the return of Bytharion the Gender-indeterminate Wizard.  And immediately after that, the arrival of three new 0-level Hero-Newbs.  It was noted a strange curiosity that in this world, cannon-fodder always came in groups of three; an explanation was offered that it may have something to do with the Three Fates.

After that, the PCs:

-got acquainted with Nigel, the Religious Fantastic. Apparently, "Religious Fantastics" are a movement from a distant part of the world that are a kind of combination between devout followers of G.O.D. and Soccer Hooligans, sharing the 'good news' of the religious life and viciously clubbing anyone who doesn't listen.

-got a bit lost in the deepest recesses of the Tangled Wood (while still on a meandering route to Highbay).  Apparently, as one of their new arrivals to the party proved, professional Dung-gatherers are not particularly qualified by their career to serve as wilderness guides.

-nevertheless reached the River of Gems, which proved rather disappointing as it had long since been mined dry of any gems.

-recalled that the reason they were going to Highbay (also known as the "City of Stoners") was that Night had to obtain a Violet Lotus Shrubbery for the King of Elfland, without which she could never recover the ridiculous amount of Spellburn she'd spent on Agility.  She was effectively derped up, bumping into trees almost constantly as they traveled.

-found that even Night's hearing had apparently been gimped, as she'd completely failed to hear the arrival of an extremely elderly dwarf knight, who had apparently been on a geas-induced for these last 200 years of his life.

-watched as the elderly dwarf, with what seemed to be his dying breath, bequeathed his bag of magic beans to Night, to be planted at the shores of the Furry Bay, and with strict instructions that they be used for good and not for self-serving purposes in spite of the 'great power' these beans were said to grant.
-Also watched as the elderly dwarf seemed to not quite be dead yet, for quite some time.  His lingering ruining what would otherwise have been an intensely dramatic final moment.
-Likewise, watched as the dwarf cursed himself for giving away the Extremely Powerful Beans Not to Be Misused to the first party-member he met, rather than to the Azure Wizard who would be far more likely not to misuse them.

-finally nodded off after concluding that the elderly dwarf wasn't likely to actually die quite yet; only to wake the next morning to find nothing left of him but dust and his armor.

-discovered, and proceeded to mostly ignore, the fact that the detect magic spell registered the beans as not being from this plane.

-realized that the Second Sight spell, cast by Clerics through the somatic component of shaking their tablet while asking a question, was really just a "Magic 8-ball" App.

-managed to get themselves ambushed by a gang of Centaur slavers with Australian accents, all of whom were named Bruce.

-were to be taken to be sold as slaves to Lord Dread, of Castle Dread, who everyone, even the Centaurs, agree is a total asshole.

-bided their time for the right moment to try to get free, which came along the next day when the Centaurs got into a fight with a passing patrol of mutants from the town of Focks (which is routinely mispronounced, much to its inhabitants chagrin).

-ran into some trouble with their escape attempt when the Centaurs scared off the mutant militiamen a lot faster than anticipated, and most of the PCs hadn't even managed to get free of their bonds yet.

-saw Night the elf make the ultimately extremely unfortunate decision of eating all the magic beans, in the hope that they would grant her immense cosmic power.

(the beans were evil!!)

-watched Sandy and Bytharion get the living crap kicked out of them by the Centaurs, while Schul surrendered to them to avoid a similar beating.  However, Ack'Basha the Cleric saved the day by a very creative use of his Holy Sanctuary spell.

-Saw Night fly after the fleeing centaurs while the rest of the party was still freeing itself.  They did not see how when Night started to cast spells against the centaurs, she immediately started to mutate into a horrific derpy-fungus thing and fly off, no longer in control of her own body.

-decided to track the Centaurs first, and try finding Night later, not being aware of her horrific bean-related metamorphosis.

-plotted a careful night-time assault on the Centaurs, which immediately turned into a string of fumble and spell-misfire related disasters.  Suddenly Sandy couldn't manage to hit the broad-side of a barn, and Schul the rogue fell flat on his face in some centaur-droppings rather than skillfully backstab the person he was supposed to backstab.  Bytharion finally managed to save the day with his trademark gender-changing magic-missiles.

-decided to rest and recover from their fairly serious wounds that night, and put off searching for Night until the morning.  After all, how much difference could one more day make, right?

-woke up the next morning to find a 200-story tall Horrific Derpy-fungus thing emerging from the Furry Bay.

-Decided it was time to use G.O.D. to call up the Azure Wizards, since this was frankly beyond them.

-went with the entire High Council of the Azure Wizards to Highbay, where they found a mix of panic and business-as-usual, as about half of the population were apparently convinced that the colossal void-infected monstrosity that was slowly shambling toward their city was probably just a drug-induced hallucination.

-headed to the city offices, except for Schul who stopped off at the market to purchase a Violet Lotus Shrubbery.

-met once again with Chief City Officer Swanlee, who was pretty blase about the latest existential threat to his city, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his reputation for being the only stone-cold sober man in the whole town.

(he may just be the DCC version of this guy:)

-learned to their dismay that their friend Bolt-O the conversation robot, who had last been seen accepting a bureaucratic position in the city government, was not in town, but had in fact been kidnapped by the Orc mercenary Chief Omnblarg on the last occasion that Lord Dread had tried to besiege Highbay.  Omnblarg had since parted company with Lord Dread and overran and conquered the town of Badbreath.

-decided that the best plan was the one proposed by Leandra of the Azure Order, which would be for the Azure Wizards (including Bytharion) to make a massive group ritual-casting to try to petrify the monstrosity, while the others protected the wizards around their circle.

-began the ritual and quickly found themselves accosted by a trio of incomprehensible terrors from the void, who could eat magical energy and looked a little bit like transparent ducks covered in tentacles.

(they were scarier than the description sounds, what with ducks being evil to begin with)

-were about to start fighting these creatures, when the Derpy-fungus Kaiju only made things worse, by spitting out a toxic mist of hallucinogenic gas, instantly incapacitating half the party, including Sandy (their best fighter).

-watched in terror as the evil Tentacle-Ducks Man Was Not Meant to Know dug their tentacles into Leandra and sucked out her soul.

-were further horrified to find that ordinary weapons could not hurt the ducks.

-reached the limit of lovecraftian terror when the Derpy-fungus Kaiju shat out radioactive acid all over the bay area, likely ruining property values port-side.

-saw Ack'basha the cleric once more step up to almost save the day, blowing away most of the Cthulhu-Ducks with a particularly effective Turn Unholy.

-snatched victory from the jaws of failure when Schul the rogue, in an uncharacteristic display of valor, stepped up and managed to kill the last of the Cthulhu-ducks after borrowing the Hornet Mace from a drugged-out Sandy.

-breathed a sigh of relief as the Azure Wizards were then able to launch their spell, turning the Derpy-Fungus Kaiju into a gigantic statue, and about a kilometer of the now-poisoned bay into solid stone too, prompting City Officer Swanlee to note that this will require considerable and expensive infrastructure investment.


Sadly, if you haven't guessed by now, the monstrosity was none other than Night, transformed by the Dark One's evil beans into a horror, and now quite dead (although her possession of an Amulet of Protection from Death, though it did not do what she thought it would do, did turn out to allow her to live a relatively comfortable afterlife instead of having her memories washed away and being subject to an eternity of being poked with pitchforks).  The team also lost an erstwhile ally in the form of Leandra, the leader of the Azure Order. Next time, they'll probably be going to rescue Bolt-0, which should be fun.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Dunhill Classic Series Rhodesian + C&D's Crowley's Best

Famous Pipe Smokers: Special Edition

Today I'm going to talk about someone who was famous for being one of the greatest pop culture badasses of all time.  

He also smoked a pipe, but you know what?  Even though I could show pics of him smoking pipes on the set of Lord of the Rings, or as Sherlock Holmes, etc., I'm going to show this pic instead:

Because even though it's a cigar, I think it captures the man better than any pipe picture I've seen.

Sir Christopher Lee was a real-life secret agent who hunted down nazis for fun, and a fake global supervillain, vampire count, genius detective, mad pagan, Jedi master turned Sith, and of course Saruman.  Plus, a real-life heavy metal musician in his 80s.

His long-term enjoyment of cigars and pipes undoubtedly must have been responsible for his death at the tragically young age of 93.

Goodbye, Sir Christopher.  I can only hope I get as many years as you did of doing what I love and smoking what I like.


RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Stanwell Deluxe + Image Latakia

10th Anniversary Classic Rant: Immersion

Now, just what is Immersion?

Apparently, its the "rpg theory" term for the situation where you're roleplaying and get really deeply into your character. Where you become the character, so to say.

Now, I really wasn't too up on the Swine-talk over at the Forge about the topic, but apparently they despise Immersion down there. The claim is that immersion is either something that is impossible to achieve, or meaningless, or a mark of mental illness (in fact, it seems to tie into Ron Edward's aggresive statements that all mainstream gamers are suffering from "literal brain damage").

This surprised me a little; I mean, shit, you would think that the Swine would be all over the namby-pamby talking about "becoming the role" and all that bullshit. But the truth is that there's a crucial difference: the Swine want to talk about roleplaying, not actually roleplay. And immersion is far too simple a method and a goal; it would ruin all the fun of creating convoluted theories and devising idiotic systems to "facilitate storytelling".

Its like "method" acting. "The Method" seems like it would be all about "immersion" in the acting context, but in reality it considers that directly trying to just "be" the character is impossible, and that you do a better job of acting the character by following a series of related exercises that create a kind of "character pastiche".

There's the famous incident where Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were making a movie together. Hoffman was a famous devotee of "the Method", and was trying to explain its virtues to the elder Olivier. Olivier just looked at the stupid fuck as if to wonder what kind of goofballs Dustin had popped and said "My dear boy, why don't you just ACT it?"

It's the same with the Roleplaying world. Immersion is, basically, doing a very good job of acting it. And of course it's possible, most of us that are any good at all at Roleplaying have done it many, many times. So the Swine resorting to denying a phenomenon that is brutally obvious and real to the vast majority of gamers is a move of desperation, to justify the creation of idiotic mechanics to try to stimulate what more talented or less fucked up gamers can just do naturally.

Perhaps the reason why Edwards claimed that all gamers are mentally damaged is because he is projecting his own experience (and those of his followers) on the gaming community at large.
But here's a news flash for Mr.Edwards: most of us are able to make "story" and "play in character" just fine, fuckwit. We've been doing it for years, Olivier-style, by just acting it. Too bad that kind of wrecks your little website's raison d'etre, since your gaming theories all operate on the presumption that people are fundamentally incapable of creating either story or acting the character without the help of your "crutches".

RPGPundit 

(originally posted Feb 14th 2006)

Everyjoe Tuesday: Female College Professor Subjected to Kangaroo Court and Potential Sanction for Disagreeing with Student "Feminists"

No, it's not one of my articles today, but I felt that this story was just so good that it had to be shared. And it links to not one but two great Everyjoe articles!

So Laura Kipnis, a left-leaning female professor in the film-making department of Northwestern University committed the grave error of criticizing the new anti-harassment policies at her college and others, pointing out that they were based on paranoia rather than fact and questioning the concepts of 'consent' that are being pushed by these new policies.

As a result, she had a group of students protest her by marching by carrying mattresses (in reference to Emma Sulkowicz, who did the same as an art project and attention-getting exercise after her claims of rape against another student were rejected even by the ridiculously lax standard of University Kangaroo Courts), demanding that she be punished by the University administration for daring to pen an article even questioning a group of policies that made the court systems in Communist East Germany look like the very model of fairness and openness by comparison.

But that's not all! She then became the subject of a case of her own, under the very same Title IX procedures that are being used to justify kangaroo court procedures in dealing with Sexual Harassment/Rape/Assault charges on campus.  She wasn't charged of sexually harassing anyone, mind you. In fact, at first (as is apparently, horrifyingly NORMAL in these procedures) she wasn't told what she was being charged of at all, only that she was subject to a hearing on charges she wasn't allowed to know about.  She was also told that she was not allowed to have lawyers defend her, but the university would have lawyers prosecuting.  The defendant in what passes for the "University Justice System" is not allowed legal counsel, whether facing sexual assault charges or the charges Kipnis was facing, which although (again) she wasn't even allowed to know the charges against her at first, she only eventually managed to find out were the grave Thought Crimes of "creating a chilling effect" (that could intimidate women from reporting harassment on campus) and of "retaliation" -- that is, incredibly, the argument that by writing an article that was critical of the Anti-harassment policies on campus she was trying to 'retaliate' against those policies.  Yes, apparently on campuses today just saying you disagree with the anti-harassment procedures on campus means you could be charged under the anti-harassment procedures on campus!

Every time I think "this must be the absolute peak of postmodernist pseudo-activist Censorship-loving anti-civilizational thought-police Collectivists absurdity", something vastly more absurd happens.  It would be funny, if it wasn't for the fact that people very literally can get their lives destroyed.  These red-brigade style kangaroo courts have the power to destroy the careers of professors, or ruin the futures of young students, for daring to disagree with the privileged fantasies and outright lies of a molly-coddled gang of pseudo-activist idiots who actually believe themselves superior to everyone else and have no moral qualms whatsoever about ruining lives for the sake of what they imagine to be the 'greater good' (of them being in charge of everyone else's life, that is).

God help us if these people and their poisonous ideas continue to spread and gain power and influence in other areas than the increasingly-irrelevant Student-Loan-Debt Factories.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Lorenzetti Solitario Egg + Gawith's Navy Flake

Dark Albion Cover Image Referendum Concluded: New Image Chosen.. With a Surprise

Thanks to all the people who participated these last couple of days in voting for which Dark Albion cover they liked best!

Now, over the course of the past days it became clear that a lot of people had some ideas about the surrounding borders, fonts, colour, etc.  Dominique Crouzet has listened to some of these ideas and already made some modifications, but the final production is yet to come.  So keep that in mind, the images I'll be showing you here are NOT the final cover images.

Anyways, the results are in and seem fairly conclusive.  The first cover presented got slightly over 50% of all the votes.  The second cover got somewhere over 35% of the vote.
So, while the first option was clearly the winner, there was also a substantial number of players who liked the second cover.  As a result, an idea emerged: Dark Albion will have TWO covers.

The winner of the contest will of course be the main cover of Dark Albion: The Rose War:

(note: again, not the final cover image)

While the runner-up will be available as a VARIANT COVER on Lulu:

I think both look pretty great, and both express two different sides of the elements that you will be able to use in actual play of the Albion setting.


So again, thanks to all who voted here, on theRPGsite, on dragonsfoot or on G+.

Stay tuned for more Dark Albion news!

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Masonic Meerschaum + Image Perique