I've been on something of a Whoniverse overdose the past two days. SciFi aired a marathon of the best of Doctor Who season 3 on Monday ("Human Nature"/"Family of Blood", one of my favorite things ever produced for television, plus "Blink" and "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords", "The Sound of Drums" being my personal choice for most purely entertaining piece of television ever), and this combined with the glowing reviews of Torchwood's limited season three/miniseries event thing "Children of Earth" got me to watch that, too--and, before I did, the final three episodes of Torchwood's season two, which have been sitting unwatched on my computer since they aired over a year ago due to my growing indifference to the series. (A short review: the last three episodes were better but still mostly Torchwood as usual. "Children of Earth", on the other hand, is really quite good and absolutely brilliant in a few unexpected places.)

But what I'm more interested in is the political circumstances depicted in the Doctor Who finale and in "Children of Earth". I realize I'm way late to the game in analyzing the Master's return, but as a student my work is mostly analyzing old things anyway, so whatever. What's interesting to me about the political circumstances is that they aren't unusual, or different, or new, beyond the superficialities of aliens and advanced technology.

The Master (John Simm) in Doctor Who (2007)
In "The Sound of Drums", the Doctor figures out that the Master has elected himself Prime Minister of Great Britain via embedding a psychic signal within a satellite network that controls cell phones: it's not exactly mind control, the Doctor says, just an implanted rhythm (the chilling "Sound of Drums" that also reverberates uncontrollably within the Master's mind) that contains the message: "Believe in me. Vote for me." It seems like just a science fiction plot device, but the moment when the Doctor's companion's acknowledge that even they were planning on voting for the Master (before they knew who he was) resonates uncomfortably with the modern political space:

Martha: I was gonna vote for him.
The Doctor: Really?
Martha: Well, it was before I even met you. And I liked him.
Jack: Me too.
The Doctor: Why do you say that? What was his policy, what did he stand for?
Martha: I don't know, he always sounded . . . good. Like you could trust him. Just nice. He spoke about . . . I can't really remember, but it was good. Just the sound of his voice . . .

On one level it's a merely a demonstration that the Master can affect even those who should be most resistant to his machinations. But of course on another level there's a sense that this isn't actually unusual. Martha's inability to articulate the Master's policy despite her confidence in him--her admission that she simply "trust[ed] him" based on "the sound of his voice" would not sound out of place in a modern news segment interviewing voters (or more likely, a Daily Show parody ridiculing the ignorance of voters, though the difference between the comedic farce of The Daily Show and the blatant lies of mainstream news is a thin one indeed).

Ultimately this element of political commentary is dropped in favor of Doctor Who's more usual intensely absurd character drama (which I love, no mistake), but I wish there was more of it. The political aspects of the new series--Harriet Jones, UNIT, and of course Torchwood--are some of its most interesting (at least in terms of its Earth-based stories) because they do often seem to be simply our modern circumstances with aliens thrown in.

Torchwood, indeed, deals with this a bit more often (though sometimes it dodges it when I feel it shouldn't), especially in "Children of Earth". But even in its full seasons there's an interesting arc in the background of the acknowledgement of the existence of aliens by the general populace despite governments' continued official denials. For some time I considered it simply absurd and contrived that the populace at large hadn't already simply accepted this after the events of Doctor Who's seasons--the Master himself points out a number of such incidents, including the highly visible destruction of Big Ben by an alien spacecraft, as part of a press conference announcing his (as Prime Minister) official first contact with aliens (an elaborate ruse ending with his global domination, though the aliens are real).

It seems ridiculous that after this public declaration and subsequent fallout (the deaths of the Master as Prime Minister and the American President in "Last of the Time Lords") the world's governments would refuse to acknowledge aliens and that the public would, by and large, accept this. And it should be ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more it occured to me that such obvious, blatant lies have always been the province of government, and though in the age of decentralized social media these lies are more visible than ever before to those looking for them, they still have ridiculous powers of persistence.


The United States' torture of detainees, its general execution of the War on Terror and the predatory nature of Western foreign policy in general, plus many, many others: they're a sort of step beyond "open secrets", those things like Israel's nuclear armaments that are officially denied but nonetheless widely acknowledged. They're things that anybody looking to know can know, that all the information about is out there and ridiculously easy to find, but that the vast majority of the public do not know, because the mainstream news refuses to acknowledge them and because the public in general simply do not want to know.

And with this depressing realization I accepted that Torchwood's treatment of the subject is actually probably accurate. Even after so many public images, most people wouldn't accept the existence of aliens--but it wouldn't be hard for them to accept it once forced to, as happens numerous times throughout Torchwood. It seems at first wierd that people accept so easily extraterrestrial life, perhaps just a necessary plot contrivance to keep 42-minute episodes moving, but once we see that they already know, in some sense, and just haven't accepted it yet, it becomes much more understandable (and, perhaps, frightening).

I've got more to say about politics and "Children of Earth", but it's of a more different sort, and so will be another post.

Before I can collect my tax income and proceed with restoring Spanish glory in the winter, the United Provinces offer me a chance to try out a duel. Apparently they're rather offended by that whole attempted espionage business and they send a gentleman to deal with this affront to their honor by challenging my rake to a duel. There's no option to flee, unfortunately, despite his supposed stealth skills, just a choice of weapon. I'm helpfully informed that the Dutch gentleman is better with both swords and pistols. I decide to go with swords, since that at least sounds less lethal.



I'm treated to a fancy video (seems a bit anachronistic, really) of the duel, which involves the two men chasing each other back and forth off the screen. Apparently they didn't have mobile cameras, at least. The last shot is of the gentleman running away with my rake waving his sword defiantly, and then a video of a carriage moving down a city street. I have no idea what the carriage was about since the duel took place in a wooded area, but against the odds my rake has won! That ought to show the Dutch. Maybe he'll be more confident in his sneaking next time.

Before I can celebrate too much, however, there's another problem. Pirates have attacked by fleet in the Caribbean. And by fleet, I mean an admiral's flagship and one other ship, which is a bit less than I was expecting, but I suppose the Spanish Armada is in the past and Barbossa was an admiral with just two ships, right? This pirate's got more ships than I do, but no admiral, so I figure I've got a fighting chance and decide to duke it out. Not that fleeing from pirates was ever an option anyway, Spanish honor and all that.



It turns out the pirates may only have one more ship than me, but they have a lot more guns. For a while it looks like I might actually triumph, as I get the pirates grouped up and disable one of their ships, but things quickly fall apart after that minor victory, and soon both Spanish ships are fleeing from the battlefield. Err, battlesea? Anyway. Cowards. Shouldn't the British and French and Dutch be dealing with these guys? Or maybe New Spain?

Ah, yes. As winter rolls around, my adviser informs me that the government will occasionally assign me optional missions. Not sure who's assigning them, given that I seem to have control over everything, but in this case it's a moot point, as the mission is from New Spain. It seems a bit audacious for my own protectorate to be giving me orders. They want me to capture three territories (Texas, Curacao, and Trinidad) in exchange for giving up control to me. Shouldn't I already have control of them? This seems fishy, but they also have a lot of territory and I assume thus a lot of money. I guess it's something to work towards.

Next time: New allies, more pirates, and WAR!

I have a love-hate relationship with Civilization IV. I love the mechanics, the music, the dynamics, the customizability. I hate Isabella. Every time I played a game of Civ IV, without fail, sooner or later the Spanish came knocking. Every time, Isabella was pissed that I was a different religion than her, and sooner or later, without fail, she declared war on me. And every time I tried to negotiate with her, she just stared back haughtily at me. I have never hated a video game character so much--and all she is is an animated profile picture and some obscure game logic.

Somehow I find myself playing the Spanish in Empire: Total War.



The year is 1700, and somebody's handed me control of what's left of the Spanish Empire. My history's a little hazy, but it's pretty obvious that the days of Spanish glory are in the past, though Spain does begin with control of various parts of Italy and southern Holland, which my adviser helpfully advises me is in danger of being overrun by the now Protestant republican northern Holland. She also gives me a quick overview of the Spanish possessions in the Americas, which seem surprisingly sparse until I realize that "New Spain" (all the land from California to Venezuela) is a separate faction set up as a "protectorate" but not under my direct control. Which seems a bit cheap, but they're still sending me lots of money and I'm not paying for upkeep, so I guess that works out.



My adviser warns that the "rogue states" of Great Britain and the United Provinces (northern Holland) may attempt to take my American possessions. Apparently "rogue state" still just means "people we don't like". The adviser also warns me not to piss off the French, but they're apparently my allies, which is nice since they're right next to me and I'm not looking forward to a protracted land war right now.

Also, apparently the last lion has died in Libya. Then the game gives me control.

I start off focusing on Flanders (southern Holland), per the advice. There's a nice army stationed there already, along with my best defensive general, which is nice, but there's no walls, so I order the construction of those. There's an option to build either a governor's mansion or a military governor's encampment--I'm going with the military governor. It looks like it lets me train better units. I've also got a "rake", e.g. a spy and assassin, which I decide to sent into Rotterdam, a mission that immediately fails. Oops. The rake gets away, at least.

I decide to send a missionary to Flanders as well to convert the Protestants and maybe improve my public image after that failed spy. Unfortunately it's going to take four years for him to get there by land and there's no ships on the northern coast to get him there faster. Ah, well. Maybe I should improve roads with next year's income.





In addition to the regional options there's a lot of options for the central government, the most interesting of which are my ministers. My starting cabinet is full of floozies--apparently whoever was in charge before me didn't put much value in efficiency--but a few of the candidates are more impressive and some of the standing ministers perform better in other posts, so after some shuffling the government's looking much better. I'm hoping there are more monocled candidates soon, though.

The other significant option is technology research. There are options under military, agricultural, and more theoretical stuff. Initially I'm rather interested in the military technologies, of course, but after looking over them "Social Contract", surprisingly, grabs my eye, mainly because it increases technology research rate, which seems a good thing to get out of the way in the beginning. I also order one of my government-employed gentleman to a nearby college to speed up the research. The adviser informs me gentleman can also duel other characters, which seems too amusing not to try at some point.

Next time: pirates, a duel, and New Spain's impositions.

• A movie about the end of the world that's not about saving the world but about who gets to live through it. Inspired by the 2012 trailers, which actually have a few interesting bits among the Roland Emmerich Epic Explosions, involving scenes of the government preparing what amounts to a modern Noah's Ark and deciding who gets on and who gets left behind. (Think also Battlestar's "Razor": "So you're going to decide just like that who lives and who dies?") You could even have lots of explosions and action shit with people revolting, trying to smuggle/attack their way onto the ark, etc., as well as a genuine Ethical Dilemma and angsty character drama (survivor's guilt, etc.).
  
  
• A prose story (novel, novella, hypertext, whatever) about digital ghosts formed by the vast quantities of personal data left behind on the Internet in the modern world. Inspired by Caprica's pilot, except not with a stupid perfect copy but a fragmented, obviously artificial but still bearing significant resemblance construct, like a person with Alzheimer's, where sometimes they sound just like themselves and sometimes they're so very obviously not. Targeted straight at Uncanny Valley technological anxiety, identity theft fears, dreams of technological immortality via singularity and sci-fi's brains on disc trope, and more generally the piecemeal, constructed nature of modern cognizance (which has always been true obviously, just not so obvious, and the tearing away of the illusion of truth is what's so damaging and scary to us).
  
  
• A video game about the exploration and terraforming of a new planet after Earth's downfall. Player character as the lone awakened human aboard an ark spaceship stocked with humans in hibernation/cryostasis/whatever and plant and animal specimens, sent down to a living planet's surface to scout. Encounters completely alien fauna and flora and early on involves lots of exploration porn, sweet vistas and crazy creatures and stuff, structured by a categorization mechanic ala Beyond Good and Evil or Pokemon Snap. Switches between on the planet (huge open world nonlinear exploration, with scout vehicle for fast travel around, all natural and curvy and colorful and alive) and the ark ship (cramped corridors, bulky square technological drab dead), getting orders from an AI terraforming protocol, gradually transitioning from exploration and cataloguing to terraforming, bringing in algae and small stuff at first and slowly escalating to higher terrestrial life forms, in the process wiping out the existing ecosystem. Watch all the cool creatures you hopefully became friendly with early on slowly killed off by your own efforts. Rebellion is inadvisable as the AI controls your fuel, food, water, etc. rations--and even if you just kill yourself, the AI awakens someone else to take over, and the game continues.
  

These are not the monsters exactly as I ran them; rather, they are updated versions based on my own experience with running them. They in general run on the more damaging side (as my players noticed) but also ideally of lower health and defenses, to get as close to L4D's greater swinginess (to use an RPG term) while still feeling like 4E. House rules that already do this (e.g. decreasing monster hit points and increasing their damage) will amplify this effect.

Zombie Horde Level 3 Brute Huge Natural Humanoid (undead, swarm) XP 150
Initiative +1 Senses Perception +1; darkvision
Grabbing Mass aura 1; at the start its turn the zombie horde makes a melee basic attack against each enemy in the aura as a free action.
HP 55; Bloodied 27
AC 15; Fortitude 18, Reflex 15, Will 15
Immune disease, poison; Resist half damage from melee and ranged attacks, 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 close and area attacks, 5 radiant, 5 fire
Saving Throws +5 to effects imposed by ranged or melee attacks
Speed 6 squares, climb 4
M Slam (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.
m Grab (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +4 vs. Reflex; 1d10 + 3 damage, and the target is grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie horde's grab take a -5 penalty.
m Engulf (against a grabbed target, standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +4 vs Fortitude; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is engulfed by the zombie horde (until escape). While engulfed the target is grabbed, restrained, takes ongoing 10 damage (ongoing 5 while the zombie horde is bloodied), and slides into an adjacent square occupied by the zombie horde. An attempt to escape being engulfed takes a -5 penalty (not cumulative with the zombie horde's Grab penalty). Any ranged or melee attack against the target instead targets the zombie horde. While engulfing a target, the zombie horde can take no action other than to sustain the engulfment, although its aura still functions.
Horde Stability
The zombie horde can reduce any push, pull, or slide effect against it by 1 square.
Thinning Out (when first bloodied)
The zombie horde's size changes to Large, and all its attacks take a -2 penalty to damage.
Stragglers (when reduced to 0 hit points)
Three zombie rotters appear in any unoccupied space formerly occupied by the zombie horde.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Str 16 (+4) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 11 (+1) Con 15 (+3) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

The zombie horde owes much of its design to a similar homebrew monster on the EN World forums by a user whose name I unfortunately do not recall. It begins as a fairly normal swarm creature (though unusual in that it is a swarm of Medium creatures) with an unusual and powerful Engulf ability that unfortunately I never got to try out in actual combat. The Engulf ability is meant to simulate getting surrounded by the horde in L4D and is quite dangerous, although as a brute the attack is unlikely to hit.

One of the additions to most of these monsters from the versions I ran is a vulnerability to fire. When the tank attacked my players their first thought was to set it on fire; I had not originally included any rules for it, but I decided on the fly to give the tank vulnerability to fire (although not actually catch on fire from such damage, to my players' disappointment), which I then transferred over to the rest of the zombies as I went over them afterwards. Purely from a 4E stand point, the radiant vulnerability is completely servicable and adding fire gives them an additional weakness, but fire is such an iconic part of L4D that I didn't want to give it up.

Zombie Hunter Level 3 Lurker Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 150
Initiative +8 Senses Perception +8; darkvision
HP 37; Bloodied 18
AC 17; Fortitude 16, Reflex 18, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 fire
Speed 8 squares, climb 6 (spider climb)
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +8 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.
m Pounce (only usable as part of a charge; standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs. Reflex; 1d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 damage, and the target is grabbed and dazed (escape ends all) and knocked prone. Attempts to escape the zombie hunter's grab take a -5 penalty. The zombie hunter enters the target's space, is dazed, and any melee or ranged attack against the target instead targets the zombie hunter. If the zombie hunter leaves the target's space for any reason, the grab ends.
Leaper
As a move action or as part of a charge, the zombie hunter can jump up to its speed without making an Athletics check and gains a +4 bonus to defenses against opportunity attacks provoked by jumping.
Flaming Hunter
If the zombie hunter takes fire damage, its attacks on its next turn gain a +2 bonus to damage (including ongoing damage).
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Stealth +9, Acrobatics +9
Str 14 (+3) Dex 17 (+4) Wis 14 (+3) Con 13 (+2) Int 4 (-2) Cha 3 (-3)

Hunters were especially interesting to design due to their Pounce attack. I borrowed from the horde's already established Engulf ability for an attack that did a lot of damage if sustained (though, like the actual L4D hunter, the initial damage is less than a simple claw swipe) but also made the hunter more vulnerable. (In one encounter, I had a horde attack a hunter pounced on a character due to its aura; I figured it fit the mindlessness of the Horde.)

Flaming Hunter is one of my favorite features of any monster I've ever designed. Part of it is that I like the idea of mixing advantages and dangers--hit the hunter with fire to do more damage to it, but also make it do more damage. And part of it is simply for the fact that flaming hunters are probably my favorite part of L4D, to the point that I giddily scream "Flaming hunter!" and intentionally set myself on fire when playing as one. (I suppose a few people might not actually know: hunters in L4D do significantly more damage when on fire. They also don't take ongoing damage from fire while pouncing someone, which makes setting yourself on fire extremely effective in most situations.)

Zombie Smoker Level 3 Controller Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 150
Initiative +4 Senses Perception +3; darkvision
HP 43; Bloodied 21
AC 17; Fortitude 16, Reflex 17, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 fire
Speed 6 squares, climb 5
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +8 vs AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.
r Tongue Grab (Standard; recharge 56)
Ranged 10; +7 vs Reflex; 2d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 (until escape, and the target is knocked prone, pulled 3, and grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie smoker's grab take a -5 penalty. Sustain Standard: the target is pulled 3 squares. The first time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target is dazed (until escape). The second time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target becomes unconscious (until the target takes damage from an attack). If the zombie smoker fails to sustain this power, the target automatically escapes at the end of the zombie smoker's turn. The zombie smoker can only recharge this power when it does not have a target grabbed.
c Smoking Cloud (when the zombie smoker is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ poison
Close burst 1; +7 vs Fortitude; 1d6 + 3 poison damage, and the target is weakened and takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls until the end of its next turn.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Stealth +9
Str 14 (+3) Dex 17 (+4) Wis 14 (+3) Con 11 (+1) Int 5 (-2) Cha 3 (-3)

The smoker is my favorite of L4D's zombies, and it proved the most annoying of any of the zombies in the 4E version due to its ability to attack at range and quickly disappear. The smoker is labeled here as a Controller, but that's mostly for diversity: all of the specials are clearly Lurkers, with the boomer having an obvious Leader ability as well, but smokers clearly have a minor in controlling as well--their job, after all, is not so much damage as disruption of the survivors' formation.

While the smoker proved the most annoying of foes for my players, it never managed to sustain its grab long enough to reach the more powerful effects (it kept strangling the ranger, who had a very high Acrobatics modifier), so I'm not sure how those work out. Obviously it's very powerful for a level 3 monster, but I also ruled that players could use their own move action to make an escape check for the grabbed player (essentially L4D's melee-to-free), which I don't think is RAW an option but seems reasonable.

Zombie Boomer Level 2 Lurker (Leader) Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 125
Initiative +5 Senses Perception +1; darkvision
Boomer Stench aura 1; enemies in the aura take a -2 penalty to attack rolls.
HP 26; Bloodied 13
AC 15; Fortitude 13, Reflex 13, Will 14
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 force
Speed 5 squares
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +7 vs. AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.
c Vomit (Standard; recharge 6) ♦ Acid
Close blast 3; +5 vs Reflex; 1d10 + 3 acid damage, and the target is blinded (save ends). While a target is blinded, zombies gain a +4 bonus to damage rolls against the target.
c Boomer Burst (when the zombie boomer is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ Acid
Close burst 2; the zombie boomer makes a Vomit attack against each non-zombie creature in range.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Str 13 (+2) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 11 (+1) Con 8 (+0) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

Boomers are a finicky beast. Due to the way hit points work they need to be of lower level (or have a general vulnerability, I suppose, or make them minions, which would be hilarious) than the other zombies to make them seem easier to kill. I also didn't get a chance to see how their signature vomit interacted with zombies in play; the boomer's only appearance in combat only hit one player and the only other zombie around, a horde, was blocked by the rest of the characters.

Zombie Tank Level 3 Elite Brute Large Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 300
Initiative +1 Senses Perception +2; darkvision
HP 116; Bloodied 58
Regeneration 5
AC 17; Fortitude 19, Reflex 15, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable fire, radiant; if the zombie tank takes fire or radiant damage, its regeneration does not function on its next turn.
Saving Throws +2
Speed 7 squares, climb 4
Action Points 1
M Slam (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 3 squares and knocked prone.
m Smash (against a prone target; sandard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 3d8 + 3 damage.
a Rock Throw (Standard; recharge 3456)
Area burst 1 within 10 squares; 1d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 1 square and knocked prone.
Swat (when an enemy moves adjacent to the zombie tank; immediate reaction; at-will)
The zombie tank makes a melee basic attack against the triggering enemy.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Athletics +9
Str 17 (+4) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 13 (+2) Con 18 (+5) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

Ah, the tank. The players appropriately grew terrified when the tank arrived, although due to its lack of entourage it failed to live up to expectations. And while its Slam and Swat abilities proved accurately powerful, I never got a chance to use Smash, which would have a significant chance of knocking a level-appropriate character unconscious. Due to the interior setting I also never used Rock Throw, but only pansies use that anyway. Unfortunately I could figure out no way to included the tank's ability to kill everyone with one punted log, car, or forklift and stay balanced.

The Boys are Back in Town

My last campaign was a travelogue in structure; that is, the characters were on a journey (though their destination changed and at times they weren't exactly sure what it was) and thus rarely visited the same place twice. They had no "home base", in campaign structure terms: a town or other location which they visited after completing major quests.

One of the many things different with my summer campaign is that I am trying to establish something of a home base, or at least let the characters stay in one location longer. But for that to matter you have to have an established setting with meaning and context, which means more than a map with a key and some brief description. I meant to reestablish (or really, establish, given the loose context in which the campaign began) the setting of the town of Winterhaven upon the characters' return, but, well, if you read these postmortems you know I mean to do a lot of things. (In retrospect, forcing the players to walk back to Winterhaven from the ruins of the Keep, and thus through the farms that surround it and through the gates and such, would have given plenty of opportunities for just this sort of thing. Oops.)

Instead, the characters found themselves in the ancient stone tower at the center of the town, which had gone unremarked their previous visit. They briefly met the tower's occupant, an ancient sage named Valen who offered some brief comedy (by pushing one of the characters off the tower's roof and then casting Feather Fall just before he hit the ground), then met with Freddy Lipton, their nominal employer (of sorts) on the expedition to the Keep, who simply directed them to convert their loot into gold at the nearby store--whereupon they were arrested by Winterhaven's guard captain, Andre de Ker, who had previously stirred trouble with the characters.

Only as Good as the Villain

Andre de Ker is, I think, one of the successes so far of the summer campaign. Villains are always interesting characters to me, in that I don't truly believe in "evil", just in the effects that fear and self-righteousness can have on people. De Ker is the kind of villain I appreciate and I think players appreciate a lot as well: not a villain with grand schemes whose opponent is the world, something that players have a hard time getting involved in, but a villain personally to the characters, whose evil is as direct antagonism against the players.

As the players realized as they worked out de Ker's past as a failed adventurer (from comments by Valen and de Ker's strange obsession with the Keep), de Ker is not so much evil as pathetic and jealous of actual successful adventurers. Making the conflict personal made the players hate him, not just the characters (leading to some hilarious moments in session 5).

You are Number Six

Not so successful was the concurrent introduction of our new fifth player. Introducing new characters is an art I have little experience with (and never on the DMing end), and the circumstances were did not help the situation: I helped the player create her character in the hours before the session, and our only discussion of how she might fit into the ongoing campaign was during the brief car ride over to our playing location.

I do think that the character creation process itself was slightly better. Since I knew for some time we'd be adding a new player, I gave some thought as to how to introduce the concept of character creation in a less haphazard way than with the first four players of this campaign. I realized that power sources, often ignored by more experienced players, are actually a very good way of presenting choices to new players: since I imagine most people unfamiliar with RPG mechanics come into the game wanting to play a magic user, a weapon wielder, a divine caster, etc., the power sources are, it seems to me, a better place to start than with classes or races, of which there are of course many. And if they do have a grasp of basic RPG mechanics--enough to grasp the class rolls, at least--then you can easily narrow down the myriad choices. In this case the player liked the sound of the Primal classes and, since she had wanted a companion similar to our ranger's beast companion, a shaman became a natural choice.

The actual character's introduction was unfortunately more-or-less nonexistant. The characters met her as a fellow prisoner arrested by de Ker but I never actually prompted an appropriate introductory dialogue. Once the players were freed (due to a zombie attack and most of de Ker's guards being slain in the initial onslaught), they simply brought the shaman along with them, since she was now a member of the party, of course.

ZOMG

There was a period of time while designing the Keep that I had no idea what would come next. I pondered various possibilities and eventually returned to one of the basics: an undead attack. It flowed naturally from the established background of the Keep (though the players have yet to figure out the exact connection) and gave an opportunity to run a series of encounters I have personally wanted to do for some time: Left 4 Dead, D&D style. I actually experienced a L4D-inspired encounter in a campaign I play in (and thus all the credit goes to that DM for the idea), but for my own I created custom versions of all the L4D zombies (minus the witch, although the imagery of the witch did come into play).

I didn't get to use them all as planned, unfortunately: the series of three combat encounters, always lengthy in 4E, in the back half of a session meant combat fatigue set in and the climatic battle--set in the Clue manor, standing in for the home of Winterhaven's Lord Warden, and featuring a tank, a smoker (which previously ambushed the characters while they were outside), a hunter, a boomer, and a horde, I ended up cutting the final encounter down to a brief confrontation with a horde and a boomer (which simply ran when the horde fell) and one-on-five fight with the tank, who despite his elite status (and due to my forgetting his regeneration) fell quickly.

The cliffhanger--approaching the final accessible room on the first floor to hear crying--proved quite effective, though.

Took a Level in Badass (Or At Least Not Dying)

The players returned the next session facing that the bad news that their characters would not be getting an extended rest, meaning the rogue remained at 1 HP with all healing surges used, and the good news that they reached Level 2. Leveling takes a while, but luckily many of the players, despite their relative newness to the game, had by now gotten enough of a handle on the Character Builder to do most of the leveling up on their own (an action I was initially quite wary of), with only a bit of overview on my part to ensure everything went well. Unfortunately the time won by this was offset by the extra time taken to set up a new player--time well spent, of course, but it nonetheless meant the session started much later than normal.

Leveling also reduced the rogue's problems, as to combat his constant shortage of surges he took the Durable feat (the bonus surges which I immediately granted him) and the cleric took Cure Light Wounds as his utility power, which he promptly cast on the rogue as well.

You Can't Go Over Water . . .

The players began actual play fitfully. They remained worried about a boss encounter ahead they felt ill-equipped to fight, and so it took some encouragement from me as DM to get them to venture forward to the next open room, which contained one of the most important parts of the Keep, a complex device that players figured out after some time (with the help of outbursts from the angry voice) was some sort of power generator and containment system for the planar rift that the deva's flashback had established the Keep was built to defend against.

The description of the centerpiece of the room--a group of metallic circles spinning in a spherical formation, with three large, finely carved gems set at the intersections of the circles--attracted the players, so much so that they were afraid of doing anything with it (correctly assuming that messing with whatever was containing the rift would have serious consequences). In the end I had to keep prodding the players, who eventually came up with a plan to instead cut the power lines connecting the generator to the rest of the facility (and specifically the magically locked door to the final room). But since in this case the generator's collapse was the inciting incident for the next act of the campaign, cutting the lines simply led to a feedback loop within the generator that brought the containment down just as well (and opened the door).

Something of an Anticlimax

The players entered the final room prepared for a boss battle and possibly the rescue of a prisoner (the fifth player waiting to be introduced this session). They found instead only a small but well-furnished room (everything was gnome sized, as they realized) and a ranting robot, now too confused and upset by the containment failure (I threw in a "resonance cascade" reference that no one got, unfortunately). The room also quickly began falling apart, along with the rest of the facility (the implication being that some sort of magical field or other device had been keeping the ancient ruins stabilized), but an escape quickly presented itself: one last false wall, revealed by its not shaking along with the rest of the room, behind which was hidden a teleportation circle.

Originally I imagined the finale of the Keep as a complex skill challenge involving an Indiana Jones-style escape as the ruins collapsed around the characters; I'm honestly not sure why I went with the hidden teleportation circle instead, aside from the ease of getting the players back to town. It certainly would have been a bit more exciting, though for once the skill challenge to activate the circle got everyone involved with useful skills, as the cleric and wizard used Arcana to decipher the circle itself, the ranger used Perception to search the room for useful information, and the rogue made one last attempt to get information out of the robot with Bluff--not to much use, but he did end up dragging the robot along as a man-sized trophy.

The Last of the Traps

When we returned from dinner, the characters had just recovered from a fight against themselves and discovered a way out of their illusionary prison. This short corridor led to what was originally planned to be one last illusion, more annoying than anything else--a hole in the floor of the corridor and the apparent doorway out on the other side, with the quick revelation that the "other side" was actually just a blank wall and the hole in fact led to the next level--that once again fell flat on its feet (and once again, to no detriment to the party, thankfully).

The last actual trap--the gnome's security system of pressure plates and magic crossbows (straight ouf the DMG, for once)--sparked some unintentional but welcomed humor as after detecting them each of the group managed to get across the pressure plates--except for the exceptionally agile rogue, who fell flat on his feet and activated the crossbows. Further humor ensued when the rogue asked as they fought the crossbows if the doorway was in fact still open--yes, I responded, hoping to give the party an opportunity to end the encounter quickly if they wanted to. They disabled the crossbows anyway.

The Voice in Your Head

The characters finally entered the meat of the Keep, beyond all the defenses. The first major detail I described was of a tinny voice shouting at them from somewhere distant but all-around them, a voice angry at their breach of the facility and ordering them to leave. The cleric attempted to negotiate with the voice once the players realized it could hear and respond to them, but quickly realized they would get nowhere.

I originally liked the idea of the characters being able to convince the voice that they were servants sent by the "master" it kept referring to, a bluff that the cleric in fact tried, but I was forced to discard this when I considered that a successful bluff would leave force a radical alteration for my plans for the dungeon. This was due to early plans focusing more on puzzles than combat--essentially, the players would have been helping the voice (a robot placed in charge of the facility in the gnome's absence, they would eventually find) restore the facility to functionality rather than just exploring its ruins and fighting the remnants of its production. I am still intrigued by this idea (and it would have led to far more sinister implications later on), but unfortunately I couldn't come up with ideas for puzzles that I liked enough and weren't simply following what the voice told them to do and so fell back on combat, a system which 4E of course handles much better.

Robot Factory (Minus the Machinist)

Players always grapple on to ideas you don't expect them to, hanging on even as you try to make clear that you have no plans for that eventuality--which is really your fault as a DM anyway; they should be allowed to cling onto the ideas they come up with based on what you've presented them. In this case there were two things the players grabbed on to: the ruins of the robot assembly line, which, accepting unfortunately that I was not about to deal with the players getting it running again for their own purposes, I simply had them able to start long enough for it to fall apart completely; and a "clockwork mechanism" they recovered amid rusted debris in a storage room, an item which I originally intended as simply a useless gadget to be sold (i.e., a clever way to give the players gold in a place where there would not reasonably be much gold to be found). The mechanism, a much more ambiguous item, has instead become a part of my ongoing plans.

The cleric also opted to spend the gold to use his Unseen Servant ritual and order it to search the storage room (and later the other rooms) instead of searching it themselves (although in the ten minute casting time I would have allowed them to find all available loot); I embraced this plan by having it find the mechanism immediately and wait for it to turn up the rest of the room's loot (4 healing potions) until after he returned to check up on it. Rituals are a part of 4E I feel are unfortunately under-used, and I continue to consider steps to make them easier and more useful. The PHBII classes' ritual casting features are a good start, and one that I plan on passing to my PHBI class players, allowing clerics to cast Gentle Repose once per day without components and wizards (supposedly the ultimate ritual casters after all) any ritual they know up to their level once per day without components (though this of course requires restrictions on creation levels to prevent enchanting item abuse--perhaps a limitation to only rituals with a set component cost?)

After a brief visit and raid of an armory, the players moved on to the next room, which did not come across as planned, to possible detriment. I described the room as full of mechanical equipment built around a low long metal table--intending but failing to evoke the imagery of Frankenstein's lab. This was, in fact, the "animation room", the place where the gnome's robots, after assembly in the construction room the characters already explored, were brought to "life". The players didn't figure that out (which was my fault, of course), and although this did not have negative consequences at the time, I fear it will come back to bite me in the ass later. (Of course, most of them read this, so now they know and will theorize accordingly, I suppose.)

Damned Respawns

The exit of the players from the animation room triggered the next combat encounter, the only actual one on the Keep's second level: a group of security robots (Warforged Soldiers and a Captain, leveled down) sent by the angry voice still yelling at the characters for their intrusion. The quirk to this encounter as the nearby open doors to a storage room where dozens more unactivated robots stood ready, with another activating on each turn, supposedly leading to a desperate in-combat skill challenge to close the doors before too many robots emerged.

But while the players quickly recognized the panels they needed to reach to close the doors, the Captain's tactical positioning of itself in front of the panel and his high defenses made the struggle instead simply to kill the Captain. The main culprit of this was the lack of forced movement powers among the party: although the wizard has Phantom Bolt as an at-will, the Captain's high defenses made it too difficult to use. As a result, I simply stopped adding robots after a number of rounds, though I continued to describe the threat of the activating robots, and the first few rounds proved to put enough fear in the players to make them very thankful when they did manage to kill the Captain and close the doors, at which point the session ended with the characters in bad shape--the party's rogue, downed during the fight with no remaining surges, managed to roll a 20 on a death save and thus was walking with 1 HP--and the players anxious and worried about what lie ahead, presuming a looming boss fight with the voice overhead and requesting an extended rest that I informed them (following the rule of needing twelve hours between extended rests, but also knowing that there was no further combat coming) would not be coming.

When the mind is sick, sometimes even stranger things come out.

"Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

It is my understanding that Independence Day, the 1996 summer blockbuster, was nearly universally reviled in Europe and, well, everywhere in the world that is not the United States, with many critics pointing to the speech above as the epitome of unironic American egocentrism. After all, what is a clearer statement of American arrogance and ignorance than the supreme success of a movie predicated on an asinine analogue between the American Revolution and an alien invasion?

This is not the point of this post.

American egocentrism is nothing new and to say something new about it would be difficult and, more importantly, not particularly meaningful. To attack it on the American Independence Day would also be a poor move: a nation's citizens should have the right to celebrate their nation on the anniversary of its founding if no other day, should they not? Perhaps, then, we should attack nationalism, or the positively connoted synonym patriotism, which Samuel Johnson famously declared "the last refuge of the scoundrel". After all, Americans have only recently emerged from eight years of opponents to government actions being summarily dismissed as "unpatriotic".

This, too, is not the point of this post.

Or at least, not exactly. The genesis of this post lies with a bumper sticker I saw some weeks ago: I have meant to write this since then, but the Fourth has finally given me the motivation to actually do so. The sticker's text was something along the lines of, "The PATRIOT Act is Unpatriotic". Pithy, of course, and a standard line since the infamous legislation that legalized so much dangerously unsupervised surveillance. But I argue that the line is an intrinsic contradiction; that it fails before it begins by accepting a vocabulary whose baseline assumptions already make the winner the side of centralized authority, secrecy, control, power.

It is no news that what passes for "liberal" in the United States--or rather, what is allowed to pass for liberal in the mainstream political and media spheres of the United States--would barely pass for center-right in any other modern political discourse. But even among those ostracized, "radical" members of the American Left, there are many who still suffer from a great and terrible fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". They find the PATRIOT Act offensive not just because of its contents but because of the audacity of the name, the vile contradiction between signifier and signified that they perceive from it. They rise to anger when mouthpieces denounce them or others as "unpatriotic" because they are the "real" patriots: because they support what the United States was truly founded on, the values they espouse, which are contrary to the centralized authority proffered by the "other side".

It is not simply that they fight a battle, not realizing that they have lost the war, it is that they fight a war on terrorism with terror. It is that they fight a war to end war. It is that they are arguing from a position whose central tenets, if examined closely and truthfully, can only result in the conclusion that war is peace and freedom is slavery. And thus, of course, ignorance is strength.

Their failure, their first and damning mistake, is that they accept the premise of the "nation". That the idea of the United States is a noble one, that it is a real and living entity that must be defended from those who would prey upon it, that a legitimate purpose of government and politics is the vitality and morality of the nation.

This is bullshit.

The idea of the "nation" may, in fact, be the most dangerous bullshit ever thought up by the minds of men--or perhaps not. But certainly the nation, the successor to the empire (though of course empires persisted long past the rise of nations and persist today, America's being the most notable), is one of the greatest tools of oppression ever devised.

A nation is an artificial community. People naturally group themselves by connections of family, locations, resources, anything that can connect people together. Human beings are a social species; their strength is in networks. Alone (although we are never truly alone, of course), we are weak; it is by working together, by giving and taking from each other, that human beings have accomplished what they have.

Networks, however, can be difficult to build. Beyond the blood ties of family, human connections can be notoriously tenuous--barring childish "friendship bracelets" and the like (though they of course are similar symptoms of the same desire for signification), there are no permanent marks of friendship. Friendship is a connection based on trust, but trust, of course, is something that is difficult for many people to give. And so we create visible signs and symbols of our connections, to make sure they are based not simply on trust (as if a physical embodiment gives a connection more strength--though of course often it does, in that a person who defies a signified connection becomes known as a betrayer): we have contracts, and laws, and titles, and business cards, and in the process the network solidifies and becomes an institution.

The essence of a network is its fluidity: it is flexible, mobile, easily redefined--in fact, it exists in a sort of quantum uncertainty at all times, so that it has no definition at any particular moment except when one is asked for. It is the strength of networks: they cannot be tied down, or destroyed by one link in a chain being destroyed, for there are no necessary parts. Everything is replaceable. But this is also the danger of networks, for humans: we are replaceable, and so the only thing we can rely on to keep us from being replaced is the goodness of the other parts of the network.

An institution is a network without fluidity, a network frozen in a moment of time, so that all the connections that existed then become a permanent structure, never to be in danger of being replaced, and never to be added to. It is a structure: a tribe and a chieftain, a fief and a lord, a kingdom and a king. The titles of nobility, the levels of the church, every hierarchy, every artificial social construction designed to give rigidity to social networks, the epitome of which, of course, is the nation: a social institution so vast it can contain 300 million people (or over a billion), manifest as a bureaucracy with such vast reams of legislation and levels of governance that no individual could ever conceive of the entirety at once, so that instead it is reduced to one or two words, a bite-size vocal meme to be repeated in lieu of any real understanding of the vast complexity of the social sphere the institution superficially encompasses, a golden idol to bow before in lieu of any real conception of the nature of God (which is, of course, simply another idol. But that, too, is not what this post is about.)

Besides churches or other organized religion, there is no other institution that has acquired as much legitimacy as the nation--and in the postsecular world of today, even religion's supremacy is arguable. In the years after the beginning of the Iraq War, the "Support the Troops" ribbons became a tired punchline of ignorant consumerism; but the criticism, of course, was always simply that those who purchased such ribbons had not actually done anything to "support the troops". It was and remains and unquestioned assumption that everyone should, in fact, support the troops.

I do not mean to suggest that American soldiers deserve to die--but I do believe that no one deserves to die. And thus it is without qualms that I can say, I do not support the troops. I do not say, I merely criticize the administration that sent them there, or even the new administration that keeps them there. I criticize the cultural worship of the nation that leads people to accept that it is a noble thing to kill or even to die for an artificial construct with as much real impact on the average person's life as, well, any major Western power. It is easier to see the lack of influence of the nation when considering another: there are many nations in which the American government has more influence than the local national government, most obviously, but the people living in those nations do not pledge their lives to the cause of the United States.

The nation's success, I think, lies in its coopting of the notion of "citizenship". You may be members of a club, employees of a company, or followers of a church, but you are a citizen of a nation, and that word enjoys many special connotations that the others do not. While again there are similarities with religion, for most people, citizenship implies far more duty, loyalty, and responsibility than membership in any church. This is because citizenship is at its core a word for the type of give-and-take interaction that is the nature of every real, nonartificial community.

Citizenship is not a bad word--it is, in fact, I think a very good word, and a very important word, deserving of respect. Citizenship means being an asset to your community and not a burden--the problem is in the definition of "community", which has of course expanded far beyond any rational borders (though such borders would of course be nebulous, as any true network is) to include the entirety of modern states.

In such a context the values of citizenship becomes impossible to follow because there is no way to ascertain what benefits the "community" of the nation and what does not--beyond, of course, what the national government says. Which is the entire point of the nation, its great danger and its great promise to those desiring power: when a person can no longer contextualize their community, when the network of people they know and rely on becomes too vast for them to even begin to understand, they turn to institutions and structures to provide simple labels for them to use instead, and simple values for them to use instead of true evaluations of benefit.

And thus young men willingly fly hundreds of thousands of miles around the world to kill and be killed by people they know nothing about and believe that they are being good citizens.

But this is from a physical newspaper and I don't feel like looking up an Internet link.

Government backs down on Internet-filter mandate

In a rare reversal, China's government gave in to domestic and international pressure and backed down Tuesday from a rule that would have required personal computers sold in the country to have Internet-filtering software. Just hours before the rule was to have taken effect, the government said it would postpone the requirement for the software. The government did not say whether the plan might be revived. Top U.S. officials had protested the plan after it was imposed abruptly in May, calling it a barrier to trade.

(Emphasis added.)

Remember: Internet censorship is only a problem with it puts a burden on the manufacturer, because the only job of government is to ensure the market runs smoothly.