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Tag Archives: Spelljammer. D&D
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Posting to Patreon: The Eye of the Storm (Toy Soldier Saga)
Hi all, Sable here! This is my heads up that tomorrow I will be posting the completed and edited story, “The Eye of the Storm,” as a charged post for my Patrons at Patreon. This is my Shaundar and Y’Anid elf-orc love story, for my Toy Soldier fans! This is your one and only chance to get it if you want it without buying the Chasing Fireflies anthology! Note that there may be some small changes in the story between now and the time it appears in the anthology. Chasing Fireflies will be released July 1, 2017. (Rated R for graphic sex.)
Originally posted at Toy Soldier: A Spelljammer Saga.
Lightyear FM
Want a perspective on what flying through space might actually look like? Here’s one project to give you an idea. Working on the knowledge that radio waves travel at the speed of light, this simulation shows you the local neighbourhood near Earth (excluding exoplanets) up to the limit of the first Earth radio broadcasts; up to 110 years ago (as of 2015).
Things I learned from this:
- In general, stars don’t float randomly by themselves. They appear in clusters. We’re part of a pretty little cluster of mostly much tinier, dimmer stars than our own, that might look like the Pleiades with a red-shift in someone else’s perspective.
- We can infer that most of the stars near us are smaller/dimmer than our own because most of them have alpha-numeric names (more on that in a minute). Also, stars progress from red to orange to yellow to white to blue in terms of brightness and most of the stars around us are more orange than we are.
- Every once in a while you do get singular stars just floating in a void, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
- There are two nebulae relatively near to us. One’s about 40 light years away and the other is about 80 light years away. Each is about 10 light years across.
- The oldest stars we know about have proper names. Those tend to be the brightest from our perspective and are typically the ones visible with the naked eye. Most such names are derived from the Arabic language. You’ll see relatively few of them in our local neighbourhood (Sirius, Fomalhaut, Pollux, etc.)
- Sometimes stars are named for astronomers or the people who discovered them. You’ll see a couple of those in this simulation. One of them, Barnard’s Star, which you’ll see right after the Centauri stars that are our closest neighbours, blasted right through the edge of our solar system only 70,000 years ago! Talk about a near-miss!
- Some stars are catalogued. The Bayer Designation names stars by a lower case Greek letter generally representing its corresponding number, plus the constellation it appears in. (ie. Sigma Sagittarii). Once all 26 Greek letters have been assigned, letters of the Arabic-derived alphabet are used (ie. G Scorpii). Sometimes when concurrent stars were discovered (like, say the smaller star in the Alpha Centauri binary) it was designated with a superscript. The Flamsteed Designation is used when no Bayer Designation exists or when the Bayer designation uses numeric superscripts, because it’s less awkward. (ie. 61 Cygni). These stars are usually visible with a decent telescope.
- The most recently discovered stars, visible with ultra high resolution or space telescopes and tracked by computers, are named with an alpha-numeric designation based on their position in the sky. Over 990 million such objects exist.
- Special cases: Pulsars are designated by the prefix PSR, with a series of hyphenated numbers in which the first indicates its right ascension and the second its degree of inclination. Supernovae are designated by the prefix SN, plus the year they were discovered in, and if there was more than one, a letter indicating the order of discovery (ie. SN 1987A.) A few supernovae are known by the year they occurred in (ie. SN 1604, also known as Kepler’s Star). Novae are usually given a name according to the naming convention of the General Catalogue of Variable Stars, which includes a number or letter designation and the constellation it’s from (ie. V841 Ophiuchi, SZ Persei, T Bootis.)
Here’s a preview to show you what it looks like: you can find the simulation itself at Lightyear.fm. Note that if you hover your cursor over each celestial body (save the Earth, the Moon and the Sun) it will tell you what it is and how far away from Earth it is. Enjoy the simulation!
Lightyear.fm – An interactive journey through space, time, & music from chris baker on Vimeo.
Okanagan Library Summer Reading Challenge: Review of “Bio-Booster Armor Guyver”
Complete Rules for One-Page Spelljammer
Courtesy of Blog of Holding (follow the link for complete rules and explanation):
Book Review: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writer who gave us Tarzan, published this novel first as a magazine serial and then released it as a completed novel later on. It’s always an interesting experience to read classic sci-fi, especially when it’s this classic. This pulp legend is loaded with so many tropes it might make the modern reader toss it aside in disgust; except that none of these were tropes when this book was written. And why are they tropes? Because they were amazingly successful and popular, and thousands of writers who succeeded Burroughs tried to imitate what made the John Carter books what they were. These, along with C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, were the primordial space operas.
John Carter, ex-civil war soldier and Southern gentleman, is mystically transported to the planet Mars in a fashion that feels more like fantasy than science fiction to the modern reader, except that almost everything that happens after that is sci-fi to the core. John Carter finds that as a denizen of Earth he is considerably stronger and can leap incredible distances compared to the native Martians, who are adapted to Mars’ lesser gravity; which, of course, would be exactly what would happen by all laws of physics and biology, if Mars were actually inhabited (though this is also ignored in some places; for instance, Martian riding beasts have no trouble carrying John Carter, although he is certainly more dense, and therefore much heavier, than the people of Mars, which is called “Barsoom” by its inhabitants.)
Carter initially finds himself among the savage green men, who are twelve to sixteen foot tall green, four-armed aliens with great tusks like orcs; where he, through a strange combination of coincidences and misunderstanding of social custom, finds himself both a prisoner and a chieftain; and he teaches the green men about friendship, loyalty and benevolence, which are qualities they have forgotten because limited resources on the dying world of Mars have demanded a more savage way of life of its denizens. Then he ends up meeting the more human-like, more technologically and culturally advanced (but smaller and weaker) red men of Mars, where he meets the princess who motivates him to acts of heroism that read like mythology; which of course also make the John Carter books the primordial planetary romance.
As a modern reader I found that I was impressed by much of the implied technology, which included but was not limited to anti-gravity vehicles, terraforming, and the rudiments of nuclear power and plasma weaponry (described as being powered by radium or something similar.)
Aside from the fact that this standard story formula has become the essence of the default science fiction plotline and setting (clearly guiding, among other things, the standard plots of the original Star Trek series,) I can see so many direct influences in many other ways. The Gor novels are essentially Barsoom updated, kinkified and taken to the extreme; the Dark Sun novels borrow the “savage world of limited resources” setting whole-hock, and I think we even get the fact that Mork hatched from an egg from this novel, since the people of Barsoom are born thus. We even get our scantily-clad heroes and heroines from Burroughs’ work; the Martians wear jewelry and combat harness, but not clothing.
There is much to irritate the modern reader if you allow it to. Racism and sexism is rampant, as is the hypocritical logic of Colonialism, and as I’ve said, it’s full of what have become tropes. The writing of the time is prone to contrived plot conveniences and dei ex machinae. There’s a lot of telling and not showing, which of course is considered bad writing by modern convention. And yet it’s a damn good read that keeps you pressing on to the very last page. It took me only a day to burn through it even though I don’t have as much time to read as I would like on working days.
Refreshing, however, to the modern reader, is the fact that despite his Colonialism, John Carter is a man who tries always to do the right thing as he sees it at the time, and in this age of dystopias and anti-heroes, this is like a breath of fresh air. And the style is an easy read that is appropriate for everyone from teens to octogenarians and up.
Everyone who considers themselves a sci-fi or fantasy fan should read this book, whose influence is clearly underrated. Despite, or perhaps especially because of, the tropes.
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Les grands courants philosophiques à travers les Sphères Connues
Si les peuples qui vécurent durant l’Âge des légendes semblent devoir posséder des motivations incompréhensibles pour les espèces plus jeunes, et que les Âges sombres ne soient finalement qu’une succession de conflits à une échelle sans précédent, c’est bien durant l’Âge spirituel que se développent et s’affirment de grands principes qui vont rapidement exalter les ancêtres des Syndarh, des Mordd et des primitifs Valoriens.
Le Point d’Equilibre, la pensée mystique
Sous la guidance des Sharood, les Voies de l’Esprit sont développées en opposition au règne de la magie Reigar. Bien des élus de pratiquement tous les peuples d’alors sont initiés aux pratiques psioniques, afin de pouvoir par la suite dresser les leurs contre une tyrannie mystique qui n’existe déjà plus. A travers ce conflit que souhaitent initier les Sharood apparaît cependant le fondement d’un mode de pensée qui amènera la région des Sphères Connues à s’affranchir régulièrement du joug d’un…
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Symphonies of the Planets
Although space is a virtual vacuum, this does not mean that there is no sound in space. Sound does exist as electromagnetic vibrations.
Through specially designed instruments, the Voyager, INJUN 1, ISEE 1, and HAWKEYE space probes used Plasma Wave antenna to record the vibrations of the planets that they visited that are within the range of human hearing (20 to 20,000 Hz).
To be fair, however, they are often quiet; quiet enough that they are difficult, if not impossible, for the human ear to hear.
The recorded sounds are the complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the Solar Wind, ionospheres, and planetary magnetospheres. Here’s a sample of some of the recordings released by NASA:
Here is a recording (and photos) of the noise of the Singing Comet, 67P, as recorded by the Rosetta spacecraft (though in this case the volume has been increased by 10,000 times):
And here is a full playlist of the Symphony of the Planets. These five CDs, which are now out of print, were created from the complex sounds recorded by the Voyager probes.
Yes, really. This is real world stuff I’m talking about, not just Arcane Space!
So if you’d like to imagine what it sounds like aboard a Spelljamming ship, picture that the closer you got to a planetary body, the more of this kind of sound you would hear. It would start as faint, water-like popping noises. Then you would wonder when the wind noise had started. Then you might notice a high-pitched drone like a wet finger on crystal or a Tibetan singing bowl. In some cases (Suns, large planetary bodies) you might notice a low droning buzz, like the sound of a WWII airplane. The closer you got to the planetary body, the louder it would get, and when you reached a planetary gravity plane, it would be a veritable cacophony to ears accustomed only to the creak of the ship, the flap of sails and the quiet of the Void; which would fade again into the background once you hit atmosphere and terrestrial noises began to reach your ears. Or you might be sailing along in space, likely with continual distant popping sounds that would be more rapid the closer you were to the center of the sphere, and all of a sudden a Solar Gale might whip wind and ringing and high-pitched drones through the air envelope. In which case, a sargasso might be heralded by a sudden, deafening silence.
Wildspace: The Spelljammer Fanzine 