Virtual Illusions

Event Details:
MAX’S 4th ANNUAL BELGIAN BEER FEST 2008
This Years Belgian Fest dates are Feb 15, 16, 17
We will start each day at 11am and go until 2am
NO ENTRANCE FEE.
SAMPLE SIZE PORTIONS AVAILABLE.

This Year we are planning on having over 100 Authentic Belgian Beers on draft and Over 130 Authentic Belgian Beers in Bottles. Also a full Belgian Style Menu.

As I put together lists for drafts and Bottles I will be sending them out.
I will also be sending out some new special news in about a month. Hope to see you all here at Max’s. Any questions please contact me at chard@maxs.com

This will be the biggest fest yet. CHEERS

Casey Hard
GM & Cellarman
Max’s taphouse
737 South Broadway
Baltimore, MD 21231
410-675-6297

Learn more @ the official event website »

Oddly enough I’ve never even heard of Max’s though they sound like they have a sweet set up. They’re in Baltimore which is a city away but I should find an excuse to at least wander by at some point.

Beer

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

- Dave Barry

You can’t be a Real Country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have a football team or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least, you need a beer.

- Frank Zappa, 1940 - 1993

24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?

- Stephen Wright

Alcohol, Beer, Quote, Quotes

[These Abilities represent a modification to the rule system designed by Hank Driskill and John "The Dodger" Gavigan. Highlander: The Gathering was built around the White Wolf (World of Darkness) rules engine.  The below abilities represent very minor expansion of that system for a higher powered campaign.]

When the Immortal supplement came out it was uncommon in White Wolf for abilities to progress beyond 5. It would seem appropriate to expand the capabilities of the Immortals quickening power into the six through ten range. It is particularly appropriate given the release of Highlander III which clearly shows Immortals wielding non-traditional (for the Highlander Series and Movies)powers as well as the episode of the series showing an immortal clearly demonstrating a brand of animal control. I’ve included a couple of powers that I propose are appropriate for the sixth and seventh level of quickening both in power and within the mythos of the Immortals.

Various readings I have done (mostly on the net) seem to indicate that the quickening is very much a telepathic force. Further the prize has been described as an immortals ability tap into the mind and soul of the world. The closer an Immortal gets to the prize the more telepathic abilities they are likely exhibit.

****** True Sight: At level six an Immortal gains the ability to use his quickening as almost a radar. Within the range of his quickening zone an Immortal can use the quickening for several sensory capabilities. The most basic is to use it to “see” when blinded or in the dark. This capability is automatic and is based on the Immortal’s ability to perceive free quintessence so nothing hampering visual sight will hamper this ability.

An Immortal’s quickening can also be used to examine people or items. True sight grants an Immortal the ability of to use his zone of quickening feel things with much more precision than the level one ability (Sense Quickening) which can sense quintessence, blood, rage, etc. The higher level ability allows the Immortal to gain incite into the nature of the creature by how their power source reacts with the quickening. When it is used this way the Immortal rolls his quickening dice and is able to discern certain things about the subject based upon his or her number of successes..

1 success:	Nature of the creature/Item (vampire, werewolf, magi, bound spirit, etc.)
2 successes:	The creature or items aura (as per level 2 auspex)
3 successes:	Current amount of quintessence, blood, rage, quickening, sepkum, etc.
4 successes:	Disciplines, gifts, spheres, etc.
5 successes:	Subclass (clan, breed, type of spirit, etc.)

If the Immortal has never seen something before he may be unable to recognize it.

Gidieon spots Nathan, a master of time. Using the level one ability Sense Quickening Gideon knows Nathan is more than he appears. Gideon uses his True Sight to determine who and what Nathan is. He rolls and gets 4 successes. Gideon would be able to determine that Nathan is a mage, he’d be able to see the aura and all the information that imparts, he’d know that the mage had 4 quintessence and prime 3, forces 1 and since Gideon has never seen the time sphere he recognizes the existence of a third sphere but can’t recognize what it is. If Gideon sees Nathan using time magic he has a good chance of properly identifying it as such depending upon how much he knows about mages.

Keep in mind by the time an Immortal has a six quickening he’s probably been kicking around for an awfully long time and depending upon his background he’s likely to have seen an awful lot.

The quickening radar also gives the Immortal the ability to see through illusions (chimery, obfuscate, illusion (mental and physical) magic, etc.). The Immortal gets his quickening dice as counter magic or contested roll vs. any attempt to magically or pseudo magically alter the appearance or existence of an object or person. Once an Immortal as pierced an illusion he or she may spend a willpower point to attempt to have reality reassert itself. This is an Immortals first inkling of access to the prize. The Immortal can enlist the aid of other to help him disbelieve the illusion on a grand scale. However this is not easy the target number for the roll is (sources willpower - quickening +6) or 7 whichever is higher.

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******* Read the World: At level seven an Immortal has begun to reach for the prize. The thoughts feelings and emotions of the world are just outside of his reach. At this level an Immortal can spend a willpower point and reach out to the world seeking the best and brightest and borrow a single ability (skill, talent, or knowledge). The Immortal rolls his quickening dice to determine the skill level he has temporarily acquired. The ability lasts for the entire scene an Immortal can’t borrow more than one ability at a time. The Immortal can also try and read the individual thoughts of people within the range of his quickening. The Immortal expends a willpower point and rolls his quickening against the subjects willpower. And can read the thoughts depending upon how successful his read is. The Immortal can ask one question for each level of successes about things no deeper than the number of successes scored. The questions are fairly broad (not “Have you heard of Father Ernest?” but “What have you heard about Father Ernest?”)

Botch:	Target is aware of something.
No Successes:	Nothing
1 Success:	The Immortal gets a sense of the targets emotional state and where the emotions are focused.
2 Successes:	The Immortal can read the surface thoughts of the target.
3 Successes:	The Immortal can read memory.
4+ Successes:	The Immortal can read deep unconscience thoughts.

James the Immortal wants some information from Harry the crime boss. As it happens James doesn’t have time to coax the information out of Harry so he extends his quickening into Harry’s mind. He spends a willpower and rolls his quickening dice against a target number of Harry’s willpower. Since Harry has a 7 willpower the target number is a 7. James rolls gets 3 successes. Allowing James to ask 3 questions about Harry’s emotions, surface thoughts or things Harry has witnessed.

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If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts send them this way. Otherwise more will become available when I need them or when a great one just pops into my head. Below is a letter I sent to Gilkane involving other powers and my view of immortal theory. In a word Immortals are the Lorax… They speak for the sleepers.

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Gilkane wrote:

Hello,

Hello, thanks for taking the time to write.

I ran across your page on the High Level Quickening powers and I have several powers that I have seen in the Series and in the Final Dimension movie that I feel you might like to work out(Sorry I have not really had to hash these out until recently. I was wondering your feelings on them)

The final dimension is what inspired me to write the high level powers but the problem is that the abilities demonstrated in that movie were both inconsistent and in order to account for all the things he did probably unbalancingly powerful. That is one reason I chose not to mimic those abilities precisely. The second reason revolves around my theory of immortal power and their relationship with the sleepers in the World of Darkness.

An Immortal is almost the ultimate sleeper but he isn’t the a sleeper. The higher an immortal’s quickening goes the more telepathic abilities manifest and the more they are aligned with the 5 billion sleepers in the world. The pressure of those 5 billion people would make it difficult for an immortal to create an obvious parting with reality. So I made the decision not to give immortals any abilities to do that.

With that background and how I constructed level 6 and 7 in mind lets take a look.

7th Level: In one episode one Immortal had Duncan fighting an Illusion that only Duncan could see. He was every adept at this. I feel he took many heads with this power and thus the highness of it. I also feel this would be a graduated effect learned after mastery of your 6th level power True Sight.

I seriously toyed with this one. The first condition I’d put on it is that it is purely mental. As a level 7 ability I’d probably include the functionality of chimestry 1-5 with a little streamlining to make it easier to use. I’d probably make true sight not defend against it because it doesn’t really effect the eyes so much as the mind. It would be form of mind control that specifically targeted the perception. I’d also have include some very difficult way for it to noticed and broken out of.

8thLevel: Kano and Kaine in the Final Dimension had many powers. Illusion above, but also the ability to Shape Change and the Correspondence like ability if teleportation. These were all I feel 8th level powers if for nothing else but for game balance.

My feelings on most of the powers demonstrated in the Final Dimension is that they violate the law of the ultimate sleeper. However, I don’t just ignore them. In my opinion Kato and (after Kato’s death) Kaine had a form of hedge magic. You could probably go so far as to propose a form of quickening powered hedge magic.

6thLevel: Farseeing: the ability to glimpse the future on a very limited scale, like from days to maybe at best a year

I would actually merge this with the last and allow the GM have more full control over it. Personally I’d go with more grandiose long range prophesy than short term. Long term broad prophesies are easier to deal with than short term specific ones.

Speaking of prophesies I’m sure you’ve seen the episode where Cassandra comes to have Duncan fulfill the prophecy and Kantos is wandering around doing the suggestion thing. This is my idea for the 8th level power. I figure a combination suggestion/awe/domination haven’t really put much thought into it and I’m at work right now without books to research the idea.

Level 9 would give the immortal the ability to sift through the memories and knowledge of all humanity. If even a single sleeper has the knowledge he wants he’ll eventually be able the dredge it up. At this level the immortal may be unplayable.

Level 10 the immortal turns into an NPC. This level can only be obtained if he is the last immortal on the planet. At this point he can do anything that doesn’t directly conflict with theory I’ve laid out in the beginning of this message. Don’t worry about game mechanics they are irrelevant at this point.

Uncategorized

My movie watching has been stymied for the last little while by having in my possession The Lost (Season 2, Disk 3 I think), Lady in the Water (which was actually pretty good) and The Covenant.

I knew the Covenant was going to be bad, I think Netflix gave it two stars. And so I just couldn’t get behind watching it. The only reason I got it was because as a genre I think urban fantasy is interesting and was hoping it had an interesting element or two.

I was actually doing other things while watching it and I’m usually less critical of movies that don’t have to absorb my entire attention. Given that I still thought it had some potential, they failed to deliver on any of it, but it could have been conceptually interesting.

The real downfall was the end. When two mages face off it should not include one charging the other on a motorcycle like a jousting match. When you see that scene that is when the writer or directors or someone stopped trying to be imaginative. The final battle is all energy bolts with a little TK thrown in for flavor. Some times the shimmering bolts would hit and people would get hurt, othertimes identical looking bolts would be shrugged off. The whole battle just became tedious.

The real problem with the ending is the lever. I’m evil and gone through the trouble of abducting your love to force you to relinquish your power to me. You show up at the appointed place and the chick is suspended in air in some sort of undefined peril and you decide to fight me because your that kind of guy. I now have the choice of fighting you fair or giving the lever a little kick.

Since I’m evil I decide to fight you fair. What?!

Aparanlty counter magic for anything more subtle than a telekenetic blast is just unheard of. It seems once you tag someone with a spell there is no way magic could undo those effects.

Anyway if you like the genre and you need something playing in the background sure, otherwise probably skip it.

Media

Chances are anyone reading this has read and used to some degree the Cyberpunk 2020 Netrunning rules. If you are reading this it means you are interested enough in an alternative that you decided to look at a file labeled alternate Netrunning rules or something similar. There are several problems with the neturunning section of the rules book. First it offends me technically. The primary target audience of this article are people who cruise the web on a regular basis. I assume you know something about computers, which makes you a step above the person who first penned the image used for a model of cyberpunk netrunning or the people who converted it originally into a rules system. Secondly as written in CP 2020 the net exists for the sole purpose of allowing netrunners to plunder data fortresses. While this is slight exaggeration, it isn’t that far off of how things are represented. Another reason I’m going through the trouble of writing this article is to streamline the gaming system, however since it is hidden in this horribly long and convoluted article it probably won’t come across as any simpler.

Lets start back at the most basic concept of Netrunning, the Ihara-Gubb Transformation Algorithms. The I-G transformation is an interface that takes incoming data a turns it into visual representation. This raises the question
whatever for? You must remember that there are two types of traffic on the Net, Legal and Illegal. 99.9% of the traffic is definitively of the Legal variety. What do they use the I-G Transforms for?

Legal Users

Legal users aren’t going to want to do anymore in 2020 then they do now to access net resources. In fact they will do quite a bit less. When a legitimate user decides he wants to know about say “Novell acquisitions in the last 5 years.” From the users perspective he will simply state his request and a list appears. The user then can ask for further manipulation, extrapolation, or detail about the data.
Let’s look under the hood. The computer send a query to a GRS (Global Resource Service.) There are 20 GRS computers spread across the world, they are essentially a huge index of documents on just about any subject. The GRS employs state of the art database techniques to produce a custom list for every request. (The GRS has programs running 24/7 finding computers and asking what documents they have to export.) As soon as this list is in hand the computer starts retrieving all of these documents using natural language processors and expert systems to correlate and build a body of knowledge and provide enough information to the user not to appear trivial, yet not overload him. (This is not possible given today’s processor speed
and power, however, these things tend to increase exponentially, so it is not out of the question for the capability to exist in 2020.) Among the data retrieved are links to any VRs that may be relevant. For example, Novell maintains a public relations VR in it’s Santa Monica office, a link to this and any other relevant VRs would appear, probably in a second “screen.” More data can be represented by using the I-G algorithms to graphically represent data. These are actually a subset of the I-G transforms, the full set only being found in true netrunning decks and security
consultants tool boxes (netrunning decks.) This graphical data can be manipulated by word, gesture, and to some degree thought. This manipulation is achieved by Complex expert systems. Thus is the Web of 2020.

Let’s not forget that computer have some limited uses outside of netsurfing and file serving. Someone has to create the documents to be shared, and I understands corps
do all sorts of work with computers: Word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc. While there exist experimental versions of all of these applications that will pull data directly from the brain without any subvocalization (yes this means what you think it does in the realm of interrogation) very few people have the control or skill necessary to use these programs. Word processors take subvocalized dictation with incredible voice recognition and word matching accuracy. For spreadsheets and databases you just point (with a finger, nothing so clumsy as a mouse) at a field and announce a new value. Thus is computing in the ’20s.

Netrunners

Netrunners are those individuals who find the GRS and the associated returned data much to limiting. It seems some computers/companies/people are keeping data to themselves. Netrunners tend to bypass the GRS and associated directions on where to find data. Thus the job of a netrunner to get the information is much more arduous, however they have a tendency to get information not found on the GRS. I.e. Information that isn’t announced as existing.

Uncategorized

I was thinking this morning about Libertarianism. I concluded that in its idealistic form it is “Wealth Makes Right.” People often frame it in terms of about personal liberties and that sounds great, but I see in terms of institutional liberty.

So the libertarian says we should get rid of governmental regulation because the government has no place telling me how to live my life. Which is great but that means there was no wrong doing in the Enron scandal (SEC regulations require honesty in financial reports), no wrong doing in dumping tons of toxic waste into rivers or bays (EPA regulations), nothing wrong with owning 100% of the media someone has access to (FCC regulations) and no wrong doing if a hospital decides not to treat a man with broken ribs if he can’t pay for it (I’m not actually sure who mandates this).

This is the part of libertarianism that scares me. One of the government’s functions (whether you think it does it well or not) is to be a check against large, well funded organizations whom it is very difficult to directly affect.

Politics

A man, Dempster, was acquitted of manslaughter charges yesterday. The death that the prosecutor believed Dempster should have been accountable for is described as such:

In the early hours of April 25, Dempster fled on foot in a wooded area after an officer who suspected that he was driving while intoxicated attempted to pull him over. Hoffman, one of the officers searching for Dempster on foot, was struck by a police cruiser as he stood on the side of a narrow, poorly lighted road.

At trial last month, prosecutors argued that Dempster, 20, ought to be held accountable for Hoffman’s death. “Because of the defendant’s selfishness and concern for only himself, Montgomery County police officer Luke Hoffman lost his life,” Deputy State’s Attorney John Maloney said during opening statements.
– http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/18/AR2007121801853.html

Justice, News

I had to wake up ridiculously early this morning for a meeting, but the meeting was canceled. Due to waking up early I showered soon after my roommate and had no hot water. I’m tired and can hardly keep my eyes open. Hopefully I’ll become productive once we enter normal working hours.

Life

Given that I had an index ready to go last night all I had to do was get the javascript to work, how hard could that be? Javascript is not a language I consider myself proficient. I usually swear a lot when js is involved.

So I started by ignoring the js. Grabbed a page and hollowed it out to a template and declared it the search results page.

Then I spent a lot of time staring at js. The example seemed to do its best to hide what a developer actually had to do. I eventually found the call I needed to make. You call the method and pass the search terms and a callback method that gets the results objects and outputs them.

The callback method had some issues and so I wrote my own. Then comes the part where I waste a lot of time because it doesn’t look like search results should look. I finally get something that looks about right. Modern search results have a description/context section which jsFind is missing. This is obvious because I removed the position data when I created jsFind’s xml file. But we have results with a title, url and frequency. Good enough for now.

Reworked the search forms on the page to point to the results page. Seems the piece that process args doesn’t properly process more than one argument, so I worked around that problem by not giving the submit button a name. I’ll fix it properly later. And now I had one working page that worked like a charm.

Then I started testing.

So the page has a stylesheet imported by the @include mechanism. Which means it was still pointing to the original site. This got me wondering how I could build some js to include search.js for any location in the site hierarchy… I had the same thought about the css file. For the time being used a known key the url to find the root, it works but it isn’t very portable to another project. I’m going to have to think about a long term solution, but with a root in place I used DHTML to dynamically add the js and css files.

The search page was not portable to other directories. Of course paths returned by jsFind still point to hard coded locations. I’m going to have to use the root information to translate the locations to wherever they happen to be if the root moves (i.e. copied to a cdrom).

Then I got tired of that.

I still have to fix the portability issue, and write a script to do the search and replaces on all the html files in the corpus.

I’d like to keep the positional information and re-write mkIndex (in python) to store that information. Once I rewrote search.js to retrieve that information I could make a callback function that retrieved some context at least out of the html files to show results.

Once (if) that is done I’ll probably post that code up somewhere so others can use it if they have a need. Which is why I’m making this post to remind myself what I did when I document it.

Tech

So one of my favorite blogs is a blog for GMs called Treasure Tables (http://www.treasuretables.org), it is one of the few blogs which strikes a perfect pose of being player centered and system neutral. It’s generated some great ideas and mad me think about GMing and gaming in general in new ways.

Sadly the gentleman who writes has declared himself burned out and is taking an indefinite hiatus. Wanting to make sure the content didn’t simple disappear I fired up wget and downloaded the site. 800+ posts, 8000+ comments. wget set it up all nice and clean, but there was a problem.

In the scheme of things a corpus that size doesn’t count as large, but it is big enough that the search feature of the site is more than just a mere convenience. Treasure Tables had doled out search to google, and since I was operating under the idea that I’d burn the site to a CD, I certainly couldn’t burn google to disk.

So I was looking for a client side search mechanism. After a bit of searching I found reference to jsFind. There is actually a pretty good write up of its working at Linux Journal (http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6932/print). You may notice that the article is from 2004. All the resources point to www.elucidsoft.net/projects/jsfind which fell off the Internet in 2005.

Spending far too long searching I couldn’t find an opensource replacement for jsFind or anywhere that jsFind is currently available. There was some perl code on CPAN but not only did it not seem to work for me it was mostly a Btree population system it didn’t seem to have a simple method to call passing in a path to create an index. I was feeling stymied.

So went to the way back machine (http://www.archive.org/index.php) and pulled the original code back from the abyss. I spent Sunday night getting swish-e (http://swish-e.org/) working and writing some python to export the index into the form desired by jsFind. Before going to be I fire up mkIndex.pl which seems to work fine and I have a nice btree.

To be continued.

Tech