lategaming

“In the Spring of that year I had the good fortune to visit my friend, Mr Askell, at the Royal Society where they were pursuing development of a computational device using the research of intellectual giants who had gone before. Bright young scientists to’ed and fro’d with metal rods and some articles salvaged from the Martian machines. This device, Askell explained, could perform complex mathematics faster than the most talented idiot savant and I watched in awe as nothing particularly exciting seemed to be happening. “This,” Askell explained, “is the future”.
In the background I could swear I heard the tuts of the luddites of the Royal Society making their opinions known.”

The first Computational Analyser was built in Manchester University in 1900. It drew scientists from afar to view the processes which ran it - whole orders of magnitude faster than Babbage’s engine due to the salvaged Martian technology which powered it. What a Babbage Engine could perform in 3 minutes could be calculated in 3 seconds on the Analyser.

The building of the device was originally opposed by both the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. However it was funded entirely by the Royal Navy and by 1903, there were six analysers in Britain and a further two had been shipped to the Americas each with a full maintenance crew of twenty.

Supporting Links:
Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Thomson’s Differential Analyser
Cynical-C

Six short movies (Youtube links)

Mars & Beyond 1 of 6 - Man & the Sky

and more:

Mars & Beyond 2 of 6 - Mars in Pop Culture
Mars & Beyond 3 of 6 - History of Life on Earth/Solar System
Mars & Beyond 4 of 6 - Mars from Earth
Mars & Beyond 5 of 6 - Life on Mars
Mars & Beyond 6 of 6 - Travel to Mars

Here’s a simple system that would get a WotW: Earth game up and running. Before I go into the details, here’s what was going through my head as I designed this.

1. WotW: Earth is set in turn-of-the-century England
2. Player characters are likely to have a base set of skills which can probably default to stats
3. Highly technical skills don’t really exist, and science is still the realm of the wealthy
4. Skills matched career very closely, and people generally had one career
5. My feeling (from reading what Matt has written) is that this is a game about normal people in an abnormal situation, so there won’t be much difference between the characters

And now the system …

Read the rest of this entry »

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places.

“I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light. “

The pit at Primrose Hill was the largest outpost the Martians secured in Britain and perhaps the world. Their fighting machines collected the materials from their cylinders and brought it to this pit so they start the construction of new machines. Handlers, refining machinery and buildings dot the landscape of the newly turned earth and their trails, dotted with powdered metal and the bones of their victims, weave an intricate web of snail trails.

Lofty towers affording observation of the surrounding countryside and armed with the dread funnel from which smoked the Heat-Ray. The land approach of the pit was of blackened turf and charred ruins of houses, tree stumps and the wreckage of anything that dared come near.

Now, the work of exhuming the dead and giving them a decent burial has occupied hundreds of men and women, eager to work for food, over the last weeks since the defeat of the Martians.

“They’ve gone away across London,” he said. “I guess they’ve got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can’t. But nearer–I haven’t seen them–” (he counted on his fingers) “five days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night before last”–he stopped and spoke impressively–”it was just a matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe they’ve built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly.”
I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.
“Fly!”
“Yes,” he said, “fly.”
I went on into a little bower, and sat down.
“It is all over with humanity,” I said. “If they can do that they will simply go round the world.”

As if their Heat Ray and Fighting machines were not enough, the Martians have a deep understanding of science and in the weeks post-invasion were able to analyse our environment and create flying machines. Our most seasoned scouts were able to describe this process as they experimented with their machines, sometimes resulting in disaster for the Martian who sat in the hood but with every setback, the hammering within the pit would resume and soon enough a new machine would be created. The Flying Machine crumples easily, possibly due to the lightness of it’s manufacture and most resembles a “flying wing” style craft.

“Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them.”

The Martian Flying Machine uses compressed air to launch itself into the air with a loud popping sound and further air jets and aerodynamic surfaces to provide forward motion and lift. They cannot hover effectively and are currently limited to strafing runs for deploying Black Smoke and attacking with the Heat Ray, a tactic which has proved thus far to be utterly devastating.

Forward observers have noted the craft are simply too swift to be targetted by normal artillery and even our best riflemen have expressed doubt at whether they could provide an effective hit. Scouts describe the screaming roar of the engines to be as terrifying as the howls of the machines themselves.

Thankfully the range of these terrible air-borne scourges seems to be approximately 50 miles. It would not have delayed their eventual defeat even by a day but should their range have been much greater, we can only imagine the destruction they would have wrought upon us.

“And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that was near akin to tears.”

As an aside, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds will be playing in the Odyssey in December. Am I going. Oh yes, I am.

“Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shell burst six yards above the hood. … Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to dodge, the fourth shell. The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal.
“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.”

Of all our vaunted technology, only the efforts of the modern artillery seemed to give the invaders any pause. Even our mighty Navy, though effective, found itself helpless at sea while the marauders burned and poisoned their way through the countryside.

Even so, a battery of six guns was no match for more than two of the Martian Fighting Machines. We would always strike from surprise and the Martians, once alerted to our presence, would strike back with their terrifying heat ray and destroy the entire battery. We found we were outclassed in several areas. The Martian heat ray was deadly accurate, quick to re-orient and could fire multiple bursts of deadly invisible phlogiston in quick succession. In comparison, our artillery, field guns and cannon, was slow to reload, sluggish in movement and, perhaps worst of all, woefully inaccurate.

“The Heat-Ray is certainly capable of dealing death - melting lead, softening iron, incinerating wood and cloth and searing flesh to ashes. When used, it handles as a man might handle a searchlight - playing over it’s targets for a split second before moving on, ever in search of victims to blacken and twist.

With this tactic, we can effectively resist the invaders.”

This tactic, of course, was soon abandoned as quickly as the artillerymen abandoned their guns at the sound of the terrible howl of the Fighting Machines. England, and indeed the rest of the world, belonged to the Martians.

I don’t know if anyone is even reading this Certainly doesn’t look like it in the comments.
I’ve got two more WotW articles on the back-burner. About the actual technology, machines of war, recovery of civilisation and what we were left with afterwards.

I’ve not written a jot on system yet. Will likely re-use one of the myriad systems I’ve already published in some form or another.

The tragic story of a face-eating fungus on Youtube and another about mind-controlling fungi has pushed me to write a little about the Red Men.

“The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that came drifting down the stream in patches.”

Of all things, a man’s home is his castle and such was our affrontery at being attacked by distant alien intelligences in our own homes. That they had travelled millions of miles in order to exterminate our way of life was taken by some to be a sign of extreme malevolence. I, on the other hand, presume their opinion of us to be quite different. Indifferent to our plight they came to destroy and plunder, treading roughly on the ant-hills of our civilisation.

In hearing the scope and magnitude of their plan, we must recognise they have come to disrupt everything - planning all but the most meticulous details and it is in those details that we eventually found our salvation. The plans they saw through to fruition go far beyond jets of black smoke, the unstoppable heat ray and the red weed which still stymies our agriculture.

If reports are to be believed, it was in Shepperton where the first of the Red Men appeared. He attacked two women who were walking along the canal and could only be subdued by two men from a passing barge who claimed his skin was dark and oily and he took “a lot of hammering” to break his grip on the women. When the civil defence militia arrived, there was a large crowd around what seemed to be a heavily waterlogged and extremely rotten corpse. Though there was much damage to the head, the body was identified as one Albert Hargreaves, a part-time labourer in the village who often operated Shepperton Lock when the Lock-keeper wasn’t about.

The body was shipped to London and reports were few and far between but one alleged witness reported that “even though old Bertie was dead, you could see things wriggling under his skin”.

Advanced examinations brought forth a dread warning for everyone to steer clear of any sign of brown scum upon the water and report it immediately. The scum was the spore clump of a fungal fruiting body which had infected poor Bertie. With their alien hyphae forcing themselves through his flesh and interfering with his mind, Bertie must have been driven insane. Weeks later, when the women who were attacked came forth with their story, one was adamant that the thng which had once been Bertie Hargreaves was pleading with them to help him and not attacking them as previously thought. One can only imagine his horror as his attempts to find help were met with violence, swift and deadly.

Shepperton spent weeks under quarantine but no other cases were reported there. What is known is that the Brown Fungus invades the human body and spreads quickly, attaching hyphae threads to nerves and through muscles. This process is extremely painful as the hyphae eat the protective myelin from the nerve sheaths causing jerking, threatening-looking spasms. Eventually the threads reach the torso where they start to build their fruiting body for spore production and the threads then travel north to the brain and drive the victim to water, for this is where the terrible spores will break free. The hyphal elongation of limbs is common, dissolving bone and leaving a flesh-wrapped fungal tentacle and as the fruiting body grows, the torse swells to enormous proportions, as does the skin surrounding the skull.

What I do know is that the Ministry of Science and War have samples of the fungus and they have been testing them on animals and humans to see what remedy can be found. The spores could be anywhere, or indeed everywhere by now.

“At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time–a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication–the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page.”

In the weeks following invasion, the news organisations of the world were quick to find their feet. Not only are stalwarts like The Times, The Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail recovering but there are a plethora of independent news-sheets making their rounds in London. Most of them carry sensationalist headlines and in many cases can be obtained for free from their various hawkers.

Telegrams, of course, provide our international news. While the Martians had decimated the telegraphic communication infrastructure in England, they had not seriously damaged the links across the Channel or the Irish Sea. News from Paris flooded in about their own invasion and soon after we heard reports from Dublin, Berlin, Geneva. It seems odd now to think that it was easier to get news to Paris than it was to get news from Manchester or Edinburgh, but that was the way it was until the lines were again restored, a process which would take months and not weeks.

In every town and district, you will find notice boards with entreaties, offers, wishes and promises. Everyone needs some sort of help, be it help to find someone, needing help to rebuild, not wanting to travel alone in these dark days. There is certainly no reason to be idle and perhaps even less so now than before - I wonder at the actual worth of my savings considering the world came so close to ruin. How much is this paper worth?

All said, a good wage can be had for a fast runner in these times. Better still if he had a bicycle, can handle a horse or has an encylcopaedic knowledge of the train timetables. Information now, much more than before the invasion, is a valuable commodity and with millions of people worldwide displaced or missing family members, News has become the new currency.