Week 5: Rube Goldberg Writing, Odin's Laboratory, Crashing, and Me - A name, I call myself!
Rube Goldberg Machine Backstories
In a role playing game where all player characters were brought back to life after experiencing an event that should have killed them, there are all sorts of backstories possible - from epic explosions that the player inexplicably walks away from to pushing someone out of the way of a bus only to be hit by the bus yourself. I like to have fun with the more amusing options, like the epic explosion that the hero walks away from only to die from vitamin A poisoning at the celebratory dinner, or the bodyguard who takes a bullet for the president and lives, only to choke on the hospital food. Along these lines, I wanted to have a go at writing a Rube Goldberg machine backstory, where a series of seemingly harmless events culminates in the demise of the character, so here it is:
Julie ran gaily down the street through the light sun shower, happy to be up and about after being bedridden for a week. She fumbled some coins out of a pocket to throw at a napping busker, now wet from the drizzle. One of the coins happened to bounce out of the saxophone case and begin rolling down the hill, racing Julie as she jogged.
At the green grocer, old Jimmy was carrying a box of oranges out the door, his thick moustache jiggling as he laughed at something Thomas the grocer had said to him – probably a dirty joke. Julie rolled her eyes and waved to the pair as she ran past with a polite smile. The coin rolled quickly and quietly under Jimmy’s foot. His ankle rolled and his box of oranges emptied out into the air in front of him.
Barry’s dog Rumple barked loudly at the oranges from his position on the back of Barry’s rusty utility. A pigeon sitting on the grocer shop awning took to the air at the sound of the dog barking.
The startled bird flew past a bathroom window where Richard was busy trying to manage the shaving off of his winter facial hair. Richard flinched and gave himself a nasty cut. He shouted a profanity at the window where the bird flew past.
Grace, the elderly lady downstairs with an obsession with dinner parties turned the radio on so she wouldn't have to listen to ‘that hooligan upstairs’. “Shut up you looney tune!” She rapped a broom handle on the ceiling. The radio began blaring the daily quiz question and as Julie jogged past, she heard the question.
“I know this one!” Julie quickly ran across the street to a telephone booth to call the local radio station, and realised she’d thrown all her change to the busker. Sulking, Julie started making her way back across the street. The clouds moved, and glare reflected into Julie’s eyes from something further down the street. A pigeon flew past her and she turned to look at it as she walked, then suddenly the world turned upside down as Julie stepped on an orange. Her head came crashing down behind her onto the road. Stunned, she lay on the street looking down the road, at the glary object that seemed to be getting larger – no, closer. A… truck. It was a truck, Julie decided. She stared at the truck as it got closer, and noticed that it was an orange truck. Through a ringing in her ears, Julie could hear people shouting and something making a screeching noise.
It was Ivan’s last shift as the delivery driver for Roberto’s Orange Wholesale and he was looking forward to a decent retirement on a beach somewhere warm he had decided. He knew he really should have gotten his glasses prescription updated some months ago, but hadn't seen the urgency as he wasn't going to be driving much any more. Eventually, he did actually see Julie lying on the road and swerved, slamming his big orange truck into a steel and aluminium framed glass telephone cubicle.
Minutes later, a police car and an ambulance arrived at the orange-littered scene. Geraldine, a paramedic, had finished checking Julie’s head wound and walked over to the grocer to triage Jimmy’s ankle. She noticed the coin lying on the side walk and bent down to pick it up. “It’s my lucky day,” she murmured.
Richard walked past Geraldine with a band aid stretching most of the way across the underside of his chin. “You could be the only one by the look of things.”
“Let’s do something about that,” she replied and walked over to the busker. “Here you go, buddy. It’s your lucky day too!” She handed him one of the oranges from the accident.
“Thanks ma’am.” Ned the busker was unshaven and wore dirty clothes. He had obviously seen better days and was treating any gift as a blessing. The emergency services finished their jobs and left the scene, and a tow truck was called to remove the truck. The busker peeled part of the orange and took a bite. A minute later his throat had swollen up and he couldn't breathe. He died quietly, with the taste of citrus in his mouth. And then he was inexplicably alive again.
This week, in The Last Journey of the Eye of Odin
Alison breathed too close to the glass again, and it fogged up.
“Doctor, can you please move back from the glass. That's really distracting.”
She was sure Joe wasn't all that interested in looking through the glass. He was probably just
watching her again. It was becoming unnerving. She was going to have to say something soon...
“No, just focus on the work,” she would tell herself. “He can't stand there forever.”
“So what do you think it is?” Joe asked pleasantly.
“We're not even close to determining that,” Alison replied bluntly. “We're still running basic tests: how it responds to things like electrical charges, temperature and pressure changes. To be honest, doing anything with it is a bit of a risk – we wouldn't be able to tell if it was about to explode or shoot at us, or write a sonnet, or give birth. The problem is we have to get the basics out of the way before it gets anywhere near a population centre. So here we are.”
Space had been provided in the bowels of the Eye of Odin, one of several massive ore transport freighters that travelled between the Far Colonies and the inner solar system. The ship was to transport a quarter's worth of ore from Gliese 581 to Peary Base spaceport on Earth's moon.
Alison glanced around again disdainfully. She hated it down here, knowing that above this secret laboratory a crushing amount of rock waited. She shook her head and returned her focus to the task at hand. “Let me get back to this, please.”
“Sure thing, Doctor.” Joe rolled his eyes and went back to the door. This guard duty seemed pointless. Why would anyone want a prehistoric trinket like that, he asked himself. It didn't seem to do anything so far, other than take up valuable ore space.
“Felix,” Alison summoned the disembodied voice of the ship's computer.
“Yes, Doctor Forde,” the unemotional voice replied through the shipwide intercom system panel, located on the wall near the door – behind Joe.
“Can you please move the running display of environmental sensors onto display one, and increase the humidity in the containment to fourteen percent?”
“Yes, Doctor Forde.”
“And has Captain Harris replied to my request yet?”
“No, Doctor Forde. Would you like me to send him an alert?”
“Yes please, Felix. Thank you.”
“You are most welcome, Doctor Forde. Alert has been sent.” The intercom clicked off.
Fantasy Tabletop Strategy Game - continued
This week, we’ll take a look at the other side of city usefulness - production - as well as the resources available in the world, and the effects this can have on the side who controls them.
Production
Cities also gain production points each turn, equal to their population points. Production points can be saved up, unlike construction points. Production points are spent on units, unit upgrades, items, and some powerful spells.
Many of the things production points can be spent on have other requirements such as a building like a barracks (without which infantry cannot be produced). Without any of these requisite conditions, a city can either spend its production points on basic options, or save them up for a later turn when the city has managed to construct a requisite building or acquired a requisite unit or item and can now spend the points on what it wanted.
Different things will have different production costs, depending on their tier. For example, a soldier, requiring a barracks can be produced with one production point. A catapult, requiring a lumber mill and a siege workshop can be produced with two production points. A spell requiring a mental link between an entropy caster, and a blasphemy caster, created by the services of either a community or domination caster may require three production points, and therefore could only be cast in a city of population level three.
Resources
Resources such as timber or ore are not counted by quantity. You either have access to it, or you don’t. So a side with access to a lumber mill feature can construct things like siege towers, catapults, and trebuchets with a siege workshop, while a side without a lumber mill simply cannot produce these things.
Resources also make life easier for your side, providing unique bonuses that do not stack from multiples of the same resource. A side with a lumber mill and an ore mine would gain a bonus from each resource, but a side with two lumber mills would only gain the one bonus. These bonuses, and other details, are listed in a table following this section.
Resource
|
Produced By
|
Bonus Provided
|
Allows
|
Lumber
|
Forest hex
|
+1 construction
|
Lumber Mill
Unit: Archers
|
Timber
|
Lumber Mill
|
+1 construction
|
Siege Workshop
|
Ore
|
Mine
|
+1 production
| |
Stone
|
Quarry
|
+1 construction
|
Keep
Tower
|
Horses
|
Horse Farm
|
+1 construction
|
Unit: Horse cavalry
|
Giant Spiders
|
Giant Spider Nest
|
+1 production
|
Unit: Spider cavalry
|
Giant Eagles
|
Giant Eagle Eyrie
|
Unit: Eagle cavalry
|
The features of each of the unit types and buildings listed will be covered in their own sections. This table is just meant to be an easy reference for the resource itself, and what it provides.
Note that Dragons are not treated as a resource for the purposes of turning infantry into ‘dragon cavalry’ units. Dragons will not allow themselves to be ridden. Control of one of their eyries will still allow a side to produce dragon units, however.
Youtube
This week, I have actually finished something for this segment! No really! I finalised editing the first five episodes of a series of Crash Landing videos. I’ll upload them to Youtube overnight after posting this entry, and I’ll put links in a comment. You’ll also be able to see them on the main channel page, which is linked on the right hand side of the blog.
Random!
This week I was tagged in one of those chain-post things on Facebook where you have to list seven random points about yourself and then tag a few people to pass it on for someone else to do the same thing. I usually don’t go in for these things, but I decided to use it as a chance to be ridiculous. I know what you’re thinking: .oO(You need a reason to be ridiculous?) Well no, I don’t - but it feels better to be able to justify it sometimes.
7 Random Points About Me
A long time ago (in relative terms), in a galaxy very very near here (New Zealand is a galaxy - just go with it), a little boy began his epic quest to obtain the elusive seven random points about himself. He recorded his findings on a scrap piece of Facebook that was thrown at him by Dawn.
He quickly discovered that the random part was difficult. He wanted structure and logic. The chaos of randomness made things harder to manage and less predictable than was useful for most tasks. Years later, he would go on to have three daughters, which would provide all the chaos he could ever hope to need. This turned out to be the last of seven points, recorded in reverse order.
During the passage of time, our protagonist took part in many battles with aliens, orcish hordes, and other nefarious foes - both at the kitchen table and on the internet, where there seemed to be an endless supply of trolls. He found he enjoyed the adventure and escapism that roleplay gaming offered, and began running his own games for other intrepid adventurers. This was the sixth random point, which at the time of its recording was pointing…. that way.
Health-wise, he found that he’d been fairly lucky overall, or had somehow survived the rigours of earlier randomness. He had never broken a bone (that he was aware of), and had only gone under the surgeon’s scalpel twice (also that he was aware of - and maybe not counting alien abductions). This may or may not have been the fifth random point. He wasn’t sure at the time of recording this, so he put a question mark next to it. Actually that might have been part of a shopping list. No, never mind; it was the fifth point.
Time passed, in both directions - depending on which way you were looking. Our starring character found he lacked much in the way of culinary interest, or even culinary ability - both in the cooking as well as in the eating - and usually wished he could avoid the whole unfortunate eating thing in general. It was both a waste of time, and a waste of energy, he would think. And he would just wind up spending most of the energy gained from eating in powering the next lot of digestion exercises. However, when food was necessary - which it often seemed to be - his preference inevitably turned to those of the strong-tasting varieties such as the mexican, indian, thai, and portuguese meals, or cereal - which had a textural element that allowed it to be eaten for any meal of the day. He noted this down as the fourth random point, as it seemed to be close to being a point, and he wanted to move on to the next one already.
The third point was found to be written on a neon sign in the night sky, large enough and bright enough to be mistaken for our hero’s ego. No, the ego isn’t the third point, but the star sign is - and so he noted Leo down now, with a side-note to maybe hang on to the ego thing for a later point....
Alas, the second point was extremely tough. Our author tried to skip it to see if anyone would notice but unfortunately, the readers who made it this far through his findings were too dedicated or just plain stubborn to give up now. These people were perhaps more dedicated than he was to his to-read list which was now so long that it was visible from Earth’s orbit(*). He listed this as a point just to see if he could get away with it.
* It has been widely argued that this was in fact the Great Wall of China, and not a list of books yet to be read by someone.
The first point took so long to get to that he forgot what it was. After some time, in which he stared at a curtain blankly and waiting for the curtain to tell him what it was, he gave up. He promised himself that this was the last time he would have a staring competition with a curtain. Without this point, and probably to some people’s relief, the chain was broken and he could therefore not nominate any other people to list their own random points.
You can all thank me later.
See you all next week.
-Ix out!
