The Baron of Magister Valley (Steven Burst):This is a light, frothy confection great for whiling away the hours on a winter day. It's not as good as the first two Khaavren romances but it's fun, funny, brisk paced and sometimes surprising. As a big fan of the Khaavren romances I wasn't disappointed, but I also wasn't expecting terribly much.
Machine (Elizabeth Bear): Bear's _White Space_ novels (this one and Ancestral Night) are both great explorations of self-biochemical hacking, asking the question "if we give ourselves the ability to stop being assholes, what does that mean?" and from the enemies point of view "sure your vast multi-species society has created a place where everyone is cared for and feels valued, but is it worth it if I, personally, can't be an asshole to people?" Bear doesn't phrase it quite that way, but the answers to those questions are surprisingly nuanced and compelling. On top of all this ethical stuff are great SF stories with adventure and risk and big broad concepts. This one in particular is a love letter to James White's _Hospital Station_ novels, which I also love.
Record of the Lodoss War: Discovered through Ben Milton's _Glatisant_, this is a fascinating cultural artifact of the magazine column that introduced Japan to D&D.
Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s by B. Dylan Hollis: Speaking of frothy confections! If you haven't watched Hollis' TikToks, they justify the existence of that platform. His recipe collection culled from old cookbooks and his past episodes are just as delightful and full of joy. I can't wait to try some of the things in here.
Plans for 2024: Creation of an NSR setting for super-heroes; My D&D 3E campaign as an example of sandboxing via published adventure, and likely more.
Friday, January 5, 2024
Friday Book Recommendations (January 5)
New Salem Character #5: F.A.G.A.N
F.A.G.A.N. (aka Francesca Alyssa Gabriella Aspen-Nodens)
Pyramid Tier: 1 Experience level: 2
Affect/Gimmick: Steampunk visuals - top hat with goggles, opera cape, corset, cane, etc. etc. Like this, only FAGAN normally wears boots better designed for kicking.
Gang?: Yes, the Artfuls and the Dodgers. The Artfuls are her high end escort chain, all of whom are at least minimally combat capable. The Dodgers are her street urchin pickpockets, who are also minimally combat capable. They make up in numbers what they lack in strength.
Status: FAGAN is not much of a physically threat, but one on one inside a smoke cloud she can take a hero by surprise. Her status in the Syndicate is hindered by reporting through Handicap, who doesn't take her seriously.
Powers: 3
- Telepathy Device: Not real telepathy but a highly advanced comms system (her gang members all have invisible to the naked eye earpieces and throat mikes) that lets her maintain a 'mind link', flying micro-drones that let her 'speak' to anyone pretty much undetectably and track their location, and computer skill sufficient to 'mind read' anyone's electronic history. These have 10 hours of charge a day.
- Heightened Endurance: She has a high stamina, a boundless will, and a lot of lung capacity. +11 to her Endurance score, and as a bonus she's immune to her gas attacks.
- Poison/Venom Device: her London Fog bombs can run from full darkness (per darkness control) to serious obscurement (everyone treated as 'to the side' for combat, Int saves to spot things); from no toxins to devitalization (every action in the cloud at x2 power cost), to painful to sinuses/eyes (chemical power attack for 1d8) to sleep (paralysis attack). The clouds cover a 3" radius sphere and last 2 full initiative rounds before dissipating.
Background/Origin: Francesca Alyssa Gabriella Aspen-Nodens is the product of the finest of breeding and education from the strictest of schools, who has come to New Salem in the wave of gentrification of Francis Park to help educate the unfortunate children and lost girls. And she does. In her fashion. Obsessed with the trappings of Victoriana and the steampunk movement she uses her skills to recruit and protect the vulnerable by teaching them the ways of the world and how to best crime in it to their advantage. She's a dues paying member of the Syndicate but since her turf in Francis Park is overseen by Handicap - who has no idea what her capabilities are - she is limited for the moment. But if something were to happen to old Vinnie she could step in and run his business pretty quickly.
Information is power, you see, and with her constantly interconnected network of Artfuls and Dodgers she has a lot of information. She doesn't stoop to blackmail to profit, just to defend her own. Besides the profit from prostitution, pickpocketing and burglary serves her just fine for now.
Thursday, January 4, 2024
Weekly Cooking Report January 4: Lemon Capellini
This week marks the 13th year since I started cooking as a real hobby rather than just as a way to prepare sustenance, and obviously I've enjoyed it or I wouldn't have stuck with it. It's also helped my marriage and impressed my friends. I cannot stress enough the advantages of the usual non-cooking spouse in a relationship (usually, but not always, the man) to take on the task of cooking once a week.
To that end one of my weekly goals for the year is to highlight some simple dinner layouts that I firmly believe anyone can make quickly and easily. This year's new year's day recipe was Lemon Capellini, serve with garlic chicken breasts and a side salad with balsamic vinaigrette. In Garten's recipe for the pasta is linked here. ]
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/lemon-capellini-3742575
As you can see, this is literally make pasta and drop it in half a pound of melted butter into which you have juiced and zested 2 lemons. That's it. Now, this leaves you with a pasta dish that is super light, lemony, and rich, so much so that it's almost a dessert. You need something to go with it that's more savory. That's the chicken and the salad.
Grocery Run: First - check and see if you have any of this, you probably do. Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper; 1 pound angel hair pasta; 1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter; 2 large lemons; a 1 pound package of chicken cutlets (if you're just starting let the butcher do the work!); olive oil; jar of diced or minced garlic; bottle balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing, some sort of leafy green and other salad fixings (or buy a bag, no one will complain!)
Prep: Get water on to boil in a saucepan, get two skillets (one for the butter sauce and one for the chicken). Zest and then juice the lemons (make sure to do that in that order! Zesting juiced lemons is not fun!). Either open the bag salad and pour it in a bowl, or wash and chop up the vegetation for the salad and put it in a bowl.
Actual Cooking:
- Put the butter sticks in the skillet and turn it on medium heat to melt. While that is happening sprinkle salt and pepper on both sides of the chicken cutlets, then put 1 tbs of olive oil in the pan for the cutlets. Add some salt to the pasta water, then turn it on to boil.
- Once the butter is melted, put the lemon zest and juice in the water and swirl to combine. Take it off heat, and put the other pan on heat. The oil in the pan should be shimmering in a few minutes.
- Toss a half tablespoon of the garlic in the pan - it should sizzle, not blacken. Give it a minute, then swirl the pan a couple of times. About 2 minutes before the pasta goes in the water, put the cutlets on the pan, with some space between each.
- Wait 2 minutes, then add the pasta to the water, set timer for 3 minutes. Flip the cutlets over so the other side starts cooking.
- After 3 minutes, swap the skillets again so the butter is back on heat. Flip the cutlets again to finish the other side with residual heat. Using a strainer move the pasta into the butter sauce and cook for one minute.
- Move the chicken cutlets over the pasta, maybe drizzling the garlic oil onto the chicken, and serve in the skillet to a happy family. Don't forget to bring the salad over.
In future I'll have photos of these things, but I'm sure you can manage that. Dinner on the table in short order, with little more effort than opening a jar of sauce.
New Salem Character 4: Handicap
Handicap (Vincent Molinaro and Sally)
Pyramid Tier: 2 Experience level: 4
Affect/Gimmick: Imagine if Steve Buschemi from Reservoir Dogs were playing a bookie and loan shark, but he also had a female version of Solomon Grundy as his muscle. Yeah. It's that. Vinnie isn't a costumed criminal, he's a weaselly bully backed by the biggest, most loyal attack dog. There's nothing fun or charming about him,
Gang?: No, Sally takes up all of that space. This means that the PCs might have more of an advantage in the action economy without the gang, but Berta is plenty nasty.
Status: He's a nasty node on the Pyramid whose muscle supports the people above him. Eight Ball dotted line connects to him because of her using Francis Park, his turf, for her numbers racket.
Powers: 1
- Animated Servant: So Vinnie doesn't have any powers; he's an average enough guy, 8-13 in all his stats, call it 4 HP, 32" move, 45 Power. The big issue is Berta, the wood and earth infused reanimated corpse of his roller derby girlfriend. From here on in, these are stats for Sally.
- Chemical Powers - Plant and Earth: On nights of the full moon, in moonlight, she changes back to her old living self, but otherwise she's permanently transformed.
- Her weight is increased by x3.4 and she gains 15 points of Strength
- Her body provides her with the Chemical Powers defense type.
- Due to her size the disturbing tendency of her hands and feet to get bigger when she grabs for you, she can choose to have make a Chemical Powers attack for 2d8 damage. Power Requirement 8, which appears as an HTH attack.
- This does as a carrier attack for her HTH, so she can follow up with an HTH attack for her basic damage; this is always assumed to be a special attack (without the need for another roll) as she is good at grabbing limbs and ripping them off.
- While she is standing on earth, she spends no power for anything and automatically recovers all lost power, as per Water Breathing B(it has to be actual earth or soil; tarmac doesn't cut it).
- Heightened Expertise: as a former roller derby queen, Sally has +4 with both her Chemical Powers and HTH attacks. Note that she can choose to make a standard attack with HTH if she chooses to do so, and will if her power score is getting low.
Background/Origin: Vinnie Molinaro and Sally Grund were the power couple of the Francis Park underworld, him working as an assistant for a major bookmaker and her as a roller derby queen. Then one day her team lost when they should have by all rights won, and Vinnie's boss got really mad thinking they had thrown the match. Decided to take it out on poor Sally and Vinnie. Brought them to the marshy riverside, made Vinnie watch while his boys beat Sally to death and threw her in the muck. Then they went to work on him. But before they could finish, Sally came back out of the swamp and remonstrated with them.
Remonstrated most fiercely.
Vinnie took over the bookmaking and loan sharking operations around Francis Park at that point. Should have happened years ago, people said, it's just Vinnie wasn't taken seriously. He didn't have the muscle. Well, that's not so much a problem now.
Authors Notes: Is this a love letter to the Batman: Brave and the Bold version of Solomon Grundy, with his 1950's mobster affect and mouth sewn shut? Of course it is. I have at least one more Batman Expy villain coming as well.
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
New Salem: Renaissance and Urban Centers (Or, what we talk about when we talk about Batman)
One issue with comic cities, especially Batman and Gotham (which means by extension the PCs and New Salem) is that the circumstances that crafted the 1970's-90's comics era we're aiming for tonally don’t exist today.
Frank Miller began made Daredevil a crime comic is not just because he loved crime comics, but because he once got held up 3 times in one week in 1970’s NYC. There was a massive crime wave that crested in 1993, and all the ‘urban justice’ books - from Spider Man fighting the flood of Saturday Night Specials or the Teen Titans intervening to stop runaways from being enslaved by criminal cartels, to Batman having a never-ending series of thugs to fight - derived from that. Vigilantes were needed - and we let them get away with violence – because the systems were failing.
But that’s not true today: violent crime is down by 3/4ths and it is not going back up; the much fear crime wave of the 2020s is a temporary return to the level of the... 'oughts. The circumstances that caused the crime wave – dosing 4 generations of children with an airborne neurotoxin that reduced impulse control while government policies hollowed out the income and tax base of the urban centers – are not coming back. Current urban centers are too expensive for urban poor to be urban in, or too hollowed out to recover. Without lead poisoning the crime rate stays down. There are more murders per year on TV New York on any station then there in actual New York.
The problems inside the urban centers today are the infiltration of fascistic/oligarchic ideology into the institutions that were empowered in the 1990's to deal with the crime wave. It can be hard for people born in the 90's or later to comprehend how much urban people of color were backing the fielding of more police, harsher sentencing, and all the tools used by the ACAB of today. The ACAB itself comes from concentrated efforts in the 1990's and on for white nationalist movements to infiltrate and direct the culture of law enforcement. Urban police in the 1990's really were outnumbered, underfinanced and threatened; these days pizza delivery is more dangerous than law enforcement, and and that in turn is because the city is so much less dangerous, but the monster we created to deal with the other monsters we created prior has slipped from our control.
So where does that leave us for the New Salem project?
- I want to keep New Salem in the timeless/overlapping time aesthetic of Batman: the Animated Series. Ideally i would make it completely retro, but I fear people are too used to the 2000's cell phone and internet culture. I won't be commenting on those things, leaving them unsaid. But it could be the late 80's/early 90's and the crime wave of that time fits. This will be represented in one of the two conspyramids I'll be making for this, with the criminal elements. This is what I'm working on now, as its full of Batman-esque villains with strong gimmicks etc.
- But New Salem is also deeply corrupt, so there's a second pyramid of urban/civic corruption: the various aspects of the law enforcement system will be represented - various groups of corrupt cops of different flavors, bought and sold members of the legal and judiciary, etc. - which will link to the oligarchical families that use the city as a plaything.
- There may be a 3rd pyramid of some sort of Hydra/Viper etc. comic book paramilitary world domination group as well, infiltrated through the city.