Douglas E. Berry

I've written about Earthdawn before, as one of the great examples of what I called FASA Syndrome - great settings, mediocre rules. But in this case, FASA also managed to fumble the setting in my opinion. It all goes back to how some worldbuilders can't stand an empty space on the map. They have this need to fill every space and detail everything.

This brings me back to my concept of The Edge in settings. Adventures can only take place on the Edge. The Edge is a setting where civilization is either absent, an active threat, or simply unaware of the campaign setting because civilizations impose order. With my eyes, I have seen the oldest fragment of a legal code we know of, The Code of Ur-Nammu. It is from Mesopotamia and is written on tablets in the Sumerian language c. 2100–2050 BCE. Civilizations also make safe areas and expand those safe areas. This includes wars and genocides, of course, but also destroying predatory animals, taming rivers, improving communications and roads, patrolling those roads, and so on.

Edges are by nature unstable. The classic Wild West era lasted about 40-50 years. There was a period of about twenty years in China where things like pulp adventures would thrive. Both of these eras ended with the spread of effective law enforcement for good or bad, and social disapproval of typical "adventurer" activities. I think the longest edge I can think of in a nominally civilized area would be France during the Hundred Years' War when bands of unemployed knights rampaged around looting and blackmailing cities.

The point is that an Edge requires some absence of oversight. This brings me back to Barsaive. The default setting for Earthdawn and roughly in the same area as Ukraine. Let's review the main conceptual theme of the game.

Magic is cyclical. At the low end, magic ceases to work. The problem comes at the peak of the sine wave. when our world starts to reach that level, barriers drop and things known as Horrors can enter our world. Immensely powerful, amoral, and hungry for new victims. Cenobites meet Lovecraftian nightmares. But as the world began reaching this level a few centuries ago, a great wizard or team of wizards learned how to build a magical barrier to the Horrors. String physical defenses would be needed as well. All across the civilized world, men and dwarves began digging Kaers, deep fortified cities. There are real examples of these you can tour in Turkey.

Stores were stocked, subterranean farms started, and everyone was safely inside, the great gates of the Kaers were sealed with iron and magic across Barsaive. Well, not everyone. The immortal Obsidimen melted into their Life Stones to sleep, and the T'skrang made Kaers in deep lakes and hibernated. Many elves worked a great ritual to leave the Earth, while the few who refused paid a great price for their survival. No one knows where the Windlings hid. Then the Horrors came.

The siege lasted centuries. Every Kaer faced attacks that ranged from the brutal force of an angry god beating on the gates to subtle attempts to poison the minds of Kaerfolk. When the attacks finally ceased, when the Sorceror-Kings determined it was safe, the gates were opened. . .

. . .and the world was changed.

This is where the game should start, a recently opened Kaer that has established its first villages outside the gates and is ready to start sending out scouting parties. How has the world changed? Where are the other survivors? What Kaers failed, and why? Are there any signs of Horrors remaining? Do our old maps mean anything? Go forth and find out!

That would have been a great game. Instead, FASA gave us not only a Barsaive that was already up and running, with trade and flying ships, and all that, there was a pseudo-Mycenean empire already on the march! The Edge was already gone!

If I were to run this, I'd rewind to the one known dot on an unreliable map. A game of exploration, diplomacy, horror, and mysteries. Most Kaers would have failed, leaving much of Barsaive a howling wilderness. Ruined Kaers make great Places of Mystery; yeah, Kizen fell, but why does it look like the gates were breached from the inside?

You can do so much with this setting, build something lasting, and never really lose the Edge needed for a great campaign. One thing I'd add. If you've ever seen the 1981 Heavy Metal movie, you'll recall that in the final segment, Taarna, The evil Loc-Nar smashes into a mountain, creating a wave of mud that overwhelms a near-by village and turns them into monstrous humanoid mutants. There's the second phase of the campaign, learning of this growing army of "changed men" who capture entire villages and march them off to an unknown fate.

Hey, do y'all remember the Takata airbag scandal? Where Japanese manufacturer Takata used unsafe accelerants in their airbags, then fake test results, resulting in multiple deaths when the inflation mechanism acted more like a Claymore mine than a safety device?

Remember that? It was a big deal when, on May 18, 2015, a recall notice was issued for some 32 million inflators on vehicles for many automakers, including BMW, Fiat Chrysler, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, and Toyota.

I mention this because I have to take Tuesday morning off so I can drop Darby the Ford Ranger off at Capitol Expressway Ford to get the driver's side airbag* replaced. 7 years, 4 months, and 17 days after this urgent recall due to a defect that had already killed at least nine people was announced.

Aside from wishing that Takata executives be forced to serve as crash-test dummies in cars equipped with their airbags for five years, I'm pissed that the automakers didn't jump on this and say "Holy fuck, people are driving around in our product with a known killer defect! Clear the decks, we're building a solution NOW and making sure our customers are safe!"

I can even blame Ford because every single automaker affected by this has had the same lackadaisical attitude. But they better wash my damn truck, that's all I'm saying.

*The passenger side airbag was replaced a few years ago.

And there was a shooting at a Houston flea market, although that one appears to have been a dispute between armed parties. Fuck it. I'm politicizing this shit. The 2nd Amendment says nothing about body armor. Ban it from civilian use without a license from a registered law enforcement agency or bonded security company. Ban extended magazines. We won World War II with a rifle that held eight rounds. The Soviets did it with a rifle that held five rounds. You can live with ten rounds. Ban bump stocks and require manufacturers to make sure their weapons cannot be converted to full automatic fire. If an arms dealer makes an illegal sale of a weapon that is later used in the commission of a felony, that dealer can be tried as an accessory. Any sale that occurs without a complete background check costs the dealer his license. Proxy sales are a federal offense. Require reporting of large ammunition sales to a single party, and buying ammo requires an ID across the country.

There. No confiscations, no arguments over what constitutes an assault weapon. No mass registration. Will this stop determined killers? Of course not! But we can slow them the fuck down. If the asshole in Buffalo didn't have body armor, he was dead on the floor seconds after entering the grocery store. If he had to reload five times, more people would have escaped. Just like we started tracking the sale of ammonium nitrate fertilizer after the Murrah Building bombing to deter future ANFO bomb builders, we can slow down potential mass murderers while still respecting the rights of gun owners.

I'm not even going into why these jerks do what they do. Some are racists. Some are religious fanatics, and some just hate the world. The unifying them is they can get guns with large ammo capacity, lots of ammo, and can spread mayhem. Do you want a precedent for all this? Look at the National Firearms Act of 1934 or the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. The 2nd Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Well regulated. It's right there in the first three words, and the Supreme Cort has ruled that we are all the Militia, so we can be regulated. You can't buy an operation 155mm howitzer and ammunition for it. No matter how much I want one, I'm not getting a 38mm anti-tank cannon for the corner I work as a crossing guard to deal with idiots who roll through the stop sign. Because Congress has declared those weapons off-limits. I can buy myself a Mosin-Nagant and giggle as I mount a $700 scope on an 80-buck rifle.

But the carnage has to end. I don't know how to do that, but I think we can make it harder for murderous assholes to carry out mass killings.

OK, I'm seeing the "I can't breathe with a mask over my face!" crap going around again. If you see it, feel free to share this:

Hi. I served in the United States Army during the mid-80s, and what you see in this picture are four of my fellow soldiers operating in the Persian Gulf during Desert Shield. They are wearing what we called "MOPP-IV" which was the name for the maximum amount of chemical warfare protection we had. Each of these guys is wearing a thick, charcoal-impregnated multilayered suit over his regular uniform, big rubber boots over his regular boots, thick rubber gloves, and to top it off, an M-17A1 Protective Mask.

The M-17A1 was designed to keep things like nerve gas and other chemical weapons out of your lungs, and it worked. We trained using CS tear gas, which is stronger than what the cops normally use, and if you got your mask on, cleared, and sealed in time, you never knew the gas was there.

By the way, from a standing start with my mask in its bag on my left thigh, I could get my helmet and glasses off, deploy the mask, don it, clear it, and seal it in NINE SECONDS. Yes, I am bragging.

We spent a lot of time in masks and MOPP-IV because, in my day, we were expecting to be fighting the Warsaw Pact in Western Europe, where the use of chemical munitions was assumed. So I ran around Georgia in the summertime wearing this crap, and could still breathe. Hell, I volunteered for an endurance test in MOPP-IV doing basic skill tasks while never getting out of the suit (and if you want to know how we used the latrine, it's gross and requires a friend who owes you a lot of money.)

I lasted about 80 hours before my body quit due to heat build-up. But I never had any breathing problems!

These days, I do in fact have lung damage and carry a rescue inhaler. I was still able to spend several hours at a ballgame, go to the store, and generally live my life while wearing a mask!

Now, there are people, especially on the autism spectrum, who cannot tolerate a mask. That's a disability, and we should make accommodations where possible. But the rest of you apes? WEAR A FUCKING MASK OR I WILL PUT MY FUCKING SIZE 10 JUMP BOOTS UP YOUR FOURTH POINT OF CONTACT!

Last night I watched the first two episodes of Away on Netflix. I will not be bothering with the rest of them.

There were just too many points where my suspension of disbelief failed. First of all, who the hell approved this crew to fly an eight-month mission? Even after a supposed two-year training period, they don't really know each other, don't trust each other, and two of them openly hold their commander in contempt. Eight. Month. Mission. They can't even get to the Moon without fucking up an emergency and pointing fingers at each other.

Which brings up another point. They launch this Mars mission from the Moon. WHY? Low-Earth Orbit can be reached in a few hours, is shielded from radiation by the Van Allen Belts, and you don't need to escape another gravity well to begin your transfer orbit. Not to mention all the scenes of the crew tromping around on the lunar surface in the same suits they'll be wearing on the trip to Mars and on the Martian surface. Ask NASA, lunar fines are impossible to clean and can screw up electronics. Build the ship in orbit, boost from orbit, and avoid all these problems.

Finally, the big conflict comes when Commander Green's husband, a fellow astronaut grounded for medical reasons, suffers a severe stroke. There is a battle about replacing Green as mission commander as it is seen that her concerns about her husband and daughter might cloud her judgment, which has already been questioned.

For fuck's sake, she would be removed in a heartbeat and the back-up commander, already on the Moon with the back-up crew, would be immediately slotted in. There would be no question about this!

Finally, when they lift off from the Moon, their ship leaves a long red trail of flames. That only happens in an atmosphere. Sigh.

I will give them props for having a rotating crew section for artificial gravity. But they lose one point for having everything folded away into compartments. Build it in orbit!

I'm just going to sit here and hate people for a while. I came across a series of pictures of young kids mid-tantrum with a brief explanation of the cause. Like "Not allowed to eat the bath bomb."

One was a kid in full fetal sobbing in a parking lot in Marin with the view of the Golden Gate Bridge. "Bridge wasn't golden." OK, I can get that, kids are very literal and have huge imaginations.

But I read the comments.

Adult after adult expressing shock and disappointment over our bridge not being gold in color. Several asked why it wasn't named the "Orange Gate Bridge/"

After several factual replies, I gave up. so I'm here to rant.

The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most filmed, photographed, and visited modern works of man on Earth. Every single TV show or movie made here works it into a shot or three. How you can visit Sodom of the Pacific and not already have seen at least a few pictures of the bridge in context is beyond. It's been orange since shortly after it opened.

So why the Golden Gate Bridge?

Because the 2-mile straight that connects the San Francisco Bay system to the Pacific Ocean is called the Golden Gate. It's really a remarkable thing to read about.

Why is it called the Golden Gate? Because on July 1, 1846, before the discovery of gold in California, the entrance acquired a new name. In his memoirs, John C. Frémont wrote, "To this Gate I gave the name of 'Chrysopylae', or 'Golden Gate'; for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn." He went on to comment that the strait was “a golden gate to trade with the Orient.”

The Gold Rush several years latter solidified the name.

But seriously, I'm hating people right now.

I am beyond done with these idiots at "CareMore." Last fall I scheduled my annual physical with my PCP. He's sent lab orders in, which I can get done the same day as the labs ordered by my hemo-oncologist. I see Dr. Morgan (PCP) and Dr. Agrawal (Oncology) about a week apart. The nice thing is all my current doctors can see all the current results and notes.

Today, CareMore calls. They haven't seen me at one of their centers in a while and wanted to schedule a physical. I tell them that I'm having that done by my PCP. They whine. I lower the boom.

My insurance pays for ONE full physical a year. And I have to trust a doctor before I can relax enough for a full exam. I have no idea who these doctors are, they are *not* part of my care team, and why should I have to go through this twice, including a second set of labs, when they can just see the results from the doctor I trust?

Guess what? THEY CAN'T SEE THOSE RECORDS!!!! This alleged 'health management group" doesn't have access to my records the way my actual insurance provider can.

As a reminder, these are the same morons who tried to charge me for surgery I had years ago and that was paid in full by MediCal.

On this day, when I'm celebrating the 953rd anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, people who still give a damn about Columbus are insisting he never discovered anything. Because the Americas were already filled with people.

This is, of course, utter bollocks and only works if you try to restrict the use of the word "discover" to the very first person ever. Which makes no sense in English, as discover covers a lot of territory, pun intended.

Because discovery can be personal, as in "I've discovered this great new burrito place!" Of course, the restaurant's owners, staff, suppliers, customers, bankers, insurance brokers, et al, already know it's there, to say nothing of the local police, health inspector, food bloggers . . . you may be the 10,000th person to learn that Burrito-a-Go-Go is amazing, but to you, it is a discovery.

Which brings us back to Columbus. Yeah, several million natives from the Arctic Circle all the way down to Tierra del Fuego knew where they lived, it was news to Europeans. Because the only other landing by Europeans was the Norse who settled in Canada for about six months before either being wiped out or running for their ships or both. And Vinland went very quickly from history to legend to myth.

So when Colombus sailed west in search of Asia and ran into Hispanola instead, it was a discovery. A discovery with unimaginably tragic outcomes, but a discovery. Europeans learned there were lands across the Atlantic for the first time. That's a discovery.

I also dislike Indigenous Peoples Day, as those who push that tend to try to cover up the fact that the First Nations made war against each other as enthusiastically as Europeans did.

So, it's October 14th. Celebrate the Chicago Cubs winning the 1908 World Series over the Tigers or that on this date in 1947 Charles "Chuck" Yeager became the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound.

And in the Missing the Point Category, we have MeTV. Purveyor of classic television, including Perry Mason, to which I am addicted.

Because I suffer some hearing loss and tend to not wear my hearing aids at home, I usually turn on the subtitles when watching Perry. Which is where we run into the issue.

I can understand censoring foul language, but really, they've gone too far. People drink cocktails, not xxxxtails. It got really bad last night, where the mystery centered on the death of a young man named Richard two years prior.

Of course, everyone called him Dick. Which came out on screen as xxxx. Had I been dependent on the subtitles, rather than using them as an aide, I wouldn't have been able to follow the story. Which would have been a pity, as "The Case of the Golden Venom" is really good.

I'm going to try to figure out who does the closed captioning and suggest they adjust their algorithm.

It's that time of year again, the list of those being enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF hereafter) has been released, and right on schedule, people are screaming about it. Why was this ban left off? Why was this artist who was never a rocker let in? People are never happy. But I don't care, because I've known from nearly the start that the RRHOF was going to be a shitshow of distinction.

There are two main reasons why. First of all, no one at the RRHOF bothered to define what they were honoring! What is rock music? Is disco rock, or an outgrowth of soul and funk? With no clear guidance, the RRHOF has inducted some people and acts that only brushed the edges of rock while having fine careers in other genres of music.

I know classifying music is a lot like defining porn, "I know it when I see it," but I think we can all agree that some of the acts added to the RRHOF simply don't belong there. It dilutes the brand to have Donna Summer celebrated for her achievements in rock music. She sings soul and disco! Those and other odd choices make it hard to understand how these selections are made.

Then there is my second, bigger point. I can explain it in one sentence:

The 1927 New York Yankees are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Considered perhaps the greatest team ever assembled, the '27 Yankees finished with a record of 110–44, winning their fifth pennant and finishing 19 games ahead of the Philadelphia Athletics and were tied for first or better for the whole season. In the World Series, they swept the Pittsburgh Pirates. This Yankees team is known for their feared lineup, which was nicknamed "Murderers' Row."

The 1927 Yankees batted .307, slugged .489, scored 975 runs, and outscored their opponents by a record 376 runs. Center fielder Earle Combs had a career-best year, batting .356 with 231 hits, left fielder Bob Meusel batted .337 with 103 RBIs, and second baseman Tony Lazzeri drove in 102 runs. Gehrig batted .373, with 218 hits, 52 doubles, 18 triples, 47 home runs, a then-record 175 RBIs, slugged at .765, and was voted A.L. MVP. Ruth amassed a .356 batting average, 164 RBIs, 158 runs scored, walked 137 times, and slugged .772. Most notably, his 60 home runs that year broke his own record and remained the Major League mark for 34 years until Roger Maris broke it by one with 61; however, this was done in a 162-game schedule, a fact that Commissioner Ford Frick wanted to be noted when the single-season home run record was to be referenced.

The 1927 Yankees pitching staff led the league in ERA at 3.20, and included Waite Hoyt, who went 22–7, which tied for the league lead, and Herb Pennock, who went 19–8. Wilcy Moore won 16 as a reliever. Three other Yankee pitchers had ERAs under 3.00 that season.

If you don't speak baseball, let me translate: they were fucking unstoppable. Even if you hate the Yankees, you have to admit that 1927 is a year the likes of which we may never see again. Yet the '27 Yankees aren't in Hall of Fame. Why is that?

Because the Baseball Hall of Fame inducts people, not teams. Of that storied team, six players were eventually enshrined in Cooperstown. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earle Combs, Tony Lazzeri, Waite Hoyt, and Herb Pennock. Know who isn't in the Hall of Fame? Cedric Durst, who as part of the team that year batted only .248 with almost no power.

Which is where the RRHOF blew it. Look at almost any rock band's Wikipedia page, and there will be a long list of former members. For example, The Doobie Brothers have a hugely complex history of people coming and going. If they were to be voted in, who exactly are you honoring? Willie Weeks? He was the bass player from 1980-82 and came back for about five minutes in 1993.

We saw this happen last year when KISS was inducted. For most people, KISS means those first ten years or so, with the original line-up. Do you realize that Mark St. John, who was with the band just long enough to record Animalize before being sacked, is technically in the RRHOF?.

If I were in charge, the rule would be people and people who played rock music as their main musical output. We'd have a jury to keep things tightly defined. There would be categories like Performer (everything you do to make music. Play, sing, whatever you are doing to make rock music,) Songwriter (if you were a regular contributor to the craft of building rock songs,) Producer (the skill or making the song come together in the studio,) and Influencer (those who helped rock grow without being directly part of the talent. The late Bill Graham would fit in this category, as would Alan Freed.) I'd also be open to nominating albums or moments for special awards. Queen's performance at LiveAid deserves to be in the Hall. Can you imagine a theater where you get to watch the ten greatest performances in rock history?

If they had done this, they still could have inducted bands by nominating and voting them in as a group. That way the Beatles come in, but Paul McCartney's plaque also lists Wings and his solo work.

That's my rant, hope you enjoyed it, and always remember . . .

LONG LIVE ROCK! BE IT DEAD OR ALIVE!