#diamond age

[verysharpfish]

neal stephenson was right, diamond age here we come

[caribassa]

2024

Neal Stephenson

L’Âge de diamant

[fantasyfantasygames]

Illustrated Primer

Illustrated Primer, Market Drift Games, 2005

If you're thinking of the title of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, you are right on target. Illustrated Primer is a mid-future game, set between a Neuromancer near-future and a Star Trek far future.

The personal-level setup is a family of women being pulled into a story that's always bigger than they realize, until they can turn the tables on the big players and take control of their own story. This happens against a backdrop of a massive technological shift - AI, nanotech, bioengineering, neural interfaces, all happening at once and reinforcing one another.

Your character has a set of base stats, randomly determined "straight down the line". They have a randomly determined background that sets skills and resources. It's all pretty swingy - you might be a rich, young, highly skilled woman or a great-grandmother with nothing left but memories. It's up to you to stitch all those random backgrounds together into a unique family story of marriage, divorce, estrangement, love, and adoptions.

If you're not a fan of chargen that's random to that level, the good news is that they hardly matter. It's the tech trees that determine your real abilities. At the beginning of the game, only a few enhancements are open. As the game goes on, the GM opens up different parts of the tech tree based on in-game events. Your characters are likely to be involved in developing some of the tech. Other pieces will be opened up as individuals and corporations around the world release their discoveries.

Your character's motivations and personal limits are key, especially because this amazing, powerful, immature technology has side-effects and drawbacks. Some even let you choose - are you going to take the dexterity reduction from the bulk, the stealth penalty from the heat signature, or the charisma penalty from the nervous system hijack? The best part - what's the only part of character creation that isn't random? Your motivations and personal limits. What does the XP system let you change? Motivations and personal limits.

The game book is somewhat reminiscent of the book for the Die RPG but in black-and-white. The art is not quite as fantastic, but quite good. There are a few iconic characters who appear multiple times. The layout is fairly standard. I feel like it might benefit from an update with a more avant-garde approach.

The system uses a d6 dice pool fairly similar to Open D6. It tones down the all-out craziness of the Wild Die, requiring extra 6s or 1s before the critical hits/fails kick in. It uses the roll's total for success, and a target number system to trigger enhanced successes based on tech powers or charge up higher-powered abilities.

All in all I'm a big fan of the game. It tells a specific, wide-spanning but character-focused story, with enough flexibility that it doesn't feel railroaded or forced. The tech tree is expansive enough to make every character unique. Most of the tech is at least plausible. All in all, a definite win for Market Drift Games.

I have another game with this name waaaay down my review queue, so we might get to that some day. It's a much more pastel kind of game, but equal amounts of... calling it "girl power" feels dismissive, but that's because people dismiss girls and women. Anyway, it's fun, and I hope I get to review it eventually.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

write a short fan fiction about johnlock

Seven rings he made to rule them, nine rings he forged in the fire; three he gave to mortals, seven he kept for himself.

[real-evil-genius]

“The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."

"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."

"Yes. Some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe, but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel."

"Which path do you intend to take, Nell? Conformity or rebellion?"

"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."

“Conversation with a grizzled hoplite”

[real-evil-genius]

“The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker."

"When I was a lad, that word had a double meaning. It could mean a trickster who broke into things—but it could also mean an especially skilled coder."

"The ambiguity is common in post-Neolithic cultures," Hackworth said. "As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts — of technology, if you will — while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.”

“Hackworth presents the Primer to Lord Finkle-McGraw”

[real-evil-genius]

Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.

[madamemarmot]

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson