The Truth: Red, White & Black is a 2003 miniseries published by Marvel Comics, about a group of black men who were experimented on with the same super-soldier serum that was used to create Captain America; it was later collected as Captain America: Truth, which I accessed via Hoopla. I read it as part of my ongoing Black Panther project (see link below) because its main character was the father of one of the characters featured in Christopher Priest's The Crew, which also featured a former Black Panther. Okay, so that's kind of tangential as a "Black Panther" comic, but it seemed to me I ought to read it before I ended up even further away from the point where I read The Crew.
The story is made up of two distinct halves. In one, a bunch of black men join the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor, all from various walks of life, all for their own reasons. They encounter, unsurprisingly, racism in the institutions of the military, and soon they are being experimented on in what is clearly a riff on the Tuskegee experiment. Writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker introduce us to a diverse and sympathetic group of characters—and then put them through some really heinous, racist stuff. I've never read any other comics by Morales (he doesn't seem to have written many others, actually) but here he shows himself to be a thoughtful, interesting writer. I think this could have been pretty hamhanded, but the racial dynamics of it ring truly. I have read other work by Baker, who has a pretty cartoony style, and who I usually associate with more, well, comic work; his big claim to fame other than this is a Plastic Man miniseries, for what it's worth. He has more of a dynamic range within that cartoony style than I might have guessed, with some characters (usually the very racist whites) being drawn as almost literal caricatures, and others as fully fleshed out people. Some moments are quite horrifying even in his style. I don't think it's what I would have chosen, but I think it works.
from Truth: Red, White & Black #6
In the second half of the comic, though, the perspective shifts; it's the present day and Steve Rogers is investigating the events of the 1940s that he never knew anything about, which continue to be filled in as flashbacks. This, to me, diminished some of the potency of the whole affair. It seemed pretty clear to me that the experiments in the first half were meant to be forerunners of the experiments on Steve Rogers, it just doesn't make sense any other way. But to fit with Marvel continuity, it has to turn out that all this happened in parallel with what happened to Rogers, that he has to be the first super-soldier. To me, this really disrupts what was surely the whole point of the story: that we would want to do this to a person of color. But it turns out we did it to a white person first? It also turns the narrative focus onto a white person, the problem of the book becomes how does a white person find out about this injustice? Which is a marked difference to how the opening chronicles the black experience.
from Truth: Red, White & Black #5
All that and yet—I have often said superhero stories are power fantasies, and thus that makes the superhero stories that explore powerlessness particularly interesting to me. It's a powerful metaphor, and even if this comic doesn't make the best use of it, it's clearly trying to do something more interesting than 95% of the superhero comics out there.
Having finally caught up on both Oz books and Star Trek Adventures modules, I don't have any content queued up for today (Friday) as I write this today (Wednesday).
If you have followed the news at all, you will know that Hurricane Milton is about to hit (has just hit) the Tampa Bay area, where I have the dubious honor to reside. We haven't evacuated for a hurricane since Irma in 2017, but for reasons that seemed good at the time, my wife and kids decided to go up to Columbia to hang with friends while schools were closed; meanwhile, I would stay here to prep the house and ride out the storm.
Once they left Monday morning and it became increasingly clear the storm was headed directly our way, we began to wonder if this was the right call. We don't have, say, storm shutters or a generator! So as I write this Wednesday morning, I am soon to head out to the house of some friends who live nearby and do indeed have both of those things.
Milton will hit tonight. Recent trends have it probably making impact to the south, which is good, because the original estimated track took it basically right over where we live!
So what will happen? Well, by the time you read this, you will know, but as I sit here writing it, I have no idea. Hopefully my house is still intact.
And hopefully so am I.
EDIT AT 9:20 AM ON FRIDAY: I am alive, and my house is intact.
Last month, I read Eddie Robson's most recent novel, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words; this month, I jumped back to read his debut, Tomorrow Never Knows, from small UK press Snowbooks.
Though I enjoyed Strange New Words a lot, this is in some ways exactly what I wanted out of an original Eddie Robson novel, based on my familiarity with his Doctor Who work. I think Robson thrives when he juxtaposes the everyday with the fantastic, and that's exactly what we have here: it's about a small group of ordinary people living their lives... but on a platform floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter. It's one of those books where there's not one overarching plot, but rather lives of the protagonists weave in and out of each other, intersecting and connecting and having unexpected ramificiations. Robson has good worldbuilding,* good jokes, but above all a good sense of heart; I really liked all of these people and their struggles and wanted to see them succeed. They felt like real people living in the future, living mundane ordinary lives... but in each case, an ordinary life tinged for the better by an encounter with the fantastic.
The ending is, honestly, kind of sudden, but as I sat on it for a couple days, I came to be okay with that. It's not a book about unravelling cosmic mysteries—there are some here, but that's just not what the book is about. What matter is how our encounters with the cosmic change and reshape us. It reminds me of what George Levine says in his excellent Dying to Know: that the requirement for growth and self-knowledge is first self-humiliation, that we must first deny the self in order to expand it. If we understood more what happened at the end, I don't think that would be the case, and the novel wouldn't totally work. Here, all the protagonists see enough of the universe to realize that there is more they need to know of the universe, and thus they all end the novel in a better place than they began it.
* For example, I thought the stuff about the class implications of homosexuality in a world where the rich can afford to genetically tweak their offspring was a very clever, interesting idea.
Previously, I reviewed the first nine issues of Black Panther vol. 4 in two separate posts here and here. The series ran up to issue #41 (plus one annual), all of which except the last three (a Secret Invasion tie-in) were written by Reginald Hudlin. There are a number of different artists, but Francis Portela, Scot Eaton, and Klaus Janson contribute the most.
from Black Panther vol. 4 #28 (script by Reginald Hudlin, art by Francis Portela)
I always like to title my blog posts about ongoings with whatever description of the premise is given in the comic itself (I don't know if there is a technical name for these things; I'm sure there is). As the one I picked for this post highlights, the big change in this comic is the marriage of Black Panther to Storm of the X-Men. Beginning with issue #10, T'Challa starts looking for a wife; in #18, he and Ororo are married. The rest of the run largely concerns how things are impacted by their marriage, though more the world at large than Wakanda itself. They go on a "world tour" honeymoon, they poke their noses in the American superheroes' "Civil War," they serve together on the Fantastic Four while Reed and Sue are on vacation.Unfortunately, to me, the marriage was never totally successful. Hudlin tries his best, but the relationship is largely depicted as a preexisting one, which we the readers have never seen before. (Around the same time, a Storm miniseries was published that layers in some of that backstory, but I haven't read that, though I intend to.) If it had just been a marriage of political convenience, I think I would have bought it, but the series tries to tell us it is both that and a passionate, genuine romance, and I just never could believe it.
from Black Panther vol. 4 #31 (script by Reginald Hudlin, art by Francis Portela)
I also think the comic spends too much of its time being a generic superhero comic, not playing to the strengths of the Black Panther premise. The overly long story arc about T'Challa and Storm being on the Fantastic Four is just a Fantastic Four comic with some different leads; I'm sure this was a fun thing over in the actual Fantastic Four, but fighting Skrulls and revisiting long-lost plot FF plot points from the 1960s is not why I'm reading Black Panther, you know? I also found the Civil War crossover particularly tedious, jumpy, and incomprehensible. Hudlin tries at time to make it work, such as giving up Skrull versions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, or trying to focus on Wakandan politics during Civil War, but it never did much for me. Too often, the unique selling point of this comic—one that Hudlin really emphasized during its opening story arc—was neglected, which was Wakanda. Little of the action takes place there, unlike in Don McGregor's run, but in Christopher Priest's run, even parts of it set outside Wakanda never let you forget you were reading about a king doing statecraft.
from Black Panther vol. 4 #22 (script by Reginald Hudlin, art by Manuel Garcia and Jay Leisten & Sean Parsons)
Occasionally, Hudlin does do a good job merging social commentary on the African diaspora experience into superheroics, following in the footsteps of Don McGregor's Ku Klux Klan story arc; I particularly enjoyed the post-Katrina New Orleans story arc; I really liked Hudlin's take on Luke Cage, too. Notably, this is the run where Shuri is introduced... in the films she's an intrinsic part of the Black Panther mythos, so I have been mildly surprised to realize how late she came to it. But Hudlin does very little with her here, also to my surprise. She would be easy to forget if this was all you ever read of her; after being set up for significance in the opening arc, she plays very little role until late in the run. I think she plays a bigger role in Black Panther vol. 5, so we'll see.
from Black Panther vol. 4 #14 (script by Reginald Hudlin, art by Scot Eaton & Klaus Janson)
I was a bit apprehensive about the final story arc, seeing as it was a crossover and by a different writer, Jason Aaron. But it had great art by Jefte Palo and even greater coloring by my fave, Lee Loughridge. It seems to me that Aaron does a Priest pastiche here, not a Hudlin one, largely depicting T'Challa from the outside as Wakanda fights off a Skrull invasion. The viewpoint characters are all Skrulls... and you actually end up feeling bad for them as they are yet another attempt to invade Wakanda that ends in failure. Well done, great stuff.
Yankee in Oz and Enchanted Island created a precedent—like them, Forbidden Fountain is a return to Oz published by the International Wizard of Oz Club written by a "Royal Historian," in this case, the mother-and-daughter team of Eloise and Lauren McGraw, authors of the final "Famous Forty" novel, Merry Go Round in Oz. And like them, it has somewhat mediocre illustrations provided by Dick Martin.
The Forbidden Fountain of Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw illustrated by Dick Martin
I was looking forward to this a lot, because I knew it had a cracker of a premise. Ozma accidentally drinks the Water of Oblivion from the Forbidden Fountain, forgetting who she is; as "Poppy," disguised as a boy, she ends up wandering the countryside of Oz. While the denizens of the Royal Palace search for her, it's Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant of Oz, who stumbles upon her—only in classic Kabumpo fashion, he gets the situation entirely wrong. Plus, it was by the writers of my favorite post-Baum novel in the Famous Forty.
Perhaps because my expectations were so high, I found it mildly disappointing... though I should say it's probably also my favorite of the "quasi-canonical" Oz novels I've read so far, except for maybe Wicked Witch. The first couple chapters are great, with a really compelling set-up. In fact, they were so intense that after the first chapter, my six-year-old was so freaked out by Ozma's loss of memory, that they declared they didn't want to read any more of the book! It took me a bit to persuade them that surely everything would be all right in the end (as it always is, in an Oz book) and thus that we ought to press on and keep going.
I also really liked the role of Kabumpo. If there's a complaint to be lodged with the post-Thompson Oz novels, it's that the sense of continuity abates somewhat; Neill picks up some of Thompson's characters and concepts (in his own distinctive way, at least) but then in the later Famous Forty books, Jack Snow and Rachel Cosgrove ignore everything post-Baum, as did the McGraws their first time out. But here, Thompson's Kabumpo is a main player—and I think they do very well by him. Like in Kabumpo in Oz and Lost King, Kabumpo here has good intentions... but his self-assurance and vanity causes him to get a key detail very wrong. It's a good showing for a character who hasn't had a key role for some time.
The McGraws give us some striking images, particularly the creepy maze in the Emerald City that was used to exile people in the time of King Pastoria, and some fun new characters, particularly Toby the highwayman who doesn't have the nerve to actually rob someone. There's also a fun area called the "Bordermoor," which is between the Gillikin and Winkie countries,* and thus things there are both purple and yellow. Other worldbuilding note: The book tells us there are Roma people in Oz (not that it uses that term), contradicting Ojo in Oz, which ended with Ozma sending them all back to Europe.
Where the book falls down for me is that if Merry Go Round was like a strong Thompson, this is like a weak one, in that the protagonists move between largely uninteresting locations and don't really do anything interesting to get out of them. Merry Go Round had a lot of team problem-solving, one of my favorite things in an Oz book, but this is one of those Oz books where the characters more stumble in and out of places without much deliberate action on their own part. The result is kind of unmemorable, like reading Purple Prince. I would particularly liked to have seen Ozma shown some steel or ingenuity as "Poppy," but she is pretty timid and directionless. C'mon, Tip was awesome!
That said, unlike many Thompsons, it does have a strong ending. When Ozma makes it back to the Emerald City, the first person she sees is Jack Pumpkinhead, who calls her "Tip." My kid was like, "It's because she's a boy!" No no, I pooh-poohed, Jack is just seeing some kind of essence of Ozma. But they were right and I was wrong! In boy's clothes, Ozma looks like Tip, and there's a touching scene where Jack and Mombi are all Ozma can remember. My kid was bouncing off the wall in excitement as everything came together in the last two chapters.
When I asked if they liked it, they gave me the thumbs-up sign five times. "Each thumbs up means one star," they explained. So I guess they were into it! When I asked it that was despite how scary the beginning had been, they insisted the beginning hadn't been scary at all.
Next up in sequence: The Ozmapolitan of Oz
* For some reason this is a trope of many of my recent Oz books; Hidden Valley, Yankee, Enchanted Island, and Forbidden Fountain all go back and forthbetween these two countries. Where are my Munchkins at?
In the declining days of the so-called Star Wars "Expanded Universe," there were largely two kinds of books: tedious ongoing event series (like Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi) and very disconnected standalones (such as Paul Kemp's Crosscurrent). The former category I gave up on as the ongoing narrative kept getting worse and worse, but the latter I kept buying, on the basis that a standalone adventure could be the kind of fun I want out of a Star Wars tie-in.
Star Wars: Shadow Games by Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
This one I did not pick up at the time, as it came out after I largely stopped buying Star Wars novels, but I just picked it up from my local library and gave it a quick read. Set shortly before the original movie, it's about Dash Rendar, a mercenary who I guess was significant in Shadows of the Empire, but as I last read that back when it came out in 1997, I can't say I really remember him. Dash is hired to be a bodyguard to a holostar whose been experiencing a number of threats on her life; along the way, Han Solo manages to insert himself into the narrative as well.
At this point, fun standalones are what I want out of the EU, but this one didn't hit the mark for me. Too fast, too many complications that ultimately got ridiculous, too little emphasis on character. I think there was probably an interesting story to be told about Dash's state of mind, his reluctance to join up with a group like the Rebellion and so on, his dealing with the trauma of his past, but the novel doesn't really go into that in a meaningful way. It's kind of just there when it ought to be the crux of the story, I think.
Also I am no longer a continuity nut as I once was, but seemingly everyone in the galaxy knowing Prince Xizor was the leader of Black Sun is a pretty big inconsistency with what is literally the only other book to feature Dash and Xizor. So though I appreciate this book was allowed to exist, it's much more of a miss than a hit.
Pick of the month: Two months in a row, two Eddie Robson books? I suppose so. Tomorrow Never Knows is everything I ever wanted out of one of his books—this book deserves a wider audience than what it probably has received from Snowbooks.
This is the debut novel of G. Willow Wilson, better known to me as the cocreator of Ms. Marvel. I've classified it as "fantasy" on LibraryThing (it's got a genie in it), but it arguably lies at the overlap of fantasy and science fiction, as advanced computer technology is also a key aspect of the plot. The book takes place in a generic Arab state during a sort of "Arab Spring"–like moment, fueled by social media. Wilson says in an afterword to my edition that she wrote the book to unite the three audiences for her previous work: sf&f fans, Muslims, and the kind of people who listen to NPR!
This combination of genres and approaches is the high point of the novel. To me, as a western reader of genre fiction, the book takes a lot of familiar ideas and presents them in an unfamiliar way, which I really enjoyed. Despite being over 400 pages long, it's a pretty quick read. It's largely undemanding, I would say, but occasionally has a really tough moment, highlighting the difficulty of the concepts it works through.
Two things of interest to me. One, I don't know how many readers of the book were in the market for Lawrence Durrell jokes, but I thought the book's comment about the Alexandria Quartet was laugh-out-loud hilarious. I was squarely in the target audience, anyway. Second, if you are a Marvel fan, you should note the book has a couple mentions of World of Battlecraft, the same fictional MMORPG that Kamala Khan plays in Wilson's Ms. Marvel comics.
"Nest in the Dark" is one of the standalone Star Trek Advnetures missions that you can buy direct from Modiphius as a PDF for a few dollars, though I am pretty sure I got my copy from a Humble Bundle. I've been intrigued by this one for a long time—it's about the player ship encountering a sort of cosmic megastructure—and had once thought it could make a good "season finale" for my previous campaign. That campaign had the players chasing down the origins of alien signals, and I thought the "Matryoshka Brain" here would be good for that. That campaign fizzled out before we got to that point, but when my new campaign started up, I knew I wanted a finale with an emphasis on science and exploration, one that might feature some moral dilemmas, and one that would explore ideas of nonhuman consciousness—my players include Ph.D.s in psychology and neurochemistry, and the former even gave her character an interest in cybernetics.
Thus it became the fourth episode of...
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53876.0. Starfleet Command has raised questions about my handling of the Haradin prisoners we left at Outpost SE-119, but that issue will have to wait. The Diversitas has returned to the Omega Draconis system in response to a distress call from Abyss Station. The black hole at the heart of the system is destabilizing—threatening to swallow up the station. The gravimetric fluctuations are rendering it difficult to transport personnel off the station…"
Planning the Mission
The big change I made here was, of course, to tie the mission into our mini-campaign, so I'll lay that out clearly here. In the first episode, the players found that a Haradin terrorist they'd met was actually an android when it collapsed; their investigations in the second showed it had a highly complex brain but relatively simple physical construction as well as a powerful transmitter, now burnt it. The second episode also saw them find that an unknown element used in its construction was also used in the alien facility orbiting the black hole Omega Draconis A*. They discovered that facility had been designed by mysterious ancient aliens they dubbed the "Engineers" but they were not able to find any images of them or other details about them. In the third episode, they discovered the black hole was going haywire, negative impacts rippling across the sector.
So the idea was that the Engineers were a digital intelligence living in the Matryoshka Brain; a long time ago they had been responsible for building the Omega Draconis facility in order to calm the unstable black hole, but the players' unwitting actions in episode two meant the facility was no longer doing that—and they were going to need to track down the Engineers in order to get them to repair the facility. (In the mission as written, the Matryoshka is mobile and about to brush up against an inhabited system.) The Haradin android would turn out to be a member of the Engineer civilization on a mission of exploration, much like the players themselves, on a secret anthropological survey, as we've seen Starfleet itself do in episodes like "Who Watches the Watchers?"
My goal here was to do some Prime Directive stuff, but from the other side. What happens when the Federation is the one being "protected" from an advanced civilization? What happens when there's a disaster threatening the Federation, but those advanced civilizations could stop it... but won't? (as seen on screen in episodes like "Pen Pals" and "Homeward")
The big change, thus, was to rewrite the first act. I began with an in media res teaser, with the Diversitas evacuating Abyss Station, which was falling into the black hole:
Each round, there was first a Control + Conn Task D3 for the ship to maintain position amid the gravimetric distortions. (If they fell out of position, it would be a D4 Task to return.)
Transporting a batch of crew from the station was a Daring + Engineering Task D3. (They could transport more than once per round, but this would increase the difficulty.)
Complications would mean that a random player was injured by a gravimetric fluctuation, or that a piece of equipment would fail; I could induce them on purpose with 2 Threat if I wanted.
There were four groups of people to transport, and the players had four rounds to beam them all over.
I also added a new Act I, Scene 1 where the players would have to figure out some way to track down the Engineers.
Additionally, this was the first episode where my player Joel would be back after a six-week absence; his character Oliver Johnson had vanished into a time anomaly during the second episode. So I wrote in that he would reappear inside a spherical structure inside the Matryoshka Brain, having inadvertently been transmitted from the Omega Draconis facility to the Matryoshka Brain. This meant a scene where Oliver reappeared, and also I would have Joel play a support character until the players actually reconnected with him.
Other than that, I mostly followed the mission as written, just making the "Engineer" Mercury who the players meet be the same one who had been in the Haradin android. I also decided to play up on some stuff in the backstory of Alita, Forest's character; Alita has a brain injury she compensates for with a cybernetic implant of her own devising, and an interest in cybernetics as a character. So I decided I wanted something like Mercury ending up in Alita's body, with Alita either sharing it or herself downloaded into an android—that would of course depend on exactly what the players decided to do.
As always, I changed the episode title to make it more pretentious. "Angels in Your Angles" seemed like a nice one for summing up the idea of advanced beings residing in pure mathematics. There's been a pattern to these changes; if you know it, you might have the same taste in indie bands as me.
The mission took three sessions to play, basically one per act. It took a bit of scheduling, but I made sure all our regular players were there for final session. For the two absences, I once again invoked the anatid space flu.
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1, 3)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer (1-3)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-3)
Claire as Mooria Loonin, pilot (1-3)
Austin as Frector, security chief (2-3)
Forest as Alita Faraday, medical officer (1-3)
Joel as Oliver Johnson, science officer (1-3) and Anthor, anthropologist (1-2)
Good turnout from the "main cast," though, mean that this was the only episode to feature no sessions involving our back-up recurring character, Toren as Tronnen, the ship's counselor.
The teaser I had planned turned out to be quite exciting. When they designed the ship back during our session 0, the players chose a lot of Talents that made it good at stuff involving sensors and science, but episodes 1 and 2 had largely taken place off the ship, so here they really got to make use of those Talents. On top of that, Kenyon's engineer character, Nevan, has a lot of engineering Talents that work best on the ship, but had done little on the ship, so again, he got to make use of that stuff. But as much as they did a good job, they also rolled a bunch of Complications, so I was exploding consoles and causing transporter shorts and all kinds of good stuff that kept the tension on.
My plan for Act I, Scene 2 was very vague, honestly one of the vaguest I had ever written:
Players will need to come up with some kind of plan, ideally one that pushes them in the direction of searching out the origin of the “Engineers.” They are the ones who might have the technology to re-stabilize the black hole.
The main benefit they would have is that the crew of Abyss Station has spent the last six weeks poring over what data they could retrieve from the remains of the alien facility. Crew can analyze this with the facilities on the Diversitas.
Other ideas: tracing where the alien transmitters feed to; talking to the Ithik, who might have some kind of lead.
Whatever they find, it points them toward the heart of the Ekuemene sector, an area with less stellar density than can be found elsewhere.
So I told the players, you need to figure something out, and then just leaned back to see what would happen.
They knocked it out of the park! I was so delighted. The players went through a bunch of different theories and ideas, weaving together a number of different strands and details from across the campaign. (One of the benefits of playing weekly, as opposed to monthly like in my old campaign, is that concepts sewn twelve sessions prior are much easier to keep in mind!) At one point, Debi actually totally put together exactly what was going on in terms of backstory—but I couldn't react, I had to let them figure it out for themselves, so they had no idea! It was just one of several theories proposed.
Eventually they decided there were three things they wanted to do:
Return to the alien facility and see if it had any data they could recover after all.
Study the black hole to see if there was any hint to collapsing it.
Get in touch with the Ithik.
My only real intervention was asking them who was going to do what. They decided that Nevan and Faraday would do task #1, T'Cant and Anthor #2, and Rucot #3; meanwhile, Loonin would have to get the Diversitas back into orbit and maintain it amid the gravitational fluctuations.
the alien facility in the Omega Draconis system (from a game called Planetary Annihilation)
It was just so fun to watch them spitball and theorize and plan, it was like watching a real conference room scene from TNG. My players have really embraced the STA system and how it works, and how to do problem solving within it, really thinking like a real Starfleer crew. It was so fun!
The actual tasks went pretty well, too, and I responded as GM by making sure each was able to pick up some useful information. On the alien facility, they were able to find traces of the deleted information, that with the help of what Rucot got from the Ithik, they were able to recover; by analyzing the black hole itself, they were able to discover that stopping this black hole was beyond the power of Federation science. Calling back to the Ithik, by the way, was so much fun. I established that they were just playing lots of games, infuriating the Federation bureaucrats really earnestly working on resettling them. The members of the Cult of the Deathbringer in particular were just excited to be allowed to finally have fun, and were getting drunk all the time. Rucot promised to send them some kanar for their help. If we play another campaign (more on that later), I'll have to see if I can work them back in somehow.
Act II of the episode takes the player ship to the actual Matryoshka Brain; the mission as written gives a Task the players can perform to figure out what it is, but Joel and Austin recognized it as a "Dyson swarm" just from their own knowledge, so I rolled with that. Similarly, there are a number of mathematical Tasks the characters can undertake... but hey, if you play at a table with a bunch of STEM Ph.D.s, including one actually in math, and they can recognize a sequence of prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence perfectly fine, thank you!
In the mission as written, the players beam over to a duplicate of their own ship, and one of the crew gets trapped in a bubble as a final test. I tweaked this as a way of reintroducing Joel's character of Oliver to the proceedings; having vanished from time back in episode 2, he appeared inside a sphere here in episode 4 aboard the duplicate Diversitas... and he was almost out of air. This lead into an Extended Task to free him; basically the players have to solve a logic puzzle before the bubble runs out of oxygen.
Nevan has a Talent that makes him very good at Extended Tasks, and he rolled extremely well on his very first attempt, generating enough Work to almost complete the Extended Task on the first round! I hadn't spent very much Threat yet, so I dropped a ton of it at this point (I think five or six!), each point of Threat spent eliminating one point of Work.
This turned out to make things incredibly tough indeed, because at that point Nevan began rolling very poorly, as did other players when they tried to take over the Extended Task. Typically this have been super-easy for my players... but finally I created one they struggled to complete! They did get there in the end, but man, I think both they and I were pretty stressed. But finally, they did succeed.
Like I said above, I wanted a Complication where something happened with Alita's brain, and the players gave me exactly that. Alita attempted to use her cybernetic implant to help transmit the consciousness of "Mercury" (a member of the Engineers) from a plate constituting the Dyson swarm into the Haradin android, but what happened is Mercury ended up in her body and she ended up in the android! I think this threw Forest for a loop a bit, but ended up resulting in some fun stuff. Alita, who wanted to understand cybernetics better, was able to get some detailed scans of her own consciousness operating in an android body. Forest had made delicious cinnamon rolls for our last session, and so we ended up with a series of jokes about how Mercury in Alita's body kept eating all kinds of food, especially cinnamon rolls.
The third session mostly centered around the players first communicating with Mercury, convincing Mercury to let them talk to the "Consensus," and then convincing the spokesbeing of the Consensus, "Zeus," to intervene to stop Omega Draconis A*. I set this up as a sort of Prime Directive dilemma in reverse. Building the facility to calm Omega Draconis had prevented a natural disaster—in letting the station stop operating, the argument of the Engineers was that they were restoring the "natural" state of the Ekumene sector. The players had to convince them that they ought to intervene, and they did a good job of coming up with some powerful arguments—particularly Claire as Loonin, who gave a good speech about the responsibilities and obligations toward life.
the "Matryoshka Brain" (I can't figure out the original source of this image)
I particularly liked this, as my whole reason for calling the series (and thus the sector it takes place in) "Ekumene" is that it's ancient Greek for "the inhabited world," which gives us the modern word "ecumenical." But in a slightly less literal sense, it's the idea that the world is a unified place, that we all belong to and participate in. The action and the science is fun, but these are the ideas and ideals that make Star Trek work for me, and I was glad we got to focus on that in the last session.
I made this a Difficulty 6 Task... but I probably made it too easy in that I also let every single player contribute their own little piece to the Task, which meant they generated 10 Successes! I think I made it too easy; in retrospect I wonder if I should have let them succeed at the Difficulty 6 Task with only a normal number of assists, then spent Threat to introduce some kind of Complication, and then forced them to undergo a different incredibly difficult Task to finish. But these things are easy to think of later, and I am not always good at thinking in the moment.
The main situation resolved, the players swapped everyone back into the right body, and then the Diversitas left the influence of the Dyson swarm to discover 1) almost no time at all had passed, and 2) the black hole was totally normal and posed no threat. They also discovered, however, that Mercury had uploaded a copy of itself to the Diversitas computer—in a very fun moment, Nevan's player was finally able to use his Talent "I Know My Ship" to diagnose this, which he was always asking about but the circumstances were never right for the entire campaign!
So came the end of our last session and thus our campaign. But I would like to keep playing and I made sure to lay in some seeds for that. What's up with the Haradin has been a big ongoing thing, and the players had theorized there was some link between the Haradin and the Engineers; back in episode three, they had been flummoxed by the Haradin's confusion over how the players could not know where Harad was or why it had been invaded. Mercury, it turned out, had been an anthropologist studying the Haradin, so the Mercury program running on the Diversitas computers gave them this piece of information: "In their language, the word Harad means 'universe.'" Additionally, I think there's some good potential to see what happens with Alita's scans of the android. (The Engineers took the actual android body.)
And finally, like I said in my write-up of episode three, Captain Rucot made the somewhat dubious (in my mind, anyway) move of handing over a bunch prisoners to the Klingons. So I ended the episode and thus the whole mini-campaign by giving this on a slip of paper to T'Cant's player:
You have received new orders from Starfleet Command—you are to relieve Rucot of command and take him back to Deep Space 10 for questioning over his handling of the Haradin prisoners.
TO BE CONTINUED...
"You guys will all have to play again next summer to find out what happens next!" I declared.
Though I don't think I made perfect choices (in particular, I feel like the strand about Joel/Oliver ended up not mattering very much in either a character or plot sense), I enjoyed this final mission a lot. Good challenges, good focus on exploration, discovery, and diplomacy.
And I enjoyed the campaign a lot, too. I was a bit trepidatious about having a player captain (I did an NPC in my first campaign), but Ryan was great at playing the character appropriately. And all my players were great, really throwing themselves into the system, their characters, and the Star Trek ethos. Everyone brought something to the table, and even though we at times had seven(!) players, I don't think anyone was slighted. Overall, it was definitely one of the best gaming experiences I've had.
I meant to show this at the end... but I forgot!
At the end, when I suggested a campaign for next summer, Austin piped up—"maybe a quick set of sessions over winter break?" So I guess he liked it too!
The Father-Thing: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3 by Philip K. Dick
The third volume of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick collects shorts he wrote in 1953 and 1954, which were published from 1953 to 1959; my edition is called The Father-Thing but it has also been published under the titles Second Variety (also used as the title of the second volume, confusingly) and Upon the Dull Earth. I had been collecting the 1999 Gollancz editions of this series, but I wasn't able to find one of volume 3 for a reasonable price, so I settled for a 1990 Grafton edition instead—now my collection won't match!
Collection published: 1990 Contents originally published: 1953-59 Acquired: August 2024 Read: September 2024
I found this less interesting than I remember the first two volumes being. There are a lot of stories here about that bugaboo of 1950s science fiction, the "evolutionary throw-forward," the super-advanced human "evolving" in our midst. It's a theme that's largely vanished from contemporary sf, and I think it's pretty much evolutionary nonsense—at the very least, even if it could be plausible, that work is rarely done. To his credit, Dick often attempts to undermine this idea, as he lays out in his notes on "The Golden Man," and this one I did enjoy; like Wells's The Time Machine, it understands that evolution is not a teleology, that to be "more evolved" doesn't mean "more advanced" but only "more capable of reproducing within a particular niche." But so many of the other stories go with this theme in various ways, and I quickly came to find it tedious.
I have previously opined that the thing I find most interesting about Dick as a writer is the way he captures the alienation of modern life; unfortunately, there's not a lot of that in these tales of throw-forwards, time travel, and galactic war. My favorite stories were "The Hanging Stranger," "The Eyes Have It," "Sales Pitch," and "Foster, You're Dead." "The Hanging Stranger" really captures that classic Dick feeling of alienation, particularly in its early stages, when the main character realizes there's a dead body hanging in the town square... and no one thinks it's weird but him. What happened? Why? How did everyone around him suddenly become a terrible person? I wish this part had been drawn out more but it's still an effective story.
Both "Sales Pitch" and "Foster, You're Dead" hit the idea of consumerism gone horribly wrong that you get from a lot of Dick's best stuff. The surreal robot in "Sales Pitch" that goes around destroying the protagonists' home as a demonstration (and they still purchase one!) is great; I also really liked the premise of "Foster," where salesmen go around selling nuclear bomb shelters, and buying one is seen as a sign of great patriotism. If you can't afford to buy one and the war comes... well, too bad! Great satire on the military-industrial complex.
"The Eyes Have It" is a simple tale, but a good one—probably technically not sf at all, but commenting on the way that sf takes metaphorical language and literalizes it. It would be fun to teach, I think.
Overall, though, I'm hoping the next volume (which coincides with the part of Dick's career where his novel writing took off) contains more of what I like about his work.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
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"Nest in the Dark" is one of the standalone Star Trek Advnetures missions that you can 
