Secrets Of The Ancients Part 6
Feb. 22nd, 2011 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxI just downloaded Chapter 6 of Mongoose Publishing's epic multi-part Traveller adventure Secrets Of The Ancients to read.
In play, it runs similar to the Barony abstract system from White Wolf's Vampire: the Requiem sourcebook Damnation City, in that characters play a higher-level game as movers and shakers, their usual characteristics abstracted into generalised attributes such as Analysis, or Influence, rather than Intelligence or Social Standing.
I won't say much else about the plot of Part 6 - if you want to download and read it, go here to download it - but I found something amusing already.
The episode uses a term I have not seen for years. It introduces a "prototype ansible" - a means of FTL communication. Subspace radio from Star Trek, if you will.
This sort of communications device is a game breaker for Traveller since, of course, the game is predicated on a lack of reliable FTL communications other than physical transportation of the data from point to point on board a Jump-equipped ship; nonetheless, this is not the amusing thing.
What amuses me is the story I once heard, from David Langford's Ansible site (or was it from Interzone?) that Ursula K LeGuin coined the term.
But that she deliberately chose the nonsense word because it is an anagram of lesbian.
In play, it runs similar to the Barony abstract system from White Wolf's Vampire: the Requiem sourcebook Damnation City, in that characters play a higher-level game as movers and shakers, their usual characteristics abstracted into generalised attributes such as Analysis, or Influence, rather than Intelligence or Social Standing.
I won't say much else about the plot of Part 6 - if you want to download and read it, go here to download it - but I found something amusing already.
The episode uses a term I have not seen for years. It introduces a "prototype ansible" - a means of FTL communication. Subspace radio from Star Trek, if you will.
This sort of communications device is a game breaker for Traveller since, of course, the game is predicated on a lack of reliable FTL communications other than physical transportation of the data from point to point on board a Jump-equipped ship; nonetheless, this is not the amusing thing.
What amuses me is the story I once heard, from David Langford's Ansible site (or was it from Interzone?) that Ursula K LeGuin coined the term.
But that she deliberately chose the nonsense word because it is an anagram of lesbian.
