This is a forum to discuss possible interactions or connections between characters.

Example- considerations for 8 year old girl.

No comments?

OK, how about we discuss the backgrounds of our PCs - non game mechanics stuff ....

Publicly Stavros will be a grad student, age 28, studying math and the humanities (triple masters degrees, working on doctorates but that takes time he is still putting in). His parents are rich, but he isn't your typical rich kid. In fact, he lives a very spartan lifestyle with very few possessions and none of the funny money one might expect - he's not rich, his family is.

He is, however, involved in clubs and student organizations, though on a senior level - helping with national and international web-sites on social issues (typical left wing student, amnesty international stuff). He isn't a leader, but he does help with art work and writing, and though he isn't known as an artist (he's interested in his studies, not making a niche in the art world) his talent is obvious.

His younger brother is also a student, but not a brilliant one - and seems to be on the outs with mother and father. What little extra money there is goes to take care of his bro.

Secretly, he is actually adopted. His Mother and Father are not blood relatives, but instead his Masters in a secret society. They are wealthy, and powerful, but Stavros has not yet earned sufficient rank to benefit from their wealth - rules of the society, keeps apprentices from getting lazy, keeps them thinking, proving themselves, etc. His Mother and Father do fill parental roles, and there are bonds of friendship - but it isn't as close as if they were genuine family.

For convenience sake, he can be attending any major University in the world. He could be living next door ... there are lots of possible links to other PCs or NPCs ... So:

Lead: any details you can suggest that will mesh my background with your ideas? Is there anywhere you might want Stavros to live, anyone you might want him to know?

Players: I am open to links to other PCs, if that is allowed.

Darren Thompson, 25 years old. Originally from Cornwall in the UK, but studied for his degree in Forestry and then stayed working in North Wales, as a park ranger/warden in the Snowdonia National Park. Not a great paying job, but one that he generally enjoys. More importantly to him he has managed to stay living within the student and ex-student community of the University there. His main interests are his hobbies which are varied but generally outdoor and active: mountain walking/climbing, including as a volunteer with the local mountain rescue team(s), caving, surfing, para-gliding/sailing.

Players: he could have enountered them through one of his hobbies, or as a guide/trainer/lecturer etc during his work, or perhaps he was on the rescue team when you got lost in the mountains and forests as a tourist at some point?

Location doesn't matter.

As an occultist, je might have actually seen some weird shit a time or two, but I really don't need anything on that level. At least that pops to mind.

Sky: Sorry but it was unclear in your PM, is that 3 language skills (native = Norwegian group), English, and German, or were you trying to put English within the Norwegian group?

Having tried unsuccessfull to learn Icelandic I must say that I saw no resemblance to English at all, either in there grammar nor the spelling/pronounciation.

Yep, telepathy and Psychic link should be able to get around the langauge problem once they meet and work that out.

Have you/Lead decided where she went to bed? Was she at home, on holiday, at a sleepover. Does she still live in Iceland or has her parents work meant travelling to other countries?

Cool, I have to do a little digging - as there was (perhaps is? are?) cults(s) of Pythagoras in RL. Weird shit, even historical accounts of weird shit via the society libraries, would be really cool.

I think, he will live / study in New York - close enough for an easy train ride to the exchanges and brokerage houses. The occult society no doubt works out of a number of brokerages, as they use money and math to make more money.

Given he'll have no resources of his own and no real need for them (he does school, hangs in coffee shops, attends (cheap) campus events, doesn't drink, etc. he probly has a tiny aprtment (likely more like a rented closet).

Also have to look up what schools are in New York ...

3 language families.

My PC, who's name has yet to be determined, is an 8 year old girl of Icelandic nationality. Because of her age, I feel like personality is more important than background as she has limited life experience. Because I want her to bond with the player group as a surrogate family I have decided that she is an orphan and has been living in an orphanage. As I mentioned to Rorx via PM her last memory was going to bed on a Friday night, looking forward to Saturday morning cartoons. She wakes up in custody of whoever is behind the kidnappings, and all of her hair has fallen out, no doubt due to whatever experiments have been performed on her genetically superior self.

Sky: though Stavros won't be a father figure or anything, he is pretty good as older brothers go. He already takes care of his younger bro (who wasn't inducted into the society, and doesn't know of it - and is barely supported and largely ignored by 'Father' ... only 'Mother secretly sends some money out of some feeling and some guilt).

So, anyhow, Stavros would be psychologically receptive to bonding, possibly the shared abduction, circumstance, etc. could form something like a sibling bond over time.

I believe in Iceland they still follow the tradition of the 'surname' being the fathers forename with , in your case, the patronomic of ...dotter added.

An example would be Magnus Magnusson, is literally Magnus, son of Magnus. So you would be Blah Randomdotter, if you get what I mean?

There is probably a website somewhere with Icelandic type names...

Scott Winters is a 6th year med-student at Harvard Medical. He did his residency at a local hospital, and is basically a trust fund baby (who was emotionally abandoned because he wants to give almost all he has to the poor and charities).

Possible connections, patient he helped in the hospital, someone or part of an organization or someone helped by an organization that he gave money to. I think that he could be a father/mentor figure.

He's never been outside of the USA, but he wants go out there and help the less fortunate.

Brynja Ulfhrafensdottir (Bryn) is an 8 year old Orphan from Iceland. Caring and sweet she wants nothing more than to help those around her, and has taken on an almost maternal doting upon those she likes, no doubt a need to fill the void left by her parents. She is however, tender of heart and vulnerable and a little lost in the world. She is mostly a happy child and is quick and eager to bond woth others. Nature: Caregiver.

Role: Party Brick/Weapon of Mass Destruction

If i am allowed in my character idea is:
Name: Erasmus "Raz" Jones
Age: 30 Occupation: Former Electrical Engineer
Height: 6'0" Weight: 200 Hair: Brown
Skin: Coffee and cream
Concept: Human Dynamo
Nature: Architect
Raz was an electrical engineer working in South Korea on a new nuclear reactor. His job was to oversee all the wiring and infrastructure needed to convert the nuclear energy into electricity then to connect it to the national power grid.
Continued strikes by the workers meant that the project was getting further and further behind. One day, during a meeting where he was being called on the carpet yet again for not being on schedule he had a searing headache that left him writhing on the floor, inarticulate with pain, blinded by a flood of information and vast new vistas of understanding. He saw everything that he had been working on and everything that still needed doing crystallized in his mind. He left the meeting, went to his office, created a more efficient design for the workers to follow, then quit to give himself time to understand what had just happened to him.
Raz' powers are electrical in nature, he has channeled much of his nova power into making himself better in almost every way both physically and mentally. He is friendly, outgoing and charming, a natural leader.

Just an aside, something that always strikes me as ironic and funny:

For all the vaunted power of the atom, how do we derive electricity from nuclear power? we use all that tremendous power to: heat water...

That's right! Nuclear power is Steam Power! We are still in the Steam Age!

Hmm...new ideas for Steampunk game...


I cant wait for an Aberrant:Steampunk game to come 'round...

SL, first off, what is a 'brick' as far as party members go? I understand 'WMD' (dps) and I'd understand tank, but what is a brick.

Scott, tank/healer

SL, lastly, in my sleep addled brain, I can't think up of any other method that we know of to create AC current than spinning a loop of wire through a magnetic field. This naturally lends itself to a turbine, and the easiest way to turn a turbine is through steam. Not that I'm trying to defend it, but you're right SL, we are still in the 'steam age'.

Thermocouples, solar, they produce DC current. Wind, hydroelectric, just using something other than steam to turn a turbine. Everything else that I can think of now (natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc.), steam. It's amazing to think of where we would be if we didn't know that a loop of wire moving through a magnetic field created current, or where we'd be if it didn't do that.

But we are working hard to leave steam and the basic electric motor/generator behind. The next two big steps after steam are:

- Use of liquid sodium as a heat exchange system (used in advanced reactors, not the light and heavy water designs we tend to cling to, but breeders and micro reactors like Japan is putting out)

- Use of Nuclear reactors to directly crack hydrogen. This is proven to work, and will be implemented with China with their next generation pebble bed reactors (which also have no chance of melting down and can run unattended with no massive containment shell - which makes up a huge fraction - maybe most - of the cost of modern reactors.)

The only other thing that springs to mind for actual creation of power is fuel cells. These will be key in a hydrogen economy, which still has infrastructure issues of course.

Likely at some point the wires will be high temperature superconductors, the power mains in NYC already have a root system of superconducting lines.

Inertial Confinement Fusion (see Polywell Fusion and look for the Google video, speaker Robert Bussard) can produce power directly. They scale that up, and ions in plasma replace the moving wire. Same possible via Tokamak fusion, but the tokamak are looking like a dead end design.

... That has been your science geek public service announcement, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming ...

Came up with a Nova name: Time-Shard

Brick=Tank. Lots of soak and strength. Old school term. Tank is the more recent MMORPG term.


IIRC back when the government was still trying to decide whether to go with AC or DC, they decided on DC because it could be transmitted over long distances, allowing for centralized power. The competing model would have had local power stations using DC. Ironically the latter would have been better since it would have allowed our communitites to be more self sustainable and fit in with the emerging, act local think global mode that will lead to greater sustainability.

Fuel Cells don't create power. They are just a storage medium. It takes energy to actually extract the hydrogen in the first place, bringing down the net efficiency. If we transition to a hydrogen economy, first it will be based off of using natural gas for extraction and then later we will shift to building solar and wiond farms to accomplish this. Others are working on elctrochemical electorolysis to seperate the hydrogen from ater (before it rebonds with Oxygen in the fuel cell and becomes water waste).

A couple of interesting thoughts about fuekl cell cars: First of all there is an interesting model where when you drive to work, you plug in your fuel cell vehicle and it powers your workstation a your desk. That would make all of the cars currently parked into lots into generators for the grid. That would be awesome.

Second, if we have all fuel cell cars, emitting water vapor on such a massive scale we wont have any more smog, but would it make the climate more humid?



I like it! Sounds very Lovecraftian, like something from the Angles of Time. Just watch out for the Hounds of Tindalos!

Fuel Cells are not a storage medium, which is part of the reason they aren't in use in more places (the tanks or chemical storage mediums for H are still too expensive). They are a power source, hydrogen and oxygen being the fuel, the chemical product being the water. They are not a primary power source, which is maybe? what you are getting at - in that it takes energy to make hydrogen.

The advantage of high-temperature (note thermal) production of H in nuclear reactors is they can 'crack' ... it just gets made at very high efficiency (something like 95% possible efficiency). The conversion efficiency is actually better than using a water/turbine loop. The other big advantage of using hydrogen is it can be stored. Electrical power is not stored in any significant quantity in terms of the power grid, which is why we have a grid.

Shipping hydrogen can, with the infrastructure built, be more efficient than send electricity over long distances ... and has no time-of-usage issues (look up what kind of headaches peek usage causes the folks who operate the grid for more on that).

The fuel cells then oxidize the hydrogen with no by-products except clean water - hence the excitement of many eggheads about someday getting into a hydrogen economy. The infrastructure replacement for vehicle fueling is a beotch, but that doesn't need to happen all at once - though the fuel cell tech is still coming. Miniature cells are not as efficient as the cells they are using in buses and in combat Submarines, for example - plus hydrogen storage has some hurdles too, but mostly just getting the tech we have engineered at lower price points.

Some interesting work on nano-tech electrodes for 90%+ efficiency electrolysis was recently featured on Wired and Slashdot. Maybe about two months ago, ish? Interesting stuff, as it appears that building electrodes with a huge surface area via self-organizing materials is the way to go. Neat stuff, especially for Solar (PV) Hydrogen production plant ideas.

If we care about the game world, getting a Hydrogen economy in place with solar (lots of solar), tidal (lots of tidal) wind (as much as possible), hydro, geothermal, and nuclear (pebble bed pls) production in place is what should be done.



EDIT: Speaking of Lovecraft, I ran across an interesting article just yesterday: http://arxivblog.com/?p=596
Now, this is really cool. Lovecraft postulated that alien beings had their magic because the laws of physics were different where they came from. If the fine structure constant has a stable range (i.e. isn't a constant), as it now apparently does ... incredible variation in life forms may be possible. I apologize ahead of time for any who I have now sent down the road to insanity by way of my reckless research in to the unknown

From a Nova perspective, whatever the cause of the variance ... if you can cause enough variance there may well be a mechanism in RL for a subset of 'powers'.


Also an article just popped up about a RL branch of my secret society. Naturally, this is only a front cell meant to eventually be exposed when their work writing text books and shaping the academic community was finished: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/..._Mathematicians

Ok, I'll admit that I've been away from the cutting edge for a while (just found out about the WB-6 & 7 yesterday). However, I will say that I knew about PB reactors. For my Sr. Design Project, we designed a nuclear probe to head to Pluto (back when it was still a planet), and we used a PBR to power it. I was the propulsion guy, so I can tell you whatever you want to know about a VASMIR engine, but I didn't delve into much of the powerplants.

If you are talking about solar, then it would be hard not to mention:

http://www.nanosolar.com/

Solar panels as thin as papar.

Then there is the ink-jet solar panels, the new 'paint-on' solar panels, solar panels that work at night...the list goes on. I can easily see many houses in 50 years being roofed in panels if not having their southern exposure sided in it as well...

VASMIR is good stuff. How close are they to deploying it?

Isn't the polywell stuff just the coolest? Really hope that gets enough funding. I love how Bussard put out papers on how the reactors could be used when he wasn't allowed to put out anything on the reactors themselves (skirting nicely around Navy regs).

Glad to see they've continued with the WB-7.

EDIT: For those who have no idea what we're prattling on about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
check out the google talk video on external links ... neat stuff.

Yes, VASIMR is about the coolest and best idea in new propulsion systems that I've seen. In '01/'02 they were still developing it, as one of the Sr. Design teams that year actually visited and talked with them. A'la '05/'06 I don't know if anybody's still working on it, as I heard that the contact person had moved on/been let go. Sorry.

Oh, did you hear, Bussard died last summer (I think that's when). It's his team that's continuing with the WB-7, it's basically a re-test of Bussard's findings. Currently (as of the latest article I could find on it) the results are being reviewed by the Navy before the go-ahead (probably on a break even reactor) on a larger version.

Yeah, I had heard of his passing. Brilliant fellow.

I see on wiki that Ad Astra is still working on VASMIR.

What I really want to see is laser launching, but the engineering still isn't there for it.

I read once, somewhere, an idea about lining a ScRAMJet with a radioactive material, that way, once a speed fast enough to use it was reached, the radioactive decay would provide the heat for operation instead of an injected fuel.

I know that 'radioactive' is taboo, but I'd still like to see some calculations regarding this. I think a ScRAMJet might be just the idea for a low cost SSTO.

Might be. I know that lot of nuclear thruster designs have went the way of Russian attempts and the NERVA project in the states ... the central issue being that the engines all run so hot they melt ... and they have to run hot or they aren't light enough (one of the viscious circles). There was some discussion of using a gas core which solved that (maybe?), then the only real real problem with nuclear aerospace the remains is something called Neutron Backscatter.

Essentially, the reation neutrons spill out the back of the reactor, and in dense atmospheres (>30,000m) are reflected and irradiate the crew. Shielding turned out to be too heavy. This is apparently what grounded the nuclear airplane attempts too.

EDIT: I always wished the ORION designs had got off the ground. Then again, they could never solve the fallout issues, so maybe I don't want that part. There is just something about cruising around the solar system in a two thousand ton vessel - a real space craft, not the kind of paltry things we have today.

Yeah that is what I meant by storage medium. We take energy, usually from coal or nucelear plants these days, and then apply it to extracted natural gas to isolate the hydrogen...an energy intensive task. So in a way a fuel cell is just a trasfer medium, from the initial fossil fuels. Its cleaner on the car end (if we are talking about emissions) but you still have to look at the net energy savings and the cost to extract the hydrogen. Eventually when we have a whole grid where every house is a soalr generator, every car a plug in fuel cell, and miles of unbeached coastline is hydro and offshore windfarms where the wind always blows with new advanced turnbines that can take it from any direction...then we will be able to sustainably process hydrogen and it will be truly green.

Other cool things: I did alot of research on solar cells and yeah they got really good ones now...transparent ones fro windows etc. Thats what i meant when I said every home will be a generator. Windows, roof tiles and siding will all be photovoltaic.

Also there are photoelectrochemical cells that seperate hydrogen from water in the presence of light. Very cool stuff! Now if only we had the collective political will to completely ovehaul our decrpit waste intensive infrastructure we could actually get somewhere!!!

Speaking of which, the World Game Institute placed the GENI project as its highest priority for global change. GENI stands for Global Energy Network Initiative, where lines connect across the Bering Straight so that the whole world becomes one grid, and the light half of the world powers the half that is in the darkness at any given moment.

We can do it!!!

Yeah, Solar is cool. As is Tidal and wind.

I was amazed to find out that wind could supply all of our energy needs and more. I personally like the five km high kite farm generators they are working on in Europe. Kites, great stuff!

It is amazing to think the sci-fi dream 'thruster' design (Aluminum Falcon stylz) might actually be antimatter one day. They are doing good work with pulsed lasers that will reach the energy required to 'cook' particles out of space. Some papers I glanced at suggested that separating the electron/positron pairs just after the particles cease to be virtual might be the way to generate antimatter in a cost effective manner. The nice thing about positron thrusters is that their annihalation energies are insufficient to cause secondary radiactivity ... so no 'hot' reactor lining to dispose of as waste, and no neutron backscatter.

The only thing that I have with the fuel cells, especially in cars (or other hydrogen type cars) is that they produce more of the absolute worst greenhouse gas than our current cars.

Water vapor traps more heat from the sun than all other greenhouse gasses, and these 'clean' cars will pump more of it out than ever. Talk about global warming...

Anyways, I have serious concerns about the over use of wind-farms, geothermal, tidal, and all the other 'clean' and 'renewable' resources. Has anybody even begun to calculate the change to the climate that these will have? First off, with geothermal, we're taking heat out of our planet, which cools off the core, which, to the best of our knowledge, only produces the magnetic field which protects us from being fried by the sun because it's liquid. Secondly, if we start taking all this energy out of the air and water of our planet, how is that going to effect currents, jet streams, and the over-all general climate?

And, before you start talking about infinitesimal amounts, I'll point to chaos theory, and the whole butterfly flapping --> hurricane theory.

But that's water vapor at low levels (same as the levels you get from lake, river, oceans, etc.), not high in the atmosphere where it acts as a greenhouse agent (unless I am mistaken, speaking off the cuff there )

Was always dubious of magic theories. Chaos theory is sketchy at best when applied too broadly. Very few RL situations have that kind of run on effect, or else there would be no sturcture to our universe at all, just a giant cascade of entropic energy transfer. The systems choas theroy are useful for predicting are, in my laymens understanding, mostly boundry effects where order meets chaos. Also, with regards to the chaos thery end of things, remember the Earth is not a closed system ...

Unfortunatly the whole problem of where to get our energy from is never going to be ideal, we just have to look for least impact.

Fusion would be so great, Fission could be pretty good.

Also good that we can chat about these kinds of things. Good to geek out once in a while.

Don't forget zero point energy!

Seriously though, geothermal vents are already venting to the surface. We would just capture the excess. Same with wind, it turns these turbines and goes on its way. Certainly photons don't mind being put to work!

DL you gonna be in chat? I gotta go to bed at midnight...

I can hop on. I didn't see anyone there, but I will log on now.

Well, a nice slow night at work allowed me to write for several games. Mostly this one, and so Time-Shard is coming to life. I love it when a PC comes together.