{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards....", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/83569507875/", "html": "

So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.

First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it\u2019s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone\u2019s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.

Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don\u2019t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s written well enough that you\u2019ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that\u2019ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.

Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the \u201890s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.

But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn\u2019t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn\u2019s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.

I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don\u2019t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant\u2019s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.

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