trumpelon Aims to Shoot the Moon

If you play Hearts, you’ll recognize the strategy of the USA’s current White House.

The goal of Hearts is to avoid taking points; 1 point for each of the 13 Hearts, 13 points for taking the Queen of Hearts. A player with an extremely powerful hand can skip the niceties and try to shoot the moon, to win every trick, taking the Queen and all the Hearts. Instead of hurting themselves with 26 points, they give 26 miserable points to every other player.

Shooting the moon is hard. Most of the time, at least one opponent has high Hearts or the ability to control the Queen. You’re taking a big chance, and part of what you’re gambling on is that the opponents who could stop you won’t, that they won’t be willing to take a smaller hit to prevent everyone else from taking a giant hit.

And that’s our situation in 2025 America. The hybrid entity I’m referring to as ‘trumpelon’ doesn’t control everything it needs to avoid honest elections and keep power indefinitely, but with every heavily compromised or unqualified sycophant cabinet-member that gets approved by lawmakers willing to deliberately vote away their own power, trumpelon gets closer to shooting the moon.

An enemy of the free world has taken office, and people who prefer democracy are hoping that judges, governors, military commanders, lawmakers, Republican lawmakers, and others with capacity to resist will choose to take a hit, to suffer some smaller pain resisting so that we aren’t all taking all 26 points of subjugation.

Threats of trumpelon funding campaigns to remove incumbents from office has been enough to keep Senate and House Republicans from objecting to policies they don’t agree with. It’s likely to get worse. As this article from the Guardian reports, Republicans now fear violence against themselves and their families. Pardoning the people who violently attacked the government en masse on trumpelon’s first day surely hammers that point in.

So does confirming an FBI director who seems likely to play as trumpelon’s personal police. (You can’t even say ‘secret police’ because it’s right out there in the open.)

This blog post starts with game mechanics, applies them to politics, and loops back to my own family dynamics. My Estonian refugee father never played cards, but he did study the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. His dissertation, if he had managed to write it, was about how the politicians of the Weimar Republic had capitulated when there was no need, they’d squandered the powers they possessed in hasty surrenders when Hitler’s moves were largely bluff.

So here we are again. It’s not all bluff, but it’s not all actual power, and every capitulation plays into trumpelon’s moon shot.

Johnny Reb, Dana Lombardy & Glorantha

As a younger dude who hadn’t entirely grown into game designer boots, in mid 1996 I got a job at Chaosium as Greg Stafford’s right-hand man for publishing Glorantha. Positioned on the right-hand, I learned that neither the left hand, nor the checking account, nor the pockets, nor any other chunk of Chaosium, had money to pay freelancers for work they produced within, oh, maybe three years if all went amazingly well. So, my Glorantha work was mostly about shutting projects down.

But Greg’s dream was that Giovanni Ingellis and his company, Stratelibri, from Italy, were going to produce a Glorantha miniatures game. Stratelibri hoped to challenge Warhammer, go big or stay home. But it wasn't something we could start working on at Chaosium. Giovanni wanted to design our Glorantha game, that was his dream, and in return he would fund it.

So I dove into the world of miniatures gaming. I’d already been turned on to a clever ancients/medieval game called Armati by Jon Kovalic, of all people, who for a brief time helped put out an Armati fanzine. But I’d missed the brilliantly abstracted DBA (De Bellis Antiquitas, which I still love) and its wooly ancestor (WRG 7^th Edition, which Charlie Krank & friends introduced me to in Charlie’s game garage). About the same time, Scott Schneider of Chicago introduced me to Great Battles of History, the GMT ancients wargame that plays a lot like a minis game with counters.

Closer to home in the Bay Area, Chaosium’s friend Dana Lombardy wanted to teach me to play Johnny Reb. I put him off for a little while. I believe I was thinking that a regimental American Civil War minis game wasn’t all that relevant to a supposed rival to Warhammer.

the rules at the time; these days some gamers prefer John Hill's newer rules, Across a Deadly Field

After work one day, Dana set up a giant battle (well, giant to me!) and we played for several hours. I'd played write-orders-then-execute-them wargames before, but Johnny Reb improved greatly on that model with face-down order counters executed in a timing sequence that created a dynamic battlefield. Dana was enthusiastic and helpful and wanted to help the Glorantha minis project take off. I remember the Johnny Reb game fondly. Which is ironic, because at the time I was nowhere near appreciative enough.

Dana, closer to now

I was caught up in the strange dance steps of preparing to produce a game that I wasn’t allowed to think about designing. Greg was focused on turning out orders of battle for the various combatants in the Hero Wars, particularly the Lunar Empire. (Some of this work has recently resurfaced in Martin Helsdon’s The Armies & Enemiesof Dragon Pass.) Giovanni of Stratelibri wouldn’t talk about the Glorantha minis game until I visited him in Italy. I thought that was unhelpful, but hey: free trip to Italy!

Giovanni, someone I'm glad to have met

The trip was delightful, Stratelibri were gracious hosts and just meeting and hanging out with Giovanni was splendid in a life/historical sense. But the minis business rolled a fumble. It turned out that Giovanni didn’t actually have time to design anything new, he planned to re-purpose a quirky little cyberpunk skirmish system he’d created years earlier. It hadn’t really worked as a cyberpunk game and I didn't think it was going to work as a Glorantha game. I hadn't really expected to challenge Warhammer but I'd at least hoped to take advantage of Greg’s work on the military histories of Dragon Pass. 

By the time I had returned to California, Giovanni had regretfully pulled the monetary plug because of a) problems with Magic: The Gathering; b) store expansion plans; c) knowing the Glorantha project wouldn’t work; d) choose your own adventure. That was when nearly everyone at Chaosium got laid off thanks to the Mythos over-printing disaster.

But back to Dana. He was on hand, helpful, and would have been one of the best people in the world to talk with about miniatures and wargame design. I stumbled along without recognizing that Dana’s presence in the project was a lucky penny that I should have flipped many times. On the bright side, my mistake wasted less of his time than if I'd understood what I was doing. 

You can find links to Dana’s doings here. If you grab a copy of Green Ronin’s wonderful 100 Best HobbyGames, edited by James Lowder (now of Chaosium!), Dana wrote up Johnny Reb on page 157.

Coining the Coronavirus: Terms that Might Be Useful

Cultures are going to change. Not just ours, everybody's.

I've heard a couple new uses of language and there will certainly be more. I don't expect that the terms I've started using work for anyone else, but they provide a less-boring way to talk about changes-in-progress. 

It's easy to go dark very quickly in the coronavirus hole, so this note on vocabulary is deliberately on the lighter side. That's probably helped by the fact that I'm not in on medical jargon. 

baabaas: What I'm calling ironically vulnerable populations, demographics, and politicians who have made the mistake of listening to the wrong leader, against their own survival prospects. For the term to apply, both conditions need to be present, so most applicable to elderly religious organizations and states like Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. 

bc: Before coronavirus. I've heard this used already. It feels right. I'm not at all sure that 'ac' will go anywhere, it feels more like there's a bc and a now. 

cv: Sorry, curriculum vitae, your stuff has been taken. 

cv-lite, cv-medium, heavy cv: One way to phrase the virus' levels of effect. 

  cv-lite is asymptomatic or about as much trouble as a regular cold for only a couple days. 

  cv-medium is a multi-day problem, heading into weeks, but not involving marked difficulty breathing. Maybe a little but not much. (If what I've been having this last week is actually cv, it's looking like cv-medium.) 

  heavy-cv is high fevers, trouble breathing, complications with pneumonia, and so on. In Seattle, you can maybe eventually get tested if you're in the middle of heavy-cv. 

cv-maybe: The status of suspecting you have had cv but not having been tested and therefore not likely to be sure anytime soon, as of early April in the USA. 

emissary: Someone friendly and helpful who tested positive already, survived, cleared the time limits and is now running errands and shopping for friends and family. Eventually emissary status probably needs to be extended officially into being able to return to work, but that's future-talk. For now, emissaries care for their community. 

mask-maker: Self-explanatory, but relevant to both private individuals and larger organizations like NanoLeaf. Maybe also useful to describe companies and organizations that are converting to making medical supplies instead of what they usually make. 

necromancer: Politician or pundit who argues that those most vulnerable to the virus should be willing to greatly increase their risk of death so that everyone can get back to work and keep the economy rolling. Not necessarily applicable to every scientific argument that heads this way, but definitely applicable to talk show hosts and politicians who claim they'd be willing to die to save the economy so everyone else should be too. 

returner: Version 1) Player who left a familiar roleplaying group behind because of a move or other circumstance, who is now returning to the table because everyone has to be online, not just them. 

   Version 2) Future possibility: what emissaries could become, people with antibodies against cv who get to return to wider life and helping people without worrying about spreading the disease; requires wide distribution of antibody tests and yes, hopefully science that proves that antibodies matter. 

tree-counting: Paying too much attention to the reported numbers of cases, because the forest is so much larger than the trees. Only positive tests make it into the numbers, and tests that are pending don't make it into the numbers yet, and so many people are asymptomatic. Morgues and mortuaries in the USA, at least, may be a bit of a Wild West in terms of how deaths can be classified, perhaps especially in places that don't want to have cv deaths. 

I said I'd stay on the lighter side, so I'll sign off with links to two good things. 

First, an article about communities bonding to fix problems that government isn't. 

Second, a link to the Humble Bundle of games and gaming books that's sending all its proceeds to organizations fighting cv. 

For inspiration: Archaeology magazine

The most recent issue of Archaeology magazine, November/December 2013, has four pieces I found inspirational.

An Imperial Underworld details the network of roads that cavers have been uncovering underneath Hadrian's Villa, 15 miles east of Rome. There was an upstairs/downstairs dynamic in play here, where upstairs was a world of palaces, libraries, baths, and gardens, while downstairs was a network of tunnels that kept things running smoothly and silently. The cavers recently found underground roads 19 feet wide, wide enough for ox-carts traveling both ways. I'm planning to use these ideas in Axis somewhere and I loved the hint of interplay between the enthusiastic cavers and the stuffier people running the site.

Later there's an examination of how at least one ancient Roman glass workshop mastered a type of nanoartistry, suspending gold particles in glass so that an apparently opaque cup changes color based on what light or liquid is in or behind it. Then there's a Bronze Age Mystery in which perfectly useful boats (and a couple old ones) are sunk in boggy East England rivers. Along with a few other excellent articles there's a look at ten ancient tattooing traditions. And finally, on the last page, a wonderful look at what appears to be a ceremonial shield from the Moche culture of Peru, constructed like warriors' shields but made of reeds and yellow feathers!

Definitely an issue worth looking at . . . . unless you lack the willpower to resist the magazine's bizarre medley of golden oldie and odd collectible advertisements, highlighted this month by "The only Cuckoo Clock inspired by the Wonders of Ancient Egypt."

Norman Dee-Dee-Dum

This is a picture of Lisa’s bike still showing her race tag from the triathalon she was in last summer. You’ll note the wonderful number. She normally wouldn't keep a race number around but she kept this one because really, how could she get rid of 1066?

A few weeks ago we were talking with a friend who had no idea why the number 1066 would matter. We started explaining the Norman Invasion.

“Oh man,” he said, “enough, I learned everything I wanted to know about Normandy from Saving Private Ryan.”