'The Heresy Within' — surprisingly good dark fantasy
This is fantasy without a lot of magic and without a lot of monsters: fantasy, in fact, about human beings and how they interact. Which is to say, frankly, fantasy as I like it. But it's nevertheless extremely dystopian fantasy. The civilised empire (in which the narrative spends very little time) is a theocracy where orthodoxy is policed by an all powerful inquisition; what precisely constitutes heresy isn't clear, at least from this book, but it has to do with the use of magic. Which is odd, because the inquisition are, for most of the narrative, the only people with the power to use magic. The principle protagonist is an officer of this inquisition.
The bulk of the narrative, however, is set in 'the wild', a very large area of lawless steppe nominally ruled by nine aristocratic families. In this lawless, chaotic and wartorn region, outlawry is rife. The novel follows a band of outlaws who ally with the protagonist to help him complete his quest — they have a contract to assassinate the aristocrat whom he has been sent to question.
Draft submission to the English parliament's enquiry anent Scottish land reform
Summary
In this submission I seek to argue that land in Scotland is grossly inequitably distributed, which is a public policy problem in its own right; and that, partly as a consequence of the inequitable distribution of land, our uplands have been catastrophically mismanaged, leading to a nexus of other public policy concerns. I seek to show that a progressive land tax would significantly address the first of these problems and should contribute to remedy of the remainder. However, some change in planning law is also required.
Introduction: on the basis for private land ownership
Modelling rural to urban, take two
In an earlier post, I wrote aboutmodelling the change from rural to urban, and I did so in the context of what was a grid based landscape. And that really does not work for me, because artefacts of the grid are bound to show up in the final settled landscape model, and it won't look natural. So although for height-maps I may continue to have an underlying grid — mainly because there's so much code of other people's I can re-use — I'm going back to thinking that for rivers, roads and boundaries and for point features like buildings I need to overlay what is essentially a vector map.
So, going back to populating a game world, the first generation of settlers wander the landscape moderately randomly until they find good farmland. Then they reserve themselves a long quadrilateral, not necessarily perfectly rectangular. The width of that quadrilateral is the approximate width of two building units. Why? It will become clear. The length will be approximately eight to ten building units. The quadrilateral, like a div in HTML, will be laid out with a certain padding, more at the ends, less at the sides, into which other plots may not intrude. The padding at the ends of two facing plots will naturally become a street — actors will traverse it because they may not traverse actual plots. Similarly, padding to the sides of plots will naturally become closes, wynds or alleys.
The attack burden
I have, it won't surprise you to know, a server out there on the Internet. And occasionally I do a little sweep to check its security and general health, because it is out there on the Internet, and the Internet is a pretty nasty place with lots of pretty nasty people.
Now, on my server there is only one valid login. That login requires a certificate — you cannot login with a password alone. Even once you have logged in, you cannot do anything significant in the account to which you have logged in, unless you also know the root password (although, of course, once you have logged in, brute-force guessing of the root password could be attempted). So I'm reasonably safe from attacks such as the Hail Mary Cloud.
But two things are interesting. The first is the sheer number of attempted logins. Last week I had 8322, or an average of 49 an hour, or not far shy of one a minute.
Of pigeons, and long distance messaging in a game world
However, there's more to the spread of information than news. Sometimes the player character must communicate with allies — either other players or non-player character allies — who are distant. Most current generation role playing games would introduce some magical device — a scrying mirror or whatever — which allows instant communication. But I want to radically limit the use of magic in my games, simply because an incoherent magical physics leads to an incoherent world, while any coherent magical physics which is more than trivial tends to ruin plots. The god should be lowered out of the machine only rarely, and never in plot-destroying ways.
So, messaging. How would real bronze-age or iron age heroes have communicated with distant allies? Well, one way is to send a messenger. That means hiring a non-player-character messenger that the plot gives you reason to trust. You've got to find that messenger. The round trip time is just the round trip time for a journey over the distance, which is to say thirty kilometres per day if the messenger is on foot, about 120 kilometres a day if on horseback, about 160 if by sea with a fair wind. Obviously the cost of the hire has to be enough to pay the messenger a premium over what he could earn from his normal occupation over that period, and enough in addition to cover the expenses of the trip. So it's quite slow and quite expensive. And if you want a message back you've got to agree a rendezvous point with the messenger (or a poste restante, possibly an inn), and you've got to actually get there. The messenger may also be unreliable, either in failing to deliver the message or being suborned by an opposing faction.