KDM Lantern Year 2

     I forgot to mention in my last post that we rolled up 6 survivors at Hearth bringing our grand total to 10 and located the Vibrant Lantern (+1 accuracy).

Anyway on to our first hunt for a level 1 white lion!

Loadout: we loaded our armor, lanterns and bone axe on Lucy aiming to make the most of her +1 strength and penchant for critical wounds. Zachary and Ezra got the default loadout while newcomer Simone picks up our bone darts. The idea is to keep growing Lucy and start fresh with the undamaged Simone. Zachary and Ezra we hope for the best but are more sacrificial should the situation arise.

Hunt:
It was pretty short and sadly uninteresting as Zachary got lost loosing all of his 0 survival and the scent making a short hunt even shorter. We didn't realize it at the time but getting a few light wounds here would be clutch especially one to Zachary's arms

Showdown:
Well the lion made up for his kin right away by immediately running up and inflicting the two woulds to trigger a severe injury on Zachary. A one on the die seals his fate and he's gone. This sets up Lucy to start hacking away at it from the rear. While not at critical wound happy as against the first she manages to get another to the hand and nets another strength. Somehow she manages to avoid triggering the trap creating steady damage though the fight. Simone falls back and starts flinging darts ineffectually scoring one hit over the entire battle to the mane. Ezra however takes a pounding taking a critical and loosing a speed,  jumping up to insane and at the end drug off on her own.

Settlement:
Getting back to the settlement we get the scream and nominate Lucy who manages to gather enough courage to advance and pick up matchmaker and another point of strength! This is huge as she's at 3 strength she's more likely to wound than not even with tooth and claw. As we now have the Catarium we look at the goods decide she's perfect for the white lion set with her natural strength making daggers or katar's devastating. But for now she's getting our competed rawhide armor until we can get her the gear. Hunting the screaming antelope will have to wait until she's set up. Our innovation was drums which we try with both our remaining endeavors and fail pushing Ezra to a terrifying 9 insanity.

KDM Lantern Year 1

The Kingdom Death Monster Kickstarter first attracted my eye back when I was first dating my finance. We invested and spent much good time deciding which of the gorgeous miniatures to get. Finally we ended up getting all the expansions and a few of the promos. After years of waiting the base game finally arrived and since it's my little corner of the net I'm going to use this blog to document our travails and hopefully success. Since so much ink has already been spilled on the amazing miniatures I'll not retread that ground no matter how much how I concur.

So without further ado:

In our first lantern year we named our group per the classic team Allister, Zachary, Ezra, and Lucy. As we have the promo cards Dying Lantern and Vibrant Lantern we rolled off and gave the Dying Lantern to Allister, the character depicted in the introductory story. The Dying Lantern is a nice piece of gear no affinities and grants +1 dodge. It's not really powerful until you can start stacking enough dodge to make it hard for the monsters to hit. If we can get to the point where monsters start missing more than hitting I expect it to be amazing. Sadly in the first lantern year it did absolutely nothing.

The fight went quite well for our survivors. We suffered only two bleeding tokens Zachary lost his ability to use survival and Ezra picking up the disorder seizures. But luck definitely favored the ladies especially Lucy who snagged a point of strength. Between the two of them the first lion was reduced by two speed when it finally used it's knockback attack and split the party. We laughed and pelted it with half our Founding Stones as it tried to move far enough to get any of us. We finished it off in melee.

We got amazingly lucky on the rewards with two critical wounds granting extra resources and drawing the one that can be converted to two giving us an amazing 11 resource cards for the settlement phase.

Going to our new settlement now know as Haven we selected Allister to get the bonuses taking him out for the next session. We built the base buildings and picked the innovation Inner Lantern. We got so much gear; Bone Axe, Bone Darts, and most of the Rawhide set, gloves, boots headband and vest.

Next time our first full hunt.

Review: Fate Stay Night

After having read favorable reviews, getting positive comments from acquaintances, and discovering it's popular enough to have manga and an anime made from it, I decided to try the visual novel Fate Stay Night by Type Moon. Like all visual novels it plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book with special effects and a mostly linear path. Despite the limited game side of it, as many options are A or B and B gets you killed or false choices where your choice makes no difference, it made a pretty interesting if long winded story for the first third to half of the game. I was beginning to really enjoy the story and characters. And then the game went H. It totally blindsided me. I should of paid more attention to those reviews I suppose. Sadly, this is also the point the game finally veered too far into typical anime tropes that I dislike, such as an over-important useless male lead, absurd gender roles, and stupid heroism without an accompanying price. I went ahead and pushed though to the end having to endure the increasing standardization of the plot. It's too bad too, I enjoyed the tantalizing subversion suggested in the early plot. Overall it makes the equivalent of a decent manga which already exists.

The British Industrial Revolution by Robert C Allen

This book tries to explain in explicit detail why the industrial revolution started in Great Britain and how it happened. In a nutshell Britian had relatively high wages with very cheap energy; coal. This created a demand for labor saving devices. On the supply side Britian had a highly educated population with a large population hub in London to disperse the knowledge. Now the book itself takes nearly 300 pages to make this argument and all the supporting details really strengthen the case and there are thorough deconstructions of other major theories. Overall Allen does an excellent job of making his case. I highly recommend this book if you want to know more on how the industrial revolution started.

Science a Four Thousand Year History

I recently finished reading this title by Patricia Fara. It appears the point of the work's goal is to deconstruct the story of Science. For example it takes big names in science such as Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus and discusses how they did things in a way no longer considered scientific, self promoting, or were one of many discovering something. It goes a to great detail into the importance and process of selling scientific memes and the great battles between ideas such as heat being motion or a fluid that flowed into or out of things. The roots of modern science in the now rejected fields such as alchemy and astrology are also discussed at length. A lot of time is spent on illustrating the biases of science towards, upper-class European males.
It is surprising that the scientific method was more or less ignored as its adoption is critical in how current science works, evolves, and self-corrects.

I found the book unsatisfying perhaps because I've never felt science can answer everything; science is great for how thing work but flounders with why which philosophy and religion seem better suited. It just appears similar to perspective of religious adherent who discovered their organization is like any other; imperfect. The conclusion feels a tad incomplete. After deconstructiong the weakness of science and the woldview, not mentioning any other potential viewpoints or calling for reform seems well uninspiring especially after discussing in depth the importance of selling ones ideas.

Transience

Greater North America, The Combine, UCAS, USoNC, The Union,

By many names and many iterations it's common in Science Fiction to have the USA annex Canada in the least through the western hemisphere completely. Never mind that annexing even Canada would be prohibitively expensive to synchronize. My theory is USA size is increased to be representative of how big the country looms in the imagination and to show how much more powerful this future form is. It also allows for narrowing the players in the story. Major nations such as Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia and Argentina can be safely ignored despite the sizable power they represent, and greater potential, on the world stage. On the other hand these worlds usually have the EU as a unified nation and often a pan-African or Arabian Superstate as well so it may just be an attempt to keep the USA up to speed with it's rivals.

What is Science?

Science seems very misunderstood by the general public. Usually when portrayed in media "scientists" are dogmatic priests of the religion of science. "That's not scientifically possible" is the antithesis of scientist with solid observations.

Science is a very simple process: Observe - Conjecture - Predict - Test

Observation
Observation seems straightforward however the key aspects are precision and repetition. Seeing something, say a spaceship once from hundreds of miles away in a fog is a much less trustworthy observation than seeing your spouse next to you everyday.

Conjecture
Conjecture is a guess at why the observation occurred.


Predict
Prediction is essentially that if this theory is accurate what else, untested, will be true. One of the most impresive examples of this comes from Dmitri Mendeleev who used his periodic table to predict many of the qualities of germanium, gallium and scandium which had yet to be discovered.

Test
Evolution happens to be one of the strongest theories in science stronger than Newtons Laws of Gravity. Quantum mechanics were needed to replace gravity in the realm of the very small. In addition many of the smartest minds in the world have been trying for over 100 years to specifically to disprove evolution. In a proper scientific environment other people who often disagree with you will try to actively disprove your results.

This is why string theory is not really scientific, it's just not currently testable. The math is beautiful but without a way to test it is pretty much just beautiful math and philosophy. This is part of the reason why so many proponents are big on supercolliders. They need the evidence.

Now within that framework there a a few generally accepted goals:
Parsimonious: simplest explanation. eg gravity being a bunch of strings between every object in the universe and each other

Predictive: This serves as the most powerful evidence of a theory. If it can predict what will happen in other untested thing and is accurate it indicates the theory is robust

Testable: This is why science and religion grind on each other. The divine is specifically non-testable. Ah well, what sort of divine being is cruel enough to give us a way to interpret a world consistently and then expect us to ignore that ability.

Provisional: No science is proper if it cannot be updated in the face of new evidence.

Science does make some assumptions. Mainly that reality is a cohesive place in which observations can be consistent and the physical laws of reality don't change randomly.