After spending the last eight months poking around Dark Nebula and the Aslan Hierate, I’m going to step back for a while to finish up a fairly large and exciting project that will utilize some of the material I’ve been developed here. Accordingly, I’ll be posting a little more sporadically over the summer. Most of the posts, like this one, will be miscellanies.
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I’ve been itching for another regular D&D game for the last six months, and I recently started playing in a weekly 5e game on Roll20. It’s a homebrew viking game and has been a blast so far.
We’ve got a gigantic group with three berserkers, so there’s no shortage of raging. This is my first chance to play a 5e barbarian and like all the classes I’ve tried the mechanics are simple but fun—there’s almost always something interesting to do no matter the opponent. Right now we are trying to deal with a cursed greataxe.
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A few months ago I backed the Traveller RPG Starship Miniatures kickstarter by 2nd Dynasty, which produced a series of 3D-printer files of classic Traveller ships. Ian Stead worked on many of the designs, which are really stunning.
Of course, I was sold by the inclusion of a Type U armed packet. My initial plan was to finally buy myself a 3D printer and start churning out my own models. But alas, I have been too busy working on my big project to really jump into a completely new hobby.
Fortunately, Arthiarn Gaming is an Etsy store licensed to print 2nd Dynasty designs. I ordered a copy of the armed packed in both 1-inch and 1/270 scale, and my package arrived last week.
The purchase was well worth it: the Type U can look a bit ungainly from certain angles and is best appreciated in three dimensions. The quality of both sculpts is quite high: there’s plenty of small detailing to add considerable interest to the model. And at 1/270 scale, the packet has a satisfying heft while still being able to fit comfortably in one hand.
Similarly, the quality of the print is very good, comparable to what I’ve gotten from Fantasy Forge. There were only a few bits and bobs that needed trimming, but the material is soft enough to easily work with. One small section of a wing on the 1 inch model was a little ragged, but sanded down smoothly.
I haven’t tried to paint a starship model before, and after years of painting bones, scales, blood, and ghoul flesh I’ll need to research how to do a good job with clean lines, futuristic materials, and reflective surfaces.
Being able to look at the ship in three dimensions has also made me want to revisit my deckplans for the armed packet. With Mongoose Publishing’s revised High Guard Update scheduled for release in July it might be high time to take one more crack at this ship…
Your work on the Aslan is great -- I hope people make use of these resources. Given the depth of your worldbuilding for the Hierate, I wondered what your thoughts were on a matter that I think is very important, if understated, in how the Fteirle work. Something interesting noted in the background material, though never expanded upon so far as I can tell, is that Aslan descend from solitary animals, unlike humans. This is very telling, and perhaps explains why a people so committed to quantifiable value -- how much land or wives you have (males) or tradeable wealth you command (females) -- can have such rigid adherence to abstract concepts of honour and etiquette. Humans didn't have to develop society and politics, those came inherently to us as social animals; we couldn't not have them. The Aslan, implicitly, had to construct them. Civilization and society is to Aslan as consciousness is to Hivers: something they had to make, not something they were burdened with. Given this interpretation -- are Aslan always afraid of what happens if they lose their framework for society? While having Solomani drive, they also have the Vilani’s obsession with ensuring a homogenous, closed system of tradition (they had their own Consolidation Wars, and it’s fascinating to consider that their nation might be on a wide orbit of divergence through forced conformity, back to divergence, currently being shortly removed from the conformity peak.) Conservative and rigid culturally, even as they sprawl across space with no real unified government, just clan systems.
ReplyDeleteI think you've hit on an important tension within Aslan between powerful individual drives (mates, territories, offspring) and powerful cultural restrictions channeling those drives into very specific expressions and outlets. I think without the two components Aslan society would either fly into chaos of every Aslan for him- and her-self, or complete and total stagnation. Balance is often described as a central Aslan value, and when Aslan society is out of balance bad things happen.
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