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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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(Quote) Interesting. Could you say more about this? What did you find different? Was the older interaction better or worse than you'd expect in modern times (whether in life or in a fictional portrayal)?
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(Quote) Isn't that similar to other situations with fixed times ("the ritual will be completed at midnight!"), or travel with timetables ("there are only two trains per day to the next city")? If time and location are important …
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(Quote) "Sensible" is probably the wrong word. "Believable" or "justifiable" might be better. I'm trying to express the notion that the character, actually living in the world, knows much more than the player does about…
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(Quote) I can't see anyone attempting military invasion of the UK. I can see the possibility of subversion, economic aggression, and a take-over of the apparatus of power.
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Good gaming relies on the players making interesting decisions. For RPGs, I'd go further and say that good RPG gaming relies on the players making interesting decisions that are based in the character. With travel, its difficult to make the decisio…
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Reliable, long-distance communication is still difficult. Social media means that all sorts of incomplete and conflicting reports come out of an ongoing event. Hostile actors can make it worse by injecting false stories and spreading misinformation.…
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(Quote) Thanks for explanation. I agree with most of your analysis of Carruthers's change in the book. But I don't see much in the book that supports your final assertion, that he is forever an outsider. The frame story for the novel has an editor c…
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Games like The One Ring and Ryuutama make travel a significant part of the game, but mainly as a resource-depletion activity. Difficult travel can leave people tired or injured, putting them at a disadvantage at the destination. Travel may also thro…
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The terrain is a major factor in the book, and the story mostly comes out of the terrain and its military implications. What I thought was missing was the element of danger in it. As I said elsewhere, there's very little jeopardy coming from the ter…
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I don't mind that there's no fighting, but the book lacked immediate tension and stakes for most of it. Even the tensest scene, Carruthers eavesdropping on the conference, didn't have much risk of discovery or close scrapes. Similarly, the duel of w…
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In terms of protagonists, the outstanding thing for this book is that they were to some extent "everyman" characters. No great talents or training, and the privilege they had was purely to allow them to muck around in boats for a few weeks…
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I don't think there's as much interest in an invasion by another nation: it's a less credible threat, and that kind of European imperial ambition was of its time. Threats in the current zeitgeist are more like the typical Bond villains: attacks on …
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I liked the initial contrast between Carruthers and Davies, the upper-class entitled twit against the entitled adventurer. Carruthers's transformation was a little too large to be believable, but it set up a decent set of actions in the second half …
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I didn't mind the descriptions of sailing, as they fed directly into the decisions the characters were making, and how they interacted with the people and setting around them. It's not like the long meandering digressions of Moby Dick. As for the p…
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It was an attempt to be a thriller, but it wasn't very thrilling. There was some activity, but no immediate stakes for any of it. And it's not even to say it's a book of its time; stories by Conan Doyle and Haggard are more thrilling than this one. …
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Well into it. Should be able to join in.
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(Quote) Sounds a bit like the Battlestar Galactica game. That one has the twist that some of the characters are randomly assigned to be enemy agents. Some are assigned part-way through the game!
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(Quote) Which is why I interpret the ending as the dying hallucinations of the passengers aboard the train, as they're consumed by various plants in the quarantine zone.
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(Quote) Or not enough? I don't think this book was as good as the film.
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(Quote) Please remind us of them.
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(Quote) I don't think that ruleset went into injuries in any more detail than normal: we were focused on firefighting and rescue. A lot of these games use the idea from Fight Fire of treating the threats as monsters and the rescue incident mechanic…
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Thanks for explaining that. And yes, I agree with the privileged place violence has in RPGs (and culture more generally). In another RPG community I'm in, someone ran a game of First Responders (emergency response people). Some people were surpris…
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I came across this article on the disagreements about "what is artificial general intelligence?" : https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/agi-may-be-impossible-to-define-and-thats-a-multibillion-dollar-problem/
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(Quote) The Third Class passengers were still passengers, not servants working their passage. And all passengers were subservient to the crew on the train. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. It's a steam-era train, so of course it will have diff…
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One major failing with the technical part of the writing. I share @Apocryphal 's opinion that the characters weren't clearly distinguished on the page. The characters were all different people (to me), but the voice in the chapters wasn't distinct. …
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I also thought the ending was weak. It was the literary equivalent of the "fade to silence" way some pop songs end. The train just ... carried on going, and the Wastelands change just carried on. I'd have liked a more definitive end to the…
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I was disappointed that she set up these different ways of understanding the world, but didn't interrogate or challenge them. I don't know whether she had something to say about them, then ducked the issue, or just added people like Petrovitch becau…
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(Quote) But do our perceptions of people change when their name (or the name we use) changes? Do we think about Suzuki differently from the Cartographer? Do we think about the Professor differently from Artemis? When is their role more important tha…
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Yes, things were carrying regardless. The train was moving, the ecology was asserting itself, the future and adulthood were coming anyway. But most of the people there chose to open themselves to those experiences, and they chose how they behaved in…
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I also picked up on the similarities with The Girl with all the Gifts, but didn't mention it mainly because I couldn't remember the title! As for the different metaphors, do you think any of the alternatives are worthwhile to consider? Does the boo…