By Deputy Editor Sergeant Frosty.
Look - no opposable thumbs.
Well, it’s the weekend. The meat-sack Editor has been complaining how stressful the case that he’s sitting in judgement on is. Obviously, he can’t say anything about the case other than that it isn’t a case that showcases humanity at its best. “Sickening” is the most he can say about it. He’s liable to be a little ratty when the case is over.
That means that I get to continue my rain of terror on this blog, and I expect to start seeing some fan mail. You ought to be grateful a Snow Marine has stepped into the breach.
Have you any idea how hard it is to type when you just have a lump of snow for a hand, and no fingers? I’ll come back to that point later.
Yesterday, we looked at tabletop roleplaying games (and not bedroom role-playing, which is – I’m told – subtly different). The full discussion can be found HERE, but the highlights include:
M_Kresal suggested:
H.G. Wells became a noted early author of game scenarios in the mid to late 1890s. The Chronoauts saw players thrown forward into the future by a temporal device, with the Scenario Master using Wells’ guidelines to have them either defend the Eloi from the Morlocks or join forces with the subterranean brutes to recover humanity’s lost future inheritance. Players who attempted to return with it to the present would instead be betrayed by the Morlocks who would seek domination over the Earth both in the present and future. The popularity of the latter ending inspiring Wells follow-up The War of the Times, which saw players facing the tripod clad Morlocks as they invaded Victorian Britain.
I'm partly surprised that I can't find any trace of combining Morlocks and Martians before now. It may well exist, but I've not run across it.
And Stateless noted:
Given Dungeons and Dragons was majorly influenced by The Lord of the Rings, Victorian RPGs would draw on different inspirations. The Matter of Britain, particularly the Arthurian cycle. Greek myths. The Prose and Poetic Eddas.
But maybe the book that would spark it would be Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, a book that launched the first ever science convention (the Vril-Ya Bazaar and fete) (and Bovril).
Interesting thoughts involved, and H Rider-Haggard is a good call for inspiration.
*****
I said I would come back to the issue of fingers and opposable thumbs. For today’s challenge, I want you to consider the fact that humanity descended from apes, Bishop Wilberforce notwithstanding.
Soapy Sam, Bishop of Oxford. Argued against Evolution.
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Imagine a world in which it wasn’t apes, or wasn’t only apes, that walked the Sapiens Path, but some other (or possibly multiple) creatures such as cats, dogs, badgers, or rabbits.
Incidentally, I have seen a line of thought that this applies in a lot of the sub-Tolkien fantasy, harking back to yesterday’s discussion. It was suggested that:
Cats – fastidious, aloof, self-contained, sometimes cruel, and graceful (Ed: check this last) clearly evolve into proto-Elves.
Dogs – being pack animals with a strict dominance structure, pack hunters and with imperfect hygiene protocols, are clearly proto-Orcs, which explains the traditional antipathy between elves and orcs.
Badgers – burrowing animals who are stubborn, squat, and aggressive clearly develop into proto-Dwarves.
Rabbits – being burrowers who are inclined to generate an ecologically unsound number of offspring (see Samwise Gamgee’s family tree) are proto-Hobbits.
But that was just a whimsical thought. I fully expect you lot to come up with some brilliant insights.
Discuss them HERE.
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