Just The Caffeine Talking

Island of Lost Games: Epiphany

Throughout the history of roleplaying as a hobby, there have been attempts to remove the dice from the games. The argument usually goes something like this: real life isn't random, at least not on the scales at which humans act in day-to-day life. Events have causes. So why do we roll dice to see if a skilled warrior can hit someone with a sword?

A second argument comes from storytelling: if the events of the story are determined randomly, then what's the point? (Signor Calvino, please sit down and stop trying to interrupt!)

So ever since the 1970s there have been attempts to create "diceless" roleplaying games. They have met with mixed success. The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game system works pretty well and has a dedicated fan base, but even fans of the game agree that its system is tied to a specific type of fictional subgenre (fantasy intrigue), and wouldn't be as useful for something like Conan-esque sword and sorcery adventures.

The big problem is overcoming the inherent determinism in a diceless game. In the Amber books by Roger Zelazny, the character Benedict really is the greatest warrior — not just in the Universe, but in all possible universes. So in that setting, it's perfectly right and proper for the Gamemaster to resolve a battle between anyone else and Benedict with "You fight. He wins." Contrast that to the duels between equals or near-equals in The Three Musketeers: the question of who will win is always in doubt, a source of tension. Having the GM simply state "Rochefort has a higher Fencing rating so he beats you" would be unsatisfying.

So the big question for game designers is how to create a diceless system which still preserves uncertainty and tension? Well, that question was answered more than twenty years ago in 1995. It's called Epiphany, by Greg Porter.

Epiphany looks like a throwback to the first generation of roleplaying games. It's a 48-page stapled softcover with decent interior art (though more nipple-rings are on display than one would have seen in the original Dungeons & Dragons). The typeface is slightly goofy, in the tradition of mid-1990s desktop publishing, but one can actually read it, so no points off there.

The setting of Epiphany is pretty neat: it's set in the warm Arctic lands surrounding the giant hole at the North Pole which leads into the interior of the Hollow Earth, at some time during the last Ice Age. The entire region is called Hyperborea, and encompasses the kingdoms of Atlantis (inhabited by sorcerous quasi-Aztecs), Lemuria (Vikings), Mu (kind of intermediate between the two). All of them have a mix of pulp-fiction super-science, magic, and steampunk technology. Adventurers can travel to remote regions in their flying machines, but defend themselves with swords and muzzle-loading firearms.

Given the small size of the game book, setting information amounts to only ten pages or so, and is necessarily done in broad strokes. To actually run this game one would have to borrow liberally from Phil Masters's GURPS Atlantis, M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, and Jeff Combos's Hollow Earth Expedition.

But that's not where Epiphany really shines. The strength of this game is in its diceless mechanics.

Characters start with one Attribute and two Abilities, and can gain more by taking Burdens. Attributes are chosen from a list of a dozen, grouped into Physical (Strength, Physique, Agility, and Endurance); Mental (Perception, Intelligence, Charisma, and Will); and Spiritual (Aura, Insight, Faith, and Serenity). These are not at all "granular" — if you have even 1 point in the Strength attribute that means you're notably stronger than other people.

Abilities are more free-form, like "Good Looks" or "Swordplay." The player relates his Abilities to an Attribute, though it's up to the player to justify which Attribute controls the Ability: a cunning thief could have the "Lockpicking" Ability linked to Intelligence, while another rogue could attach the same Ability to his Agility.

Characters can also have Boons, which are either social advantages or supernatural abilities, and can have Tools, which are pretty self-explanatory.

When resolving an action, the player totals up the Attributes, Abilities, and Tools his character is using. If that total is higher than the difficulty of the task (as set by the Gamemaster) then the character succeeds. Simple enough.

But when there's someone opposing the character, then it's a Challenge, and that's when things get interesting. Combat is an obvious Challenge: the players both total up their relevant advantages (Strength, Agility, swordsmanship, armor, a sword, and perhaps some situational advantages like "fighting with the sun at my back" or "ambush").

The two combatants allocate their respective advantages between attack and defense. This is done secretly, then both sides reveal at once. If one character's attack is greater than the other's defense, he scores a hit and the loser must abandon one advantage. So if my character is using his Agility, his Fencing ability, and a sword, I must decide which one to lose. I sacrifice Agility (the fight is wearing my character down), so the next round the character only has two advantages to use instead of three.

What makes it interesting is the secret allocation step: you don't know in advance if your foe is going to fight defensively, go for an all-out attack, or try to balance between the two. And he doesn't know what you're going to do, either! So an incredibly good fighter, with all the personal and material advantages, could still get hit by a novice if the rookie puts all his advantages into offense. Sure, the rookie's going to get hit, too — ability and equipment do give one an edge, after all — but the outcome isn't preordained, so there's still a place for tension.

It's a really neat system, and would adapt very easily to live-action roleplaying games as well, especially games where one-on-one combats are an important element, like The Three Musketeers or feudal Japan. Unfortunately, I've never seen any copies other than the one I bought directly from Greg Porter one year at Gen-Con. It's one of the greatest advances in roleplaying game mechanics and nobody's ever heard of it.

Maybe this 'blog post will change that. Maybe people will suddenly wake up and realize what they've been missing. Maybe they'll have an . . . Epiphany.

 

If you want to see my own works about strange creatures in exotic lands, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Tales of Gargentihr

This may rival Droids as the most obscure game on the Island of Lost Games. Tales of Gargentihr was published in 1994 by Sanctuary Games, a startup game company based in Scotland.

Unfortunately, that meant that Tales of Gargentihr hit the market precisely when the initial success of Magic: the Gathering sucked all the oxygen out of the game business. Distributors and retailers weren't interested in anything but card games, and for a while it seemed that customers didn't want anything else, either. Some roleplaying game publishers managed to ride out the crisis — and a handful profited handsomely by making their own card games before the bubble burst — but there were a lot of casualties. Game Designers' Workshop, the publishers of Traveller and a host of superb wargames, bit the dust in 1996, and even the mighty TSR itself wound up getting purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

The collapse of the roleplaying industry in the mid-1990s was especially sad because that era was one of great creativity and innovation. The first generation of gamers who had grown up playing D&D were out of college, ready to start publishing their own ideas. The availability of personal computers and the rise of what was once called "desktop publishing" meant that anyone with a cool idea and not enough capital could (and did) publish a roleplaying game. There were dozens of small game publishers, and they all got swept away as the card games vacuumed up all the money and then the distributors and retailers who had over-expanded went out of business.       

But back to Tales of Gargentihr. I bought that game as the result of a review by Phil Masters in a little magazine called Interactive Fantasy. Phil has very nicely reposted that review on his own Web site, with commentary. I don't remember if I ordered it through my local game store, or direct from the publisher (there was no such thing as Amazon or RPGNow in those days).

The actual product is substantial: a 344-page softcover book, printed on European A4 paper so it gets crushed when you store it in the same box as your 11-inch American products, with the traditional page-losing British paperback glue. The color cover art is not bad, while the interior black and white drawings are at least competent. (One of the often-overlooked benefits of our online culture is that it used to be really hard for a small publisher to find competent artists. That's why so many old games look like they were illustrated by the author's friend from high school. You couldn't go to Deviantart or wherever and look for someone with talent.)

In those pre-Open Game License days, every new game had to have its own game mechanics, so about a third of the book is devoted to character generation, combat rules, and general game mechanics. The rules are rather clunky: if you're using a particular skill, you have to cross-reference your skill level with the difficulty of the task on a table (with white numbers on a black background, no less) to find the target number; you then roll a die and must get equal to or less than the target to succeed. Combat uses the same mechanics, with an interesting wrinkle: the attacker chooses the difficulty level of the "task" of attacking, which then affects how hard it is to defend against that attack and how much damage it does.

Character creation is history-based: the player rolls attributes and then works through the character's past life, going through family background, apprenticeships, travel, and employment. The result is that starting characters are seasoned adventurers with connections, plot hooks, and backstory firmly in place.

The greatest aspect of Tales of Gargentihr is its unique and original setting, which spills over into character classes. There are no wizards; the closest thing are "Kyromancers" who look like the Borg from Star Trek and rely on magic crystal technology to keep themselves from fading out into the spirit realm. There are steampunk/clockpunk scientist-engineers, but a lot of their "science" is effectively magic, too. And there are herbalist-shaman types, but their magic seems to rely heavily on knowledge of obscure plants and animals.

The game setting takes up most of the book, and is so weird and interesting that I can barely summarize it here. We're on the continent of Gevuria (and continents in/on Gargentihr float on seas of silt, constantly moving together and then drifting apart), which is currently dominated by a kinda-Victorian, kinda-Elizabethan nation of colonists called the Karro. They in turn lord it over the kinda-Japanese natives, the Ha'esh (and let's just state here for the record that this entire game would be vastly improved if someone had removed the apostrophe key from the author's Macintosh). As the Karro home continent drifts away, the two races have to build a hybrid society of their own.

Vast chunks of the continent are still unknown, home to various humanoid and non-human races. You can do Great White Explorer adventures in the wilderness one week, then switch to Dickensian London intrigues in the coastal cities of the Karro the next. Player-characters are all assumed to be members of a secretive do-gooder organization called the "Clondis," but it's unclear exactly why that should be so.

There is a strong "because it's cool" aspect to the world of Gargentihr. We've got pirates and urban Mafia types in beat-up top hats, priests and cyborg-wizards, gladiators and boffins, with a mix of Victorian and Elizabethan technology. Now, "because it's cool" isn't a bad rubric for creating a roleplaying game world, and Tales of Gargentihr manages the remarkable feat of actually being cool.

But my Tolkeinian soul is a little irked by the odd mix of familiar and strange. Why not just call these top-hatted steampunk/clockpunk colonialists "Englishmen" and have done with it? And then you can call their swords "swords" and their pants "pants" instead of using setting-specific neologisms.

Tales of Gargentihr could have been a great game, but it came out twenty years too soon. It would be perfect as a contemporary e-book, possibly using the Pathfinder rules to allow for a bigger pool of customers. I don't know who owns the rights to it nowadays, but it wouldn't be hard to bring Tales of Gargentihr back, and I think it would find a surprising welcome.

 

If you want stories of explorers and lowlifes, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

We Have A Situation Here

Most roleplaying games display a curious paradox. The player-characters, the ones controlled by the players, are literally the only people in the game setting with free will, yet they tend to show a crippling lack of agency. Player-characters are forever getting hired by bossy patrons, handed orders by their commanders, or being assigned quests by passive-aggressive wizards.

There's the so-called "sandbox" style of play, in which the player-characters wander around a setting having encounters, but in practice that often devolves into either a series of muggings, or desperate flailing as the players look for some obvious adventure hook. Many game systems have "random adventure generators" but most of those could more accurately be called "mission generators" — ways to randomly determine what the bossy NPCs are telling the heroes to do.

Surely there must be a way to create adventures which aren't pre-scripted, preserving player agency, without leaving them with nothing to do except kill everyone they meet. I decided to come up with a way to randomly generate situations in the game setting, situations which could then be used to create adventures.

I began with George Polti's famous "36 Dramatic Situations" and then reduced the list based on what kind of physical actions the characters are likely to perform. So Polti's situation 3 (Vengeance for a crime) is physically the same as his situation 4 (Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred): both involve killing or punishing someone.

Some of Polti's situations seem more like "backstories" to me: his situation 16 (Madness) isn't really a situation in itself but rather the potential cause of others (perhaps 2: Deliverance, or 19: Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized). The same applies to his 17 (Fatal imprudence) or 32 (Mistaken Jealousy). So those get dropped.

Since players make the moral choices for their characters, some of Polti's situations involving self-sacrifice or the consequences of bad choices don't really apply. My players may want to sacrifice themselves to save another . . . or they may run away. So those drop off the list. (Note that self-sacrifice is a theme of games like Delta Green, but that still can't be the hook for an adventure. Rather, it's an "emergent property" of the setting and the situation.)

Once you start this kind of reduction it's hard to stop. I finally managed to boil Polti's list down to a dice-friendly list of six situations.

So: how do we apply this list to a roleplaying game? Simple. Pick one non-player character or creature in the setting — if there's a random encounter table, just roll a die. That's person or element "A." Roll on the Situation Generator Table below. For additional elements (B, C, etc.) roll again on your encounter table or pick from the list of NPCs. Inanimate objects (represented on my table by "X") can be whatever seem appropriate, or possibly rolled on whatever "random treasure table" your game system features.

Now, notice that these aren't "missions." Simply because A wants object X doesn't mean A is going to hire the player-characters to get it. Maybe A is trying to steal it and the heroes have to protect it. Maybe the heroes learn of A's desire and can use that as leverage to get something they want from A. Maybe they will try to rob A's lair while A is away trying to get X. Whatever.

Generating situations rather than missions means the players can decide how to react. This puts more agency back in their hands — and frees the Gamemaster from the drudgery of shepherding the players along the path of a scripted adventure scenario.

Situation Generator Table (roll 1d6):

1. A desires B: Someone wants to win the love, loyalty, or services of another; or help that person escape from danger. There may be a guardian (C) who wants to keep B away from A, or a rival who also desires B.
2. A wants to capture B: Someone wants someone else alive, but that person resists. There may be a person C who wants to prevent this, or a rival who is also trying to catch B.
3. A wants B dead: Or ruined, or exiled, or whatever. Again, there may be guardians for B, rivals who also want B dead, or someone who wants to take B alive.
4. A wants to go someplace: This is either an escape (in which case there's some person B who wants to keep A from leaving), a journey (in which case there are encounters along the way), or an intrusion or attack into a place (in which case B may be guarding the destination).
5. A wants to solve a mystery: There is a secret A doesn't know; possibly some person (B) is trying to keep A from finding it out.
6. A wants X: Someone wants a thing. Its location may be unknown. It may belong to someone else (B). There may be a rival (C) who also wants it.

Worked example: to show the Situation Generator in action, let's turn to the venerable Dungeon Master's Guide for the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, by the mighty Gary Gygax himself. Consulting the random encounter tables for Rough terrain in a temperate climate*, I roll a 63: a Gynosphinx. Then rolling on my own Situation Generator I get a 2: A wants to capture B. I roll again on the random encounter table and get a 73: a Troll.

So the Sphinx wants to capture a Troll. How does this affect the player-characters? If they encounter the Sphinx she may bargain with them, asking if they've seen her quarry or demanding their help. They may simply see the Sphinx searching. If they run into the Troll it may beg for help hiding from the Sphinx, or offer to pay the heroes for protection. Perhaps they'll decide to capture the Troll themselves and trade it to the Sphinx for treasure or information.

Things can get very interesting once the Gamemaster has generated multiple situations in the same area. A second set of rolls for that same patch of Rough terrain indicates that some Orcs are looking for a magical Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, which is currently guarded by a Wraith (evidently in a tomb). The Sphinx might know where that tomb is hidden. And why do the Orcs want the bowl?

I'm probably not the first person to take this approach to adventure generation, but I've made good use of it in games I've been running, and as always the random table makes a good spur to creativity. I'd love to hear feedback about this — has anyone else used a similar method? Are there situations I missed?

*God, this takes me back . . . 

 

For more situations from my brain, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Kitchen Report: Sous Vide

I know, I know: I'm about ten years late to the party on this one. Sous vide cooking techniques have become universal in the restaurant business, and probably half of the "foodies" in North America have a sous vide gadget sitting in a kitchen drawer somewhere. I'm a late adopter: I prefer to let other people get the bugs out of things before I take them up.

If you're even later to the party than I am, sous vide is a method of cooking which uses food vacuum-sealed in plastic bags (though you can do a perfectly adequate job of vacuum-sealing with a zip-lock bag and your lungs). The bag is then immersed in a water bath which is kept at a precise temperature. (The availability of cheap electronic thermostats in recent years moved it from high-tech cookery to something you can do at home.)

The process allows for very long, slow cooking of meats to exactly the desired level of done-ness. When meal time arrives, the meat can be quickly seared in a pan or flash-broiled to give it a proper Maillard-reaction exterior crust. You don't have to balance time and temperature to get the interior properly done without overcooking the outer layers.

One reason I was late to the party is that sous vide is always promoted as a way to cook steak. But since my preferred steak is essentially "beef sushi" I never saw the point. It's already done as much as I want inside; it comes that way straight from the cow.

Nevertheless, my tech-loving wife gave me a sous vide cooking device (it's a thermostat, an immersion heater, and a circulating pump, but there's no good name for the whole thing) for our anniversary. Events intervened this summer, so we only really got to start playing around with it in the past couple of weeks.

She used it to prepare a hanger steak, but neither of us could tell the difference between a "vided" hanger steak and a regular one. (See the remarks about "beef sushi" above.) I was starting to think it was all hype, but resolved to give it a fair test. So I bought a four-pound chuck roast, put it in a gallon ziplock back with a couple of minced garlic cloves, some salt and pepper, and some rosemary, then put it in the water bath at 135 Fahrenheit for six hours. Shortly before dinnertime I took it out of the bag and seared it, then cut slices.

I was expecting something like pot roast, but the interior was still quite pink. Effectively I had a four-pound steak on my hands. The long low-temperature soak had converted most of the connective tissue to gelatin so it was quite tender (though not "fork-tender" as one of the recipe sites I looked up claimed). The fat was mostly un-rendered, so it was wonderfully moist. (Indeed, after six hours of cooking there was no more than a couple of tablespoons of juice in the bag.) Delicious, really. I'd guess that among the three of us we must have put away a third of it — though I must point out that one of us is a growing fourteen-year-old.

We discussed other things to cook in the same way. Vegetables don't seem to be high on anyone's sous vide list, if only because you really do have to get close to boiling to make most of them tender, and long low-temperature cooking doesn't really do much for the flavor. It would also be tricky for any stew-like dishes (boeuf bourguignon, ragout, curry, etc.) since they also contain vegetables. Although it would be great for keeping a pre-cooked dish like that ready at serving temperature . . . which of course is what many restaurants do nowadays.

It seems that it's better to think of sous vide not as a cooking method but as a pre-cooking technique, analogous to marinating. Use it to prepare the meat before you actually cook it. I've got some ideas I'd like to try: cooking a leg of lamb in the water bath all day and then finishing on the grill with some aromatic woods, or possibly a pork loin. I'm very nervous about using this method for poultry, however. It may take me a while to work up the nerve to try that.

So, the final verdict: cooking meat sous vide works very well. I'll be doing it again.

 

For stories involving beings made of meat, buy my new ebook, Monster Island Tales!

Island of Lost Games: Nephilim

Nephilim, published by Chaosium in 1994, is one of the handful of French roleplaying games which have been translated or adapted into English-language editions — Steve Jackson Games's In Nomine is the only other one I'm familiar with. Compared to Anglophone games, the French ones all seem more cerebral, more mystical, and much more closely-coupled to real-world religious and occult beliefs.

When you pass a French occult roleplaying game to the American genius game designer Greg Stafford — who is also a scholar and devotee of shamanic spiritual practices — you get something strange and amazing. In the American version of Nephilim, the player-characters are ancient immortal spirit beings who have lived through multiple previous lives in human form, who are striving to gain magical knowledge and power in order to attain supreme enlightenment and transcend the material world. The feel is very much like its near-contemporary Vampire: The Masquerade, from White Wolf. (The Chaosium version of Nephilim came out in 1994, three years after Vampire.) You've got powerful supernatural beings with an array of different types and factions, living in secret among modern humans, and fighting against a variety of powerful conspiracies and ancient secret societies.

The main difference between the two is one of tone. Vampire is a horror game in which the characters are, frankly, monsters, and the main conflict is just how monstrous they allow themselves to become in the course of their intrigues and infighting. Nephilim is more straight-up urban fantasy in which the characters are trying to be morally better than ordinary humans. Guess which one found a bigger audience?

The underlying game engine of Nephilim is Chaosium's sturdy and reliable Basic Role-Playing system, with a few modifications for the elemental affinities and mystical powers of the Nephilim. The fact that the characters can have multiple past lives across human history creates a nifty bit of game balance mechanics: your past lives give you both mundane skills and mystical knowledge, but each incarnation reduces a character's magical power level. You can be wise but weak, or strong but naive. Having past lives also offers the gamemaster the chance to run "flashback" adventures set in the past, in which players can game out episodes in their characters' backstories.

The strong historical and "real occultism" focus of the game means the book is packed with (mostly) accurate info about mystical conspiracies and secret societies, ancient esoteric traditions, and things like Tarot and alchemy. Unsurprisingly to Those Who Know, one contributor to the game was a Chicago upstart named Ken Hite, who thereby kicked off a long career of Getting It Right in historical/occult gaming.

One lovely feature of Nephilim is its magic system. Not the system itself, actually, but the names of the spells that characters can learn in the game. While many of them are pretty straighforward ("Choking Vapor" creates a cloud of pungent smoke), the category of Summoning spells have wonderful names like "The Jade Flowers, Mysteries of the Dark Forests" or "The Spirits of the 24th Part of an Instant" or "The Powerful Pale Queen of Torment, With Tears of Flame." To be candid, the spell list was the primary reason I bought the game, as I was interested in maybe adapting some of the Nephilim material to Call of Cthulhu, as they have (sorta) compatible mechanics.

Nephilim is not without its flaws. The biggest one is simply the literally arcane nature of the game world — it has no easy point of access for players and gamemasters. For Call of Cthulhu, the hook is simple: you're characters in an H.P. Lovecraft horror story. Even if the players aren't familiar with Lovecraft's work, "characters in a horror story" gives them a lot of information about what the characters are likely to be doing. For Vampire, the hook is equally accessible: you're vampires. (And Vampire: The Masquerade even conveniently populates its game world with versions of all the popular fictional vampires, just to make it easier.) Whereas in a Nephilim game there's a lot of made-up cosmology the players have to digest just to create a character, let alone play.

The second is a problem shared by nearly all of the wave of what we can frankly describe as "Vampire knockoffs" of the same era: the designers wanted to contrast the superhuman powers of the characters with their status as powerless outsiders in society. The sample characters in Nephilim, for example, are a goth rock-band leader, a bike messenger, a "loser," a con man, a graduate student, and so on. There isn't much wish-fulfilment fantasy in any of those roles. And more integrated, socially-powerful roles just tie the characters to jobs, family responsibilities, and all the other things people play roleplaying games to escape. You wind up with all the bother of real life and Templar assassins.

I bought Nephilim in North Carolina in 1995 or thereabouts, but never played it. I created a couple of characters to try out the system, but never got the spark of inspiration to write any adventures. Now that I've re-read Nephilim for the first time in twenty years I actually do think it would be an interesting game setting, but not in the way the creators intended. Suppose that, instead of immortal superbeings living as bike messengers, the player-characters were ordinary humans, possibly with an interest in the occult, who become aware of this secret world and get swept up in its conflicts. That way the players can learn the game's cosmology bit by bit rather than in an appalling dose right at the beginning. Maybe give them one sympathetic Nephilim as a mentor, but otherwise play up the literally inhuman nature of these beings, and their indifference to human concerns. The villainous secret societies may still be bad guys, but they can be open to temporary alliances and "nonaggression" agreements with the heroes. That might be a fun game to run . . .

 

For stories of strange creatures in the modern world, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 4

Once the main event was over, we spent another couple of days on vacation in Charleston before the long drive back up the East Coast to Mole Hill. There's a lot to see and do in the Low Country, and we could easily have spent another week.

The day after the eclipse we spent at the beach on Sullivan's Island (where Edgar Allen Poe set his story "The Gold-Bug"). The South Carolina seacoast is not one of your gentle "paddle around in the ocean" spots. The waves coming in have been building up strength since they left Africa and hit like football tackles. The water temperature is like a warm bath — if you're accustomed to having your bathwater flung in your face by the tubful.

Still, we had fun. My son and I pit ourselves against the breakers while my lovely science advisor puttered about the waterline looking for interesting organisms in the sand.

The following day — our last full day in Charleston — my son and I went to Patriots' Point near our rental cottage to visit the city's other historic warship museum, the World War II aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. This is the second carrier to bear that name, an Essex-class ship (hull number CV-10) which replaced the original Yorktown (CV-5) sunk at Midway.

Like other warships I've visited the Yorktown is a paradoxical mix of vastness and claustrophobia. It's a huge ship, but it's absolutely stuffed. All the compartments (except the hangar deck) are cramped and labyrinthine. The Yorktown has a lot of its interior open to visitors; we were even able to climb down into one of the boiler rooms.

There's a nice collection of aircraft on display in the hangar and on the flight deck, with planes from World War II all the way to the present, plus a replica Apollo command module in commemoration of Yorktown's role as the recovery ship for Apollo 8. I was amused to see that the more recent jet fighters on display are missing their engines. Apparently jet engines are still too valuable to be stuck in a museum. The winner of the loveliest aircraft award is the F-14 Tomcat, hands down. Even sitting on the deck with no engines it looks like it's moving fast.

After touring Yorktown from stem to stern we went back ashore to visit the Vietnam War museum. It's a pretty neat museum, with most of the vehicles and equipment displayed outdoors. The Charleston summer heat and the presence of a nearby helicopter harbor tour operation gave the whole place an eerie verisimilitude.

That afternoon my science advisor and I went back to Sullivan's Island to tour Fort Moultrie. I was expecting something like Fort Pike in New Orleans: a pile of 19th-century bricks and a couple of replica cannons. What I didn't realize was that Fort Moultrie was in use right up to the end of World War II as the lynchpin of Charleston's harbor defenses.

The museum does a great job of showing the fort's long history. Different sections are restored to how the place would have appeared at different times. There's a War of 1812 battery, a Civil War-era section, a section set up in the late 19th-century style with giant muzzle-loaders, an early 20th-century coastal artillery emplacement, and the World War II era command post for the entire harbor. Even if you're not keen on forts, Moultrie is worth a visit.

On our final night we sampled more of Charleston's super-hip dining scene, at the ironically-named restaurant The Ordinary. The oysters were excellent, as was the steak tartare.

And the following morning, we packed up, locked the house, and turned north for the long trip home. I think I'd like to return to Charleston someday (though probably not in August).

 

For more stories about travel to exotic places, buy my new ebook, Monster Island Tales!

MONSTERS ARE LIVE!

I've got a second ebook out for Amazon Kindle: Monster Island Tales! It collects two of my short stories, "Return to Skull Island" and "The Dinosaur Train." Both of them are gonzo pop-culture alternate history stories orbiting around the idea of a lost island in the East Indies where monsters and dinosaurs roam. The original cover art is by Joshua Newman, and I've included an afterword describing how both stories came to be written. All this can be yours for a mere $1.99!