It is starting to look like this might actually see release!
http://massively.joystiq....oads-six-preview-videos/

Jammed in my head.  Had to get rid of it.  Enjoy?

Fascinating.

 

In the deep hours of the night, the cavernous library was
dark and still.  Overhead, the bright
waxing moon cast its light through the roof-spanning skylights, but the height
of the towering shelves created deep valleys of darkness.

Through the stacks moved a tall, bipedal figure, moving with
calm and silent efficiency across the deep-pile carpeting.  Weaving among the maze of shelving, it came
to a halt before an empty spot on one shelf, and a long-fingered hand raised
into the light, revealing itself to hold a book which fit perfectly into the
empty space.  Said hand moved to the adjoining
book and removed it with a smooth, practiced grace that made caution
unnecessary, despite the age and fragility of the tome.

Mission accomplished, the figure turned to retraced its
steps through the library, but paused as an unanticipated sound was perceived
by its sharp ears.  The figure remained
still for a moment, weighing options, then changed course towards the most
likely vector of the anomaly, moving with unhurried stealth but no real overt
caution.

The sound revealed itself to be accompanied by a dim
light.  Just around the nearest corner,
the figure paused.  At this range, the
anomalous sound resolved into a muffled voice. 
Young, female, strained, the figure judged.

“…almost…. Just a …. Little… ugh!  More….”

Additional sounds, filtered for reverberation and
distortion, seemed most likely to indicate that the owner of the voice was
climbing the high, freestanding bookshelf. 
A hazardous course of action.  If
certain random factors were to resolve in an unfortunate way, the young female
might well be at risk of harm.  Such risk,
if realized, would necessitate the figure revealing itself, with wide-ranging unforeseeable
consequences.

A sudden creak, accompanied by a frightened “oh oh,” signaled
that random chance had indeed tended towards maximum entropy in this case.  Aural analysis left no doubt that the tall
shelf had tipped its center of gravity past the perimeter of its base and had
begun accelerating onto a trajectory that would terminate upon striking the adjoining
shelf… or upon knocking down said adjoining shelf, and potentially crushing the
young female beneath it. 

The potential “chain of dominoes” effect upon the rest of
the shelving in this section would also be unfortunate, although potentially
interesting from a distance.

Such analysis required less time to perform than describe.  The towering shelf had only barely begun its
acceleration as the figure slipped quickly around the corner, leaving its book
tucked neatly into a handy space between shelves, and took several swift steps
down the length of the aisle.  One long
arm reached up to plant a hand against the central vertical support, at the
highest practical point in order to maximize leverage against gravitational
acceleration, while the other made a long calculated arc and hooked the young
female away from the shelf she was beginning to fall from and hugged her
tightly against the figure’s chest.

One leg swept back to the optimum bracing angle and dug a
foot into the floor, as the other remained braced beneath for lifting
power.  For long moment, strength and
calculation struggled with gravity and inertia. 
From the upper shelves, a few heavy tomes fell, one of them bursting
rather explosively on impact.  But with
inertia halted, gravity alone proved insufficient, and a carefully calculated
push pivoted the shelf’s center of gravity back inside its base perimeter.  The shelf tipped back towards, and then past,
vertical, threatening to topple the other way, but a swift tug at the correct
moment was sufficient to settle the heavy shelf back towards center, rocking
like an inverted pendulum.  Several books
–did- fall from the far side of the upper shelves, judging from aural analysis,
but serious harm had been averted.

Returning to a vertical stance, the figure finally free to
turn its attention to the young female whose back was still pressed against his
front, dangling from the curve of his arm. 
Said young female eventuated to be a young unicorn filly, whose horn was
still emitting the modest red glow (of nearly the exact perfect amplitude and
wavelength for a covert mission in low-light conditions, he noted) that he had
noticed just earlier.  The light made
ascertaining the color of her coat a dubious exercise, but other clues made
that unnecessary.  The filly’s identity
was not, he mused, much of a surprise.

“Twilight Sparkle,” he said in a measured, slightly gravelly
voice.  “That was an unwise course of
action.”

The unicorn, for her part, appeared to still be catching up
with events.  Indeed, her horrified
attention was fixated on the books that had struck the floor.  “Oh no, oh no, oh nonononono!  I broke a BOOK!  I broke a BUNCH of books!  Princess Celestia is going to banish me to
the moon!  No, she’ll throw me in a
dungeon, and then banish the DUNGEON to the moon!  With me IN it!  Ohhhh, and she’s going to be SO disappointed
in me, and I know she told me to stop staying up all night reading but I just
couldn’t stop reading the third volume of the biography of Starswirl the
Bearded and when I hit the end I just HAD to come get the fourth volume because
I was NEVER going to be able to sleep without knowing what happened but I knew
I couldn’t wake anyone up just to help me get a book and I was SURE I could do
it myself but now she’s going to be so DISAPPOINTED in me and that’s even worse
than when she’s MAD at me and I BROKE A BOOOOOOK!!!!!!”

That last was delivered in a strangled wail of despair that
still stayed at a volume low enough to avoid being noticed by any theoretical
authority figures which might for some reason be roaming the library at this
hour of the night.  Young Twilight, he
noted a bit dryly, was possessed of a rather impressive lung capacity for a
child with such a sedentary lifestyle. 

He bent to place Twilight gently back in contact with the
ground.  “Books,” he noted, “can be
repaired.  After all, what is truly
important is not the books themselves, but the information which they
contain.  Although as a fellow
bibliophile, I cannot entirely disagree with you.  To see books needlessly damaged is…
distressing.  Even if backup copies
exist.”

“But!  But!” Twilight
stammered in protest, turning to look at him. 
“Hurting a book is like kicking a puppy or a  kitten, but even worse because a book can’t
run away and… and… and….”  Her eyes
slowly travelled up from his knees to his face, growing rounder with each
millimeter to an anatomically improbable diameter by the time they made contact
with his.  “Who… what… are you?”

Moving slowly in order to avoid spooking her further, he
dropped into what his old friend would have called a “catcher’s crouch,”
reducing his probably intimidating height. 
“I am a friend of Princess Celestia’s, which is how I know your name,
Twilight Sparkle.  She speaks of you
often, and usually with pride and affection. 
Which leads me to conclude that your fears of banishment to the moon are
rather exaggerated.”  He felt the tiny
ghost of a smile cross his normally impassive features.  “I am a castaway, whom Her Highness was kind
enough to provide with a place to stay and access to her library, albeit after
hours, while I research a means of returning to my home.  My name is Spock.”

She stared at him long enough that he began to wonder just
how badly the series of shocks had affected her.  She hardly moved, indeed barely even blinked,
for an improbable length of time.  When
she spoke, her first question caught him completely by surprise, although he
later concluded that he really should not have been.

“What’s a ‘bibliophile’?”

……………

She trotted along at his knee as they traversed the library,
asking questions as quickly as her inexperienced but impressive intellect could
generate them (which was more quickly than she was capable of verbalizing them,
a bottleneck which obviously frustrated her). 
“You said you were a castaway.  A
castaway is someone whose ship broke and left them stranded, right?  But you must have come from an awfully long
way away because I’ve never seen anything like you in any of my books and I’ve
read most of the volumes on major life forms in Equestria and you would really
stand out.  So where did you come from?”

He paused and looked down at her innocent, earnest
expression… and found himself unable to resist indulging the sense of humor
that Doctor McCoy would have insisted he did not posess.  Lifting his free hand, he pointed up towards
the skylight… and waited.

Her eyes followed, and rounded improbably again after a
gratifyingly short pause (such a quick mind on one so young was, while
potentially exhausting, undeniably a pleasure). 
“The MOON?  But that means that
the speculations about ecological conditions on the moon are actually all wrong
since you can obviously breathe our air and move comfortably in this
gravity.  Was it a case of parallel
evolution or—“

“No,” he interrupted her gently when a raised palm proved
insufficient to the task.  “Further.”

It should not have been amusing to watch her head tilt
further and further back, as she stared up through the skylight at the
brilliant stars, until she toppled onto her hindquarters with a thump that
failed to pry her grasp from the firmament. 
But it was, despite the fact that he would never had admitted it to the
doctor.

“The STARS?” she whispered. 
Her expression was easy to read, exhibiting a sensation he recalled
fondly himself – that of one’s mental horizons suddenly and unexpectedly expanding,
of unprecedented vistas unfolding before the mind’s eye too quickly to be
grasped.  That bright, shining moment of –possibility-,
when limits and constraints momentarily ceased to exist.   Such moments came to him all too rarely now,
but the vicarious experience of seeing it through her eyes was in some ways
even better.  The thought of becoming a
teacher again was certainly taking on increased appeal.

She pried her eyes away from the stars with an obvious
effort and looked at him again, struggling to enunciate the first of what would
certainly be a lifetime’s worth of questions – and halted almost painfully as
he raised a hand for silence.

“Perhaps we should first retire to my quarters,” he
suggested, suppressing a smile, “and begin repairing this book.”  He gently gestured with the badly damaged
tome, bringing a shamed blush to her cheeks. 

“Oh.  Yes.  Right. 
We should do that first.”  Her
crestfallen expression tempted him to laughter with an intensity he had not
felt since… since the last time he had been in the presence of his
friends.  It felt good.

“Of course, I’m sure I can answer some questions while I
work.  It is, after all, only logical to
develop a talent for multitasking.”  She
brightened like Engineer Scott being presented with a new engine upgrade to
experiment with, and fell into step beside him, sparkling with questions like
her namesake again.

There was a line of dialogue, he recalled, from an ancient
Earth film which his mother had been quite fond of.  Something about “the start of a beautiful
friendship….”

 

 

I see at the top of the Forum homepage:

Quote:Chapter 7 of Drunkard's Walk V is now at 123 Kb.
Chapter 1 of Drunkard's Walk VIII is now at 38Kb.
Chapter 2 of Drunkard's Walk XIII is now at 70Kb.

I was looking for a place to put Marduk (near Kandor, but not too near) when I noticed the Luna map does not, in fact, show where Kandor (or Daniell crater) is. Ooops.
Since I had wikipedia and Paint.net open, I went ahead and located the rest of the lunar locations in the fenwiki, and the landing sites.
Luna 2 and Luna 17 are in an approximate location (specially Luna 17).
The Jedi Academy was placed, more or less randomly, in Crater Bessarion. "Oceanus Procellarum" was a mite too vage a location, given the thing must be a third of the hemisphere.
Marduk is in Crater Plinius, wich is a bit larger than I intended (43 Km.) but had that cool mesa in the middle, ideal for an olde worlde town overlooking the fields. I think I am adding a lake to the south half, wich the wiki claims is a plain at a lower elevation, while the north is rugged -good for small hills with vineyards, manors and a couple of creeks.
The moon Kindom memorial is in nowere specific, simply midway Apollo 17 and Luna 21. The region is a big valley between the Taurus Mountains and a smaller ridge of hills in Mare Serenitas, so it probably will be quite scenic.
Blind Io is on the south pole, but Moonbase Alpha is said to be "near" the north pole, so I put it randomly at a lower latitude in Crater Anaxagoras.
Bristol and the Takeuchi Shipyard are on the far side, so they don't appear here.
 
[img]http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumimportfiles/4ca26037980b5593a44836fe9e812edc1f34f2ee_r.bmp]

Edit: While I was looking, I found this nifty page: http://www.lunarrepublic.com/atlas/ 
The search function seems inexistent, but the maps are wonderful.

This forum is intended for the discussion of the eighth Step in the Drunkard's Walk. entitled "Harry Potter and the Man from Otherearth", and set (obviously enough) in the world of the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Judging from the chapter update strip, Bob's begun the Harry Potter step.  Sneaky, sneaky, putting that there without a post somewhere

One of my players made this image for the memorable encounters in the campaign I'm running. To be fair they started at 2'nd level and one of them just hit 4'th. Now I'm worried that they will be disappointed in the next encounter.

oh and this is the party;


It include the Cheshire Cat, a Djin Ninja Bard, a Wyld Hunt, a Tarrasque, and a Xixecal Cirno.

Sigh, it sounds like the kind of campaign I always want to play in. So why am I always stuck running them?
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Spacebattles made me write this!
--------------------
Koenig MonsterBase Hull: Custom Transforming vehicle (shuttle/bipedal robotic vehicle)
Length: 64m (shuttle) / 44m (biped)
Width: 62m (shuttle) / 24m (biped)
Height: 19.6m (shuttle) / 22.5m (biped)
Mass: 264,432 kg
Drive Type: 3x Compact Fusor (powerplant) / 4x atmospheric capable arc fusion reactionless drives
Drive Rating: 0.06c (shuttle) / 45 km/h (biped)
Armament: 4x 155mm railgun
2x triple 250mm rocket launcher (AGM-84 sized arm mount)
2x quad 84mm rocket launcher (Carl Gustav sized arm mount)
1x anti personal flamer (chin mount)
1x anti personal .72 chain gun (chin mount)
Primary Manufacturer:
Mars Base Sara
Owner: Gearheads
Flag of Record:
Fenspace Convention
Launched: April 2nd, 2014
Purpose: Self propelled Artillery Platform
Primary Crew: Gojira (AI)
pilot, gunner, mechanic
4 Exocomps
Operational Status:
active

The
Koenig Monster is the brainchild of a group of Gearhead around a mecha
enthusiast named Barricade. Designed during the height of the Boskone
War this machine was from the ground up intended for combat operations
in an offensive support role as self propelled artillery platform.

However
the design process and some problems with actual support by OGJ caused
the project to be delayed again and again until the Boskone War was over
when the Koenig Monster was officially put into service by the
Gearheads.

With
its impressive armament and bulk of the transformative systems it is
already large at the base, but the slow speed of the actual
transformation and the slow ground speed makes it necessary to carry a
large amount of armor. Said armor is a laminated mix of various battle
proven alloys that were forced in microgravity to get a monocrystalline
structure. In its structure is it similar to ‘dane Cobham armor.

Additionally
the system is from the ground designed to be modular and capable of
being repaired and serviced with ease. There are also 5 slots for larger
additional modules.

The following systems have be added to these slots since 2014:

1. Deflector Shield System (2015)
   
2. Exocomp Service Station with four Star Fleet issue Exocomps (2017)
   
3. 1st gen Mass Effect Core (2020)
   
4. 1st gen Mass Effect Shield System (2021)
   
5. empty
   

• The
  first larger scale public outing of the Koenig Monster was during
  Alphacon, where the Gearheads offered joyrides/joyrampages for everyone
  in a holographic mini-Tokyo.
  
• Since
  2016 there is an anual Rampage through a model city that is build near
  Mars Vegas. It even includes ‘defense vehicles' build by various fen.
  
• The Koenig Monster is capable of generating its own Seibertron strain of handwavium.
  

Maurice Sendak has gone to where the Wild Things are ... for good.
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

This started as an idea to be able to make the Chinese available as a plot device and as a secret in Fenspace. Of course it doesn't make much sense if the truth is known by the Fen. But why shouldn't a nation with that much resources have their own secret handwavium project that is in one aspect more advanced as most Fen tech.

##########

Post Handwavium History

The CNSA has no asset in Fenspace, everyone knows that. They are too paranoid to embrace the wonders of Handwavium, too angry to cooperate with anyone else. They damn themselves to being stuck at the bottom of the gravity well.

At least that is what everyone believes.

Being very angry and paranoid about the Fen and their involvement with China, the CNSA was prohibited to openly move into orbit. Still, huge amounts of money were made available to develop a solution for the ‘Fen problem’.

In early 2013, CNSA tested their first successful stealthed space ship in a large underground hangar, a specially waved Chinese van. Only six months later, while most larger Fen ships were turning the Asteroid Belt upside down, the CNSA sent up the ship to find a place to hide and setup a base of operation.

Only to find out that ‘the damned Fen’ have spread over the whole inner system.

Unwilling to take chances, the CNSA began to build up a small base in an lone asteroid far outside of the ecliptics. From here they began to plan China’s domination of the Solar system.

The Ships

Unfortunately for the CNSA, reproducing their stealth technology to ship enough cargo to the asteroid proved more difficult than planned. While even the first ship had a lot of quirks they had to work around, building more ships became a frustrating process. Between 2014 and 2017, the CNSA built five other stealth ships, two of them large trucks to ship cargo to their new base.

One of the trucks had to be destroyed shortly after construction when it developed an AI that wasn’t willing to join the communist party of China.

A smaller second craft was lost when the pilot left it without disengaging the stealth system. CNSA is still looking for the craft, which should still be within their testing facilities.

The Base

The base is a small set of hidden caves within an asteroid 15 astronomical units away from the sun. The original plan called to upgrade the caves to a full military shipyard to produce the new Chinese armada.

The low number of transports combined with the unwillingness to use different types of transportation delayed the plans of the CNSA year after year. At the current rate, the CNSA hopes to make the base self sufficient within 2020.

Trivia

• The CNSA managed to evade the attention of Fenspace since their start 2013 and hopes to continue this way beyond 2020.
  
• There are influential people within the communist party unwilling to allow the asteroid base to become completely self sufficient.
  
• The two small stealthed cars have been using the asteroid base as a homeport for espionage and reconnaissance missions since 2016.