My Steampunk RPG Campaign

Perfidious Albion is a steampunk RPG campaign -- a Scientific Romance for ladies and gentlemen of good breeding (ahem), set in the late 19th Century in a well-developed alternate-history setting in which a peaceful compromise (Ben Franklin's "Albany Plan") prevented the American Revolution, the British Empire is the world's dominant power, and steam-powered supercomputers perform econometric calculations in mere minutes! (For those who really like trivia, there was an earlier point of divergence at the Putney Debates in 1648.)

For Perfidious Albion: A Scientific Romance, I recommend either GURPS Lite or FUDGE. Even more, I recommend any good steampunk fiction, such as The Difference Engine, Girl Genius, The Two Georges, and so forth.

Some good references for steampunk, and for the Victorian period in general, are:
* What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist -- The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool (available for cheap on Amazon.com);
* An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't, specifically the section on English Literature, which discusses obscure details of nineteenth-century British life (likewise available for cheap on Amazon);
* GURPS Steampunk by my old friend Bill Stoddard (available for cheap as a PDF at Warehouse23.com), hands-down the single best reference source for the period, whether realistic historical or steampunk.;
* Forgotten Futures: The Scientific Romance Role Playing Game by the brilliant Phil Masters (available for free as shareware, he asks that you make a donation to charity, God bless him!)
* Comme Il Faut, a supplement for Castle Falkenstein on daily life and manners in the 19th Century.

(For what it's worth, I did graduate work in English literature and specialized in both sf/fantasy and Victorian/industrial revolution fiction.)

I prefer "system" games, because the system helps answer questions like "How far can I jump?" and "How long will it take to fix the engine?" I strongly believe in a good story rather than rolling dice, and I also believe in realism and balance.

Above all, I want to make sure that people who are interested in the genre and/or the setting, and are not familiar with the system, to join and play and learn the system as we go along.

For more information about the game, or if you wish to join, please contact the Management of the game via electronic mail for any questions about the setting, or for the Approval of Characters.

Excerpted from a survey report by the Infinity Corporation:

PERFIDIOUS ALBION (BRITANNICA-8), 1877

CURRENT GLOBAL SITUATION:A libertarian British Empire (including America) vs. the Holy Alliance (France, Spain, Austria, Russia) and Ottoman Caliphate.

DIVERGENCE POINTS:
1648: The Levellers win the Putney Debates to decide the new government after the English Civil War.
1765: Ben Franklin's "Albany Plan of Union" is accepted by the Whig government of Britain.

MAJOR CULTURES: Western (multipolar), Chinese (empire), Islamic (empire).

GREAT POWERS: British Empire (feudal technocracy, CR2), France (dictatorship, CR5), Spain (dictatorship, CR5), Austria (dictatorship, CR5), Russia (dictatorship, CR6), Prussia (dictatorship, CR4).

MINOR POWERS: Ottoman Empire (dictatorship, CR5), Manchu Empire (dictatorship, CR5), Sweden (democracy, CR4), Japan (feudal technocracy, CR 5).

WORLDLINE DATA:
Technological Level: 5+2 (except TL5 weapons/armor)
Mana Level: low
Quantum: 7
Infinity Class: P1
Centrum Zone: YELLOW

KNOWN ADVENTURES:
"A Series of Tubes"
"Can You Get Sound On That Thing?"
"First Contacts"
"Hearts of Steel"
"League of Extraordinary Ladies & Gentlemen"
"Sphereland"

R.I.P., E.G.G.

Andrew Rilstone puts it better than I ever could. One life, furnished in early Gygax.

Ending the Embargo on France

I'm still recovering from Thanxgiving -- and still in a period of heavy seminar-paper overload -- but I'm glad that Sarkozy is President of France. Since Eurasia /i/s/ /n/o/w/ has always been allied with Oceania, I can enjoy Beaujolais Nouveau again with a clear conscience. I got into the habit almost twenty years ago of drinking Beaujolais Nouveau with Thanxgiving turkey and I don't care what Mike Steinberger says.

3 Laws (of War) Safe

Kenneth Anderson's Law of War and Just War Theory Blog has an excellent article on applying the laws of war to robots. At this stage of development military "robots" are just remote-controlled armed fighting vehicles but Anderson makes it explicit: "That post was about machines with the capability to act independently, independent of human control." He also quotes an article in The Economist.
For me, of course, the money quote from Anderson's post is this:

The most striking part of the project is that I do not see that the attempt to translate ethical decisionmaking into machine terms involves genuinely novel questions of ethics as such. On the contrary, what we seek to do is not to establish novel ethical principles, but rather to create, or re-create, hypothetically ideal or perfect ethical decisionmaking and conduct as we would imagine it for a hypothetically ideal or perfect human soldier but do so within a machine, a robot. The problems are in translation, not the creation of new problems or new solutions. In that sense, one could say that however interesting or important a task of ethical translation, it poses no new tasks in fundamental ethical theory. (Italics mine.)

He then goes on to provide an interesting and well-thought-out discussion of the current state of just-war theory...which (surprise, surprise) hasn't advanced in any discernable way since I first read Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars thirty years ago.
ObCit: "3 Laws Unsafe" by the Singularity Institute, and a "Prognosis: Terminal" by David McDaniel, may God rest his beautiful soul!

Sousveillance is a Juvenal Activity, and an Enema of the State

David Brin calls for a "transparent society" in which everything will be known to everyone. Here is a step in that direction, a website of sousveillance i.e. "inverse surveillance" -- the poor and disadvantaged spying on, or at least monitoring, the rich and powerful. (That's why I call it "an enema of the state.")

ObLitCritCit: Lots of contemporary literary theory deals with the "panopticon"; M. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a prominent example.

And the issue of how to prevent the authorities from being corrupt and/or tyrannical goes back at least as far as Aristotle and Juvenal. As James Hughes put it, new technology (e.g., cloning, cyborgization, A.I., nanotechnology) doesn't require new ethics, it only requires the application of old (and valid) ethics.

Update: Radley Balko has a devastating pro-sousveillance article at that hotbed of left-wing anti-authoritarianism, FoxNews.com.

Update: "Jimmy Justice" is videotaping NYPD officers breaking the law. Hat tip to Instapundit, of course!