Character Update

Brick Arms never sleeps!

GI Brick delivers!

Robert Jenkins is the recipient of Brick Arms "NATO Battle Rifle" and web gear that shows his pistol.

Plus a Lego scale Energa!

William Jenkins gets a web-gear upgrade too!

Thag The Evil Magic User has a Minifig now!

I don't have the Minifig ready yet, but I have the weapon and LBE for him!

Brick Arms Update

William Jenkins, an Orc from an alternate earth where the Confederate States of America won and orcs filled the role of the negro, in Lego.

Robert Jenkins, a snake-chimera from an alternate earth where the Trinity test at White Sands opened up a hellstorm which dumped magic as fallout over the world.  An alt of an alt, actually.  Robert is from the USA, joined the Army to escape the rather severe discrimination against chimera-kind in the US and served in Vietnam.  After Vietnam, not wanting to return to America, he enlisted in the Rhodesian army.

Both figures have been updated since last show.  Added hex-bases to make facing clear.  Changed guns around to be more accurate to the character sheets.  BrickArms doesn't make an FAL so the "HAC" is as close as you can get.

The hex base is even 1" across flats, standard GURPS size!  It's like they're encouraging us to use mini-figs to replace our old lead figures!

Race Fantasy And The Old West

I've repeatedly toyed with making a world set about 1875 or so in the American Old West with fantasy races and magic.

This is where the elf-human-orc genetic discussion came from.

Originally I was trying to shoe-horn the fantasy races into historic slots, with orcs taking the role of blacks...

Yeah, I spotted how bad that looked as fast as you did.

I've made an orc character from a world where orcs were the African slaves in The South, and The Confederate States of America won.  That's William Jenkins.

It was the placing of other races where everything fell apart.  Orcs naturally fit the role of the hated race that everyone hated.  But what if I made Jews elves?  Scots seem to fit dwarves well, when was the last time a dwarf wasn't depicted as Scottish?  Does that make Germans gnomes?

The shoe horning wasn't working.

But what if humanity was Elf-Human-Orc?  I need to find a place for dwarves, gnomes and halflings.  Maybe for goblins too.

Inserting dwarves into some cultural memes works well.  The English oppression of their Celtic people and their gravitation to mining lends itself to the Scots/Welsh/Irish miner being a dwarf.  Other Celts could be gnomes.

The mechanically inclined and inventive dwarves and gnomes mesh well with how many inventions stem from Scots too.

The scary part of using GURPS Fantasy races for cultural stereotypes is the Jews = goblins thing.  Goblins are the racially inclined traders in both Fantasy Folk and Banestorm.  That meshes with the stereotype of Jew, but...  It's a bit on the nose...  Especially as it meshes well with Arab traders too.

But my Gohds the racist implications...

It gets to be very difficult to pull off.

Not that there's anything in the racial template that's particularly insulting to Jews or Arabs, except for their physical description that plays like a Nazi newspaper editorial cartoon description.

Ugh.

Best to make religion independent of race.  And it's fairly easy to fit goblins into non-Jewish templates by putting them at the head of other famous trading ventures.  East India Company being goblin helmed would do it.  The Jewish propensity to head for education, science and medicine doesn't match well with the goblin template either.

Then, for The Old West... who are the Chinese?  In the orc=African idea I toyed with making them all elves.  Chinese, after all, are sometimes referred to as celestials.

But who will play the Indians?

Thus was the elf-human-orc Humanity idea was born.  These three races are most of the population with the others taking the place where especially appropriate to individual example.

One thing that clings is associating elf with royalty.  You see a poor, indentured or enslaved elf; you're looking at someone who's been dispossessed.  Insert dark-elf template for 31 points, Wink.

Sabers And... Snippet 7

It was inevitable.

From the journal of William Fowler, First Lieutenant, Regular Army:

When the Indians bolted through their temporary gateways, the narrow spots between the worlds were left behind.

Hundreds of them.

General Crook tried to keep a lid on where the Indians had gotten off to.  But the thaumatologists from Harvard had spilled the beans both by publishing papers and talking to the newspapers about their breakthroughs.

It was, therefore, inevitable that some enterprising person would cast the gate spell fresh on that spot and try to settle on the far side.

Red Dog told us the tale.

While the Sioux were less than thrilled at the 77th's appearance; we at least had come through carrying The Word from Lieutenant General George "Nantan Lupan" Crook.

We'd also come armed to the teeth, not knowing how warm our reception would be.

These naive settlers, though, they'd come prepared to farm.

The Goo Goo hated us whites worse than the Indians.

The old stories about what the damned Redskins would do to a white captive paled to what happened to these settlers.  It was a fate so gruesome that Sgt. Jenkins had to threaten our photographer at gunpoint to record the grisly scene.

The Goo Goo had feasted that day.

If that weren't enough, the settler family appears to have been flayed alive and their near intact skins made into macabre banners flown over their homestead site.  Even the children.

The Goo Goo don't seem to take captives or slaves like the Indians would.