The Mobrup catchment working plan - A resource inventory and strategies

The Mobrup LCDC has persevered for three years with its efforts to produce a catchment plan. They readily acknowledge that their work is just beginning as they now wrestle with this working plan to form something which will have application on each individual\u27s enterprise to ensure a sustainable future for this catchment.This report is a collation of their ideas, an inventory of works done in the catchment and the best advice which research and local knowledge can provide

Creature, Monster, Nameless, Created: Frankenstein transformed in role playing games

This paper explores the transmission of Frankenstein’s Creature - or Monster - into tabletop and computer gaming. It briefly covers the 'Flesh Golem' archetype and Frankenstein-esque figures as encounters in Dungeons and Dragons - superficial imitations, influenced more by cinematic adaptations than the novel, and emphasising the ‘Monster’ reading of Frankenstein’s creation. Then, it moves on to more developed versions in which the player or players adopt a persona akin to the Creature as avatar and central character: the Nameless One from Planescape: Torment and the player characters of Promethean: the Created. These games are transformative works, influenced by and addressed to Frankenstein. While they do not directly adapt Shelley's novel, their narrative and mechanics evoke a corresponding ‘feel’. They locate the player’s ‘readerly’ perspective within a created entity who is in search of identity, purpose, and sense of the world, and confronted with an evolving moral education, which is developed further by iterative gameplay process similar to repeated readings of a challenging text. By creating complicity in the role of the Creature, Planescape and Promethean engage players in the process of growth, development and discovery which Shelley’s original character undergoes

Vanishing: A Novel

My thesis is a novel titled Vanishing. It is a work of speculative fiction set in Western Australia. The setting is contemporary, although in a departure from history, the state of Western Australia has seceded from Australia and exists as an independent nation. The government has evolved into a liberal model of tolerance and invited the maligned races of folklore to immigrate. To the world’s astonishment, the Snitches emerge from the wilderness and settle in their new homeland. Their unique mind-reading powers are pressed into service as the government strives to eradicate offensive speech and offensive thought. The novel’s protagonist is Hunter Jones, an average guy with an irreverent attitude towards the government’s social engineering agenda. His ordinary life is rocked when twin brother Sean is abducted after a night out with their parents. Hunter’s search for his missing brother is stymied by the loss of anything to do with Sean—personal effects go missing and memories are erased. The unbreakable bond shared by twins means that Hunter is the only person who remembers Sean ever existed

The evolving Gothic of White Wolf's Vampire games

This chapter looks at the evolving Gothic of the Vampire role playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen et al. It offers a brief explanation of role-playing games for the uninitiated, defining their textuality in Bakhtinian terms – as chronotopes. It will lay out the relationship that role playing enjoys with the Gothic, drawing on Spooner’s postmodern ‘ludogothic’, and Kryzwynska’s sense of genre as defined by coordinates. It will then summarise of Vampire’s complex design history, and offer a swift tour through Vampire’s various editions, charting how the game’s Gothic has evolved and, eventually, come to transcend itself over nearly thirty years. Jon Garrad, The evolving Gothic of White Wolf's Vampire games, published in The Palgrave Handbook of the Contemporary Gothic edited by Clive Bloom, 2020, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan

La renta de los habices "de los Mezquinos" de las Alpujarras y valle de Lecrín. Algunos datos sobre su administración a mediados del siglo XVI

El origen de los habices es ya bastante conocido de los arabistas para que sea preciso entrar aquí en detalles. Solamente conviene constatar que, al tiempo de la Reconquista de Granada y de muchos años atrás, las rentas de ciertos bienes raíces en este Reino (casas, tiendas, molinos, hornos, huertas, etc.) conocidos bajo el nombre genérico de "habices", estaban consagrados por los moros granadinos al mantenimiento de sus mezquitas y otras instituciones religiosas y a la redención de cautivos caídos en poder de los cristianos

Fluff Ain't Rules: absence, presence and haunting in RPG design

Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played. Rules are crunch. They are - particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist - the important bit. “If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says one of two things: either you’re not efficiently using your words, or your game isn’t really about what it says it’s about.” — Olivia Hill “Fluff” is often an absent presence within game design. It’s clearly important to the aesthetic experience of playing the game, and the context - narrative or otherwise - that provides play with impetus, but it too often exists at some point of discretion from the actual rules that reify the game’s intended or desired themes, affective experience and outcome. This paper offers a hauntological perspective on RPG rules - how the developers' claims about a game’s fictive and cultural context are frequently a spectre, missed and yearned after but not fully secured by the (relatively) concrete reality of its rules. What is not reified by a game’s rules does not exist within the game - and what is reified by a game’s rules is often not what the game claims itself to be