#Revolt on Antares

[oldschoolfrp]

TSR's Mini Games were their answer to the microgame movement, pocket-sized board games with folded paper maps and a small sheet of counters (ad from back cover of White Dwarf 30, GW, April/May 1982)

[whitewaterpaper]

SL1:“Gorlans ruiner”.

Originaltitel: Ruins of Gorlan. Serie: Spejarens Lärling #1 (Ranger's Apprentice #1). Författare: John Flanagan. Översättare: Ingmar Wennerberg. Publicerad: 2004 (på svenska 2013). Medium: eBok/B. Wahlströms.

Läses tillsammans med @kulturdasset i vår läsecirkel.

¡Oi! Spoilers, stavfel och alternativa fakta kan förekomma rakt föröver!

Delmål 1 (Prolog + Kapitel 01–04).

En bok som har en relativ mjukstart men lyckas på ett par kapitel sätta upp brädet med dess nyckelfigurer. I prologen får vi möta det jag antar kommer vara bokens (om inte seriens) stora skurkroll: Morgarath. Vi får det bekräftat i första kapitlet när vi får möta baronen han vill störta som är godhjärtad och ger föräldralösa barn en chans att få kontroll över sitt liv. Efter ett tidigare försök till revolt har Morgarath tagit sin tillflykt till bergen där han tränas sina styrkor och bidar sin tid. Prologen väcker viss nyfikenhet.

Samtidigt får vi möta Will. Will utan namn, ingen vet vilka hans föräldrar är mer än meddelandet att hans far dog som en hjälte. Han har diktat ihop en egen historia om vem hans far är, och planerar nu gå i skuggestaltens fotspår och bli krigare. Trots att han är för kort och tanig för jobbet. Samtidigt får vi en hint om den talang som skall ge honom ett lärlingskap: han är skicklig att klättra och ta sig in i slottet för att ställa till bus.

Hans mor dog i barnsäng. Hans far dog som en hjälte. Ta hand om honom. Han heter Will. (Flanagan, 2004/2013)

Det är minst sagt ett udda möte med Will och hans vänner, där den starke krigaraspiranten Horace ständigt retar Will för dennes tanighet. Och givetvis alla vännerna uppvisar de drag som är instrumentala för deras yrkesval. Spejaren Halt har antagligen hört talas om Will, det skulle inte förvåna mig om han gått till det här mötet bara för att ta sig en titt på honom. Halt har iaf ett pergament med sig som berör Will, något Baron Arald bör veta, och med all säkerhet handlar det om Wills bakgrund. Will verkar vara den enda som får lämna mötet utan ett lärlingskap, som om vi inte redan vet vem som kommer ta Will under sina vingar. Förhoppningsvis får vi reda på mer i kommande delmål om vad som står i dokumentet och vad man nu vet om Will – något säger mig att vi kommer få veta vem hans far är så småningom och att det kommer avslöjas med en tung mörk sanning.

Redan här så märker man att den här boken är skriven för en yngre publik än de vi främst läst hittills i läsecirkeln. Intrigen känns kondenserad och scenerna målas upp med snabba penseldrag. Men utan att det gör boken oläslig för en äldre publik.

Delmål 2 (Kapitel 05–09).

Redan när kapitel 5 inleds, slås jag av tanken: givetvis är det ett test. I samma stund som det står klart att Will inte kan släppa pergamentet och dess innehåll inser jag: det är ett test för att se om och hur han väljer att försöka läsa det.

Samtidigt kunde han inte låta bli att tänka på spejarens pergament. Han undrade vad som stod på det. När skuggorna på fälten blev längre hade Will fattat ett beslut. Han måste läsa vad som stod på det där pergamentet. (Flanagan, 2004/2013)

Och visst slår ”fällan” igen runt Will i samma stund som han nästan har dokumentet i sin hand. Halt är där i mörkret och väntar. Så klart, de dolda agendorna i den här boken kommer inte vara dolda av Illuminati. Och av texten på pergamentet att döma så har Halt haft ögonen på Will ett tag. (det bekräftas senare i delmålet med, Halt har haft ögonen på Will i flera år).

Eftersom alternativet är att bli bonde tackar Will ja, och accepterar att krigarskolan antagligen aldrig kommer vara inom räckhåll. Och när vi får läsa om Wills sorti från slottet när han skall flytta till Halts stuga så funderar jag lite om det var en del av rekryteringen att Will skulle lämna slottet obemärkt och utan att någon egentligen visste att han blivit rekryterad?

Delmålets sista kapitel sticker ut med att vi plötsligt får följa Horace och hans första tid på krigarskolan, hur hans romantiska bild av den smulas sönder under trycket av hård disciplin, ännu hårdare träning och pennalismen som verkar vara en del av all militär träning. Mot slutet av kapitlet påminns jag av filmen ”Full Metal Jacket”.

Att de äldre rekryterna går så hårt åt på Horace kommer med all säkerhet ha inverkan på dennes sinnesstämning och utveckling. Och jag är lite nyfiken på hur detta kommer påverka Horace och Will när deras vägar korsas igen. Horace verkar också rätt förtjust i ”Jenny��� som vi fick träffa tidigare och blev rekryterad till köket. Än finns kanske inte så mycket som tyder på att Jenny skulle ha intresse i Will (när Will satt i trädet var det Allys som tittade ut genom dörren) men lite undrar jag om det här är grunden till en kommande liten triangelintrig?

Delmål 3 (Kapitel 10–14).

Horace visar sig vara en ren naturbegåvning med ett svärd och imponerar stort på Sir Rodney. Att vi fortfarande dröjer vid honom måste innebära att karaktären kommer bli viktig på något sätt. Har svårt att tro att det enda målet med karaktären är att visa ”vilken tur” Will hade som inte platsade på krigarskolan. Ellerockså är det för att bidraga med något intressant till handlingen under Wills träningssessioner, som ärligt inte tillhör bokens intressantaste delar.

Jag undrar bara kring det där om att be hästen om lov? I en tid/miljö där hästen är det befästa transportmedlet så borde väl ändå vara viktigt för alla hästar? Lite lockas man att fundera kring varför den här detaljen framhålls som specifik för just spejarna.

Jag måste erkänna att jag rullade lite med ögonen över det där med ”funktionell manlig prägel”. Varför måste saker som ”personlig prägel” eller ”affektionsvärde” vara något som endast förbehålls kvinnor. Sir Rodney har med andra ord inte en pryl kvar efter sin fru? En säng och ett skåp för rustningen tillsammans med skrivbordet? Är det manligt funktionellt att sitta ned? 😋

Medan Rodneys hustru Antoinette fortfarande levde hade det varit lite mer utsmyckat, men hon hade dött några år tidigare. Nu fanns det inga prydnadsföremål alls i rummet. Det hade en funktionell, manlig prägel. (Flanagan, 2004/2013)

Och det visar sig att krigarskolan inte alls gillar när äldre rekryter trakasserar och mobbar de nya. Boken är ju riktad till en yngre publik, så att det är två element som lyfts som olämpliga är kanske igen förvåning. Dock så är det trevligt att Flanagan inte glorifierar den militära banan som om det inte förekommer – för mobbing, trakasserier och ren pennalism har ju alltid tillhört olämpligt beteende.

Inte det intressantaste av delmålen hittills, men storyn rör på sig iaf. Framöver hoppas jag att vi kommer titta in hos tjejerna med. Något säger mig att även om Will är centerfiguren så kommer han, Horace, Allys och Jenny på något vis bilda ett team framöver. Jag tror iaf inte att det här en tillfällighet att deras lärlingskap passar så väl ihop (Jenny lär vara den som hör mest av slottsskvallret t.ex.).

Delmål 4 (Kapitel 15–19).

Will får träffa sina vänner igen, och det blir ett inte helt glatt möte då Horace kommer på kant med gänget och tar ut sina frustrationer på, främst, Will. Lite förvånande, men inledningsvis i boken visar ju Horace en tendens att vilja reta Will för dennes tillkortakommanden och gör så också här genom att omnämna Will som ”den blivande spionen”. Det här punkterar min teori om att Wills rekryterings delvis skulle vara medvetet dolt.

Det vankas vildsvinsjakt efter att Halt och Will fått spår på ett stort sådant, och jag trodde att något skulle hända mellan Horace och Will när den förre blev utvald att få följa med på jakten. Nåväl – de har hela nästa delmål att ryka ihop på. 😋

Tyckte man att det var en twist när det blev fullt slagsmål mellan Will och Horace under skördefesten so kommer en till i slutet av det här delmålet: Horace tittar på Will utan fientlighet. Har han kanske kommit till sans och insett att det var han själv som klampade in med spikskorna på?

Delmål 5 (Kapitel 20–24).

Ett händelserikt delmål som både verkar sätta punk för pojkarnas fejd och även ta itu med Horace problem. Min teori om att Horace och Will (tillsammans med flickorna) på något vis kommer bilda ett informellt team är sålunda på rätt köl igen. Jag gillar f.ö. att det är Halt som kliver in och bringar reda i oredan, även om den rena hämnd-misshandeln som tillåts Horace mot sina tre plågoandar kanske inte är delmålets starkaste delar. Det skall bli intressant om vi kommer stöta på Alda, Bryn och Jerome igen i kommande delar.

Delmålet knyts ihop med att Will slutligen känner sig hemma hos spejarna, och inser att han nu ingår i en exklusiv liten skara lojala mot varandra. Och trekvart in i boken så var det dags att Morgarath började röra på sig. Som det ser ut så kommer kriget möjligen bara hinna bryta ut denna bok. Kanske i samband med att man kommer nu att leta upp kalkaranerna. Ytterligare ett monster som beskrivs som en blanding mellan apa och björn. Av någon anledning kommer jag att tänka på Trollockerna i SoDÅ/tWoT.

Delmål 6 (Kapitel 25–29).

Ett småspännande delmål där saker och ting börjar röra på sig, framför allt så inser spejarna att Morgarath har börjar ansamla styrkorna och söka nya allierade. Will ges en väldigt aktiv roll utan att han utsätts för onödiga eller orealistiska risker – han får hämta förstärkningar hos baronen. Han vågar sig också på att lufta sina rädslor för baronen: att Morgarath kanske jagar ett betydligt personligare byte än kungen. Baronen är inte främmande för att Halt kan vara en måltavla.

Jag kan uppskatta att det aldrig blir internt mellan Halt och Gilan, och att en viss vänskap uppstår mellan Will och Gilan. Jag gillar också att sir Rodney skäller ut vakten efter noter när denne avfärdar Will som obetydlig trots att han helt uppenbart borde kännas igen som en spejare. Trots att han bara befinner sig i bakgrunden är det en karaktär som jag gillar mer och mer för var gång han dyker upp.

Trots att karlakanerna skall vara ökänt svåra att döda så gör baronen och sir Rodney processen kort med den. Kanske hade de turen och överraskningsmomentet på sin sida i kombination med att Halt ”mjukat upp” den lite inför deras ankomst.

Truppen lär sätta efter det ylande ljudet nu, och förhoppningsvis komma i tid för att Halt och Gilan inte skall hamna i allt för stora svårigheter.s

Delmål 7 (Kapitel 30–32 + Epilog).

Sista delmålet, knyter som väntat ihop säcken, inklusive en liten kärleksscen med Allys. Med Will som den store hjälten efter att ha dödat den sista Karlakanen med en eldfängd pil. Alla hans drömmar ser ut att gå i uppfyllelse när Baronen och sir Rodney omvärderar Will och ger honom en chans att studera vid krigsskolan. Horace är den som hurrar högst och längst, men som väntat säger Will nej. Vilket följer Wills karaktärsutveckling de senaste delmålen: han har trots allt hittat hem. Och trots att det kanske känns lite ”over-the-top” att Halt inte bara visste vem Wills far var utan även räddades av honom så blir det ett fint slut i epilogen när Will äntligen får reda på vem hans far var. Och med vetskapen att hans far inte var en storslagen riddare utan bara en sergeant med ett gigantiskt jävlar anamma blir han till syvende och sist ändå tillfreds med sina beslut och var han hamnade i livet.

Sammanfattning.

Bra skriven och en story som håller måttet även när man är lätt utanför målgruppen. Will är en trevlig prick, lätt att tycka om och han uppvisar både mod när det gäller och osäkerhet inför vart livet fört honom medan han långsamt hittar ett hem hos spejarna. Jag är inte förvånad över att boken slutar innan kriget bryter ihop helt, utan mer rundar av efter den här första prövningen. Will får inte många kapitel ihop med de gamla vännerna, men mycket tyder på att de kommer behålla kontakten böckerna – så min vision om att de tillsammans kommer bli lite av ett team är inte helt omöjligt. Jag är också glad att min teori om att Morgarath skulle vara Wills pappa visade sig vara en obefogad oro. På det hela taget en trevlig läsning och jag ser fram emot att få se vart fötterna bär Will härnäst.

Länkar.

Boken @ Goodreads.

eBibliotek @ Axiell Media.

Biblio @ Axiell Media.

[dr-lizortecho]

Completely randomly, I was thinking about Nora’s character and started wondering what her abilities were. Because everyone seemed to have a distinct ability on top of telekinesis (healing, empathy, fire, etc.) but she isn’t really shown using any. Than I started thinking about how she was referred to as ‘The Engineer’ and how they could hint towards her abilities. Going back to OG Roswell (sorry I do this every time) their abilities were reconstructing and manipulating molecular structures. And I guess I am wondering if her abilities could somehow connect to what Michael said about their technology being on some level biological. Like if technology is just technology unless you have the power to make it something more. Which could explain how the Lockhart machine was amplified by the turquoise.

Then I started thinking about why Michael would be considered the heir to the dictator, as Isobel and Max both would have seemingly equal claims. And I started wondering if maybe Nora was part of the original ruling family, one that imprisoned Jones and Louise to use their abilities. Which would make Jones why they locked him up bit checkout, because he was the savior at some point? Maybe he eventually broke free and took control, Nora creating an underground revolt and somehow having a political marriage to him? Giving Michael the rights to claim the throne from multiple angles, kicking Isobel and Max down the line. (This is assuming their planet works on a monarchy system, since Antar did in the OG Roswell show)

[wlw-lovestruck-fiction]

I don't think that they will remove Aurora old story...unless they want start a revolt or something like that

-------------------

True, it'd be a horrible move on Lovestruck's part. I think it'll just be like Antares and Nova, so Aurora and Chance(?) will have a route both with the old MC and the new MC. - Mod Jessa

[shaneplays]

Love this Erol Otus piece. Evidently from Revolt On Antares,  a science fiction-themed microgame by Tom Moldvay from TSR in 1981.

[fanficsrusz]

Taglist

Ok so i was an idiot and deleted the taglist i had saved but i did manage to restore some of the names so if you're not on the list then please just comment that you want to be added but please specify which taglist you want to be in whether it be on my permanent taglist meaning you will get tagged on ALL fics i post or just on the Adrestia, Goddess Of revolt fic. Ok thank you

Permanent tag list

@gwenebear @celestiaelisia @blondieee-me @harrisongslimited @wittysunflower @introvertedmegalomaniac @derangedcupcake @wholelottatiffy

Adrestia Goddess of revolt taglist 

@go-to-the-window-blog-blog @letoursilencebreaktonight @babygirltaina @beyond-antares   @notyouraveragemochii @baphometwolf666

[centurionsreview]

Revolt On Antares Review

https://centurionsreview.com/revolt-on-antares/revolt-on-antares-review/

[otusshrine]

from Revolt on Antares

[derriereunemasque]

Kalems and Lucifers Relationship is rather Complicated, to say the least.

Much like Antares, Kalem used to be very close to Lucifer. They shared complete trust with each other, let themselves depend on the other, took care of each other. That time is fondly remembered by them. Even now, they do care about the other. Noone else may come as close to them as Lucifer, Aedrial and Kalem were. 

Though that pure devotion to each other is heavily tainted by the angelic revolt under Lucifers lead.

Unlike Aedrial, who decided to only ever follow Lucifer, Kalem decided to stand on the other side. To Lucifer it was the most hurtful feeling to see someone who knew him better than anyone to oppose his ideals. Questioning his desicions. While to Kalem... he ended up paying for standing in Lucifers way with scars that will never fade. Seeing Lucifers betrayal not only against heaven, but also against their close bond.

They both regret the happenings back then. While Kalem still believes he had done right to oppose Lucifers violent way of changing heaven, he regrets not being able to talk sense into Lucifer. Not pushing harder on the matter. For Lucifer... after his rage died down, long after his banishment, he started to feel deep regret of hurting Kalem. He knows he had betrayed Kalem even on a personal level, and does not ever expect forgiveness.

[arrhakis]

(via he Mystic Tragedies Of Theodhatres: Antares - The Antagoni… | Flickr)

The Mystic Tragedies Of Theodhatres:

Antares - The Antagonism Of The Impossible by Daniel Arrhakis (2020)

Two young women Anthea and Thalia fall in love in spite of the moral values ​​that reign in their families.

Despite being very different, they have something in common, the pleasure of observing the night sky and especially their favorite star Antares, the red star in the Constellation of Scorpio.

But there is something else that unites them, the non-conformity of their destinies and the impossibility of their dreams. However, one day the relationship is discovered and they are prohibited from seeing each other.

Disconcerted, they devise a plan to flee the two of them and on a stormy night, taking advantage of the confusion, they flee and take refuge in an old abandoned theater. There they discover, along with the props, various clothes of characters and decide to disguise themselves, one as a bishop and the other as an ancient Greek warrior. For a time they lived out their fantasies experiencing several personages and stories until  they decide to rehabilitate the old theater and stage a play to get money.

Meanwhile, their families were looking for them throughout the region, tightening their grip on that fleeting and forbidden freedom.

But on the night of the premiere, to great amazement and fear their families appear, but do not recognize them, after all they were unrecognized in their roles.

In the play "Antares" a Bishop who had lost his faith and an Amazon wounded and disenchanted with the battle, finds themselves  in the ruins of an old temple under a starry sky. In the dialogues the revolt and the bitterness of a life they did not want, the loneliness of those who had nowhere to go and the incomprehension of a world that they no longer understood. After all, it was their story, a story that ended in that old theater, in the last act of their own tragedy. In the end the two characters say goodbye to life sharing a poisoned chalice while looking at Antares, their red star in the sky.

While the audience applauds, Anthea and Thália join hands looking at each other for the last time, no one would separate them anymore ... they would be together forever in the constellation of scorpion!

________________________________________________

Antares - O Antagonismo Dos Impossíveis por Daniel Arrhakis (2020)

Duas jovens  Anthea e Thalia apaixonam-se à revelia dos valores morais que reinam nas suas famílias . A pesar de muito diferentes, têm algo em comum, o gosto em observar o céu nocturno e em especial a sua estrela preferida Antares, a estrela vermelha na constelação de Escorpião.

Mas há algo mais que as une, o inconformismo dos seus destinos e a impossibilidade dos seus sonhos. No entanto certo dia a relação é descoberta e ficam proibidas de se verem.

Inconformadas arranjam um plano para fugirem as duas e numa noite de tempestade, aproveitando a confusão fogem e refugiam-se num velho teatro abandonado. Ali descobrem junto aos adereços várias roupas de personagens e resolvem disfarçar-se, uma de bispo e outra de antigo guerreiro grego. Durante algum tempo viveram as suas fantasias experimentando vários personagens e histórias até que com o tempo resolvem reabilitar o velho teatro e encenam uma peça para arranjar dinheiro.

Entretanto as suas famílias procuravam-nas em toda a região apertando-se cada vez mais o cerco àquela liberdade fugaz e proibida.

Mas na noite da estreia, para grande espanto e receio as suas famílias aparecem, mas não as reconhecem, afinal elas estavam irreconhecíveis nos seus papéis.

Na peça "Antares"  um  Bispo que tinha perdido a sua fé e uma  Amazona ferida e desencantada com a batalha,  encontram-se nas ruinas de um velho templo sob um céu estrelado. Nos diálogos a revolta e a amargura de uma vida que não queriam, a solidão de quem não tinha para onde ir e a incompreensão de um mundo que não entendiam mais. Afinal era a sua história, uma história que terminava naquele velho teatro, no último acto da sua própria tragédia. No final os dois personagens despedem-se da vida partilhando um cálice envenenado enquanto olham para Antares, a estrela vermelha, a sua estrela do firmamento.

Enquanto o publico aplaude, Anthea e Thalia dão as mãos olhando-se também elas pela última vez, ninguém as iria separar mais ... iriam ficar juntas para sempre na constelação de escorpião !

________________________________________________

Elements from photos of mine for the background that i take in Pena Place in Sintra, Portugal.  Sculptures from stock images and images of mine, all modified for this work.

[thesaint-jimmy]

GET TO KNOW MY HUNTER

OC answering meme curtosey of @princeofmorley

We all know Bloodborne can be a difficult fandom for OCs given the vagueness of the lore, but a lot of us still enjoy coming up with stories for our hunters. I hadn’t seen an OC meme for Bloodborne so I figured I’d make one myself!

These are all the questions I could think of without getting into the nitty gritty of the lore. Of course, all questions are optional. You can remove any question you don’t want to answer, or add questions I might’ve forgotten!

Feel free to use this template as you wish! I’d love to read about other people’s hunter OCs, so be sure to tag it as #bloodborne oc meme so I can read yours!

(Artwork created by the lovely @esuerc )

Name: Templeton Kingsley Nickname(s): Temple, Temp Age: 26 Gender: Female Sexuality: Bisexual Height/Build: 5″1 and very thin

Personality description:  Usually nervous, Templeton seeks the approval of others like its going out of style. She’s trusting and loyal though, not the kind to back down from a difficult task or a friend in need. She can find hope even in the darkest times which is rare in the world of Yharnam.

Physical description:  Templeton wears the starting set you get at the begining of the game, little baby caplet and all. She’s got messy orange hair, brown eyes and wears glasses. Her skin, like most residents of Yharnam is fairly pale from never seeing the sun.

BACKSTORY

Introduce your hunter and their backstory. Templeton’s rise to being a hunter isn’t anything dramatic.  She grew up near Yharnam around the time of the hunt and was trained in the ways of the hunters. She became close friends with a huntress called Frigga who was a lot more skilled, and worked hard to try and be like her. Templeton was constantly fascinated by the wrong things, reading books when she should’ve been sparring or looking at the stars when it was time to clean weapons. Unbeknownst to her she gained a ridiculous amount of insight while perusing her own little whims and has been known to get feelings about things before they happen, though often they go unlistened too. Frigga was fast friend and constant protector, the two forging a fairly deep bond despite a few major mishaps. Now they are part of the same small group of hunters.

Which class/origin did you choose for your hunter? Does this tie into their backstory? I chose violent past. It’s not accurate.

Where is your hunter from? What brought them to Yharnam? A little city a few miles from Yharnam, the name of which was never relevant. Templeton forgot it due to growing up in Yharnam and never really looking back.

Did your hunter know any of the characters from the game before they entered the Hunter’s Dream? They had heard of a few of them. Eileen and Executioner Alfred, but never actually met them.

Had they fought beasts before entering the Dream, or is this their first experience as a hunter? They’ve fought beasts before

CHARACTER DETAILS

How do they react to first waking up in the Hunter’s Dream? Do they remember anything about their life before the Dream? Templeton remembers most things and assumes this is just another stage of the hunt.

Do they align themselves with any Covenants or other factions (the Healing Church, the Choir, the Old Hunters, the Unseen Village, etc)? Nope, just whomever seems trustworthy. This sometimes leads to bad decisions being made.

Do they befriend any NPCs in particular? Make enemies of any NPCs? Templeton tries to befriend whomever she can. Things go well with Alfred for a time, but then it ends poorly.

Are they in a relationship? If so, with whom? Nope.

How does your hunter feel about the Healing Church? About blood ministration? Positively. Blood ministration is kind of essential to a hunter.

Do they fear the scourge? Are they afraid of turning into a beast? Afraid of becoming blood-addled? Of the unknown Cosmos? What are they afraid of? Templeton is afraid of most of these things. She does all she can to banage cuts and prevent infection and has been known to keep charms to ward off evil on her person.

Does your hunter relish in the Hunt or revile their bloody work? No but she knows she has too do it, and is desperate for an end to the hunt.

What is your hunter’s attitude towards Gehrman? Do they resent being trapped in the Hunter’s Dream? She finds him very creepy. Does not wish to spend time with him, but is an admirer of his book collection.

Does your hunter sympathize and associate with fellow hunters, or are they more of a loner who avoids other hunters? Do they leave notes for other hunters? Templeton leaves all the notes, happily offering help whenever she can. She wants to do whatever is in her power to assist the others out on the hunt.

Does your hunter worship the Great Ones? Do they worship blood? Or do they have a different belief system? If they’re not devout, what do they value or prioritize in life? She’s got a dim faith in the great ones, but it doesn’t rule her life. She says prayers when she needs luck or strength but mostly that’s just for her own reassurance.

Do they have a special place where they feel safe or “at home”? Is there a place they’re afraid of or that they avoid? Templeton feels very at home with a book in her hands and a wall at her back. She often worms her way between candle holding statues to get in some time to read and believes that the statues will look out for her. She HATES Yhar’ghul and avoids it at all costs.

Are there any particular items your hunter holds onto for sentimental reasons, or items that serve to comfort them? She is quite protective of her glasses.

Do any of the discoveries in the game (about the old blood, the Healing Church, the Great Ones, etc) shock them? How do they react to these revelations? Most things shock her, but the whole process of trying to birth a great one she finds particularly revolting and unsettling.

Does your hunter want to discover the secrets of the Healing Church and the origins of the scourge, or do they just want to kill some beasts and escape the Dream? What motivates them? She’s very much interested in finding the source of the scourge and a way to stop it. To end the plague is her foremost goal.

How does your hunter feel about being effectively immortal? How do the unending deaths affect them over the course of their time in the Dream? She’s not really come to terms with that yet, and deals with it by being in deep deep denial.

COMBAT AND STATS

(I’m answering these ones more based on how I play then how I write Templeton in my bloodborne stories. Hope that’s alright)

Which primary stat does your hunter most rely on (Strength, Skill, Bloodtinge, Arcane)? Do they prioritize Vitality or Endurance? Strength and Vitality over everything. That’s where all the blood echoes get spent.

What are your hunter’s trick weapon and firearm of choice? Why? Whirligig saw is the best one, two handed wield style with no gun needed.

Do they make use of any hunter tools? Not very often

What type of armor do they wear? Why? When it’s nessecary to change out of the typical outsiders clothes for something a bit more flashy she prefers the decorative old hunter set, complete with a top hat. She thinks all the charms will bring her luck.

Describe their fighting style. Hit it until it dies.

Which Caryll runes does your hunter keep equipped? Vision. The star shaped one.

How much Insight does your hunter have? How does this affect them? Lots of insight. They want to notice all the little details they can.

Does your hunter take advantage of Beasthood to fuel their attacks? How does it affect them? No she is very afraid of the effect that might have, that things would turn out to be irreversible.

Is there a beast or type of enemy your hunter likes to fight? An enemy they avoid? When she has to choose she doesn’t mind fighting darkbeasts like Paarl. Something sparking and glowing so it can’t sneak up on her. She hates the brain sucker/cthulu guys.

Do they often summon the Old Hunters or hunters from other worlds to aid them? Yes, quite the one for jolly cooperation. Strength in numbers as of were.

PLOT DECISIONS

Does your hunter’s story deviate from the central plot of Bloodborne? In what ways? Oh yes. There’s a lot of deviations as most of what happens to Templeton in my cannon takes place before the game and I see the world of bloodborne a bit different then other people do. It’s way too many to list.

Does your hunter try to rescue any of the civilians of Yharnam? Are they successful? Yes. They manage to rescue none of them though and end up making mistakes that lead to the death of each one.

Does your hunter kill the Impostor Iosefka or let her continue her work? Templeton is completely unaware of Iosefka (as I was) and lets her carry on.

Do they fight Djura or befriend him? What about Eileen the Crow? Fight Djura, brefirend the Crow

Do they choose to side with Alfred or Queen Annalise? ALFRED

Does your hunter enter the Chalice Dungeons? Heck no

Does your hunter enter the Hunter’s Nightmare? Do they defeat the Orphan of Kos? in all actuality of me playing yes, in her story no

What is your hunter’s final choice at the end of the game? To be reborn as a great one

If they accept Gehrman’s offer, what does your hunter do once they’re free of the Hunter’s Dream? n/a

If applicable, how does your hunter die? As of now I do not know.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your hunter?

Yes! You can read about Templeton and her adventures through my weird Yharnam cannon here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6655885/chapters/15223582

Also I have lots of other hunters if anyone would like me to fill this out for one of them!

I’m going to tag @tetsuna-chan for Fwahe @focsle for Obediah , @skelephibian for Bloodborne au Antares and @lycheeberry17 for Aditya Lupei 

If you guys have the time it would be super cool to learn about ya hunters

[dareread]

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, tibco, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, tibco’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also tibco’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a tibcoconference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, attitude!”

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, attitude. It’s One, two, three, attitude hah ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.

“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox parc, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude hah.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

“One girl fouled out.”

“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all.

[oldschoolfrp]

Antares is revolting.  (Erol Otus from Revolt on Antares, TSR minigame, 1981; image via A Paladin in Citadel.)

[taskboy-archive-blog]

Looking for 'Revolt on Antares'

Dear Internet,

For no reason more than nostalgia, I'm looking to buy a copy of the TSR minigame "Revolt on Antares". If you've got a complete, usable copy of the game that you'd like to sell, please drop me an email (jjohn [at] taskboy dot com). I'm not looking for a collectable, near-mint copy.

Thanks!

UPDATE (Jan 12, 2008): After a nerd-fisted slap fight on eBay over a near-mint version of the game, in which the bidding when over $100, I decided that I'd try Alibris, which has a used copy in an unknown condition for $27. Who's laughing now, TSRwhore88?

Even when I win, I lose.

FINAL UPDATE: I received RoA today and was pleased to find all the counters still attached! Near Mint, baby!

[chax-az]

Revolt on Antares is such a fun and evocative game.

TSR's Mini Games were their answer to the microgame movement, pocket-sized board games with folded paper maps and a small sheet of counters (ad from back cover of White Dwarf 30, GW, April/May 1982)