Real-life dungeoneering

A photo gallery of explorers under London and New York (link >>>). A lot of steampunk and dieselretro mood in those abandoned places.

Westbourne tunnel

Space rovers

Here is an article outlining the development of robotic rovers for the moon and Mars since the 1960s (link >>>).

The Soviet Lunokhod rover 1970

A complete map of the Third Imperium of the Traveller

This link leads to a nifty web version of the star map of the Third Imperium and the surrounding six star empires (link >>>). Quite nice for old Traveller fans like me.

A car for adventures

Icon FJ 40: a custom-built terrain car for the discerning adventurer (link >>>). A delight in any contermporary or near-future campaign.

Landing a car on Mars

This is how NASA intends to land a car on Mars. Pretty mind-boggling engineering. No SF writer would come up with such a solution.

Ice on the moon!

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has found that the Shackleton crater at the moon’s frigid south pole contains about 22% ice on its surface. Read more here >>>

That’s great news for the future human exploration of the moon, since local access to water will make it easier to maintain a long-term base.

Catch the day!

Carpe diem

The adventurer’s way

Facing the difficulties, we can choose either to be a poor victim or an great adventurer
— Paulo Coelho

A renaissance for Swedish RPGs?

The last few years there have been a resurgence in Swedish role-playing game (RPG) publishing, probably due to the advent of cheap DTP software and cost-efficient print-on-demand suppliers. The hobby’s nadir might be over. Mylingspel, Saga Games, Fria Ligan and many garage-size producers are making sure that there is a steady influx of new products of high quality. (Here is a link to the Swedish blogpost that triggered this notion >>>)

However, this is a renaissance for enthusiasts, not for the mass market. Saga Games’s Fantasy! is a top seller in the specialty shops, but it won’t be in the shelves of the common toy stores or bookshops, unlike the situation in the 1980s and 1990s.

And that’s the crux. When the national game wholesaler Top Games collapsed in the late 1990s, the RPG market died with it. The specialist intermediary between the manufacturer and the individual stores is essential. That was one of the major reasons for the success of Drakar och Demoner 30 years ago: Target Games found an competent ally in AB Jan Edman, a company that worked business-to-business to distribute all sorts of games and toys on a national scale. Its salesmen made sure that all relevant store owners got our RPG products in their hands. But nowadays there simply isn’t money enough in the Swedish RPG business to attract the attention of such companies.