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I’m a Mac user and a very happy one at that. My computer just works, and that’s what I want. I also have access to several awesome programs which you don’t get on Windows, such as Delicious Library and Papers.
Annoyingly, I may have to leave my shiny aluminium and black glass comfort zone the the shiny, but bloated land of Windows 7 come this Autumn.
Why?
Civilization 5.
I am a massive fan of the Civilization games. I own all of the main series games and most of the spin offs and if it wasn’t for my self imposed exile from the world of Windows, I would still regularly be playing Civ 4 and Civ 2 (Civ City I never bothered with, Civilization Revolution has overly simple gameplay and I could never get a hold of the Alpha Centauri add-on).
So you can see my dilemma. After all, Civ 5 promises to make the features introduced in Civ 4 and it’s expansions more integral to the game, revamp the combat system, create a more dynamic and interactive diplomacy system and a hex-grid based map.
Ah well, I’d better get stuck into Bootcamp.
 A GWR 57XX Class locomotive with some wagons and detritus Oh dear. It looks like I’ve finally taken the first steps on actually building something which I can run my trains on.
How horrifically geeky of me.
It’s not terribly big and it’s not progressed very far, but it’s a start and it’s taken me more then two years to actually get to this point. For reference, this point is having cork glued to the baseboard (to dampen the noise made by the trains) and nailing the track down.
The track will be coming back up when I’m next at my Mum’s (there isn’t room for it in my current accommodation). This will let me put down ballast, which will makes the track look a bit more realistic. I would have done that this weekend, but I don’t have enough of the granite chips to do the whole thing.
After that’s done, the board needs to be painted in a neutral colour and I need to build some some landscape, because there are very few parts of Scotland which are as flat as a billiard table. Then, it’ll start looking a bit more like what it is – a siding off a branch line to allow coal to be dropped off for local merchants.
In the meantime, I’ll probably be building a few scenic items and kit models. I’m particularly taken with the idea of having a patched up carriage body sitting around for use as a store, or possibly accommodation for the local tramp.
For reference, the setting is somewhere in the North-East of Scotland, between 1930 and 1960. That allows me to use vans and trains suitable for the LNER or British Railways, including some of the early diesel trains. Sadly, it’s not big enough for me to play with things like this or this, but it’s not the end of the world.
This is the story of how I (almost) died in session three of the on-going Rogue Trader campaign I’m playing in. It was, at least, a glorious near-death experience. The only reason I wasn’t rolling up a new character there and then, was use of the fate point mechanic and a Teleportarium.
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It was meant to be a simple operation. Grav-chute out of shuttle at high altitude to avoid detection, land on the roof of a temple, break in, grab the Armour of Sanguine and get out out. The temple was circular, with a 10 kilometre diameter dome with 8 tunnel-like structures radiating from it. The target area we were aiming for was a two kilometre wide area of stained glass in the centre of the dome. A true masterpiece of pre-Imperium engineering.
Vendigroth and Anastasia (the party’s Astropath and Rogue Trader respectively) both landed successfully, near the edge of the dome. Both myself and Salia (a powerfist and chainsword wielding ball of psychopathic fury), landed with slightly less grace. Salia was headed towards a collection of unpleasantly spiky structures on the dome, until I knocked into her sending us both towards the stained glass in the middle of the dome.
Then things got slightly nasty. After failing two rolls to correct my decent, I hit the dome at speed, taking critical damage. I then rolled down the dome, failing five rolls (one per kilometre plunged). Eventually I passed out, shooting off the edge of the dome and plunging through a multi-storey hovel, much to the surprise of a number of mutants within. On the upside, they are now the proud owners of a bag of Mechanicus equipment, a Boltgun and an optical mechadendrite.
At that point the Teleportarium finally locked on to my bubbling and broken body, transporting me to the ship’s Medicae bay. I played my Servo-Skull familiar for most of the rest of the session.
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For those who doubt my lack of luck when it comes to dice rolling, I made 9 rolls (1 initial roll, 1 re-roll, 1 correction roll, 1 re-roll, 5 rolls as I fell). Of those, all but one was more then 90, with at most of them coming within Rogue Trader’s ‘probably fatal’ band between 96 and 99. It was a wonderful and glorious piece of action.
It also demonstrates my favourite part of the fate point mechanic. In addition to the standard rules, which allows fate points to be spent to re-roll a skill check, house rules allow a fate point to be burnt permanently, avoiding certain death by the skin of the teeth. This does allow for quite wonderful, action-movie style events such as this, without cheapening death to the point that it’s an inconvenience rather then a serious consideration (as in some games where a revive spell doesn’t cost much).
 I’ve been looking for a dice carrying container that was compact, hardwaring and attractive for quite some time now. Finally, such a tin is mine, and it didn’t even cost me a penny.
The two tins in the accompanying photos are miniature whisky tins. They are compact, small enough to fit in a coat pocket and pretty solid. They also had the advantage of containing whisky. They are just the right size to fit a complete set of dice for the d20 system plus the 15 or so d10s I carry for Rogue Trader.
I would recommend these to other gamers. While I got these as a gift, they cost about £3 or £4 in the shops and repurposing them for this purpose is pretty eco-friendly. I would, however, recommend getting something better the Famous Grouse – it is not exactly the finest whisky to come out of Scotland.
It’s simple when you think about it. The two hobbies which I’ve talked about on here so far are both quite cheap. After all, the only investment which you definitely need to make for roleplaying is the dice – everything else required can be obtained for free (with some gamers even making a point of sticking to free games). Cooking is slightly more costly, after all, even if you have the resources of River Cottage you need some investment (or considerably more time), but overall it’s still pretty cheap given the requirement of food for sustenance.
My other hobbies are far more expensive, both in time and in money.
 The first is inherently geeky, a bit strange strange and carries a less then desirable reputation: railway modelling (or “railroading” as it’s known in the States). It’s a good hobby, it indulges my interest in engineering and it’s probably the most creative thing I do. I’m not particularly good at it, and to be fair I’ve never gotten as far as something like Waverly West (a realistic recreation of parts of Edinburgh’s main station). The closest I’ve got to that is building some hills out of foamboard for a diorama – hardly making it my most active hobby.
So where does the expense come in? Well, the models themselves are expensive – top of the range British models similar to the ones in the picture generally cost between £80 and £125 if you model in OO scale. Smaller engines are cheaper, but still seldom under £40. Thankfully, these are a snip compared to the larger O scale models, which generally cost between £500 and £2,000. There are also heavy requirements on time and space – even a simple circle of track requires a lot of space, with realistic models generally occupying their own room and taking hundreds of man-hours to build. I doubt I’ll ever get to that kind of level, not least because it’s going to be years before I’m going to have that kind of space, but I still collect some models, at the rate of about one per year. Generally I only buy ones which mean something to me – in 2007, it was a model of a locomotive from Glasgow Transport Museum, this year it’s a different version of the locomotive my parents gave me when I was 6 or 7. Eventually, I might actually finish off the diorama I started so I at least have something to display them on.
 The other expensive hobby is much more embryonic and considerably more expensive: collecting whisky. Being a student, I obviously don’t have much chance to collect whisky – a reasonable bottle of mass produced whisky – Jura, Laphroig, Ardberg, Talisker and so on – costs between £20 and £40 and offers no collectors value. Some collectors whiskys can be bought for as little as £30 while a number of limited editions are sold for between £40 and £100. Not a cheap business at all, not least because opened bottles lose their value.
It gets worse however. If you pay £100 for a bottle of whisky, you might consider opening it eventually. I certainly would, especially if it was something along the lines of Bruichladdich Octomore (pictured, RRP £90), the world’s most peated whisky. There is a level of collector’s whiskys where they cease to be something for human consumption and instead become an investment, alongside shares or gold. One example is MacAllen 1945. Now, MacAllen is a reasonable distillery, although not the first choice of many whisky drinkers. It was one of the first distilleries to come back into production following the Second World War, the upshot of which is the ‘45, ±250 bottles of which were made available in 2002. 50ml bottles of it now retail for £675. One dealing website offers £7,000 for a full size bottle.
On a more achievable scale, Kilchoman is a new malt from a farm distillery on Islay. Bottles of it’s first release whisky retailed for £45 (an exceptional price for a 3 year old whisky); less then a year later and it commonly changes hands for upwards of £200. It would appear that the second bottling is being traded in America for similar prices. It’s also an excellent and surprising whisky with a complex nose and peated character, guaranteeing that it’s only going to increase in value.
Whisky is a fascinating substance. I’ve been drinking whisky since I was 18, but it’s only after 6 years that I’m really beginning to appreciate the true subtleties of the drink. It takes on even more complexity when you consider that you could be drinking something which you may never be able to taste again and which is utterly unique. That’s why I’m trying to start collecting it – as an investment and as an opportunity to try unique things.
So, yes, some hobbies really are more expensive then others, but then every hobby has different rewards
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