uncredited microfiction: the Marduk Project

When the Marduk Project started, it was a lark. A few employees in the archaeology department added a half dozen religious texts to a deep learning database just to see what would happen. We were surprised that it so readily identified similarities between various ancient and modern rites. Not only did the system detail concrete lineages from alchemy back to Egyptian and Babylonian myths – some we knew about, some we didn’t – it found direct links between almost all of the world’s religions, myths, and philosophies. Soon, we were adding as much digitized esoteric material as we could find and Marduk was cranking out commonalities between modern religious ceremonies, alchemical recipes, and ancient magical rites.

Then Dr. Prasad added physics texts and, well, that was that. Marduk’s output switched to gibberish equations for about a week, what’s now known as the anti-Copenhagen calculations. We were considering shutting it down when Marduk suddenly generated what it claimed was a lead to gold transmutation recipe.

Dr. Valk gave it a shot just to see – and it worked.

It took just a few hours and it worked. As department head, I ordered everyone out of the computer lab and destroyed Dr. Valk’s notes myself. My plan was to lock down the system until we could get permission to completely wipe the entire system. The implicates were just too great.

Dr. Valk came back to the lab before the University board was convened. She had keys. By that time, Marduk had generated an additional 400 spells. Dr. Valk saved the spells from system memory to text files in the main directory and she copied those files to a thumb drive. Then she left, never to be seen again.

Whatever she’d planned, it obviously didn’t account for competition. Dr. Valk’s technical expertise was average, she knew enough about the lab’s computers to use them. She was most likely unaware that every file in that main directory was publicly accessible on our research website. Between 5 pm Tuesday and 8:30 am Wednesday, when IT noticed the heavy bandwidth, Marduk generated another 3900 working magic spells and placed them on an unsecured web server.

IT terminated access to the server Wednesday morning, but by then it was too late. The folder had been linked on Reddit, Facebook, RedRanger, Desker, Orbitron, pretty much everywhere. Dozens of reshare sites appeared with copies of the files and we had no way to stop those.

Pandora’s box had been opened. The world finally had working magic.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601066/software-that-reads-harry-potter-might-perform-some-wizardry

Moons of Saturn May Be Younger Than the Dinosaurs | SETI Institute

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/moons-saturn-may-be-younger-dinosaurs

Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000. Albert Robida, 1882, via the Public Domain Review [ http://publicdomainreview.org ]

Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000. Albert Robida, 1882, via the Public Domain Review [ http://publicdomainreview.org ]

…I think I’ll adopt these shrimpface platforms as my Barsoomois flyers. Although I still love Gino d’Achille’s flying Venetian taxis [ http://bit.ly/22wlgjG ] and Robert Abbett’s charming little motor-launch [ http://bit.ly/1UN3hPV ]

Also, for the Cock-floppers of Barsoom crowd, here: have some minis
[ bit.ly/1MmlXVb ] that also pick up on Mars’s lower gravity. (NSFW, obviously)

This looks promising: Charles Stross started a list of Space Opera Cliches.

This looks promising: Charles Stross started a list of Space Opera Cliches.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

So every few months someone pipes up with “no but what’s the point of the OSR really? Where’s the creativity? Aren’t you just doing the same thing again and again?”

So every few months someone pipes up with “no but what’s the point of the OSR really? Where’s the creativity? Aren’t you just doing the same thing again and again?”

Well, my son’s recently started DMing for his schoolmates. Unfortunately he takes after me when it comes to planning ahead, so he’s always going “dad, do you have an adventure I can use?”
And so far he’s run Roger Giner-Sorolla’s putatively non-violent Egg of the Gazolba, bit.ly/1p58M0d
Luka Rejec’s Deep in the Purple Worm, bit.ly/1LOMvyc
he’s improvised some things off Paolo Greco’s Chthonic Codex bit.ly/24OoDRI
and he’s planning to run Joesky and Ramsey Dow’s Forgotten Chambers bit.ly/1YrWg7g

Yesterday it was “oh I forgot I need a bunch of magic treasures because they broke into the wizard’s library.” So I sent him a dozen links to Jason Sholtis’s Dungeon Dozen and the D666 starting equipment table from Chthonic Codex. And the Links of Wisdom treasure page, of course bit.ly/1UPY1eF and finally Erik Jensen’s Wampus Abecedary bit.ly/21jkpNl
They had to stop playing, they were laughing too hard. They had to let 3 more players join them, too.

And my point is, almost all this stuff is free, and what’s not is remarkably cheap in pdf. You can get it right off the internet. And there are hundreds of people still pouring out this extraordinary, generous fountain of  creativity.
“But the core rules are really just reprints of DnD, I can’t understand why you’d keep rehashing this obsolete old game.”
I’ll let you into a dirty little secret:
he’s never even bothered to read the rulebook.