Slashdot Mirror

Little known fact. A raid by the U.S. Secret Service has revealed that this Facebook project was coordinated by Steve Jackson Games with documents camouflaged as rules for a card game named Illuminati. Pass phrase "Orbital Mind Control Lasers".

This is not some secret tinfoil-hat stuff, it's all quite open for anyone who looks.

Oh good, then you can post a reference please. Because as far as I can tell, CALEA applies to both Title I and Title II.

It's just that nobody who wants what the politicians call NN, including the MSM, wants to talk about it.

Yeah, I played the SJGames Illuminati card game too. "Punk Rockers control the NSA, which controls the Democrats and Big Media, all controlled by the Servants of Cthulhu". Fun game (though it needs updated groups), but if you're using it for real life then you've got a problem.

There's Russian data in the document metadata. Could be Russia using the White Nationalists to try to control France. Hmm. For some reason that makes me think of a card game.

Your answer is here

As visible in your official company FAQ, you had run a ISP as well as other online services (I seem to recall there having been some manner of MOO/MUSH service for running online games), well in advance of most other RPG publishers. Furthermore, you run your own digital store (e23) rather than using through the DriveThruStuff platform used by the rest of the tabletop industry, and made PDF copies of your books available for purchase before the other "major" industry players (Fantasy Flight, Pinnacle, WhiteWolf, and WotC).

How much of this decision was strategic—based on a firm belief this was "The Way of the Future"—and how much was it exploratory / risk-taking? In hindsight, what decisions for your online presence would you have made differently?

We would have to legalize the blood sport known as the Autoduel.

Human brains, even the bigger one's here on /., often miss sarcasm. It's one of those subtle things that varies immensely with context, intelligence, context, etc. Then again, software can hardly do worse than the Secret Service at differentiating things like "real" from "make believe". For you new kids, please see http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Why the fuck even call it "Star Wars" then? Because you bought the rights to it and a combination of plot elements, etc? Is it illegal for other fictional works to reference another? No. So, why even call it "Star Wars"? Name Recognition, ugh.

We solved the Rifts issue of namespace-time decades ago with GURPS.

Creators exist within a culture and leverage the entirety of existence by reworking the tiniest layers atop it all. Without the culture they are irrelevant.
All your Metaverse are belong to us.

This brings to mind Steve Jackson's Ogre game, where a huge robotic tank was pitted against forces of conventional tanks and weapons.

DM: What class is your character?

Noob: Vulcan! Spock is wicked cool.

Irritated? Dungeon Master, heh, yeah. What a bore. A Game Master would be Overjoyed. Halflings and Wizards can work with Spock, (hell, he'd be mistaken for an Elf in Shadowrun), and in games like Rifts, or super-rule-sets like GURPS, the more worlds collide the better!

You'd actually be irritated instead of imagining a Star Trek 'away team' going off course on The Voyage Home and winding up amidst There and Back Again? You can't fathom the fun of Starfleet's finest crash landing on Bag End, and being guilt tripped into helping Gandalf take back the Lonely Mountain from a dragon that's been conspiring with dimensional shamblers to bring an evil cyBorg race to Middle Earth?

Closed minds are the biggest reason the medium is in such a state.

Or such crimes as making a table top role playing game or being the love intrest of a NSA agent.

but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.

forbidden books, mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted...

whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior

I rest my case, your honor.

Would you like to learn more?

Miles driven does nothing to the road compared to pounds per square inch.
If that is the case, then an automobile causes more damage than an 18 wheeler. A passenger car puts 30 PSI on the ground. An 18 wheeler puts about 10+ PSI on the ground.
Sure your car weighs 1/10th as much, but the two front tires of a big rig have more contact area than your entire car.

Heh...

Get your Discordia from the real source: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/ or in hardcover from From the same publisher of the diluted version you referred to

Actually, what's happening is that the Bavarian Illuminati are using their control of Barack Obama, the NRA, the Ice-Capades, Mel Gibson, and the TSA to seize control of the Moral Majority from the opposing Adepts of Hermes.

Of course, everything I needed to learn about politics, I gleaned from playing Illuminati: New World Order.

If the author is intending to have a comprehensive history of RPG (which is ambitious) I'd argue play-by-mail games should be included in the history.

Difficult to imagine, but there was a time (before BBSs) where players actually played fantasy/strategic/etc games through the mail. Steve Jackson is one example, and there are others.

I used to work in that business, and it sadly seems to have been completely ignored -- Wikipedia has no entries for the games I worked on.

SS = secret service. The guys who protect the President and raided Steve Jackson Games' and took down Illuminati BBS. The case was famous among the BBS community in Texas at the time. An excerpt from the above:

The facts. By now, most people interested in the case are familiar with the basic facts: On March 1, 1990, the Secret Service, in an early-morning raid, searched the offices of Steve Jackson Games. The agents kept the employees out of the offices until the afternoon, and took the company's BBS -- called "Illuminati" -- along with an employee's work computer, other computer equipment, and hundreds and hundreds of floppy disks. They took all the recent versions of a soon-to-be-published game book, "GURPS Cyberpunk," including big parts of the draft which were publicly available on Illuminati.

On March 2, Steve Jackson tried to get copies of the seized files back from the Secret Service. He was treated badly, and given only a handful of files from one office computer. He was not allowed to touch the Illuminati computer, or copy any of its files.

Steve Jackson Games took a nosedive, and barely avoided going out of business. According to Jackson, eight employees lost their jobs on account of the Secret Service raid, and the company lost many thousands of dollars in sales.

Once the apocalypse happens, and everyone drives around with guns on their cars, of course this will be the case. But, until then...

As any player of Illuminati: NWO can tell you, he's not actually controlled by the gnomes of Zurich but instead by the Adepts of Hermes (through a tangled web involving urban gangs, Bill Clinton, vampires, and South American Nazis.

Have you ever encountered GURPS? (Generic Universal Role Playing System)
They recently released a 4th edition(the 3rd edition was released in the 80's).

It has a point-based character generation system that uses d6 (mostly 3d6 for success rolls), but there are enough rules/optional rules to give any degree of realism you with to put in the effort to achieve. While everything you need to play is in the basic set(two books in 4th edition), they also have hundreds of generally well-researched source-books from Aztecs(pre-Spanish mezzo-America) to Biotech to Ogre(the giant cyber-tanks) to Lens-man(Based on the books by 'Doc' Smith) to Wheel of Time(Robert Jordan) to Diskworld(Terry Pratchett) to Martial arts to Celtic Myth to Supers. http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/

Of course all of the source-books from 3rd edition work just fine for 4th edition, you may want to tweak the point-costs for the few things that were not very balanced in 3rd edition, but even that is pretty optional.(4th edition mostly ironed out the bugs found in 20+ years of playing and publishing new material for 3rd edition)

One of the principles to come out of the Steve Jackson Games case is that the accused can't be deprived of their computer equipment and data. Law enforcement may only make copies of data.

One of the oldest tabletop RPGs, and the first to emerge with a rules set that wasn't a spin-off of Dungeons & Dragons, was Traveller, a science fiction RPG modelled on the galactic empire genre of science fiction -- a genre that itself has much to draw upon, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, the Aliens movies, to China Mieville's Embassytown. One of the original designers of Traveller commented that Firefly was as close to a Traveller TV series as he could hope for.

The classic premise for a Traveller campaign is a band of merry rogues, travelling from system to system in a small merchant vessel, usually at odds with the powers-that-be, who tend to have a hard time catching up with merry rogues with their own starship.

There are a couple of lines of Traveller still in publication, such as GURPS Traveller, featured prominently at your Friendly Local Gaming Shop, at least as of Friday.

Here you go...

http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG30-7142

You'll need to buy counters and maps or make your own but that's everything you need to get you started.

Too bad it had a short running time, Castellan might be worth a look for somewhat older kids.

The castle game looks really interesting. It seems like a simplified version of go with the addition of cards.

It's the same basic concept - take turns placing pieces in order to capture territory, and more territory captured is worth more points. I could see it being used as a gateway drug for getting someone into go.

I wouldn't go so far as "full of shit", but there's almost certainly more to the story. For the curious, I'd suggest looking at SJ Games Online Policy: http://www.sjgames.com/general/online_policy.html There, you'll find that SJ Games encourages free fan-created tools for their games, but if you want to charge, they require that you get a license from them.

FWIW, Ogre 6th edition is being worked on, hopefully to come out later this year. http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/products/ogre6e/

Too bad it had a short running time, Castellan might be worth a look for somewhat older kids.

-----

Title: Timothy Lord Checks Out Steve Jackson Games' Latest
Description: Fun Fact: Steve Jackson made games before there were computers to play them on

[00:00] <TITLE>
The Slashdot logo with "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." zooms out to the bottom right corner of a view of 3 custom dice from the game Zombie Dice.

[00:01] <TITLE>
A view of Timothy without his signature glasses.

[00:01] Timothy>
Not all the gaming action at south-by-southwest (SXSW) was electronic.
The Catan folks were on hand, and so was Steve Jackson Games.
Steve Jackson Games has been around since 1980; It's a real Austin stalwart.
Philip Reed COO of the company took a few minutes to lead us through the company's new tabletop game offerings.

[00:18] <TITLE>
The view changes to that of the interviewee, Philip Reed, sitting behind a desk with various board game items on it.

[00:18] Phil>
I'm Phil Reed with Steve Jackson Games and I'm gonna show you a couple of our upcoming releases.

[00:24] Phil>
Right this year we'll have Dino Hunt Dice out.
This is for kids 10 and up.
In the game you are going to go through and look for dinosaurs.
Like our Zombie Dice game, you will roll the dice, and you want to find dinosaurs so you capture them and bring them back to your zoo.
This dinosaur's hiding in the leaves, so if you keep going you're gonna roll the die again.
This dinosaur stepped on me.
If you get stepped on 3 times, your turn is over, and you don't get to take any of the dinosaurs home with you.
This is really quick, simple, should be out later this fall.

[01:05] Phil>
Also this year we have Castellan.
This is a two plaer strategy game where each player has cards, [...]

[01:17] <TITLE>
The view changes to a closer look at the cards in Phil's hands.

[01:17] Phil>
[...] and each player will have the exact same decks of cards.
The cards allow you to play [...]

[01:20] <TITLE>
The view changes back to Phil sitting at the table.

[01:20] Phil>
[...] pieces to build a castle.
On your turn you'll play a card, you'll add pieces to the castle.
You're trying to score locations, so you wanna fill a courtyard completely, so it's totally walled in.
At the end of the game this courtyard is worth 5 points - one for each tower.
The game takes about 30 minutes.
I think it's my favorite new game we have coming this year.

[01:46] Phil>
For things available in stores right now we have the latest Munchkin expansion; "Munchkin 8 - Half Horse, Will Travel".
This was designed by our Munchkin Tzar, Andrew Hackard and illustrated by John Kovalic.
It's stupid, silly, fun - it's everything you expect from Munchkin.

[02:07] Phil>
Hitting stores in the next couple of weeks is "The Good, The Bad, The Munchkin 2 - Beating a Dead Horse".
Because, well, that's what we like to do with things.

[02:19] Phil>
Also coming out at the same time will be Zombie Dice 2.
It's the first expansion for our Zombie Dice game.
These three dice fit right inside this cup.
You get Santa Claus, who might bring you presents or he might shoot you.
You also get the The Hunk and The Hottie - these two work together and if you've got one in your brains pile with the other one comes up a shotgun, the brains are rescued, he goes back into the cup, so they're dangerous.
Notice her fashionable high heels(!)

[02:52] Phil>
That's what we've got new.
Also this later year we'll have Munchkin Conan and Munchkin Apocalypse.

[02:57] <TITLE>
The Slashdot logo with "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." fades into view in the bottom right corner and the background changes to the view of the three dice used at the beginning of the video.

This entire situation reminds me of the Steve Jackson Games versus US Secret Service case of 22 years ago. The key aspects of the case include; a company providing collaborative services for a community like email and a place to centrally store files, a type of content that government did not understand because technology was moving outside of what was culturally known and accepted, and of course a flagrant abuse of power by the federal government. Today we see the US government usurping sovereignty to suppress a technology that they view as having gotten out of hand. In this new case they seek to clarify their vision of international law (ACTA) and will make sur they are victorious. The eventual victory of Steve Jackson Games over the US Secret Service should be viewed as Pyrrhic in that it took many years of litigation to win, but the authorities held all of their equipment in an unknown location, tampered with by zealous but unskilled forensic 'experts,' and returned. The original case did teach the US government many lessons; always have an inside informer, create instances of violation (entrapment through juicy uploads), and get political backing.

ref: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Just like Jackson Games in Austin (Google It) back in the 90's. Feds seized hardware and all data in a raid that were later proved to be innocent of.

Heck, you can also just look it up on the Steve Jackson Games current website. No mention of the IRS, but the Secret Service did have to pay the company a chunk of change.

Sovereign Immunity wasn't an impediment in the canonical example of a lawsuit about technology-related unlawful seizure: Steve Jackson Games v. United States Secret Service; The Federal Tort Claims Act probably provided the rationale to waive sovereign immunity in this case, since it was the tortuous actions of agents of the Secret Service which were the heart of the case.

This case was the genesis of the EFF.

To recap: SJ Games was raided in early 1990 on unsubstantiated claims of possession of stolen proprietary "telephone system hacking" information. (i.e., interstate theft and wire fraud). The affidavit supporting the warrant was sealed at the request of the Secret Service until October of that year, so SJ Games didn't even know what it was really being raided for.

Some of the seized goods (hardware, documents) were returned within that year, but not all; I'm not sure if all of it ever was.

SJ Games filed suit to "to redress violations of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, 42 U.S.C. 2000aa et seq; the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as amended, 18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq; and the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution." in May of 1991 and won the judgment in March of 1993.

To borrow the central conceit of the Battlestar Galactica retread series: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."

http://sjgames.com/404.html . Reload a few times; the messages change.

I've been around long enough to remember the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, which was the triggering event for founding the EFF.

Most companies don't have "The Feds turn up with search warrants and take all your stuff, including backup tapes" as a threat they plan for in their backup strategy. Off site backup doesn't protect against this.

I don't know what the problem is in this case - whether the backups were also seized, or that they simply lack the hardware to restore on to.

While not exactly what you're asking for, have you tried Knightmare Chess?

Steve Jackson games originated this almost twenty years ago.

No! It's Car Wars's fault! That's where all the road rage came from! Cars, man! The petroleum companies are out to rule the world and make everything over into a Mel Gibbs-esque Mad Max utopia for the evil Republican ruled Illumnati and their computers!

They might suspect that but proving it in a Court of Law is an entirely different matter.

And as we all know, if it's impossible to prove in court, they won't ever arrest you and destroy your business.

Oh, wait...

I'll openly admit I'm against the Secret Service (as an AC...er...well..I just don't have an account).

Because like every other law enforcement organization--they overextend their welcome.

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

"Nationwide crackdown on hackers"--in which they nearly put independent publishers out of business and revealed an astounding lack of judgement for which nobody was ever held accountable or appropriately punished. Even *had* their damned ignorance been correct, there still would have been first amendment implications even for an unreasonable individual--as all of the cyberpunk books--in the manner of SJ games were clearly written in a manner that is nearly high fantasy!

If they really just cared about counterfeiting and presidential protection, I'd be fine--but just like every other government agency involved in law enforcement, the shit they do goes *WAY* beyond their official duties--and when they do so, they routinely act in the manner of violent fucking thugs.

I did read your link. The SJ case didn't seem to be a criminal investigation,

Those two statements do not belong together. It was, in point of fact, a criminal investigation in to, IIRC, the theft of information regarding the workings of the 911 system, or some such.

Additionally, the verdict in that case didn't seem to be related to any journalist rights over and above the fact the SS incompetently seized a bunch of necessary business tools from a company with insufficient evidence that a crime had been committed. IMO, the verdict would have been the same if the company was George's Car Repairs, or John's Ice Creamery.

In point of fact, if you bothered to read in any depth, the acknowledged errors in the warrant were dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant. The entire civil case - which the Secret Service lost - was over the "Private Protection Act", 42 U.S.C. 2000aa violations. These have not to do with being journalists, but with being publishers. The relevant law was quoted in the ruling, available in full at http://www.sjgames.com/SS/decision-text.html :

"The Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. 2000aa, dictates: "Notwithstanding
any other law, it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee,
in connection with the investigation . . . of a criminal offense to search
for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably
believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper,
broadcast, or other similar form of public communication . . . ." _See_,
42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000aa(a)."

Gizmodo has the same protection, as a publisher, assuming that what was seized contined "work product materials," which seems likely (from the very small amount of information available in the news stories). It is entirely relevant.

Now claim that unpublished articles were on the seized computers and file a claim against Apple and have the police come in and seize their computers. That'll teach 'em.

Actually, the proper course is to sue the police for violating their rights as a publisher, like Steve Jackson did (and won, including legal fees).

A quick Google Images search turns up...
http://www.sjgames.com/ill/img/2008/sultan.jpg

and just plain google turns up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgwg5779i0M

But yeah, their own website needs photos.

Sorry, never played those games... but "Ogre" and "Battle" do bring up another memory for me: a tabletop game from Steve Jackson Games.

It ain't a real Ogre unless it's a continental siege unit! ... Unless it's a Bolo instead...

Do we have the technology for Open Source miniatures to work? It's certainly easy enough to make a lossy reproduction of a suitably designed miniature, by making a mould and melting some lead. 3D printing could become mainstream soonish. It just needs enough people to be interested.

Sculpted miniatures are nice, but the games play just as well with cardstock cut-outs. The ones I linked to are for sale, but Steve Jackson has no proprietary claim to the technology of printing a figure on a piece of heavy paper and folding it. You just need to find someone who can draw better than a stick figure(*) to do the artwork.

(* Not that XKCD: The Role-Playing Game wouldn't be... interesting.)

So, it's sort of like Transhuman Space?

Those books a pretty good read even if you don't plan on playing the game. And yes, you can play as an uplift or AI too.

You jest... but reliable Electric Powerplants with satisfactory performance, range and efficiency brings us one step closer to the world of Steve Jackson Games' CAR WARS.

Now all we need is a grain blight. And an affordable forward-mounted VMG.

/drive offensively

Cyberpunk raid ring a bell?

Hmm, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

we just give up on mmo's and micro transaction based flash games and go back to some good old Tabletop Gaming with friends that uses our brains and some funny looking dice - if you really need a computer, there are excel characters sheets and virtual dice that will run on any platform?

http://www.rpgnow.com/

http://www.yourgamesnow.com/

http://www.paizo.com/

http://e23.sjgames.com/

Well, we all know that counterculture role-playing games are just training grounds for crime. The obvious solution is raids on all their "publishers" (as the terror cells call themselves) and arrests of all their active trainees.

Please stand by. Agents of the DHS will be there shortly.

Well, we all know that counterculture role-playing games are just training grounds for crime. The obvious solution is raids on all their "publishers" (as the terror cells call themselves) and arrests of all their active trainees.

Please stand by. Agents of the DHS will be there shortly.