Processes of Reason - Late February / Early March 2015

Cross-posted from the offical PD Forums

Quote :: Hi all!

We're running what might be described as a meeting of the Freaks and Geeks Social Club at the Halls of Knowledge in Urizen, 27th Feb to 1 Mar 2015 (or about a month before Empire).

I publicised this event at the Conclave and generally around and about: it is a combination social event and IC academic conference aimed at characters whose idea of a good time involves deep thought, the cut and thrust of debate and perhaps a little PERFECTLY WISE AND APPROPRIATE magic; one of the Eternals with Imperial Amity is rumoured to been invited, and the invitation in theory has been read by Heralds of Eternals of Day, Summer, Autumn, Night and Winter! The casting of experimental magic per se would of course be forbidden on IC health-and-safety grounds due to the fading after-effects of the Grand Conjunction, but the mages of the Halls of Knowledge will hardly have been idle during the Conjunction itself and are likely to have something impressive to present.

The format would be a series of short talks from volunteer speakers on entertaining, new* or favourite topics in the fields of natural philosophy, moral philosophy, theology, mathematics, logic or basically anything that people in metaphorical or actual pointy hats might study, followed by more wide-ranging discussion of those fields in seminar, interspersed with performances of poetry and music; the idea would be to start the day talking natural philosophy, mathematics and logic, move on to theology and moral philosophy in the afternoon, and have an after-dinner session based around the unanswerable and the unknowable.

For those attendees not particularly interested in a given seminar, there would be a second chamber primarily reserved for networking and social interaction; we also plan to provide a number of activities for those whose interests tend more towards the physical than the theoretical, for example a LARP interpretation of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing (though clearly without fisticuffs, fisticuffs are for animals).

This would be a low-risk rather than a no-risk event: after all, there would be PCs present, and a ref, and weapons, and maybe creatures from one or more Realms, so anything might happen, but it is set on top of a mountain in the heart of civilised Urizen, so hordes of barbarians there ain't. There will be no mechanical loot available at the event at all, because the organisers' player characters will be attending and they wish to avoid a conflict of interest; there might be the possibility of PD plot being run at the event, and there will certainly be minor and hilarious Magic Things to interact with.

The event would be at Bilberry Hill centre in the West Midlands not far from Birmingham; ticket price would be £46 before Christmas / £50 after / £10 crew, and hopefully interesting monster roles would be available for people interested in the concept who don't have characters who could come. The maximum size of the event is 65 people, although if we hit that I'll be flabbergasted.

*Not actually new! If someone proves Riemann in February 2015, please don't bring a copy of their proof to the event IC! On an out-of-character note, apart from a potential 'freestyle' session, the topics presented will be at a level aimed at the bright and interested sixth former / non-expert (think Goedel, Escher, Bach or the early parts of the Feynman lectures); the idea is to entertain, and to give us something to sit around and feel like Proper Academic Wizards discussing, not to cause Day curse RP effects out of character or to line up our groups' respective maths academics and make them fight (unless, y'know, they want to engage in chessboxing). Acceptable topics are basically anything without icky computer science cooties on, but please be sensible about this - there are vast swathes of mathematics that would make sense without us having to get our lovely high fantasy setting all icky with modern thought.

Concerning this event I can be contacted either here or through Facebook (Ian Horne).

Ticket price increased from the provisional one on the flyer because the site's initial very good per-night rate turned out to be 'if you are a VAT-registered group and and brought 50 friends under 16'.

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