d100 Ship Names for the Oort Cloud

Out in the Oort Cloud people use spaceships. Sure, you could have a lot of fun playing a game about asteroid mining, or what happens on the last human outpost, but for my money you can have more fun flying between different places and causing trouble looking for interesting things along the way. That means spaceships.

I've posted a work in progress idea before about what ships are going to be like in the game, both game-mechanically and setting-wise, but one thing I've not mentioned is names. I am a massive fan of the late Iain M. Banks. The names of the Culture Ships in his novels are astounding; I love the thought, the humour, the outlandishness and sometimes the way a name can make you go "Huh? Why that?" While the spaceships in Into The Oort are going to be much, much lower down the technology ladder than a Culture GSV, two aspects of their names are things that I want to follow: the ship classes and their names.

I'll follow up in another post about ship classes, but for today I want to share a starting point, d100 spaceship names. If you're playing Into The Oort you're free to do what you want, make some up, come up with a cool setting idea and have them be derived from that. Or you can use some of my names, from the list below the cut. And if you do check them out, scroll down to the end for another thing to expect from Into The Oort.

Into The Oort: Hexes

Into The Oort is set in a region of space that is 50,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the Sun, way out where the comets that orbit the Solar System move in a vast shell across a huge region of space. What is an AU? An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Which is vast. To reflect the incredible distances and emptiness of space, each hex is 10AU across. Approximately 1.5 billion kilometres. If you were moving at the speed of light it would take over an hour to cross a hex.

A hex is big.

As with other settings, a hex in the Oort has a quality to it. In another game it might be called the "terrain". Some are basically space, empty; some have dust clouds, some have a high gas concentration, some have cometary debris, some have rogue asteroids in them. With the distances involved, there is a good chance that there is a human settlement of some form somewhere in a hex; if not, there is a good chance that there is an old human settlement - something abandoned or lost or wrecked. And of course there are ships that are travelling here and there; the Oort Cloud is big but the people living there are not static.

Occupied settlements might have huge populaces - tens of thousands of people - or only have a few dozen, or even less. The Hub - the largest human settlement that anyone knows about - has far more people than anywhere else, and no-one knows quite how many people live there.

The region of the Oort Cloud 50,000AU has, from a back of an envelope calculation, on the order of 500 million hexes. If, on average, each hex has a thousand people in it (some have far more, some have far less) then this region of the Solar System might have 500 billion people living in it.

Variety and wonders and opportunities are everywhere...

A note: for the playtest campaign and ultimately a release of Into The Oort I am planning to populate a region of around 50 hexes around the Hub, along with tables for populating hexes with settlements, groups and people. I've shared an in-progress document for generating the basic outline of a human habitat before; if you haven't seen it you can get it here.

Into The Oort: Ships 2

In Into The Oort, ships have three stats, just like player characters. They also reflect, sort-of, the features or attributes of the player stats (which at the moment have the same name as stats in Into The Odd, Strength, Dexterity, Willpower). The three stats in Oort for ships are currently:

• HULL: the physical structure of the ship; the exterior, the interior, how spaceworthy it is, and so on. It is no indicator of size particularly, or speed - it is more about resilience.
• DRIVE: a measure of how fast a ship is and also how well it handles. It is used almost-directly to calculate transit times across large distances (a hex can be crossed in 20-DRIVE days by a ship), and over short distances it is needed to make difficult manoeuvres.
• SCAN: the sensors of the ship - whether those are heat-based, x-ray, optical wavelengths or radio transmissions. It is also a measure of how good those systems are for understanding what signals have been picked up.

Unlike characters, rolls are made under the ship stats for active choices rather than saves. For example:

• Roll under the SCAN stat when you are trying to look for something.
• Roll under the DRIVE score when there is a difficult comet debris trail to navigate.
• Roll less than your HULL when you're trying to maintain the ship in a difficult situation.

Does that make sense? I hope so. I don't have much more to say about ships today, I suppose I just wanted to clarify or share a few more details beyond what I mentioned in the last post.

I'm creating tables that generate the appearance of ships, but my impetus for doing so is for NPC ships to be generated quickly. Players could use some them though, but appearance could also be left to player-choice - so long as they can choose fast. As with Into The Odd, I aim for players to get playing ASAP. At the time of writing I'm constructing a table to give some details of the features of the ship - does it have something special like missiles, a cloaking device or a leaking engine coil? Or is it perhaps owned by someone else or a notorious past?

Into The Oort: Ships

Chargen in Into The Odd is one of the fastest things I've seen for a game. 3d6, 3d6, 3d6 and a d6 and then mechanically it's done. Sure, you might want to make up some details of what your person looks like or talk about how they know the other players' characters, but after a brief flurry of rolling you're done.

I want the same thing for chargen in Into The Oort, but also for shipgen as well; a starting group of players has their own ship, which has three stats that are related to different mechanical aspects of the ship. Roll 3d6 for HULL, 3d6 for DRIVE and 3d6 for SCAN, along with a d6 for shield points. Shields are always on, as a kind of energy shield to deflect dust and particles. In a pinch they absorb and redistribute weapons fire; once they're overloaded damage is taken by ship systems, but it only takes a short break from combat before the shields are back online.

Some combination of highest/lowest stat and the d6 for shield points will index a table that gives some details on what else the ship has - type of weapons, armour, special systems, and so on. I'm looking at ways to make other aspects of shipgen as simple. I think that there are possibly three other aspects which could be done quickly, and I've tried something for them recently at my second playtest game.

I had a short table of six entries for each of three aspects: TYPE, CREW, CARGO. Players roll three d6 as a group, and then use each result to pick out what they want. 6s are generally better than 1s. So at the playtest I think they got 6, 6 and 1. They assigned the 6s to TYPE and CARGO and the 1 to CREW. For the purposes of the playtest this meant that they had a decommissioned warship, two valuable cargoes but a small cargo hold, and they only had a skeleton crew of two others.

I liked this, but it also seemed slightly at odds with the other mechanical setup. That may or may not be a bad thing. I liked the aspects of choice rather than totally random gen. The discussion at the table - "We want an ex-warship, but do we need a good crew? Would it better to have no cargo?" - was great, and didn't take long. I can see that it might take a different group more time deciding what ship they want. I'm not 100% sure about it yet, so it might change.

What do you think? Any questions? Maybe in the next post I'll say something about how the different main ship stats work, mechanically, in the game.

Into The Oort: Start

Some time ago I was convinced that I wanted to run a game called Dogs In The Oort Cloud. I had this idea that there was something attractive about religious peacekeepers in a far future solar system, on the edge of interstellar space, going from asteroid to asteroid, helping to solve problems and mete out justice.

(There's a whole other post that I want to write some day soon about why DitV is such an attractive proposition for me, that for the faults I find in the game's mechanics I actually found it to be one of the best campaigns that I've had the pleasure of being able to run. But another day!)

Time and life intervened. Apart from one shots I've not run a game for ages, but I keep reading, keep noodling ideas, keep on talking nonsense with David over on A Gaming Podcast About Nothing. And then towards the end of last year Paolo Greco posts a link to a new thing he is publishing by some guy called Chris. The price is right, so I buy the pdf. I flick through it for ten minutes and email Paolo asking if I can upgrade to get the print version.

Into The Odd is fantastic for many reasons: the setting is imaginative and heavily themed (implicitly), but not described through page after page of flavour text. Everything about the setting you get from the various tables. Chargen can be done in a minute, and the mechanics for various resolutions are easy for beginners and familiar for more experienced hands. It's a game that anyone could be a party of playing.

And precisely because the game is so clear, so simple in mechanics, it popped into my head that it could be perfect for combining with my idea of the Oort Cloud as a setting. Gone are the religious peacekeepers (for now, although they're in the background as one possible group in the Oort Cloud) and hello to adventurers and explorers, traders and tyrants, anyone and everyone existing thousands of years from now at the edge of everything.

This has been my creative playground for the last few months; tables and setting things are coming together, and I took a step to start sharing some work-in-progress tables for various elements. I'm a big believer in tables as a useful aid or prompt for setting generation (inspiration providers), so while some of them have been difficult to put together so far, they've always been there for a clear reason for having them.

This is the first in a series of who-knows how many posts. It's a long time since I've posted on this blog (although until fairly recently I was doing a good job of maintaining a work blog) and I hope to update a few times per week as I talk about where Into The Oort is going - ultimately, I'm aiming at publishing it - but that's a little way off yet.

Thankfully not 50,000 astronomical units though.

By The Numbers

Last night I sat down and realised that the setting I was coming up with wasn't working quite as planned. Basically, travel times between locations (potentially, I've not fleshed them out yet) would just be too short. You jump in your spaceship and even though something is just miles and miles away - you get there fairly quickly. I thought that a smooth 10m/s^2 acceleration (slightly higher than Earth-standard, but makes for easier calculation! Call it "metric gravity" maybe...) as a baseline would mean that it would still take days of travel for adventurers - not because I want things to be boring and tedious, but because I want some semblance of realism.

(I don't want Star Trek style space travel, where the ship moves at the speed of plot)

So what to do? I came to realise that, basically, the local area of space I was considering was just too small. So I scaled up. I started with a square that was about two light minutes across, and have now scaled up to a ten light minute square. For those who don't know: the Earth is approx eight light minutes out from the Sun; the region of space I'm setting this in is approximately 400,000 light minutes out from the Sun.

A ten light minute square might not be big enough, but I have to add the numbers etc to my tables and see what it does to travel times. My basic generation table starts off with a ten-by-ten Grid of single squares; roll two d10s for each square and any 1s indicate that there is a place of interest in the Grid - then refer to tables to generate those. Double 1s mean there is something alien there. Am considering tweaking it very slightly (possibly if any 2s are rolled these indicate something else about the square: a problem? A hazard?)

Enough maths for today! Two good things about progress with prep for all of this: first I have typed up a list of the traits for chargen, along with their effects. Chargen will have the option for three player selected traits or four random ones (should keep things interesting). Second, I've found the notes I had for chargen, so now I can type those up and hopefully streamline the process for players.

Next up, making weapon and armour selection simple!

(if anyone wants to see my maths for any of this, let me know, I'll see what I can do)

Ships in the Oort Cloud, part 3

Previously (add link later!) I've been musing on the idea of generating ships for my Oort Cloud hard-ish sci-fi hack of MotSP, and I had got as far as assigning dice to ship "stats" although really we might think of them as characteristics I guess. Wait, is there a distinction? One for the philisophers.

I have been musing over the last few days about whether or not seven tightly defined stats for ships might be an interesting thing: particularly because MotSP uses seven stats (adding Comeliness to the expected standard six). I like the idea of that, of a ship's basic capabilities mirroring something of the PC's stats. When I thought about it more though, I realised that while I could add a ship stat that would perhaps be about the "look" of a ship, it would feel a bit fake. I also started thinking that the stats/characteristics that I had didn't map to the other six stats neatly.

So I think that seven mirroring stats (treating the ship more explicitly as an NPC or party-PC) is out. For now I'll stick with the six I had previously. I've made a choice for now that the Range stat (which will be the d20 roll) will be multiplied by 10 to give the number of light seconds range that the ship has (assuming normal power usage and travel).

So I now have six stats/characterisitics/qualities(?) that are attached to the six dice, roll them, read them off and you have the basic capabilities of a little NPC-ship.

This has been helpful to me, having this idea and noodling on it, as I now have an idea for PCs and their ship(s) - they can either roll and get a ship's stats which they then spin some idea of what it looks like from, or I could give them an average ship, giving expected values or close to for the six ship stats, and then giving a couple of points for them to invest.

Thinking about being smugglers or traders? Spend a point in Capacity to get more space for hiding stuff!
Want to go really fast but probably get organ damage for constantly being under two gs? Spend a few points on Acceleration!
Expecting to come under heavy fire? Armour up and spend points on Hull Strength!
Want to, shave hours off destination orienting and combat evasion? Improve your gas jets by boosting your Manouverability score!
Expecting to put others under heavy fire? Add more Gauss guns by spending a couple of points on Weapons!
Want to travel further before having to pay for a new fuel rod crystal-mo-tron? Increase your Range!

Did I really just do those six questions and exclamations? Obviously not had enough caffeine this morning...

Onwards and upwards: next steps with MotSP hacking include
1. Typing up the skills/traits lists - particularly helpful as I'm tweaking the former and excluding about 20% of the latter.
2. Habitat generation tables - I have a basic space-grid and know where things are, but need something to fill in the blanks.
3. Character sheets - it makes sense to me to have separate, slightly tweaked sheets for the three classes I'll be using (mostly because the skill lists are different depending on classes)
4. Hangout or offline play - need players!

Some Notes on Setting

Last night the baby slept quite well; we did get woken, but it didn't seem long enough for my brain to start to process something. It was carrying around half an idea from yesterday about luxuries in the Oort Cloud (what would be really valuable, or what would people treat as really valuable) but it is still only a half-formed thought.

And everything that is coming together related to that idea just reminds of things that Patrick has already said before about moving valuables in the Veins of the Earth.

So instead of writing about that, I thought I would share some of the thoughts and ideas about the more general space that the campaign I'm looking to run will sit in.

It started with the idea of running Dogs in the Vineyard in Space and then as I thought about it more I realised that the kernel of that was that I wanted to run something with humans - not aliens, although they might be in the background somehow - and I wanted to run something that was a harder science-fiction than other things I had seen or heard of. Not grim, but just with some thought about how and why things might work.

Then I got Machinations of the Space Princess, which right on the back cover says that it isn't any of that "hard sci-fi mularkey". That said, reading through I could see that for the most part it had a good OSR feel to it (as much as I can tell something is OSRish) - which at the very least means that it would be familiar and not require too much in the way of explanation to get people playing it (Dogs is great, but it takes some getting used to).

So, having read Machinations I started to think about what a campaign in the Oort Cloud would need. It would need places to go and people to see; it would need some general background hooks for why humans would be there. It would need some means of travel, and to be realistic would need an eye on just how fast people would get around. I thought about the species traits that the book uses for chargen and NPC gen (which then made me realise that I would need some tables for quick NPC gen perhaps!) and I realised that many of these traits would still work as human adaptations or traits - humans either having their natural talents or genetic enhancements.

But I wanted to remove the Psion and psi powers, and also the cybernetics - these didn't feel like a good fit. At the same time, the ships and the way they are handled felt like it needed tweaking (hence my noodling with "popomatic" ships in previous posts). Removing and tweaking these parts meant that the setting started to focus, but it also removed some of the moving parts - if I didn't have to think about these things then I was free to start thinking about the other aspects of the setting and the game.

(Aside: a recent thought has had me think that ships might have just seven stats/attributes, to mirror the seven stats of PCs. Just a thought, not fully thought through)

If I am going to play this Oort Cloud hard sci-fi hack of Machinations with people though, I'm going to have to do some more writing. The book is pretty well written I would say, but it gives people a lot of options: a base weapon doing x damage costs 5gp, but then multiply by this or that for these options like such and such... Which is nice in a sci-fantasy setting, and maybe something that you would really go town with, but in a hard sci-fi setting it feels like too much. I think what customisation options are presented need to be done cleanly, almost as tick-boxes? I was also thinking of creating character sheets that show off the skills-lists (which are extensive actually), rather than have little boxes for people to write in. That way they can see what they can do at a glance.

Anyway! This has been helpful to me to get some ideas out of my head - and to realise connections I didn't know where there previously. I hope at least it has been interesting to you the reader - and if you are interested in playing (maybe that's playtesting?) this in August or early September then drop me a line!

Ships in the Oort Cloud, part 2

Last night I actually slept pretty good, and we only got woke by the baby once really. I say baby, but she's ten months old nearly, and looks less and less like a baby every day. Time flies...

I don't need to worry about relativity in the Oort Cloud setting (which, if I had to sum it up neatly I suppose you could call a hard sci-fi hack of Machinations of the Space Princess), as the ships will never reach anything like relativistic speeds. I've definitely made some assumptions about the kinds of ships that are being used, and some of them are kind of arbitrary, but why not?

I am tweaking numbers now really, to make sure that I have something which makes a simple kind of sense. Ships can't just have infinite fuel, so I have to put some bounds on that - and when you put a boundary on something that stacks and knocks over a whole series of other dominoes. How much does fuel cost? Is it available everywhere, or could PCs get essentially stranded when they dock at an asteroid and are told "Next shipment is due in two weeks"?

The more I think about writing my own games/hacks/etc, the more I appreciate just how skilled other people are who have a successful back catalogue. Over on False Machine, Patrick was talking about designing adventures (link to be added here later!) and a few points really stand out. The big one for me is that you have to write and write and write and then edit and pare back: and I think I agree with this broadly, even if what you are doing is writing and re-writing notes to then be combined. The really big point in Patrick's post though is the idea of information being chunked (my word not his) into single or double-page spreads; if things go over pages it disrupts the flow, it makes your ideas less accessible and could actually make things confusing.

Which is why I value this habit that is starting to fall into place; this little place on the internet is a way to just mull ideas over, and then collect them later.

I have my formulae (or formulas, whichever you prefer), so I'm going to get Open Office to spit out a table of travel times; which will then give me some ideas as to whether or not I am on the right track with distances and acceleration in the setting.

This has been a bit of a ramble, but to finish I'm going to flesh out a "popomatic" schema for ships (PCs will have something like this, but with some tweaks to the options; this is for a general ship encountered, not some ultra-fast fighter)

Popomatic Ships
d4 - Capacity - add 3 to get the number of berths on the ship; possibly a cargo rating as well... (needs thought)
d6 - Acceleration - use as indexing for 0.5g, 0.75g, 1g, 1.5g, 2g, 2.5g
d8 - Hull Strength - use in conjunction with MotSP armour tables
d10 - Manouverability - a rating that will have two effects: first in terms of turning ship for long distance travel (will have a positive or negative effect on travel time); second, for evasion in ship to ship combat
d12 - Weapons - after coming up with some options, use this to index them; mostly about strength of railguns etc
d20 - Range - still working this one out! The domino has not toppled yet...

Cough, Sneeze, Poop, Space

Last night's sleep was particularly disturbed. Our daughter is feeling a bit under the weather (nothing too serious, but when you're only ten months old and you can't articulate how you feel to your sleep-deprived and worrying parents it must seem bad), and this got me thinking about illness in the Oort Cloud.

I don't think that disease will be a big portion of the setting, but there is always something particularly "What do we do?!" about a plague or a sickness that is going around. So it's at least fun to think about it.

We know that bacteria and viruses evolve quickly (relative to our own evolution, and even relative to our technological evolution). So it is reasonable to assume that there will be some infectious diseases in the future. Organisms want to propogate (in as much as they might have "motivations") so there are two options for thriving diseases hundreds or thousands of years from this point on (as I see it at the moment for the setting; I'm a doctor, but I'm not  that kind of doctor, just thinking).

Option 1 is that there are diseases which are essentially symbiotic or at least non-problematic for people. Contagious colds that don't really bother people, but which stay around long enough to be passed on. Option 2 are things which we might liken to Hyper-SARS, things that get passed on, have a relatively high lethality and are really infectious. People die, quarantines are imposed - and that is a neat adventure hook perhaps, because there are all kinds of wants and needs that a quarantined population might have - and all kinds of problems that thrillseekers might need to work around to get paid.

There is a third option: I recall reading a few months ago about a bacteria that had been found in a space centre clean room. Shortly after the same (or a very similar) organism was found in another clean room at a different space centre. There was no possibility of any kind of cross contamination. The analysis was that this bacteria had evolved to survive in the aggressively sterile environments of clean rooms - and had evolved twice at two different locations.

Simply put, as I understand it, this bacteria had been trundling along for millenia, just there and then a niche came along when it could thrive. What kind of bacteria, I wonder, will thrive in habitats at the edge of space when they are given the opportunity? And how will they impact the humans in those environments?

In space no-one can hear you drink your own urine

And thankfully people don't pay too much attention.

It must be true, when you really think about it, that atoms in the water that you drink, have been through the digestive systems of other humans - and other living things. They've gone in one end and come out the other. I have an inkling that xkcd has even run a strip or a What If about it... But in space, in the Oort Cloud, needs really must, and out of necessity, people drink their own pee.

Recycling of basic, rather than processed resources, must be an absolute societal basic at the very edge of interstellar space. With the exception (probably) of cometary mining, there's no more water around unless you have alchemical processors - and those things don't run cheap.

I guess most places wouldn't begrudge thrillseekers and travellers some basic water rations (apart from despotic asteroids or criminal waystations); they might not include showers or baths as part of basic accommodation though. Going a step further, a simple bath might be considered a luxury - a spa retreat might be half a day just having a good soak.

If you have the rights or the firepower to defend a cometary ice body - or some other source of water - then you might be on to a winner economically... Or you might have painted a big target on yourself.

Ships in the Oort Cloud, part 1

A night idea. I suppose in reality this is a couple of ideas that have been floating around for a while. On a recent train journey I started thinking about travel time between places in the Oort Cloud. I did some calculations on a series of Post It notes; I assumed that there was no instant travel, that unaltered humans wouldn't want to be subject to more than 1g of acceleration or deceleration. I also assumed that the drive in the ships wouldn't be explained using massive liquid fuel tanks (i.e., it will be totally hand-wavey in game; although some concept of range would be good).

These were in my head, have been for a few days. But at 2am when the baby woke up, the main thing that popped in was dice.

I like Zak S's Popomatic concept: so to come up with a random ship (not necessarily a ship owned/used by a group of PCs) why not roll a d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12 together, with the five numbers signifying different attributes or aspects of the ship.

There are a couple of things which dice could randomly select: weapons, armour, range, style of ship, cargo/berth capacity, maximum acceleration/deceleration. Off the top of my head this morning, I'm thinking:
d4: acceleration/deceleration (1g, 1.5g, 2g, 2.5g)
d6: berths and cargo
d8: armour
d10: weapons
d12: range

I'll have to expand on some of these ideas in the coming days. This is a departure from the way ships are handled in Machinations of the Space Princess, where the concepts/mechanics are much more closely aligned with the stats of PCs. That game as written is more sci-fantasy than I'm thinking for the campaign in the Oort Cloud. So: while I'll continue to do little "night idea" posts, it seems like last night's idea has nudged me in the direction of resolving this little gap that I currently have in my setting schema.

I'll see what the next night idea is, but the next part in this Popomatic Ships series will be saying more about acceleration - which will also, I guess, say more about where I'm coming from in the harder sci-fi setting. More later/tomorrow!

Aliens are Magic

A night time idea. In the campaign setting I'm preparing for, aliens have been and gone a long, long time ago. Humanity lives and breathes recycled air at the very edge of the solar system; some live in religious seclusion, others mine for rare elements, while some prepare for the eventual journey to the stars.

And then there are the thrillseekers.

Aliens left behind things. There are disc-shaped structures of impervious exotic materials, bigger than any human-made habitat. On an asteroid, while digging for a probable vein of uranium, some miners found a cache of odd, metre-high clear cubes. All floating an inch off the ground, with no clear signs of how they were doing it. (When one was eventually placed in a large enough scanner, then scanner reported that there was nothing there) Then there is the religious order based in an abandoned military communications satellite that teaches true enlightenment can eternal life can only be found through hugging (what one scholar described as) alien skittles.

The order's members have no body hair of any kind, and require no food. They also have horrendous halitosis.

Alien tech is magic: sometimes the effects of objects and items can be guessed, but often the mechanism is completely opaque to even serious researchers. Alien tech has mundane properties as well. A perpetual light source, a sheet of "paper" that negates all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, a bag of sand that organises when poured into one of seven different configurations.

Alien tech is magic in a magic-free universe: resourceful thrillseekers will find uses or buyers for what they find. It's not the aim of the setting to find alien tech, but it is an option; and who doesn't like exploring a perfectly static alien-death-cube in orbit around a comet?

Baristas in the Oort Cloud

If you listen to A Gaming Podcast About Nothing, you might know that my current pet project is running a campaign set on the various communities in the Oort Cloud of some future time. Probably using Machinations of the Space Princess, although it started off in my head as a Dogs in the Vineyard hack, I've been making notes, creating tables, even a sample grid of space two light-minutes by two light-minutes across.

At 3:30 this morning while I was waiting with my daughter something just popped into my head: Baristas.

At the edge of the solar system, alcohol isn't so much banned as it is severely frowned on. There's a time and a place for a good time, and you can buy beer if you want it - but it's not the done thing. Coffee on the other hand - well, it's a natural stimulant, keeps you alert, and even in the safest of safe places, there's always a chance of a micro-meteor causing a hull breach, or a cometary ice storm to weather. Coffee is good.

And the Exalted Order serve the best coffee. Some people scoff and say that the machines they use are a sham, that the taste and smell from the resulting coffee is all about perception. Others say that the machines came from Earth, have been lovingly restored or preserved over many generations, and that the Baristas are near-alchemists, turning dials, grinding beans just-so and applying water of the correct temperature to two decimal places without computer aid.

You pay a price for this devotion, but it's often rewarded. The movers and the shakers, the high and the low, they all pay at the temple-cafes of the Exalted Order. There are even stories of the Baristas of the Exalted Order, in their simple black shirt and trousers (forearm sleeve tattoo optional) entering trances, uttering things about patron-worshippers that they couldn't possibly know. Who knows?