Apart from the above tweak I'm happy to move on.
Tweaked.
I'm not sure the following warrants a conversion...
The city of Laputa is a marvel of magical engineering: a flying city. It is populated by a race of humans who value philosophy and technology. The Laputans use their intellectual and technological superiority to control other countries.
Laputans: AC 10; MV 12; HD 1d6 hp; THACO 20; #AT 1; Dmg by weapon; SA dropping stones, gun-powder weapons; SZ M; ML Average (8-10); INT Average-genius; AL LN(G); XP 175.
Laputans wear 18th Century European garments adorned with representations of suns, moons, and stars, interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords and many other musical instruments, some found only on their flying island. Laputan philosophers (all of them happen to be men) surround themselves with globes and spheres, mathematical instruments, pens, bottles of ink, blank paper, telescopes, microscopes, scrolls, and books. PCs will discover that even Laputan food is shaped to resemble musical instruments or abstract geometric forms.
Laputans (satirically representative of the English) use their flying island to keep the inhabitants of Balnibarbi (Ireland) in servitude. When a Balnibarbi city refuses to pay tribute to the philosophers, the Laputan monarchy orders the flying island to hover above the rebels' land to block sunshine, snow, or rain from falling on their farms and gardens. If the revolt continues, the Laputans bombard the city with hundreds of rocks dropped from their aerial vantage point. If the city still refuses to pay tribute, Laputans could use the flying island itself as a colossal hammer to smash the rebel city, but this has never been done for fear of breaking their island home apart.
Laputan military technology equals that of Earth's Renaissance, including the arquebus and cannons. The entire Laputan army is made up of lower-class men and women, as Laputan philosophers never take the time to study mundane concerns such as warfare.
Swift used the airborne Laputan philosophers, as well as Balnibarbi Projectors, to satirize over-valuing reason and abstract studies. Obsessed with abstract reason, these impracticable philosophers do not invent anything practical, but only squander resources that could be used to help the people they rule over. Upper-class Laputan men are extremely obsessed with abstract mathematics, the celestial music of the spheres, as well as astronomical and judicial astrology to the exclusion of everything else. These men spend most of their lives in intellectual stupors, unaware of anyone or anything around them. When lost in thought, these archetypical absent-minded professors tilt their heads to one side, while one eye points inward and the other straight up. These upper class men must be brought back to reality by lower-class pages who use tools called Flappers: inflated bladders, filled with small pebbles, that are fixed to the ends of staffs. These pages very gently strike their masters on the mouth if they need to speak, on the ear if they need to hear, or in the eyes if they need to see where they are walking.
Laputan philosophers are so entirely devoted to abstract problems that the quality of practical skills, from tailoring garments to constructing homes, is absolutely wretched. According to Gulliver, these people are very clumsy, awkward, and unhandy-unable to do anything with skill except for abstract mathematics and music. They lack imagination, fancy, and invention.
The insanity of Laputan philosophers has spread to the island of Balnibarbi, where common sense has been replaced by a group of commonwealth-men calling themselves the "Academy of Projectors," satirizing the Royal Society of London. These are schools filled with hundreds of madcap crackpots who are obsessed with unproductive experiments designed to reverse natural systems. Projectors attempt to extract sunshine from cucumbers, to reduce human excrement to its original food, turn ice into gunpowder, to construct buildings by starting with the roof and finishing with the foundation, to mix colors by only feeling and smelling the paint, and to make many other strange attempts to "improve the human condition." With the exception of their political scientists, projectors are uniformly insane. The Laputan flying island is an exactly circular disk, with a diameter of 7,837 yards enclosing 10,000 acres. The island is three hundred yards thick. Rain water is collected in four large basins. The island's motion is controlled from a chasm about 50 yards in diameter. This is where a huge lodestone is suspended inside a hollow cylinder. Manipulating this loadstone can make the flying island travel either horizontally or vertically. However, the island cannot fly above the height of four miles and cannot wander more than 18 miles from the island of Balnibarbi. Human sages think this civilization was more practical in ages past when the flying island was originally cut out of the bedrock. This must have been true, as the island is far too practical to have been built by the modern inhabitants. Player characters might find much useful information while exploring long forgotten libraries.
Laputans have a life span of 60-80 years. They consume the same type of foods that were common to 18th Century Europeans. Laputans have few natural enemies. The closest enemies the Laputans might have are flying creatures such as evil dragons who see their island as something interesting to plunder. But the Laputans' use of the arquebus and cannon have kept flying creatures at a safe distance, so far.
Originally appeared in Polyhedron #106 (1995).
