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Alone Against the Flames is kicking my rear end. 
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Nov 27, 2021 20:14
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Siivola posted:"14 MAY 2015: The Director of the Program orders its security director to launch Operation SOMERSAULT. Run without the knowledge of the operations director, who handles most actions, SOMERSAULT combs U.S. medical records for DNA profiles indicating Innsmouth ancestry and sends kill teams to eliminate "tainted" individuals." (Handler's Guide) I forgot about this. I wonder if this was part of the inspiration for the New Life Fertility scenario in the Labyrinth sourcebook. quote:By the fall of 2018, approximately 800 of the 15,000 New Life children have reached maturity. They have produced nearly 600 second-generation offspring. (The oldest second-generation child is Mary’s six-year-old son, Marcus Andersson.) New Life children marry young and swiftly begin having babies, but their window of fertility only lasts a decade. Unless someone intervenes, by 2030 there will be 25,000 first-generation and 11,000 second-generation offspring—and the first third-generation baby will be born that year as well. By 2100, the total New Life population will be more than 600,000. Just from a product perspective it seems weird that Labyrinth emphasizes a lot of big numbers that seemingly won't factor into most games. It makes more sense with the knowledge that in the Deep Lore there is already a genocidal apparatus to deal with the perceived problem. That's part of the issue the game has where the Lore has you working for guys who probably have flying saucers but most people play it as the X-Files if Mulder died every third episode. Of course it's generally wild they keep going back to the topic of targeted mass killings of genetic deviants. Even if it's the bad guys doing it, at least to me that's a more depressing topic than cosmic horror generally. I guess you could run some really dark comedy scenario where an Operation SOMERSAULT kill team begins investigating Delta Green leadership after they start getting orders to kill rich people's kids instead of the survivors of a century old pogrom. Presumably some of the handouts will be forwarded emails about Marsh Technology executives meeting with CCP officials, complaints about leadership ignoring Havana Syndrome cases, and rumors that Forrest James has become a communist.
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Nov 28, 2021 03:58
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Atrocious Joe posted:Of course it's generally wild they keep going back to the topic of targeted mass killings of genetic deviants. Even if it's the bad guys doing it, at least to me that's a more depressing topic than cosmic horror generally. I think I get why they keep going for that angle. The book's pretty explicit that the devs want the game to be about the horrors of human beings unraveling and doing awful things. The Unnatural is there just to act as a kind of catalyst for action (and the ultimate consequence too), which I think is also a good approach for Call of Cthulhu adventures. But whereas CoC investigators have no real power and their misdeeds don't extend much beyond light murder and arson, DG conspiracies can and explicitly do commit terrible misdeeds. And because people might miss it, the devs try to hammer it home with... loving black ops eugenics. It's just horrifying turtles all the way down. But the thing is, that's the horror of the concentration camp. I don't want to game that poo poo. 
Siivola fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Nov 28, 2021 |
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Nov 28, 2021 08:40
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Siivola posted:Alone Against the Flames is kicking my rear end. I bought Alone Against the Dark awhile ago but haven't done it because the timekeeping part of it just seems so tedious
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Nov 28, 2021 17:57
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You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept
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Nov 28, 2021 18:40
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quote:Guillermo del Toro Eager to Resurrect ‘Mountains of Madness’ at Netflix: ‘Smaller, Weirder’ Version https://www.indiewire.com/2021/12/guillermo-del-toro-pitches-at-the-mountain-of-madness-netflix-1234682793/ It was my understanding that part of why Guilermo's Mountains of Madness movie got axed was because Prometheus (released around the same time as Mountains of Madness was considered) was telling essentially a very similar story. However this might have been a good thing because after Netflix's release of Arcane (a quality, quality show), I can see Netflix giving the green light to a smaller, more horrific Mountains of Madness and maybe we might have a Lovecraft video adaptation that doesn't suck. Here is hoping.
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Dec 2, 2021 23:39
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So here's an idea I've been mulling. I was considering it for the DG shotgun scenario contest, but just explaining the setting was most of the wordcount. More I thought about it honestly it's more of a setting that a bunch of different scenarios could be based in. So like all of my ideas, it's just ripping off enough existing properties and mashing them together until it's recognizable but no longer predictable. If I could come up with wholly original horror premises I'd be a horror author. So, ya know, fair warning. E: Have included feedback offered in later posts in italics. What I like about the idea is, since DG is by definition running a losing battle, allowing that defeat to progress would give a sense of momentum and urgency and demonstrate the stakes. Basically, it's Dhalgren + We Almost Lost Detroit + the Flint Water Crisis + Roger & Me disinvestment + Modern America's ability to absorb and ignore any calamity we lack the ability or will to solve + Centralia PA + an N-dimensional E&M class I once took. You get a post-apocalyptic disaster setting but one that's limited in scope, allowing all the normal modules to be run outside that area. So: March Technologies is researching... something. And it goes critical, breaches containment, no one knows what. Right south of Flint. A 30 mile radius including Flint, most of Detroit, a little bit of Windsor ended up inside The Flash forward ten years and it basically picks up in the city of Bellona from Dhalgren. Multiple suns in the sky, a neighborhood always burns but never burns down, directions are weird, time doesn't run linearly etc. Most of the people who stay behind are POC because that's what's left after the people with options bail. But also they've now completely got US Disaster Capitalism's boot off their necks for the first time since at least 1980. Get a fundie cult because pick a square on a calendar and there's always one somewhere predicting A Judgement From The Lord on the people they hate that day, and this would fit the bill nicely. Worship the plant and the disaster so highly likely to cause trouble on their own initiative or as puppets of the Ramified. Vicarious Baptisms for the Ramified, Fred Phelps style provocations on the scenesters and the locals, the whole bit. Real And then, outside the obvious intragroup tensions, as an Unnatural threat: the question of what the plant did, whether it's still doing it, how to reverse it (and whether that would even doing right by the locals) and also, the workers themselves. (I intend to never actually define what the plant did. I'll make something up for my group and if anyone else ever wants to use the idea, it's on them. I have enough trouble justifying the extent of and response to the event. My explanation of the event will never measure up to whatever someone else imagines. Spaghetti Incident Theory.) Idea I had was it was the Hypergeometric shockfront worked essentially like radiation sickness: enough miles outside, the effect was weak enough the laws of normal physics could hold everyone together fine and you shake it off within a few days. Middle ring, your carcass got splashed across 11 dimensions and you die. Inside the plant and the MT compound surrounding it though, it's intense enough that you are basically remade as a fully hypergeometric entity ramified across space/time/whatever else Hypergeometry is. So 'casualties' of the disaster were limited to a like, 5-mile ring around the plant and that's it. Limited to existing within As mentioned DG agents' outside tech wouldn't work, but once inside scientific PCs could use their skills to investigate how physics works inside and come up with a jury rigged solution, negotiated between player and DM. Been my experience its not uncommon to meet art folk that have a decent amount of scientific/technical skill, so that could help any party without a science guy. Inside tech obviously doesn't work outside either. Wondering if giving PCs a flat bonus to tech rolls equal to their Unnatural would be helpful. Anyway, any tweaks at all to story, settings, NPCs, mechanics, etc are welcome, sorry for the wall of text. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 5, 2021 17:12
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So you’re going to put 75% of the population of Michigan into the occlusion zone? Please keep yoopers out of this in the manner suggested. There isn’t much religious fundamentalism in the UP. The lower peninsula has enough to pull from. E: calvinists and other weird freaks from west Michigan seem to be what you imagine yoopers to be. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 5, 2021 |
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Dec 5, 2021 23:14
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Helical Nightmares posted:https://www.indiewire.com/2021/12/guillermo-del-toro-pitches-at-the-mountain-of-madness-netflix-1234682793/ nicholas cage colour out of space was pretty great, imo
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Dec 5, 2021 23:16
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Dr. Lunchables posted:So you’re going to put 75% of the population of Michigan into the occlusion zone? Never having lived there, but listening to Michganders talk, including one roomie from Okemos, made it sound like UP was the Land Before Time. Is this not the case? Can we get confirmation? Which part of Directional Michigan had the Michigan Militia I remember from the news in grade school in the 90s? West? The guys who wanted to kidnap whitmer and put her in a lake? E: Googled, none of the Famous Michigan Racists I'm aware of are from UP, and no hits on the SPLC Hatemap. So I may have spoken in error. But other than one Whitmer plotter from Grand Rapids seems like The Southeast quadrant down near Ohio is where you get a lot of the Treason Patriots, and that's also where the SPLC says all the action is. Can we get a poll going? Which part of the mitten is the worst? And yes, if you're wondering why there's zero in-game appetite for trying to help Detroit, imagine the political reality that snaps into being when the State and Federal election votes of Flint and Detroit are deleted by an act of Elder God. Also about 95% of that 75% of the population becomes economic refugees and fucks off to the government doesn't care where i.e. post deindustrialization in Detroit/Flint, post katrina in Nola, post gentrification everywhere etc. Plenty of durable consumer goods left behind, plenty of newly available land to farm, the living is actually pretty easy if you're ok with the nonzero odds of a screaming eldritch ghost turning you inside out or a fundie klansman 'standing his ground' at you. Or even the streets changing on the way home from the store and having to pick a new house to sleep in, or spend a week figuring out where your old neighborhood is located now. Arivia posted:nicholas cage colour out of space was pretty great, imo cosign PipHelix fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 05:07
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PipHelix posted:Never having lived there, but listening to Michganders talk, including one roomie from Okemos, made it sound like UP was the Land Before Time. Is this not the case? Can we get confirmation? Which part of Directional Michigan had the Michigan Militia I remember from the news in grade school in the 90s? West? The guys who wanted to kidnap whitmer and put her in a lake? I’m sixth generation yooper, have worked all over the peninsula, and also below the bridge. Fundamentalism isn’t very present in the UP, where it is downstate, quite a bit. Michigan militia is mostly concentrated in the West part, outside of metro Grand Rapids. Nazi happen to be concentrated near Howell. You mentioned southeast, and that has more hits because more people live there. It’s that simple. Which segues into: Putting 75% of the population of Michigan within the border of whatever event happens, then the state/national government ignores it, is basically impossible. 7.5 million people, and all the richest ones, are within that zone. Michigan would never abandon those people. You’re talking the population of the state of Arizona, and the federal government looks the other way? 90% of NYC is suddenly unhoused and the nation doesn’t care? That’s too fantastical for any game about government response. Of course the state didn’t care about deindustrialization of Detroit because the population just white flighted to the suburbs. Of course the state didn’t care about the flint crisis because of institutional racism. But that’s a discussion about gradual effects, drawn out over years; you’re talking about this happening over what, a month? The closest event would be Katrina, but with a population 15 times the size. That event was a National scandal, though. I think you’re underestimating a few things here: - the size of Michigan, both in land area and population - how much the government would respond - how upset/concerned the American people would be (imagine if the DC Baltimore corridor was just fenced off.) Taking a smaller scope, and allowing just the city of Detroit (which is massive in terms of land area) would be more believable and easier. You could still have everything you want, but you wouldn’t have to game out all the stuff I mentioned. Downtown Baltimore is also an option. Mostly though this strikes me as gross poverty porn, playing with “haha, you’re not white and nobody cares about you,” as well as making gross implications about rural poor. This bit is just my two cents though. Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 13:31
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Then again, a scenario about a national response to a Cthulhu Mythos event sounds extremely interesting. Like asking the question "What if Delta Green failed to keep it a secret" could be a fascinating delve. You could have a mass media uproar, key individuals of the Program getting outed by whistleblowers, congressional inquiries, players having to keep up with ingame social media, tons of stuff!
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Dec 6, 2021 15:12
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DrSunshine posted:Then again, a scenario about a national response to a Cthulhu Mythos event sounds extremely interesting. Like asking the question "What if Delta Green failed to keep it a secret" could be a fascinating delve. You could have a mass media uproar, key individuals of the Program getting outed by whistleblowers, congressional inquiries, players having to keep up with ingame social media, tons of stuff! This is basically where the BPRD comic series ended up and it was loving amazing.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:31
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I'll pull my blood libel on the noble yooper, but I better not find out this is just the spiderman pointing at spiderman version of my central MI college roomie telling me up north is where all the racism is... Saying that the government would ignore a massive event like that does stretch credulity. Then again, if you received a vision there was going to be a worldwide pandemic that would kill 800k Americans or so, 2018 you would probably lose your goddamn mind right? You'd have a full mental breakdown trying to warn people and if anyone said "eh don't sweat it", you'd blow up at them. And yet here we are and the government be all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ throughout. I agree with you that the hardest pill to swallow is the rich whites would get the same treatment us dirtbags would get so how about this. Given that the Army Corps of Engineers literally decides who to save from flooding by how valuable the land is, what if I make it canon that the government provides a one-time payment equal to the loss of any real property for persons so displaced. Grosse Pointe Assholes get their million dollars and the renters don't get dick, and the black Detroit homeowners would get 'gently caress You' written on their check if that wasn't too many figures. DrSunshine posted:Then again, a scenario about a national response to a Cthulhu Mythos event sounds extremely interesting. Like asking the question "What if Delta Green failed to keep it a secret" could be a fascinating delve. You could have a mass media uproar, key individuals of the Program getting outed by whistleblowers, congressional inquiries, players having to keep up with ingame social media, tons of stuff! If DG failed to keep it a secret, you would get, at most, two days to process it before middle management was calling you at home telling you that the squid dragon is stomping around Europe, but Americans need burgers and if you're not committed to being part of the In-N-Out Team he's gonna give your shifts to Debbie. She just gave birth last week and she's been asking around for extra shifts to pay down her NICU bill. So... ya know. See ya Monday. Or not. (This is specifically the horror angle I am trying to explore here. We Almost Lost Detroit is a book and song about how the government literally did roll the dice on making uninhabitable the land on which 95% of Michigan lived, and we've only become more callous and less competent since then) PipHelix fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 18:55
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I think your scope is just too grand with the affected area. You’re describing a worldwide event and an international incident, affecting a heavily trafficked international waterway, as well as a swath of land that is just massive. I think you could do everything you wanted, and have it be more believable, if you stuck it in the city of Detroit and maybe into Warren. It’s still a lot of people, a lot of land, you still get to play with Windsor, but you stay away from the scale and the rich folks. (If you like, I can say words about Okemos, but I won’t fill the thread with that)
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Dec 6, 2021 19:01
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Moreso, you could continue with your original plan, but rescale the response. It would be what occupied world news for months, in a manner like Chernobyl but worse. Because it’s not gradual, it would have to be dealt with instead of ignored. You could have Canadian DG equivalents and UN response and international Red Cross response and all the tangled web such a thing would weave, but be warned that you’re designing the event of the century that would shake world events for a decades.
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Dec 6, 2021 19:10
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Dr. Lunchables posted:I think your scope is just too grand with the affected area. You’re describing a worldwide event and an international incident, affecting a heavily trafficked international waterway, as well as a swath of land that is just massive. I think you could do everything you wanted, and have it be more believable, if you stuck it in the city of Detroit and maybe into Warren. It’s still a lot of people, a lot of land, you still get to play with Windsor, but you stay away from the scale and the rich folks. Okemos Roomie sucked! Unbelievable slob! We hated him! I just had until now no more reliable source of info about Michigan than that guy. Dish that dirt, sister! I get what you're saying but I think this is a potato potahto thing. Personally what I like about it is that it's heightened. Again, the only reason we think the government wouldn't shrug its shoulders on this one is that we haven't literally seen it happen, watch John Oliver get pissed about it on HBO, realize there's literally nothing more meaningful to do about it and get on with our lives. Also Dhalgren is a direct inspiration and one of the main points of the book was it's (satirical in the 1970s and prophetic in the 2020s) prediction that Americans would just shrug and give up on any problem, no matter how big, they couldn't bomb away, let alone watch on TV. Even if carries implications about like, the fundamental nature of reality. If I have to get out the car and *walk* to it? gently caress off outta here with that. Leave it to the hipsters and black folks. I also mentioned there was a massive global outcry, as well as the carving of a canal to open back up the waterway, and fastforwarded/handwaved ten years past all the rest. The intervening decade can be as epochal or blah as fits your worldview. Also, any investigation will fail because basically nothing more complicated than, say a gun, works inside, and no gadgetry that can be built inside gives any kind of valid trustable readings outside. (I was originally going to say guns don't work but that's not fair to people's Char Sheets, even if you allow like, crossbows and poo poo). There is literally nothing exploitable for capitalism or nationalism there. You could write some crazy dodecaphonic aria where you harmonize with yourself and record it in the growth of an orange tree, but no one who isn't inside the bubble will ever hear it. Or you could make an assembly line where you clock in and work with yourself from yesterday and yourself from tomorrow to build a car that runs on the sunlight from the smaller sun, but it's not going to get you outside the city limits. It's only of value for freaks, weirdos and those who want to be left alone. E: I'm also doing the handwaving with intention, here. I don't really feel up to modeling the response. My cynical expectation is boring actually, a big outpouring of grief, a celebrity benefit concert, a few day-late half-loaf measures from the government and then we all settle into the new normal by summer. If YOU think that the intervening period is where the interesting meat is, come up with some cool stuff and lemme know. And I'm genuinely sincere here, not being snotty. I'm just mostly interested in the setting as a stable equilibrium, as forgotten aftermath, cause that's where the book I'm ripping off starts. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 19:11
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Like everything, it'll be another event that further drives the wedge between the haves and have nots. You'd mentioned the government cutting checks for those who lost property in the event, favoring rich property owners. That's a great one! I'm not sure it'd be just so "ho hum", though. Wouldn't a mass reveal that the universe is crawling with invisible horrors everywhere be a great way to hype up the security state? Like a Weird 9/11. What if somehow the Innsmouth thing got out if Delta Green's existence was exposed? You'd have literal genetic taint with magical monster DNA going around, driving national paranoia and presently-existing racial tension. For sure it'd reach an equilibrium eventually, but I think your work is to speculate about how that equilibrium would be different. I remember pre-9/11 you could still go all the way to the boarding area to say goodbye to departing loved ones at the airport. I remember not having to take off your shoes or being able to bring on bottled water, nailclippers, and toothpaste. I also remember how for more than entire decade after 9/11, "ARE TROOPS  " was an entire part of the culture. For COVID, we seem to have settled into an equilibrium, but lots of things are different. Plastic barriers at retail, an entire generation of students and kids whose lives have been warped by remote school, the mask/no mask thing becoming part of existing political cleavages, and so on. How would a big part of Michigan being contaminated by hypergeometry warp the new normal? Like even small everyday life things -- for example, you can't take the train or drive through this part anymore, so certain towns start to become way more important as highway traffic and freight are diverted through them instead. Would refugees farther from the epicenter be like the new FEMA Katrina refugees? How would the existence of hypergeometry affect the whole "new age woo" scene, would they find new validation in it? Could there be new cults spreading on Facebook based around this? What about tourism to the boundaries of the exclusion zone? You could model it on Chernobyl tourism! Imagine someone selling tickets to visit the spooky place in Annihilation, or every now and then TikTok Influencers getting warped doing the "Exclusion Zone Challenge". I think a great reference would be to look up the lore around the "Mystery Flesh Pit National Park": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDeJDtkS39s
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Dec 6, 2021 19:43
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Mostly though this strikes me as gross poverty porn, playing with “haha, you’re not white and nobody cares about you,” as well as making gross implications about rural poor. This bit is just my two cents though. Didn't notice this and I should address it. Deleted a mean cspammy bit below, but, I'm from the 'rural poor' area. Not MI but what's the difference? I do not care about poor rural whites. Klan marched down my street as a kid. Had to fight a kid in gym class for 'taking the Lord's name in vain'. The rest of America regularly tears itself apart worrying about them, they'll be fine if a guy somewhere assumes for the sake of a session of makepretend with like four other urban nerds that a contingent of them would try to gently caress with a free zone populated mostly by POC, for bad religious reasons that boil down to 'what we actually worship is whiteness'. Anyone who protested in summer 2020 saw a contingent of Rittenhouses start showing up in their town by July looking to start poo poo. This is who we are. As to NONWHITE poor: Yea it's tricky. Basically, reading We Almost Lost Detroit, I was struck by how many times that specific area has been screwed over and how little it ever moves the needle. The Flint Water Crisis was insane, a whole city was knowingly poisoned to save a few dollars. And it's not the only time it's happened! The literal same company, did it again in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh a few years later! Guess who lives there, what they look like, and how much they make? The Breeder reactor was built where it was specifically because of who lived nearby. Same way we decide where to put highways, polluting industry, all that. IMO pointing it out isn't the same as mocking it. Katrina was a scandal but what were the consequences? Heckuva Job, Brownie, became a cofveve level meme for libs and America learned what an evil bitch Barbara Bush is, but that's about it. All those people were pushed out, no one cared where they went and Chris Kyle became a cultural hero writing about zapping 'looters' (black American refugees) with a sniper rifle from atop the superdome. That he was a congenital liar doesn't mean it doesn't say something very true about America. If you ask me any response would be like Zeitoun x 10. Bunch of amped up cornfed soldiers expecting to shoot creatures from the black lagoon and getting people helping themselves to bottled water in a 7-11 on their walk out of town instead. It's not so much trying to mock the poor as use our treatment of them as a source of horror. In Dhalgren, and in this module, the POC who remain are much better off than they had been previously, simply because even with the lawlessness and unnatural physics, America is out of the equation. The intended villains are the ghosts, the racists, and, ambiently, the society that made the setting conceivable. If the execution doesn't match the intention that's on me, but I'm not like, hyuck hyuck, Flint just has a culture of poverty and thats why they can't do bootstraps or whatever. Unlike Sam Delaney, I'm neither black, queer or a world-class author so if there's something you'd suggest to tweak it (other than the radius, I see no reason not to go big in a work of speculative fiction in a setting where the underlying stakes are the end of literal reality universe-wide) I'm interested. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 19:43
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DrSunshine posted:Like everything, it'll be another event that further drives the wedge between the haves and have nots. You'd mentioned the government cutting checks for those who lost property in the event, favoring rich property owners. That's a great one! I'm not sure it'd be just so "ho hum", though. Wouldn't a mass reveal that the universe is crawling with invisible horrors everywhere be a great way to hype up the security state? Like a Weird 9/11. One more: Passing a gas station on the 23 advertising 'Last Working Phone till Saginaw' on the approach. Then again this is all EX-gradient and I'm mostly interested in the world inside. Dropping a few deets like that during the initial briefing would be good scene setting though. A quick look at a map says a 30 mile radius centered on NE Detroit covers pretty much everything mentioned, so about 3000 sq. mi, about 3% of the state of michigan (both peninsulas included, I'm not gonna go crazy deep on this). Fukushima Dai-Ichi is 12mi, and that wasn't a full meltdown. Pretty massive area to mess around in, rural, suburbs, fancy lakefront mansions, Flint & Detroit. And I'm gonna declare the US purchases the Ontario Peninsula from Windsor up to the Tilbury Canal at a decent markup and shares toll revenue with Canada as an 'Our Bad, sorry our Mad scientists ate your city, if that helps explain the intervening. Lot of different zones for individual scenarios. Going off the text, Bellona looked pretty normal until you're within the area. More of a gradual effect than a hard bubble dome, which would help a bit cut down on Lunchable's objection. You could make a go of living near the edge for a while only thing you might notice is you're chronically late or early to work, and get lost all the time. But yea the existence of the Scenesters is a straight pull from the book. Urban Explorer-Type Influencers are a wrinkle Delnaney never had to deal with, but no cellphones inside the zone. Just do a video from a parking lot in Toledo where they described what they saw? Literally had-to-be there situation. Would that be worth potentially getting killed by a ghost or like, citizens arrested by a religious militia? The Locals could definitely make a sideline on hosting lookie loo tourists, but US money is worthless. Maybe just show up with a load of lumber or tools or a few bottles of hootch? I guess there are organic farms that host backpackers in exchange for labor, that could be a good model, and a good source of missing macguffins for any agents to start investigating. I've seen people talking about the Innsmouth thing where DG is canonially a racial cleansing squad and I think in my games that gonna not exist, never happened. US Coast Guard got em all in 1920 or if they didn't, eh so what, fishmen in Maine, they're fine, leave em alone, don't start no poo poo won't be no poo poo. BUT not gonna tell anyone they can't graft it on and see what grows out. E: That flesh pit thing seems really cool. Won't have a chance to check it out in its entirety till later today, thanks! PipHelix fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 20:03
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Hey, re-reading maybe I got defensive w/ Lunchables. Sorry, man, truce. I think we're gonna keep disagreeing about the appropriate size of the blast and the response, but you do have a lot of good ideas that have helped out. Sorry I got under your skin with the yooper bit initially.
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Dec 6, 2021 21:16
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It’s all good man, I hold no grudges. I think you’ve got an exciting adventure there. If you want a yooper hook though, it would probably stand to reason that Yooper Separatists would blow the Mackinac bridge and declare a sovereign US state, given the goings on in the mitten. This probably wouldn’t impact the campaign at all, but could give some fun background.
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Dec 6, 2021 21:44
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Dr. Lunchables posted:It’s all good man, I hold no grudges. I think you’ve got an exciting adventure there. Thanks glad to hear it. I sometimes get in arguments with people I had no intention of pissing off. It's hilarious you've been a Yooper than anyone on any branch of my family has been in America. Still waiting on Okemos dirt. Also, we're sitting here calibrating the right amount of how much people's worlds would be rocked by incontrovertible proof of the otherworldly and for 4 or 5 years now the government has been like "UFOs? *REAL*. How bout that? Anyone? Anyone care?" Only time I hear people talk about it is to marvel about how little anyone gives a poo poo.
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Dec 6, 2021 23:01
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How tall is the zone? Would planes fall from the sky, perpetually, Donnie darko style? You mentioned that mechanical objects more complicated than a gun are useless, but does that prevent electricity? Electrons flow perpetually, and are constantly available, but does it matter if it’s frozen in status? Imagine exploring perpetually dark metro suburb where even flashlights don’t work, and where reflections do not show when lit by torch. Where shadows cast by flames do not move.
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Dec 7, 2021 04:00
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Dr. Lunchables posted:How tall is the zone? Would planes fall from the sky, perpetually, Donnie darko style? Wait if electrons can't flow or move then wouldn't that be, like, extremely bad for the stability of matter? I'd probably just chalk the "simple machines only" rule up to 'mythos magic' rather than reach for a more scientific explanation, because you rapidly reach the point where that zone is physically incompatible with existence.
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Dec 7, 2021 04:07
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I was just thinking of the tiny inconsistent time rifts. That light bulb might be perpetually off because it’s stuck in a time loop where it’s just… off, no matter if there’s electricity flowing to it. Saying “electrical devices don’t work here,” shouldn’t require too much more hand wave than “complex machinery doesn’t work here,” without getting into the reasons. “Here,” in this case being specific places within the zone. The mall in Novi just cancels all electricity, for whatever reason. Stuff like that. Kind of allows for “levels” in a sense. Places that are both geographically and reality distinct from neighboring places.
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Dec 7, 2021 04:12
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Dr. Lunchables posted:How tall is the zone? Would planes fall from the sky, perpetually, Donnie darko style? 30 mile radius is halfway to space, airlines are 5-10 miles up, so it sounds like it's a no fly zone. If planes are dumb enough to fly through it I'd say yes? Though maybe a satellite could peek through, or a U2 dunno how high they can fly. No idea what they'd see. If physics are different, light would at the very least be diffracted heavily, like looking though a fishbowl. as for tech, basically, it is possible to predict how physics works in a geometry with more than 3 spatial dimensions. If you ever took an intro to E&M class, the models where you imagine an 'infinite line' or an 'infinite plane' of charge you are essentially modeling E&M in a 2 or 1 dimensional world. With enough work, you can extrapolate from 1-2-3-4-...N dimensional physics. In general, the forces get weaker cause they're smeared across a larger space. But that of course is too simple and regular. Even fire is an electronic effect. I don't intend to calculate any of this, or expect anyone in my group to worry about it. My headcanon? Modern integrated circuits just have too many sensitive, interdependent parts that if enough voltages are off by a certain fraction, if enough clocks get shifted by a certain amount, the whole system just collapses. Like, Ohm's law probably still works with some small correction, and if you wanna be James Clerk Maxwell you can absolutely restart the field of E&M as it applies to this one spooky town. But for your average joe's rules of thumb, tech don't work. The idea of it being a gradient instead of a boundary helps too. The equivalent of the 90s 'walking for bars'. If you need to use something high tech, face away from the plant and start walking till it kicks in. Likewise, any investigation of the plant is gonna require some deep acclimation, unless you want to twat an 11D ghost with a stick of wood or a sharp piece of metal. Dr. Lunchables posted:I was just thinking of the tiny inconsistent time rifts. That light bulb might be perpetually off because it’s stuck in a time loop where it’s just… off, no matter if there’s electricity flowing to it. I like the time rift/skip/loop stuff giving rise to weird phenomenon. First mission after you get in, missing tourist. What happened? They didn't follow the rope-marked path to the outhouse, tried to shortcut, and you find them 10 miles away, trapped in a 5 second repeating loop like the prospector in The Endless. And yea, Dhalgren has a neighborhood that always burns. Why that neighborhood, why not all of them or none of them? Spooky scene setting. A wizard did it. Just the photos of all those beautiful old buildings from Detroit, ruined as they are right now, in the modern day, would make great handouts. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 08:08
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Lumbermouth posted:This is basically where the BPRD comic series ended up and it was loving amazing. Charles Strosses Laundry File books go there as well.
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Dec 7, 2021 11:39
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This seems like a prime opportunity to have the investigators/agents do a thing against a group of “faceless” protagonists, then later in the campaign have the same agents end up becoming the protagonists, now having to deal with the actions their earlier selves inflicted.
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Dec 7, 2021 17:26
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Dr. Lunchables posted:This seems like a prime opportunity to have the investigators/agents do a thing against a group of “faceless” protagonists, then later in the campaign have the same agents end up becoming the protagonists, now having to deal with the actions their earlier selves inflicted. If I recall correctly Dhalgren's end mirrors its beginning in the same way, The Kid leaves and throws his weapon to someone on the bridge just like happened to him on his way in. Like, the last sentence ends midway, and is completeable by the first which itself starts mid sentence. But yea, day one on the inside they hear about some gang of raiders that's been trouble for weeks, and in a later scenario they need to steal something from the Locals. Somehow had been there for a month before they even showed up. Gonna have to watch out for my inner Chris Nolan.
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Dec 7, 2021 23:28
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Are there any prewritten scenarios out there that involve extreme fundamentalist Christian cults (things like snake handling rituals and stuff) where the Holy Spirit, or Jesus or whatever that turns up when they worship turns out to be some kind of Mythos god or Great Old One? I want to run that kind of scenario but I don't have the time to write it myself.
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Dec 10, 2021 21:27
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DrSunshine posted:Are there any prewritten scenarios out there that involve extreme fundamentalist Christian cults (things like snake handling rituals and stuff) where the Holy Spirit, or Jesus or whatever that turns up when they worship turns out to be some kind of Mythos god or Great Old One? I want to run that kind of scenario but I don't have the time to write it myself. There's Jeffrey Moeller's "Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home," arguably the strongest scenario in the anthology The Things We Leave Behind. There's even a website for the cult: https://jamesalday.github.io/ladybug/
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Dec 10, 2021 21:58
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Pththya-lyi posted:There's Jeffrey Moeller's "Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home," arguably the strongest scenario in the anthology The Things We Leave Behind. There's even a website for the cult: https://jamesalday.github.io/ladybug/ My campaign is set in the 1930s, do you think it would be easy to adapt it to the pre-computer era? Eg.: are there clues and plot points that don't necessarily revolve around the investigators searching the web and so on.
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Dec 10, 2021 23:17
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DrSunshine posted:My campaign is set in the 1930s, do you think it would be easy to adapt it to the pre-computer era? Eg.: are there clues and plot points that don't necessarily revolve around the investigators searching the web and so on. No. A lot of the clues are security camera footage, emails, etc. You could probably swing it, but you'd have to put in a lot of effort.
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Dec 11, 2021 00:18
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I'm pretty sure there's a 1930's christian cult adventure in pulp's two headed serpent.
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Dec 11, 2021 01:00
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DrSunshine posted:Are there any prewritten scenarios out there that involve extreme fundamentalist Christian cults (things like snake handling rituals and stuff) where the Holy Spirit, or Jesus or whatever that turns up when they worship turns out to be some kind of Mythos god or Great Old One? I want to run that kind of scenario but I don't have the time to write it myself. Yes almost exactly. Try Revelations by Caleb Stokes. It is Pay What You Want. Also, spoiler for Demon Souls by From Software, God turning out to be a Great Old One and being the final boss is the final revelation in Demon Souls.
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Dec 11, 2021 03:01
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Just ran a Thing based module. The usual '5 players smarter than 1 DM' meant that a castoff scene setting aside told them all they needed to know for a fool proof replicant test. Would have been over in 2 hours except the one PC who was secretly a shoggoth replicant fired his sniper rifle at his human counterpart before they could start testing. succeeded and the human failed a luck roll to miss. One of 5 humans bleeding on the ice while the shooter and two other replicants melted and merged into a molten killbeast right next to the party. Anyway, three combat rounds later, a helicopter enveloped in and flown by a massive pus colored blob of protoplasm is kamikazing the only weather-proof habitation in the ruined antarctic base while PCs plink at a chopper with pistols, flareguns, and suicide cables thrown Indiana-Jones like. The other ones were waving mops soaked in bleach, from the ground. Couldn't be prouder of how the PC was just basically told 'uh yea you just killed the real you. You were actually a shoggoth all along.' And they're like, "ok awesome. I Jaws 2 that loving chopper then, and commandeer it using the brain of the expert pilot I ate." Honestly way more fun than anything I had planned. I wanna say a lesson was learned, but I feel like as a DM better to lay it on too thick and end up an hour and a half further in the module than you expected, than have no one intuit what is happening and spend an hour and a half getting through one page of notes. Also a second cast off phrase during the briefing meant that technically several hundred people at McMurdo Station were executed by DG so as far as my whole 'DG doesn't do mass murder' stance goes, I guess I painted myself into a corner, but the Thing is the Thing and you gotta do what you gotta do to be sure. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 06:33
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God, I hope he isn't a goon but if so : This is said with love, fella. His character was the most overubuilt supersoldier I've come across in a while and I was like, 'sure, 80 firearms, an arsenal on your back great. Bullets dont hurt The Thing, 6 armor class body armor, the thing is gonna run up your pantleg and eat you from the inside out. Bring it.' Anyway he domes HIMSELF and is like, ok, I have 6 armor! poo poo, I had 5 armor PIERCING! 12 Hp, 14 dam, success too strong to handwave with a 'you aren't really you, you don't really have that crazy sniper skill', 6 armor, 5AP, AND a failed luck roll. Anyone else would have hurt themselves, they would have bled and shown blood and muscle and bone instead of protoplasm and the PC would be in the mix with a little dent. Always make your Midnight Murderer the Tier 1 Operator.
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Dec 17, 2021 06:52
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Pip Got Drunk & High, and hosed Himself Up Listening To Music While Thinking About DG - Big Black and Soft Cell Edition: Shotgun contest is over, so no point not shopping it around: DG (or some branch or Program/Outlaws/Cowboys/March Tech) runs Operation: Somersault, an ethnic cleansing op against the Deep One hybrids. Ok, sure. People don't take that poo poo lying down, especially if they have a direct line to a literal God. 'nario: An Innsmouth Resistance member with a 'passing complexion' infiltrated DG several years back. While there, they* seduced a team member as part of a honeypot that grew into a genuine relationship. Eventually their cover was blown and they escaped just ahead of the kill team. Fast forward a couple years and that NPC contacts the PC. Their back is against a wall, and they're out of moves, and they're asking for help. Fast forward to the party blasting DG agents, maybe participating in a ritual to Dagon to even the odds/help the Innsmouth NPC(s) escape. * I'm straight so in my original idea, the NPC is a woman, and there's a surprise kid that needs protecting when contact is re-established. If the PC is a female, be a little harder to explain that one, they'd need to canonically already have a kid, so almost no way you're not loving with a player's Bond. Plus gay relationships, so like, throw the kid in if it makes sense, otherwise you're just saving your old flame and maybe one or two members of their cell. I call it "Tainted Love", subtitled "I'm Sorry, I Don't Pray That Way" As Letterman used to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YILRE-fr2Dw
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Dec 20, 2021 17:42
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What would be the effect of a pc getting the elder sign tattooed all over themselves be?
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Dec 21, 2021 19:08
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