Adventure Seed: Federal March.

Federal March – Google Docs

Federal March

 

When the Galactic Federation announced its new ‘national’ anthem (the so-called ‘Federal March’), Terrans collectively had a good laugh.  The melody had been fairly obviously lifted whole from a piece of classical Terran music from their planet’s Dawn of Space era, presumably because the ‘composer’ thought that nobody would notice except Terrans, and then only the ones who were musiciologists.  Alas for the composer, the music in question had been recently used in a popular children’s show, as is traditional for Terran classical music. This effectively meant that every Terran adult between the ages of thirty and one hundred and twenty now immediately associates the Galactic Federation with the “Ultra-Loonie Uncle Robot” show.  Which is, by the way, a hysterical program. Especially if you’re a scholar of Terran popular culture. The Uncle Robot people ripped off everybody.

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Adventure Seed: The City Parks Strangler.

City Parks Strangler – Google Docs

The City Parks Strangler

 

This particular set of cases is controversial, mostly because there’s a serious disconnect between how the police are officially treating the situation, and how most of the populace is.  To the police, the City Parks Strangler is a serial killer who has murdered at least seven people that they know of, in a ritualistic and macabre fashion. To the populace, the Strangler is a admittedly murderous and probably insane vigilante who has still single-handedly chased all of the drug dealers out of the parks.  The difference of opinion here has not made it any easier to catch the Strangler.

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Adventure Seed: The Legend of Silver Alice.

Legend of Silver Alice – Google Docs

The Legend of Silver Alice

 

This particular rural legend shows up in a remarkable number of places. It goes like this: there once was a Human (or Elf, or Dwarf, or Orc) maiden who was cursed by an evil Gnomish (it’s always Gnomish, for some reason) wizard after she spurned his advances.  In his rage he turned her into living silver; worse, as her skin tarnished, it also brought her great pain.  Only poultices of gold and pearls could soothe her agony, and then only for a time. Silver Alice now lives in an sea-facing grotto, where she sieves the sea itself for gold, and watches over great beds of pearl oysters, all the while weeping tears of pure silver into the lapping waves.  

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Adventure Seed: Language-Oriented Vectored Ecstasy.

Language-Oriented Vectored Ecstasy – Google Docs

So many possible bad jokes, here.  So many.

Language-Oriented Vectored Ecstasy

(L.O.V.E.)

 

Yes, before anything is said: they came up with the acronym first.  But it’s a fair one.  The goal was to come up with a way to overload the pleasure centers of the human brain via the use of particular phonemes, and the researchers succeeded. ‘Vectored’ is maybe a bit of a stretch, but LOVE is not indiscriminate in its effects, so it’s a fair enough use of the word.  At least from the point of view of the acronym writers.

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Adventure Seed: “Super Blue Blood Moon Attack!”

Every time I heard the phrase “super blue blood moon” (it’s a lunar eclipse thingy going on Wednesday morning), I kept adding “Attack” at the end of it. Eventually I just gave up and went with it.

Super Blue Blood Moon Attack – Google Docs

Super Blue Blood Moon Attack!

So much of modern occultism becomes remarkably less opaque once you realize that most of the modern (defined as “1980 to 2030 AD”) esoteric Words of Power originally manifested themselves in children’s animated television programs.  Oh, not the actual words themselves. You can’t achieve apotheosis by lifting a toy weapon in the air and invoking a catchphrase.  But those catchphrases are usually phonetic mnemonics for the actual Words of Power, or at least the rituals used to acquire those Words.  More information is encoded in the storylines, the backgrounds, the sound effects themselves: even technical glitches can have esoteric meaning.  And no, nobody knows why the Source of Magic picked such a bizarre method of spreading the Lore around. Sometimes things just happen.

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Adventure Seed: Operation ENDOSCOPE PARLAY.

Operation ENDOSCOPE PARLAY – Google Docs

Operation ENDOSCOPE PARLAY

 

Good morning. As you are all aware, spell-casting using anagrams was the go-to occult discipline of the Seventeenth Century AD, and continued to retain some nostalgic popularity until the first half of the Nineteenth. Unfortunately, with the rise of modern linguistics the power available to linguistic magic skyrocketed, with typically horrific results.  The dirty war conducted between rival magical circles of semioticists need not be reviewed here: suffice it to say that the extermination of the last holdout Fascist and Soviet deep-penetration doomsday linguistic cults in 1953 was a close-run thing. Sufficiently so that the esoteric world’s subsequent tacit abandonment of Latin was deemed regrettable, but necessary in order to prevent future breakdowns in language, perception, and local space-time.

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Adventure Seed: ‘The Children of Elf and Orc.’

Children of Elf and Orc – Google Docs

The Children of Elf and Orc

 

It is said that, “When the child of Elf and Orc comes into its own, the world will shake and the sky will burn.”  Of course, it is usually said in tones of utter disbelief, because one of the laws that the gods set down for the world is this: the demihuman races cannot mate with each other. People have tried to get around the problem — in every conceivable way — but there isn’t a magic or miracle or mechanism that can accomplish the job.  Humans can mate with pretty much everyone, but other than that it’s strictly ‘procreate within your own species.’

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Adventure Seed: the Kingdoms of the Harvested Meat Map.

Kingdoms of the Harvested Meat Map – Google Docs

Kingdoms of the Harvested Meat Map

Physical Description: a wrinkled, somewhat used page with an outline map of the United States of America printed on it.  The Kingdoms of the Harvested Meat Map is further annotated, in a highly bizarre fashion.  What appears to be crude boundary outlines are scrawled on the map in blue, a variety of outlandish and unsavory names are written in red, and a large number of green dots are scattered throughout the map. Continue reading Adventure Seed: the Kingdoms of the Harvested Meat Map.

Adventure Seed: Operation HANDLEBAR APRICOT.

Operation HANDLEBAR APRICOT – Google Docs

Operation HANDLEBAR APRICOT

 

On Wednesday, August 2, 2017, a National Parks Service worker at the Saugus Iron Works Historical Site in Saugus, Massachusetts discovered the violently murdered corpse of an older woman. As per NPS policy in Special Metaphysical Enforcement Areas (which includes the Saugus site), the site was immediately secured until an emergency containment team could be dispatched. Fortunately, the immediate crime scene could be isolated from outside view while containment protocols were followed; the area was judged sanitized by the early morning of Thursday, August 3.

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Adventure Seed: Sam’s Dojo.

Sam’s Dojo – Google Docs

Sam’s Dojo

 

Sam’s Dojo is located in a strip mall convenient to the campaign. It’s not much to look at, visually: the Dojo is essentially a big open space with a lot of mats on the floor, an office in one corner, and a bunch of karate equipment scattered about.  The place is clean and well run, and its owner Sam Cohen is a genuinely nice guy and good teacher of American Kenpo, but he’s also about as generic a karate instructor as you’re likely to ever see. You kind of have difficulty remembering what he looks like, once Sam’s out of your field of vision.

 

And he has almost no paper trail.  Neither does the dojo, come to that. And nobody can quite remember when Sam started teaching students.

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