Campaign Seed: Halfterlife.

This got more and more complex as I contemplated it.

Halfterlife – Google Docs

Halfterlife

 

Halfterlife was one of those urban legends found among various post-mortal, extra-dimensional, and intangible supernatural entities until about twenty years ago, when somebody finally found it, then came back to tell everybody else how to get there.  ‘Everybody else’ not including the mortal races, of course. Particularly humanity, or at least the mortal part of it. That species has a real knack at acquiring all the best real and unreal estate.

 

Halfterlife is a self-contained pocket universe that appears to be a half-finished afterlife (hence the name).  There’s a lot of landscape, and even a bunch of architecture — but there’s almost no furnishings, and pretty much no lore whatsoever.  It seems to be set up on the classic Good Place / Bad Place / Stuck In-Between Place model, and maybe there were one or more polytheistic pantheons involved (hard to tell from the floor layouts).  The environmental tolerances are all within the standard human norm, but the climate isn’t noticeably different in any particular place, and no one area seems to be any more ominous or transcendent than any other.  There seems to be a standard day-night format, but there is no sun or moon.  ‘Stars’ at night, though, with about two-fifths of the night sky simply blank (just as if the work was interrupted in mid-stride).

 

There’s plenty of water in Halfterlife – lakes, streams, rivers, at least one ocean — but there was no life of any kind when the place was discovered.  The new inhabitants have introduced their own flora and fauna into the place, with a militant disregard for any kind of balanced ecosystem; surprisingly, the introduced species have generally thrived, including things that are normally incompatible with each other (like ghost trees and feral zombie sloths). Outside of the major settlements, the countryside can get very, very strange.

 

Right now, the following factions (and others) have colonized Halfterlife:

 

  • The New Fae. Various refugees from the Seelie and Unseelie Courts who were banished for allowing themselves to be too thoroughly defined by modern fantasy and horror fiction.  Generally speaking, they’re… well, unlike regular Fae you don’t have to shoot them on sight.
  • The Lost Infernal Legion.  Originally refugees from the wrong side in a particular universe’s Armageddon, this mercenary group now merely hires itself out to whoever can pay them to fight.  They’ve long since stopped caring if ‘whoever’ is an angel; indeed, by now the Legion has outcast angels in their ranks, too. Hey, when the guy with the flaming sword is Smiting the bastard trying to eviscerate you then it’s maybe not the time for racial prejudice, right?
  • The Zombie Collective. Humans only see the stupid zombies; the ones who can’t control their hunger at the smell of a fresh brain.  The smart ones are always looking for a safe place to hide from people; the smart and lucky ones have gotten themselves to Halfterlife, where they can practice their own disgusting, but not actually unethical, form of agriculture.
  • Monster Liberation Front. These guys, girls, and associated others are involuntary refugees. They didn’t want to run away from Earth, and they want to go back. They’re also even more vulnerable to human belief than the Fae are, which makes them both wary of humanity, and extremely cranky towards them.
  • The Figments.  Refugees from lost timelines, victims of reality quakes and dimensional shifts, the human detritus cast up from the collision of two universes at once, ghosts that could not or would not move on  — these poor intangible unfortunates had nothing on Earth but painful memories.  Halfterlife was a miracle to them; they can touch things here again.

 

Note, by the way, that nobody knows who made Halfterlife. And nobody knows where the creators of the place went. And nobody knows if Halfterlife’s creators are coming back, either. But one thing is for sure: if the creators do come back, they’re going to have to fight for the place.

Campaign Seed: Project GAMMA YELLOW.

Just my little joke.

Project GAMMA YELLOW – Google Docs

Project GAMMA YELLOW

 

NATO’s GAMMA YELLOW project would be legendary in the conspiracy theory community, if only any of them had ever heard of it.  But there are in fact certain security restrictions that people do take seriously, and the ones involving GAMMA YELLOW fall in that category.  It helps that the classification is at a level that can be beyond the reach of mere ministers of defense, or even some heads of states. For example, no American President has been briefed on GAMMA YELLOW since Jimmy Carter, and that was widely (for given values of ‘widely’) seen as being a horrendous mistake.

Continue reading Campaign Seed: Project GAMMA YELLOW.

Campaign seed: The B.A.B.Y. Protocol.

I blame Internet videos.

BABY Protocol – Google Docs

The B.A.B.Y. Protocol

 

The Broad-ABility Yield Protocol (at this level of security, you’re allowed to make puns) is that rarity: a genuine international conspiracy.  One that every government in the world has either signed up for, or at least sworn to keep quiet about.  And that’s not an idle oath, either: even the threat of the failure to do at least the latter has resulted in at least six regime changes since 1978.

Continue reading Campaign seed: The B.A.B.Y. Protocol.

Campaign Seed: The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD.

Yes, it’s mildly awful. Or at least the implications are.  Gotta give the PCs a suitably awful Ultimate Big Bad to aim for, right?

The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD – Google Docs

 

The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD

 

Well, it’s like this. Time travel is possible, you can change the past, but it doesn’t effect anything that happens back in your home time period.  The nations of the world — at least, the ones whose governments survived any number of revelations by people raiding the recent past for evidence of awkward or illegal shenanigans — have banded together to create an international organization dedicated to making sure that all the awful consequences of time travel stay strictly Downtime, and never impacts Uptime (currently 2057 AD) at all.  OK? OK.

Continue reading Campaign Seed: The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD.

Trump campaign contemplating having the shakeup they should have had in January.

What we have here is a good news / bad news situation, and the funny thing is: they’re both the same news. CNN is hearing a whisper of a rumor of a suggestion of a possibility that the Trump campaign may be about to consider doing a major shakeup of their campaign. It’s obvious why that would be bad news: I’m perfectly happy with Trump’s strategy as it is. It’s also obvious why that would be good news: they should have done it last Tuesday. Not talked about it, or laying the groundwork for talking about it; they should have gone and done it. Rip off the band-aid quick, that’s my motto.

But will it work? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing that’s not in that article that should be: either way, it’s gonna be expensive. Quality costs

Rep. Mike Honda (D, CA-17) squirms under allegations he mixed campaign business with House business.

When you do politics, you should always read local newspaper reports whenever possible. They often tell you things that you won’t hear from the national news organizations.  Case in point: Mike Honda (D, CA-17). He had a bad week, from a ‘campaign shenanigans’ point of view.  This is how The Hill described it:

Shown notes from his district office’s staff retreat, Rep. Michael M. Honda allegedly acknowledged to ethics investigators that what he was seeing was “open to a lot of interpretation, but it doesn’t look good.”

The California Democrat’s former campaign manager presented official staff with a strategy in which district office events would be used to raise money, according to Office of Congressional Ethics documents released Thursday.

Continue reading Rep. Mike Honda (D, CA-17) squirms under allegations he mixed campaign business with House business.

Quote of the Day, Never Underestimate A Campaign’s Ability To Auto-Darwinate edition.

(H/T: @TheRickWilson) The subject: a theoretical discussion of how the government could look into the possible illegal coordination of a Super PAC with a candidate. The conclusion: well, it’d be difficult. Ostensibly:

Former FEC commissioner Scott Thomas, a Democrat, doubts the Justice Department would ever look at such a case because the FEC has been so precise in detailing what is allowed and what is not.

“You’d have to show a true smoking gun, showing the candidate controlling the campaign and the super PAC,” said Thomas, a lawyer now in private practice in Washington. He can’t see campaign operatives being that clumsy: “It would have to be a smoking gun left by someone who had the intelligence of an advanced fern.”

…So somebody’s definitely gonna go to jail this cycle, then?