Caojiawan Ghost Station – Google Docs
Caojiawan Ghost Station
…Well. It’s complicated.
Imagine the problems, if you would, of being one of the administrators for the municipality of Chongqing. The area has a population larger than Texas’s, with half of them living in one city. It’s corrupt. It’s fairly poor, despite being heavily industrialized and a major transportation hub. And it’s full of ghosts, of course.
The Bee King
Bees, of course, do not have kings. So when bees encounter one, they tend to react about as horrified as a bee can manage. You see, to them the Bee King is this horrible, enslaving entity that smells wrong and moves wrong and that can make regular bees grow weak and passively obedient and there’s nothing that can stop him. The queens are helpless, the drones are helpless, the hive itself is helpless. When the Bee King comes, the hive invariably becomes corrupted, and eventually dies. And it doesn’t die easily; there is maximum suffering and misery involved, and the worst part is that there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to the destruction. All of which means that, to a bee, the Bee King is precisely the same sort of entity as Nyarlathotep would be to humanity.
Via Facebook, this is a simultaneously sad and hopeful article on how convicts play D&D while incarcerated:
It may sound like a strange juxtaposition: hardened, tattooed offenders donning the cloaks of fantasy characters. Yet both former inmates and correctional officers agree: D&D is more common in prison than you might imagine. Most facilities have at least one game going. Some have a player in every cell block. According to Micah Davis, a former inmate and Dungeon Master imprisoned in Texas, “We had our own table in the dayroom. That’s saying something. Aryan brotherhood table, Mexican mafia table, black guy table, and D&D table.”
Some of the players are lifelong gamers, who would be doing the same thing if they were on the outside. Others hadn’t even heard of D&D until getting locked up. But faced with a dearth of creative outlets, donning a metaphorical robe and wizard hat quickly became a welcome diversion.
Source Speak/TL [IQ/Very Hard] Defaults: None
Superficially, Source Speak resembles a language, but in reality it’s a complicated method for achieving physical effects via semantic manipulation of the environment. A successful roll will allow the user to automatically shift the results of a skill roll by one level, in either direction. For example, Source Speak can turn a critical failure into a failure, or a critical success to merely a success. An unsuccessful roll (which cannot be mitigated by another Source Speak skill check) causes 1d6 hit points (6d6 on a critical failure), which represents a piece of space-time reacting badly to being manipulated in such a fashion.
Crimson City of Milwaukee – Google Docs
The Crimson City of Milwaukee
City: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Population: 50,000/300,000
Controls: Central-eastern Wisconsin
Government: Despotism
Problem: Food Shortage
Heroic Opportunity: Mercenary Work
City Aspect: Militaristic
Milwaukee, Wisconsin was always a haven for Reds; and after the Serpentfall the local Communists were organized enough to take control of the city. Technically, current mayor (and Socialist) Frank Zeidler was democratically elected; however, the People’s Councils that guarantee Zeidler’s rule have shown no interest in ever having another election. Mayor Zeidler is thus in the unique position of being a despot who can do anything — except change the system.
Continue reading The Crimson City of Milwaukee [The Day After Ragnarok]
As near as I can tell, every word of this story about Juan Pujol Garcia is true. At least, MI5 is corroborating it. This guy messed up the Nazi response to D-Day in ways that is almost inconceivable to modern science, and he made it look easy.
Juan Pujol Garcia – The best spy in ww2 https://t.co/EcNUHpQ1iq
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) July 22, 2017
Continue reading OK, your character is cool. But is your character JUAN PUJOL GARCIA cool?
…I’m going to a playtest for a Delta Green game for WashingCon. So gonna be light posting tonight. You know how it goes.
Geek Fu [13/18]
In a world where everybody knows kung fu — like, say, the worlds of ever so many martial arts movies — the martial arts style learned and used by roleplaying geeks would have to be an interesting one indeed. Geek Fu is a ‘soft’ style: it teaches observation and evasion, not hand strikes. In keeping with it’s not-quite-serious tone, Geek Fu teaches the best way to use a trench coat (Cloak), Doctor Who scarf (Whip), and linked dice bags (Bolas) effectively; practitioners also learn how to throw their dice more, ah, pointedly.
…so now would be the time to jump in on this project that really drills down deep into the Yellow Sign and Carcosa and the King in Yellow and the rest of it. As I think I’ve mentioned before: The Hastur Mythos is probably our generation’s contribution to the horror genre, and I’ve seen the raw files that are going to make up this supplement. There’s genuinely good stuff, here: if you run horror games, you’re going to want to at least take a look at this. Especially since I rather badly want to get some of the remaining stretch goals fulfilled. Which ones? Won’t say. Better get ’em all, just to be safe.
Fear and Loathing in the Marches – Google Docs
I wrote this one, back when Hunter S. Thompson went out the way that I think we all expected him to go out, the poor bastard. I think that it holds up well. It was one of those stories where all I needed was the first line, and I was off and running.
Fear and Loathing in the Marches
An In Nomine Story
The only thing that really worried me was the ethereal. Continue reading In Nomine Revisited: Fear and Loathing in the Marches.
