Category: RPGS

Some good, if sad, news about the Prince Valiant RPG Kickstarter.

You may have heard of the sudden and recent passing of RPG great Stewart Wieck.  At the time of his death, Stewart was working on several projects, including fulfilling a Kickstarter for the Prince Valiant storytelling RPG.  The folks at Nocturnal Media just announced that they will, of course, take over finishing up that Kickstarter.  Obviously, it’s still sad news, but at least the game will still be coming out.

Church of the Brazen Serpent [Day After Ragnarok]

Church of the Brazen Serpent – Google Docs

Church of the Brazen Serpent

[The Day After Ragnarok]

 

 

Three years ago it was just another snake cult — actually, three years ago it was just a pair of minor medical Greek organizations at the University of Kansas. Then the Serpentfall happened, and the brothers at the local chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon soon discovered that certain of their rituals seemed to have rather more real-world medical relevance than they had had before.  Meanwhile, the sisters of Sigma Theta Tau discovered something similar, only in the field of prophecy and divination. Fortunately for them, in the chaos that gripped Kansas City — along with the rest of the Poisoned Lands — anyone with demonstrable medical skill could be forgiven minor foibles, such as ‘honoring’ the brazen serpent of the Old Testament and favorably mentioning the Witch of Endor in sermons. After all, it really was all in the Bible.  

Continue reading Church of the Brazen Serpent [Day After Ragnarok]

24 hours left on the Torg Eternity Kickstarter…

…which means 24 hours to go, and then I can stop resolutely ignoring the $200 tier.  I mean, i know full well that I’m not playing Torg Eternity any time soon.  The thirty buck level should be fine, given that I have half the PDFs from the old line already.  Still, it calls to me.  Callllllsssss…..

Creature Seed: Voodoo Remoras.

Voodoo Remoras – Google Docs

Voodoo Remoras

 

Naturally, these devices are neither the product of any sort of syncretic spirit-based religion, nor made up of actual scavenger fish. A Voodoo Remora isn’t even organic: it’s all raw galvanic fluid and platinum and gold aetheric current wiring and the rest of the old-style Mad Science aesthetic.  Just, you know, updated with 21st century manufacturing. Fortunately, most Mad Scientists can’t make the conceptual leap that lets them realize that, just because their science is steeped in pre-Einsteinian physics, their engineering and machining doesn’t have to be late Victorian-era as well.

Continue reading Creature Seed: Voodoo Remoras.

Whoa. This War Room WW II tabletop strategy game looks impressive.

I don’t play board games, but this looks like the business.

Continue reading Whoa. This War Room WW II tabletop strategy game looks impressive.

In the E-mail: @HPLHS’s “The Haunter of the Dark.”

Specifically, the Dark Adventure Radio Theater The Haunter of the Dark.  The actual CD goes out next week, but if you pre-ordered it, check your email.  They’re sending out links.

The Haunter of the Dark is HP Lovecraft’s last known story, one of his best stories, and also one of his most influential ones. Lots of people have taken no little inspiration from HPL’s Starry Wisdom cult and/or Shining Trapezohedron; there’s just something about the concepts that spark ideas in modern Mythos writers. And let me take this opportunity to recommend, once again, The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time to all serious Lovecraft fans or gamemasters.  It is a marvelous resource for anyone writing or gaming in this genre, and (just in case the title didn’t make it obvious) it draws directly from The Haunter of the Dark. Check it out. Check it all out.

So. Dice sets made out of mammoth ivory.

And they’re just as freaking expensive as you’d think that they’d be. Two hundred and forty eight bucks per die, but if you buy a complete set of ten various kinds of polyhedral dice they’ll take 12% off the final price.  That’s a bargain, right?

Not that I’d buy these. I can think of a bunch of stuff that I’d rather spend that kind of money on.  More importantly, I wouldn’t want to roll these dice.  I’d kind of want to avoid even looking at them, less my gaze increase local entropy around the dice somehow…

Creature Seed: The North Carolina Land Muskie.

Blame this.

North Carolina Land Muskie – Google Docs

North Carolina Land Muskie

Esox masquinongy infernalis

 

This amphibious, unpleasantly giant (10 feet, 1,000 pounds), and amphibious fish is, fortunately, sufficiently different from the common North American muskie to prevent reproduction.  And ‘fortunately’ is justified: certainly just about everybody in the world who knows anything about Land Muskies is prepared to do virtually anything needed to ‘prevent reproduction.’ Indeed, the legendary ‘black ops’ section of the Endangered Species Act reportedly authorizes a bounty for dead Land Muskies, no questions asked — or permitted.

Continue reading Creature Seed: The North Carolina Land Muskie.

Location Seed: The Bend.

Bend – Google Docs

The Bend

Canaan, Connecticut

 

The Bend is a patch of land about the size of an acre, located at the south end of Wagnum Lake in the town of Canaan, which is itself located in Connecticut’s Litchfield County. And… it’s one of those places that ‘defy gravity.’  Normally, that’s just a place where there’s an optical illusion in place that makes an downward slant look like a level or upward one; but in this case it’s an area where, if you put a metal ball in one particular spot, it will slowly but noticeably rise twelve inches in the air, and stay there.

 

And that’s pretty much it.

 

The best that the scientists can come up with is that it’s a knot in space-time — right, that’s not what they said at first.  It’s the immensely dumbed-down explanation that at least allows people to move on with working the problem.  Whatever it is is just exotic physics, not supernatural, but it’s really strange exotic physics, and as time goes on many of the scientists involved are getting less and less sure about whether they’re even close to accurately modeling what’s going on here.  It’s all a mystery.

 

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a sexy mystery, from a funding point of view: which means that there’s no institutional drive to investigate.  Quite the opposite, really: the property in which The Bend is located happens to belong to somebody who once pulled over in the middle of the night to give a wet and bedraggled hitchhiker a lift, a hot meal, and fifty bucks for the bus to Hartford.  That hitchhiker now oversees Illuminati operations for the entire Eastern Seaboard, which effectively means that NO ONE MAY BOTHER THAT GOOD SAMARITAN BY TRAIPSING THEIR EXPERIMENTS ALL OVER HIS PROPERTY.  Researchers can still research, as long as they leave no traces (memory manipulation does not count as ‘no traces’). They’d be well-advised to leave no traces.

 

And, hey! Guess who got assigned to run interference for the latest research team!