I’m about to start running into budget issues. God help me if The Yellow King Kickstarter comes out in the next day or two.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/78929588/cthulhu-dark
I’m about to start running into budget issues. God help me if The Yellow King Kickstarter comes out in the next day or two.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/78929588/cthulhu-dark
I’ve been waiting for this one. I was starting to wonder if we’d ever see Torg Eternity. But here it is:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1216685848/torg-eternity?ref=hero_thanks
Went up today, and already past $115K. The Internet more or less poured money into it.
Blame this.
Shackleton Mold
This is some cutting-edge stuff, to be sure. Shackleton Mold get its name from where it was recently discovered: back in 1915 a set of photo negatives from the Ross Sea Party Antarctic expedition got enclosed in a block of ice, then left frozen for a century. Yes, 1915. Which is to say, several decades before the 1947 Invasion from Beyond that fundamentally altered our microbial ecosystem and made us vulnerable to the Greys‘ genetic attacks. Sure, we fended them off, eventually — but we’ve been doing repair work ever since. The Mold has thus been an absolute godsend: covert recovery specialists were able to get a sample of the stuff before it got contaminated, which gives us a baseline for what our DNA looked like before we all got infected.
I had no idea where this was going.
Sausage Protocols – Google Docs
The Sausage Protocols
Description: a standard cardboard accordion file, wrapped in elastic bands and bearing various stencils and imprints that place and date it to the US Army, circa 1936 or so. Interestingly, there are no classification stickers or warnings anywhere in the file; everything was stamped as being cleared for public dissemination at some point in 2007. There isn’t even any red tape or tabs.
Blame this.
Cow Ninja
Stats: use the Oxen stats from pg 460 of GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns, but increase DX and IQ to 10, and add Intolerance [Humans], Acting-12, Brawling-14, and Stealth-12.
Actually, by laughing at this you are demonstrating that you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the ninja. The black pajamas thing is historically inaccurate; ninja were portrayed that way because the bunraku (puppet theater) tradition associated dark clothing with invisibility in Japanese culture. In reality, ninja dressed in a way that was inconspicuous. Or, in the case of cow ninja, in a way that deflected suspicion.
Pinball Wizard
Despite the name, this isn’t wizardry. It’s just good, honest 24th Century social science, being forced to use primitive 20th Century technology (specifically, seven heavily modified pinball machines). At least, that was what the guy said when the agents burst into his lair; there was also a lot of bluster and sneers about “ignorant fools” and “Cower! Cower before the might of the Chan the Unstoppa…” It was about then that the guy’s integral temporal field finally overloaded from the strain of accumulated paradox, and sent him wherever people go when they get booted out of the timestream. Don’t feel too bad about old Chan, though; the 24th Century seems to be mostly populated by megalomaniacal jerks, judging by how many of them keep showing up here.
This got more and more complex as I contemplated it.
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:
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.
There’s a campaign in Witch-finders Meets NYPD Blue, I’m telling you.
Edible Effigies
This particular magical workaround occurs only in a magical tradition (we’ll call it ‘witchery,’ with apologies to benign — or very, very touchy — witches everywhere) that permits the remote cursing of individuals by the use of an effigy that has been enchanted to have a mystic link to the person being cursed. Needless to say, if that sort of thing is both demonstrable and reproducible then the practice will get swiftly banned by the local power structure, because typically the local power structure will inevitably end up being at high risk of being cursed. And when simply banning the spell’s use doesn’t work — it typically does not — the next step is to ban possession of the specialized ingredients and equipment used to create the effigies. That often can work, for a while. But it also does encourage a certain amount of creativity among the witches making the effigies, because banning this sort of thing also invariably makes it much more lucrative.
I ran this one at a couple of conventions. Things got a little weird out towards the end, honestly.
Great Cow Race of 2003 – Google Docs
The Great Cow Race of 2003
By Moe Lane
Additional Bad Ideas by Jaymiel (and maybe others?)
It all started with a gang of Ofanim of the Wind – you know, stories that begin with that phrase never seem to end well. Continue reading In Nomine Revisited: The Great Cow Race of 2003.
This wasn’t really all that serious, either.
HellCows of Ronald – Google Docs
HellCows of Ronald
The Prince of Cows absolutely refuses to seek out human servants (he gets a few, anyway, mostly servants of various demons ‘assigned’ to the Service of Cows). However, Ronald needs corporeal agents as badly as any other Demon Prince, so he’s come up with a fairly, ah, unique way of getting them.
Yes, he has Hellsworn cows.