Adventure Seed: Dungeon Speed Crawl.

dungeon-speed-crawl-google-docs

Dungeon Speed Crawl

 

The party is called in to ‘advise’ in problems arising from the refurbishing of a long-abandoned secret facility. Before you ask, yes, the Shadow Government tries to always have a few of these salted away, in various places; it’s practically a necessity.  You see, there’s a particular quirk of the adventurer mindset that makes it remarkably difficult to accept that the Illuminati might sometimes really and truly just want a particular group of freelance meddlers and applied chaoticists to go out and apply their unique skillset to a particular problem.  And even when the adventurers do take the job from the Illuminati, they then spend far too much time waiting for a sudden, yet inevitable betrayal that will never actually come.  But give those adventurers a chance to “loot” the exact same details about that problem from “an abandoned lair,” and they’ll jump right in, with both feet.  Weird, huh?

Continue reading Adventure Seed: Dungeon Speed Crawl.

Adventure Seed: Godzilla’s Guitar.

godzillas-guitar-google-docs

Godzilla’s Guitar

Well, it may not be the actual Godzilla’s actual guitar.  However, it is in fact something that looks remarkably like a stringed musical instrument – admittedly, one that’s over two hundred feet long – so maybe it is the Gorilla-Whale’s guitar. It’s possible, at least.

Or maybe not.  Two months ago Godzilla’s Guitar came screaming down to Earth, end over end, and left a remarkably restrained impact crater in the Chilean Andes. This is one of the alarming things about the artifact, given that it’s estimated to weigh a bit more than thirteen hundred tons.  Something that big and heavy hitting the planet and not breaking up should have wrecked South America’s day at an absolute minimum, and yet it did not. That implies that the Guitar made something like a controlled landing, which is when people start wondering whether the Guitar is even a musical instrument in the first place.  Maybe we’re all just the equivalent of Stone Age savages trying to make sense of a computer, huh?

And yet, again, it looks like a stringed musical instrument.  It has strings (seven).  It has frets. Given the right construction equipment, you can even tune the Guitar, although not for very long: it seems to revert to a default Brazilian classical tuning.  The Guitar is also powered, although nobody knows by what. There is even what appears to be some sort of electronic I/O device at one end. Possibly interactive? Maybe it can be deciphered… provided that you understand the musical theory and ‘language’ that drives the Guitar’s operating paradigm.  But doing that requires real expertise. Continue reading Adventure Seed: Godzilla’s Guitar.

Item/Adventure Seed, Bob and the Button of Death

I was out of ideas.  So, BY CROM, I went out and got some.

bob-and-the-button-of-death-google-docs

Bob and the Button of Death

You know that Death Box with a Button thing that was half-popular as an ethical question, a while back?  Basically, it’s the entire “Here’s a box, it has a button, press the button, you get a million dollars, but a random stranger dies” thing that you get when you don’t make philosophy majors go out and join adventuring parties.  Because any competent murderhobo knows dang well that the real answer is “Break the box now, before whatever screwed up magic that’s building up inside of it goes critical all over the landscape.” Continue reading Item/Adventure Seed, Bob and the Button of Death

Adventure seed: Dude, Where’s My Tree?

Blame this.

dude-wheres-my-tree_-google-docs

Dude, Where’s my Tree?

So, the party gets a knock on the door of their office one evening – what, they don’t have an office?  If you’re running a modern supernatural/occult fixer game the party has to have an office. It’s practically de rigeur.  Otherwise, how is anybody supposed to find them in order to hire them, threaten them, or collapse in a dying heap on the floor while croaking out one last cryptic warning? Continue reading Adventure seed: Dude, Where’s My Tree?

Adventure seed: Duck Butter.

duck-butter-google-docs

Duck Butter

It’s… butter. Made from duck milk.  At least, that’s what the alchemists say: and never mind that ducks are waterfowl, and thus do not give milk.  It would appear that somebody set off too much chaos magic in one place again. Continue reading Adventure seed: Duck Butter.

Adventure Seed: The SS John Franklin.

the-ss-john-franklin-google-docs

The SS John Franklin

Two days ago, the government of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati surreptitiously reported to Great Britain’s GCHQ the appearance of a ‘derelict aircraft carrier’ in Kiribati territorial waters.  This report first amused, then alarmed the British intelligence community: amused because no ships that large had been reported missing by any country’s navy, and alarmed because the Kiribati government promptly sent video proof that an enormous, armed, yet abandoned sea vessel was drifting in their waters anyway. The British immediately sent a team to investigate the derelict: it took a day and a half to get there.  It’s unclear exactly when the team became a joint US/UK task force, but by the time they got there Americans were present; and it was probably just as well, because the ship (the SS John Franklin) had American registry.   Continue reading Adventure Seed: The SS John Franklin.

Adventure Seed: Case File ORIOLE EGGSHELL

case-file-oriole-eggshell-google-docs

Case File ORIOLE EGGSHELL

On September 23rd of this year police responded to a report of shots fired at a motel in Biloxi, Mississippi.  At 9:30 AM two officers entered Room 34 of the Don’t Tell Motel (currently being rented by a ‘John Smith,’ who paid in cash) to discover a deceased human male with no identification and several holes in his head and chest.  The owner of the motel confirmed that this was not John Smith, who remains at large as of this date.

An investigation revealed the following: Continue reading Adventure Seed: Case File ORIOLE EGGSHELL

Adventure/Item Seed: “LEARN THE FACTS ABOUT PNEUMAPHAGY!”

Briefing: A case’s worth of the pamphlet below was just delivered to the Columbus, Ohio office of Housing and Urban Development.  It is currently causing quite a lot of consternation, given that a) nobody ordered it, b) nobody paid for it, c) the DC printing company on the invoice likewise have no records showing that the case was ordered, paid for, produced, and/or delivered, and d) valid signatures from both HUD and the printing company’s personnel are all over the paperwork that accompanied the pamphlets.  So it’s either a remarkably comprehensive practical joke, or there’s something weird going on.

Figure out which.

Learn The Facts About Pneumaphagy   Continue reading Adventure/Item Seed: “LEARN THE FACTS ABOUT PNEUMAPHAGY!”

Adventure seed: “Kozlov’s Endemic Pattern-Layering Syndrome.”

Kozlov’s Endemic Pattern-Layering Syndrome – Google Docs

Kozlov’s Endemic Pattern-Layering Syndrome

(Blame this.)

This unique disease was named after Sergei Kozlov, a minor bureaucratic official working at Naryan-Mar during the Khrushchev regime.  On December 16, 1960 Comrade Kozlov was admitted to a state facility for observation after it was discovered that the pattern on his pajamas had spread to his wrists and ankles – and that removing his pajamas revealed that the same pattern had colonized the rest of his body, albeit at a much slower rate. Over the next four months the condition was studied, meticulously: Koslov’s Pattern spread until it covered the entire body, then began imposing itself on the hospital bed and floor.   Throughout Kozlov continually complained of mild headaches, nervous irritation, and shadow sensations every time somebody touched or otherwise interacted with the Pattern-infected areas.

In April of 1961 two members of the medical team studying Kozlov also came down with his Syndrome, despite the best quarantine protocols known at the time (the hospital had long since been evacuated, with the patients and the staff either sequestered onsite, or relocated to Ilimsk).  All three patients subsequently reported being hyper-aware (and accurately so) of each other’s positions and opinions at all times, as well as the ability to perceive ‘Pattern-Seeds’ supposedly growing in all human brains.  When one patient (surviving records are unclear which) proved the existence of Pattern-Seeds by forcibly infecting a researcher with Kozlov’s Syndrome — at a short distance, and through two layers of glass — offsite Soviet officials responded by remotely flooding the hospital area with yperite, demolishing the entire block with earthmoving equipment and captured POWs, loading the rubble, equipment, and POWs onto a series of cargo containers usually used for transporting plutonium, transporting the containers via ship to Sukhoy-Nos, portaging the ship to the inland test center there, and then detonating the RDS-220 hydrogen bomb directly overhead.

No further outbreaks of Kozlov’s Syndrome have since been reported.  However, in 1985 a KGB internal directive flat-out forbade all personnel from drinking water from the Ust-Ilimsk Reservoir, under any circumstances whatsoever.  The originator of this directive remains classified to this day. As is this entire dossier, really: it only got revealed to the world because it had been misfiled and included into another set of documents that got swept up in the Mitrokhin Archives.  And at that, the person who grabbed it believed that he was duplicating what was essentially disinformation against… somebody?  To be fair, it probably is.

Check it out anyway, of course.