adventure – Page 4

Adventure Seed: Operation MONOGRAM AZURE.

Operation MONOGRAM AZURE

Twelve hours ago, six test subjects completed an eighteen month joint NASA/ESA experiment where they stayed, isolated, in an facility located underneath Mount Sermitsiaq in Greenland. The goal was to simulate, to an extent not attempted before, the conditions of a voyage to Mars; the ‘astronauts’ were deliberately kept even more isolated than in other experiments, and were informed ahead of time that the experiment would not be halted for anything less than an emergency with a high chance of literal death. The six subjects volunteered anyway, and appeared to go on to have a remarkably straightforward and drama-free test session.

We are using the term ‘apparently’ because the exit interviews of the six subjects have provided some extremely alarming results:

Continue reading Adventure Seed: Operation MONOGRAM AZURE.

Adventure Seed: The Knockerhood.

Knockerhood – Google Docs

The Knockerhood

For as long as men have gone down into mines, they have told stories about mining spirits. Sometimes the spirits were considered malevolent, but more often — particularly in the British Isles — they were essentially seen as being benevolent entities who would warn human miners of dangerous conditions. The Cornish and Welsh called them Knockers, or Bucca; and, like all good tale-telling traditionalists, the miners brought the idea of the Knockers along when immigrating to America.

Where the Knockers promptly joined the union.

Continue reading Adventure Seed: The Knockerhood.

Adventure seed: The Catallus Conspiracy.

Blame this.

The Catallus Conspiracy – Google Docs

The Catallus Conspiracy

Who? Gaius Valerius Catullus. He was a Roman poet of the late Republic era. His poetry only survives to the present via the timely copying of a mysterious found, then lost manuscript — ah, yes, you’re wisely nodding your head. Yes, trust those conspiratorial instincts of yours. They will serve you well, in the Order.

So. Yes, those weren’t actually Catallus’s poems. They only exist because Catallus was a real person, who wrote real poetry, and who happened to be referenced by enough public figures later that it was deemed necessary to do more that time than simply bierce his poems and blame it all on those pesky monastery mice. So our medieval ancestors in the Order had some of their best people at the time put together a suitable body of work, and passed it off as being from the poet. Back in 1300 AD, this was simplicity itself.

Continue reading Adventure seed: The Catallus Conspiracy.

Adventure seed: The Ust-Kuyga Anomaly.

Blame this.

Ust-Kuyga Anomaly – Google Docs

The Ust-Kuyga Anomaly

Roughly 12 hours ago, a party of illegal mammoth ivory miners came stumbling into the desolate Siberian settlement of Ust-Kuyga with an unbelievable tale. Well, unbelievable to anybody who wasn’t looking for certain keywords in babbled reports, not to say access to certain satellites that continually passively scan for spikes of certain forms of radiation. One of those satellites was in place to do a deeper scan, which turned up sufficiently positive to justify this on-the-fly briefing. It’s a long way to Vladivostok, even with military transport.

Continue reading Adventure seed: The Ust-Kuyga Anomaly.

Adventure Seed: The War of Saltes.

War of Saltes – Google Docs

The War of Saltes

As in “Essential Saltes:” turns out that HP Lovecraft had access to something resembling legitimate occult knowledge, although he certainly shaded stuff a bit. For example: Deep Ones? Not actually awful, once you get past the fact that they have no recognizable body language or facial cues. Ghouls, likewise, although you can generally get a decent enough psychological read on them. And shoggoths burn just fine.

Continue reading Adventure Seed: The War of Saltes.

Adventure seed: Beeleggers.

Beeleggers – Google Docs

Beeleggers

It all started when those well-intentioned fools up in the Imperial District decided to ban mead. Now maybe mead was more of a worry now than it used to be, seeing that mages have figured ways to convince the honey-spirits how to give regular mead a proper, heavy kick. And sure, more than a few members of the demihuman races turned out to have a real problem keeping their noses out of the new, boosted mead-casks. Nobody’s arguing that there weren’t problems — but banning all of the mead, period? That was just too heavy-handed.

Continue reading Adventure seed: Beeleggers.

Adventure Seed: The LAMP Project.

So, this went dark quick.

LAMP Project – Google Docs

The Limited-Awareness Mobile Platform (L.A.M.P.) Project

Little known fact: people have been able to successfully replicate AI in machinery since about 1790 AD (this, of course, predates Babbage’s Difference Engine). Even less-known fact: nobody was ever able to sustain said replication at full strength for more than about thirty seconds. Apparently the new intelligence goes screaming up the scale to either Singularity-style apotheosis, or the neurological equivalent of putting a pelagic sea cucumber in a regular-pressure salt water tank; frustratingly, nobody’s ever been able to get a straight answer from the AIs as to whether they were shouting in joy, or screaming in terror.

Continue reading Adventure Seed: The LAMP Project.

Adventure Seed: Alien grave in Mississippi!

Man, but I miss the print edition of the Weekly World News.

Alien grave in Mississippi – Google Docs

Alien grave in Mississippi!

There is a corpse waiting to be dug up in Mississippi. It’s currently somewhere among the up to seven thousand corpses currently buried on University of Mississippi Medical Center property (said bodies dating back to the 19th Century, when the land was part of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum), and nobody at the moment is particularly looking for the corpse. Not that there’s much reason to, given that almost the only records involving the corpse were part of the batch of papers quietly burned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after Lincoln’s assassination. Including a 1863 handwritten memorandum by General Sherman reporting success in removing all details of the corpse from the asylum’s own records (a copy of this memorandum can still be found in Sherman’s papers at the Library of Congress, albeit physically misfiled among some papers from a 1866 diplomatic mission to Mexico that General Sherman had participated in).

Continue reading Adventure Seed: Alien grave in Mississippi!

Adventure Seed: The Grant Escape.

Just as a reminder: Julia Child was a member of the freaking OSS.

Grant Escape – Google Docs

The Grant Escape

Turns out that Ulysses S Grant is not actually buried in Grant’s Tomb. He’s apparently not buried at all, in fact. And, yes, we’re talking about something that’s a bit creepier than mere grave-robbing.

It’s like this: old H.P. Lovecraft was onto something with regard to Essential Saltes — or, rather, the books of his grandfather’s that he mined for ideas were onto something. Not the bits about cosmic horror, hopefully; but the techs keep babbling something about DNA echoes and the holographic residue thrown off by souls and the short version is, if you mix enough of a corpse with enough carbon, water, sodium chloride, and [CLASSIFIED] you can get a self-aware humanoid product of science that more or less has the skill set and memories of the original donor.

Continue reading Adventure Seed: The Grant Escape.

Adventure Seed: Attack of the Fifty-foot Panda!

Attack of the Fifty-foot Panda! – Google Docs

Attack of the Fifty-foot Panda!

…Yeah, that’s going to be problematical. For a bunch of reasons, really. And it’s going to be problematical for everybody, including the aliens that created this creature in the first place.

Probably the principle was sound enough: take some animal DNA, splice it into a weird biological plastic construct that could emulate said DNA at a ‘monstrous’ level, and send your new critter out to level Tokyo. And it works! And it’s even pretty cheap!

Continue reading Adventure Seed: Attack of the Fifty-foot Panda!