Tag: adventure

Adventure Seed: Abernathy and Weekes, General Grocers.

Abernathy and Weekes, General Grocers – Google Docs

Abernathy and Weekes, General Grocers

This Connecticut company first starts appearing in tax records a decade before the War of 1812.  A general grocers with sidelines in transport and warehousing, Abernathy and Weekes persisted as a private corporation until 1935, when it was dissolved by the state of Connecticut after the death of Blaise Abernathy, intestate.  Mr. Abernathy had been sole proprietor of the company after the death of his business partner Oscar Weekes in the First World War; neither Abernathy and Weekes had any other listed family, or other heirs.

Which is a sad story, but why does anyone care? Because of the advertisements that Abernathy and Weekes placed in various newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and other publications during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.  The company regularly announced that they had a wide and comprehensive stock of items that are today on secret government occult watchlists: and not ‘eye of newt’ or ‘toe of dog’ stuff, either.  We’re talking about the hardcore materials that gets used to blight counties and sway towns.  The ingredients that black-bag sorcerers try to weaponize before the NSA finds them and then no-knocks a silver-and-steel team right through the wall.

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Adventure Seed: Avenging the Cores.

I’ll be honest with you: I have no idea why somebody would flat-out steal an entire research facility.  Fortunately, when you have the right kind of players, you don’t need a reason. You just pick the one that your players like best and run with it.  This is Secret GM Knowledge: feel free to feel honored by it.

Avenging the Cores – Google Docs

Avenging the Cores

Somebody has kidnapped the Austin Core Research Center. For those that don’t know, said center is a part of the University of Texas’s Bureau of Economic Geology; it’s a storage / research facility for core samples taken from well drillings.  Which is a very useful resource for geologists and engineers to have, yes, but it’s not exactly something that you’d expect to be kidnapped.  And ‘kidnapped’ is the right word: the entire building has been removed, right down to the foundation (fortunately and oddly, the cleaning staff was left behind).

Why, yes, it would be nice to know how that trick was handled.

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Adventure Seed: the Commodore P-31.

Blame this. And… entropy, I guess.  We grow old.  …Well, at least it beats the alternative.

Commodore P-31 – Google Docs

The Commodore P-31

This ‘Commodore P-31’ is certainly an interesting piece of  inexplicable computer tech.  It’s unquestionably designed in the same style as Commodore’s 1980s computers, starting with the way the keys are set up and continuing with how the entire unit is contained in one keyboard.  This one has a serial number and production stamp on it dated 2016, but needless to say said serial number is gibberish.  It does have standard USB and HDMI ports; there’s what appears to be some sort of disk drive, but it looks more like the slot for a camera memory card than for anything else. In terms of raw processing speed and performance, it runs slightly more slowly, and a good deal more warmly, than a comparable gaming computer rig.

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Adventure seed: The Leicester Graveyard Dirt War of 2013

Blame this.

The Leicester Graveyard Dirt War of 2013 – Google Docs

The Leicester Graveyard Dirt War of 2013

 

I assume that you all already know to not bother looking up the War in either the papers, or the history books?  Good, good.  Yes, of course this sort of thing doesn’t spill over into the non-magical world.  For one thing, the non-magical world doesn’t really want to hear about this sort of thing. Magic is typically mostly socially acceptable in our culture when it’s perceived as being faintly ridiculous.  Having people get killed over handfuls of dirt is kind of antithetical to that.

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Adventure Seed: Operation XYLOPHONE PETUNIA.

Operation XYLOPHONE PETUNIA – Google Docs

Operation XYLOPHONE PETUNIA

Your two-minute background briefing: in 1965 a satellite designated LES1 (Lincoln Experimental Satellite) was launched, ostensibly to place it in an elliptical orbit around the Earth.  It instead went into circular orbit, reportedly provided good data anyway, then ‘died’ after a couple of years.  Fast forward to 2013, when a British amateur radio astronomer detected renewed transmissions coming from LES1, apparently due to a complicated set of conditions on the derelict satellite.

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Location Seed: Salamander’s Firebreeze Resort.

Blame this.

salamanders-firebreeze-resort-google-docs

Salamander’s Firebreeze Resort

 

It startles some people when they find out that there’s a luxury resort that’s exclusively for fire elementals. First off, there are people who do not actually know that there are fire elementals. I mean, it’s obviously not a secret, or anything: but apparently some parents don’t teach their kids the facts about elementals of various sorts, and since there are various treaties in place that forbid the videotaping of regular, law-abiding supernatural entities (or otherwise determining their True Names) some people can go twenty, thirty years without ever actually getting the head’s-up.  Weird how folks can get bubbled, huh?

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Item/Adventure Seed: Deborah the Destroyer.

I assume I’m not the first person to make this joke, sure.

deborah-the-destroyer-google-docs

Deborah the Destroyer

 

Because even Black Ops Necromechanic Engineering (BONE) teams have senses of humor.  And, for that matter, kids.  No, really, you want men and women with families for that kind of job. Keeps them focused on the exoteric world, and not on the bad half-heard whispers on the edge of hearing.

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Adventure Seed: The Great Wheel of Turkeys.

This is apparently a thing. Here, here, and here.

the-great-wheel-of-turkeys-google-docs

The Great Wheel of Turkeys

 

OK, here’s the background.  The Druids discovered America, OK? – In as much as anybody ever did, really.  Thanks to the joys of temporal paradox and inter-dimensional timeline amalgamation, pretty much EVERYBODY discovered America, including Christopher Columbus… but the point here is that there has been a Druidic presence on the North American continent for thousands of years, and that very much includes their arcane dendroidal computing architecture.

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Adventure Seed: Galactic Discovery.

galactic-discovery-google-docs

Galactic Discovery

 

So Humanity’s made it into interstellar space, gotten past whatever-it-is that kept us from detecting the Galactic civilization, and is now in the process of creating a vast star empire (translation: going through the lists of empty planets that can easily support human life, and colonizing the closest ones). Maybe there’s been a war or two, or just some tense diplomatic exchanges, but everything is now humming along smoothly. Or even reasonably smoothly.

 

And then the summons to the local sector of Galactic Court comes in the mail.

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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?

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