Tag: item

Adventure/Item Seed: Death Comes Round to Carnival: A Lady Latimer Mystery.

Death Comes Round to Carnival: A Lady Latimer Mystery

The more you look at this book, the weirder it gets.  Superficially, it’s a murder mystery set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro: it’s one of a series written by “Angelica Mountjoy,” apparently. The heroine is an Australian amateur sleuth married to an amiable British nobleman who will happily take her on yacht trips around the world, where apparently she promptly encounters bizarre, themed murders that the police cannot solve on their own… you know the drill.  Fairly classic stuff.

But then you start noticing odd details. For example: the Latimer’s yacht is apparently half the size of an ocean liner and is armored like a battleship. In fact, the text ostentatiously points out that the yacht does not have guns, complete with a little bit of exposition as to why it doesn’t (something about because megalodons are extinct).  People in the book are absolutely terrified of hurricanes; even the hint of one shuts down Rio for a crucial moment in the plot. Speaking of which: apparently Japan was fighting the Allies in World War I as well as World War II (a convoluted alibi hinged on this), but the Americans never controlled the Philippines. Oh, and there’s an endless fascination with the curve of the earth. Including one scene where the happy couple watch Rio “suddenly rear above the waves, its towers springing to full glory as the happy land-wind brought with it strange and tantalizing scents.” Continue reading Adventure/Item Seed: Death Comes Round to Carnival: A Lady Latimer Mystery.

Item: Mage Alicia Cogstalker’s Astounding Treasure Machine.

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Mage Alicia Cogstalker’s Astounding Treasure Machine

The existence of this magically-engineered device is prima face evidence of the existence of dimensional travel: clearly an enchanter came into contact with an automated teller machine, and loved the concept on sight.  Alas, the average late-medieval/early Renaissance culture has little hope of duplicating cathode-ray screens and transistors, to say nothing of hard-to-counterfeit paper currency.  But one may, as they say, make do.

Continue reading Item: Mage Alicia Cogstalker’s Astounding Treasure Machine.

Item Seed: the Bee Suit.

Blame this.

The Bee Suit

This item is at least one hundred years old: it’s made out of dried-out wax and twigs, essentially, and even moving it slightly causes an alarming amount of crackling and bits coming loose.  Any kind of rough treatment and the whole thing will come apart at several seams. Cautious investigators will inspect the Bee Suit strictly in situ.

In its current state the Bee Suit appears to be a rough approximation of a human being, made again out of wax and twigs.  There is no body hair, no genitalia, no eyes, no tongue: there are only front teeth and fingernails (both made from polished wax), and the torso is subtly misshapen.  A previous investigation team has cut back the ‘skin’ on the left side of the Suit to reveal the internal framework, which is alarmingly sophisticated – and, again, made of twigs and wax.  The Bee Suit could walk and pick up things; it would have been absolutely useless in combat, but put a suit, gloves, boots, a wig, a hat, and smoked glasses on it and it could credibly pass for human on a sight check.

Continue reading Item Seed: the Bee Suit.

Item Seed: The Retrospective Radio

Item Seed: The Retrospective Radio

This item is, to outward appearance, identical to a portable transistor AM radio from about 1970 or so. It runs on 9 volt batteries, although the batteries may not be actually necessary: the Radio never seems to quite run out of battery power on its own.  People who own the Radio seem to change the batteries mostly out of a sense of caution.

The Retrospective Radio operates exactly as a normal AM radio would, with one glaring exception: if you tune it to 1410 on the AM dial you’ll pick up a strong signal from a radio station (WTIM).  There is actually a station with that frequency and call sign (out of Illinois), but it’s not this WTIM.  This WTIM is a 24 hours news station that faithfully reports current events from precisely two weeks ago, in between commercials for products that nobody’s ever heard of.   Continue reading Item Seed: The Retrospective Radio

Adventure/Item RPG Seed: Belief Sinks

Belief Sinks

Once upon a time, there was magic in the world, powered by the beliefs and dreams of people.  But those who secretly ruled the world decided that that not everybody who could wield magic deserved to wield magic – and that there wasn’t enough magic to go around anyway.  So they had their own magicians create special mystical devices that would suck up all the magic in the area, and concentrate it in one place.  That would allow the secret rulers to properly control who got access to the magic, and keep it out of the hands of those that the secret rulers disapproved of.  And it worked!  It worked so well that eventually the secret rulers forgot to keep good records of how to make those special mystical devices. But that was fine, because there were plenty in storage.  So they all lived happily ever after – well, everybody who mattered did, at least.

And then the Industrial Revolution happened.  Steam power! Vaccinations!  Germ theory of disease! Anesthesia! Nutrition science! Suddenly human-powered magic generation was no longer a scarcity problem. Quite the opposite, in fact: the stuff was building up.  And when magic builds up too much… things can happen. Sometimes good things; sometimes bad things. Sometimes both at once, or, well, plaid things.  Trust me; if you ever see a plaid event in the field you’ll know what I mean by that.  And wish that you hadn’t. Continue reading Adventure/Item RPG Seed: Belief Sinks