Tag: seed

Item Seed: the Bee Suit.

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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 seed: The Devil Double-Bind

Adventure seed: The Devil Double-Bind

Somewhere out there in the multiverse there is a continuum where the forces of supernatural Good and Evil are locked in a nigh-eternal struggle. Neither side wishes to provoke a final battle, because neither side is confident of victory.  So an armed and often threadbare truce barely holds, but is bitterly resented by both sides.  Both sides scheme and plot and hatch byzantine plans to gain momentary advantage. Often the plans are subtle and complex, as befits the machinations of immortals…

And sometimes there’s just a disaster in the paperwork.

Continue reading Adventure seed: The Devil Double-Bind

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

(Generic) RPG Spell seed: Horatio’s Stereoscopic Infallible Viewer.

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Horatio’s Stereoscopic Infallible Viewer

This spell was designed by ‘Horatio,’ who was one of those interesting mages.  Thoroughly interested in mind and body spells, it was… and ‘it’ is used deliberately; Horatio had a habit of switching bodies like some people switch shirts. Ethically, mind you: the mage was rather good at jump-starting a recently-deceased corpse and getting everything running again properly. Or possibly ‘is:’ nobody’s heard from it recently, but that could just be Horatio not bothering to tell anyone, right?

Moving along… you need three targets for this spell. Preferably, they should all be from the same species (high-intelligence ones are not preferred), and as closely related to each other as possible (kittens or puppies from the same litter are typically ideal).  One target is designated as the ‘archer:’ the other two are ‘scouts.’  The caster takes up residence in the brain of the archer, and can cast spells at whatever both ‘spotters’ can see, with difficulty and range based off of the archer’s location.  That’s one of the advantages of this spell.

The other? Well, it’s almost impossible to get any kind of mystical ‘lock’ on the actual caster this way, so a lot of counterspells and other defensive magic won’t work on spells cast this way.  Essentially, you could still deflect a fireball cast using this method, but, say, fending off mind control attempts is a bit harder to successfully do, and trying to trace the spell back to its owner is going to be pointless; you’d just bounce from brain to brain to brain, and none of them will have the information that you need anyway. Or be able to comprehend it, probably.

As you might imagine, this is a fairly useful spell.  It’s also insanely dangerous: simply kill one of the targets of it, and the caster is going to get immediately thrown out of the link – and probably have a stroke in the process.  And the longer the caster stays in the linked minds, the harder it is for the caster to break the link consciously.  And, of course, you need a serious amount of magical energy to even create the link in the first place.  This is barely within the capabilities of a senior journeyman mage; and while easier for an archmage, one wouldn’t cast it frivolously.  Even Horatio only used this spell once it got the hang of on-the-fly reactive healing spells…

Adventure seed: The American Herd.

The mundane details are all true, by the way.

The American Herd

Oh, this one is tricky, esoterically speaking.

It goes like this: there is an ethnic/linguistic group in Africa called the Maasai. They live more or less in Kenya, where they herd and maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle.  And, about a decade and a half ago, a certain attack in NYC prompted one tribe of the Maasai to gift the American people with some of their cattle.  This is significant because one of the folk traditions of the Maasai is that they in fact were given all the cattle in the world by God; apparently the rest of us are simply taking care of the cows until a Maasai tribesman can come to collect them (yes, not unrelatedly: the Maasai are legendary cattle rustlers). So just giving the USA some of their cows is… ‘significant’ is not the word to use. Try ‘remarkable’ and ‘virtually unprecedented.’

Continue reading Adventure seed: The American Herd.

New Martial Arts Style: Spellfighting [GURPS 4e]

Spellfighting (10pt)

This martial art was created to give mages something of an idea of how to handle a close-up and personal brawl. Its primary skill is Brawling, for simplicity’s sake; it assumes that the mage is being beset by several opponents at once, and teaches appropriate techniques.  There are also some specialized techniques for use with heavy wands and staves.  The heavy wand in particular (uses Smallsword, and is equivalent to a baton) is associated with this style: Spellfighter students have specially-reinforced wands made, and usually proudly displayed.  It should always be assumed that these wands have been enchanted with at least the Staff spell. Also note that a Spellfighter is also almost always a mage, and thus has theoretical access to any number of useful spells that rely on physical contact. Continue reading New Martial Arts Style: Spellfighting [GURPS 4e]

Adventure seed: The Liberty Artifact.

The Liberty Artifact

“Good morning, Agents. Yesterday afternoon this item was brought in voluntarily by a movie memorabilia collector who purchased it on e-Bay, under the mistaken belief that he was bidding on a prop from the film Cloverfield:

liberty

Continue reading Adventure seed: The Liberty Artifact.

Adventure seed: Topeka Wireless Interplanetary Telegraphy Company.

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Topeka Wireless Interplanetary Telegraphy Company

Established 1921

This company does not exist in electronic record, so don’t bother looking it up.  The thing is, though: it should: the state of Kansas has older companies in its online database.  However, for some reason, the only files are all in paper form and stuck in an archive somewhere.  Very likely misfiled, too. Continue reading Adventure seed: Topeka Wireless Interplanetary Telegraphy Company.