
Servitor of Daoloth, Render of the Veils; Creator & Destroyer of Universes.
Continue readingContinue readingI was there when it started, the plague, right there in that alley. I seen him, hunched old guy in a torn up, dirty brown bath robe. He had full facial hair, brown, and his hands and feet were covered with it too. His finger and toe nails were long and pointed.
–Popular children’s rhyme during the global plague of 2030-2043
He walked along, saying hello to everyone. When he smiled, his teeth were all brown, yellow, and black–rotten. He started doing this weird dance, held up his arms, and stared shouting or chanting in some weird language. “Eeya,” more digging,” that’s all I can remember.
He split up a little blood, started laughing, and huge rats started flowing out from under his robes–hundreds of them, thousands. They bit everybody in the ally. I don’t know how any of the other people ended up, but I got the fever and lived–as you can see.
What? Damn you, I’m not just some crazy old guy! I was an accountant before the market collapsed again. That’s how it works you know, up, down, up, down. When it’s down the world goes to shit.—Gerald Simmons, CPA.
“The old Rat King,
Is a very bad thing,
And where he goes,
The rats he brings”
Cold Wind, Werewolves
Continue readingPeople said he went crazy. He wasn’t crazy. He just wasn’t Jimmy anymore. Something was wearing Jimmy’s body like an old set of clothes. Something that looked out of his eyes and made sounds in his throat. But you could tell, whatever it was, it was very old and very wicked.
-Brian Taylor, “After Sunset”, Nightfall, 4-29-1983
Continue readingIt was just as I had read. It appeared as a large man in tattered clothes. Its jacket had two vertical slits in the back, from which its wings emerged. The bats swirling around it blocked most of the damage from Dawson’s shotgun. Thankfully, my Invisible Blade spell bypassed them. Between that, and the little bit of damage which made it through from Dawson, we finally put it down. The streams of bats were very distracting but, thankfully, they caused little harm.
—Byron Timmons, Team Wizard, Strike Team 1.
Stress Remnant
“How was your vacation?” “I feel like I need another one!” —Anyone who’s ever gone on vacation
Continue readingThe Filing Cabinet is four drawers high, and appears perfectly ordinary. Either wood or steel, it is slightly worn, has a few scratches, a touch of rust, very small dents, etc., but is in fine condition. It will appear to one or more of the Investigators as an auction item, at a yard sale, as a gift, simply standing on the porch when they go out in the morning, etc.
Continue readingContinue readingThen I recognized the full significance of those statures. It couldn’t be! It was impossible! But what other answer was there? We turned to head to the surface and just as we did so, I saw something coming up the tunnel toward us. Something that was a pallid white shape in the light of my flashlight. Something running on all fours and howling…”
– Robert Arthur, “The Black Door”, The Mysterious Traveler, 3-18-1952
APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) BotNet
Continue readingNyarlathotep… the crawling chaos… I am the last… I will tell the audient void….
— screamed by a Security researcher as he plummeted off the roof of the datacenter cackling
One thing which can be very unsatisfying in an investigative role playing game about the paranormal, the cosmic, the profoundly non-human, is a lack of results from scientific analysis.
If a player chooses a character who is a chemist, a biologist, a physicist, etc., they have as much right to fruitful scientific research as the tough character has to punch people, the shooty character to shoot stuff, and so forth.
Behind the screen I know the armor value, hit points, POW, etc. of the bad guys and monsters, but what do I know about the biology, biochemistry, and anatomy of the monsters themselves? Once the player characters have defeated the threat though the use of punching, shooting, and magic, what does the scientist do? They collect samples and bring them to their lab.
What is their reward? “It’s an unknown protein,” “The musculature is very unusual,” “It’s the scale of an animal you can’t identify” are not gratifying answers–in fact they’re simply unfair. Subsequent evidence which proves to be identical to previous samples may help in solving the problem, but it still yields no reward for playing the scientist character.
I did a couple of Google searches: first involving blood, the other cellular structure.
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