Inspired by this Atlas Obscura post, I’m re-planting a classic campaign idea from way back in ‘05. This tree would’ve made a great model for a Tree of Anti-Knowledge for the antipode of the Garden of Eden.
The hook of the game was “angels and mortals in a Southern town in the early 20th century.” Elements of this game ended up filtering in unbidden into my Promethean: the Created game set in modern Tennessee. The meta-game post is elided here for purposes of just putting the campaign flavor out there. Enjoy.
A couple of years ago I found myself thinking about California and how it’s a Weird Attractor. I’d been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon and James Ellroy and consuming a lot of media about cults and serial killers and think tanks and the human potential movement, really digging the 60s-80s period of California as this big messy distillation of all that is mythic and strange about America. And so, of course, I started planning a game around it.
Reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon right now made me think this would make a great Classics Thursday post. So here we go. Below the cut is the list of Wikipedia pages I did as a brainstorming exercise. The 80s period of this list really needs to be added to, and perhaps I will continue to do so as I read more Vineland.
There are so many ways you could go with a campaign frame for this sort of game. The idea that’s really been sticking with me is that the PCs all belong to a bleeding-edge think tank, stocked with both straights and freaks, who participate in field research that touches upon the Weird and Technologically Advanced in physical, life, and especially social sciences. (It occurs to me now that this could very easily be a perfect Genius: the Transgression game. Huh.)
PAX-goers interested in participating in my nWoD Medieval Werebear one-shot! I have finalized the pitch and pre-gen character concepts, so take a look below.
“Then (I say) the earth and they be planets alike, moved about the sun, the common centre of the world alike, and it may be those two green children which Nubrigensis speaks of in his time, that fell from heaven, came from thence.”
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, 1621
A few weeks ago, cross-surfing through my various Forteana blogs, I came across this entry (great blog, by the way, you should add it) on a medieval legend I’d never heard of before: the Green Children of Woolpit. The Wikipedia entry is startlingly detailed, and pretty much gives you all the historical context and occult fodder one could ask for, so I won’t repeat it all here. Go read it, it’s a rip-snorter. Instead let’s take a closer look at the Green Children, and decide where indeed they came from.
It’s an idea I’ve had rattling around my head for a long time — honestly, probably since the Buffy musical episode — but last week I finally ran a “musical” session of an RPG I was running.
Okay, granted, the players didn’t sing. That may have been a bit much and I’m not sure if all members of our group would’ve dug that (although I’m sure some would have!). But the central conceit of the session was that musical numbers would interrupt and complement the action and it went fairly well; better, in fact, than I expected.
So I’ve looked at a lot of the various social combat and relationship management systems in the new World of Darkness (like Primacy/Assets in Damnation City and the various social combat rules in WoD: Mirrors) and I’ve decided that for this next phase of the Mage game, the top priority is simply to construct a master relationship map. Show the PCs, show their Allies and Contacts, their cults and organizations, and then how all the other NPCs relate to them. It’s going to be a huge project, given the size and scope of how many NPCs I’ve introduced in the game, but this will be the game board on which the remainder of the chronicle will be played, so it’s worth it to do it now. The question now is… how?
I have a simple mindmapping program for the iPad, but it’s just not robust enough to handle this kind of larger, multi-dimensional relationship map.
So… any suggestions?
This is a pretty incredible article; as usual, they focus on one (admittedly interesting) artifact, but good God, this guy Martin Schøyen is an adventure hook waiting to happen!
Consisting of 13,717 manuscript items spanning over 5,000 years, the collection includes parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Buddhist manuscript rescued from the Taliban, and even cylcon symbols by Australia’s Aborigines which can be up to 20,000 years old.
I mean, if you can’t base an entire modern occult RPG on that (and here’s a link to the collection itself), I can’t help you.
Also, I’m going to be posting on Tumblr more now.
“I often think that there are many things that occur to us in our daily life, many unknown crises, that are more important to us than this mysterious circumstance of death, which we deem the most important of all. All we understand of it is, that it takes the dead person away from our knowledge of him, which, while we live with him, is so very scanty.”
“You estimate at nothing, it seems, his earthly life, which might have been so happy.”
“At next to nothing,” said the minister; “since, as I have observed, it must, at any rate, have closed so soon.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life”
Pondering “mad” scientists in the Boston area got me thinking about one of the abortive campaigns I’ve come up with over the past 6 years. Genius: the Transgression was a homebrew new World of Darkness setting developed on the rpg.net forums. When I read it, I knew I wanted to run a game with it, but what would be the hook? Then I remembered my friend Rob’s old “Channel Ocho” idea: a story about TV archeologists who went in search of lost and forgotten TV shows. We played two sessions, but the game fell apart (the rules were not exactly clicking on all cylinders for me). But I’d love to revisit this setting I invented for Genius, especially if a version of the Genius rules comes out that addresses some of my concerns.
