Adventure brewing

Role-playing games
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Construction offers the opportunity for a two-fer if there’s a geomantic component and some ley lines need to be rearranged

construction allows for a lot of money laundering with paper only contract overages and material changes. He could have a lot of wealth already somewhere and needs to get it into the US banking system

LA handily allows for evil plots involving film. Could be the wealthy folks targeted are actors and producers and directors and changes in quality of their output is a clue

San Diego presents naval construction lines if desired to tie in some sub nautical menace or if a treasure needs to be salvaged

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My SO is feeling a weird western kick after some re-watching of the Westworld TV show

So I’m kicking around running the GURPS “Big Lizzie” scenario but I’d like some hooks to add in for a possible Infinite Worlds ongoing from it

Is there a particular alternate world setting that fits well with a longer wild American frontier setting? Like pushing the closing of the frontier back 25 years or so or having technology run about 25 years ahead and a gold rush before the US conquest of California

How would Centrum or the Cabal benefit from linking a Wild West frontier to a dinosaur area?

Is there some way a projector malfunction or a sorcerous gate could exist that would draw the I-Cops attention and allow locals to stumble between worlds

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23

I don’t know one offhand, but I wonder if it would fit into the Dixies? If the frontier is open longer, there’s slightly less of the pressure that makes the civil war happen when it does.

Of course if it’s simply more hazardous that will slow down the spread of habitation. For example, because there are dinosaurs. :slight_smile:

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Here’s a terrible idea unassociated with any existing world, sadly.

Aspected mana catastrophe.

On this world, the mass death and disruption associated with colonisation has disrupted the old stability of the North American mana fields, tipping many of them into a self-perpetuating Gate aspect which spontaneously formed massive, largely-stable one-way gates into the distant past. Dinosaurs emerge, and rapidly reproduce, filling the ecological gap left by the human population collapse.

The dinos are a new challenge for the settlers. They can’t be turned against each other. They can’t be lured into deceptive treaties that are swiftly broken or blackmailed into compliance. They don’t have a culture to undermine or subvert. They don’t give a damn about smallpox, and they carry their own microbes. Plenty of them don’t give a damn about period firearms, either. Some of them are very, very clever. Some of them are vengeful and will lead a hundreds-strong herd to trample your frontier town into the ground because some fool killed their kin with an elephant gun. Some of them are happy to chow down on those nice big herds of cattle the settlers have and make ranching a very bad idea.

The Native Americans, used to coexisting with megafauna and varying degrees of nomadic existence, and knowing the landscape and ecosystem, handle this far better than the settlers.

The same phenomenon could create other, smaller, less predictable gates that do what you want and get attention from the I-Cops.

If the Cabal were involved, they might have been experimenting with mass mana aspecting for various reasons. The link was an accident; now they’re studying it to see what went wrong, and perhaps to exploit the phenomenon. Alternatively, the link has staved off settlement and they are buying time to learn everything they can from the Native Americans. Or it may not be a whole-Cabal thing at all - maybe a particular faction wants to stop the colonists out of actual benevolent motives (which might include being survivors of colonisation themselves). Maybe someone just really likes dinosaurs! (insert obligatory comic here)

Centrum may be experimenting with tipping the world into their own sphere of influence, as they’ve done before. It could also be a deliberate distraction designed to keep Homeline attention off something more important (and a good one, because time gates releasing dinosaurs will intrigue just about anyone, let’s be honest).

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25

You want a Lakota brave riding a T-Rex, don’t you?

I’m not saying you’re wrong.

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26

I like this option a lot

The math on mana for gates and atmospheric modification to keep from having to acclimatize dinosaurs is pretty prohibitive and I prefer this kind of a catastrophe to a Banestorm

I like 1874 as my change point for the locust plague and the red river war starting up. I’d only have to bump the colt frontier up 3 years if I want to standardize NPCs with .44-40 Winchester and it’ll give that .50 Sharps-Borchardt something to actually do in 1878

I’m thinking a cabal from a Ghost Dance parallel tried to push things along for Wodziwob in a normal mana parallel and kept meeting with failure after failure and by the time they get to the Red River war actually starting they are out of options and try something aggressive with wild mana generators to head off the second battle of adobe walls. So, bang, 26 June, 1874 the entire Great Plains become considerably more maastrichian in character with plants and megafauna magically covered for the change in atmosphere for a cinematic acclimatization period

Any PCs will be happy not to have to deal with using black powder weapons in a maastrichtian atmosphere

With the Panic of 1873 still a factor this’ll be a pretty big shock. Antipodean to the Great Plains is the middle of the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles from Perth. Quartered from those two are the middle of nowhere South Pacific SE of Hanga Roa and Gansu China. So I’m faced with why not also add Maastrichtian Lemuria and R’lyeh to the globe while throwing dinosaurs into the Dungan Revolt for geomantic consistency

That got weird fast but who has time to read the big city papers on the Dino-frontier?

And have the whole shebang shift the parallel a quantum closer to Centrum from Homeline. Maybe this was a parallel of Homeline up to 1869 on Q5 until this nonsense and now it’s on Q6. That’d wake up Infinity

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“Banestorm” is just a thing magicians say when they don’t want to shrug their shoulders and say “I’unno, guv”.

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28

I can see myself ending up with a Photography Series… Kirklian Photography is cool and can surely be turned to some devious end.

Hookwise (Question 3) the trick is going to be moving from the intro (PCs should be happy enough to help their friend catch this weird observer) to looking into broader events, so I need to work on what clues they have to make those connections.

Some progress though: I started writing up a scenario about vaguely spooky things happening in places near the paintings, which had no obvious way of coming to the PCs attention when I thought about it, and have now torn that up in favour of Horrible Things killing people. My default is heavily towards slightly spooky things happening which are hard for the PCs to find out about, so moving away from that to something blatant and actionable is a step forward.

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Well, if murdering has been happening and the people seen near it were (a) a photographer and (b) typical PCs, I feel that they are going to want to clear their names pronto before they get nicked…

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Ahh - I’d missed that the NPC was friends with the PCs - you’re right - that’s an easy “Hey - I’m seeing this weird thing and I hope you can help me with it?”

In terms of a middle step between spooky and hideous death - a couple of suggestions:

Your friend asks the PCs to intervene at the spooky stage. As they start researching around the subject, they find a series of Victorian articles in the local newspaper that talked about the serial killings / wild beast slayings etc. that were afflicting the town. In the same paper are the adverts for the town’s first ‘Photographic Studio’ where the well to do family can have a portrait ‘painted with light instead of oil’. Further research either ties the killings to one of the first people photographed (because the photographer revealed their inner beast’ or, to really drive it home, mentions the accidental explosion / fire that destroyed the studio, all of the negatives, and the poor photographer. “A vile concoction of chemicals were discovered in the storeroom, and surely careless handling by the photographic artist was the cause of the unfortunate fire.”

Is there something in how your friend is taking the photos that harks back to the 1840s in terms of technique? And while the original photographer was studio bound, and so could only spot the people afflicted by [insert ultimate meaning], your friend can take it further and is actually spotting the sites which are causing [ultimate meaning].

Second suggestion is they’re getting it backwards. The sites have historic resonances, usually where serious bloodshed or suffering have taken place. That’s why it’s only showing up occasionally. Research in the library for the early photos will make this clearer.

But - because the photographer is taking photos on [insert old school film using their own special technology] using a camera that they found [insert horrible connection to a serial killer / other horrible thing] a couple of things are true:

  1. Unlike modern digital photography, the photographer only takes one photo at a time (or maybe up to 16 if they’re got the technology onto a film canister). Each shot tends to be carefully composed, and it’s rare that they take more than one photo in a location.

  2. While the original strangeness is attributable to bad things happening, there are reports of issues happening (violence, assault, whatever is likely to make your players want to resolve the issue) in locations other than those with an historical bad vibe.

What do the players do when they realise that if the photographer takes a photo of a bad place, the badness is getting picked up and bleeding through to the places depicted on the camera reel immediately before and after that photograph? And if the bad place was really bad, maybe the whole reel is infected?

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31

So… you have accidentally shifted this into a different explanation we talked about (Special Camera) but I like this concept of the camera revealing bad places so much that I think I do need to write another scenario! All of those ideas you suggested are great (infected reels of film!) and it would even thematically tie together my modern scenario and one of my Victorian scenarios.

For this one I’m currently going with Roger’s idea (the photographer is just a hook, she saw the aftereffects of the weird portal paintings). So I’ve got:

  • This photographer who is hanging around saw something weird going on in NPC’s workshop (not immediately attributable to the painting, at least without some forensic investigation, but there’s a limited set of suspicious things to investigate).
  • Several weird deaths occur in the city/general region.
  • These two things are both connected to the magic paintings and the monster emerging from them, but there’s no reason for the players to know that.

So I’m trying to work out what leads the players (and PCs) to think there’s a connection and to look into the deaths and their circumstances, beyond “the GM is heavy-handedly introducing some information about some deaths”. Deaths happening near the PCs is certainly a possibility. The cinematic answer is they actually see one.

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32

Maybe not just “weird deaths” but “weird happenings”. An electrical fire (because the circuit breakers were so deeply chilled that they couldn’t trip), metal tools found not missing but shattered, etc.

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33

I can see central heating suddenly activating, which might wake people in residential buildings. Some temperature-based fire detectors might malfunction if they’re not built for low temperatures. And there’re definitely going to be unexplained puddles.

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34

New scenario! (I’m still working on the other one, just needs some musing)

The PCs are in a building that’s caught up in a supernatural manifestation, and can’t escape without breaking it, but what could they try?

The classics for occult rituals are of course “murder the leader” and “burn the house/temple/forest down”. If there are cultists chanting and so on, they can attack the cultists or try to convince them to stop. If there are occult items, you can smash them or gather them up. This scenario doesn’t have any of those trappings, though.

They can find out what caused the problem and who is responsible for it. My current assumption is that the person is basically a patsy or simply unlucky (but I do lean heavily into not having capital-v Villains, and perhaps I should reconsider). If so, hurting them won’t help and they probably can’t reverse the effect. In general I feel “find and kill this person” is a boring solution.

The other scenario trope is of course “you happen to find a Mythos tome which happens to contain exactly the counter-ritual you need to stop it”, but that might make sense in context, so I’m open to ideas. Just brainstorming at this point.

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What I want to say is “tell me more about the nature of the manifestation” and come up with something specific for that. If it’s the ghost of the maid who fell down the stairs while sneaking out to meet her lover, someone needs to talk to her and explain that she doesn’t need to keep doing that, she can move on.
It sounds as though someone’s latent abilities have been triggered. At the very least they can probably be talked into not feeding the effect to keep it going.

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36

(this is one I’m writing for you lot, if you mind about that)

So specifically, you’re visiting a shop when it gets trapped by an Entity (details TBD) starting to manifest. It’s manifesting because the boss has altered the product names and layout to act like a prayer wheel: thousands of customers walking the path and reading the words, day after day, produces enough power to actually summon it.

My plan is that the boss was tricked into doing this - he knows he’s secretly doing a ritual using customers, but he thought it was to help him, not to free an Entity.

The elements of the ritual are still there - the product names and the store layout - but the entity’s influence turns it into a liminal space so everything is a bit weird. You’ll want to try and get out before it finishes draining everyone in the building.

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So in my model (great big disclaimers etc.) one step is finding out about that and un-doing the sacred architecture. That doesn’t fix the problem, but it does at least mean once the problem is fixed it won’t instantly recur.
Then effectively it’s “trapped in Fairyland,” you need to find out the rules it works by in order to get out.

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I imagine that some players will attempt one or more of the following:

  • Physically escape the store (front door, back door, windows, loading dock, HVAC system, whatever it takes). If they are trapped inside, their methods will become more desperate and destructive.
  • Physically restrain the customers. Or worse (“I go to the isle of cleaning supplies and start mixing things together”)
  • Tear down the store interior by knocking products off shelves, knocking over shelves, setting fire to anything that burns, and so on.
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My thought on that would be to make it immediately clear that there’s a magical encystment going on. No power, no water, no fresh air. Ooh, deadline. (But also you probably want to be a bit careful about producing noxious chemicals…)

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Yeah, this is always a risk.

The pregens will explicitly not have any experience of improvised explosives etc., but even an everyman can come up with something that ought to catch fire eventually.

I’m fine with them physically escaping the store. They won’t like it. Wrecking the interior is potentially more of an issue because navigating between departments effectively is meant to be part of the adventure. So “we team up and demolish all the interior walls” is suboptimal. Still, there’s liminal space nonsense going on so I can interfere with that to some extent, and it’s time-consuming.

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