seneschal

I like these but haven't yet been able to come up with a contribution of my own. Good work.

Better yet, you could land a small gyrocopter on their Hayward, CA, lawn and ... Oh well, maybe not.

"Wouldn't it be interesting to see this setting from the pagan point of view, and that there God of the Israelites as the powerful force who's minions seem to be dangerous to face, where you have very little chance succeeding against some of them, and when their God acts, it brings certain doom. Hmm, another setting like that Calls to mind - one which is well-known to those who Love this Craft; the RPG . . . ;-)" The Old Testament sort of supports this style of play. While the Hebrews under Joshua did eliminate some culture groups and settle in the Promised Land, they never did conquer the whole enchilada as they had been instructed to by God, nor did they wipe out all the pagan peoples dwelling there -- which is why we get the multicultural patchwork seen in Judges onward. The Israelis weren't an unstoppable force; they repeatedly disobeyed God and/or were seduced by the competing lifestyles around them. After getting clobbered by one or more neighbors for decades, they'd eventually return to the faith of their fathers, and that's when God would bail them out. But after Joshua, He wouldn't completely destroy their enemies. They had to stay faithful or be at the doubtful mercies of whatever rising culture group was kicking butt at the time.

Imagine Indiana Jones tackling ancient temples without his trademark whip or Carl Denham & Co. exploring Skull Island without even rifles to defend themselves with. A rugged tropical island packed with hazardous terrain, ravenous monsters, and booby trapped ruins is surely dangerous enough even if the player-characters are dumped there armed to the teeth. After all, one crumbling mountain ledge or rushing river and most of their gear and supplies are gone anyway. Bounty hunters are unnecessary, but the island could host desperate convict survivors or sinister natives with grisly methods of welcoming visitors. The ruins aren't stocked with equipment, per se, being the remains of a higher civilization that the current inhabitants remember only as legend if at all, but they do contain wealth and technological goodies the ancients left behind. The folks that stranded the adventurers on the island have no realistic means of creating such caches or of knowing whether there is really a hidden escape route; it's all a lie. That doesn't mean that an exit doesn't actually exist, however. The "treasure" might be a map a previous prisoner made of a risky passage through the surrounding shoals or of the location of a venerable but operable escape vehicle, or of a mysterious tunnel that leads ... somewhere/somewhen else. Inspirations: King Kong Son of Kong The Land Unknown She King Solomon's Mines The Lost World The Lost Continent

Naturally, in the reassembly of the shards, legalistic Therion wound up adjacent to gangsta haven Scyrth, while peaceful Solace is the fertile plain separating Kush, Thane and Rath. Rathians are militaristic jerks because they have to keep fending off hordes of zombies from neighboring Skorge. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure (or figures) from the Land of Ambition plots to annex all the shards in the world's biggest real estate scam ever. Calling all heroes aka the player-characters ...

I've followed the thread daily, don't see where it went off the rails. All the posts (until the last three) involved practical brainstorming suggestions on keeping D100 products alive in the minds of potential players. Didn't see any comments involving unmentionable body parts.

A strange package from sometime else. Creepy.

True. But in dystopian stories the bad guys have pretty much won. Good had its chance and muffed it. The plucky freedom fighters lost the revolutionary war. The Sheriff executed Robin Hood. Lex Luthor kicked Superman's butt and took over. Sure, a token resistance struggles to maintain its existence, but without outside intervention from a greater power no real victory is possible. Imagine the fate of French partisans during World War II if the Allies had lost. Dystopias are what one discussion board GM called "crapsack worlds," where things are rotten all over. It's the scenario of X-Men: Days of Future Past or Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or Blake's Seven. If an overabundance of righteousness is boring, the triumph of evil is depressing. If the player-characters absolutely can't win, if all their victories are ultimately meaningless and hollow, why bother?

I agree. Devoted BRP fans have pumped out quality, even award-winning, products over the last eight or so years but that doesn't seem to have translated into name recognition, product on store shelves, and eager new players filling local gaming groups. In my area, I see a stray copy of Call of Cthulhu 6 or Runequest 6 past through stores briefly and then disappear. D&D and/or Pathfinder dominates the gaming tables, and there are no local groups playing any variant of D100 games. Some sort of energetic marketing strategy is in order. I mean, my largest local store stocks a reasonable selection of venerable Palladium (!) titles, but it is as if no one ever heard of Magic World, Runequest 6, OpenQuest, the Big Gold Book, BRP Rome, Mythic Iceland, etc. As a community, the BRP crowd needs to match its productivity in creating material with aggressive promotion.

"... the geeky upstart will be working on a computer that looks as if it was designed in 1978." The obvious reason is the time period many of the dystopian novels that inspired the movies were published in. But there are in-story possibilities. The most current gear is really expensive and easily traceable. It does cool stuff but Big Brother instantly knows where you are. On the other hand, obsolete equipment -- which can be made to work with ingenuity and an open-source OS -- is slower but also cheaper and harder for the authorities to locate since your info is saved on a hard drive instead of the cloud, is operated by ancient, arcane software almost nobody remembers anymore, and saves data to floppies (a strange name since they are stiff) instead of sending it wirelessly through the ether.

"But, do you want the Judeo-Christian God to be all powerful in your supplement? Or do you want to balance off the various religions. The Bible is written from the viewpoint of one faith. None of the other an ancient cultures .believed that the God of the Jews was more powerful than their own gods. So who is right, as far as your supplement goes?" Judaism is just another minor religion practiced half-heartedly by former invaders who now get kicked around by the various big empires vying for control of the Mideast. The God of the Israelis is just another local deity ... until your major god gets knocked down in its own temple ... until your veteran super-soldier gets clobbered by a farm boy who hasn't shaved yet ... until captive teeny-boppers who refused to worship your image refuse to burn in your fiery furnace ... until your multinational coalition army is destroyed by a coward armed with a torch and a trumpet ... until the prisoner of war you brought in to be mocked literally brings down the house, etc.

The whole cyberpunk thing is basically a Marxist vision of the end of Western capitalistic civilization: the mega-rich elite businessmen exploiting their hordes of mindless wage slaves until the oppressed proletariat, spurred by charismatic leaders, rises up to claim its freedom. Hmmm, we've all seen how that worked out in Russia, China, Cambodia and Cuba. Throw in 1960s and '70s era Cold War fears and you get the typical modern post-apocalyptic drama. I helped my Mom study Marx and Engels for one of her college classes before I attempted to read Walter Gibson's novels. When I broke open the latter, I said, "Hey, waitaminute! I've read this all before (minus the cool gear)." The Postman -- the original novel by David Brin, not the movie -- turns the genre on its head. The protagonist restores civilization, not by leading a rebellion or by defeating an army, but by encouraging people to communicate with each other and to return to the traditional American values they'd temporarily lost faith in. Likewise, both Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Star Trek envision mankind pushing through troubled times into an even more prosperous and advanced society. In both sagas bad things did happen -- the Han Dominion, the Eugenics Wars -- but history didn't stop there. Dystopian filmmakers, in contrast, want to hit the pause button when things are at their worst. If they were doing Lord of the Rings, they'd end the movie with the Nazgul bursting through the gates of Minas Tirith because elitists don't believe what the little people do matters. It reflects a certain cynical worldview, where rebellion isn't a last-ditch defense against evil but a virtue in its own right -- because if I'm not in the top 1 percent then obviously whoever is running things is on the take.

"And while Moses didn't have a magic staff, the Pharaohs magi apparently did." Good point. The Old Testament goes out of its way to contrast the way God acted for the Israelites with how the Gentiles believed the supernatural worked. The Egyptian magicians could turn their walking sticks into snakes, could turn small quantities of water into blood, and could call small numbers of frogs out of the Nile. Moses' staff did cool stuff only when God told him to use it, but his stick-snake ate the magician's staffs, he turned the entire river into blood for days, and he called enough frogs out of the Nile to fill all Egyptian homes and public buildings with amphibians. After that, the Egyptian priests told Pharaoh plainly that they were beaten. Another example of how biblical miracles are different occurs in 1 Samuel 4-6. Despite what Indiana Jones told us in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant was neither a weapon nor a radio for talking to God. The original Hebrew settlers in Canaan understood that the Ark was merely a symbol of their invisible, all-powerful God. But their great-grandchildren thought they had God in a box and took it into one of their first big battles with the Philistines. The Philistines freaked ("A god has come into the enemy camp!") and redoubled their efforts, dealing the Israelis a decisive defeat and seizing the Ark. The Israelis were devastated ("God is a prisoner of war!") while the delighted Philistines hauled their trophy home and set it before the idol of their main deity, Dagon (a shout-out to you Cthulhu fans). Now, here's where the fun began. The Philistines twice found the idol fallen face down before the Ark in Dagon's own temple; the second time the idol actually broke. Then a rodent-borne plague broke out, so the Philistines sent the Ark on tour. Plague broke out in every city the Ark arrived in. Finally, the Philistines put golden mice and golden tumors (symbols of the disease they were suffering) into the Ark as a peace offering to God and decided to send it back to Israel. But they were scientific about it. They loaded the Ark onto a wagon and hitched it to a cow that had just given birth. They figured if the cow returned to its barn and its calf, the plague was just a coincidence. But if the cow wandered into Israeli territory then the disease really was a punishment from God. The cow made a bee-line for Israel, and the Philistines left their wimpy neighbors alone for a while.

One difference between standard fantasy role-playing and the OT, though, is that the prophets weren't the ones doing the miracles. They prayed but the results were always up to God. Amazing stuff did happen, but not because Moses had a magic staff or because Elijah had a memorized spell list and 150 magic points. In fact, the Israelis tended to get into trouble when they slipped into the magical thinking of their pagan neighbors. This is in no way intended to criticize your idea. The Old Testament is packed with tales of exploration, political intrigue, personal combat, and espionage that practically beg to be gamed. However, we need different mechanics to represent how biblical miracles worked.

We got their attention with that Cold Harvest monograph ...

explode szamba betonowe? More grist for the mill. The post goes on and on about purification by water, the unshrouded house of god and being right-minded, all in an apparent effort to please The Intelligence. Sounds like a religious, if not Lovecraftian, message to me. All hail the Purified Intelligence!

Spam messages are annoying, and the Call of Cthulhu discussion area seems particularly vulnerable to them. We've seen ads for kitchen remodeling, peace of mind courses, fancy cookware, acid reflux cures, and most recently a solution for all your office paperwork needs. On the other hand, the topic headings for these spam messages are almost always wonderful adventure fodder: off-the-wall, think-outside-the-box concepts for a Lovecraftian campaign, getting a tired GM away from the standard "You inherit a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere." So let's run with this one. What can we do with the adventure/monograph title "Consolidate the Postman"? Postmen have an interesting history in popular literature and culture. We've got the noir classic "The Postman Always Rings Twice" about an adulterous wife. We've got the sci-fi epic "The Postman" about the rebirth of civilization after a societal breakdown. We've got the whole postal system established by that 18th century genius and busybody Benjamin Franklin (and everyone knows it is all about the Benjamins). We've got countless horse operas about that most famous of mail runs, The Pony Express, where unmarried orphans were encouraged to apply. We've got Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter." Now we've got the Cthulhu universe confronting your (supposedly) friendly and helpful local letter carrier. What does that mean to those brave individuals facing weather, dogs, unsavory delivery locations, sinister residents, long hours, federal budget cuts? How much can they take before they "go postal"? What does that mean to your average householder, confronted at his door by a stranger with a package or letter from God only knows who? Dare he look inside? What is involved in "consolidating" a federal employee, and what is the end result? It looks like a job for Superman, but unfortunately Delta Green will probably get the assignment instead. Go for it, and don't forget to include appropriate postage and ZIP code.

"...your average d100 user "out there in the wilds". And there are many of them. Fortunately, I wish to add." Help me find those wild D100 players, PLEASE! I feel like the only lonely around here.

Wasn't quite sure whether to put this here or in the Cryptids thread, but ... Loveland Frog First sighting near Loveland, Ohio, May 1955; second sightings March 1972. Although a police officer involved in one of the 1972 incidents has since said the whole thing is a misrepresentation of his encounter with an escaped exotic pet, the Loveland Frog still makes a great story. Motorists driving lonely roads beside the Little Miami River in the wee hours of the morning spotted strange animals crouching at the side of the highway. When the drivers stopped to investigate, the creatures stood up to reveal themselves as wet, leathery, wrinkled humanoids 3- to 4-feet-tall and possessing wide-mouthed amphibian or reptilian faces. One of the two police officers who encountered them in 1972 estimated their mass at 50-75 pounds. The frogmen inevitably dived or ran for the river and escaped. In the original Fifties encounter, one of the frogmen pulled out a wand-like instrument that let off sparks, perhaps a weapon of some kind? The creatures also left a strange odor behind them. Not necessarily hostile in intent, the Loveland Frogs are members of a survey party scouting for a non-human civilization. Their goal is to observe as much as possible before sliding back into the river. Despite their claws, Frogs are too puny to do much damage in a hand-to-hand fight. Their skins, however, secrete poisonous slime in times of fear and stress – such as when they encounter monstrous giants (the player-characters). The frogmen are also armed with ranged weapons of alien design. It isn’t known whether they can speak since Frogs and humans have tended to flee from each other rather than attempt to communicate. Loveland Frogs are nocturnal amphibians: excellent swimmers, can stay underwater much longer than humans, and have great nighttime vision. Their long, webbed fingers and toes also are useful for climbing. Heightened agility and powerful legs enable them to move more swiftly than their short stature might indicate. Frogs also possess an uncanny ability to heal their bodies, including (over time) regenerating limbs and other body parts. STR (2D6) 7 CON (2D6+6) 13 SIZ (1D3+3) 5 INT (2D6+6) 13 POW (2D6+3) 10 DEX (2D6+8) 14 APP -- Move: 6 Hit Points: 12 Damage Bonus: -1D6 Armor: None Attacks: Brawl 25%, 1D3+DB; Grapple 25%, 1D3+DB; Contact Poison (POT 2D6); Wand 60%, 1D6 Skills: Climb 65%, Jump 80%, Listen 45%, Spot 75%, Stealth 50%, Swimming 70%, Track 40% Powers: Leap, 3 levels, +6 meters horizontal leap or +3 meters vertical leap (3 character points) Regeneration, 3 levels, heals 3 hits per combat round (9 character points, 1 power point per hit point healed) Extra Energy, +100 energy (10 character points)

Transhumanism comes home to roost with a mystic twist. Very scary critters. How are Captain Kirk/Buck Rogers/Scully & Mulder going to fight these things since their post-Enlightenment worldviews don't accept the existence of magic?

Rhoda Penmark, your ordinary, average 8-year-old sociopath, was scary enough (The Bad Seed, Warner Brothers, 1956). And you're going to give her supernatural powers? Great write-up. Hope my player-character never runs into one of these. Other inspirations: Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1964), The Omen (1976), Carrie (1976). It was just the usual babysitting job, something to earn a little pocket money. What could possibly go wrong?

You mean even more dark and dangerous than your usual instant-death-roll-another-character-or-insert-another-fifty-cents-in-the-console old-school fantasy game? Eek!

Call of Cthulhu 6th has stats for a Bunyip. The Big Gold Book has stats for Alien Greys. Chupacabras (and a couple creatures from American tall tales) here: Yeti write-up here: Mothman is here: Loveland Frog here: Depending on your concept of her, you could use standard fantasy sea serpent stats for Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, or similar northern lake creatures. On the other hand, such creatures are sometimes described as similar to plesiosaurs or giant turtles. The BASIC Bestiary has stats for plesiosaurs, brontosuars and kraken (giant octopus). The brontosaur stats might be scaled down for Mokele-Mbembe, a dwarf saurian supposedly living in the Congo. Many cryptids are misplaced species of dog/wolf, large cat, or primate supposedly existing where they shouldn't. For these, you could use regular animal stats. Some are super-sized snakes or lizards, or dinosaur survivors. The BASIC Bestiary has some dino stats. Others are extra small or extra large humanoids; you could use standard fantasy stats and dress 'em up as appropriate for your cryptid campaign. The definition blurs between cryptids and some fantasy creatures (e.g., mermaids, sea bishops). You'll have to decide where to draw the line between creatures of folklore and modern cryptids for your campaign. Still, an all-cryptid game sans fantasy critters and Mythos monsters could be interesting. FYI, the giant shark stats in the BGB (aka Jaws) would be appropriate for juvenile specimens of Megalodon. Yeah, we gotta get a bigger boat!

I'm sure I've seen write-ups for El Chupacabras floating around, too. And Mothman. Any specific cryptids you want stats for?

Please let us know how your mystery one-shot pans out. From what you've told us so far I deduce that the butler did it ... in the library, with the lead pipe. No, no, you allow superficial appearances to deceive you. Colonel Mustard is not, in fact, a veteran, but a disgraced manservant from Brooklyn posing as a former officer in order embroil servicemen in his confidence schemes. The set of his shoulders, the wear on his shoes, and the phony British accent give him away. Calluses on his hands and knowledgeable remarks about faucet brands indicate he worked for a time as a plumber, hence his choice of weapon. Elementary, really.