Whispers in the Dark

Old houses and buildings sometimes become havens for the strange creatures called babblers.  People seldom get a good look at babblers: they're skilled at staying hidden, owing to their ability to contort and flatten their bodies and their chameleon-like power to blend into their surroundings.  What fragmentary descriptions exist suggest they are approximately three to three and a half feet tall and look like a scrawny cross between man, gecko, and frog. They have large, milky yellow eyes and many have strange ruins cut into their skins.

Babblers crawl up from--somewhere--to invade the crawlspaces or basements of buildings. They lurk in vents or even under beds.  From hidden places, the babblers whisper to their human victims.  Their utterances are jibberish--and that gives them their name.

Babblers tones seem to wheedling at first, then plaintive.  When this fails to achieve...whatever it is their after, They may attack in anger.  The cycle may take several nocturnal visitations over as much as a week.

Those that encounter babblers often develop a peculiar aphasia "the Jabber." How the jabber is transmitted is unclear. It may be through the babbler’s bite--certainly most who develop it are bitten--but it has been suggested that only close proximity to a babbler is necessary.  The mechanism is likewise unclear.

Those exposed get a saving throw. Failure means development of an aphasia within 2d6 hours based on the following table:

1-3: anomia - character is unable to remember names either of people or objects (except in general terms).
4-5: fluent aphasia - character is able to speak in a normal manner except that they use the wrong words, and perhaps even nonexistent words.
6-7: receptive aphasia - as above, except the character is also unable to make sense of the speech of others.
8-9: expressive aphasia - character has difficulty producing fluent speech. Words are pronounced with difficulty, in a halting manner, or with odd intonation.
10: global aphasia - The character is either unable to produce speech, repeats single words (perhaps in echo-like manner) or either occasionally shouts a single expletive.

Cure disease or the like will remove the illness, but otherwise it is permanent. in most cases (75% of the time) ability to read and write is preserved.

Babbler: #App.: 1-4, HD: 1, AC 6, Atk: 1 bite or claw (1d4), Special: stick to walls, chameleon skill, transmits "the jabber."

Battle in the Skies!

In last night's thrilling installment of our WaRP Weird Adventures campaign, Boris, Diabolico, and Cornelius Doyle engaged the enemy more directly than they had before.  When setting the surface of Greasy Lake ablaze (with a flare gun!) failed to scare up anything, the gang went to meet with Hew Hazzard at Zephyrus Aerocraft to tell him one of his engineers was working with a dangerous group involved with the so-called Machineries of Night.

Hazzard had heard of those.  It seems a group of adventures had fought them years ago to save Hardluck from being subsumed into the Machine.  He was shocked to find out his trusted employee Silas Atwill might be working with them (or it?). 

They went to confront Atwill and found him trying to make an escape out the window. One of the flying automata seemed to be coming to get him. The cloaked and masked being he called "the Master" was with it!  When the gang stopped Atwill's escape, the Master just disintegrated him with a a blast from a weird rod.

The automata and the Master flew off. Hazzard and the gang gave chase in an experimental autogyro-bladed airship.  What followed was a pitch battle with two other automata in midair.  Bullets were flying and the automata were trying to destroy the rotors and bring the craft down.

Ultimately, the gang destroyed both automata (with a lot of shots fired) and Hazzard was able to land the damaged craft safely. 

The mysterious Master, however, got away.

Night Nurse

In the City, the wail of an approaching ambulance may not be good news if you’re a badly wounded adventurer. Could be the ambulance is coming to rush you into the hands of the Night Nurses, and very soon, their not so tender ministrations will bear you from this world.

They have other names: the Sisters Without Mercy, the Ladies of the Morgue. Whatever they're called, the Night Nurses are thought to be ancient death goddesses, something like the valkyries from the old sagas of the Northmen. These eikones have adapted to the modern world. They look like pretty, young nurses--except they're pale as a “Jane Doe” at the City morgue, with uniforms bloodied and soiled like they just got off a bad shift in battlefield surgery.  They arrive out of the night (always the night) and the take away the dying.  Those they whisk away turn up later in some hospital morgue and nobody knows how they got their.  The bodies are always worse off than when they disappeared.  They looked like they've been picked over by carrion birds.

No one knows how they choose who they take. They only come for those dying as a result of violence, and they have a predilection for larger-than-life types: no working-stiffs shivved in a bar fight, or battering husbands brained with a leg of lamb.  How they decide who to come for out of several that fit the bill dying at the same time, no one knows.

Night Nurse
#App.:2-8 AC:0 HD: 8 Attacks; 2 (hands/fingernails/teeth 1-8) Special Abilities: travel etherically and astrally, only fully materializing when they are ready to take a body; not truly living, so possessing of inherent invulnerabilities)  

And for WaRP:
Attack: 3 dice, 2x damge; Defense: 4 dice. HP: 35 Traits: Eikone (4 dice) --more an idea wearing flesh than a physical being. Can travel incorporeally (uncanny appearance); Taker of Souls (4 dice) -- Drawn to the near dead, can draw the spirit of a person from their body 1/day (accompanied by the chill of death).

Wheels Turn in the Night

[Our Weird Adventures G+ game continued last night.  See this post for the first session.]

In last night's game, Diabolico (gentleman thief), Loone (mentalist and drug enthusiast), and Doyle (he brings 'em back alive) did a little old fashion detective work.  When Leonard (Diabolico's police contact) was unable to turn up anything on Olimpia Kapec, the missing fiancée, they decided to go down to the neighborhood of Carmody's lab and ask around.  A waitress's description of Olimpia's odd and reclusive behavior led Diabolico to jump to the conclusion that she was actually an automaton! 

A leap perhaps, but Doyle and Loone remembered the slim and disguised figure of the leader at the Eisenmenschen rally.  It could have be anyone. Even an artificial  girl.

Heading back to Greasy Lake to do a little more snooping, the gang avoided treasure-hunting rubes and got a sample of some strange black material--like graphite dust composed of tiny cogs and bits of machinery.  Was this the Machinery of Night people kept talking about?

Silas Atwill, automata engineer for Hew Hazzard and conspirator with the Eisenmenschen, knew about it.  He had a mimeographed document of weird symbols and drawings (that looked like the sample they found) and mentioned the Machinery of Night. They found this out by breaking into Atwill's house.  When the gang asked Carmody about them, he got about as agitated as a brain in a jar can get--but then pled amnesia (again).

A late night visit to Hazzard's Zephyrus Aerocraft turned up nothing except the fact that security on the geodesic dome housing the laboratories is very tight.  Whatever was there was hidden behind an aura-sensing lock even Diabolico couldn't crack.

But the team does know there's something beneath the surface of Greasy Lake.  Loone could sense it, pushing on his mind.  The quesiton is what was doing the pushing?

The Wild Frontier

Previously, we went back in time to take a look at the City roughly a hundred years prior to the default date of Weird Adventures.  Now, let's look back a bit further in time...

Over a century and a half ago, the City is barely worthy of the name. It's home to less than 20,000 people and occupies only the southern part of marshy Empire Island; The more northern parts of the island are a mix of small villages and a few lingering Native settlements. Beyond the band of colonies clustered along the Meropic coast, the Strange New World is wilderness.

The Smaragdines are a wild barrier to westward travel, populated mostly by Natives and monsters like the "rustic giants." Just plowing a field can turn up mysterious artifacts from the time of the Ancients. Wandering monsters can be encountered by travelers riding the lonely dirt trail through the countryside that will one day be Broad Boulevard passing through the bright lights of the Circus District.

Foes: tyrannical and corrupt colonial officals, monsters and wild animals, hostile Natives, Black folk conjure-men.

Media Inspirations: Film/TV: Brotherhood of the Wolf, Drums Across the Mohawk, Last of the Mohicans, Davy Crockett; Books: Those Who Went Remain There Still, "Wolves Beyond the Border" and "Beyond the Black River" by Robert E. Howard; the Leatherstocking Tales, the Alvin Maker novels; Comic Books: Tomahawk (either series).

Miscellaneous Inspirations: the Hellfire Club, Mystery Hill (America's Stonehenge), anything on forgotten civilizations or secret history of North America.

See also my post on "The Weird Frontier" back in 2010 and check out Wampus Country for a more whimsical take on the era.

Junkyard Rats

With Diabolico still absent and Lenny wandering off at the urging of his inner (rabbit) demon, Boris and Loone were left to investigate Greasy Lake Scrapyard on there own. At the junkyard they unexpectedly met lion-tamer and adventure serial star, Cornelius Doyle.

Doyle was there after what he suspected was a werewolf. Everybody was surprised when they were attack by a family of yokel wererats. The teenagers Tater and Jughaid took a bite (literally) out of Boris, while Papa Snuffy and Mama Luweezy went after Doyle and Erskine. Doyle’s foresight in bringing silver bullets paid off. Luweezy and Snuffy were quickly snuffed.

Their offspring only lasted a little longer. Boris was badly injured, so the gang had to hide from a couple of Eisenmensch investigating the gunshots. Stealthily following them, they discovered a rally being led by a masked figure promising a group of Eisenmensch that their weak flesh would soon be replaced utterly by machine--and then the same would be true for the rest of imperfect humanity. Interestingly, on the stage with this figure was Silas Atwill, Hew Hazzard’s newly named head of automata development.

Informed of the dead wererats, the Eisenmenschen began to spread out looking for infiltrators. The gang beat a haste retreat and made it back to the City. Boris got treated for wereratism at the charity hospital.

Our heroes still have more questions than answers. The leader of the Eisenmenschen would-be revolutionaries has the dodecahedron--but who is the leader? Does Hazzard know what his subordinate is up to? Where is the heartspring the dodecahedron needs, and what happens if it’s activated?

In other news, the gang finally got their secretary: Miss Lola DeWytt:

The City by Gaslight

Weird Adventures presents the City and it’s world in the year 5888, an era of automobiles, machine guns, and jazz.  Of course, that’s not the only age when there’s adventure to be had:

Roughly a hundred years ago, alchemical gaslamps began to appear in the streets of the City. For about forty years, their flickering lights held sway--but banishing the night didn’t always banish the darkness.

The little wars in the South and West created battle-hardened veterans and  returned them to the streets of the City ,where times were hard and opportunities few. Political corruption was the order of the day.  Immigrants streamed from all over the world to be crammed into the most crowded slums in existence where disease and crime were rampant.

And then, of course, there were the monsters.

Foes: Serial killer thaumaturgists, street gangs, corrupt politicians and their cronies, mad inventors.

Media Inspirations: Film/TV: Copper, Gangs of New York, Sherlock Holmes, Vidocq, The Wild Wild West; Books: The Alienist, The Dante Club, The Devil in the White City, the John Silence stories, the Carnacki Ghost-Finder stories; Comic Books: Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, From Hell (the movie, too), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Weird Western Tales (2001).

Miscellaneous Inspirations: Jack the Ripper, Spring-Heeled Jack, Spiritualism,Steampunk.

Lenny Goes Undercover

In last nights Weird Adventures WaRP game on Google+, the gang followed up on some leads but were still left with no clear idea of who killed the body of the now disembodied brain William Carmody or kidnapped his fiancee.  Without Diabolico in attendance, they had no car, so that meant a lot of cab rides.

First, they crashed the Cobalt Club to check try to dig up something on industrialist Hew Hazzard, who Carmody had been working with. This involved overall wearing Lenny having to wear a coat and tie. Loone pretended to be a reporter out for an interview, but no headlines were made from his chat with Hazzard.

Next, Lenny went undercover to infiltrate Waxy Moldoon's gang.  He had impressed Two Teeth (a suboordinate) with his moxie last time and got offered a job. Lenny got a chance to prove himself in front of the boss by applying "harsh interrogation" to an Eisenmensch they had captured.  What did thaumatosurgically altered cyborgs from the Great War have to do with this?  Well, Waxy seemed to think they had the dodecahedron (or "dingus" as he called it).

Either the guy didn't know anything or wasn't talking, and Lenny contrived to bust him out and escape, which he did with the help of a fire started by Boris, telepathically coordinated by Loone.  Before that, though, Lenny almost lost control to his "imaginary" rabbit-like companion who wanted him to kill them all:

After they made their escape under the goons' guns, they used a bit of gentler interrogation on Karl the Eisenmensch.  he still claimed to no nothing, but Loone's peaks into his mind revealed he did know of a group of Eisenmensch that were good candidates for having the device, and a place called "Greasy Lake" seemed important.  Boris recalled there was a big junkyard at a place called Greasy Lake.

The gang decided to find Diabolico and check it out.

At Midnight, All the Agents

Today I'm proud to feature a guest post: Jack of Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque explores an unchronicled aspect of the City... 

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”

– William S. Burroughs

The vampiric blood-addicts are a known menace on the streets of the City; however, out of the all-too-common tragedy of need has come an ever darker threat to the City's denizens. Agents from Ealderde, the Old World, appear to be tracking the movements and aptitudes of blood-junkies; those that show “promise” are introduced to a mysterious injectable referred to as Malthus serum.

Malthus serum doesn't cure a vampire, but it makes blood addiction manageable; it allows the vampire to function in society and even alleviates the physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal—at least temporarily.

More importantly, from the point of view of the Ealderdish agents who lurk in the shadows, Malthus serum treats the tell-tale signs that indicate a vampire's foul addiction; vampires who have been administered a steady dosage of the serum develop neither the usual bodily sores, nor do they lose hair or muscle mass, nor are they jaundiced of tooth, claw, and eye. In fact, on a Malthus regimen a vampire will face none of the physical drawbacks common to their condition, but retain all of the powers and abilities granted by their addiction.

Of course, the agents don't provide Malthus serum out of the goodness of their hearts. Rather, they administer the supplemental drug in order to hook the vampire on the “high” of exercising their powers without the gnawing pull of crippling addiction.

Nothing comes for free in the City. Once a vampire has proven themselves useful to an agent, the agent will begin requiring them to perform acts of spying, sabotage, and even assassination in return for the next serum injection. The agent becomes the vampire's handler, dispensing both drugs and secret missions that fulfill strange agendas to the of benefit distant financiers in the Old World. The vampire, for his or her part, becomes a nosferagent in thrall to unknown invisible hands that order machinations from afar.

Magic and Science

In the chat Q&A and a couple email exchanges, I’ve gotten questions about the relationship of magic and science in the world of Weird Adventures.  It seemed like a good time to do a post to clarify, as the setting doesn’t follow the strong separation of the two seen in a number of other rpgs or fictional worlds.

In the City and its world, what people call “science” and “magic” are areas of knowledge which together describe a spectrum of phenomena (or perhaps, phenomena and noumena). Science deals with the material world (the Prime Material Plane, specifically) and repeatable observations about things within that world.  Magic, on the other hand, deals with the interaction of other planes with the Material Plane.  While thaumaturgical studies have certainly led to repeated observations, the performer of a magical experiment is linked to the results, and the forces involved are not always measurable or observable.  

In the dim past or the modern age, the two areas of knowledge have never been completely separate.  Briefly, here let’s look at the spectrum of disciplines leading to technology in the modern City, from strictly physical to most metaphysical:

Science: Humanity’s accumulated knowledge and understanding of the physical world, without account for noumenal forces or extraplanar interactions. The results of this knowledge have produced technology usable by all.

Alchemy: A field focused on the magical or metaphysical properties and interactions of physical substances.  The dividing line between chemistry and alchemy is blurry; various individual experiments or techniques make greater or lesser use of magical interactions.  Alchemy can lead to mass produced products, though these are perhaps not as stable or predictable as the chemistry of our world. 

Artifice: When alchemists moved into the production of homunculi, and thaumaturgists into fashioning automata, the artificer's art was born. Constructs or automata can be made in factories, but their power supplies and mechanical brains (if they have them) are fashioned by alchemical or thaumaturgic means. These techniques can produce devices that might be termed “super-science”--like death-rays or anti-gravity.  Because of the heavy thaumaturgic influence needed, these sorts of devices aren’t mass-producible at the current level of technology,and instead are the work of lone genius (or mad) inventors.

Magic: The ancient art of effecting change in the physical world by will, i.e. the application of forces and powers often extraplanar in origin and not really measurable or detectable (except in their effects) by current scientific means. Thaumaturgy has laws, but these can be idiosyncratic, and often make more intuitive sense than strictly reasonable.

Take a look at the Weird Adventures Index for posts dealing with examples of these technologies.

Relax and Enjoy

Nothing goes better with a good beer than updates to the Weird Adventures Index.

You can check out a few monsters you might have missed, including the gill-men, the oh so sweet (and oh so deadly) candy zombies,  and the undead weirdness of the swarm of husks.  If travel reading is more what your in the mood for, then how about an exotic locale like Demiurge Island?  If you'd rather stay closer to home, you can enjoy that good beer in the bar at the Capricorn Hotel.

Maybe you like travels of a more metaphorical nature?  Then let the doors of perception open your third eye through the use of weird psychedelics or take a no less harrowing trip down some adventurer's photographic memory lane with the contents found in a shoebox.

Brain Games

Last nights WaRP Weird Adventures game opened with Erskine Loone getting an odd letter from an old grad school friend, William Carmody. Our heroes--joined by the mentally deficient pugilist Big Lenny--went over to Carmody's lab to see what was going on.  They find what's left of Carmody in the basement--and he asks them to solve his murder!

Carmody, at this point, is a brain floating in a vat of nutrients.  Only his scientific genius (and his trusty automaton Laurence) kept him alive.  Unfortunately, the trauma of his death and transformation left him with a good deal of memory loss.  He doesn't know who killed him.

He's got an idea as to why, though.  He's been working with an alien artifact in the form of a large dodecahedron.  He believes this could revolutionize the automata field, and so does his business partner, the aviator and inventor, Hew Hazzard.  Maybe Hazzard wanted the new technology all to himself?

Or maybe it's "Waxy" Moldoon--the Hell Syndicate boss Carmody borrowed start-up money from--that killed him.  He might want to get his mits on a valuable dingus like that.

Two good suspects--but Diabolico always wants to pin it on a dame. The one at hand (or not) is Carmody's  fiancée and lab assistant, Olimpia. She's now disappeared and Carmody thinks the murderer kidnapped her, but he doesn't really remember.

While they're trying to piece all this together, one of Carmody's automata prototypes becomes active somehow and goes on a short rampage.  Loone cuts the broadcast power just before it can decapitate Diabolico.

It's their first case in their own office, and looks like "Team Victory" has some dangerous work ahead.

Programming note: I'll be doing a Weird Adventures Q&A tonight at 8:00pm Eastern on rpgnet IRC. To join:  Go to http://www.magicstar.net/chat2/, select your nick, login, and type "/join #rpgnet"

In Oceans Deep

For a race that has long bedeviled the surface world, the gill-men remain mysterious. Any school child in the City knows the story of Horatio Stormalong who repelled the last incursion of the creatures, but the only modern account of them in their native habitat comes from the memoir of a journalist held hostage by the merman separatist and terrorist known as Nemo.

Nemo’s vessel seems to have been captured by the gill-men in the ocean’s depths and taken to a sunken ruin of ancient Meropis where the gill-men lived.  Though this point was never entirely clear, it seems the gill-men consider themselves the descendants of the Meropisians. If this is true, the forces led to their smaller stature and inhuman appearance are mysterious.

Gill-men seem a distinct species from the sea devils, who are larger with toothier maws and may be (horribly) interfertile with humans.  They also seem unrelated to whatever species the head of Thraug belongs too.

Nemo’s encounter with the gill-men shows they have made advances in technology since their last attempted invasion, even if not exactly at pace with humanity's.  This fact, combined with their belligerence and organization, suggests the gill-men remain a potential threat to the surface world. 

[Mechanically, treat the gill-men has aquatic versions of humanoids of some sort. Either goblins or hobgoblins.]

One of the divers from Nemo's vessel captured by Gill-Men

   

City Rumors

Here are some rumors (adventures hooks big and small) from the City by neighborhood:

Barrow Island: “Trouble’s brewing again between the Barrow Men and the ghouls.  Some adventurers killed some punk kid ghoul that wound up being connected to a muckety muck in Undertown.  The Barrow Men are looking for somebody to take the restitution they’re offering to the ghoul bosses.”

Yiantown: “Word has it that Tsan Chan has been replaced as head of the Five-Headed Dragon Society. No one knows who would have the moxie to pull off a coup like that, though.”

Grand Terminus District: “The Imperator Hotel is looking for a new night auditor and a house detective.  The last ones disappeared--they say--on a night when the hotel actually lost a room instead of it’s usual weirdness of growing and gaining 'em.”

Empire Park East: “Who’da thought it? Celebrity detective and perennial skirt-chaser Heward Kane seems to be smitten with the headmistress of the Mircalla Karnstein Finishing School for Young Ladies. It’s a bit odd.  She’s not hard on the eyes, but she’s a little bit more schoolmarm than the usual glamor girls Kane has on his arm.”

Hell’s Commot: “There’s a new crime lord in the Commots.  That’s right, lord--though people sometimes call him “the Mermaid.”  He operates out of the backroom of the Iceberg Club.  He ain’t human. He may not even be alive.”

Grimalkin Village: "Leland Throne runs an antiquarian book shop. He doesn't usual have magical tomes, but sometimes some stuff that deals with occult lore and related topics. People say Throne is also a bit of an amateur photographer--takes naughty pictures of girls for sell or trade with like-minded enthusiasts. Sometimes he gets a young lady with a rich family to pose for him, and he isn't above a little blackmail. His 'collection' might be worth quite a bit to the right people."

At Midnight

Weird Adventures resumed last night in the WaRP system. The gang was on hand for the reading of Old Cyrus Westerly’s will to his five (six if you count one’s daughter) hopeful heirs. The would-be heirs were unusual characters, and a couple seem to have past history. Given these dynamics, it was lucky that Don Diabolico and Boris were accompanied by Erskine Loone (The Grumpy Old Troll , Michael), psychologist and psychonaut, who turned an analytic eye on the clan.

Cyrus’s will gives his entire estate to Cordelia, the only surviving relative bearing his surname. The gang felt this immediately put a target on her back. But from whom? Matti Besant, the housekeeper, says spirits roam the house--the result of the diabolism of Curwen Westerly, Cyrus’s grandfather. Then, there’s an escaped homicidal maniac on the loose from a nearby sanitarium. Compared to those threats, jealous family members seem positively mundane.

Diabolico schemes! Boris scowls! Erskine expounds!  Will they be up to the task of protecting Cordelia Westerly from harm?

Stay tuned.

Found in a Shoebox

Cataloging of a deceased adventurer’s belongings revealed a shoebox full of assorted old photos.  A few held more than sentimental interest:

The Dark Manor
The most dangerous photo of the lot.  If stared at during night, the photo may open a portal to the pictured manor in a strange demi-realm shrouded in mist and populated by people who appeared to come from a gothic horror yarn. Anyone transported to the realm will be there for 24 hours on earth--though the exact time in the demi-realm is variable: anything from one night to a two weeks.

The Gold Women

A set of automata construct by a Staarkish thaumaturgist two centuries ago.  They disappeared from a private collection in Lutha during the Great War.  This photo has an address in Metropolis written on the back of it.

The Succubus
Naughty postcard from roughly 40 years ago.  It can be used to summon a succubus once per week if the incantation written on back is read and a few drops of the summoners blood (or other body fluid) is spilled into a circle draw on the floor.

Random Rampage Table

On occasion, someone in the City can be heard to ask, incredulously: "What's climbing to the top of that skyscraper?!":

1. nonhuman hominid or primate
2. Gargantuan crustacean (lobstrosity)
3. Fifty-foot showgirl
4. Gi-ant
5. Flesh golem compose of parts of 1-6 other giant creatures
6. Animated statute
8. Man mutated by thaumaturgic accident
9. Gigantolycanthrope
10. Ghost of another creature (roll again to determine which)
11. Amorphous blob or slime
12. Mega-flumph

Have You Heard?

Art by Lester

There's a new crime boss in the Hell's Commot neighborhood of the City.  He's connected to the Hell Syndicate but not (as far as is known) an infernally "made man" himself.  They call him (strangely) "the Mermaid," but his real name may be Marbendlar.

He holds audiences at the Iceberg, a new club off the Circus, where the bright-lights bleed into the darkness of the Commot.  The interior of the club is like an ice cave, all white and glittery with stalactites.  The band plays on a stage that looks like an white ice flow on an indigo night sea.

What power does this weird wizened and legless homunculus have to command the respect (well, fear) of hardcases and tough guys? No one is sure.  Some say that (though he's new to the City) "the Mermaid" has been around a long time, and is used to being in charged.  Some point to accounts of an odd little idol snatched from gill men in  skirmish in the last century.  No pictures exist, but the description is similar.

If you should meet Marbendlar (or whatever his name is), don't call him "the Mermaid."  He hates that.

Hey Kids! Weird Adventures now has a Google+ Page.  Follow here.

If You're Just Joining Us

Art by Adam Moore

I'm still on vacation, but I noticed I picked up a couple of followers in the last few days and got a nice review over at Grognardia, so for new visitors I figured I'd point you to where you can get more information on Weird Adventures or the City.

Here's the link to an index of Weird Adventures related posts.  I haven't indexed all the back catalog, though, so it's worth perusing the previous posts.

I've got a Google+ game going in the City, though it's on vacation, as well, at the moment.  We've been using Lorefinder (Pathfinder/GUMSHOE mashup).  You can read about the whole weird affair beginning here. The first teaser post for their next mystery is here.

If you want another Weird Adventures review, the Gibbering Mouther has written a recent (and cogent) one here.

Regular programming will resume soon.  Stay tuned.

Belt of Vigor

Minor magic items are not uncommon in the City and its world.  These are typical of modern manufacture and not as powerful or as dangerous (mostly) as the magical equipment of adventurers.

The Health Belt was actually a girdle which ameliorated fatigue and bolstered the constitution.  It’s no surprise the primary use of this device is as an aid to amorous activity. Some adventurers use it to provide an extra bit of stamina and edge against poisons and shocks to the system.

[+2 bonus to Constitution and all that entails including hit points. These benefits last as long as the belt is worn, but wearing it longer than 3 hours is likely result in physical harm: 30% chance + 10% for every additional hour of a permanent Constitution loss of 1 point.]