Secret City

An email from a friend yesterday on everybody's favorite holiday destination of Zheleznorgorsk (it's flag is pictured above), reminded me that secret cities aren't just for hidden cultures in comic books.

Zheleznorgorsk used to be called Krasnoyarsk-26 (like all Soviet secret cities, it was designated by a post office box). This town made produced weapons-grade plutonium. All the Soviet "closed cities" were doing secret military (mostly nuclear) or space stuff. The cities didn't appear on maps and could only be accessed by special permit.

This sort of thing just didn't go on in the USSR; Oak Ridge TN was similar deal in the U.S. during the days of the Manhattan Project.

The gaming value of a secret society out to be obvious. Beyond the spy/espionage genre, what better place for a zombie outbreak to start or a legion of Soviet Man-Apes to be based? Of course, if none of that is fantastic enough for your setting, Brigadoon (or Gemelshausen)--or it's gore-splattered redneck counterpart--is just another sort of secret city

Thinking About Rifts

Blame Blizack over at Dungeonskull Mountain. His posts about Rifts have got me thinking about how I would tweak the setting for a game. It's likely this madness will pass, but here are some of the things I've thought about:

Rifts and Zones
The areas of rifts in the fabric of reality shouldn't be just gateways to other dimensions or sources of magical energy. They ought to be really strange and dangerous; A lot like the zones in Roadside Picnic. The rifts would be alluring, though, as sources of high technology to reverse-engineered. A lot of advanced tech might have been acquired this way. There would also probably be a cargo cult element to many human societies.

Retro-Future
Rifts was published in 1990 and in its DNA is material from 70s and 80s post-apocalyptic films and comics, 80s anime and manga, and the general genre zeitgeist of the age. It wouldn't change a lot, I guess, but it might be fun to assume an alternate history where our world of smartphones and mp3s never existed. It was the future of Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell that led to the world of Rifts. And that future looks like the Logan's Run TV series and the Kamandi comic filtered through the tech and style of Akira, Appleseed and Walter Jon William's Hardwired.

Comic book
The kitchen sink-ness of Rifts and it's big action have a real comic book sensibility. Not in the sense of superheroes (not as traditionally considered) but in the way that every character is distinctive and has their own look and schtick--and maybe even G.I. Joe style codenames. No PC should be "just a merc"--or even "just a vagabond."

Inner Spaces

You can never have enough cross section maps. Here are a couple from Marvel's Micronauts:

The starship Endeavor:

And the robotic Bioship:

Artifacts Amid the Strange Stars

Items rare and valuable--if they even exist:

gravid war womb: A central relic of the Sisterhood of Morrgna, these living nano-assembler/bio-computers are able to birth an entire Sisterhood hive, given enough substrate material and time. Though descriptions are likely unreliable, they are said to be spheroids of organic composition with a surface divided in hexagonal and pentagonal areas about 38 cm in diameter. No war womb has been deployed since the time of darkness following the Great Collapse, though barren husks have been found over the centuries.

Mnemosyne leaf: Certainly large leaves of the great choral trees of Dodona in the Coreward Reach are rich in their neurochemical memory, which includes thoughts gleaned from the minds of sophont visitors to Dodona then shared through the trees' songs. Ingesting a properly prepared leaf will allow a psi-sensitive individual to search and experience the tree's memory store. The leaves can also be prepared in a way that allows them to be smoked. The memories can be experienced this way by non-psis, but the visions are more haphazard and uncontrollable.

strangelet bullet: Despite it's name, this legendary planet-killer weapon is actually the payload for a missile warhead. Freed from their containment on impact, the strangelets will convert any ordinary matter it impacts into strange matter.

zurr mask: The appearance of the ancient and engimatic zurr is only known from their iconography, where they are always depicted in nonrepresentational masks. Items purported to be zurr masks or fragments of them show up in auctions or museums from time to time, but these to date are of disputed authenticity or definite forgeries. These archaeological treasures have a lurid reputation in the public imagination due to memes derived from popular horror sims over the last few of centuries. The stories say that each mask is actually the soul of the zurr who wore it.

Wednesday Comics: Doomsday!

Here's the next installment of  Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

"Doomsday! (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter XIII)"

Epic Illustrated #9 (December 1981) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: Vanth and Aknaton are close to being overwhelmed by the onslaught of the Zygotean mercenaries. The Zygotean forces fight so fiercely because they know what is going to happen and they're trying to save their own lives.

Things look grim for our protagonists. Aknaton gets his forearm shot off. Still, they fight on, but the Zygotean mercs begin to flank them. Why don't the others blow the horn? They can't. Not until the forces are properly aligned. Soon now.

Within the skull building, the three approach the strange horn. As they take their places, Juliet asks if it's going to hurt. Za believes it probably will; change always does.

They blow into the three mouthpieces on the weird device. A force from a higher plane breaks into their lesser reality. Aknaton pulls Vanth to his side, and then, it all explodes:

The Milky Way touches the infinite and is destroyed. Only five beings survive. Three (Juliet, Za, and Whis'par) are beings of a new form, of pure energy. They linger for a moment in shock at their own birth, then they are off to begin a new world. The other two are Vanth and Aknaton.

They drift through space and time in a bubble of energy. They land on a planet named Caldor, 500,000 light-years from the Dark Sector--what was (a million years ago) the Milky Way.

Things to Notice:

• Aknaton suggested before that he would die with the Milky Way. That does not appear to have happened.
• Vanth's future is known to us thanks to the follow-up series Dreadstar, but we don't know what becomes of the transformed Za, Juliet, or Whis'par.

Commentary: 
After all the chapters of build-up, Aknaton's grand plan goes off so easily, it almost seems a bit disappointing. Of course, Starlin's tale was perhaps never one about blowing up the galaxy but about how one decides and then convinces others to blow up the galaxy.

Hello, Hyehoon

Still recovering from the NTRPGCON, but hey: Why do you guys enjoy another cool piece of David Lewis Johnson Strange Stars art?

This is a hyehoon, an avioid humanoid species you may remember from this post. Or not.

NTRPGCON After Report

The curtain falls on NTRPGCON today and it's all airports and getting ready for the work week. Though it lacks the scale, I think I enjoyed this convention better than my trip to GenCon a couple of years ago. Part of that was getting to meet (and consume alcohol with) blogger/Google+ compatriots like Chris Kutalik, Robert Parker, James Aulds, and Brad Ncube, and renew my acquaintance with Justin Davis. I also found that I am not wholly immune to the thrill of getting to meet the celebrity of luminaries of gaming history: it was a kick to listen to Jim Ward spin tales of the TSR of yore, and to hear Chris Holmes reminiscences about his father's gaming and writing.

Of course the gaming was great, too. I played in Tim Snider's SyFy channel creature feature-esque Cryptworld session, and got to try Jeff Dee's Bethorm (my first actual Tekumel game, despite years of loving the setting) with the author himself gm-ing.

All in all, it was a good reminder that G+ Hangout games are great, but there is something to be said about being present in the same