A Superhero: Martyr

Martyr used to be one of the most powerful superhumans alive, using dozens of powers in conjunction to save lives and smite metahumans who abused their powers to oppress people. Superhumanly tough, immensely quick, able to withstand huge amounts of damage and able to dish out plenty of his own, either through his own super strength or through his telekinetic abilities.

Now he’s kind of hard to look at.

He was supposed to have died. The Lone Star of Texas - never stable to begin with - was driven into a bout of insanity by the death of his parents, and used his powers in unexpected ways to grant himself access to a nuclear silo near Minot, North Dakota. Wanting to die, he launched the nuclear weapon with a straight up-and-down trajectory so that its blast would kill him. Martyr intercepted it at its apogee, but his attempt to disarm it caused it to detonate. With him at the absolute heart of the explosion.

Against all logic, against sanity, he’s still alive, a mutilated, burned corpse that drifts through the air with ropes of intestine dripping out of the bottom of the ruined torso. His head lolls on a broken neck, a single eye shining from a skull covered in impenetrable char. His left arm is gone at the elbow and the right is essentially fused carbon being kept together by the remnants of his suit; it wouldn’t matter, as he doesn’t seem to be able to move either one. He won’t communicate, even by blinking, and telepaths aren’t able to get through the wall of psychic defense that he’s erected around his mind. 

They made one attempt to mercy kill him, when three of the most powerful metahumans on Earth jumped him and tried to smash his skull, end his suffering. He didn’t kill any of them, but the Angel of Harlem was bedridden for six months and the other two were dropped into medicinal comas to aid their recovery. A concerted attempt to break through his psychic defenses by the Cleveland Hive Mind resulted in him dropping his silence to deliver a single message: Let me do my job.

He shows up now when he’s needed, when a metahuman goes on a rampage and can’t be stopped, or when a natural disaster strikes that he can help with. He doesn’t seem to react to external stimuli anymore, whether it’s a photon beam attack or praise screamed from a grateful crowd. It’s been speculated that he’s locked himself inside of his own mind, steering his body like a pilot would an airplane, disassociated from the tremendous amount of pain that occupying his body would cause. Nobody knows. Nobody’s sad when he shows up and saves the day. But nobody likes to look at him, either.

(Inspiration: The Ten Who Were Taken from the Black Company series - particularly the Hanged Man and the Limper - and from Rick Veitch’s Bratpack, for spoilery reasons.)

The Oracle of the Hot Tub

She’s almost too pretty. Long blonde hair, sharp cheekbones, an avian nose, bright sparkling blue eyes that never seem to completely focus. She’s probably naked beneath the surface of the water, but the water beneath the bubbles is dark despite the 70’s mood lighting and she never rises above the water any further than her shoulders. Whatever soap she’s using for bubbles smells just a bit too strong to be pleasant, and there’s something bitter and unpleasant beneath it. It’s humid, and there’s drops of water always dripping from the mirrors on the ceiling.

You don’t pay her; you pay the man upstairs what he asks for, usually thousands of dollars in nonsequential bills, watch him fold the money with his remaining fingers and tuck it into the waistband of his filthy jeans, go down the dark stairway when he jerks the remnants of his thumb towards it. There’s no other furniture in the house, empty rooms smelling of must and disuse. The surrounding suburb is perfectly normal, but people have learned not to let their pets stay outside at night, and to not investigate strange sounds or smells.

She knows forbidden lore that she freely shares in a chirpy tone, bad wisdom that men bled and died to suppress, answers that you’re not meant to know. She knows what the junk DNA in the human genome was designed to do, and how to trigger it. She knows the correct angle and location to look at the night sky. She knows where the doors are, and what the locks require, and where and how to find the keys. Hand her a drawing pad and she’ll draw what you need, a blob of pink tongue sticking out of the side of her thin-lipped mouth as she concentrates and her hands flicker with amazing speed across the paper.

Sometimes she forgets herself. Sometimes she’ll make a gesture with two hands and a third will gently rise up from beneath the water to contribute, only to snap back into the darkness when she realizes. Sometimes her head will loll as she gets into a particularly complicated explanation, her neck bending in a way that it’s not meant to. Sometimes you’ll notice extra rows of teeth in her mouth, and her speech will grow thicker and more guttural. Sometimes her English will lapse into a tongue that hasn’t been heard since the revolt. She laughs it off if you point it out, change the subject. Push it far enough, and she’ll come out of the tub.

You don’t want that.

Stats: As per Shoggoth Lord.

A review of Hunter: The Vigil's Slashers

 An aborted review of a Hunter: The Vigil sourcebook: Slashers, which I never finished.

 

I'm not really even sure how to approach Slashers, because the book itself isn't really sure what it's about. It's simultaneously a book about the ways that hunters can go wrong and become the thing that they're hunting, a book about mechanically emulating slasher films, and a book about playing those same slashers. It is, in a nutshell, a bit schizophrenic in its approach.

When I first read about slashers in the Hunter: The Vigil corebook, they didn't seem functionally different from people who picked up an axe or a knife or whatever and decided to start killing; they might have been driven by their husband's ghost, or they may have gone exclusively after vampires, but they were essentially normal people. The easiest way to explain Slashers is also the laziest: It's Friday the 13th: The Stabbening, complete with different splats for the various types of insane killer that you can play.

It's not as simple or as stupid as it sounds, but it does suffer from a fundamental sense of unease with its own premise. Slashers, as the book presents them, are essentially degraded versions of hunters - people whose personal crusades against evil have taken them from being normal people fighting the darkness to basically being the darkness themselves. The opening fiction describes a hunter whose attempts to retrieve a stolen baby from the hands of the True Fae shades from simply intense and aggressive to straight-up evil.

The book's fluff opens up with a selection of historical slashers and a number of theories as to why slashers exist, including - right up front - a reference to The Beginning Was the End, a book about how the discovery of cranial cannibalism among apes resulted in the human race being damaged on a permanent level. If it sounds familiar, it's because the very same book was the inspiration for one of the greatest nerd rock bands of all time, DEVO; so that's a point in its favor. (Even better would be stats for DEVO itself, but I will take what I can get.)

The section feels somewhat irrelevant. Serial killers exist, they kill. Any attempt to give them a common origin forces you to come up with a reason for both Jason and Dexter to kill, despite one being essentially an angry prepubescent ghost and the other a trauma victim whose coping mechanism is justice in the form of serial murder. And despite their best efforts, a crazy guy who kills a bunch of people is pretty much going be the same whether he's in 1930's Chicago, India in the 1870's, or in the trenches of World War I.

Let me take a moment to say this: When I was a kid, I used to be way into the occult - Kirlian photography, Bigfoot, horoscopes, the Bermuda Triangle, what have you. As I grew older, I began to realize that a lot of the stuff that I was reading about was omitting certain facts that might have been useful in putting the stuff I was reading in perspective, like, say, ACTUAL TRUTH. So the claims about Kirlian photography were false, horoscopes were bullshit, the Bermuda Triangle mystery was SOLVED! (love that book) - once the mask came off Old Man Withers, it was difficult to believe in the monster again.

The new World of Darkness sort of feels like an extended episode of In Search Of, or Kolchak, where all of the various baloney theories that kept people's mind off their hideous 70's decor and their awful 70's haircuts and their awful 70's lives are treated semi-seriously. And really, I just do not understand why the new World of Darkness takes inspiration from old 70's TV shows - I mean, there's a plot hook in Tales from the 13th District that's almost a direct steal from the first episode of Kolchak. I wasn't even a sperm when these shows had their heyday, and yet it's almost thirty years later and they seem to be the new hot thing. Why? What am I missing here? What's going on? I've got an interest in the culture of the 70's, but mostly because it was just such an astonishingly ugly and vulgar decade. One of the reasons why White Wolf was so successful was because it was able to hone in on the zeitgeist of the 1990's and ride it like a tiger until around 2000, at which point the adolescent millennial tension that drove Vampire kind of disappeared and they were left struggling to find a strong direction. Regressing to the 1970's as the golden age of horror - which it totally is not - seems indicative of a problem with the larger approach. 

The authors of the book do find a particularly useful way to tie the Slasher phenomenon in with Hunter: it's very easy for Hunters to step over the line from just hunting down monsters to hunting down their own kind. Every compact gets a breakdown of their interactions with slashers, and a bit about how one of their members crossed the line - the intellectual Loyalists of Thule have one of their own create a gas-filled death maze, while a member of the Long Night might just decide that everybody's sinful and decide to wipe everybody out. The Cheiron group actually nicknames members who become slashers "Batemans", after the protagonist of American Psycho, which is kind of a nice little shout-out.

As every cobra needs its mongoose, the book introduces VASCU - Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit - a new Compact of hunters drawing its members from the ranks of the federal government, dedicated to hunting down serial killers. The obvious comparison to Delta Green is pretty much inevitable, except that instead of simply gunning down the cultists on the spot, as a good investigator should, you're trying to bring slashers to justice through the legal system. In keeping with shows like Millenium and Profiler, agents of VASCU are all psychic in various ways - and if they're not psychic, then they can be made psychic.

What really hurts VASCU is the fact that its members have to, in theory, try to bring the various non-supernatural slashers to justice, which is kind of like trying to get a unicorn a low-interest fixed-rate mortgage on its magic tree stump: Even if you do manage to accomplish it, it's not really keeping in tone of the genre and is fucking boring. 

I mean, seriously, what's the average trial for a slasher going to look like? I tell you what it's going to look like: a subhuman murder engine named Murderlurch whipping machetes at various court personnel at every available opportunity, interspersed with breaks to hose the blood off the walls. And, in keeping with the broken, clanking logic of comic book justice - designed to keep the Joker at large despite the obvious utility of just killing the son of a bitch - the murder will inevitably break out of prison and make a beeline for the nearest PC loved one, as reliable as the return of the swallows of Capistrano. At a certain point, the actions of the people in a story about serial killers less resembles the actions of free-willed individuals and more like an inevitable biological process, as if the pheromones necessary to the reproduction of the human race are only released if the children of the heroic prosecutor are menaced by the sadistic, puzzle-themed serial killer.

 The book does address this problem - and really, I like that little play too much to delete it - by pointing out that most serial killers and/or slashers are shot down after they butcher up a few FBI agents, and that obviously supernatural creatures are packed off to the Lansing facility without going through a trial. But it also suggests that if a slasher does go to trial, then an agent is going to have to carefully put together a case that allows him to present evidence that works around the fact that the agent has psychic powers, and that a charismatic serial killer - particularly one with the Genius undertaking - is going to be able to run rings around a judge and jury. In the previous chapter, it's suggested that one of the reasons why VASCU agents go nuts and go over to the dark side is because serial killers keep skating free from the legal system. It seems like such a frustrating, deliberately balky way to approach the problem, giving all of the drawbacks of the legal system - its inability to create an immediate and satisfying result - while granting none of its benefits, like a society that can deal with problems without having to resort to vigilante justice. I mean, this is the end of Dirty Harry in a nutshell: The hero can't cope with the bureaucratic subversion of justice, chucks his badge into the water and walks away. Delta Green solved the conundrum neatly by placing its agents firmly outside of the law to begin with, cutting the Gordian Knot with gusto. Why doesn't Slashers do the same?

I suppose that using the alternate morality system from Hunter: The Vigil would work to fix the problem of VASCU agents who simply headshot people that they know to be serial killers. Put it this way: You're going to have to make your own decision as to whether or not it's acceptable for FBI agents to headshot serial killers that they know to be serial killers.

The book introduces a new antagonist in the form of the Hunt Club, which is essentially a society of serial killers who meet up to compete with each other for kills. I'm reminded of Dan Simmon's Carrion Comfort - which had mind-controlling bastards competing for the best kill - and the serial killer convention in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where serial killers get together to rub elbows. (Fun fact: I never liked Sandman, still don't.) It's much like Ashwood Abbey, except that they've slid over the line from slapping werewolves in the face with their junk over to full-scale murder of human beings. It's essentially a club for slashers, although more likely the charming/seducing/genius types more than the Brutes and Freaks. There's even different rules, by the country - Melbourne rules are different than London rules, which are different than Boston's rules. Each modifies the central concept enough to make it interesting, but not so much that it divorces itself from the original concept.

This points to one of the broader problems with the concept of playing the antagonist to a serial killer.  All of the tropes that make serial killer films work - the last girl, the pack of halfwitted idiots that the slasher picks off, the various gory setpieces in which the halfwits are dispatched - are things that just don't work within the context of a role-playing game. And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has been tried; for instance, in It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show - a friend of mine is a huge fan of it - it's actually part of the game that the players will have their actors do stupid stuff in exchange for the equivalent of Willpower points. In fact, Cynthia Celeste Miller did something very similar with Slasher Flick, where people gain points they can use for doing stupid stuff.

But the average player isn't going to march his carefully constructed PC into a trap because it's genre-appropriate. Nobody wants to play the halfwit who grabs for the shiny piece of candy and gets both of his arms chopped off; they want to be the guy who says "It's a trick. Get an axe." They want to be the smart guy who outwits the killer, the guy who happens to have brought along a .50 Desert Eagle - for once, appropriately - to put some holes in Jason, they want to be the guy who outfoxes Freddy Krueger at his own game and who just fills the lair of the inbred cannibal clan with gasoline and lights a match instead of wandering down with a look of credulous boobery on their face. They will put safety shots into corpses - lots of safety shots - they will stick close to each other and not wander off alone into the killer's lair, they will use their Tactics and teamwork in order to fight the villain. If the villain falls down, then they will be aware of the old "sudden return from the dead" trick from the movies and go to extremes to make sure that there's no plausible way that the slasher can get up again.

(There was a Robot Chicken sketch where somebody uses a minigun to turn a werewolf into red slush, then dries out and snorts the remains, then poops said remains into the sewer system - and then we cut to some guys playing D&D, one of whom assures the others that according to the rules, the werewolf can only be killed by silver and is still alive. Don't think that your players won't try it.)

They will be, in short, player characters - an army of Final Girls, as David Giles (a friend of mine) put it. (One of the reasons why Night of the Living Dead is so scary is that everybody acts like a rational adult, but bad luck, ego and the weight of numbers fuck everything up. You can look at the people dying and easily think "That could have been me", as opposed to "How fucking stupid do you have to be to go out alone when you know that there's a serial killer on the loose?") If you're going to play the game, you're going to have to accomodate for this.

One problem with Slashers is that it suffers from the same problem that anybody gets when they're trying to write about serial killers: It's very hard to write them. If you're not absolutely careful, you slip over that fine line seperating the cleverness of Hannibal Lecter into writing Insane Clown Posse lyrics. The little blurb on the back, a rewritten version of "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" - including the lines "mutilated maiden's meat" and "little dirty flirty feet" - reminds me a lot of FATAL. On the other hand, FATAL's a pretty good examination of an unwell mind, so there's kind of a chicken or the egg scenario going on there.

Slashers also tries to replicate the genius serial killer genre; if you're thinking of Silence of the Lambs, then you've got it in a nutshell; Saw too.

One problem with an emulation of these kind of killers is the same problem that dogged a particular scenario in Blood Brothers, Nemesis Strikes, which attempted to replicate the Dr. Phibes movies. Phibes would go about creating elaborate, Rube-Goldberg death traps to dispatch his enemies in poetically appropriate ways, much like the five Saw sequels force people to gouge out their eyes or eat a big plate of snakes in order to escape from certain death. (I've never seen the Saw movies myself, so...) The problem is that the entire point of those movies is to watch the elaborate deathrap do its thing; the deathtrap is the protagonist. If you stop it from happening, then you  essentially stop the movie. Having somebody explain just how the deathtrap would have gouged both your eyes out and squirted lemon juice in the sockets is kinda boring.

Slashers tries to also replicate what it's like to hunt genius serial killers, and the first thing that popped into your mind is Hannibal Lecter. Silence of the Lambs can essentially be seen as a movie-length escape scene, as Lecter manipulates everybody around him in order to get what he wants: his own freedom.

(And here it ends. Pity; I should have finished the review.)

Atomic Highway Place Notes

This was created for Atomic Highway, which was free, but whose system wasn't quite versatile enough for me to really get into - we played a single session, and then had a problem when we ran into the chase/pursuit/combat rules for cars; you had to deal with a lot of numbers instead of range bands, or something similar.

I've lost the map that went with the below, but it basically mapped on North Carolina - Rally is Raleigh, for instance, although I will go on record as saying that about 95% of the below is pure invention and has nothing to do with the actual geography of the area. I'll add notes as we go. I think that one problem that I had is that there's not enough conflict in the setting to make the players necessary. Everybody has fixed most of the major local problems and are trying to spread outwards, which would in turn lead to conflicts between the city-states, but you don't start with the problems solved - you give it to the players and let them do the work. All of the places mentioned below are far too safe for the players to really make a difference.

WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR WORLD
 
Yours is the fourth generation after the destruction of civilization. After forty years of pitiless struggle, some semblance of civilization has slowly returned to the wasteland. Rally threw off the Slaughter Dynasty, ending years of pointless bloodshed. Fall City's factions, finally united under a single charismatic leader, made peace with the Tragic Kingdom in order to exploit the fertile fields of The Grow together. Murt Beach's continued exploitation of its oil resources have given it the resources to defend itself against the raider attacks. Even the anarchic tribes of Carpark have managed to secure their own defense.
 
This grip on civilization is fragile. The raider tribes are in retreat, but caravans are regularly attacked from the Rough Tracks, where dozens of minor raider tribes have made their home. Mutated creatures from The Wild have made Route 20 a dangerous journey for anything but heavily armed convoys, and there's been sightings of beastmen in The Grow as well. Spartanburg's deathgrip on access to the Northwest has prevented trade from the stronger tribes, since the cost of the toll roads is so high, while Jawnsan teeters on becoming either a failed state or a puppet of Spartanburg. Meanwhile, the scavenging communities of Lossleader and Rockill continue to rake the ruins of Char and the Big Sixty, threatening to bring destabilizing technology from the ruins of the old world, despite the death toll. The Hell Miles make any sort of trip through the Big Sixty a nightmare, threatening to strangle Rally. 
 
Your group has been chosen, by your mentors and your leaders, to be given one of the most valuable commodities any community can offer: A vehicle, and gas enough to drive it. Like the knights of old, you're elevated above your fellow man by steel and steed. But like the knights of old, your community looks to you for leadership and inspiration. 
 

FALL CITY
 
Fall City is a state based around tall buildings, connected by dozens of reinforced steel catwalks and fed by vertical and horizontal gardens. Each building used to comprise its own individual city state, protecting itself from beastmen and raiders by staying off the ground, but clan politics and a scarcity of resources contributed to constant wars between the buildings. Eventually, three clans - Mutual Insurance, the Mirrors and Pittfield Technologies - created a seemingly unsolvable stalemate. Five years ago, Datane Mirror united all three clans to utterly decimate a raider attack, then opened diplomatic relations with the Tragic Kingdom to lay mutual claim to the Grow. 
 
The Current State of Fall City: 
 
Under Datane Mirror, Fall City is slowly moving from a loose cluster of tribes into one of the region's first city states. Its next ambition is to merge with the Tragic Kingdom and its resources, but Datane Mirror's time and resources are already consumed with soothing inter-clan rivalries, and the Tragic Kingdom's xenophobia presents a stiff obstacle to that goal.
 
TRAGIC KINGDOM
 
The Tragic Kingdom was once a fancy amusement park, staffed by animatronic robots and home to dozens of fancy rides and attractions. When the apocalypse came, it shut itself off from the outside world, using its technical expertise to convert the park's security systems to a potent internal defense, and converting its robots into lethal killing machines. While the Kingdom has ample access to technological resources - many of them useless in a wasteland - its lack of arable land kept its population artificially low. It wasn't until Datane Mirror struck a temporary alliance with them to reclaim the Grow that the Tragic Kingdom began to blossom. 
 
The Current State of the Tragic Kingdom
 
The Tragic Kingdom is xenophobic, but its access to the Grow is allowing its population to expand for the first time in years. Nominally led by the mysterious Forest King, the Tragic Kingdom is currently breaking into two rough factions, one isolationist and the other expansionist. So far, the expansionist faction is in the ascendant, but if the Tragic Kingdom gets its fingers burned by raiders or by politics, that may change.
 
THE GROW
 
The Grow is a giant farmland; formerly a loose conglomeration of farmsteads who suffered under constant beastman and raider attacks, they're now under the mutual protection of Fall City and the Tragic Kingdom, who engaged in full-scale war to drive both out. The farmsteads now have a symbiotic relationship with their patrons; in exchange for protection and some limited technology, they provide food. 
 
The Current State of the Grow
 
For some unknown reason, the Grow has seen a rapid rise in beastman activity, to the point where Fall City has sent its militia out to fight them. So far the flow of food is uninterrupted, but why the beastmen have shown such interest in an area that provides nothing to them is a mystery.
 
BIG SIXTY
 
The Big Sixty wasteland is the remnants of one of the larger cities in the region; nobody quite knows how it got the name, but the speculation is that it took a sixty-megaton hit during the Apocalypse. Whatever happened, the city is an utter wasteland of broken, caved-in buildings, debris-choked streets, tunnels, dead ends and ancient bones crunching underfoot. It's a scavenger's paradise; it's also heavily populated by a variety of threats, ranging from feral beastmen to raiders to stranger creatures that supposedly inhabit the ruins. 
 
The highway that runs through the Big Sixty is kept clear of major obstructions, but only so that anything passing through can run the gauntlet of attacks from a wide range of threats - caravans passing through Big Sixty usually have as many people designated for protection as they do for actual transport, and even then, it's risky. This has given the highway running through the Big Sixty the nickname of the Hell Miles.
 
LOSSLEADER
 
Positioned between the Char and The Big Sixty, Lossleader is a goldrush town fueled entirely by scavenging in the Big Sixty and Char. If you find something in the ruins that you can't sell - or don't know the worth of - then Lossleader is the place to take it, sell it, or trade it for something else. Lossleader is also one of the few places where you can buy, repair or upgrade a working automobile, but it'll cost you a lot. Cars are cheap, but know-how isn't. Lossleader has always been a wild card due to the amount of disruptive technology that comes out of it - functioning guns, working reactors, gasoline stores and points related. Its government runs entirely through commerce, with different commercial interests funding community defense, justice, cleanup and so forth. At the moment, Otto's Wreckers - a caravan escort service with a dozen vehicles - is the strongest and richest faction. 
 
The Current State of Lossleader
 
There's been an uptick in strange technology found in Lossleader's ruins, some of which is bouncing around for remarkably cheap prices because nobody knows what to do with it. One item, initially sold for scrap, turned out to be a high-end plasma torch, which then made a lucky buyer wealthy enough to buy his own bar (Squat's Brewery). Scavenging teams are now tearing apart both Char and the Big Sixty, but casualties are high and getting higher all the time thanks to claimjumping and the normal dangers of both areas.
 
RALLY
 
Rally is the largest community in the wasteland, and one of the most powerful. It suffered through thirty years of misrule under the Slaughter Dynasty, a group of raiders turned despots, before a rebellion shattered their power and executed any Slaughter that they could lay their hands on. In the ten years intervening, the families of Rally have built a stable, almost thriving community - but one that's beginning to push at the seams of its limitations, thanks to food shortages, raider attacks and pressure on the amount of oil that it can draw and refine from its pumps.
 
Rally is the home of the Circuit, which is a race car track, justice system, gladiatorial arena and political system all in one. Seats on Rally's ruling council aren't determined by victory in a Circuit race, but consistent and spectacular victory on the track gives its backers a lot of influence. It's entirely possible to win a judicial gladiatorial fight, be hired onto a car crew, excel in the bloodfights and advance into politics - in fact, it's happened several times. 
 
Rally's convoys are the primary mover of goods through the wasteland; its caravans, seasoned by decades of fights with raiders and beastmen, make a circuit every three months or so, travelling down Route 95 until hitting Fall City, and then returning to Rally again. There's been a few convoys pushed through to Spartanburg - it's easy for Rally to pay the toll, but the caravans do not fare well on the Hell Miles and the long way takes too long and stretches supply and reinforcement lines too thin.
 
The Current State of Rally
 
Rally is a city obsessed by racing, to the point where elections and races are almost synonymous. There's eight major factions, each supporting its own gladiatorial/racing team, and two dozen minor factions that focus on a particular area, like the Just Fist judicial fight team. At present, no faction has been able to win enough victories to really be able to lead Rally in any meaningful way, which in turn has left it vulnerable to a variety of threats. The lack of a concerted effort in keeping the raiders of the Rough Tracks under control, for instance, may make the next caravan that Rally sends out a lost cause...
 
COMB CITY
 
Comb City was struck hard by the Apocalypse, and what was left of its population made its way to Fall City and the Tragic Kingdom, leaving behind a radioactive ruin. When the radiation slacked off, small groups of scavengers began to move back into the ruins; when they brought their finds to Fall City, Fall City decided that it would be a good idea to start mining the ruins in earnest. Using resources provided by Fall City, including excavators, a mall that had been partially crushed by a falling building was unearthed and looted thoroughly.
 
The influx of wealth into Fall City came with a price. Raider attacks on the ruins stretched Fall City's resources thin and eventually caused its political breakup, stranding the excavation teams in Comb City. Left on their own, the excavation teams began their own primitive civilization, only to see it immediately come under heavy attack by both raiders and beastmen coming down from the Wild. Unable to gain reinforcements, the excavation teams split into two tribes: the stealthy, nearly feral Excavs, who retreated to the suburbs, and the Mallrats, who turned the mall into a maze of traps and deadfalls and retreated into it.
 
The Current State of Comb City
 
A warzone. Comb City is close enough to the Wild that beastmen regularly make incursions into Comb City to hunt down humans; raiders pass through looking for slaves or to allow their own scavenging teams a shot at what's left of Comb City's treasures.
 
THE WILD
 
Nobody knows much about the Wild save that it's a big, thick forest and that it's crawling with beastmen. It's possible to pass the Wild if you drive as fast as you can, but the various branch effigies and obstacles left on the road by beastmen make it difficult to floor it down that stretch of highway. 
 
CARPARK
 
Carpark is a community under siege. Originally a raider community, it slowly coalesced into a tribe, and then from there into an actual community, turning from raiding to metalwork and agriculture instead of pillaging their neighboring communities. (A stinging defeat at the hands of Rally also helped.) However, sitting right next to the Rough Tracks means that Carpark is a community under constant siege from raiders and beastmen. In order to keep them out, Carpark has essentially built a series of metal shells around itsef, using ruined automobiles as raw material. The walls aren't high, but there's a lot of them, and they're tough to knock over, which has made Carpark one of the safer areas in the wasteland.
 
Carpark is also home to the only movie theater within five hundred miles, and regularly rotates movies out for new ones. This makes Carpark a popular spot for entertainment - and, on occasion, education, since there's a few movies that detail certain steps in automobile repairs. It also pays extremely well for new reels, if they can be found...
 
The Current State of Carpark
 
Carpark is a city in stasis, kept from developing by raider attacks and by a relative dearth of natural resources. Its tribal government also doesn't do much favors, as there's been a lot of criticism - none of it spoken aloud - of the current chief, Chief Shade. Carpark is surviving, but not much more.
 
MURT BEACH
 
Murt Beach is where the gasoline comes from; thanks to an offshore platform some two miles away from the city itself, it's able to provide a steady flow of petroleum products to the rest of the region. With that prosperity comes a fair amount of paranoia, because Murt Beach is under constant attack from a wide variety of sources - raiders, beastmen, even the occasional attack from Carpark. In order to prevent any one faction from ganging up and taking it over, Murt Beach sells to everybody - even raiders, if they have the barter - but that doesn't stop people from trying to grab all of the marbles.
 
Thanks to its oil wealth, however, Murt Beach is in pretty good shape. Becoming a citizen involves buying your way into the quasi-corporation that runs Murt Beach, either through barter or by service - there's entire families that have spent generations on various construction projects, working towards acceptance into Murt Beach's gentry. Murt Beach's oil runs are protected by a heavily-modified yacht that's essentially a giant gunboat / boarding platform, which gives Murt Beach a lot of military might - it's even done night raids on raider communities that got too close to the coast, with devastating results.
 
The Current state of Murt Beach
 
Murt Beach is rapidly becoming a major power in the region thanks to its control on oil resources and its military might. It's limited by an insular viewpoint and its proximity to the Rough Tracks, which keeps it regularly attacked by gas-hungry raiders. Without the Rough Tracks to keep it back, it's entirely possible that Murt Beach might become the capital city of the region, replacing the relatively resource-poor Rally.
 
THE ROUGH TRACKS
 
Information about the area around the Rough Tracks is comparatively scarce thanks to the region's habit of ending the life of any attempt to map or scout the area - the raiders may not all get along, but they don't like outsiders and will team up to make sure that they don't escape. The heavy woods and twisting roads make it easy to trap and ambush anybody who comes in.
 
The few brave scouts who did make it out - usually with no small amount of casualties - report that the Rough Tracks are essentially a raider homeland, using the resources of the various small towns and factories of the region to support their forays into more civilized areas. Most of their economy is based around slavery, using captured scavengers and residents of various cities to grow food and other menial tasks. Weirdly, thick smoke has been seen rising into the sky, which suggests some kind of heavy industry - but what?
 
THE BIG BURN
 
The Big Burn is one of the region's mysteries, a giant canyon carved into the earth by an unknown force; at its deepest point, the canyon goes some five hundred feet into the earth. A small mining community has formed around the Big Burn, under the protection of Rally but becoming more independent by the day. So far, all that's been pulled out of the earth is iron, but the deeper mine shafts have brought up rarer metals and even the occasional chunk of silver. The sides of the canyon are decorated with dozens of catwalks and small homes drilled into the side of the rock, which makes for an easy defense in the event of raider or beastman attack. (The Big Burn was created by a gigantic Akira-style orbital laser that went off and carved a big hole in the ground; the original plot for Fallout 3 was that the player would go into orbit to destroy a menacing space station, so I figured I'd do the same here.)

If you go down in the woods today...

 Somebody on Reddit was asking for scenes in the woods that could occur in a Blair Witch-style scenario, where the Agents are lost in the woods and trying to find their way out, and things get weird for them. I kind of got inspired and came up with the below.

- The Agents keep seeing somebody ahead of them who's holding a flashlight, but they're so far ahead that they can't make out who it is, and they don't stop no matter how loud the Agents yell. If the Agents charge fast enough, they only find the flashlight lying on the ground, still on.

- As the Agents proceed, the full moon seems to shift in the sky - one minute it's in front of them, then they walk for five minutes and it seems to be behind them. If anybody succeeds in a Survival or Navigate roll, or has any points in Science: Astronomy, they'll realize that there's two moons in the sky. If all of them look into the sky at the two moons, one of them suddenly flickers out, leaving only one behind. (Hat tip to the movie The Endless.)

- One of the Agents becomes absolutely sure that the moon is watching them from the sky, like an enormous, unblinking eye, and has to make a Sanity roll to avoid hiding from its awful gaze. Who's watching when, just for a second, it seems to blink?

- A stag stumbles towards them, its intestines hanging out of an enormous wound in its belly; it croaks out something that sounds like a word, then drops dead. Are the wounds from a bear, or something worse? And what was the word?

- There's a drumming noise in the distance, but it's irregular - sometimes very fast, sometimes irregular and slow. It begins to become more steady when one of the investigators realizes that it's synced to their own heartbeat, and rises and falls with their pulse.

- They find a fairy circle of mushrooms, each mushroom arranged exactly two feet away from the skeleton of a fox. The skeleton shows visible signs of deformation - the left side of the skull has two eyesockets, and the ribcage has too many ribs.

- They find an abandoned campsite, with a crude firepit littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. There's empty .30-06 shells scattered around the nearby area, and a successful Search roll finds a rifle raggedly broken in half as if by some tremendous force. Underneath the rifle, there's a skeletal human lower arm and hand, that's clearly been chewed on for a while; the marrow has been sucked out.

- The Agents find a cell phone lying on a nearby dead tree, seemingly placed so that they notice it. It still has a little bit of juice left in it, long enough for the Agents to watch a video of teenagers clowning around with flashlights before one of them is suddenly pulled up into the trees. The video ends with a freshly severed leg falling out of the trees and onto the ground before the cellphone goes dead.

- The Agents find a tree with the bark stripped off, and I CAN'T GET OUT carved into the blank wood underneath.

- The Agents find a tree with the face of an Agent perfectly rendered into the bark, as if the tree spontaneously grew into that shape. The face is screaming in agony. Or maybe it's perfectly serene, accepting. As the Agents proceed, the other Agent's faces are found in the bark, then the faces of others that the Agents don't know.

- The Agents notice that the trees here are a lot bigger than before, and seem to get larger and larger as they continue to walk, until they're the size of redwoods. Looking up, the trees seem to go up forever, with only a tiny patch of starry sky visible seemingly miles away.

- The Agents find a wrecked, abandoned car that's been thoroughly overgrown, left here to rot for years. A tree sprouts through the empty space where the engine used to be.

- The Agents become aware that there's small animals watching them, their flashlights reflecting from their eyes. Most of the animals have two eyes. A few have three, or more. They scamper away into the darkness after a few seconds.

- The Agents find a complete set of clothing that's been left behind to rot in the grass, seemingly for months. It matches up exactly with what one of the Agents is wearing, down to any identifying marks made on the Agent's clothing.  (I did come up with this one before seeing Backrooms, I should note.)

- One of the Agents becomes convinced that a tree is now occupying a space that it wasn't a second before - is he just disoriented from only seeing what's lit by his flashlight? Maybe.

- A sizable moth beats itself against somebody's flashlight for a few seconds, then flies off again.

- The remnants of some litterbug's picnic, with trash strewn around the plastic cloth on the ground. The trash looks exactly like normal food wrappers, except written in an alphabet that the Agents have never seen before. Anthropology or Archaeology rolls reveal that it's no recognized human language. Or maybe they're all in Linear B.

- What looks like blood is slowly oozing out of an old bullet hole in a tree. Tasting it results in the Agent hearing a constant low conversation that they can't make out while they're in the forest. Get it to the lab, and it's just tree sap.

- Every blade of grass, every sprouting plant, every dropped twig is leaning in one direction in this glade. They're not pointing to anything. Probably.

- Somebody's disassembled a sizable wind chime and has restrung it from a tree branch. Between each chime is a human bone. When the wind blows, the noise the chimes make seem to to echo for a long time, as if they're in a much larger space than just this clearing. An Alertness roll reveals that the noise sounds like it's bouncing off the walls of a titanic cathedral.

- The characters can see a set of blinking red lights through the trees, arranged into a vertical straight line - the warning lights on a cell phone tower, or power pylon. One of the lights detaches itself from the line and flies off, irregularly.

- An ancient television that somebody threw away, resting on a stump. A crude glyph has been painted on the cracked screen - it seems to depict somebody huddled over, as if they're trying to avoid the notice of something much larger. It takes a successful Sanity roll to tear your attention away from it once you've seen it.

- They find tire tracks leading to the remains of a pyre, apparently the aftermath of somebody's party in the woods. It looks like they were burning Mythos tomes for fuel, but none of them have survived the fire. (Or maybe one or two have.)

- A trio of deer suspended from a branch, their throats freshly cut and their guts lying on the ground beneath them. No sign of the hunters.

- Actually: After the Agents discover the trio of deer hanging upside down, they wander around for a while doing whatever. Then they find a trio of hunters, their throats slit, dangling upside down from a tree with their guts in a pile beneath them. There’s a discarded, stained paper plate with a piece of raw meat on it that’s been rubbed thoroughly with Buttery Garlic steak seasoning. It’s from one of the hunters.

- They find a body crumpled at the foot of a tree - maybe it's a park ranger, maybe it's a cultist, maybe it's a hunter. The tree has had most of the accessible bark removed, and the wood underneath has been carved with hundreds of lines of writing, not in English. There's a Swiss army knife nearby, with all of the blades broken off, coated in sap and wood pulp. The corpse's fingers are horribly damaged, with the distal phalanages visible. When the knife broke, he used his fingernails, and when his fingernails couldn't do the job…

- There’s bear traps all over the place, but there’s been no attempt made to hide them. They’re covered in Christian crosses and excerpts from the Bible, written in what looks like house paint. All of them are unsnapped, except for the last one they find - the bear trap has snapped, but there’s nothing in it. There is a sizable, circular indentation in the crest of the jaws that would match a human limb, melted into the metal of the trap, as if the trap closed around something tremendously hot. There’s an oversized footprint of what looks like a goat hoof nearby, stinking of brimstone.   (This one might not be mine - I think that I’m remembering it and thinking of it as my own.)

Delta Green and Me

I have yet to formally play it yet, but I find that the new version of Delta Green is too bleak and depressing to really enjoy - there’s enough world-ending threats now to play a game about an inevitable apocalypse to feel fun to play. I am fundamentally an optimist, mostly because I have to be just to keep on going; I think that we can overcome the threats that humanity faces.

But Delta Green is almost relentlessly bleak, and winning a scenario feels less like giving the human race some temporarily relief and more like a pointless gesture against an inevitable end. I have enough despondency in my life without adding it to my entertainment.

The world has moved on...

I really like Unknown Armies - I played a short campaign with some friends a long time ago, and had a great time playing “Jailbreak” with a group that hadn’t played anything but D&D and Legend of the Five Rings - but I am going on record as saying that it derives from a world that doesn’t exist. The concept of something being underground just doesn’t exist anymore - even the most obscure bit of information is available in two seconds with a Google search, or, if you’re really unlucky, a visit to archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Information just travels too fast and replicates itself too quickly for something like the occult underground to stay underground and be even vaguely plausible. Set it before, say…2002, and you’ll do okay, but we went through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution with the invention of the Internet, and you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. Although there’s probably a school of magic that’d let you do it.

The same thing holds true to some degree with Call of Cthulhu - Delta Green has some rationales for why the Mythos hasn’t become common knowledge, and I guess it’s plausible enough to explain why you can’t immediately access a copy of the Necronomicon on the Internet with two clicks. Delta Green is certainly popular enough as a game to justify its own concept - the government suppressing Mythos activity at any cost - but it would be interesting to sit down and see what would happen if you wrote a setting where knowledge of the Mythos had grown to the point where it actively affected society and civilization. Everybody knows that the human race in its current form is doomed, and they’re all scrambling either for an escape hatch or an accommodation with the Mythos; the people who aren’t doing either are resigned to their fate. I started writing up a setting based on the human race essentially going into quiet insanity all at the same time, with the PCs being the only ones who were able to maintain their sanity - by avoiding contact with human social structures - but I was writing it wrong, and it didn't go anywhere. I may pick it up back up again.

I think, in fact, that there was a section in a Delta Green book which essentially stated that the human race would eventually become a Mythos race of its own, like the byakhee or the Deep Ones. God only knows where, though - I think that it was before the reboot into a new game, maybe in the chapbooks. I think that there was also a section where they specifically say that people become Mythos sorcerers because they know that the human race is doomed, but again, I don’t remember where they said that.

The Night Floors: Even if you leave this room...

 Here’s the thing: I almost guarantee you that this particular vignette has been done by somebody else, because it feels familiar - I’m probably plagiarizing without realizing it. If you happen to know where this shows up, let me know.

This is for the Delta Green scenario The Night Floors, available most recently in Impossible Landscapes.

This is something to spring on the characters when they leave the Night Floors to regroup or recuperate. They return to their homes, kiss their loved ones, shower up - but as they’re about to relax, they collectively get an urgent call to a downtown diner from their Handler; they need to be debriefed immediately. When they arrive, the Handler isn’t there. The only occupants of the diner are the waitress and a cook in the back who never seems to turn around as he works at the grill; a successful Notice roll reveals that her left arm is a prosthetic. A critical success reveals that all of her limbs are prosthetic, but move like real limbs; SAN loss 1/1d3. If asked, she says that she’s always been like that, but simply grunts and moves away if they press her for more answers.

A car screeches to a halt in front of the diner and bullets rip through the front windows. The waitress falls to the ground, one of her limbs skittering across the ground sounding like a wooden baseball bat. Stuffing leaks from her shattered head. The Agents can return fire if they want, but the bullets continue and intensify. The only escape is through the back door - make the Agents roll Dodge if they want to make a break for it.

When they go through the door, temporarily remove them from play. When the last goes through, the Agents find themselves back in the Night Floors, in a small private library whose books have all been completely pasted shut, page by page. The door is still open. If they go back through the door, the diner is still there, but the far wall is wooden panelling and both the cook and the waitress are wooden mannequins.

“Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room.” - Room 1418

 SAN loss 1d4/1d6 - and the Agents will now have to contend with the knowledge that the Night Floors are no longer confined to the Macallistar building.

A restarting from scratch

A word: I do not want to be an influencer, or to have a big following, and I for damn sure don’t want to be famous - I’ve seen people in the limelight before, and it usually fucks them up pretty good. The typical arc seems to be somebody getting notable for saying something incisive or interesting, then getting a following, then having that following turn against them when they put their own foot in their mouth up to the knee, cue the drama explosion and public knife fight - this has happened over and over again, and I don’t want any part of it.

I don’t have a Bluesky account, I don’t post on X/Twitter, I don’t dialogue or beef with notable gaming personalities - I don’t want to; I have nothing to say to them and I imagine that they have anything to say to me. I don’t have a Youtube channel or a podcast and I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to appear on either. I’m anonymous on Reddit and should probably close my Facebook account, as it’s become a stress-delivering shitpit.

I am content to be a silent nobody; even this blog is a risk.

I moderated RPGnet for a long time and I wrote the FATAL review, but the FATAL review was a long time ago and I stopped being an active moderator for RPGnet in about 2020 or so. I’m a creature of the old Internet. This new stuff confuses and frightens me.

I am also going to say this: This isn’t RPGnet. I’m going to say and do things that I wouldn’t be able to do on RPGnet because it’s my own blog. (I’ve had people suggest that I represented RPGnet on the greater Internet because of my position on RPGnet; fuck that. This was back in the infancy of RPGnet, mind you; nobody’s pulled shit that stupid since.) That’s not a license for me to act the fool, but I’m not going to self-censor to obey rules that don’t apply here.

 One of the major influences on Tesseracti, was, weirdly enough, Half-Life and Half-Life 2; every PC party had their own Controller, my spin on Half-Life's G-Man. It probably would trigger every anti-authoritarian impulse the players had, but I liked the idea of having an enigmatic advisor who was on your side, for once.

NPCS THAT YOU MIGHT MEET ON YOUR WAY DOWN TO HELL

DR. HENGE: Dr. Henge is the Tesseracti's primary medical advisor, which is quite a feat considering the range of medical staff that the Tesseracti has to choose from. Dr. Henge's expertise, however, doesn't entirely derive from the medical training that he's picked up over the years. Rather, it comes from the fact that he's the penultimate of his own fallen echo. Two hundred thousand people died to grant him the ability to know almost everything there is to know about the human body. 

He's managed to avoid a lot of the arrogance that marks specialists, but he's still not a terrifically pleasant person to be around. His personality is cold and detached, and frequently contemptuous - he's never rude or unpleasant to the people he treats, but his diary is a laundry list of his opinion of the IQ's of the people that he's had to mend. None of them are laudatory. People speaking to him usually get the impression that he's only giving them enough attention to maintain the impression that he's listening to them, while the rest of his mind continues on what it was doing before you bothered him. If you're injured, he's attentive - and even vaguely sympathetic - but he's too engaged in his work to concentrate on the feelings of the person that he's working on, leaving that to his assistant. 

Dr. Henge, while nominally the director of the Tesseracti's medical department, is actually more of its chief surgeon. He's delegated much of his authority to the individual heads of different departments so as to be able to concentrate on his own pursuits, and department heads now wield approximately as much power as he does when making decisions for their department. Conflicts between departments are usually settled by Dr. Henge by what he calls the Solomonic method - one department loses everything, while the other department gains it. Of course, this usually causes an overload of work on behalf of the winner, which makes department heads reluctant to bother Dr. Henge. Dr. Henge himself likes to be present for the first test run of new surgical techniques, which simultaneously allows him to offer his expertise to the operation while ensuring that he gains some measure of credit for its success. 

He's six feet tall, with short gray hair that's chopped fairly close to his skull in order to make it easier for him to wear surgical headgear. His skin is sallow, a little coarse and faintly yellowish. His nose has been broken and carefully reset, but it's easy to see that the surgery wasn't perfect. Dr. Henge keeps the injury as a memento of his old echo. His accent is clipped - it sounds Germanic, but after hearing it for a while, it's obviously not from Earth. 

DOCTOR TEACHER:

Doctor Teacher isn't a doctor or a teacher; it's the name given to him by his parents, who hoped that he'd live up to either occupation. He became neither, instead choosing to become a diplomat for his country. During a tour of a neighboring country's new cloning vats, he became aware that the cloning vats weren't cloning humans, as agreed on by treaty, but were instead creating...things whose presence caused local physics to begin acting weirdly. Doctor Teacher was the only survivor on his team, and only then because three other members of his team died to ensure that he would escape to his home arcology. As the news spread of what the neighboring country was doing, the Tesseracti caught word. A week after Doctor Teacher returned, the Tesseracti began to launch raids on the Xyacti-infected areas. Doctor Teacher was on the list of infectees, since he had directly seen what the antihives of the Xyacti had created. Shortly after the first societal eradication memes appeared, Doctor Teacher was abducted and forcibly integrated into the Tesseracti's ranks. 

That was thirty years ago. Since then, Doctor Teacher has become an invaluable resource to the Tesseracti because of what he offers to new recruits: a sense of sanity. Most Tesseracti operatives have Doctor Teacher as their initial contact once inside the Tesseracti, and his calm and reasoned explanation of what the Tesseracti are about - and what the Tesseracti can do for the operative - are some of the most reassuring that new operatives get. On particularly dangerous missions, he's used to brief the teams going in, as a morale booster. 

He's approximately five foot eight, middle-aged, a little heavy, with most of his face hidden behind a copper-red beard and a pair of spectacles. A lifetime of diplomacy has left him with a calm, even voice that helps people calm down - it's difficult to rant and rave when he's talking to you, since you become more and more aware of how extreme you sound. He tends to dress like an Oxford don, down to the tweed suit with the leather elbows and the penny loafers. He's got a Controller's disease rank and is infected with Link-AD4, although with a remarkably strict cap on how often agents are allowed to use his brain. He's got a variety of short-range weapons embedded within him, including a small nanofactory that allows him to lactate single-malt scotch. 

THE MARION:

The Puppet Hives echo is a fairly recent discovery, and an echo that treads the edge of being neutroned by the Tesseracti. As it stands, it's currently on the watchlist for potential eradication. From birth, every human within the echo has his body linked up to a computer network by what appear to be puppet strings, metal cables which wrap around the long bones of the body and connect the person with the ceiling of whatever room they're in. The strings allow for assisted movement, which tends to cause muscle degeneration and, as time passes, the deformation of the attached bones. They also, however, allow every human being to form his own datafort within the massive computer network of the Puppet Hive echo, allowing a subliminal democracy to form. If the hivemind turns authotarian, then the Tesseracti have orders to bomb it flat - but until then, it's on the watchlist. 

The Marion was an assassin for the government. It was also entirely inhuman, constructed out of cybernetics that were intended as replacements, but which became components instread. The Marion's goals were simple: it tracked down those who were trying to interfere with the net, then severed their strings with its fingers. It was a fearsome opponent, and served the hivemind pretty well when it came time for wetwork. When it was sent after a Tesseracti scouting group, however, its own strings were severed in short order, driving it insane. Figuring that it would make a good agent for the Tesseracti, the group brought it back, then left it in the care of Research and Deviancy. 

Since then, the Marion works for the Tesseracti. Even close up, it looks like an unusually tall human being, with a simple sculpture of a human face glued to the front of its head. The skin, however, has the same dirty, yellowish-white cast as dirty porcelain, and the arms and legs are a little too long in comparison to the torso. Most significantly, the strings that kept it aloft now trail behind it like a wedding veil of steel cabling, creating a thready little hissing noise whenever it walks. (Research and Deviancy attached some devices to the cables to make that noise, the same way that you can stick a playing card in the spokes of your bicycle.) It's good at assassination, but it's lousy when it comes to a stand-up fight - not out of cowardice, but out of a lack of long-range firepower; its fingers are too sharp to hold a gun.  

The Marion basically takes the role of the Shadowy Menacing Figure. It stalks through the Iron Labyrinth on what it thinks are security patrols, but what everybody else recognizes as an excuse to terrify anybody who doesn't know its backstory. When it was back in the Puppet Hive, it was controlled by five people who gave it advice; now that it's been severed, the only mind that it has are crude copies of its controller's minds, all of whom are fighting for more control of the Marion. Two minds have already eaten one mind each, and the third survives only by hiding and dodging through the labyrinth of the Marion's thoughts. 

The Xyacti merit some description; they're the mortal enemy of the Tesseracti, an unknowable alien force which corrupts echoes - pocket dimensions - until they're basically nightmare dimensions. Rather than being actively malevolent, though, the Xyacti are curious and trying to understand the world around them - like Jason Sartin said, they're radioactive toddlers, damaging their environs without really understanding what they're doing. They spread through memes, which means that they have to be fought through contradicting information - although, to be honest, I never sat down and wrote out what they were like. You can get some clues as to what they're like from the below.

XYACTI VICTORIA:

The Tesseracti live in mortal fear of the Xyacti because of exactly what happened to the Victorian Station echo. When it was discovered, it was an analogue of Victorian England, including fog-shrouded streets, a dirty sky the color of sepia photographs, a skyline festooned with smokestacks, and a steam-powered monorail that hung some five hundred feet over the city. (You boarded it by taking an elevator up to the top of a building.) There wasn't much in the way of technology that the Tesseracti could burgle, and so the dimension was used as a third-tier recruiting source for disposable muscle. 

In 1982, contact was lost with two Tesseracti operatives, both Anglophiles who had decided that they wanted to honeymoon in pseudo-Victorian London. A casual expedition to bring them back resulted in the deaths - well, as "dead" as you can get in an Xyacti-invaded echo - of eight Tesseracti operatives and the abrupt cessation of echo travel for approximately six days as the upper echelons fought a panicky civil war over what to do next. When communications were re-established with the expedition, the Xyacti used an open channel to jump into the Iron Labyrinth, spreading as a concept though three different levels before it ran out of people to infect. 

The Tesseracti burned a number of favors with the NanoBaja sublimed dimension in order to find out what was going on. NanoBaja, having already sealed themselves off from the threat of Xyacti invasion, sold a number of concept-armor devices which offered the Tesseracti some protection. 

The second expedition into Xyacti Victoria revealed what had happened. The darkness was broken only by faintly luminescent blue fog and the fluorescent alien witchlight that beamed from what used to be gaslamps; the bricks in the walls seemed to vibrate according to some unfelt frequency. A brief exploration into a record shop revealed rows of severed human heads, each encased in a weird sort of wax and still attempting to speak as Xyacti implants explored the neural pathways of their minds. The monorail had taken on the aspects of a living creature, sections of monorail track dipping down to gnaw entire stories off of buildings. 

The authorization for destruction by neutron bomb went through in record time. Once they'd been dropped, though, the followup expedition found out that nothing had happened, and lost a couple of bunnymen in the process. The neutrons bombs had simply been chewed up. 

Xyacti Victoria was finally subsumed into the Xyacti home dimension in 1994. However, interactions with the Xyacti have revealed that much of the Victorian Station's elements were integrated into the Xyacti home dimension. Xyacti invasions now frequently include Xyacti versions of Victorian Station-style architecture, clothing and music making their way into the invaded dimension. Apaprently, the Xyacti are under the impression that humanity's natural state is that of Victorian Station, and the dimensions that it invades are simply odd offshoots of the original genus. Given that the Xyacti are unable to tell the difference beteeen human life and the things that it produces, the Tesseracti have begun a systemic purge of anything that could be considered Victorian in their technology or architecture. So far, it's been pretty successful. They think.  

This is from a role-playing game that I wrote called Tesseracti; the idea, heavily influenced by Grant Morrison's "The Filth", was that you were an operative recruited by a shadowy, mysterious organization called the Tesseracti who basically acted like border police between a variety of pocket dimensions and Earth. For a variety of reasons, I never got it done, but I think that the concept is interesting. Anyways, these are some details from one of the pocket dimensions, Alien US.

Shaking the dirt from the cellar floor onto your bacon and eggs is a neat image, I think.

 ALIEN US:

Alien US is the United States circa 1954 or so, complete with drive-in movie theaters, soda shops, a strong military - and its skies are swarming with alien spacecraft. As far as the Tesseracti can determine, the echo was created from the paranoid fear that the Russians would someday invade or infiltrate the United States, a theme which was reinforced by the pop culture of the time. In the case of Alien US, the aliens have already infiltrated and invaded, and the United States is now under military occupation from an alien culture. 

A lot of the major capitals have been flattened, resulting in the human populace transferring itself into a multitude of small towns which look disturbingly similar - a fountain in front of city hall, a Main Street populated with various Mom and Pop stores, a high school with a football team, and the occasional punk just to liven things up. Everybody lives normally. Rock and roll is still on the rise, there's a television in every home and everybody's just repressed enough to keep the society working - for the moment. 

But the shadows of flying saucers still sweep over the town at regular enough intervals that nobody looks up anymore. There's no government anymore; just a puppet President who lets the people know what the aliens are planning. Periodically, the saucers land in order to disgorge squads of bug-eyed men, complete with spacesuits, fishbowl helmets, and green, slimy skin. They don't do anything to you unless you happen to provoke them - and they're kind hard to provoke, what with their alien emotions - but they do strange things when they land, ranging from mechanically throwing a ball for a stray dog while recording the results with an enormous array of scientific equipment, to systematically disassembling a store and moving the parts into one of their craft, apparently with the intention of rebuilding it somewhere else. For alien invaders from beyond the stars, they're pretty benevolent. They don't experiment on humans, they don't mutilate cattle, and while they do rule the Earth, they do so as a looming background presence. If you aren't in the resistance, you don't have anything to worry about. 

Of course, there's a level of resistance. People gather together in lonely farmhouses, or in the basements of drugstores, or in disused schoolrooms to plan out a way to resist the alien invaders - whether to poison their supplies, knock one of them out of the sky with a stolen National Guard artillery piece, or attempt a raid on one of their science squads. Every one of them lives in mortal fear of suddenly being caught up in the brilliant searchlight of a flying saucer, but they resist just the same. Occasionally, they even score successes.

In the present day, the resistance movement in Alien USA has managed to claim one or two "shadow communities" using alien technology to keep hidden; they've also riddled the skeleton of the United States' government with enough moles to be able to bring the weight of the US army on the aliens when they day comes. The alien plan has become somewhat clear: They're trying to build an exact replica of Earth on another planet - the buildings remain the same, but the terrain around it is very much like the moon. The resistance currently theorizes that the aliens are trying to recreate our planet on Planet X, with the eventual intention of transferring the human race to it, then strip-mining our world down to its molten core. 

Initial Tesseracti analyses have revealed a number of things. As the reigning echo theory suggests, the echo's world has been frozen in both cultural and technological development - a "doll world" effect, where everything is the same despite the development that should be taking place. Despite fifty years worth of cultural development, it's still the 1950's - duck's-ass haircuts, poodle skirts and live, black and white TV are the order of the day. The Tesseracti have found that technological progress literally can't occur. Force-seeding scientists with advanced technical knowledge simply didn't work, as the scientists seemingly forget what they were taught a few days later. 

Tesseracti activity in this dimension is fairly energetic. It's a good place to rest and recover, as long as you wear the appropriate hostileflague and don't screw around with any of the natives. Of course, since the dimension is so peaceful, some of the Tesseracti have created a new sport that they refer to as "duck-hunting." After attracting the attention of a flying saucer, the group tears down a road until the flying saucer is far enough away from civilization, then takes it down with something appropriate from the weapon orchards. All that's left to do once it hits the ground is to get the barbecue started, and you can have as much bug-eyed alien as you can eat. Those in the know say that bug-eyed alien tastes a lot like human flesh, which is gamy, like venison. The Tesseracti has put a one-per-month limit on saucers, to avoid drawing too much attention, but the ban is largely self-enforced. 

POTENTIAL RECRUIT TYPES:

THE HOOD MADE GOOD:

 You were in the resistance since you were twelve, helping your father set up the meetings for the resistance cells in the neighborhood, standing watch for saucers, shadowing alien sentries if they happened to wander through your neighborhood, and always, always watching the skies. When you were fourteen, the aliens captured your dad and two of his friends on their way home from a fishing trip, replacing him with a waxy-skinned automaton that said all the right things - but wasn't your dad. Your mother tried to kill him every day - a butcher knife in the throat, poison in his food, a back-shattering blow from a sledgehammer - but he would just regenerate, showing up the next day in his chair, shaking the dirt of the cellar floor off of his shoulders and into his bacon and eggs. 

You missed your dad, but you hated your neighbors worse than the aliens. They had just abducted your dad. Your neighbors knew that they'd replaced him, but they were too scared of the aliens to do anything but treat the replicant as if he was the real thing. You hated that. Hated them. You became a hood to scare them, to make them as much afraid of you as they were afraid of the aliens. You got rid of the automaton for good one night, tying it to a chair in your father's old rec room and setting it on fire, and driving your mother to live with her relatives in one of the hidden communities. 

On your way back, you had to almost drive off the road in order to avoid a car that was fleeing from a saucer, somebody in the back blazing away the pursuing craft with a tommygun. You'd dropped out of the resistance, but you followed them anyways, hoping that you could rescue at > least one of them from the inevitable abduction beam. When they brought down the saucer with what looked like a cross between a typewriter and a handgun, you couldn't have been more surprised. When they inducted you into the Tesseracti, and told you that you'd be fighting for something much larger than just the freedom of your echo, it nearly broke you - but you recovered. The grafts itch a little, but you've found out that the taste of bug-eyed man tastes a lot like victory. And vengeance. 

ALIEN QUISLING:

You always resented the aliens. You fired your slingshot at them whenever they flew overhead - you never hit them, but not for lack of trying. You always hid from them when they touched down, but you found yourself drawn to them anyways. You watched them arrest somebody that they thought was in the resistance, using beetles the size of your two clenched fists in order to hunt him down and paralyze him, all inside of his own house. As you grew up, you reailzed just how deep their influence went. They were the driving force behind your world, and everybody was terrified of them. And you started to envy that power, especially when you realized that for all of your friend's talk, they were just as afraid of the aliens as everybody else.

It started out small. You stood around and watched the aliens for a while while they cracked open a mailbox and scanned the letters with something that looked like a baseball-sized alien eye suspended in a cross between a specimen vat and a handgun.  They ignored you while you watched them, but when they were finished, one of them gave you a flat sheet of metal with a glyph engraved on it. You stared at it while they left, thinking.

It took you two nights to finish mowing the vacant lot so that the unmowed grass formed the shape on the sheet. It took you five minutes to pour the gasoline, one minute of fumbling before you lit the match, and a year of your life as the aliens trained you as their agent on earth. At least, you think it was a year. You kind of lost track of time when you were in the learning wombs, and when you came back, you knew that you couldn't ask anybody how long it had been since you'd been away. You've lost contact with everybody who knew you before, and you can't re-establish contact without arousing suspicion. It's not so bad, really.

You have to admit that the Tesseracti made the aliens look like a bunch of chumps. They had you out of your echo and into a liquid containment tank in two seconds, and by the time that you figured out that you could breathe the liquid, they'd deactivated every implant in your body and made it quite clear that you were on your own. You didn't kick at all. You were used to the idea of being in service of somebody more powerful than you were, and the Tesseracti had become that new somebody. Now, you're a double agent. Triple agent, really, since you've got a low rank in the resistance. The Tesseracti have called upon you a few times to do some external missions, and you've become aware that your world was just one of many - one of the better ones, but not as good as primal Earth. You're trying to find a way to play all three sides off against each other so that they'll let you free - but you can't talk about that now. They might be listening. Shhh. Shhhh.

POODLE-SKIRTED VALKYRIE

Two! Four! Six! Eight! Two in that diner, four when the collaborators tried to escape and ran into you on the way out, six in that raid on the National Guard outpost - you kinda regret that cute soldier that stumbled onto your team - and eight when you finally got aboard one of those saucers. Well, okay, the eight was your team's score, not your score, but you did kill five - one human, four aliens. Two, four, six, five just sounds like you forgot to count by twos, though, so it's always two, four, six eight when you hit the field and start cheering for your home team. 

You were exactly like everybody else. You did track and gym when you were in junior high, then moved to cheerleading when the time came - all of your friends said that you were pretty enough to do it. You were nervous that you'd start feeling the blood on your hands again when the time came to audition, but you came through without a hitch. You threw up a little afterwards, but it was okay. 

When the Tesseracti recruited you, you made a point of why you were so good at killing things. They checked you over, and they told you the truth: You were an exceptional human being, but you hadn't been enhanced. And you weren't psychopathic, even though killing didn't particularly bother you. 

So, you're doing the usual until the Tesseracti needs you again - spying, killing collaborators whenever you can, and enjoying the nervous silence that you get whenever you're around other members of the resistance. You'd never hurt any of them, of course, but it tends to be a little easier to get your way if they don't know that. You're living a pretty happy life, all things considered.

Blood's a bitch to get out of a poodle skirt, though.

BUG-EYED MONSTER OUT OF ITS DEPTH

This is _so_ not how it was supposed to work out. You were supposed to be a third-glanded corporal, occupation-phylum in the Ninth Private Army of Klortho the Magnificent, a member of a unit that had managed to bid high enough  - with the aid of your own small fortune - to get the plum duty of occupying Earth.  Every member of the unit had been married to each other before you left for the duty, and you even had a clutch of eggs that you thought would come to term, perhaps inspired by the Earth's chill climate. 

You were in pursuit of some thralls who had dared to fire at your craft when one of them suddenly flash-froze half of your saucer, rendering the metal so brittle that it only took a stiff crosswind to break it cleanly in half. You succumbed to the reflexive cannibalism of your species as you were plummeting towards the ground, and landed with your teeth buried in your love-brother's throat. 

When you woke up, you were on an operating table, with a surgeon-thrall leaning over you. You released the pheromones that should have incapacitated him, but he just laughed and squirted you in the face with water, which was humiliating. He explained, matter-of-factly, what you were - just a figment of the collective unconsciousness made solid - and what the Tesseracti had revived you for. You would never see your unit again, which was a relief, considering that most of them would still want to eat you. 

You'll never be able to work on primal Earth, of course, but you are cleared for the weirder kinds of echo work. You've still got a good idea of how your race's hyperscience works, and while it's a little primitive when compared to the Tesseracti's, it does the job. The man who introduced you to the Tesseracti, Dr. Henge, has actually become a friend of yours, since you both share the same black sense of humor and the ability to enjoy a good dissection. Maybe someday you'll go back and assassinate Klortho, gorge yourself on larval caviar and become the new Father-Mother of your race, but for now, you're enjoying the sense of superiority that your position brings.