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.