The Paranoia Effect

Most gamers fondly remember West End Games' classic silly roleplaying game Paranoia. Long story short, you work for the all controlling Computer as a troubleshooter, eliminating mutants & traitors. The catch, of course, is that your character is a mutant traitor. Hilarity (and laser fire) ensues. Great silly fun when it's expected. Here's a thought for running a one-shot with pre-gen characters: Bring this concept into some other genre & play it straight. I think it'd work particularlly well in a horror setting like Call of Cthulhu or Chill. After all, no one in their right mind is going to read anything in a CoC game, but if you're related to the Whatley's or the Marsh's through your maternal grandmother then you really aren't all that sane, now are you? (cue creepy, gurgling laughter)

Meme from Tam's

Tam at View From The Porch posted this meme. You type in the letters of the alphabet into your address bar & fess-up to the first thing that shows up.

First things that come up on mine, not counting pop-up ad urls,

A:http://abacuscomics.com/Online_comics/abacus_online_comics.htm

B:http://babelfish.altavista.com

C:http://www.cafepress.com/minipro (Once I scrolled past a crapload of stuff from my C: drive.)

D:http://www.dagradivisual.com/media/design/pinkerposter-draft.jpg

E:http://www.ebay.com

F:http://farts.alexkujawa.com/archive.php?date=20070106.jpg (ROFL!)

G:http://www.gastateparks.org/content/georgia/parks/maps/FortMountain-sitemap.pdf

H:http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/07/25/watch-it-shred-car-eater

I:http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/photoshop/07-23-04-albums/keepsleeping.jpg

J:http://www.jamespiatt.com/handbags.html (For the record, I followed a link to this site. Link was from Tam, I think. Looks like something she'd link to, anyhow...)

K:http://kalashnikov.guns.ru/models.html (Like anyone's suprised at that one...)

L:http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2007/08/06/liberal-bloggers-conference-sea-of-middle-aged-white-males

M:http://maddox.xmission.com

N:http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/nwprod/analysis/carib/gfs/00/ten_s_loop.shtml (Either weather charts or a trip toy. Not sure which.)

O:The intranet home page of my employer. (No link because you can't get there from outside anyhow)

P:http://pages.ebay.com/help/account/closing-account.html (Buh-by, you GFWs!)

Q:http://www.quizilla.com/users/craezame/quizzes/Which%20Firefly%20character%20are%20you (It thinks I'm Mal. Usually I get Jayne or the Operative.)

R:http://radar.weather.gov/radar_lite.php?rid=mpx&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=yes

S:http://www.sat-gps-locate.com/english/index.html

T:http://tancos.net/wp/2007/08/02/anomarokarisu

U:http://unitednuclear.com (Bwah-hahahahaha!)

W:http://www.wafb.com/Global/story.asp?s=6943340

X:http://xavierthoughts.blogspot.com

Y:http://www.yahoo.com

Z:http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/u/U/saddam_hang.gif

Inspirational Music part 2, "Lyin' Eyes"

This one doesn't so much inspire a setting as it does a character.

City girls just seem to find out early
How to open doors with just a smile
A rich old man and she won't have to worry
She'll dress up all in lace and go in style

Ok, so she's a gold-digger. Big honkin' deal, you say. Yes. But take the next few couplets out of your World of Brightness...

Late at night a big old house gets lonely
I guess ev'ry form of refuge has its price
And it breaks her heart to think her love is only
Given to a man with hands as cold as ice

D'oh! Looks like Ms. Golddigger has become Mrs. Ventrue. Lucky for her that the old sap has fallen for her so hard.

So she tells him she must go out for the evening
To comfort an old friend who's feelin' down
But he knows where she's goin' as she's leavin'
She is headed for the cheatin' side of town

Looks like she's going to have time to rethink her decisions, though. A loooooooong time...

She gets up and pours herself a strong one
And stares out at the stars up in the sky
Another night, it's gonna be a long one
She draws the shade and hangs her head to cry

Now, did he bring her over, or was it a rival who did so to cause him to loose gravitas? Perhaps the crying is in response to him having fed the lover to her as a way to help break her away from her humanity.

My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
You set it up so well, so carefully
Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
You're still the same old girl you used to be

Looks like she manages to keep the beast in check in the end. Just remember that even if you're playing Vampire, you don't have to take your musical cues from Robert Smith...

All Hail The Mouthless One!

Hello Kitty Tarot?!? Ieeeeeeeeee!

A very long Friday...

Karen's Friday sounds as busy as mine. Got up at midnight. Did laundry. Finished packing. Got to the airport for 4am to get checked in. Went back to my car to drop off books to make room for clothes in my carry-on because my suitcase was 5lbs too heavy, and there was no room in my gun case for them. Fly to Huntsville by way of Memphis. Get the rental car & drive to Chattanooga. (This being cheaper than flying to Chattanooga itself... and faster as well!) Get to the con hotel an hour & a half late due to traffic & a time zone change. Get checked in. Get my badge. Pay Mad Mike for the knife he's making for me. Catch up with a friend or two. Go back to the room and crash for a few hours. Then get up, get into Viking garb, and wander the halls drinking mead from a cow horn until the wee hours & I had to get some sleep before the Saturday range trip.

Crossover setting idea: Survivors of the Caribbean

So, what happens when you read back through your old copy of Aftermath! while listening to Jimmy Buffet's "I've Made This Same Album 28 Times"? If you're me, your mind starts moving in odd directions. Well, even odder directions given that it's me we're talking about... Except for Cuba, there's not all that much in the Caribbean likely to have caught a nuke had WWIII happened. Plenty of sailboats. Plenty of oil if you can find a rig that hasn't been destroyed & can figure out how to refine the stuff. Full of colorful characters even without the whole "end of civilization" thing.
Swap out those ass-less chaps and leather jacket for Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and imagine a version of "Waterworld" that halfway makes sense. This can be played realistically or over the top.

Realistic means that life is likely to be nasty, brutish, and short. No antibiotics, no more spares for your engines, and a slow slide back to 1600's era technology as what little trade is left gets strangled due to the lack of anything resembling the policing of the sea lanes. Pirates in a realistic setting are likely to be very bad men indeed.

Over the top is more fun, and thus much more likely to be played & enjoyed. In an over the top game, it'll be perfectly acceptable to say something like, "Avast ye lubbers, I be here only for the gazzoline. Arrr!" as mohawked lunatics on Skidoos menace the residents of an isolated oil rig. Mad Max on "Talk Like A Pirate Day" and Captain Jack Sparrow with an AK-47 should be the order of the day.

Inspirational Gaming Music Part 1

That's inspirational as in, "Hey, that'd make a great plot/setting/NPC", not necessarily tunes that "&%*#ING RAWK!". For the first installation of this subject, I'm going with the great grandsire of the type: King Crimson's The Court Of The Crimson King. Pretty much everyone who's ever run a swords & sorcery game has mined this one for ideas. Given access to a time machine, I wouldn't be surprised to find a copy of the album on Gygax & Arneson's turntables back in the day.

This "prog rock" classic is younger than myself by a few months, and has admittedly aged better than I have. The album of the same name was recorded in August through September of 1969, and was released in early October of that year. It's got a fuzzy, dream-like quality that sets the mind going in odd directions. It's almost a legal way to trip. I can only imagine what it's like while actually on mind-altering chemicals.

All that said, most older players will flee at the first mention of chanting black queens, fire witches, & yellow jesters in a D&D-like setting. They've seen it too many times. Therefore, use it in pretty much any other setting. Base the background court politics of something ostensibly mundane on the song. Perhaps in your technothriller, that wisecracking Naval Attache from the Chinese Embassy is the one pulling the strings to bring about a coup back home and part of his plot involves getting Dr. Rice to convince Janet Reno to visit Bejing. For that matter, I shudder to think what a good CoC GM could do with it...