Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Glam, Baby

In the latest installment of our highly dramatic podcast, Ken and I talk GMing Hillfolk, Chandragupta Maurya, socially conscious RPGs, and ransomed Michelangelo letters.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Underground Subterranean Fort

In the latest episode of our well-excavated podcast, Ken and I talk overly real CGI, us as scared kids, the Toronto mystery tunnel and Charlemagne vs. Irminsul.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Ghost-Kissed Pilsner

In the latest episode of our curry wurst of a podcast, Ken and I Talk Hannover Spielt, John Kovalic, the brothers Tsarnaev, and Paschal Beverly Randolph.

The Warehouse of Dorian Gray

Insurers specializing in high-end art have become increasingly worried by the proportion of their clients’ art collections stored in a small handful of warehouses, mostly in Switzerland. By stashing their art at a so-called free port, the hyper-rich avoid taxes and customs fees.

To rip this story from the headlines, we can see an obvious plot for a heist flick, in which the PCs plot a single score allowing them to scoop up enough masterpieces to stock a world-class museum.

Let’s bend it a little into a premise for a Night’s Black Agents scenario. A venerable vampire, who perhaps once shared absinthe with Oscar Wilde, has transmitted his soul essence into a painting. You know the drill—it ages, he doesn’t. The only way to destroy him is to burn the canvas. He’s stashed it in a free port, confident that its experts will give it all the security they’d provide to a Rembrandt or Picasso.

The mission: under the guise of an ordinary heist, get in there and grab the painting—either to end him, or gain leverage to squeeze favors out of him, in furtherance of your broader war against the international bloodsucker hegemony.

The Leng Connection

A Ripped From the History Books Scenario Hook for Trail of Cthulhu

The exact extent to which the 1938-39 Tibet expedition led by explorer Ernst Schafer served the Nazi agenda remains a matter of controversy. After the war, Schafer claimed to have come by his posting as an SS Hauptstrumfuhrer unwillingly. Also unclear is how successfully he derailed Himmler’s goal for the trip—to have Ahnenerbe pseudoscientists measure Tibetan skulls in an attempt to prove that Siddhattha Gotama, the historical Buddha, had been an Aryan in good standing.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is what Himmler thought he stood to gain by proving this, given the incompatibility of Nazi ideology and Buddhist thought.

If we fictionalize it a little, though, we get a Trail of Cthulhu scenario of high altitude high adventure.

When a politically fervid fellow inquirer into the mythos conspiracy goes missing in Tibet, the investigators follow his trail. They discover his plan to infect Himmler’s minions with contagious madness, by leading the Ahnenerbe to the Plateau of Leng. Do they help him destroy Nazi scum—or see the vast potential for backfire, and work to thwart him?

Source: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Stephen Batchelor

The Brain Printer

A Ripped From the Headlines Scenario Hook for Ashen Stars

In a development that raises the prospect of bespoke organs created with cells extruded through a 3D printer, a patient in a June 2011 procedure received a new windpipe grown specifically for him. 3D scanning technology provided the template for an exact replica of his original windpipe, sculpted from polymer around a glass mold.

In the future timeline of Ashen Stars, the utopian space empire known as the Combine once assiduously policed its ban on sentient-species cloning. Like so much else, this has fallen by the wayside in the frontier region of the Bleed. But so far it’s proven impossible to create true replicas of intelligent beings—you can make a physical copy, and even age it, but you can’t recreate all of the experiences that shape personal identity.

That may have changed, the lasers discover, when they get the terms of their latest contract. Famed inventor Sian Sar hires them to track down her ex-husband, Rog Trainor, who, without her knowledge, used her own scanning technology to make a complete cellular scan of her brain. She believes that he’s printed out a meat version of her brain, and is using it for competitive advantage—putting her genius to work on the same technologies her company is feverishly developing. Their mission: to bring Trainor to justice, and destroy the counterfeit of her brain.

The twist: Trainor has not only grown a replica of his ex-wife’s brain, but installed it in a clone copy of her body. The result is a new person, who shares Sar’s experiences and personality up to a point, but then diverged. She may not want to remain imprisoned and working for Trainor, but she doesn't want to be murdered, either. Do the lasers fulfill their contract, or accept her claims of full personhood?

The Once and Future Vice-President

A Ripped From the History Books scenario premise for Trail of Cthulhu

It is 1936. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, hailed for his New Deal innovations, is easily the most mystical of cabinet secretary in US history. A self-proclaimed spiritual seeker of Theosophist bent, he openly connects his occult beliefs to his liberal politics. He even convinced fellow mason Franklin Roosevelt to pluck the Great Seal, with its eye and pyramid design, from obscurity to a new spot on the back of the dollar bill.

Neither man knows it yet, but in four years Wallace will become Vice-President. Someone who does know this is the New England dowser and sorcerer Eliphas Haslam, who has learned to perceive non-linear time. Using spells of soul migration acquired from Joseph Curwen, the terminally cancer-ridden Haslam aims to possess a new body before his old one dies.

Both he, Wallace and at least one of the PCs are on the guest list of a seeker’s conference outside Arkham. The action begins when a car crashes into a telephone pole outside the resort hotel where the conference is convening. Haslam, the sole passenger, is dead inside the car—but impossibly, seems to have been dead for hours!

The horrible truth is that Haslam managed to anchor his soul in his dead body long enough to reach the conference and migrate his soul to another of the guests. (The spell only works on hosts who have opened themselves to occult perception—which includes not only every participant at the conference, but any PC with a rating in Occult or Cthulhu Mythos.) He’d hoped to take Wallace’s body, so he could ride it to the coming Vice-Presidency, then kill Roosevelt and become President. But, despite the setback, the weekend is young, Wallace is still at hand, and Haslam may yet body-hop his way to the White House.

Informational Rescue

A Ripped From the Headlines Scenario Premise for Ashen Stars

As this article reveals, the conversion of mortgages into complex financial instruments did more than provoke the 2008 global financial meltdown. The data-tracking process used to spin fragments of mortgages off into a tradeable derivative—creating a sort of mortgage slurry, if you will—now makes it impossible to determine whether homeowners, banks, investors, or anyone at all really owns certain real-world property. A nebulously owned property can’t be used as collateral, undermining a key value of everyday finance.

Speaking of slicing and dicing, this springboards a scenario that perfectly fits the Ashen Stars setting, where information loss has been one of the prices paid by a former stellar utopia torn at the seams by recent warfare.

Unlike most planets of the Combine, the synthculture planet Trump’s World practiced 20^th century capitalism –albeit in idealized, tourist-park form—even before the Mohilar War. Private ownership of property underpinned this historical reenactment economy. Now info-saboteurs have struck at the heart of the system, scrambling the worldwide property database. The PCs are hired to track down the McGuffin on which the entire economy rests—the single accurate copy of the pre-disaster real estate registry. Complicating the mission: plenty of Trump’s World moguls want the database back up—after they get a chance to fiddle with it, just a little…

The Forest Game

A Ripped From the Headlines Plot Premise For The Esoterrorists

When viral videos appear on the Internet documenting a mystery sound heard in farflung locations throughout the world, skeptics declare them obvious fakes. It doesn’t take a sound engineer to tell that they’re electronically generated, possibly from a sample of the Godzilla scream.

But the Ordo Veritatis knows that a hoax, no matter how transparent, can touch off supernatural events, if it opens vulnerable minds to the possibilities of the supernatural. As its governmental contacts take the videos down, the PC investigation team heads to the Alberta first nations reserve where some joker has been broadcasting weird noises in the forest. But as they attempt to triangulate his location, they realize that a portal to the dreaded Outer Dark has already opened—and they’ve just walked through it. In a borderland mixing qualities of Earth with that of the terrible beyond, hunted by predatory entities, they must find and neutralize the hoaxer’s speaker setup—and hope they wind up on the right side of the gateway when it closes.

Minotaur Planet

According to a conspiracy theory both odd and oddly un-sinister, a youthful Barack Obama, as part of a secret CIA program, used to teleport to Mars. Why, the official denials only serve to confirm it!

To rip this from the headlines into an Ashen Stars scenario...

Teleportation technology doesn't appear in the game setting. It's a notorious plot-hoser. And in a roleplaying game you never have to leave out an establishing shot of a shuttle for pacing or budgetary reasons.

With this in mind...

A wealthy woman hires the lasers to locate her missing daughter, Rika True. Like many missing persons contracts, the arrangement calls for them to bring to justice anyone responsible for any harm that may have come to her. Rika, they learn, was last seen applying for employment with the utopian Eden Corporation. They find the uncharted company world that serves as its headquarters: a lush paradise that provides Eden settlers with a life of ease and luxury. They discover that Rika won the coveted right to participate in an Eden teleport experiment. The experiment turns out to be a scam to feed willing volunteers to a bi-dimensional predatory entity. The twist: it's the entity that makes the planet inhabitable. If they destroy it or drive it away, the atmosphere immediately becomes toxic. Should the lasers reveal this to the populace, the residents decide that they'd rather continue the modest sacrifices than abandon their paradise. Do the lasers bring the system crashing down, as their contract demands, risking the lives of thousands?

The Arsenic Eaters

As with other GUMSHOE games like The Esoterrorists and Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars GMs are encouraged to look to the news for episode inspiration. Like the writers of the various Treks and the nouveau Battlestar, they might use the space opera form to examine issues of the day.

Alternately, they can start with pop science articles and either work their way to political allegory, or not, as desired.

For example, a recent study indicates that drug addiction piggybacks on the same neural impulses that lead animals to crave salt.

In the episode this inspires, the crew is hired to investigate a series of attacks on Combine ships near the Bleed’s far edge. They discover that the hostile party is a heretofore unknown advanced species called the gretherin. Although at first they seem merely xenophobic and implacably hostile, a twist reveals their motivations. A gang of human and cybe drug runners has infiltrated their home world, engineering a synthetic drug by hijacking the gretherin’s necessary craving for arsenic, a trace metal they require to regulate metabolic function. The gangsters aim to addict the entire planet to a substance only they can manufacture, draining it of its wealth. The gretherin take this for an act of war waged by the entire Combine. Can the PCs avert a nasty local conflict by taking down the drug gang and destroying the technology used to create the drug?