Ravings of a Textual Deviant

The most recent IRE reminds us that the last cheap real estate in New York is long gone.

TodayJune 12th of this year marks the 340th anniversary of the reincorporation of New Amsterdam by the English into the colony of New York. Its an important and momentous occasion, a turning point not only in the development of New York, but America in general. ((L.E. Modesitt Jr. Ghost books, as a divergence, have a Dutch-dominated New York and New England surviving British attempts at incorporation).

So, the handover of a valuable colony or country between rivals…and the people in the colony caught in the crossfire…

The setting is Hong Kong; the date is June 1st, 1997. The People’s Republic of China is set to assume control of the island in thirty days. The players are members of an organized-crime syndicate who have to realign their business contacts and processes in order to prosper under the new regime. Unfortunately, their boss has just gotten killed, so they also have to track down the perp, avenge the murder, escape not one, but two justice systems, and keep business running as usual. The name of the game is “Hong Kong Phooey.”

The most-recent-less-one IRE gives us E3, the Electronics Exposition, to work with.

Given that I tend not to run high-tech games, I’m going to start my players off at a State Fair or County Fair, circa 1910. Eventually, they’re sure to wander into the sideshows and carnival games. And what better way than to transition them almost unnoticeably, into Murphy’s World. Not only do the players have to figure out how to get their characters back to their home dimension, they have to figure out whether or not they’ve actually managed to do so successfully…given that they’d end up back at the midway where they started. Or would they?

This week’s IRE whisks us away from politics (thanks very much!) and hands us a scientific question, to wit: The rediscovery of a thought-lost creature and its impact on the PCs and their world.

Jurassic Park-type scenarios dance in my brain with wild abandon.

However, I’m not going there. I think that bringing back an intelligent species that was thought to be extinct (or mythological) has a much higher potential for mayhem. For example…mer-people. They’ve had enough of underwater sonar, overfishing, coral bleaching, icepacks melting, motorboat collisions, and agricultural runoff, and they’ve decided to come out of hiding and do something about it. In my mind, the only question is whether the players are mer-people or land-people—and I’m having trouble coming up with a good answer for that.

In honor(?) of the U. S. income tax filing deadline, Paul presents the following:

Across the kingdom, public buildings are being outfitted with gold-leaf roofs. From temples of the state religion to slim towers on top of coliseums, it becomes clear that the taxes of the kingdom are going toward an enormous amount of ostentation of buildings. Those foolhardy enough to try and take some of this gold are met with increased patrols of the constabulary. Visibly, too, the taxes are not being spent on the things that the characters would expect…roads, general works projects and so forth.

Why? Why has the lord/lady of the land turned the taxes and revenues toward this seemingly non-sensical goal? Has the Queen simply gone mad? Is she under some sort of influence, mundane, magical or other? Is there some unfathomable logic to this that the characters will regret uncovering?

Of course the characters should regret uncovering the unfathomable logic…there should be a very serious, very disturbing reason for the gold roofing. As to what the reason…well, gold has a lot of uses besides money. It’s a catalyst, an anti-corrsive plating material, reflects heat and infrared radiation, it transmits green light, and it has several medical and dental applications.

My first thought is that a gold roof on a building is like an expensive and very large tinfoil hat. In fact, given that gold is so heavy, the roof would probably have to be gilded, rather than gold, otherwise the weight of the roof might compromise the building’s structural integrity. However, you don’t need a thick layer to take advantage of gold’s reflective properties. So, the gilded roofs are reflecting…something. Given that it’s a fantasy capmpaign, I’d say that the country’s infrastructure is being readied for a large-scale conflict with an entity that has some corrosive and/or heat-related weapons in its arsenal. Dragons, for example, or some of the nastier combat spells. Presuming that the players had gotten to this point in their musings, the next natural steps are a) to find out who the likely opponent is; b) discover the cause of the brewing conflict; and c) decide what they want to do about it.

Short and sweet, but not easy: Paul asks

What if a deity passed away in a campaign? Let’s use a generic fantasy setting.

In my mind, the obvious question is “who’s going to inherit the position?” Imagine, if you will, the mad scramble both earthly and divine under the circumstances. I’d set the players up as priests and/or laity of a particular “candidate” and run a scenario chock full of election-style campaigning, lobbying, and PR. The players would be the grass-roots organizers; I’d have them preaching on street corners, going door-to-door, dealing with the sabotage caused by the other candidates’ organizers, and so on.

In reference to the BP oil refinery explosion in Texas, Paul presents us with:

A center for an important resource goes boom.

Continuing my long habit of swiping other peoples’ ideas, I’d make this an Elven Special Forces mission. (Elven Special Forces is Doug’s creation.) The players are members of an ESF team. Their mission is to destroy a facility in another country that makes a dangerous, illegal, magical drug…or so they’re told. Turns out that the Director of ESF, who comes from a family that manufactures a vital, legal magical product, has decided to destroy a rival manufacturer’s facility. Will they find out before they blow up the factory—and how high up does the conspiracy go?

This week (whew, I’m caught up!) Paul hands us the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s completion of the first of his major papers that would revolutionize physics .

I’m in the mood for something funny this time, so I’m going to whip out my Toon sourcebooks and start waving the cosmological constant (a concept that plagued Einstein for the rest of his working life) around. A prominent Mad Scientist publishes a paper on the Unified Theory of Toonitivity. The author is lauded by the Mad Scientific establishment and the general public alike. Soon, everyone is convinced of the absolute and complete correctness of the Mad Scientist’s view—so simple, so elegant, so…toony. The characters can feel the very fabric of Tooniverse change around them, conforming to the new UTT on the strength of everyone’s belief. Unfortunately, the Mad Scientist’s work contains a fatal flaw, which begins to manifest itself first in small oddities, then ever more fundamental ways. (Imagine the laws of cartoon physics slowly unravelling! That’s comic potential.) The characters are faced with the total destruction of the Tooniverse as they know it. Armed with the Acme Catalog, can they build an anti-Doomsday device to save the world? Or will they give up and attend the last Wassamatta U. football game ever played?

In reference to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Paul asks, “What happens when the [occupying] troops go home?”

If you look at history, more often than not the answer is “a civil war.” In my version of this game, the characters would be soldiers in the occupying army of country Y who don’t want to go home—they’ve been deployed in country X for over a decade and have decided that they actually prefer it to whatever home might have to offer. With “How You Gonna’ Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm after They’ve Seen Paree?” as a soundtrack, the characters have to figure out how they’re going to get out of the army and back to their lives in country X. Along the way, they stumble across information that could be valuable to any one of the several political factions gearing up to take over the government of country X as soon as the last occupying soldier crosses the border.

Paul asks how we’d work the newly-discovered Homo floresiensis into a game.

As soon as I read this, my mind flashed back to the scene in Galaxy Quest in which the crew first encounters the aliens on the planet with the beryllium spheres.

I’m better now.

Is it me, or does this cry out “Indiana Jones-meets-Call of Cthulhu.” In my mind, the real question is the species of the characters…and which species is the anthropologists. Because I’m me, I’d set up the game so that the characters are Homo floresiensis covertly studying Homo sapiens. For thousands of years, they have propogated myths of fairies, elves, and so on to keep their existence from being a subject of series study by the “big people.” Now that someone has finally discovered their ancestors’ archeological remains, they’re going to have to put in some overtime…

This week, Paul presents us with the Miracle on Ice; to wit:

Our 13th “Unlucky” IRE harkens back a quarter century to one of the most stunning events in Hockey, or any other sports, history. The unheralded, plucky US Hockey team beat the defending Olympic champion Russian team (enroute to eventually beating Finland for the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics). This story of David versus Goliath is the fodder for this outing’s IRE.

I love ice hockey. I love everything about ice hockey. I especially love Olympic ice hockey. But that’s not what I am going to talk about.

No, I am going to continue ripping off other authors and drop my players into the Big Game themselves, per Robert Aspirin’s Myth Directions. If you haven’t read the book, the short version is: the main characters find themselves facing two professional sports teams in a three-way match for the Trophy. The only rule is that players are not allowed to use edged weapons against each other. (My favorite bit in the book is when one character asks about the guy wearing stripes. “Leave him alone, he’s neutral,” the other replies.)

Heck, I’d probably go for a two-for-one ripoff and make it Quidditch for Blood and Revenge. I’d love to watch my crew run riot against the equivalent of, say, Manchester United.