Game Fodder / Story Fodder

[Gorkamorka]

Classic Lovecraft would be black cultist in the swamp.  Not racist at all...

Having said that.  You could do it as whities  fighting the evil black cultist.  You just have to humanise the black slaves / cultists.

Part of the horror is that the escape slaves were desperate enough to call anyone for assistance.  And eventually someone really bad answered. Now the ex slaves are stuck in their swamp doing horrible things in the name of their saviour.  They can't not do what the saviour says because he makes them able to live in the swamp (Protection from hunger, disease. insects?).  Can't leave the swamp because then they get captured again. 

The players are the whites sent into the swamp to stop the actions of the escape slave, then find out why they are doing what they are doing and have to deal with the mythos problem at the core of the swamp.    If they just shoot the ex-slaves then the Mythos problem will just keep going and get worse.  If they manage to get information from the ex-slaves then there is a glimmer of hope of stopping said bad thing in the swamp.

Doable?

[trinite]

Yeah, the interesting thing is that we know exactly how Lovecraft himself would write this scenario: it's Chapter 2 of "The Call of Cthulhu," complete with sinister swamp mulattoes and everything. The fun of this scenario is going to lie mostly in subverting that form into a totally different type of horror.

You guys are thinking in the exact same direction I am. The PCs are going to be escaped slaves. I'm probably going to set this in the 1850's instead of during the Civil War proper. I think there won't be any white characters in the entire scenario, except some terrifying slave catchers and probably a few cultists -- nothing brings people together quite like Cthulhu!

Like most of the Civil War scenarios, I'm looking to design it as a one-shot, though the whole setting could easily be a campaign seed.

[Alethea]

An international, invite-only convention of people who solve physical puzzles for fun — who else is hearing secret society, possibly hackers in their down time or safe crackers on break?

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/solving-the-mystery-of-the-secret-international-puzzle-party

[CADmonkey]

So in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp, there were apparently secret villages of free black people, mostly escaped slaves, living in almost total isolation from the outside world. For like 150 years.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/?no-ist

SECRET VILLAGES OF FUGITIVE SLAVES DEEP WITHIN THE SWAMP. Do I have my next Civil War Cthulhu scenario? Yes, yes I do.

There's a movie about a Brazilian community of freed slaves: Quilombo.  It's about the quilombo of Palmares, a democratic community of nearly 30,000 people which survived for almost a century despite repeated attacks by the Dutch and Portuguese.

[Twisting H]

That is awesome.

[trinite]

So in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp, there were apparently secret villages of free black people, mostly escaped slaves, living in almost total isolation from the outside world. For like 150 years.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/?no-ist

SECRET VILLAGES OF FUGITIVE SLAVES DEEP WITHIN THE SWAMP. Do I have my next Civil War Cthulhu scenario? Yes, yes I do.

There's a movie about a Brazilian community of freed slaves: Quilombo.  It's about the quilombo of Palmares, a democratic community of nearly 30,000 people which survived for almost a century despite repeated attacks by the Dutch and Portuguese.

Wow, sweet! I've gotta check that out for inspiration. There's also a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel set in the swamp, titled Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. It was her follow-up to Uncle Tom's Cabin and features a much more militant protagonist.

[Twisting H]

Fodder for Ross' next Payday inspired game

"In 341 robberies, the Pink Panther gang have stolen jewels worth £276m. But who are they? Havana Marking meets them"

2013

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/22/pink-panthers-diamond-thieves-documentary

[Alethea]

The Roman den of debauchery and licentiousness literally dropped into the sea

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/10/the-sunken-city-of-baiae.html

albeit about 8 centuries later...

[Redroverone]

So, does anyone want to see the FBI files on Nikola Tesla?

https://vault.fbi.gov/nikola-tesla

[Twisting H]

GOOD FIND 

[CADmonkey]

Some floor plans for your Buffy/Stranger Things/what-have-you RPGs:

[trinite]

Dutch WWII-Era Shipwrecks Have Mysteriously Disappeared

Delta Green would like to know -- what are they building down there?

[Twisting H]

Celestial Mysteries: fast radio bursts from deep space.

http://www.nature.com/news/long-sought-signal-deepens-mystery-of-fast-radio-bursts-1.20993?WT.ec_id=NEWSDAILY-20161117

Long-sought signal deepens mystery of fast radio bursts
A discovery that was supposed to help reveal how the bursts arise only thickens the plot.

Elizabeth Gibney
17 November 2016

What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in the sky from billions of light years away is one of the most perplexing mysteries in astronomy. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of high-energy γ-rays that looks as if it was emitted by the same event that produced a fast radio burst (FRB) — a correlation that was predicted to help whittle down the zoo of possible explanations for the origin of FRBs.

“If FRBs have γ-ray counterparts, it would be hugely constraining of models and extremely interesting,” says Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

But as well as exciting astronomers, the nature of this particular finding offers no clear answers and deepens the FRB riddle. “The association, should it turn out to be true, is an entirely unexpected and astonishing development,” says Shri Kulkarni, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Orbiting observation
The γ-ray signal, described in a paper published on 11 November in The Astrophysical Journal Letters1, turned up in data from a NASA orbiting γ-ray observatory called Swift. A team from Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in University Park found that a γ-rays flare at around the same time and from the same direction as FRB 131104, a burst named for the date it was seen by the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in Australia, on 4 November 2013.

One puzzle is that the two signals portray different pictures of the underlying source, which seems to be as much as 10 billion light years (3.2 gigaparsecs) away. Whereas the radio burst lasted just a few milliseconds, the γ-ray signal lasted between two and six minutes, and it released much more energy in total than the radio burst. “We’ve pumped up the energy budget more than a billion times,” says study co-author Derek Fox, an astrophysicist at Penn State.

This has big implications for the FRB’s origin. One leading theory suggests that FRBs are flares from distant magnetars — neutron stars with enormous magnetic fields that could generate short, energetic blasts of energy, and do so repeatedly, as at least one FRB is known to do. Although magnetars are thought to produce γ-rays, they would not emit such high energy and over such a long time, says Fox. “This is a severe challenge for magnetar models,” he says.

Black-hole contender
Instead, the γ-ray signal resembles events that Swift has observed previously, which scientists identified as either a shock-wave blast from a supernova or a surge in radiation from a supermassive black hole as it swallowed a star, says Fox. The problem with both of these options is that neither is expected to produce radio bursts.

Another possibility is that both the γ-radiation and radio burst came from a collision between neutron stars. But if that is true, it would not offer an explanation for all FRBs: colliding neutron stars are thought to be relatively rare, whereas estimates suggest that FRBs are common, occurring around once every ten seconds somewhere in the sky. (Astronomers have so far detected only around 20 FRBs, largely because radio telescopes usually only look at small patches of sky). Fox notes that there are already hints that FRBs could be generated by more than one type of source.

Many astronomers also need convincing that the FRB and the γ-ray signal detected by Swift come from the same source. Statistically, the chance that the γ-ray burst would occur at the same time and from the same place as the FRB by pure chance, if there were no real association, is just 1 in 800, says Fox. And there is not any other known source in that direction that could produce the γ-ray burst, he adds.

Although such a result would usually pass the statistical threshold needed to conclude that the two signals are produced by the same source, Kaspi says that the finding is so unprecedented that more evidence is needed. “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” she says.

More data needed
Kulkarni is also cautious. “The association could be due to chance coincidence of a blip in the γ-ray sky with a single FRB,” he says. “We would definitely need a few more such associations to take this hypothesis seriously.”

Fox hopes to find more. As new and existing telescopes begin to hunt for FRBs, the number of known bursts should rise from the current count of around 20 to more like 200. If that happens, Swift should be able to check more than a dozen of these locations for correlated γ-ray bursts using the centre of its field of view.

Detecting γ-ray signals centrally would produce more statistically significant results than for FRB 131104, which was picked up at the edge of the telescope’s field of view, where noise can more easily mimic signals. And this, in turn, would increase scientists’ certainty that a signal’s correlation with an FRB is not just due to chance. “Then the confidence level would be one in a billion,” says Fox.

[Twisting H]

Re: Ruin, Carcosa or Spooky Apartment buildings.

/tg/ has had three good threads on the topic of horror in Apartment buildings, titled "Urban Unease".


http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/50129254/

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/50159577/

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/50184198/

[CADmonkey]

This has all kinds of potential 'emergent properties' that could be used in a modern/sci-fi horror rpg:

Vespers: Series II

2016   
London Design Museum

Christoph Bader  Dominik Kolb  Rachel Smith  Sunanda Sharma  James Weaver  Prof. Neri Oxman 

A Collection of Death Masks By Neri Oxman & Members of the Mediated Matter Group
Masks created for The New Ancient Collection by Stratasys curated by Naomi Kaempfer
To debut in Fear and Love at The Design Museum, London, November 24th—April 23rd

Novel technologies for Additive Manufacturing are enabling design and production at nature’s scale. We can seamlessly vary the physical properties of materials at the resolution of a sperm cell, a muscle cell, or a nerve cell. Stiffness, color, hygroscopy, transparency, conductivity, even scent, can be individually tuned for each three-dimensional pixel within a physical object. The generation of products is therefore no longer limited to assemblages of discrete parts with homogeneous properties. Rather like organs, objects can be computationally ‘grown’ and 3D printed to form materially heterogeneous and multi-functional products.

Throughout history, technologies express the spirit of their age in design, and are embodied within the archetypes they create. Some archetypes—such as automobiles, airplanes, garments, prosthetic devices, and building skins—have evolved to improve the relationship between object, body, and environment. Others have become relics. The subject of Vespers, the next embodiment of the death mask, is a relic. The objects of Vespers are artifacts, which unite information architectures, manufacturing practices, and—at times—biological augmentation, to grow rather than assemble. Vespers’ death masks, however, are not intended to memorialize the dead. They are designed to reveal cultural heritage and speculate about the perpetuation of life, both culturally and biologically. By pushing the boundaries of cusp technologies—such as high-resolution material modeling, multi-material 3D printing, and synthetic biology—they express the death mask’s deeper meanings and possible future utility, thus bringing it back to life.

The custom of the death mask in the ancient world was believed to strengthen the spirit of the deceased and guard their soul from evil on the way to the afterworld. In this view, death is a conduit to a form of rebirth. The mythical notion that the soul can be guided from a state of death to a new state of life inspired the design of Vespers.

The Vespers collection comprises three series, each with five masks, that are related through time. Here, we unveil the second series. Modelled after Lazarus, this series—the present—explores the transition between life and death, illustrating the progression of the death mask from a symbolic cultural relic—as represented in the first series, past—to a functional biological interface—as revealed in the third series, future. It moves beyond the exterior surface and into the interior volume of the mask, employing a contemporaneous interpretation of the soul’s journey.

Using spatial mapping algorithms, the culturally coded surface colorations and truncated geometries in the first series are transformed into colored, internal strands within transparent, smoothly curved volumes in the second. The second series elucidates embryonic forms through complex internal geometries as it prepares to support the re-engineered life of the third series. In this series, it is the interplay of light that reveals the internal structures. Like spirits (from Latin spiritus, meaning “breath”), these structures reference the distribution of the martyr’s last breath.

The New Ancient collection produced by Stratasys, a 3D printing company, marries ancient crafts and designs of past civilizations with advanced technologies to reimagine design in and of the modern world. Created for this collection Vespers expresses the intertwining of Fear and Love through the continuity of death and life. Vespers ‘masks’ five imaginary martyrs. Each martyr is memorialized three times, through sequential interpretations at three different moments: the past, the present, and the future.

The New Ancient collection was curated by Naomi Kaempfer, Creative Director of Art Fashion Design at Stratasys. Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group would like to thank our collaborators at Stratasys, including Naomi Kaempfer, Arita Mattsoff, Boris Belocon, Gal Begun, Yoav Bressler and Ori Moalem

And there's many more photos in the linked article.