¦ dialling in from Sky Bunker ¦
I love it when you play a piece of music and it whisks you back to some place / point in time; sonic librarians of the mind, responding to memetic codes, flicking through the filaments of neural tissue running up through the crown of your spine into your brain.
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From the album Dead Son Rising – related links: (Wiki Data) (Buy Amazon.co.uk)
So this track came on today and it took me back to November 2011. A period of time that sticks out against the backdrop of the year itself. It was the weekend I hired a car and drove the Yellow Dawn (Age of Hastur) players to a house on the edge of the sea (owned by my friend Lone Pine who is happy to let me use it when the need arises). The drive was through wild storms. A brief moment of sunlight when we arrived – me running on the expansive and deserted beach after we parked up, clutching a bottle of bourbon. Later, I’d be swimming in the chilly ocean, late November, under the alabaster glare of a full moon; the water like glossy black glass around me.
(Related Blog Post: Hayling Island – November 2011 – a Yellow Dawn weekend)
Awesome times. It was also a fantastic couple of days of RPGing. The players deep into Horror on the Orient Express, a CoC campaign I’d modified to be run within the post-apocalyptic horror adventure universe of Yellow Dawn.
Also nice to spend quality time with friends. Nice Guy Tony, Game-Breaker Hagen, and Doc Toc. Missing from the medley this time was Sharky Bones McCoy, now based in Madrid - in Spain, but he made the reunion we put together a few months later.
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The Gang
R2L: Hågen Landsem; Tony Jordan; David J Rodger (centre); Chris Halliday; Kelvin Wright
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The whole album is fantastic; if you were ever into the electronic punk of the late 70s or like Trent Reznor / NIN then this should be a walk Down In The Park just right for you.
This period also slots into the timeframe of the novel I recently started writing; one of six that I’ve had simmering for a few months now. It’s when I first began considering cyborg characters within the Yellow Dawn world, so my memories are riddled with concepts like:
Large joint casings with G-TAN honeycomb structural inserts, beneath custom-weaved carbon, aramid hybrid fabrics and glass, fibre-reinforced, epoxy. Not so much expensive to fix as time-consuming. Beneath the anti-ballistics, the mechanics were pretty crude; hallmark of the Boris brand. The bulk of the raw lifting power came through hydraulics rather than synmov – the latter being the synthetic muscle systems, vat grown, for more advanced chassis.
- Rise of the Iconoclast
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Rise of the Iconoclast will be the 3rd story to be set in the world of Yellow Dawn, following on from Dog Eat Dog (2010) and The Black Lake (due to be released August 2012).
Talking about Horror on the Orient Express; the group finally finished the campaign last weekend after a solid year of game play, starting July 2011. It’s been epic and a pleasure to run such a wonderful story; also very satisfying to see it working in the Yellow Dawn universe – with a few tweaks – demonstrating again how adaptable YD can be to absorbing scenarios from other RPG systems. You can browse session notes here.
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