Yellow Dawn Session Notes 18th May ¦ Aigues-Mortes – East to Prudence #1

Heading East on a mission…

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by British Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also has two novels set within it: Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

Aigues-Mortes established itself as a Living City with perfect defenses against the Infected. However only wealthy survivors get to live within the walls. Everyone else squabbles in the mud outside the walls – and this is where the Canal Market exists

RESUME 12th March  YD +10 (ten years after Yellow Dawn happened)
Bela and Winter to return to Aigues-Mortes. They’re now free men. They’ve left their jobs here at the market outside Aigues Mortes. Being back is strange despite it only being a few days since they’ve left.  Bela sees Abu and can’t stand the Somalian little piece of shit so walks away, tells Winter he’ll be back in a month – says he needs to be alone in the wilderness to work out what it was he saw that night at the sanctuary at Fable.

Meanwhile, Abu is harassing the young good-looking Portuguese Alex and his new friend (a slim, swarthy maker of moonshine from Marseilles: Jean-Luc).

Baron Toten Reich arrives on his horse, with a new character in tow: an Irishman called Brendan Black – there’s something not quite right about Brendan’s appearance, the eyes are a little too close together and his facial features are narrow and haunted. Dressed all in black, much like the Baron, but that’s where all similarity ends: Brendan’s clothes are caked in mud, his pale skin is greasy with sweat and grime from days being on the road. He exudes an aura of strangeness and seems to not say much but linger back, observing, everything, very closely.  (He is a low-level Road Mage.)

Toten Reich gives the group instructions to head east, to a small survivor settlement built around the tiny fishing port of Prudence. It’s recently been doing very well with fantastic catches of fish and a small tech industry setting up there funded by some UDP science groups who are interested in aspects of the local area.  Oddly, in the past 2 months, 24 fisherman have been found dead – adrift in their boats a few miles from Prudence. All of them asphyxiated.  Toten Reich has friends in Aiges-Mortes who have business interests in the booming fishing industry there and want to make sure nothing is going to jeopardise it. The characters are to travel east, 100 miles, to Prudence and see if they can find out what’s going on.

Toten Reich agrees to pay the group 60 coppers a day, in total, for up to 2 weeks of time. He wants word back from them in 2 weeks about what is happening, otherwise he will cease payment until word is received (after 2 weeks are up).

The rest of the morning is spent selling what they don’t want to take with them and buying what they need.

By early afternoon they set off.

Several days of travel get them only 60 miles. It’s tough going – and this is whilst following the relatively easy route of the Interlink. It doesn’t help that on 3rd day they are ambushed by 11 bandits – desperate half starving men who barely have clothes on their ragged bodies.  These men run onto the road in two groups wielding club-like-branches. And then… recognition flashes between Winter and the bandit leader.  It’s Marius! The man Winter and Bela forced away from Fable. Enraged, the 11 men surge in to attack the people who caused them so much trouble. It’s a long a bloody fight.  Neither side are well equipped. But eventually Winter gets into the swing of things with his two tomahawk blades and the new guy, Jean-Luc proves to be especially deadly and bloody with an old farm scythe he’s brought along.

Later that day, coming to the end of an exhausting trek and reaching the 60 mile mark, bloodied and bruised, the team find an abandoned utility building tucked away behind some trees, surrounded by chain link fence long since smashed down in places. The building exudes decay but Alex and Jean-Luc see it is massive and may hold some items of interest. They step inside.  Brendan and Winter are uneasy. Only a couple of miles back they had to skirt the edge of a Dead City.

Cries of panic from inside realise their worst fear is true. Alex and Jean-Luc come dashing outside.  Three Infected in pursuit.  he Infected scream their dry rasping dead shrieks and sprint at the characters.  It’s an especially dark, bloody and gruesome fight… hand to hand, with Winter and Jean-Luc desperately pushing back and slashing with blades, doing nothing but hacking chunks of Infected flesh off these undead monsters until eventually causing enough damage to cause the things to collapse, dead.

Winter’s clothes are covered in Infected gore. He has to strip off to dispose of the garments. (Jacket / Trousers).

RESUME
Evening of 17th March YD+10.
<> What Clothes is Winter going to wear?
<> Team need to set up a camp.
<> FOllowing day team have still got another 40 miles to travel just to reach Prudence.

GM NOTES:
Rank rolls required.
All money up to date.
Bela has some raw components and specialised components (written on your notepaper).

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn – the struggle of post-apocalyptic survival

The hardships lead players to push desperate characters towards considering crime or taking more risks

post-apocalyptic survivor – image credit: unknown

¦ Dialling in from the Sky Bunker ¦

I ran a session of Yellow Dawn (The Age of Hastur) yesterday.

Great game and very different flavour to the high-tech, big action, thunderous magickal power play that’s been running for  the past few years: a previous set of characters who rapidly established a settlement of their own (using rules in the game book for renovating damaged structures) and went on to accumulate a lot of wealth, technology and experience.

All a lot of fun, but it usually meant the characters (and players) were able to side-step many of the issues and hardships of survival. They had a vehicle. They had access to fuel and food and water.  And they had equipment that made life comfortable

This new character group have started dirt poor, starving and stuck in a rut.  No transport.  Low survival skills.  Hemmed in by wilderness, the danger of the Infected and the threat of dying from exposure if they try to get away.

The soft pace of the session really allowed me to build up strong visuals of the area in southern France that I know and love, personally. The medieval crusader fort of Aigues-Mortes, a location I’ve used in the Yellow Dawn novel, Dog Eat Dog and the massive, globe-spanning campaign Shadows of the Quantinex.  It was great to bring it to life in the mind of the players.

But also to indulge in the full background of the new characters; why are they in Aigues-Mortes, what do they want; how will they get it?

I guided them into a simple, small scenario that required them to travel 30 miles to collect goods from a remote settlement. It was a chance to properly use the Wilderness Survival rules (consequences of fatigue and not finding food or water; risk of exposure, dangerous critters and bad weather), and I was very pleased by the result. The characters, not experts, survived, but were uncomfortable, in pain and becoming thirsty.  They players experienced vividly the shock of how “at risk” they were to falling foul of the elements, because of their low skills.  It meant that when they found their destination, the remote settlement, and were treated to hot food and warm beds – there was a tangible sense of “enjoying such simple luxuries”.

 

It’s a good case in point, that keeping the characters poor and hungry for the first few sessions really builds up the tension of survival.

.

Their low ability to cope with Wilderness Survival also served to reinforce how trapped the characters are, eking out a hard existence in the grubby market outside Aigues-Mortes. Forced to sleep on the dirty floor of the stall every night, no money for proper accommodation, and actually starving because of not having enough money to pay for proper food (one character suffered a reduction in STR stat over course of 6 weeks due to poor diet)… the players are now discussing desperate measures to try to break the vicious downward spiral. If they stay here, they’ll just waste away, starving, until they grow so weak they can’t do their jobs and then they’ll be tossed out into the mud with nothing.

It really was a bleak experience.

Rather wonderful to have it come to life so vividly. *smiles* Both with narrative, and the hard numbers of the rule systems, showing their lack of funds against the cost of living; and the system generated consequences of not eating enough over time.

You can read the scenario write-up here.

It was also a great chance to use the “map of the land” system, where the GM can fairly quickly generate an expanding route littered with ruins (for scavenging), settlements and other rare oddities. Plus the ever-present danger of encounters with people, wildlife and things that should not walk the Earth at all.

It’s been a great case study of getting back to basics. Seeing how players begin to shift their characters towards crime or high risk strategy’s in order to progress; and this creates more tension, more drama and more opportunity for GMs to weave in further plots for the game.

Just had a text from one of the players who was here yesterday:
“Forgotten how tough it is just to survive. I wonder how the others will fare.”

Result.  And they’ve not even encountered the Cthulhu Mythos yet.

We typically play one Saturday every three weeks. Bookmark this link to read further updates on the character’s exploits to survive – or delve back into the bigger action plots the players went through with previous characters.

.
.

YD 2.5 – from LULU

Paperback : from LULU ¦ Hardback (with black cover): from LULU

Primary Rulebook (2.5) This book is crammed with everything you will need to create characters and run scenarios. [] Features narrative examples of key themes • The Influence of Hastur • Medical theories on the Infection • Zombie surges • Dead Cities • Wilderness survival • Comprehensive scavenging system and how to repair or build things with resources • Backgrounds and motivations of government bodies and corporations • Computer hacking and drug abuse • High-tech immortality options • Non-human characters • Enhancements through cyberware and bioware • Weaponry, equipment and armour • Complete character generation and development system • Complex political, corporate and quasi-religious tensions • Schools of Elemental Magick, occultism, demonology, and the alien horrors of the Outer Chaos – the Cthulhu Mythos.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 9th March ¦ Aigues-Mortes and the Star of Eternal Life #1

A New Character Group

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also now has two novels set within it, Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

BEGIN 15th Feb YD +10 (ten years after Yellow Dawn happened).

This is a brand new character group for the players.

Storm Winter: a Native American Indian who had been travelling through Europe ten years earlier when the shit hit the fan with Yellow Dawn.  With an innate “body-builder” physique, he’s survived by providing protection and security to people who have needed his help.  Over the decade he’s drifted south, seeking warmer climes, hating the frozen and prolonged winters that savage survivors.  Finding himself in coastal region in the South of France, he migrated to the former medieval crusader fort of Aigues-Mortes.

Bela: once a Hungarian engineer in the UTOC Civil Defence Force, he fell sick like the majority of his platoon when the 1st pathogen struck. But unlike the 70% who died horribly over the next few days, he went into a coma and then woke up… changed.  The military personnel who survived Yellow Dawn had Bela locked up and seemed ready to perform some brutal experimentation on him, in order to try to understand what the heck was happening to the global population of the planet.  Several of his former battle colleagues got him out: recognising the human that was inside of the “monster” being caged in the penal block.  Since then Bela has survived lynch mobs and all the terrors of waking up to be no longer quite human.  Hounded, harassed and hated, his life followed the path of many Changed – suffering the abusive terminology and prejudice reserved for what survivors were calling ORCS.  Drifting south, he made his way to Aigues-Mortes and got stuck there.

Aigues-Mortes, fortified survivor settlement in South of France

Canal Gate Market is situation bottom left, outside the high walled enclosure of the settlement, squeezed in between the canals and amongst the trees (long since chopped down for firewood by early survivors). It’s a landscape of mud and filth and desperate people.

Aigues-Mortes

Within the high medieval walls, survivors are wealthy, successful, political creatures that do whatever they can to ensure their lives remain comfortable and well-supplied with the resources they need.

Winter and Bela do not have such a privileged existence. They live outside the fortified walls.  Always at the risk of any Infected that might stumble into the area – although 10 years after the Infection first showed itself in the screaming, shrieking, biting, flesh-tearing victims that sprinted through populated areas… Aigues-Mortes has done what it can to clear as much of the risk from the surrounding land as it can. There is no Dead Zone. Just the odd cluster of scavenged buildings and lots and lots of wildly growing foliage.

Both Bela and Winter have survived outside the walls for several years.  Bela works for Anitole, a weaponsmith and blacksmith, at the Canal Gate Market. Winter works for Gaiyan, a former boxer, now a greasy, filthy, overweight shadow of the man he used to be, who lives and works out of a carbo plastic hut on the edge of the canal, next to the market, providing bodyguards and security for the market and merchants who need such people.  He always has a cold, unlit, saliva drenched stub of a cigar in his flabby mouth.  Winter walks around the Market ensuring the daily influx of desperate survivors who arrive at the area – and get washed back by the armed militia on the gates of Aigues-Mortes – don’t become a nuisance as their desperation turns them to theft and violence.

It is a grim life for both Bela and Winter. They never make enough money to buy proper food and are often starving.  Winter, best friends with Bela, sleeps on the floor of the market stall, huddled next to the warmth of the idling forge.  Bela rarely feels the cold but appreciate the companionship of his friend.  Besides, neither of them could afford to pay for anywhere to stay.

Life is a struggle.

Water is three times normal price due to difficulty of supply; the local area is very salty.

Outside the walls, people don’t give anything away for free.  And the market area is “controlled” by a criminal gang under the rule of Herriot. His Somalian right-hand thug has an acute dislike for Bela – and the other two Changed – two woman who live and work in the scavenged debris heaps.   Both Bela and Winter have discussed killing the Somalian many times because of his sneering, aggressive taunts towards Bela.

One day, Bela is told by his boss that a young “wealthy” couple have come to Aigues-Mortes to sell a large stash of scavenged metal. They don’t have the metal with them… too fearful of travelling with it. But they sell it to the boss for a low price, on the agreement that the boss will have to go and collect it himself.  The boss sends Bela. And talks to Winter’s boss – who agrees to send Winter with Bela.  This means neither Bela or Winter get paid any extra as it is considered part of their job.

They hike 30 miles, part way along the Interlink and then turn off along a badly overgrown horse trail.

Sleeping one night in the ruined shell of an old farmhouse they discover how hard it is to be comfortable; it’s a grim night. The next day, cold and thirsty, they push on to their destination.

They arrive in A_______, a small wealthy settlement of about 40 survivors, and discover a strange funeral taking place. They are mostly welcomed by the residents who are delighted to have strangers to talk to – and new stories to listen to, although Bela and Winter have very little fun stuff to discuss due to their lives being so grim back in Aigues Mortes – so they talk about who they used to be. But this pleases the residents of A_____ no end.

Strange things occur later that night, with the recently buried body seemingly coming back to life to exact revenge on employees who betrayed his final dying wish; the son and daughter of the dead man compete with others to find a missing piece of jewelry, the star of eternal life.  There is the servant, the corrupt lawyer, and a mysterious Egyptian gentleman who arrives in a jeep in the early evening, claiming the Star belongs to him.

It transpires the dead man wasn’t dead at all but had been so convinced he was dying – and would be resurrected – that he went into a comatose state. And then woke up in his own tomb.

Bela and Winter are involved in capturing the lawyer – who murdered the Egyptian and tried to flee with the Star.

The son and daughter are grateful. As is the settlement of A_____.   All the locals give Bela and Winter a little food or something for their return journey. It’s a token gesture but one that means a great deal to both of them because it is at least some small reward for what they have done.  They received nothing but a handshake and some gratitude from Marcus and Claire (the wealthy son and daughter who return to Marseilles).

Ironically, they get to drive back with the jeep (and the lawyer) allowing them to transport the stash of scavenged metal back to Aigues-Mortes quickly and safely.  They also stop at the ruined farmhouse and spend a day and a night there, doing some asset stripping, gathering metal and other raw components that Bela might be able to use later.

Returning to Aigues-Mortes, both Bela and Winter experience an overwhelming despondency. They don’t want to exist like this. The lawyer departs, with the jeep (as agreed, to return to Marseilles to carry out his side of the bargain that led to him not being strung up for killing the Egyptian or trying to steal the Star). And so the daily grind of life in the market starts to sap away their strength. Literally, Bela’s character loses a point of 1 STR due to not being able to afford a proper diet every day.

Ramparts of Aigues-Mortes

Both characters (and the players) experience the hunger of desperation and the craving to break out of the negative cycle. To do something before they waste away and die here.

But they’re also aware of the trap they’re in. Because they don’t have the skills to really survive out beyond Aigues-Mortes. Their bad night in the ruined farm-house made them acutely aware of how unprepared and unskilled they are.  They could leave Aigues-Mortes, and they could conceivably find enough food and water to survive… but they would never generate an income and they would fade into the filthy peasant things that you find on roadsides along the interlink.

They have no money to really go far or get equipment. So they’re faced with the prospect of turning to crime – or finding some kind of lucky break. Or risking a Dead City run.

Interesting days ahead.

RESUME:

6th April YD+10. Aigues-Mortes market. Two new characters (Chris and Tony) should come online at this session. Meanwhile, Winter has spent several weeks waiting for Bela to finish making a crossbow from some of the scavenged resources they found at the ruined farmhouse, but he keeps making mistakes.Time drags by. They are becoming desperate.

Cash: notes written down and up to date.
Raw Components: 21 KG
Specialised Components: 1KG.
{kept in an unsecured location within Anetole’s market stall}

GM NOTES:
All rank rolls done and up to date; including occupation rep rolls for Bela and Winter.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 16th February 2013 ¦ Roots #2 – end of a character group

Roots

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also now has two novels set within it, Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

RESUME 25th SEPT YD+1 (LATE EVENING )

Clint was visited in his jail cell by a local priest; a father Allberry. He took Clint back to the small house attached to the church (closed) and gave him a bed for the night. In his room he finds a curious photo of a lake, taken a sunset, with figures standing between trees – something ceremonial? A map on the wall shows there is a lake a few miles north. Clint was wary but exhaustion took hold and pulled him into sleep (or maybe something else did).

Paul is with Corrine. She makes him food (possibly drugged) but then seems to have a change of heart; throws away the meal before he can take a mouthful and takes him to the Diner.  Meets Stu Woolley and Chris KNight. She leaves him with them. They drink into the night.

Marcus is with his hostess for the night. A woman called Janine who “comes onto him” but then abruptly backs off – as if sensing something familiar about him.  Remember that Marcus has a potent Mythos Taint due to his encounter with Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath in Europe (Horror on the Orient Express). She says… “You have the Spirit within you – why are you here? In this settlement?”

Marcus isn’t too certain about her question but he goes with it.  She takes him to the edge of Lake Nemi where the fuck like wild things – biting – punching – shrieking. Exhausted but not finished, she takes him to what looks like a figure of an ancient satyr carved into the truck of an old tree – except the figure appears to be frozen in the act of emerging from the tree. There by the base is a wooden cup filled with a vile stinking fluid  – something that Marcus remembers intimately from his experience in Europe. She offers it to him, “Do you want to know your Spirit?”
He drinks.

27th Sept YD+1
————–
Josh wakes up in Daphne’s house and is unable to contact any of his team. He spends time in town trying to find them, becoming increasingly worried. Eventually he finds Clint at the church; he finds Paul hungover but rested at the Old Store…. but there is no sign of Marcus.  Later, Clint also vanishes again after going to find Father Allberry. Clint finds himself by an abandoned church at Owl Creek – he rings the bell but it’s daylight and nothing happens. Meanwhile, Josh and Paul have threatened Janine – grabbed her, tied her up, hurt her to make her talk – to learn where Marcus is. By the lake, she says. But Deputy Steel arrives to check up on her and all hell breaks loose. They disarm and tie up the Deputy. Intimidated by Paul – who clutches the deputy’s throat with his ornate brass-like robotic hand; the deputy explains that the town has always been this way. And that Karen, the missing girl, if she is anywhere will be by the tree (this transpires to be the deputy setting the characters up for a fall).  Later, Josh uses his profound occult powers to Possess the deputy and walk back to the sheriff office to recover their guns.  The Sheriff asks him what he’s doing and Josh (as the deputy) manages to talk a way out of the situation.

Josh and Paul escort the deputy out to the edge of the settlement, into the forest; the deputy leads them to the Lake – where they find Marcus, asleep and partially transmutated into wood, but he shifts back to human and wakes when his compatriots call to him.  Around now, Clint also makes his way to the lake having left the abandoned church to find the place he’d seen into the photograph.  Together again, the team make their way with the deputy leading to the Tree.

It’s a dark and foreboding place.

And as the sun concludes its descent towards nightfall – the place comes alive with the things that are normally dormant (sleeping, looking like wooden figures) during daylight.

It is an epic fight for survival.

But Marcus finds the Taint which has infected his psyche and his physical being since the traumatic encounter in Europe, has a profound and mesmerizing influence on him here. He becomes entranced by the tree – and the new fluids now coursing through his veins lead him to suffer an episode of wild, furious abandon.

The things, dozens of them, that come streaming out of the forest like a swarm of humanoid locusts take note of him and their leader stops to challenge this… would be imposter.  Marcus and the leader square off but Marcus loses the Alpha battle – however, he accepts the authority of the leader and so joins THEM.  Turning against his compatriots.

The other characters are firing assault rifles on full-auto. Burning up 9,000 credits of ammunition every 2 second pull of the trigger (emptying magazines).  They slaughter a couple dozen Things, but are eventually overwhelmed by them… grappled, disarmed, manhandled. Josh uses potent magic to blast them with energy bolts, but he too is finally grappled and dragged to the ground – he is stripped naked and finds himself the victim of the ugly lust and unrestrained passions of these monsters.

“An amusing moment with a lightening bolt.”

There is a fresh clash between Marcus and the leader. Marcus kills him with a blow to the skull – and finds himself becoming the new alpha of hundreds of these Things.

Josh, Paul and Clint find themselves chained to The Tree. Two women arrive. A female matriarch and the missing girl. “Choose one”, the matriarch says to the girl. Clint is chosen. Held down by the Things, he is stripped naked and mounted by the girl. She then cuts his throat at the final moment of climax.  Paul and Josh scream in horror – helpless and agonised by what they’re witnessing. They also lose a dramatic amount of Anxiety points. Clint’s corpse is torn apart by the bare clawed hands of the Things and eaten.

THe night passes and they are ignored. When daylight comes, the Things return to the state of being wood. Marcus is nowhere to be found.  The bloodied, shredded remains of Clint lie nearby… buzzing with flies.

As a fresh night approaches, Josh recalls a difficult occult operation  that he knows might free him. It enables him to flicker between different planes of reality. He tries it and remarkably succeeds – and then endures a terrible struggle to escape the “gravitational” pull of the monstrous entity that occupies the heart of the tree he is chained to. It pulls him IN, so that as the flicker operation ends he finds himself entombed within the solid core of the trunk. He would have died instantly, if it wasn’t for the properties given to him by the Sedefkar Simulacrum.

He tries again and after a mighty battle of wills, escapes. He frees Paul and they flicker, together, back to a safe place. But the forest starts to come alive with the Things which are in pursuit now.

Josh opens a portal. Back to Little Boston, Paul screams. But  Josh takes them back to the Sheriffs office. He wants his stuff. Stepping through, Paul and Josh enter a struggle with the deputy and then the sherif. Eventually overpowering them.

Josh steps into the sherif’s back office where the woman lies bleeding, but alive; and he skins her… taking her flesh.  He then does the same with the deputy. It is hard for Paul to keep his nerve.

But all this delay allows the THings to make a rare appearance in town, as the sun sets. And they crash through the doors, swarming into the office.  It all happens again. Paul and Josh are about to be overpowered. But then… like a miracle. A blaze of golden light fills the street. Outside – an incredibly ornate brass-like version of a steam train has materialised in the road with a figure stepping down, an outline of a human but filled with the fire of the sun, swirling clouds of plasma and energy within his outline… he points at Paul, and Paul comes.  Whilst the THings cower and harden back to wood in the light.  Josh tries to follow but the figure (an Elder God) refuses him to approach: you are accursed.

Paul vanishes with the God and the train.

Josh is surrounded by the swarms of wooden horrors now coming back to life. He flickers away to a safe distance, then makes another portal and returns to Little Boston.

Paul is not there.

Marcus has vanished too – no doubt living a life of indulgent passions of eating, fucking, hunting and killing in the forests around Gerlock.

Clint is remembered with sad fondness.

!!! NO RESUME !!!
This scenario marks the end of the Little Boston group for the foreseeable future. The group is now parked on ice. A fresh set of characters are going to be created – dirt poor and with back to square one with skills and abilities. Probably based outside the survivor settlement of Aigues-Mortes, a medieval crusader fort on the coast of the South of France (as featured in the Yellow Dawn novel, Dog Eat Dog.

<>Josh is planning on heading back into Space – taking the evil Sedekfar statue with him.
<>Paul will be experiencing adventures with Elder Gods – but is likely to reappear at Little Boston, in the train, as if no time has elapsed whatsoever.
<> Marcus is happy with his fate.

About ROOTS

Roots is a scenario written by Simon Brake for the RPG, Call of Cthulhu.  I gratefully received a beta version to play test.  Also demonstrating again how flexible the Yellow Dawn universe is to accommodate the storylines’ from other RPG systems.  Simon Brake will be making Roots commercially available later in 2013.

About Simon Brake

Graphic designer. Writer. Father. Happy go lucky. Trying to get more writing done nowadays, but it’s hard to find the time. Still, the words are trickling out into the world and people are liking what they read. This year’s goal: a novel?

Graphic designery person. There’s more info (and graphic designery stuff) on my MySpace page – www.myspace.com/breakerspace – but to be honest I’ve probably got more up to date stuff here nowadays. MySpace is self advertising. Facebook is for reconnecting with real life people. And Twitter… Twitter is where the real party is.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 15th December 2012 ¦ Return to Little Boston – Roots #1

Roots

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also now has two novels set within it, Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

RESUME 25th SEPT YD+1
At New Boston, about to set off to the small settlement of Chambrig on request of Captain Kennedy who has close friends whose daughter has “run away” – he’s too busy with training new police recruits in New Boston.  Meanwhile, Josh is abruptly suffering terrible pains in his joints, his skin is starting to discolour and ugly lesions are rapidly forming on his flesh. Any initial attempts to perform a ritual of cleansing fail. And then he gets a radio message from Dr Zach to say that a very disturbing statue has appeared on the roof of the main building in Little Boston – he recognises it as the item the team discussed on their return from Horror on the Orient Express and has made sure nobody touches it – but, can Josh come back and URGENTLY remove it as it is causing a bad vibe at the settlement.

• Team depart New Boston and return little Boston.
• Josh, Marcus, Paul and Clint head up to roof and find Sedefkar Simulacrum there. Clint finds himself entranced by it whilst Paul and Marcus hang back. Josh performs Ritual of Cleansing and suffers fear and terror for an hour after – but the effects of corruption vanish.
• Team head back to New Boston then on to Chambrig – meet parents and young brother sister of Karen.
• Paul gets photo of Karen.
• Josh finds second letter in Karens room (but that’s all).
• Team walk to campsite that night, interview Ali’s parents, then Ali and Max and Steve – discover that Karen didn’t have argument or run away but left according to a plan – heading west, heading towards Gerlock along the eroded road.
• Sleep at campsite – although Paul forced to sleep on his own by a fire pit near woods due to his nocturnal condition.

Monday 26th Sept YD+1

• Team wake up to sound of wood being chopped.
• Try to interview and angry young man with a jeep but he tells them to mind their own business (fuck off) and drives away.
• Team head West on foot – to find angry young man being held up by UDP militia on a road block.
• Team visit gas station and tell Chris and woman there they’re heading to Gerlock looking for missing girl.
• Team finally reach Gerlock around 6pm, both Josh and Clint are suffering aches and pains from a whole day walking (25 miles).
• Town has about 90 residents with a 3:1 female to male ratio.
• Healthy, vibrant looking people. Simple but quality lifestyle – less survivors of Yellow Dawn and more like, they’ve just always been there, getting on with life.
• Encounter Cynthia / Janine on road with young girl and boy.
• Josh, exhausted from walk talks Cynthia up on offer for a place to stay – goes to her house. crashes on sofa whilst she cooks him spicy food; as he eats she tells him how lonely it is living here without a man in the house. Josh gets a bad vibe about eating the food – and doesn’t, just leaves.
• A group of men hang about in centre of town square – watching the characters with muted interest. When characters try to talk to them they slink off, not interested in much conversation (they’re all strong bodied, able looking men; manual workers on the farms etc).
• Clint, Paul, Marcus visit Sheriff, only get to talk to Deputy Steel – he asks them to place weapons in his locker.
• He takes them to see Joy -
• Joy readily admits to sending letters to Karen and is a little bothered that Karen has gone missing, probably whilst on way to see her – but not as bothered as maybe she should be.
• Clint accepts offer to spend night at Joys.
• After a shower he finds his clothes gone – he flees house, climbing through bathroom window wearing just a towel – it’s a little before sunset. He runs across a garden to a woodshed; a few minutes later the neighbours (women) lead Joy to where he’s hiding. Are you OK they ask? Perplexed.  Clint goes back inside with Joy – but then runs away again, into the night. Later he’s picked up by Deputy Steel for being a weirdo. Arrested, he’s locked in cells.
• Josh, Marcus, Paul, meet the old man who runs the general store. He doesn’t seem too bothered about life in Gerlock; been here all his life, nice place – even if the woman are a little forward.
• Josh does go back to Cynthia, apologising for behaviour – spends night with her. She tries it on but he avoids her seductions.
• Marcus sleeps at Janine’s house – yet to be described (Next Session).
• Paul sleeps at Connies house – yet to be described (Next session).
• Nobody has been to visit Father Allberry yet or been into the Diner.

RESUME
Evening of 26th Sept YD+1 (Monday) For Marcus and Paul. And Early AM of 27th Sept for Josh and Clint.

GM NOTES:

• None

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 20th October 2012 ¦ Return to Little Boston – Ghost Dog #2

Ghost Dog

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also now has two novels set within it, Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

Resume 2 A.M on 21st Sept Y+1
Characters turfed out onto the streets of New Boston, with Andrew.
Truck and weapons are locked up by main entrance.

Josh applies magical energy to Andrew’s wounds, providing some relief but he is still terribly weak and confused.

Team take him back to truck to rest; but later that morning Captain Kennedy finds them and takes custody of Andrew again.  The team get involved in research after a ghostly apparition daubs the name Kenley on a smudged bit of glass. They eventually find that Kenley died during 1600s trying to protect a young woman that he’d foolishly fallen in love with – despite being married himself. The young woman was accused and eventually charged with being a witch. Both Kenley and the woman were executed on Kenley’s estate – on request of his pregnant wife, who watched on, spiteful and pleased to be exacting revenge for this embarrassing affair.

However, the young woman was able to imbue part of her energy / soul into the unborn child – and so formed a guardian spirit (hound) that travelled with the bloodline through history.

Team track down the estate and Tempest mansion in a remote area 15 miles north-west of New Boston. They go there – encounter a small frightened community of survivors: a man recently arrived at the abandoned mansion, full of strange questions and frightening abilities (A road mage).

The team approach the abandoned estate cautiously. Three cats…. actually 3 demons – protect the boundary and there is a tense amount of conflict as the demons attack the team. Eventually the road mage himself comes out and takes on the team personally – and would have probably destroyed all of them if it wasn’t for the curious abilities (extra power and protection) of Joshua Crow (thanks to Sedefkar Simulacrum he was tricked into activating at the end of Horror on the Orient Express).

Marcus is temporarily blinded and Josh is hit by a pile-driving blow of raw energy (bouncing off his magical aura).

With the road mage dead – the demon cats disperse (the two that were physically destroyed failed to take possession of Josh, Clint or Marcus).

The team investigate the estate and discover an opened grave by the base of the great tree;  there lies the skeleton of the young woman executed as a witch several hundred years earlier -  the team deduce the road mage was trying to use occult powers to sever the link between the corpse and the protective hound, with the intention of taking control of it for malign purposes – and at the expense of murdering Andrew (to break the link).

Consequences are that Andrew is saved – he makes a full recovery and gets to publish his article about the low-level criminals taking hold of the north end of New Boston; the result is that Captain Kennedy gets more resource to police that part of the town.

RESUME 25th SEPT Y+1
At New Boston, about to set off to the small settlement of Chambrig on request of Captain Kennedy who has close friends whose daughter has “run away” – he’s too busy with training new police recruits in New Boston.  Meanwhile, Josh is abruptly suffering terrible pains in his joints, his skin is starting to discolour and ugly lesions are rapidly forming on his flesh. Any initial attempts to perform a ritual of cleansing fail. And then he gets a radio message from Dr Zach to say that a very disturbing statue has appeared on the roof of the main building in Little Boston – he recognises it as the item the team discussed on their return from Horror on the Orient Express and has made sure nobody touches it – but, can Josh come back and URGENTLY remove it as it is causing a bad vibe at the settlement.

GM NOTES:

• All characters HAVE received COOL rewards for succeeding in the scenario.
• All characters do need to attempt a RANK ROLL
• Josh needs to resolve the issue with his rapid deterioration
• Review Augustus Clay III actions within Little Boston / involvement with Captain Kennedy in a certain prohibited group activity and the proximity / attitude of the nearby UDP garrison.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 15th September 2012 ¦ Return to Little Boston – Ghost Dog #1

Ghost Dog

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. It also now has two novels set within it, Dog Eat Dog and The Black Lake.

.

Resume 17th Sept Y+1
The characters have returned from Horror on the Orient Express and settle back into the almost idyllic swing of life in Little Boston

• Joshua Crow
• Marcus Carfax
• Paul Bishop – and his bizarre magical train

Everyone takes stock of what they have achieved and what they possess.

All other characters that having been “sitting on ice” within Little Boston community were reviewed.

All inventory items were reviewed.  Everything to do with Little Boston is up to date:

Caveat: output from food growing and fuel production needs to be checked at end of month, along with risks from bandits and other wilderness types who might take notice of such a prosperous survival settlement in the middle of nowhere.

Josh is worried about the satyr-like behaviour of Marcus Carfax – ever since he had a deep and potent interaction with  Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath in Belgrade (see relevant session notes here) he’s been seducing women left right and centre. To be so “corruptive” here in the closely knit community of the farm, which includes several woman – who are in relationships with other male workers, could be harmful to the smooth running of their food growing and fuel production business. The characters have made Little Boston self-sufficient in this respect.  It could be a disaster if things are disturbed by internal tensions.

Meanwhile, one of the farm hands, Chet, approaches another farm hand – Clint – about a favour, and this results in Clint getting the characters involved in a trip to New Boston (23 miles east on an eroded road, part of the interlink).

20th Sept Y+1

• Josh, Marcus, Paul and Clint take the 2 1/2 ton truck to New Boston
• They’ll nearly blasted off the road by a truck in convoy with armed outriders (Akinolo Odusola).
• They talk to captain Kennedy – details of Marsha and her missing boyfriend Andrew (Sage), and the details behind Andrew being sectioned and his escape.
• They observe and are observed by a couple thugs of the Bronte gang.
• Paul asks around town and learns there are only about 20 thugs in the Bronte gang, that they resent the UDP coming in to take over; they make moonshine and run gambling nights including dog fighting (which is where Andrew was injured) – they’re aggressive but not known to be murderers – but Bronte himself looks like he’s trying to expand the local operation.
• Team visit Marsha at the house she shares with Andrew:
  • - a friend called Patrick is there, hostile to their arrival. He’s skinny and stinks of bong smoke. He’s been sleeping on floor, whilst Marsha sleeps on sofa (she doesn’t want to be in her and Andrew’s room right now).
  • - Josh goes on Astral plane and encounters a hound by Andrew’s bed- it tries to attack him.
  • - Team get Andrew’s sketch book which shows a storm blasted tree, in a clearing in some kind of forest near a house (not drawn) and a large stone slab lying in overgrown grass with a massive black hound watching over it —– in the drawings the house is always looking AWAY from the viewer, as if it has seen something else arriving. Marsha says that Andrew has always dreamed of an old lady and this dog and that they’re normally nice but two weeks ago thinks started to change, the dreams turned bad, 7 days ago Andrew caught by Bronte’s filming the dog fighting, 3 days ago sectioned and escaped.
• Team travel with Captain Kennedy to part of New Boston where clothes and food are going missing in neighbourhood. Clint finds Andrew (Sage) hiding in burned ruins. The team get him to a squalid B&B for safe-keeping, he’s exhausted and weak and badly injured (wounds with no blood)… something keeps attacking him in the in the night …. Andrew says “It doesn’t want to harm him, it’s being made to harm him.”  But the wounds are getting deeper and closer to vital organs.
• That night, sleeping on straw and scratchy blankets in damp basement of B&B, Marcus discovers that Paul’s clockwork heart sneaks out of his mechanised torso and has a passion for sucking blood {think Chronos}.  It leaps onto Marcus’ thigh causing (-1 STR). There is much screaming – with result that owner and her beefy son come running downstairs demanding to know what’s going on. A bribe of 100 credits sends them away. Then an hour later in the wee hours of the night/morning Andrew has another dream attack that leaves him with new wounds visibly appearing in front of the characters eyes – an invisible, intangible assailant. Lot’s of screaming has them ejected from the B&B this time.

Ghost Hound

RESUME
2 A.M on 21st Sept Y+1, turfed out onto the streets of New Boston, with Andrew.
Truck and weapons are locked up by main entrance.

GM NOTES:

• Review Augustus Clay III actions within Little Boston / involvement with Captain Kennedy in a certain prohibited group activity and the proximity / attitude of the nearby UDP garrison.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 28th July 2012 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express # 13

Sofia – Istanbul

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

RESUME

17th Feb @ University of Sofia

The team begin to display dark veins and diseased discolouration to their faces and heads. It is a clear sign that the head of the statue is now within their domain.

The team are arrested by a thuggish Detective Ratuk:
I know about your journey across Europe and the blood you’ve left spilled in every destination. You might not be the Orient Ripper but he travels with you – and yet knowing this you still come here?

Image from lolailo.co.uk – Orient Express Diary 1920s CoC – Click to go there

Meanwhile, Josh continues to have horrendous visions through his eye, that was plucked from his skull by a mad cultist – and then insanely implanted in the cultist’s head. Josh is viewing momentary glimpses of what this cultist can see.
- inside a cavern lit with oil burning bowls.
- a massive crowd of men in ceremonial robes / middle eastern theme – but with bare chests to expose torsos covered with different patches of flesh, badly fused – the arms of different bodies stitched or fused onto others.
- a mountain of severed heads piled up on the floor, the oldest, lowest ones now skulls – with moist, decomposing ones one top.
- a blurred figure attacking these people, comes into focus
- It’s Count Drogo in his true form, twisted, blackened and stiff like bark from some ancient tree, the centuries of corruption (from the statue) and being locked away are evident in his deformed figure.  He is wild, a Thing of nightmares and molded by madness – he butchers everyone – takes the head of the statue, AND rips away the head of the cultist containing Josh’s eye… and departs.

Josh, in a police van with Marcus, conveys what he has seen happening. He is barely able to stay sane, gibbering, horrified.

Marcus is worried that Drogo, who now has the head and who knows where the rest of the statue is being stored – can come and get it as and when he wants.

.

Head of the Sedefkar Simulacrum Statue – image by sirylok

.

Josh gets another vision:
Drogo arriving at the hotel suite – assembling the statue, kneeling before it, simpering, holding it, cradling it – and then the young female receptionist comes up into suite thinking Marcus has returned. Drogo – tears her apart.

In the police station, Marcus, Josh and Paul Bishop are roughed up and threatened; Detective Ratuk wants money to let them go.  Josh and Paul get a heavy beating.

A representative of the British government arrives and ensures their speedy release. “Charles Parker says hello and sends his gratitude”.

Back  the hotel, the media are buzzing.

Marcus, Josh and Paul go up to the suite with trepidation.

Blood on the floor and walls. Gore dripping from the assembled statue. Half-eaten carcass of the receptionist in the bathroom.

The team begin to act – they need to leave, and quickly.

Drogo emerges on the balcony outside.

Josh goes to talk to him, and does not yield to his demands of servitude; Drogo nearly eviscerates him with one powerful slash of his claws.

There is a media drone hovering above. Recording.

A huge fight takes place, that stops and starts each time Drogo is driven back – but not away. Marcus has the back of his thigh sliced open.  Paul gets into a hand-to-hand tussle with Drogo, both of them clinging onto one assault rifle; which Drogo then uses to batter Paul in the face.  Josh lays down several three round bursts from another assault rifle into Drogo.  It takes the characters a while (too long) to realise that Drogo will NOT leave but merely lurk, licking his wounds, waiting for an opportunity. Drogo attacks to wound and not to kill; he’s plucking chunks of flesh from the characters – wearing them down, fulfilling the ancient code of his kind – the Great Magi – but not really; his version of the code is twisted and corrupted, as his flesh and soul, because of centuries of exposure to the statue.

Police sirens begin to converge on the hotel. The fight is attracting a lot of attention.

During this fight, Josh is ready to create a portal out of there – taking the statue and the body of the receptionist with them (Paul scooped her shredded remains into a hotel duvet and dragged them to the edge of the prepared portal).  Marcus creates an incendiary device with the contents of the cleaning cupboard (LUCK ROLL) and a chemistry skill check (- double zero, whoops – )

MIxing the contents together in a waste-basket, the steaming hissing gas acts like poison. Marcus collapses, muscles going into spasm, barely able to communicate or breathe -lungs on fire. The gas also affects the main room of the hotel – Paul Bishop collapses, going into cardiac fibrillation. Josh can barely move -but manages to drag Paul out onto the balcony and snaps his and Paul’s ArmWatch Medivac account cards – countdown to rescue is 5 minutes. Paul starts going into cardiac arrest.

Josh crawls back into the hotel to find Marcus – when they return to the balcony they find Drogo feasting on the interior of Paul’s chest, now cracked open, chewing on his heart.

It’s gruesome. Shocking to behold.

Josh drops to his knees with the horror of it – he left Paul out there, this is partially his fault.

Marcus snaps his Armwatch medivac account card.

And then a figure drops down from the roof of the hotel suite. A humanoid that looks similar to how Drogo may have looked before his corruption. Another Great Magi. A powerful one of its kind that has become enraged by Drogo’s activities and blatant disregard for their cultural traditions. This thing kills Drogo.

Then Armwatch arrive.  Aerodynes hovering overhead whilst armoured troops descend on zip lines, accompanied by paramedics.  Paul is bundled into a cryo-tank, his brain’s vital signs stabilised and his body, what’s left of it, put into stasis.

The team regain consciousness 7 days later in a private medical facility, somewhere in Bulgaria.

Josh and Marcus are in adjoining beds, handcuffed.  Paul is in a fridge in the corner. There’s an official in a suit waiting to talk to them.  Things might have been different, even with the fuzzy, badly degraded video footage of Drogo attacking them, if it hadn’t been for personal intervention by Fargas Laslo, who put his reputation on the line to vouch whole-heartedly for the innocence of the team.  “They’re better men,” stated Laslo.

Things are not all great. The corruption of their physical bodies, caused by prolonged association to the statue, is now dramatically worse.  Marcus loses 1 INT and 1 APP; Josh loses 2 POW; Paul loses 1 INT. And it’s accelerating. They can’t lounge around. They need to destroy the statue – as planned – by taking it to the Shunned Mosque in Istanbul.

After some final red-tape bureaucracy..

Josh and Marcus are flown by covert military helicopter out of Bulgaria and deposited at an airbase in Turkey.  Paul remains in Bulgaria, his mind active within a virt, awaiting major surgical operations to replace his rib-cage, lungs and heart, and repair surrounding tissue damage. This will take many many weeks to complete surgery and post-op recovery.

{tony leaves game at this point}

Istanbul Turkey Sultan Ahmed Mosque

.

Josh and Marcus are greeted by a senior Turkish military official who begrudgingly asks no questions.  They make their way to a rough part of Istanbul and check into a run down hotel.  Josh is adamant he wants to recover magical artefacts from the cavern-scene he witnessed through his severed eyeball.  He creates a portal that he and Marcus step through, and which closes directly behind them. The cavern is not abandoned as Josh had assumed. There is a brief combat.  Marcus and Josh return with a chest of items. One of these is a cube that Josh accidentally activates – he is hurled back through time, witnesses the artificial creation of this “bubble universe” by  Duc Des Essain!!!! and then further back, through the space-time stream of the true universe – to a primordial age before dinosaurs – where Serpent Men and then before them, the Elder Things, roamed. Bad luck for Josh – he is spotted by a Hound of Tindalos. Josh accelerates forward through time again. Returns to the hotel room where Marcus has only blinked in all the “time” Josh has been away. Josh starts to jabber, panicking, about “something is coming!!!! Get ready!” And sure enough, the Hound soon comes through. It’s a repulsive fight but with Marcus’ magic pop gun and Josh hurling energy bolts at it – they drive it away (for now?).

A fitful night of sleep in the slums of Istanbul.

Next day, they check into the Great Istanbul Hotel, against the wishes of Josh because this place is part of the Orient Express itinerary. And sure enough, their arrival there triggers a number of “flags”.

The manager welcomes them personally, like old friends, and shows them the gold that their benefactor  – Mr Solomon Kane – has deposited in the hotel safe for them.

Upstairs, Josh and Marcus enjoy a brief afternoon of luxury – until the Brotherhood of the Skin arrive to “collect them” – and the statue. It’s strange, it’s as if the Brotherhood believe Josh and Marcus are working for them. They are transported to the Shunned Mosque in the belly flap of an obscene “flying thing” made of once human flesh.

At the mosque there is a diabolical ceremony around the now assembled statue: Josh and Marcus experience horrors that cannot be described here but certainly left characters and players sickened and losing significant COOL points through failed Anxiety checks. Duc Des Essain is there – Josh and Marcus are exceptionally wary of this “god like” figure, but are also baffled by his friendly response – and his surprise that the characters are in fact “one of them”.

At the point in the ceremony where the leader of the Brotherhood (Selim) is about to activate / invoke the power of the statue, he is murdered by his son, who is then blasted and killed by Duc Des Essain – who is seen sprinting towards the statue. Only…

Josh and Marcus suddenly phase out of this world and return to the world of Yellow Dawn. The mosque now empty, derelict and flooded by moonlight streaming through a shattered dome. And there is the statue, fully assembled, glaring back them, radiating menace.

And in their wake… comes a seam of light, and the Duc Des Essain steps through. He’s followed their magical trail.  But as he emerges, he realises exactly where he is. Not in some other part of the universe he created, but in the universe he fled from (the characters discover this later, that  Duc Des Essain fled this universe, from Nyarlathotep, by creating a realm where Nyarlathotep did not exist).

The Duc Des Essain whirls around in a panic, looking for some point to exit by. And is then frozen.  The Skinless One – an semi-human aspect of Nyarlathotep – steps forward and condemns Duc Des Essain.  Josh and Marcus witness a gruesome, grisly end to the great sorcerer.

The Skinless One glances over at Josh and Marcus, then departs.

Josh and Marcus hear the sounds of a vast surge of Infected sprinting towards the mosque. They seen  Duc Des Essain’s briefcase and his horse-hair lasso (used for porting). The briefcase contains scrolls! All the scrolls of the statue.

They use the lasso to return to Little Boston. Quite an emotional and surreal moment, to find themselves standing outside their settlement on the main road, beyond the driveway – watching the storm that started when they came here [ a year of game play, we started this campaign in July 2011 ] now fading and diminishing.

On the roof of Little Boston, Josh attempts to perform the Ritual of Cleansing.

Only to find Nyarlathotep had another little trick up his sleeve.

Bearing in mind that it was Marcus who murdered / destroyed Rahmun Sada – the human aspect of Nyarlathotep in this universe (At the end of Shadows of the Quantinex) as they unravelled the truth behind what caused Yellow Dawn to happen – and what new and nightmarish plot has been lined up against humanity.

Nyarlathotep has been able to manipulate and use the characters to a) destroy Duc Des Essain  and b) re-install a human aspect of Itself within this Universe and c) see the Activation of the statue take place.

RESUME

<>RECONNECT WITH LITTLE BOSTON Settlement and characters.
<>Deal with return of Paul Bishop (arrives in a huge metal steam engine with a replica of the Orient Express train attached – and some very strange phenonemon about it). He has a mechanical right arm and mechanical chest (brass like fittings with steampunk tech).
<> RANK ROLLS  (note all players had rank rolls at end of Sofia and JOsh also had his character birthday roll).
<> Follow up idea of heading back to Sofia – Dead City Run – to find the gold left at the hotel.
<> Understand the consequences for Josh of what has happened to him with the statue being activated – Nyarlathoteps little sting in the table surprise.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

.

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 7th July 2012 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express # 12

Belgrade – Sofia

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

RESUME

15 FEB – around 4 a.m.
The team are scheduled to board the Orient Express for 9.37 am departure to Sofia.
Roman has two satchels, 2 x FN-RAL assault rifles, one with 10 clips, one with 9 clips. 2 x laser scopes.  A bandolier of 5 frag grenades and 5 flash bangs.  Smart SCope goggles with IR and thermal vision.  He also has conduits to carry them across borders – but needs to be careful to ensure he follows protocols.

Characters have noticed black dogs, black cats, black insects…. observing them more of less continuously since fleeing the village.

The team are escorted to Orient Express departure lounge to watch the flux and flow of important and wealthy passengers arriving.

Many stories flicker within exchanged glances or rigid eye contact.

Team quietly discuss the big picture now forming.  There are four parties interested in them / the statue.

(1) Their employer. The man who pretended to be solicitor in London – Solomon Kane. The man who died three times in London. Mehmet Makryat.  A man capable of changing his appearance by killing victims and wearing their skin.  He is the reason the team are travelling across Europe in this train, gathering bits of statue on Mehmet’s behalf.  Why can’t Mehmet do this himself? Because his father, head of cult in Istanbul, Selim, is looking for him.  Mehmet told team that he wants to destroy the statue, to stop his father from activating it and unleashing a terror into the world.  Josh doesn’t buy this.
Query: if the characters phased into this universe – was it on Mehet’s request? Did Mehmet have the ability to make this happen or was it a “favour” from a powerful Outer God?

(2) Selim.  The father of Mehmet and leader of cult in Istanbul. Not much known about him or the cult.  The team are supposed to take statue there – to the cult’s mosque and destroy it by placing it within niches in the walls.  Selim has men scouring Europe looking for his son (to kill him?) and for the statue that he must now is being collected together.

(3) Count Drogo. Previous owner of the statue. A member of the race of the Great Magi. Drogo stole the statue from Sedefkar during the Crusades in the Middle East back in the 12th century.  Drogo survived for centuries, using the statue to walk within the realm of men… a predator concealed in the skin of his victims.  Drogo wants it back – but what has two centuries being bricked away in a wall in an asylum in Paris done to his mind?

(4) Duc Des Essain. The bloated, larger-than-life mad man from Lausanne who created his own “blister reality” where he was able to torment the inhabitants there.  When the Duc approached them in Belgrade, he said this world belonged to him.  What did he mean by that?  This world?  This entire parallel universe or…? Whatever the answer the characters realise he is possibly one of the most powerful and dangerous adversaries they face.  Marcus believes that the Duc wants to stop Selim – or anyone – else from getting the statue because its activation would shift the balance of power. Right now – in this reality – the Duc is king, perhaps?  And the Duc wants to keep it that way.

In the departure lounge, the team take notice of Charles Parker and Walter Protheroe and his assistant, Amy. There is some kind of sardonic dynamic in place between them.

On the train, luxury comfort and relief to be moving again. Characters won’t totally relax until they’re over the border and hopefully away from SPARSK assassins.

Marcus begins to exhibit Satyr-like qualities. An influence of his close encounter with the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. Women begin to act very strangely around him.

In salon car, team discover that Fargas Laslow (tall, glossy and highly groomed Italian) is riding with them: his job is to observe them and ensure no more massacres by the “Orient Ripper” take place.

Leaving the region of Belgrade, their following of black birds and insects fades away.  Josh thinks it was Baba-Yaga.

Later…

Walter Protheroe is found dead in his compartment. Shot through the head. Gun in right hand. Window locked and a pile of Arabic stim-pipes crowding a small ashtray.

Laslow puts his ego and desire to best the team, above the desire to properly solve the crime.

Marcus and Josh put together a solid line of reasoning and work through the clues, with a final twist of help coming from Paul Bishop “It’s a locked room case”.

A locked room. Of course.  The room was locked but there should have been a smell from all  the stim pipes.

Team discover a false witness statement and the fact Amy found Protheroe dead from suicide, but she re-arranged clues to try and have Parker (who she hated) accused of the murder – which nearly worked because Laslow followed her bait.

When the truth is revealed Laslow is gutted – and flits between drunkenly sneering or praising them.

The the Bulgarian border, Roman is removed from train by authorities. An issue over protocol; but he ensures the team still have the bags and the webbing.

An avalanche
stops train in the mountains, 2 hours from Sofia. Paul goes to front of train to take a look; Marcus goes with him and so does Josh – but Josh stops to grab a coat. Alone, trying to catch up with the others he is attacked by a maniac with a knife. The maniac gouges out his eye and runs off with it.

Later, a grisly discovery is made in the snow – tracks leading from train into forest… they find an eyeball, but it doesn’t belong to Josh.

Josh begins to experience flashed glimpses of another point of view.  His eyeball now in the head of the maniac.

It’s horrible.

Laslow comes up to Marcus and proffers to him a hardscreen loaded with latest newspaper; page 5, article about a strange ceramic head dug up yesterday by a farmer.  It is the head of the Simulacrum.  International paper.  Everybody who might be interested in it now knows the head is at the University of Sofia for study.

Sofia

Arriving in Sofia the team are taken to their hotel, the Caravaggio. Marcus seduces the reception girl and gets a presidential suite. Private elevator, marble statues, a sunken lounge with window wall views across city, bullet-proof glass, gas-filtered air-vents.  A private fortress.  Josh and Paul refuse to pay the male receptionist “a surcharge of 500 per night, each” so are given “standard rooms”.  These are down in the lower floor of the hotel overlooking car park. They’re not impressed.  Eventually they go up to Marcus’ suite and sleep on sofas there.

They notice when Marcus comes out of shower, stark-bollock naked, he’s walking around as if he has hooves for feet and is stoking his thighs as if they’re covered in coarse matted hair.  It’s obvious this is what Marcus believes. Strange. Instead, Marcus just has the same skin deformity and scars and aching joints across his limbs and torso as the rest of the group (dire consequences of possessing the statue pieces).

17th Feb
Team leave hotel by extortionate taxi (again) and travel to University of Sofia. After much delay and procrastination by people who either wants bribes or don’t talk English, they finally get to meet the professor studying the recently found head.  Meanwhile – Josh is experiencing all manner of strange glimpses of the journey of the maniac who gouged out his eyeball. A river gorge. A cavern.  A ceremony…

The professor is intrigued by the character’s knowledge of the strange, unidentifiable ceramic material the head is made from. He agrees to show them the head.

However, when they walk into the work lab… a horror scene awaits them.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT SESSION

Sofia city

GM NOTES:
() Next Rank Roll should be when they complete Sofia.  Laslow is in Sofia keeping tabs on them.
() All Cs have yet to experience TAINT from Dark Young
(!) Marcus has started experience something particularly potent due to his mind engaging with the things.The question is, where is this going to end up?

.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

DJR: thoughts for next session on local copy of these notes.

Role-playing: GMs don’t always follow the rules

.

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007, is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

Dead City Runs, Scavenging and the Infected

I’ve got a small, secondary group I’m acting GM for, several folks who are getting into Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur.  It’s been a very interesting experience for  me because one of the chaps has never even played an RPG before; so I’ve had the opportunity to watch him totally get into the concept, something that is almost impossible to really explain to anybody who has never done tabletop RPG before. Pens, paper, dice… and the raw energy of the human imagination.

It’s also been a little nerve-wracking for me because I’ve had to “sell the world” to them, build up the layers that creates the fabric of Yellow Dawn and bring about suspension of disbelief in a very short period of time.

Thankfully, I feel like I’ve achieved this: they’re certainly enjoying the short (1 hour) sessions I’m running every couple of days.

As players new to the world of Yellow Dawn, I feel the best way to introduce folks to the darker horror aspect of the world is to start them off utterly broke and desperate, and have them join the CRC (City Recovery Corps) to do some scavenging. Ostensibly to earn some ready cash, but in truth it allows a GM to describe the concept of a Living City – where life seems to continue almost as if billions of people didn’t die ten years earlier; and then the journey outwards, out through the Infection Free Zone, past the toast-towers (flame-throwers) into the Dead Zone, through the Rural Support Zone and then into the true Wilderness. Finally to reach the claustrophobic and sweaty terror of a Dead City.

The folks have been experiencing the Infected first hand. And it’s been bloody and horrible.  I’ve also been able to weave in some of the more subtle Lovecraftian aspects of the world, through the Influence of Hastur.

However, I think if I had stuck to the rules as they were written (killing Zeds; risk of Zeds appearing on a street; chance of zed-surges from loud noises) then I reckon the game would have been over pretty quick.  Their characters are fairly ordinary people. Not hardened fighters. Just survivors thrown into this horrible situation.  Not to say that I’ve been making it easy for them, not at all (you can listen to their exploits via a podcast that’s coming out soon), but being a GM is all about the importance of balance. Delivering a great story, a tough challenge that isn’t always utterly impossible to beat.

The characters have just crawled through an abandoned apartment into a bedroom and shut the door – with two members of their original team (NPCs) now outside, screaming horribly, mindless and freshly Infected, and I can see the genuine fear on the players faces. They want to stay there.  They don’t want to get up and face those “things” again. But the characters have signed contracts. They are CRC now and they have to scavenge and recover a minimum of 500 KG.

I know they can probably do it, but the players are locked in a world painted by their imaginations and what they’re experiencing is palpable and unpleasant.

.

I am promoting a novel - click me

.

.

.

# # #

Available from LULU

YELLOW DAWN – THE AGE OF HASTUR: The Earth has been ravaged by viral pathogens, the death of billions observed by the orbital colonies and deep-space habitats that were largely unaffected by the Outbreak. Terrified of infection, nobody came to help. Less than 30 percent survived the first few weeks. Then came the 2nd Wave of infection, spreading steadily outwards from the impact points, and that was when the horror really began…

This book is crammed with everything you will need to create characters, run scenarios and experience horror and adventure in the fictional world of David J Rodger.

FEATURES: Narrative examples of key themes • The Influence of Hastur • Medical theories on the Infection • Zombie surges • Dead Cities • Wilderness survival • Comprehensive scavenging system and how to repair or build things with resources • Backgrounds and motivations of government bodies and corporations • Computer hacking and drug abuse • High-tech immortality options • Non-human characters • Enhancements through cyberware and bioware • Weaponry, equipment and armour • Complete character generation and development system • Complex political, corporate and quasi-religious tensions • Schools of Elemental Magick, occultism, demonology, and the alien horrors of the Outer Chaos – the Cthulhu Mythos. Purchase or Preview via LULU.

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 17th March 2012 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express # 10

Belgrade

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

RESUME
6th FEB @ 5 A.M.
SUNDAY

The team have just got back to their hotel and crashed. Today is Sunday. They’ll have to kill time before going back to meet the professor at Belgrade Museum on Monday.  Josh is already gobbing off about they have to buy everything – but does come up with the smart suggestion they should convert the cash into precious metal or gems they can take back to their own true universe of Yellow Dawn – and not remain in this odd parallel universe where Yellow Dawn never happened.

Telfus has booked into a smaller, cheaper hotel and waiting to see what he does with his life now that he dealt with the killer of his sister.

The team grab some sleep then head down for a late breakfast; they agree to buy in:
() Vortek Personal Protection Fields (these are only 50,000 each rather than 500,000 as listed in Yellow Dawn rulebook, because this world is a blister reality where YD did not happen).

() Armwatch Security Cover – snapcards

() Executive quality suits with ballistic and stab resistant weave.

On news in story about assassination of Serbian minister of interior. SPARSK are mentioned. Nobody claimed responsibility but Croatian or Kosovo is picking up blame via speculation. Tensions in country are increasing.  SPARSK militia noted as mobilising across countryside.

They are hassled by a high-ranking journalist from WorldStar Media who wants to know how they bested Fargan Laslow last night – and what happened; but this appears to be more about digging for dirt on Marcus Hardman (wealthy host of last night’s party where the jewel was stolen by Countess Roskoff but recovered by characters).  Characters play silent. Journalist threatens to expose links between deaths and mayhem in Paris, Milan, Venice and Trieste and their arrival in each of those locations on the Orient Express – timescales overlap.

Team ring Marcus Hardman to warm him about journalist digging.

Marcus Hardman says thanks, repeats his promise to have minister of culture approve their paperwork for removing rare artefacts from Serbia.

Team contact Dimitri to ask about a favour. Dimitri was wanting to meet them anyway… Caterina wants to have lunch / dinner with the team before she has to head back to London for an opera.

They all meet at a posh warehouse eating place.  Dimitri arranges for a hacker called Viral 5 to contact characters – to satisfy their needs.

Heading to a cafe near bazaar later on, a car bomb goes off… dozens killed and many more injured. Dimitri hit in leg by shrapnel; everyone else blasted to ground; Paul is hit by shrapnel but it destroys his PA instead.  Then the driver of Dimitri’s SUV (who has a SPARSK tattoo) shoots the other bodyguard, shoots Dimitri and then shoots Caterina and flees.  Marcus and Paul chase after him (as does a drone) and catch him amongst tables and chairs of an indoor cafe (closed). Dimitri’s men arrive to shoo away police and take the prisoner.

Josh and Metz use magic and first aid to save Caterina’s life. Dimitri is ignored and dies from his wounds.

Police are grateful to characters and no awkward questions are asked.

Characters return to hotel to assess situation.

Barely there 30 minutes they’re summoned by a phone call with a modulated voice to meet at a sports stadium. Taxi there. They go in and meet a man in late 50′s.  A Serbian spook. Dimitri was helping internal security protect minister of interior… looks like his failure made him a target of SPARSK. Government spook says thanks for what you did and offers to grease the wheels a bit whilst they’re in Serbia: also says to be wary of SPARSK, now that they helped apprehend the assassin.

The spook leaves. The characters wait a few minutes, standing in the middle of the pitch surrounded by empty rows of stadium seats. As they’re about to leave… the lights fail. In fact, there are no lights ANYWHERE. With a chill horror they realise they’ve phased back into the world of Yellow DAwn.

There are Infected within the stadium – just visible in the moonlight.

Marcus uses his pop-gun to take a couple down. More surge in, attracted by the noise.

Metz falls victim to some kind of mesmerization, he stands there, not participating (caught within Influence of Hastur). The team try to get him out of there but more Infected are running towards them, shrieking and snarling. Marcus shoots. Paul wrestles one to the ground as it thrashes around in his desperate grip.  Josh slashes with his sword cane. Metz get’s tackled by an Infected and slammed to the ground, the Infected bites deep into Metz’s neck, tearing the flesh…

The lights snap back on.

They’ve phased out again; back into this strange blister reality where YD has not happened. And to their horror they can see Paul is still grappling an Infected; one of the things has come back through with them!!!!  It stops struggling and abruptly becomes alert. It looks at Paul and Paul sees a monstrous intelligence seeping into that rotting face… it looks around with growing delight as if sensing a whole new world to Infect. And then it disintegrates into golden glowing particles of dust and blows away. Spreading Infection or vanishing from this realm, nobody really knows. Then all attention turns to Metz who is sitting there clutching a wound to his neck and asking over and over – am I ok? Am I okay? Only a few seconds have elapsed. Josh approaches him, uses magick to heal the wound and steps back… watching cautiously.  The transformation is fast and brutal. Metz snarls, leaps up to attack… but then before anything else can happen he too disintegrates into golden particles of dust.

The team are traumatized to see a long-standing character become Infected and then to disappear like that.

They return to hotel, numb.

7th FEB
MONDAY

A government suit arrives at hotel and hands over paperwork authorising team to take artefacts from Serbia. Marcus goes to Belgrade museum and is told about the village where such artefacts may be found.

Team are driven by their new Serbian security man, Roman, in his jeep, out into the wild countryside to Oraszc.

Encounter the village. The priest and the headman.

A fertility rite takes place.

They sleep the night there.

8th FEB
TUESDAY

Team head out deeper into forest to see the old lady in the woods.
A terrifying encounter with an ancient spirit form – Baba Yaga takes place but the characters pass the test and are told where to find the RIGHT ARM of the statue.
Team head back and witness the beginning of a ceremony, a goat sacrificed on an altar stone and strange chanting.  Marcus and Paul wander down amongst the “cultists” as if to confront them when something large and monstrous emerges from the woods. A Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.

Marcus throws down something given to him as a charm – but it’s a false gift, a trap, and TEN MORE Dark Young materialise!!!

Paul is grabbed by tentacles and hauled towards slobbering mouths.
Roman shoots dead the Headman and priestess, with the random consequences of allowing Marcus to take control of the TEN Dark Young – Marcus commands them to attack the solitary DARK YOUNG. Paul barely gets away with his life.
Marcus grabs the RIGHT ARM and everyone flees through village. They are not pursued. The TEN Dark Young chomp, grab, stamp and devour the cultists.

RESUME
8pm on 8th FEB, just leaving the area of the village in Roman’s jeep – driving like the wind, clutching the RIGHT ARM of the statue and everyone feeling very lucky to be alive. Roman’s right index finger now has a gnarly nail, since Baba Yaga bit it down to the bone and stripped the flesh from the finger (and Josh used magic to repair the finger as best he could).

As they accelerate, Roman has to brake hard and screech the jeep to a halt: a large black dog is on the road, staring back at them with intelligence that is far beyond what is normal.

The team need to get back to Belgrade and get on the next train to Sofia.

LEFT LEG, LEFT ARM, RIGHT LEG, TORSO at Excelsior hotel in Belgrade.  RIGHT ARM is with the team in the jeep as they’re blasting back towards Belgrade.

GM NOTES: all characters had Rank rolls with a +3 bonus.

DJR: thoughts for next session on local copy of these notes.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Le Grog – French interest in Yellow Dawn The Age of Hastur – Le Guide du Roliste Galactique, l’encyclopédie des jeux de roles

Yellow Dawn gets a Euro reference

click to visit site

This is a cool little site with an epic mandate.  Their mission is to reference every roleplaying game ever published in its database.

Now including Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur.  :o)

They’re a friendly crowd and the main man sent me an awesome photo of the utterly insane house he built – which, looks literally like a flying saucer made out of wood, roof tiles and glass. I won’t post it here because I don’t want to spoil the very thing he shares with the people he engages with.

You can view the listing on Le Grog for Yellow Dawn here.

.

click me

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 4th Feb 2012 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express # 9

Trieste – Belgrade

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

RESUME 3rd FEB @ 8PM
Josh and Telfus are in Trieste, clutching the RIGHT LEG now wrapped in a camping tarp that Telfus had in his backpack. They’re in a taxi heading to a cafe anywhere.  The Orient Express leaves in a few minutes. Next train is just after 8pm tomorrow night.  Telfus has started to show signs of the skin irritation on right leg, left leg, left arm and bad chesty cough.

Marcus, Paul and Metz are at Posthumia. Marcus is having shower in tourist facilities, washing away blood, but the wound to his head (1 HP) needs medical attention as Josh failed First Aid.

LEFT LEG and LEFT ARM at at Orient hotel in Trieste. TORSO is somewhere…?

# # #

AT THE TOURIST CENTRE: Metz and Paul can see signs of the remaining lloigor cultists regrouping, surrounding the isolated building; cutting the power and then turning on the lights of the coaches in the car park. They’ve just become trapped.

IN TRIESTE: Josh and Telfus sit in a cafe; Josh rings Marcus and then Paul – trying to persuade them to stay there until he’s able to make the 4 hour journey back to Posthumia. Both Marcus and Paul give their PA devices a WTF? look.

AT THE TOURIST CENTRE: Metz and Paul head outside; Metz gets into a fight with a cultist who has some weird tentacle appendage growing from the back of his head – wielding a knife. Metz gets a gash across his upper left arm.  Paul and Metz grapple the man to the ground and bludgeon him to death. Then Paul sneaks off and commandeers a coach.  Metz runs up to the back of it and clambers up the ladder; Marcus – who is now on the roof of the building – leaps off onto the coach before Paul manages to grind a few gears and pull away.  Dark and dangerous drive down through mountain roads. A brief chase by vehicles until Paul side-swipes one of them into crashing into the mountain side.

IN TRIESTE: Josh send Telfus back to the hotel with the RIGHT LEG. Then creates a portal into the cavern system, only to find the Lloigor are heavily active there feeding from all the power. He’s nearly unable to portal out due to the Lloigor boiling-off his magick points.  BACK IN THE HOTEL, he finds that all the statue components including the TORSO from Milan, has been placed in his room AND assembled. Eerie.

4th FEB
——–

Everyone regroups at the hotel and then camps down unwilling to risk going out. Taxi to the train station that night and abruptly into the luxury and safety of the Orient Express.

Leave Trieste with much relief.

A number of curious strangers on the train.

Marcus plays backgammon with a businessman who invites him to a party in Belgrade the following night.

5th FEB
——–

Belgrade

Arrive Belgrade. Heavy snow.  Calm atmosphere. A sense of something missing – they’re no longer being watched by Drogo? Is that possible?  There’s a lot of desperately poor people begging; scrawny kids try to take their bags. A tall teenager who’s made an effort to look presentable and who speaks good English chases them away and offers his services as a guide. The team take his number and haggle him down to 100 credits a day.

Check into Hotel Excelsior.  Then contact Belgrade Museum.  Meet the professor there.  He says he knows where the characters might find information about the strange statue – they’ve shown the professor the LEFT ARM. Baffling him. However, the professor will only reveal his source when characters come back with paperwork that authorises them to leave the country with artefacts.

THAT NIGHT:
Go to party of wealthy businessmen. Become involved in investigating a theft.  Encounter Caterine Cavelova and her boyfriend Dimitri again (very positive experience).  Marcus encounters a dangerous but beguiling jewel-thief… and cross-swords (playfully?).  They also encounter Fargan Laslow – the greatest detective in Europe?! – and he bows to the characters ability: Metz was responsible for finding the stolen jewels outside the property – although got shot by a long range taser rifle for his trouble.

Businessman provides a staggering reward; a cash value on a slice of black crystal.

Belgrade

RESUME

6th FEB @ 5 A.M.
The team have just got back to their hotel and crashed. Today is Sunday. They’ll have to kill time before going back to meet the professor at Belgrade Museum on Monday.  Josh is already gobbing off about they have to buy everything – but does come up with the smart suggestion they should convert the cash into precious metal or gems they can take back to their own true universe of Yellow Dawn – and not remain in this odd parallel universe where Yellow Dawn never happened.

Telfus has booked into a smaller, cheaper hotel and waiting to see what he does with his life now that he dealt with the killer of his sister.

GM NOTES: all c’s had rank checks after leaving Trieste – but what Hero Bonus did Marcus take? How many Karma Points did he generate?   Team have RIGHT LEG, LEFT LEG, TORSO, LEFT ARM and are all displaying signs of skin irritation and illness in those body areas.  Interestingly, since arriving in Belgrade they’ve started to feel aches in their RIGHT ARM.  Marcus is carrying the black crystal slice with LOTS OF CASH.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Yellow Dawn Session Notes 7th January 2012 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express #8

Trieste

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur, first published in 2007,  is an RPG written by sci-fi & dark fantasy author David J Rodger – it blends the Cthulhu Mythos and cyberpunk genres in a post-apocalyptic setting. Learn more…

.

RESUME 8pm on 1st FEB
in hotel room, having just completed séance. Local news is talking about baffling disappearance of tram driver after a mysterious breakdown in tunnel. Foul play is suspected but so far no bodies have been found.  Brief reference to Venice, along the lines of “This is Not Venice” … but another local news feed suggests that the homeless people of the city are spreading rumours about a monster stalking amongst them, eating them and throwing remains into the sea.

Characters may wish to rest or head out to fetch the ring/

# # #

-

Marcus heads downstairs to grab a drink, settle his nerves and get something on his stomach.
At dinner he is approached by Telfus Fleet – a British speaking, half-Thai character who looks slightly wired on stress and tension.  Skull sockets beneath his left ear distinguish him as involved in computing and technology.

He’s seen the team being watched and followed and thinks the same people are mixed up in the reason he’s in Trieste – hunting down the man who murdered his sister. Alfonso.

The Maitre’D is accosted by an unseen dinner guest and walks off in a strange daze – when he returns, there is something different about him; Marcus suspects this is the work of the man who killed and took the skin of their translator in Paris – perhaps the man who originally hired them to find the statue?

Later that night Telfus is driving across Trieste alone to meet with someone who says they have information on the killer.  He encounters [a man who is later recognised as Antoni Termona], in a plush house on the hill – and six other men [cultists of Lloigor] including Alfonso.  Telfus has to restrain himself: he’s warned off… told a few things… told his persistence and questions have made him an irritation but killing him is risky and they’d prefer to avoid the risk… leave Trieste and never ask about Alfonso again.  Later – Telfus is given an opportunity for ultimate and gruesome revenge… does he take it? There’s a monolith in a room with glass walls; a sense of great power and glimpses of another reality… deep underground caverns.

That same evening, Paul and Metz – having snuck out of the 5* Simplon Hotel with the others – avoiding the various tailing parties… find a new hotel and check in for the team.

THE LEFT ARM and THE LEFT LEG is back at Orient hotel; they suspect THE TORSO is on the train with them (Count Drogo?) due to the growing issues of health and irritation.

Also that same evening, Marcus and Josh – having escorted Telfus to the first rendezvous point and told to go away by the driver, find themselves in a bad part of town.  They avoid getting robbed by local kids and make their way to the location of the artefact hidden by W_____ more than 300 years ago. An abandoned house, shuttered and lost.  They break in. And after a few hours of digging around the ancient basement find the very thing Marcus saw during the séance… the ring buried under a flagstone. This is the object W____ had tried to bring to Things in the caverns at Posthumia… and the same object the cult here wanted to bring to the THings instead… and the reason W_____ was murdered all those centuries ago.  Now it is in the hands of Josh.

Everyone RV’s back at the new hotel.

2nd Feb
——-
The team want to get an early train to Posthumia… the plan is to take the ring there and hope the collection of occult artefacts supposed to reside with the Things will include a part of the statue.  However Josh demands everyone hangs around for most of the day whilst he inspects the ring, ultimately finding it is a Mythos object of minor power.

3pm – the team catch a train from Trieste to the nearest town to Posthumia… trying in vain to shake off the various tails that have caught up with them; also a brief phase back into the horror world of Yellow Dawn along with Telfus and a pickpocket.

7pm – get to the small town and half an unsettled nights sleep.

3rd Feb
——-

Team head to the caves.  Met by the tour operator, a swarthy looking man with a gold tooth; there’s a hundred or so other folks there for the tour – none of them look like tourists and many of them are missing limbs.  The team get a bad feeling about this.

A Lloiger phyiscal manifestation - click for artist link

The tour starts off nice enough but soon plunges into madness in the deepest darkest area of the cave complex; lights go off, men with torches hunt the characters down with knives and sticks; the party is split up several times; Marcus is grappled and man-handled away – only to be found a while later, unconscious with a gash to his head surrounded by a dozen shredded bodies…. it looks like the Turks have come down here and started killing the Lloigor cultists — and that something else {Drogo?} has been killing both Turks and cultists. It’s a blood bath. Meanwhile, Telfus takes the ring to THE CAVERN. Encounters The THings. Hands over the ring and is teleported – along with Josh – to the private vault of a collector – and there is the RIGHT LEG of the statue. The Things WANT the team to take the leg away because it is a blot on the energy of the area…

Josh grabs it – the alarms go off. Security guards come running. Then Telfus and Josh phase into the horror of Yellow Dawn – and have to make their way down into the centre of Trieste  (but now it’s a Dead City full of Infected).  They spend several hours by the side of a road, freezing, before phasing back.

NOTE: This is all entirely new to Telfus. He’s lost a lot of COOL points through Anxiety this session.

Marcus, Paul and Metz pick their way through the hundred or so murdered bodies in the caves and return to the surface – there to find a few survivors [Italians, Lloigor cultists] who approach them asking where the ring is… Marcus replies, “They, those things have it”.

The cultists seem battered and weary so head off. But for how long?

RESUME 3rd FEB @ 8PM
Josh and Telfus are in Trieste, clutching the RIGHT LEG now wrapped in a camping tarp that Telfus had in his backpack. They’re in a taxi heading to a cafe anywhere.  The Orient Express leaves in a few minutes. Next train is just after 8pm tomorrow night.  Telfus has started to show signs of the skin irritation on right leg, left leg, left arm and bad chesty cough.

Marcus, Paul and Metz are at Posthumia. Marcus is having shower in tourist facilities, washing away blood, but the wound to his head (1 HP) needs medical attention as Josh failed First Aid.

LEFT LEG and LEFT ARM at at Orient hotel in Trieste. TORSO is somewhere…?

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur continues with Horror on the Orient Express today…

Geeks incorporated.

Yellow Dawn Game Testers - photo taken July 2011

So this is part of the original Yellow Dawn RPG test crew, plus guest (Kelvin Wright) on the far left. They’re all coming over here later today to play Yellow Dawn and continue the epic campaign Horror On The Orient Express, that I’ve converted to work in a post-apocalyptic setting – complete with parallel universe “not affected” by Yellow Dawn… giving players the dread of phasing in and out and the worst possible moments, but also allowing characters to enjoy life as it could have been – and the luxury of the Simplon Orient… if the Hasturian virus hadn’t struck. You can read crude session notes here: http://davidjrodger.wordpress.com/category/yellow-dawn/yd-session-notes/

Have a great weekend, everyone.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

YD Session Notes 26th November 2011 ¦ Horror on the Orient Express #7

Djr note. The team just arrived in Trieste. Wow, what an excellent session. Venice was completed during the big gamers weekend away in Hayling Island and was an exceptionally visceral and powerful session, but I reckon I succeeded in bring Trieste to life here and introduce a range of local colours to confuse and disturb the players.  After the session we went out to join friends for cocktails at Hausbar but all night I couldn’t shake free of the idea of the Bora, and the sense I was actually still someplace else… in my imagination.

Trieste Harbour Area

RESUME:
29th Jan @ 8pm
They’re arriving in Trieste. The wind is howling and shrieking about the station; icicles are forming in near horizontal formations.
THEY HAVE THE LEFT ARM AND THE LEFT LEG; they suspect THE TORSO is on the train with them (Count Drogo?) due to the growing issues of health and irritation.

Once off the train they are harassed by a MOCID Cultural Attaché:
- “This is not Milan, Mr Bishop”
- “Where is Rossini?”
- “I will be watching you. I will not allow another Venice to happen here in Trieste.”

They also glimpse a short, slim figure in a thick padded coat and large hat dragging a travel trunk across the platform from the train.  They wonder: is this Drogo?

Taxi to Savoie Excelsior

Crash out to sound of wind howling around windows.

Central Trieste

30th Jan
———
Josh buys a crate of zone to last him a month; has it delivered to a P.O.Box however had to use his ID to set this up.

Marcus discovers much about Johan W. And about his murder in 1768 and the diary that was sold at auction after this.

Team make contact with Antony Termona; they claim to be researchers, investigating a lost statue and the diary could be of use.  He invites them to dinner.

Down in hotel lobby, team discover several groups of watchers:
() KSK cadets, blatantly keeping an eye on them.
() Thin, wiry, east-european looking types in warm and comfortable clothing – watching the characters?  Later, this becomes a tall thin man with red hair and a shock of black streaked through it…
()  Three thuggish looking Arabic types in cheap suits and cheap leather jackets, all wearing that red hat they saw in Paris.  They seem to be watching the East Europeans… but then take notice of the characters.

Josh goes Astral and encounters something “there” all around, in the air. Scary.

Later again, the characters become aware of a partially deformed man, short, barrel chested, who seems to have his hands tucked inside sleeves of the cammo jacket he wears.

Dinner at Termona’s is a strange affair. The house is on the hill above the tunnel; wealthy and exclusive.  Termona hands them the diary for safe-keeping.  Termona is missing his right arm.

Outside, Paul discovers a KSK car is empty with a smashed passenger window. Also a car further down road with two shadowy figures watching: a brief stand-off between him and the car with its full beams on.

1st Feb
——-
Poor sleep last night.

There’s nothing on the news to indicate the same kind of insane violence is happening here as in Venice.  Venice is being discussed in detail by all the major news channels: something wrong with the water is being blamed for mass mania.

It seems only the MOCID cultural attaché knows there might be a link between characters and the Orient Ripper and What happened in Venice.

There’s a morning meeting with an associate of Termona, down in the harbour district. An academic called Montanelli.

They take a tram there; go through tunnel. Other side, lots of graffiti with a circular symbol; Josh recognises it and later discovers it is a Mythos symbol suggesting that worshippers of Lloigor are active in the area. It’s a frightening prospect.

Josh seems the East-european with the red hair following them off tram and then grabbed by one of the Arabic types… something done to him he collapses into a seat as the tram speeds off.

Montanelli is big, odd and missing a right leg.  Something about him is unpleasant.  He spends four hours giving the characters a summary translation of key sections of the diary (which is in archaic German). Montanelli says there is some kind of puzzle, perhaps revealing where W____ hid the ring.

The cafe is full of students from local university campus. There’s a strange vibe from them. Some of them are not… right.

It’s dark by time the characters leave the cafe.  They return to the tram where some kind of local seems to be planning on robbing them: only, as they enter the tunnel the tram stops, the lights go out and then [something] attacks him and drags him screaming from the train and kills him… it also kills the tram driver. The characters flee and get out of the tunnel on foot before anybody can notice them.

séance

Back at the hotel the power fails; in candlelight there are strange ghostly apparitions and experiences.  Is it W______?

Champagne is delivered by hotel staff, along with hand-written letter (in German) from the guest in the suite upstairs… it’s a letter from Drogo… a greeting, a thank-you and a warning.

Josh holds a séance to commune with W_____ and succeeds in having the ghost of W_____ draw a map of where the ring is hidden (Western quarter); Marcus also give staccato images showing the scene from 1768 when the ring was hidden!

RESUME 8pm on 1st FEB
in hotel room, having just completed séance. Local news is talking about baffling disappearance of tram driver after a mysterious breakdown in tunnel. Foul play is suspected but so far no bodies have been found.  Brief reference to Venice, along the lines of “This is Not Venice” … but another local news feed suggests that the homeless people of the city are spreading rumours about a monster stalking amongst them, eating them and throwing remains into the sea.

Characters may wish to rest or head out to fetch the ring.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Hayling Island – November 2011 – a Yellow Dawn weekend

You can read a blog post about this fab weekend trip to Hayling Island, with my Yellow Dawn player group.

The majority of the following photos were taken by my good friend (and game breaker) Hagen

.

Hagenland Photography
Weddings – Events – Portrait – Fashion – Art
web: www.hagenland.com
email: info@hagenland.com
All rights reserved © hagenland photography 2011

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr eyes

November: leaving Bristol and heading out through Bath the weather turned torrential; a few miles further south from us was a huge crash on the M5 that killed 7 people and left over 60 injured.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – NGT, Doc, Djr

November: on the beach after arriving , supping Jack Daniels and enjoying the moment. We made it. We’re here. We have a WHOLE weekend ahead of us. Bliss.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – suddenly the moon came out

November: it was almost as if somebody flicked a switch; as the last colour bled from the sky, suddenly the moon popped out and enhanced the already visceral and Mythos vibe of the evening.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – the beach front

November: gives you a nice sense of how close the house is to the ocean.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – NGT

November: Friday night We’ve been to the pub. We’ve had Indian takeaway. Everyone is happy.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr

November: Friday night. I’ve run into the sea. Come out again, failed to persuade the chaps to join me and gone back in again. It was utterly fantastic being in that wild, churning, black and glassy water under the blaze of the moon.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr

November: Friday night. Coming out, Tony through a towel over me. I was so exstatically happy… one of those moments like in Switzerland (2003) that I’ll always recall and cherish.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – Game Day

November: Saturday came and went although it seemed to go on forever; a cooked breakfast and then 12 hours of Yellow Dawn followed by watching Cthulhu (2007). Awesome. This is a great shot by Hagen, capturing the essence of this period of my life… from the leather bound notebook from Santiago, the Horror on the Orient Express campaign pack for Call of Cthulhu (that I read through during my train journeys through France, Switzerland and Italy earlier this year) – now being played within the Yellow Dawn universe, and the Yellow Dawn rulebook, which I’m currently in the middle of revamping (since March 2011) to create version 2.5. And of course, a bottle of whiskey.

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr

November: Sunday morning I was up early and spent an hour supping coffee, listening to Eurythmics and gazing out at the ocean.

Photo by Hagen – modded by Djr

2011 – Hayling Island – Doc

November: Sunday morning – Chris pulls more epic dance moves (and makes a flat stone skip across the waves).

Photo by Hagen

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr

November: Sunday morning.

Photo by Hagen

END OF HAGEN PHOTOS

2011 – Hayling Island – Chris “Doc”

November: a glimpse of Doc’s secret technique for making cleaning-up more fun and interesting: jive!

Even though I’m using a crappy little credit-card camera I’m so happy not to be using that heap of shit I bought in New York.

2011 – Hayling Island – Chris “Doc”

November: of course, having such fun in the kitchen precludes Doc from gaining any form of angelic status for his actions; on the contrary… the Devil in him begins to show.

2011 – Hayling Island – Chris “Doc” , GB-Hagen, Nice Guy Tony

November: ..

2011 – Hayling Island – Chris “Doc”

November: after bacon sarnies Chris, Hagen and I went for a final walk along the beach that Sunday morning; we ended up going much further than planned because it became such an enjoyable period of time. Chris hunted down interesting pebbles.

2011 – Hayling Island – GBH

November: Hagen really got into the trip from the photography angle; it was great having somebody there so enthusiastically documenting the weekend. Great memories deserve great photos. However, it did seem he was getting frustrated by the seagulls not listening to his instructions…

2011 – Hayling Island – Doc, GBH

November: blissful walk along miles of empty shoreline.

2011 – Hayling Island – Doc

November: sometimes, every now and again, Chris would have to break out of stride and just… do Michael Jackson. Kind of complements his “kitchen jive” routine.

2011 – Hayling Island – GBH

November: i think Hagen had a lot of fun, as we all did, reverting to a sort of young lad, teenage state, where we clambered over things and kept up a decent pace.

2011 – Hayling Island – GBH

November: Hagen dealt with all the obstacles with aplomb.

2011 – Hayling Island – Doc

November.

2011 – Hayling Island – GBH

November: explorer, photographer… game-breaker.

2011 – Hayling Island – GBH

November: Hagen, being Hagen, decides to warp the rules of reality and throw a few metaphysical moves to compete with Chris’ jive and Michael Jackson displays.

2011 – Hayling Island – Captain NGT

November: yarrrrgh!

2011 – Hayling Island – Captain NGT

November: such a lovely bloke. A great and genuine friend – all these years.

2011 – Hayling Island – Djr

November: Sunday morning – coffee with thoughts.

Photo by Hagen

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

The weekend starts here ¦ Hayling Island for a master Yellow Dawn session with new 2.5 systems

¦ dialling in from Sky Bunker ¦

08:12 GMT, Friday 4th Nov. Ahhhh *contented sigh*  My weekend starts here. Took today off work. Have a car rental arriving in a couple of hours and then the core Yellow Dawn players / game-testers start arriving around lunchtime.  We’re driving down to the magical sea-mist bubble of Hayling Island; the house owned by Lone Pine that sits right on the edge of the ocean… you can go to bed at night with the window cracked open and drift off to sleep with the thunderous sonic boom of huge waves pounding the beach followed by the hiss of foamy surf raking the pebbles back into the primal embrace.

Annie Lennox & Dave Stewart

I’m listening to early Eurythmics. Tunes and eerie songscapes that conjure up memories of 1984 when I first got into Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraft.

Hayling Island is a boys weekend away.  Tonight will be takeout curry followed by an evening of whisky with the sea as company.  Saturday sees me fending off hangovers with a huge cooked breakfast and then it’s strong black coffee and a day of game; Yellow Dawn (2.1).  The guys are deep into Chaosium’s “Horror on the Orient Express” campaign, which I’m running within the Yellow Dawn universe.  I’m also bringing with me some brand new systems from the latest version of Yellow Dawn (2.5) which is still work in progress, and something I’ve been tackling since March this year.  Being able to come to the table with working systems is very exciting for me as it makes me realise I’m a lot closer to finishing this epic project than I’ve been aware of.  The new systems are the streamlined Dead CIty Run rules; how people travel through Dead Cities and Dead Zones and how the Infected react and respond to the Living; modified Close Proximity Combat rules, bringing Brawling, Boxing and Martial Arts into one Fighting Matrix… making the whole GM experience a lot smoother; also the revised rules on the Infected, how they behave, their stats and how to kill them.  Finally, I’m bringing me with the system I wrote recently, which was the great “missing piece” from the current YD rulebook; the Influence of Hastur and how it has a direct effect on characters within this world.

With any luck a huge storm will crash over the coastline around the time we’re deep into play. Waves booming and frothing up just beyond the wide picture window that runs along the length of the room we’ll be using.

Surreal vibe for an amazing period

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

Social trends and game play: pervasive gaming – the next techno bubble or just an emerging snowball from the 1980s?

Social trends and game play: pervasive gaming – the next techno bubble or just an emerging snowball from the 1980s?

Language evolves and with it the meaning of certain words and phrases.  Around the mid-noughties a number of techno boffins were alluding to the concept of pervasive gaming.

Pervasive gaming is one where the participant is within their normal environment but also within the game; it’s an overlap of fantasy and reality, the former sitting as a layer above the latter.

.

The boffins talk from the point of view of game-play that is enabled and augmented by digital devices, wireless networks, GPS location, image capture to allow re-rendering of reality.  They categorise pervasive games in terms of “acting out classic computer games” or “stimulating social interaction and role-play between real people”.  More recently with the explosive growth in mobile-apps and augmented reality, there is a new frontier for getting people to run around…whilst looking at some kind of screen.

So that’s pervasive gaming.  But I feel there’s a significant omission from this description, and it’s an interesting one because I wonder (and hope) that it signifies a backlash against the rising tide of overwhelmingly smart technology that wants to batter our nascent imaginations into submission, making us nothing more than passive “zombies” hooked into primal responses of our reptilian brainstem.

Jane McGonigal makes an interesting point in her thesis, “The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play“.

Ubiquitous computing and mobile network technologies have fueled a recent
proliferation of opportunities for digitally-enabled play in everyday spaces. In this
paper, I examine how players negotiate the boundary between these pervasive
games and real life. I trace the emergence of what I call “the Pinocchio effect” –
the desire for a game to be transformed into real life, or conversely, for everyday
life to be transformed into a “real little game.” Focusing on two examples of
pervasive play – the 2001 immersive game known as the Beast, and the Go Game,
an ongoing urban superhero game — I argue that gamers maximize their play
experience by performing belief, rather than actually believing, in the permeability of
the game-reality boundary.

- Jane McGonigal

The key statements here are “the desire for a game [to transfer] into real life” and “maximise their [...] experience by [acting that they believe] rather than actually believing”.

I can relate to both of these in respect to thirty years experience with tabletop RPG and some poignant personal moments in the kind of games some people call live-action, but I think should be included within the fold of  “pervasive gaming”.

Role-playing dice

With tabletop RPG, when you get a good GM, every player experiences a state of detached hyper-reality.  It’s more than the suspension of disbelief.  It’s an overlay, built by your imagination as it feeds off the narrative descriptions and hooks provided by the GM.  In reality you might all be sitting around a table in a cold and draughty house, with sheets of paper, stacks of pencils and a boxes of fantastically shaped dice (pyramids, dodecahedrons, decahedrons), but in your mind… you’re wherever the GM is describing. And more than that, you experience vivid visuals, heightened emotional states of trauma, stress, horror and exhilaration.  To the point that the fictional experience can embed itself in your memory as deeply as a real-life episode.  This is highlighted when old gamers get together and start recollecting scenarios they played together, five, ten or even twenty or more years  ago, and the quality of recall is identical to talking about any profound incident that has occurred in life.  When was the last time you were able to talk about a session on an X-box or PS3 with much clarity, especially a decade or more after the event?

The imagination is king.  When fused with a heightened emotional context and the willingness to surrender to the fantasy fiction, there is no greater game playing experience.

Tabletop RPG’s include the classics such as Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Gamma World, Bushido, Warhammer, and Delta Green, followed by a cascading series of spin-offs and “Hollywood style” genres.  It’s a fantastic realm to get involved in but this isn’t what I consider to be part of the pervasive gaming revolution (or evolution).

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by a producer for a German-French TV show called Tracks.  A lot of the conversation was focussed on the exciting, and still rather new, street-based game called 2.8 Hours Later.  I’d taken part in the one run in May 2011, in Bristol:  a whole night of  joining 300 or so people running around the city trying to reach safe-zones, whilst avoiding the scores of zombies that were lurking around the place.  It was an utterly mind-boggling experience.  The city was the game board.  And going back to the key points stated by Jane McGonigal, all of the players were willing to believe in the altered version of reality described to them.  Not presented visually through some fancy techno gimmick.  Just some written words and some very good acting by the folks enforcing the narrative backdrop.  It didn’t matter that Jo Public was walking around unaware and unresponsive to the zombie threat.  It didn’t ruin the fictional reality that queues of late-night weekend revellers were standing around watching us running past as if our lives depended on moving as fast as possible: which inside of our heads, that was the truth.

You can see photos and videos of my encounter with 2.8 Hours Later here.

During the interview the producer referred to this as pervasive gaming.  And it struck a chord with me.   Yes, it is pervasive.

The forefather of pervasive gaming

I was also intrigued that she didn’t know anything about the game that sowed the seeds for all of this: Killer, by Steve Jackson, first published in 1982.

I ran my first session of Killer in 1987 whilst at 6th-form college, doing my A’Levels.  It was fun.  Teenagers in cars staking out houses or carrying out executions with water pistols. Things went a bit serious and wrong in 1989 when I decided to expand the game by advertising for players.  I ended up with about sixty people taking part, most of whom I didn’t know.  1989 there were no widely available mobile phones (reserved for yuppies), there was no Internet (at least not on the global mass-communication level we recognise today).  I had Polaroid photos of players stuck to sheets of paper that contained details of where a person lived, where they worked and other facts required by any would-be assassin.  Come Saturday morning these players received a package in the post, containing one such sheet of paper with the identity of somebody they had to go out and “kill”.  Typically, because of the wide spectrum of players, most people didn’t know each other.  This wasn’t a college game with familiar faces.  This was stranger on stranger.

The first sign that things were going awry was when I saw a breaking story on the local  news about a young man being abducted on a high street by masked men who bundled him into a car at gunpoint, and reportedly shot him point-blank before driving off with him inside the car screaming.

The “Killers” rang me that night, delighted with what they’d done.  The young man was perfectly alright.  In fact, they’d all gone for drinks afterwards.  But I wasn’t so sure about the members of public who maybe thought they’d witnessed a murder.

There was an almost movie-like moment as I looked at the phone in my hand and then at the TV running the news report and I thought: Oh My God, What Have I Done?

.

Things went from bad to worse, including a part of Newcastle’s city centre being closed down whilst armed police laid siege to a building containing a bunch of players who the police thought were shooters for the East End drug gangs.

Luckily, nobody got shot (for real).

I never ran another game of Killer in Newcastle.

Looking back now I can see that all of those players had willingly surrendered to the fictional reality.  They stopped living by the rules of normal society and instead became assassins.  They carried concealed weapons in public places; they broke into strangers houses and set traps (alarm clocks in cardboard boxes) or set people on fire (wrapped a victim in orange crepe paper whilst he slept in his bed).

Pervasive in the extreme.

This kind of game simply couldn’t (and shouldn’t) happen in today’s surveillance society; or at least the rules should be more robustly defined: weapons are things with bright colours that look like toys.  Scaring the heck out of the public is not allowed.

So the fact that something like 2.8 Hours Later has emerged onto the scene and is rapidly becoming a phenomenon says several things:

• SlingShot, who produce the 2.8 Hour Later events have done a remarkable job at organising and liaising with the powers that be.
• A growing number of people are becoming interested in the act of play, without technology imposing itself.

Perhaps I’m being naive but I’d love to see a resurgence in the playing of board games, maybe even a renaissance in the realm of tabletop RPG (vested interest as I’ve published one).

Another strand of gaming that fits neatly into the pervasive fold is Alternate Reality.  This concept is wonderfully demonstrated in the 1997 movie “The Game” with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn.  Nine Inch Nails used AR to promote a series of music releases and art/society concepts during the late noughties (clues leading to a rendezvous where people were abducted by “fake” police in riot gear and finally desposited at a secret location for a private gig with NIN in front of them).  Check out the antics of Entertainment 42 for more info.

And even if these street-based games as run by SlingShot and IGFest do start to insert technology into the fabric of play, the concept of pervasive gaming is definitely growing and projecting an exciting facade of being something new, despite having roots stretching back decades.

David J Rodger

David J. Rodger (born 1970 in Newcastle Upon Tyne) is a British science fiction & fantasy author and game designer best known for his novels set in a near-future world of corporate and political intrigue. So far he has published five novels; four that are set in the same world: God Seed; Dante’s Fool; Iron Man Project and Edge, and one, Dog Eat Dog, set within the world of Yellow Dawn.

Rodger’s novels often combine high-tech intrigue and political/corporate machinations with elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, as created by H.P. Lovecraft. Rodger’s contributions to the Mythos include the creation of a new Great Old One in his novel Edge, and the use of the Outer God Nyarlathotep in the novel God Seed.

Rodger spent 8 years working for a non-departmental government agency, developing a virtual communications service within the IT Division, before moving into commercial project management for a UK media company. In 2000 Rodger’s presence on the Internet got him a place in the BBC documentary Through The Eyes of the Young, directed by Chris Terrill. Rodger now lives in Bristol, England, with a Braun coffee-maker, writing from a house on a hill with a view of Earth’s curve.

.

Relevant Links:

• IGFEST: A festival of interesting games you play in the street – click
• Wikipedia page for Killer type gaming (Assassin) – click
• Wikepedia page for Role-playing game – click
• Official webpage for Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur: a post-apocalyptic RPG that blends the cosmic horror of H.P.Lovecraft’s Mythos and the near future action-adventure of the Cyberpunk genre – click
• Cubicle 7 – an independent source of new RPGs and collateral – click
• UK Role Players – website with excellent online community – click

.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA

.

Social trends and game play: pervasive gaming – the next techno bubble or just an emerging snowball from the 1980s? wp.me/pTAKk-1MV—
David Rodger (@davidjrodger) September 18, 2011

WiP: getting near end of Terrain & Encounter chapter, simmering ideas for new non-human species

Photo: David J Rodger

The days have been tumbling through my fingers, it seems. Yet another mammoth chapter as I plod through the overhaul of Yellow Dawn – this is a much revised “Terrain & Encounters”.  I’ve ratified the systems on exposure, wind chill, frost bite, fatigue and the risks of travel, hopefully allowing GMs to enforce the sense of danger that exists when travelling the wilderness – without getting bogged down in a dozen dice rolls and flicking between so many separate tables. I’m pretty pleased with the work so far, at any rate.

Also fleshing out notes on a new non-human species I’m introducing into the Mythos: the Hokan, something that spans the divide between the realm of the Occult (Quantisphere) and the Outer Chaos, the squirming of the Mythos that exists Beyond.

Also expanding existing notes on another new non-human species I introduced in the current version of Yellow Dawn (2.1), called The Great Magi, I’ve now developed a lot more background material on these things as a result of running Horror On The Orient Express with my Yellow Dawn player group.

So as usual, busy busy.  I’m be sending out review copies of the latest chapter once completed; probably next weekend.

See more posts like this – click

---

David J Rodger – DATA