As usual, I have been following interesting technology and culture-related stories that might be interesting to remix and use in Cyberpunk and near future (or even proper science fiction) roleplaying games. Most are not dark in and of themselves but some of the uses they could be put to perhaps are.
Are arcologies possible? This article is doubtful about it but it accepts that megastructures are here but just not an entire city contained in a single building. Read the rest of this entry ?
Here we wrap up the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of March, 2023, on the theme of Taverns, Bars and other places to meet.
Thank you everyone who participated!
We saw:
Of Dice and Dragons dig through the archives for Add a little flavor to your tavern, with ideas to do just that!
Clark Timmons looking at the trope of You Meet in a Tavern, where it comes from and it has become so deeply enmeshed with fantasy gaming.
At the Seed of Worlds, they look back over a long-running campaign and the role of the Bars and Taverns of Thenya.
Plastic Polyhedra provided us with a Seedy Sci Fi / Cyberpunk bar generator, which really is the random generator we all need.
While I did some fantasy places in Port Imperial: The Crossroad Coffeehouse, Hope’s Hearth, The Quill and Sword, The Saucy Seadragon tavern, and The Silver Horse.
I also looked at some of the Bars and Clubs in my Shadowrun campaign.
Hope that you enjoyed the contributions and found them useful! (And later entries are welcome!)
Notes: The RPG Blog Carnival for April is Creating Elements for a Setting hosted by Codex Anathema.
And a late entry from Vile Envoy!, the Green Gland in 13 Stages, looking at a pleasure district.
Image found on the Mirriam-Webster page and its licensing status is unknown.
Welcome to the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of March, 2023, on the theme of Taverns, Bars and other places to meet.
Obviously, the important part of the theme is places to meet, this can be where the player characters hang out between adventures, where they meet up with prospective patrons, or perhaps it is where they get together for the first time (“you all meet in a tavern”).
So, let us talk about Taverns, Bars and places to meet. Some ideas: Read the rest of this entry ?
Ron Randall is an experienced comic book artist who I first met back in Portland (OR) at the occasional Portland comic book shows which I used to haunt when I lived in th
e Pacific Northwest. He is a skilled artist who has worked across the spectrum of comic books including Justice League International, Star Trek and more. But he is (perhaps) most well known as the creator of Trekker, the story of Mercy StClair a trekker (a sanctioned bounty hunter) in the future which he is still creating (and you can support via his Patreon).
When I knew him, Randall was consistently willing to pass on his hard won experience in the industry in the form of advice to new artists. I am glad to know that he is still doing well and creating things that he loves.
He did a piece of art for me, many years ago, of my Shadowrun character Rebel Belle, which is now included with this post. More recently, he did one of the Empress for me.
As usual, I have been following interesting dark future, technology and culture related stories that might be interesting to remix and use in Cyberpunk and near future (or even proper science fiction) roleplaying games.
Is this the future of fast food? The new Taco Bell in Minnesota. It is fascinating. Read the rest of this entry ?
Over at RPGGeek, there is a discussion about GMing styles (which you can find here) where I replied but I thought that I would share it here as well.
So, my thoughts on how I run a game.
My World, I have the final say about how things are, how they work and how it all fits together. That being said, I love for players to add, adapt and build off of things in the setting. Just because I have the right to veto something does not mean that I want to use it, I want the game to be fun for the player and something they are willing to buy into and make their own as well.
Let the players lead, there are things going on in the world that will happen in certain ways if not interfered with but it is up to the players to decide what their characters do and if they want to get involved in plots larger than “let us earn so money to buy drinks”. I do not use end-of-the-world plots (except in my superheroes campaign where the characters stopping such things is an underlying assumption of the genre) and while the world may get “worse” if the characters do not stop certain things, they will always have a chance to correct course and make things better laters, if that is their wish.
Light Preparation, I rarely have more than a page of notes going into a game, sometimes I highlight people, places or things I want to make sure show up (or at least get referenced) but usually I just have an opening scene and a handful of threads and off we go. I have been trying to be better at taking notes and these days I almost always have a google doc open as I am playing to add notes to as things happen and get mentioned.
There are Consequences, which is why note-taking is important! If the shadowrunners piss off Manawave Technologies and leave clues as to who they are, if the venturers insult a Draconic representative, if our teen heroes foil a plan by the Puzzle Master, these will lead to consequences . . . The games and the adventures do not take place in a vacuum, what the player characters do effect the world, usually in small ways but sometimes in major one and, in turn, the world will affect them.
Naturally, all these interlock, because I know my world(s), I am able to work out how to fit in player ideas and suggestions and to extrapolate the effects of their actions will have on and in the world. I can start with minimal notes and work outward because I have a strong idea of how things fit together and what the general currents are in the campaign.
Notes: photo [Construction Site] Louis Lafon, found on the Met and is in the Public Domain
How dark is the Future? As dark as you need it to be for an interesting game. (Personally, I am pretty hopeful but happy, shiny futures are not as interesting to play in.) Let us see what interesting things await us in the near future:
Food thefts become more common? Look at the case of the purloined pistachios. At the very least it would make for a different sort of adventure.
Looking at alternate forms of powers, what about harnessing the power of the wind through kites! Kites can be used to generate power in several different ways and take up let space than a windmill and can even be mobile. Or perhaps you would rather convert obsolete oil tankers into floating energy generators and maybe even factories as they travel the world, fishing for power. Seems like a great place for a job. Other companies are working on modular turbines that can be used in rivers and tidal basins and easily connected into existing grids (or create new ones in isolated areas). This sort of turbine powering a small, out-of-the-way community could be a good centerpiece for a magnificent seven sort of scenario. Interesting ideas all.
Speaking of interesting ideas, what about underwater greenhouses? Using the water outside for temperature regulation, maybe hook them up to some of the generators above for a complete closed system. A fascinating idea but harvesting and retrieving the plants grown seems a bit tricky.
Water systems seem to be a theme, Bechtel is working on ways to use water to improve the efficiency of cooling data centers, which is a huge energy sink apparently, so reducing energy costs for cooling such is important for a variety of reasons. Again, another interesting place to set a mission.
So, who is watching you? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advice on how to know who is watching you and how at street-level surveillance. Good things to keep aware of.
And more ways to use technology to learn things, there is a way to use a single laser to “see” what is in a room, useful if you need to break into that room, troubling if someone is planning on breaking in on you.
Need a campaign idea? How about rescuing stranded and damaged container ships? It is likely to be a growth industry, requiring specialized skills and nerves of steel, sound like player characters to me.
Now, to wrap up on a lighter note. Need some ideas for new and almost real media for your game world, try NestFlix!
Photo underwater greenhouses from Nemo’s Garden and used without permission.
Today is the last day of the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of February, 2022, on the theme of Something, Something, Dragons so still time to join in!
I had hoped for more participation, but this has been a wierd month with lost of distractions (especially over the last few days!).
Codex Anathema talked about the Draconic Prophecies of Eberron (in Spanish!)
Curato Alain linked to this thread on RPG Geek: Not your Usual Dragon.
My contributions were: Read the rest of this entry ?
Welcome to the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of February, 2022, on the theme of Something, Something, Dragons.
Obviously, the important part of the theme is DRAGONS, creatures so central to our conception of roleplaying games that they are half of the title of the “world’s most popular roleplaying game”.
So, let us talk about Dragons. Some ideas:
Let your imagination soar like a flying dragon (and how do dragons fly?).
I hope you find inspiration. Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your submission. As people post link, please take a look as the idea is to share, inspire and bounce of one another’s ideas. At the end of the month, all of the links will be collected as in a hoard in a final wrap up post.
If you are not a blogger hopefully you will be still be inspired. If you start a relevant thread on Reddit or Discord or a forum or whatever, then please post a link to it in the comments so that can be shared too. The more people involved, the merrier! Let us create some wondrous things together!
My first contribution, the Dragon Empress.
Notes: This will be the fourth time the Sea of Stars has hosted the RPG Blog Carnival, the first time back in May, 2017 with the theme of Occult Mysteries, the second time in February, 2019 with the theme of Making Magic Wondrous, and the third was February, 2021, on the theme of Divine Artifacts.
Thanks to Daemons and Death Rays for hosting the RPG Blog Carnival last month on Political intrigue, Courtly drama and Factions.
Image The Seven-Headed Dragon, Fairy Tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Illustration by Kay Nielsen, 1925, from the United Archives, and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
A variety of interesting articles about history that I have found recently that you can use to add depth and texture to your game world or just to expand your general knowledge. I use them for both.
There are more ways to catch fish than nets and lines, the Pacific North West tribes built extensive fish traps along the coast. These fish traps were extensive and suddenly forgotten due to a terrible set of circumstances. But a fascinating technology for harvesting fish. Is your campaign set along a coast? Is there a place there for fish traps? If so, would any of the cultures there be likely to use them?
Though sometimes your concern is with water, in Indin they used to use step wells to gather and store water. There is a concerted effort to reclaim and rebuild these unusual and fascinating water storage systems. Is water a concern in areas of your campaign world? What strategies do the people there use to store and conserve water?
This is a fascinating article about the Zone Rouge, the area of France still deemed too dangerous to visit because of abanded Great War munitions and toxins. Interesting enough on its own, but noted in there is the fact that certain types of plants can tell you what sorts of minerals are in the soil. Yes, prospecting with plants! It would be a neat “secret technique” for exploring druids, perhaps an order that is tied to one of the Dwarven cultures? Are there any areas due to the aftermath of war or other reasons that are unsafe to visit?
Dogs and people have been living together for millennia, and we have shaped many dogs to fit very niche needs. This article looks at some of the vanished breeds whose purpose vanished and, as happens, so did they. The story of the evolution of our current types of dogs is interesting and a bit sad as so many other types of dogs were left behind, lost in the mists of time. Though a turnspit dog might make a fine familiar for a wizard who specialized in culinary magic. What sorts of dogs are there in your campaign? Does any culture specialize in creating exotic dogs?
Did you know that there are abandoned buildings and even entire towns in the US Nation Parks? Here are a few of them. Great place to set a horror game or perhaps for a supervillain to hide their secret base.
Hope this has you thinking Have you found any intriguing or fascinating history you would like to share? If so, please do!
Notes: Photo by Dharani.prakas, found on Wikimedia Commons and used under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
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