Lanthanide Horizon - Food, Water, Shelter

Despite the lack of work on it, Sunless Horizon (now and until later, "Lanthanide Horizon" for the purposes of people not talking about Fallen London anymore) remains my favorite of my settings. Here, I put a little bit of effort into the base layer of worldbuilding - with a setting with these environmental difficulties, how do people actually Live.

Source - this is actually Lanthanide Horizon... fanart, a thing I find startling

Food and Food Preservation

    Agriculture is tenable aboard the megastructure, and its prerequisites tend to determine population patterns among those groups that use it. Soil both exists and conglomerates in dunes solidified by plant growth, and water can be collected from rain (some sections of the structure are doused with water intentionally for unknown reasons, and others are open enough to have to their own "natural" weather - however, it is best to assume this water is nonpotable until proven otherwise) or extracted through taps into intraship water lines.

    These lines often define the size and shape of a settlement and its farms - long, "linear" towns appear along high-pressure pipes that can sustain them, farms and their drainage systems are suspended in midair to make the most of vertical tubes, miles wide, that switch from drought to flood, and large, reliable taps can be siphoned off for ponds and aquaculture.

Digression - Soil Formation, yes i am really writing a paragraph about soil formation on my rpg blog and you can't stop me

    Implacable erosion means various fine metal dusts are common aboard the vessel, as are chemotrophic bacteria, which can augment these dusts into a dry, metallic soil habitable enough for plant life. These soils are moved primarily by wind, prevailing currents collecting them in specific locations where they are solidified by plant root systems. The concepts of "fine metal dusts blowing around wherever they feel like" and "soil comprised heavily of questionable heavy metal residues" may raise Worries among my readers, and they are almost certainly correct.

s o i l     

Source

    Most groups on the worldship are at least semi-agricultural, though some are less standard than the Oasis Kingdoms or those far Houses:

    Skinborne vessels are too small and disconnected to grow food on their own, though it is common for them to supplement rations brought from their ark with onboard herb gardens, small animals, and similar - a bit for practicality, but more for pleasure.

    The Gardener Clans are sedentary hunter-gatherers - their homes in the ship's hydroponics bays not only produce enough food for them, but enough that their pillage goes unnoticed by the bays' alarms. In contrast, the Walker-Herds feed off the same bays, moving their herds between them in a grand, devouring swarm, leaving only when the complex is depleted or the alarms ring. 

    Some groups of the firstborn (those still under the eye of the megastructure's controlling AI) toil in ponds and fields, as the AI leaves them dormant and self-sufficient for future crises. When work stacks up, and the crops are abandoned, the machine promises deliveries of luxuries, hundreds of tons of grain, endless water, all as gifts for the loyal - and, of course, permanent drought, plagues, and hard vacuum for the shirkers. 

Preservation

    Salt is both required for some relevant industrial processes (water treatment, manufacturing of synthetic rubber, etc.) and for biological life - as such, concentrated brine numbers among the substances piped through the megastructure, and available to be tapped. This brine is then dried to create salt or diluted and stored for food preservation.

    Outside of these taps and reservoirs, salt is difficult to find in the concentrations required for preservation, so drying, smoking, and pickling in acids are more common, despite being less effective.

    As one of the many steps in their industrialization and expansion, the Houses have invented the canning machine (though just as on Earth, not yet the can opener), letting them preserve food for extended periods without reliance on rare minerals.         

Source

Shelter & Clothing

    When possible, buildings are repurposed from pre-existing structures - shipping containers, unused facilities, long corridors of empty closets, et cetera. When buildings have to be made, they are generally constructed of ubiquitous metal panels, dry-fit or connected with clay, siphoned industrial sealants, or even welds (as unfortunately, neither lime nor bitumen are present).

    In areas with hostile climates (after all, the central AI cares little about habitable temperatures in the 500-square mile sulfuric acid synthesizer), insulation is harvested from the ship, or ventilating holes and windows are spaced carefully to catch wind. Areas with very hostile climates, such as active furnaces, chambers filled with radioactive waste, and the insides of town-sized wire EDMs, are functionally uninhabitable.

    Clothing is generally synthetic - piles of wiring insulation painstakingly unrolled into wide strips to knit into clothing, or single mats of plastic wrapped around the body. When present, hair, plant fibers, and such are used. Metal is commonly used for jewelry, decoration, and armor.

    Access to electricity for use in heating (and the creation of fire) and light (through common, easily scavenged electric lights) is very common, but fully taking advantage of electricity requires enough layers of concepts, machines, and cultural needs that the majority live in a pre-industrial environment.

One Less Fool Play Reports

In the last post of this sort I referenced an earlier superhero game that had derailed. Here is said game, complete with perhaps too much effort in writing addenda, sectioning the most coherent part of the game from the actual ending, and going back to poke the GM to tell me hidden secrets.

And, since it ended up unpleasantly long to read a single blog post, I turned into a PDF, here.

it's hard to find one picture with the appropriate tone, but these two are close enough from opposite ends

i have been told it is intentionally like garboid 90s comics, but i don't read those

I Re

(another set of words in a sequence for/related to deus ex parabola's superhero GLOG. i don't even like superheroes but i keep writing this for accursed, unknowable reasons)

A city run entirely on blind optimism (and, of course, the elaboraziones just a bit south, but we don’t talk about those), I Re is on track to turn into a full-blown cyberpunk dystopia within the decade and absolutely hyped about it. A new skyscraper sprouts every week with a new company inside - in a month, they’re both gone. 

Local Newspaper - Eye Re

Everything’s a stock ticker (“How Will the Reappearance of Supervillain “Symphony of Noises” Affect Defense Investments?”) a heartwarming story of survival (“3rd Grader Raises $10,000 to Clean Cordoned Waste Site”), or about traffic.

Factions

Locus International: design and production of spaceborne industry. NASA offloaded the work of rocketry to them years ago, and the ESA did the same last year. An immense mass driver is under construction on the outskirts of I Re, entirely under their control. Conspiracies abound, especially around the fabled document Solutions for Occupation, said to contain Locus’s plans for an orbital habitat to escape climate change. While Locus is often the target of crimes (armored truck hijackings, payload smuggling, and hacking attempts, in particular), never fear; their External Affairs division has the equipment and legal cover to protect corporate interests.

Example Locus Superhuman

Telescope - 1Σ, Perceive 1, Think 1

Automatic subconscious understanding of trajectories and navigation. Maximum range for all weapons and thrown objects is tripled, and Telescope may make impossible attacks (ricocheting a bullet off the side of a building, off the sidewalk, and through the cracked window of a moving car five blocks away). Notably, Telescope doesn’t get bonuses to-hit or damage.

Telescope works exclusively as a rocketry and mathematics consultant, and any statement that Telescope (and thus, Locus International) are the cause of recent murders in opposing companies is grounds for a libel suit.

The First and the Last

Full-on paramilitary technomonarchists in the Curtis Yarvin vein, The First and the Last are an increasingly common sight on the streets of I Re. Their plans hinge on the creation of a society ruled by sovereign corporations led by a single unencumbered Executive, an objective that The First and the Last believe is key to continuing human technological progress.

Example The First and the Last Superhuman

Tatterdemalion, 1Σ, Shift, Ace

At will, can become "unnoticeable" - not in the form of becoming invisible, but in becoming a person whose presence would not raise concern - in most cases a janitor when in a public place or a pedestrian when outside.

This works on a building-scale basis, inconveniently - Tatterdemalion will remain a janitor even as he attempts to break into the Sealed Biotechnology Wing, Where We Definitely Don't Let Janitors In. Similarly, when outside he will shift from one body to another as his power attempts to determine exactly what kind of pedestrian is least interesting in this neighborhood.

ДPYГ

A voice on the screen, with no known identity. They speak privately with those in need - “You will have no insulin. You will go to the basement of 3310 Grover Street and find twelve buckets. You will pour one down the sink at the peak of each of the next twelve hours. You will have insulin.”

Their messages are spread between those who have heard them, searching for hidden patterns, but ДPYГ has remained indecipherable. They have no ideology, no patterns, and, it seems, do not benefit from their work.

ДPYГ has no subordinates, but they do not need them. Everyone works for them when they ask. 

I Re Municipal Police Department

Hot off the heels of eight simultaneous scandals ranging from “accidentally” leaving a suspect locked in a car on a set of train tracks to “accidentally” raiding the offices of local journalists to “accidentally” running off with tens of millions in taxpayer money, the I Re police department is undergoing a revolution, with high-ranking officers fired, budgets cut, and new penalties for use of force.

We both know that’s a lie - the police budget doubled this year and they bought a tank.

Example I Re Municipal Police Department Superhuman

“The Sheriff”, 2Σ, Perceive II, Zap

While the I Re police department is the city’s largest employer of superhumans, most discussion of their hires focuses around the faceless, nameless figure of “the Sheriff” - stories of suspects paralyzed with a glance from across a city block, and a detective who can smell murders.

The I Re police will readily admit the Sheriff’s existence, but their cases and identity are hidden.

atrocious slushposting

Why write posts that require effort and thought when you can propel your blog forwards on purely play reports and miscellaneous information soup? 

Half of this is stuff lost in Discord posts, the rest dredged up from my drafts. Perhaps some of it will be Completed, someday.

but probably not

Thanatonauts and Their Designs For The World Of Humankind

Thanatonauts, those able to drag a piece of themselves into the lands of the Dead and back, have brought back daguerreotype images, anatomical sketches, and even interviews with the denizens of that blasted waste. Some take these odysseys (which, even with modern diving equipment, are still certainly not safe) just in the interest of scholarship, but a few hold more intense plans: "extractor" groups hope to find both a way to bring objects of the Dead back to Earth, and to find something in that land worth taking for the profit of themselves the world of the living, while "weaver" ideologues in thanatonaut leadership hope to open its gates to all - closing off the possibility of a heavenly afterlife for the certainty of the grey fields.

(an attempt to mess with that old fantasy standby, the evil necromancer cult - the 1800s tech level emerges from nowhere and returns to it)

BITTER WIND SIGNS [C-E 🟥]

The Organization is at its most dense in Washington D.C., unsurprisingly. There's a good dozen fireteams based in the city - proximity to headquarters sure reinforces that.

Last week, one team turned up dead - local police found a set of seemingly unrelated murders. Another team died earlier today. We've ordered the rest to go to ground, and we're providing you a list - safehouses, identities, crime scene documentation, all of it. Keep the rest of our fireteams alive, figure out what's killing them, and handle it.

This mission is CLOSED-EYE not only because of the need to avoid civilian notice, but because of the need to avoid opposition notice.

(what's happening to them? maybe a peer competitor has gotten hold of Organization documents and is going hunting. Maybe a fireteam has turned traitor, using their pre-existing relationships to stab the Organization in the back. Or, maybe one of the deceased brought something back from their last op...)

OMICRON VEGA RECIEVING [O-E 🟩]

A small town's been impacted by a large earthquake - the first earthquake in living memory, and the largest one to ever hit. Photogrammetry shows a chasm's opened on one end of town, and civilian calls to emergency services have reported something moving in there.

You're half disaster response, half caving expedition. Put out some fires, dig some people out of buildings, and deal with whatever's in that hole.

(big worms, i bet. seems like the kind of thing they'd do)

1dsome Modern Fantasy Weapons

1. production of Cartridge, Caliber 5.56 mm, Infernal, XM653 [No primer, Black-anodized case and bullet] ended in 2012 due to a lack of necessary specialist materials. Remaining ammunition is known to provide improved penetration (ignores the effects of armor on AC or DR, can pierce car doors, windshields, home walls, etc), incendiary capability (+1d4 fire damage, can set things on fire), and unexpected reactions with human physiology (human or metahuman targets killed with these cartridges exude a cloud of caustic black smoke which both cannot be seen through and deals 1 damage per round to everyone within, and also cannot be revived by any means).

2. Infolded Ballistic Armor, the first military use of infolding, where an object is placed in the same space as another object in three dimensions, but shifted in the fourth, showed promise, reaching NIJ level IV while remaining concealable, light, and flexible in 3d. However, as was later found in industrial application of infolding, the process decays over time without repeated exposure to the Chasm. Since that land was acquired by Romanian chemical company Sinteza, it is no longer available to outside powers. All known examples of infolded ballistic armor released their components into 3D as of April 2nd, 2019. 

3. PG-7DS is the designation for a set of 40mm projectiles for the ubiquitous RPG-7 meant to improve its effectiveness against modern tank armor. Instead of a standard shaped charge, it contains a bound nature spirit. On contact with a target, the spirit is crushed, and as it dies it releases a flood of vines, stems, and flowers. Successful shots will cause this effect to spread into the tank, disabling sensitive components, starting fires, and injuring or killing the crew by piercing them with these plants.

These were abandoned due to moral radiation - as the bound spirits started to comprehend their confinement, proximity to them began to have deleterious emotional effects.

4. Unerring Stones, carved with weak glyphs (feather-type, class I) are common discoveries in conflict-prone areas from the Mesolithic to the present. These glyphs improve the accuracy and range of the thrown stone, and are easily replicated. While the glyphs have been used on other thrown items (bottles, hand grenades, etc.), stones are the most enduring of them, and thus the most often identified.

Of course, even since the invention of the bow these devices have been a weapon of last resort. Against a modern military, or even a gunman, their effect is negligible, and the standard glyph is too large to replicate on arrowheads or bullets.

+2 to-hit, 1 damage, range of 100 feet

5. The recently-rediscovered alchemical technique To Create a Killing Fire to Purge The Holy and Their Subjects has been declared illegal under the UN's Chemical Weapons Convention. Independent reporting alleges it still sees use by the U.S. military for defoliation and smoke generation.

The Astrologer

A GLOG class doomed to incompletion, and that honestly may not be very pleasant to play anyway

A: Invocation

B: ?

C: Alteration

D: Configuration

Invocation

Each morning, roll 5 dice of these types (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). Each of these dice represents a celestial object, and their results present you with their Aspect for the day.

Once each day, you can Invoke the Aspects you have rolled, causing them to take effect.

d4 - The Peasant (Work, People)

1. Something lost will be found. Invoke this Aspect to learn the location of an object.

2. The people's hearts will be turned. Invoke this Aspect to automatically receive a Friendly result on a Reaction Roll with a group of low-ranking people (peasants, militiamen, etc.).

3. A moment of weakness will consume someone. Invoke this Aspect to make someone stop paying attention through a coincidence (dozing off, important message, etc.)

4. etc

d6 - The Tree (Nature, Survival)

1. Death will be averted by chance. Invoke this Aspect to allow a character to reroll a failed Save.

2. A path will be cleared for you. Invoke this Aspect to move twice as fast for one round as plants, stray rocks, and other obstructions clear themselves.

3. You will find a bounteous harvest. Invoke this Aspect when foraging to automatically gather the highest number of rations.

4. A grievous wound will be prevented. Invoke this Aspect to prevent a roll on the Death and Dismemberment table.

5. Nature revolts. Invoke this Aspect to halve someone's movement speed for one round as obstacles move in front of them.

6.

d8  - The Red Lion (War, Beasts)

1. A death, cruel and violent. Invoke this Aspect to add 1d4 to the damage of one attack.

2. A hidden enemy is revealed. Invoke this Aspect to bring an invisible or hidden creature into view.

3. A beast is tamed. Invoke this Aspect to automatically receive a Friendly result on a Reaction Roll with an animal.

4. Fear strikes into the hearts of men. Invoke this Aspect to force a group of NPCs to make a morale check.

5.

6.

7.

8.

d10 - The Magister (Knowledge, Magic)

1. Truth will be pulled from secrets. Invoke this Aspect to learn the use of a magic object.

2. A voice will be silenced. Invoke this Aspect to prevent the use of a magic spell or item.

3. Arcane effects will shake the earth. Invoke this Aspect to

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

d12 - The Emperor (Authority, Heroism)

Alteration
Once per day, you can choose to reroll the entire set of dice as the stars reveal new Aspects to you. You must take the rerolled set.

Configuration
Once per day, you can choose the results of one of your dice.

The Eyes of Dame Guendolen

The ranks of Knight-Exorcists maintain their frail connections to our world through their eyes. Under the sign of the Opened Eye they are focused here, on the material. Under the Third Eye they balance, barely, as their armor begins to weigh on them and threats of both here and Elsewhere loom. Under the Closed Eye they are pulled away, becoming incorporeal for a time to delve fully into the lands of the spirits.

(a knight-exorcist glog class has sat in my drafts for 4 actual human years, and i'm ready to admit it'll never be finished)

A Facebook Post

Something crawled up out of my basement and stole a bag of flour? My cat really didn't like it, but it didn't really do anything. Is there, like, a spray I can buy or something to get rid of it? I found a tunnel it dug through my basement, but I don't want to go through the effort of moving all my cardboard boxes. 

thanks, bye

Aboard the Worldship

Legal disputes between Skinborne vessels are related to the ship, rather than the crew - by the time you see them next, it's certainly possible for the crew to have changed, and almost certain for them to have elected a new Select(wo/man) to represent them shoreside.

Among the clans that make their homes in the marshy Coolant Seas (as opposed to the Walker-Herds, who migrate between them), extra names are gifted on the night of the "new year" as a reward for valor or hard work. They are rarely referenced, though the number may be used in introductions (I am Benat [personal name] Itsasargi [Home of origin] of 6 [number of honorifics]).

Art in the hivemind Sustainer Cells uses hierarchical perspective - priests, the honorable sleepers, and such are presented as physically larger than others, whether in painting or in theater. Satirical works invert this (keeping members of high positions still recognizable by their dress and facepaint) or exaggerate it (a single hand the size of a person reaching down from offstage in a play).

(Sunless Horizon hasn't been posted about much since late 2020, but it remains my favorite of my settings. Almost everything in it needs to be renamed, but that can come later)

The Clockwork Neuroblock

A ticking water-cooled superintelligence buried deep under the earth, commanded in ancient times to build the perfect organism. After creating thousands of lineages of horrors, the Neuroblock has finally succeeded - down in the depths writhe nests of immortal, indestructible Proteans, living forever on nothing but trickles of water and cave moss.

(3 of the 4 floors of this dungeon are done, but it hasn't been touched since a couple days of manic effort last year. Orbiters Local 519 kind of messed me up)

The Dead Language

♑︎-♊︎-♃ "an animal with think", a person

♉︎-♍︎-♒︎ "road that doesn't move", a town - notably, can also be read as "water that doesn't move", a lake or sea

⚴-♉︎-♍︎-♒︎ "one part of a road that doesn't move", a building

⚴-♉︎-♍︎-♒︎-♊︎-♑︎-♊︎-♃-♊︎-♅ "one part of a road that doesn't move with animal-with-think-with-important", a palace

♃-♊︎-⚳-♆ "think about food and light" - to be happy

(i hesitate to call it "a conlang", since it uses roughly 20 symbols and has little in the way of grammar. it is a way for me to pass the time, and someday use for megadungeon puzzles)

G20(ish), Rendered in the Dead Language 

☊-⚶-☊ ♊︎ ♋︎-♊︎-⚴ ♅-♋︎\ ♍︎-⚼/♌︎/♍︎-☊/♃-♉︎-♏︎/♃-☉/♏︎-♅ | ♅-♋︎-♅ ♊︎ ♅-♋︎ ⚶-⚶ ⛎︎/⚶-⛎︎/♍︎ ♉︎-♋︎

⚹ ♉︎-♌︎/♍︎ ⚼-♊︎-♋︎-♊︎-♋︎-♋︎-♋︎/♊︎ ♅-♋︎-♅ | ♅-♋︎ ♅ ♋︎-♊︎-♋︎

☊-⚶-☊ ♊︎ ⚼-♊︎-⛎︎-♊︎-⛎︎ ♌︎-♋︎ | ⛎︎ ♉︎-♌︎ ☊-⚶-☊/♍︎ ♉︎-♌︎ ⚼/⚶ ♉︎-♌︎ ⚼ ♋︎ ♊︎ ♌︎-♋︎

⚹ ♌︎-♋︎ ♊︎ ♉︎-♋︎/☊-⚶-☊ ♉︎-♑︎

you-away-from-you has five-and-one important-numbers: move-stone, safe, move-you, know-things-written-down, know-things-near-you, speak-importantly. important-number-importants have/are important number away-from-away-from three, away-from three, move to five-minus-five

in the future, unsafe, move rock-with-five-and-five-five-five, add important-number-important. Number greater than five-and-five

you-away-from you has rock-with-three-and-three safe-numbers. they unsafe you-away-from-you, move the unsafe rock, subtract the unsafe rock number from safe-numbers

in the future, safe-number with many-less-than-many, you-away-from-you not animal

(i don't even have an excuse for this - coming back six months later i barely know what i was on about)

Two More Fools Play Reports

While my blog itself has been mostly silent through 2022, I have spent an honestly unreasonable amount of time writing play reports for games I've played in or just spied on on Discord. I have, just now, realized that these play reports can, in fact, be used for free blog posts, which is currently the kind of blog post I need. 

This game used deus ex parabola's superhero rules, but exact mechanical details are not particularly relevant.

Session 1

As the long-running, action-packed, and generally much more reasonable superhero campaign One Less Fool noticed its fuel-air mixture was terribly wrong and caught fire, the GM attempted to start a side campaign with a pair of its players, who both conspired to send the game’s tone down some unplanned side alleys.

On a wet evening in Destin, Florida, Mr. Jefferies (Shift, Weird - cursed for his sins with the form of a rubbery clown and an endless hammerspace of inedible pies) and Checkmark (Think 1, Weird - a racecar driver dragged back from Hell and turned into an accountant) sit on the curb in front of a nightclub neither of them are cool enough to get into. 

Eventually, one of the patrons realizes the two of them are A) superheroes, and B) completely abject, and says he’ll toss them $100 if they go handle a job he doesn’t have time for - checking out a “ghost” sighted in a retirement community’s library. With nothing better to do and the prospect of Real Legal Currency, the PCs managed to drag themselves out of their self-pitying stupor and hike their way over.

By 10 PM they make it to the gate of the Shaded Palms Retirement Community and very suddenly come to the understanding that gated neighborhoods have gates in front of them. After a few minutes coming up with increasingly improbable Doordash-based lies, Jefferies drags his horrid clown body through the network of storm drains under the sidewalk and tosses a rope over for Checkmark. 

A little more walking gets them right to the unlocked library

and its decade-old computer lab, which sparked some conversation - Checkmark’s only real useful power is sending objects directly to Hell in exchange for a bit of money. On the one hand, they don’t want to get caught stealing from the public library - on the other, money can be exchanged for goods and services, which is more than enough to persuade them. While they pocket the hell-sent $360, they hear a footstep somewhere outside.

Since he doesn’t squeak whenever he moves, Checkmark creeps up to the second-floor meeting rooms, where he is soon confronted by An Ghost, Or Similar Creature, staring at him through a door. Filled with an excess of courage, he shoves the door open ready to give it the ol’ what-for, only to be stopped suddenly when it doesn’t try to maul him.

As Checkmark runs out of ideas and tries to offer the dog-skull-headed creature a cigarette, Jefferies hears someone running down another set of stairs and leaps up to block her path, starting a four-creature pileup as the dog-skeleton rushes to protect its master, Jefferies tries running down his list of pratfalls to prove he’s safe, and Checkmark runs down the stairs to make sure nobody kills anybody else.

Luckily, no one has much time to talk to anyone or pull their limbs off for fun, as after a few half-introductions, the creature’s controller warns that back when the PCs decided “Ah, the building is simply unlocked, we will open the door and go inside” they set off the burglar alarm. 

    However, the PCs kind of ignore this and instead drill down into a long and winding conversation about names (the woman introduces herself only as “Friend”), power classifications (Friend describes herself as “Weird ב”, a statement that doesn’t frighten her nearly as much as it should), and personal histories until a dozen police cars fill the library parking lot. Oops.
    Friend chops a hand towards the glass front of the library and it shatters as the dog-skull figure slams into it at hundreds of miles an hour, dragging Friend behind as it leaves a trail of destruction.

Jefferies and Checkmark decide that running does seem prudent, and are careful to take a path that leads them away from Friend and her runaway train of a pet.

They manage to get away as the cops stream after Friend, and later meet their patron to shrug and go “yeah, you know, exploding libraries - what’re ya gonna do”, a conversational tactic that works surprisingly well. 

Jeffries spends his week of downtime “clowning around” - no further context is provided.

Checkmark saves up money for a handgun and keeps in touch with Friend (now hiding out in a golf course sand trap) over the phone.

Session 2

While Jefferies hovers around a McDonalds waiting for Checkmark to get off his shift, superhuman problems come directly to them as a pair of men in red and blue hoodies respond to the time-honored teenage dirtbag tradition of harassing fast food workers by simply picking them up, biting them, and throwing them right out of the building.

This promptly clears out the restaurant, and as the until-recently-occupants call the police, Checkmark both remembers to blink, and to gather as much information as possible. Luckily, this set of bloodlusted superhumans readily hand out business cards listing them as “Sinistro e Destro” before running out the back door as the cops arrive.

Now that the McDonalds is definitely closed for the day, the PCs hurry through the rain to their local (non-destroyed) public library to feed the rest of the Italian business card through Google Translate, finding (among other things) their Facebook account, where they have just posted a picture of Sinistro standing atop a pile of bruised Home Depot patrons a mile away. More running brings them there, where they’re confronted by reporters for the Destin World-Herald, who succinctly explain their own institutional problems by asking Checkmark about the “dangerous potential space aliens”.

Checkmark is savvy enough to take every opportunity for publicity, even against his better judgment:

though within moments the sheer presence of Mr. Jeffries has driven the reporter into a crisis about spending her career trapped in a Bigfoot-and-Roswell rag in a rainy corner of Florida.

 Resigned to not making it onto the front page, the PCs bother the wounded for directions and chase Sinistro and Destro over to a local golf course as the rain transitions to a tremendous thunderstorm. Attempting to rouse the crowd of dried-out retired superhumans into an angry mob based on ideas like “helping other people” eventually gets one of them to admit that this is, for all intents and purposes, where supervillains wind up once the arthritis gets bad enough to stop them from holding cities hostage with death rays.

However, one of the retirees, Clarence (x-ray vision, complete with the risks of radiation exposure) is persuaded (more on the virtue of “beating someone up” than “helping others”) and as the PCs pile into his golf cart, Checkmark texts Friend, finding that not only is she hiding out at this golf course, but that she can currently see Sinistro and Destro beating an eight-foot tall mechsuit with its own arms.

The golf cart slowly trundles through the mud to the 7th hole, where sneakful trick plans like “blow them up with a firework purchased from the Hell Store” are slowly whittled down until “sneak up behind one of them and hit them in the head with a baseball bat” is the only idea left. Unfortunately, Sinistro and Destro are superheroes with abilities like “extra melee damage” and “extra HP”, as opposed to “accountant” and “clown”, so within a round Jefferies and Checkmark are both on the ground getting pummeled and trying to tie a blanket around Sinistro’s neck.

A golf caddy emerges from the rain and simply starts beating people indiscriminately with a club while Destro manages to break Checkmark’s jaw by biting it and Checkmark attempts to stick a utility blowtorch into Destro’s ear.

This at least gets Destro to run, so the PCs double up on wailing on Sinistro until the golf caddy manages to crack Mr. Jeffries down to 0 HP and forces him to drop the strangling-blanket. As Sinistro flees, Friend tries her best to stop him but her pet simply digs a 10-foot deep furrow in the golf green in the wrong direction.

With the time for violence over (at least, after Checkmark clocks the caddy upside the head with a bat, to even things out), the PCs check the injuries of both the mech’s centenarian occupant (a broken arm) and Clarence (deceased) and carry them back to the crowd.

While Checkmark is allowed to shove a golf cart into hell for a clean $1000, his broken jaw ends up hospitalizing him for the rest of the campaign.

Session 3

With Checkmark indisposed, his player replaced him with Meiosis (Weird, Fly), a man who can divide into two at will, and fly by having both of them push against each other, in clear defiance of all physical laws.  

While sitting around playing poker with the golfers, the PCs get their hands on, honestly, exactly the kind of problem they deserve to solve - the utterly ancient superman Cab Calloway has lost his cat. Luckily, Calloway’s minder had held onto another one of Destro and Sinistro’s business cards, this one complete with a ransom note for One Million American Dollars, Brought To What Used To Be The Library. 

Of course, neither Sinistro nor Destro are actually there, so the PCs wind up having to slowly follow their trail of petty theft and property damage around town until sighting them from the air all the way back at the old folks’ golf course, bent double under the weight of a refrigerator full of ice cream cakes. 

Meiosis’s player had, to describe it politely, “used out-of-character information” when choosing his equipment, so after dropping Jeffries on Sinistro he splits - one half attempts to beat Sinistro with a sledgehammer while the other drops out of the air to spray Destro in the face with paint, for Immediate and Permanent Blinding.

The dice do not like this idea, so instead of a clean, synchronized neutralization of both of them, Jeffries ends up wielding a shattered Nokia phone as a shiv and is promptly absolutely turned to paste as Destro crits him over the head with a commercial refrigerator. The fight continues with the PCs hounding Sinistro and Destro as they run to the retirees;

Destro does, indeed, attempt to pull Cab Calloway’s wheelchair out from under him, but as he reaches for it he, Sinistro, and a wide semicircle of shuffleboard court simply *pop* out of existence.

Luckily, as the PCs chased them, Sinistro and Destro ditched their stolen goods - Calloway’s cat, the fridge, and an old lady’s handbag with… an entire human skull, rendered perfectly in a single sapphire.

Mr. Jeffries spends his downtime reading about Cab Calloway - along with the rest of his century-long supervillainy career, he apparently once survived a Soviet assassination attempt with a suitcase nuke.

Meiosis rents out a self-storage garage and furnishes it for Friend to live in, assuming her pet skeleton-nightmare fits well.

Session 4

Rooting through the stolen handbag reveals plenty of identifying information, so the PCs meander over to the house of its owner, one Tanya Halls, who perhaps unsurprisingly for being the kind of person to own a life-size sapphire skull, is also the kind of person to have a six-foot-high oil painting of herself and her late husband in full pirate getup in her living room.

Said late husband ran a “completely above-board” extraterritorial gambling ship, which was “completely legal, no matter what that pesky Attorney General said”, until it sank in Hurricane Andrew. While said gambling ship has since been found, its cargo of millions of dollars in poker chips still sits at the bottom of the ocean since the local Fun For The Whole Family Diving Center took the last of Halls’ money and “””neglected””” to attempt a recovery.

And with the offer of one of the $25,000 cranberry poker chips in exchange for option B, the PCs run off to the Fun For The Whole Family Diving Center with petty vandalism on the mind. Veiled threats of legal action quickly turn into regular threats of sledgehammers applied to windows and doors, and moments after that decay into every staff member of the Center grabbing the nearest blunt object.

Meiosis applies his sledgehammer to a Center worker, suddenly realizing as the blow lands that people tend to stop being alive when you hit them in the head with hammers. As he’s soon pummeled down to 1 HP with a pipe wrench, and the police are already on the way, the PCs decide discretion is the better part of valor and flee.

Epilogue

Now trapped between a building full of angry boat renters and the wrath of a octogenarian gambling tycoon, with no money, no friends, and no plan, the PCs fleeing takes them further than they’d expected at first - certainly out of Destin, probably out of Florida, and honestly maybe out of the United States.  

While it did not come up in the logs, Two More Fools managed to have all the structural problems its parent game did - between each session were weeks of unpredictable schedule changes, injuries, and decay.

I hope Friend is still doing well in her garage.

1d8 Bayport Superheroes (for a certain value of "super", and for that matter "hero")

Despite generally being uninterested by Superhero Content And Media™, I find myself pulled aggressively towards deus ex parabola's Bayport - a model for superhero campaigns in a comically terrible mode, filled with petty crime, omnipresent corruption, and superpowers like "shove unattended items into Hell for money", "summon poor drawings of guns", and "turn into a glowing sphere", and players spending a decent amount of their time trying to figure out how to kill some unstoppable ultraman with a crowbar and a box of rat poison.

With my work ethic, ability to string words together, and inner soul completely pasted by completing Orbiters Local 519 (you may have noticed an unusually conversational tone in this post, for the same reason - I expect that in future I will return to my standard dry, unhelpful writing style), I realized it'd be Free Real Estate to dredge up some of the characters I never got around to using and turn them into Blogge Post.

I expect my next attempt to Blogge Post to occur somewhere around November, or maybe in 2025, so remember to set your watches, I suppose.

Third Eye - 1Σ, Zap, Weird

An ability to bend space, somewhat, allows Third Eye to both see through walls (though this is blocked by lead, and even through lesser materials his vision is reduced to only monochrome splotches) and, with roughly 5 minutes of focus, force a single human target to Save or experience tremendous health problems in the form of their head no longer being attached to their neck, and many parts of their head no longer attached to the others.

- Real name Page Fulco, history unknown and potentially concealed intentionally

- Quiet, jittery, impulsive

- Currently leading, or perhaps soon will lead, a cross-state manhunt after spreading a half dozen corporate executives over the walls of a single locked boardroom. 

Lucent - 1Σ, Fly, Ace

Lucent can treat transparent materials (water, plastic, air, etc.) as either glass or air at will, and can "fly" by walking up glassed-air staircases.

- Real name Liêm Quỳnh

- Purely heroic, motivated by selflessness and the love of mankind.

- Sometimes sighted in random positions over open ocean, standing on one of his platforms for an unknown reason.

Dead Zone - 1Σ, Weird, Martial I (+DEX, +CON)

Within 10 feet of Dead Zone, no sound can be produced - notably, it can be perceived - sound from outside can be heard inside the Zone, but sound from inside cannot be heard anywhere. Martial I represents extra running speed and jump height (roughly double human baseline).

- Real name Johanna Calvin, history includes work in the U.S. military before cutting out suddenly - we assume this is when her power became evident. At the end of that tour she never returned, so I suppose they must not have liked her all that much.

- Before the cut in her history, Dead Zone was well-regarded - reliable, trustworthy, and just the right amount of unscrupulous. It is unknown how many of these qualities remain.

- Currently out in the suburbs of Bayport, only leaving her home during the night. Otherwise, she seems to hold no routines - we may not be the only ones following her.

Scion - 1Σ, Martial I (+INT, +STR), Fly

Recovered a ruined alien mechsuit while digging in their back garden, and has been trapped inside ever since. Flies disorientatingly with half-functional engines burning lime-green, and attacks with the suit's hands - one seven-fingered metallic grasper, and one ferrofluid bulb morphing between long needles and wiggly-looking chainsaws.

While the suit has hundreds of buttons in reach, Scion avoids pressing most of them ever since hitting Hazmat Seal and getting a few good breaths of alien atmosphere.

- Real name Callisto Marley, prior work in astronomy (how do we know she found the suit by accident?), wife Lori Marley vanished around the time the suit was recovered.

- Cheerful, careful to avoid collateral damage, good reputation

- Rumors abound of a second entity inhabiting the suit itself - as Scion has never volunteered for research into the suit, and evades when questioned about its functions, this has not been proven.

Ouija - 1Σ, Perceive I, Ace

Able to perceive what he assumes to be the spirits of the dead, using this both for information-gathering and, with appropriate payment and preparation, send them as a torrent to possess others with the screeching, hedonistic, panicked dead for one hour per year spent.

- Real name Glory Grover. Age somewhere in his 20s, outward appearance around his 90s due to payments of lifespan. We expect roughly 8 hours of his ability remain.

- Gullible, paranoid, certain he has knowledge he does not

- Appeared recently in the news after causing the collapse of a Bayport crime family by possessing their head continuously over the space of months. We expect the remnants to be after him, and expect him to die.

The Lion of Paris - 1Σ, Martial I (+DEX, +WIS), Weird

A "reformed" museum thief with the ability to teleport small (size of a fist, roughly) objects into his hands. Notably does not function on living things, or portions of living things.

- Real name unknown, former aliases include "Doran Eugen", "Levi Hadley", and "Otto Emmanuel". Surveillance has never seen him in Paris, or anywhere in France for that matter.

- Self-interested, self-obsessed, unafraid of consequences; caught six years back after stealing the Swords of Temporal and Spiritual Justice from the Tower of London and using them to duel with a collaborator of his in broad daylight.

- Currently in prison in Germany, but we wouldn't find it particularly difficult to get him out, if it becomes necessary.

Stranger - 2Σ, Durable I, Perceive I, Ace, Zap

Stranger is able to see through the eyes of anyone he has touched, knows the name of, and trusts him (Perceive I). While looking through someone else's eyes, he functionally inhabits their mind and can appear physically somewhere inside their cone of vision - stepping around a corner in front of them, for instance (Ace). Once a day, when he would be killed by an attack, he does this automatically, landing in the view of the nearest partner (Durable I).

With effort, he is able to damage his partners directly, by reaching through their eyes to claw at them (Zap), dealing 1 damage per minute at functionally infinite range. Methods to protect from this damage vary - wearing a heavy mask to prevent Stranger from reaching your skin, dissolving the arms in water, attacking the arms yourself, or perhaps even pulling Stranger through by the arms.

- Real name Mirza Arezou, 1 wife, 2 children, 1 living parent.

- Well-read, polite, generally uncooperative with authority.

- It is unknown what threshold of trust Stranger's ability requires, and unknown how many people are wired into his system.

Hydrazine - 3Σ, Create (III), Fly, Durable II

Creates rocket engines at will, powered by already-ignited solid fuel. Lower bound for rocket size is around the dimensions of an American football - higher bound is slightly smaller than Hydrazine. If she desires, the thruster can be created already attached her through unnatural means. She is resistant to heat, impact, and changes in atmospheric pressure, but still needs to breathe air.

- Real name Ulyana Varlam, though we expect this to have changed thanks to the events of 1974.

- Uninterested in superhero work, uninterested in publicity, uninterested in money. Search for living family members?

- Several of Hydrazine's rivals still live - Polarity, Standard Bearer, and Milan have been found attempting to locate her.