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as a dog returneth to your mother
Okay so.
You know how I'm always trying to start online forum RP and it never gets anywhere and after a few weeks everyone gives up and I don't manage to corral the plot back in line and it falls by the wayside and I sigh heavily?
I've decided to do that again.
Short form: the system's a secret strongly based on the OGL d20 system used by D&D 3.5 and popularised by Pathfinder, but if that was just a meaningless mess of acronyms to you, we'll be doing everything slowly and with teaching moments, and the dice probably won't be too important – definitely not to start with, anyway. Theme-wise, it'd be fairly dark: all kinds of horror, particularly involving various blasphemy, but I hope not to really wallow in it, if you know what I mean. Closer to Hellraiser than Hostel, so to speak, and indeed with strong similarities. You'll start off in a very bad position, and bad things will likely happen to you, but it will be possible to "win", so to speak.
If there's interest, it'll be up at my experimental RPG forums, and we'll do character creation either there or over e-mail or other communication thing. If you are interested, at all, please comment on this post wherever you find it. As to the storyline, at least where it starts off, that'll be here after the cut.
* * *
It's July 20th, 2014. It's been a few months now since eccentric millionaire playboy philanthropist Leland-Lamont Gilroy – a hefty serving of Richard Branson with a dash of Tony Stark and a generous sprinkling of David Miscavige and Vladimir Putin for flavour – sold the vast majority of his assets and retreated to a backwoods town in Colorado. His philosophy, heavily based on mysticism, had become more and more evident in his public persona, and when he absconded to Timberpine Rocks, he gave a bizarre (though lucid and cogent) final press release about how the time was coming for a great journey to another world. Anyone who wanted to come with him, he said, should come to Timberpine Rocks, and prepare for a great and wondrous transit.
The news media loved it; the slightly restrained coverage in the mainstream press was a pale shadow of the screaming "GILROY GOES FULL CULTIST" headlines of the blogs. Every late night comedy show for a week talked about nothing else. Jon Stewart had a particularly impressive three minute bit.
Then, with the speed of the Internet, something evolved.
First, the outskirts of Gilroy's true believers swept in a critical mass of altered-state cultists. They drew in aging and new-wave hippies, who drew in a kind of festival scene, who drew in hipsters, who drew in everybody else. Timberpine Rocks, which formerly had a population of 43, now boasts about 2,500 semi-permanent residents and five times that number of drifters and visitors, in something like a cross between Woodstock and Burning Man. Naturally, there is a lot more commercialisation, with more than a touch of worrying Heaven's Gate similarity. The locals have mostly been driven out, though there were isolated incidents of violence that, to the flocks of onlookers, only added to the mystique. The permanent party commune of Timberpine Rocks has been going on for a month now, and the pronouncements from Gilroy's followers in the booked out Timberpine Inn suggest that any minute now, the wondrous transit would happen.
(About half the party goers really want to see what's supposed to happen, especially if it's nothing, because that's blogfodder for a month; the other half are thinking of David Koresh and Jim Jones, and really don't want to be around when the 'thing' is going to happen.)
You're at the party for your own reasons. Maybe you Believe. Maybe you don't, but there are great drugs/music/fairground rides at the commune. Maybe you're tagging along with a friend. Maybe you're one of the few remaining locals trying your best to continue farming and leatherworking with all these potheads around. (The marijuana farmers aren't bothered. They're doing a roaring trade.) Maybe you're an undercover police officer trying to find out whether people should be worried that they haven't heard from Gilroy's wife for the last two months. Or maybe whatever. Whatever your origin, you're a modern-day person who's ended up in Crazy Cultist Daycare, with drugs and music and a new spiritual movement on every street corner. You probably want a lot of things. Bonus points for backstories involving dead or mysteriously missing loved ones. Mulder.
That said, don't expect the end of the party to come with a whimper.
You know how I'm always trying to start online forum RP and it never gets anywhere and after a few weeks everyone gives up and I don't manage to corral the plot back in line and it falls by the wayside and I sigh heavily?
I've decided to do that again.
Short form: the system's a secret strongly based on the OGL d20 system used by D&D 3.5 and popularised by Pathfinder, but if that was just a meaningless mess of acronyms to you, we'll be doing everything slowly and with teaching moments, and the dice probably won't be too important – definitely not to start with, anyway. Theme-wise, it'd be fairly dark: all kinds of horror, particularly involving various blasphemy, but I hope not to really wallow in it, if you know what I mean. Closer to Hellraiser than Hostel, so to speak, and indeed with strong similarities. You'll start off in a very bad position, and bad things will likely happen to you, but it will be possible to "win", so to speak.
If there's interest, it'll be up at my experimental RPG forums, and we'll do character creation either there or over e-mail or other communication thing. If you are interested, at all, please comment on this post wherever you find it. As to the storyline, at least where it starts off, that'll be here after the cut.
It's July 20th, 2014. It's been a few months now since eccentric millionaire playboy philanthropist Leland-Lamont Gilroy – a hefty serving of Richard Branson with a dash of Tony Stark and a generous sprinkling of David Miscavige and Vladimir Putin for flavour – sold the vast majority of his assets and retreated to a backwoods town in Colorado. His philosophy, heavily based on mysticism, had become more and more evident in his public persona, and when he absconded to Timberpine Rocks, he gave a bizarre (though lucid and cogent) final press release about how the time was coming for a great journey to another world. Anyone who wanted to come with him, he said, should come to Timberpine Rocks, and prepare for a great and wondrous transit.
The news media loved it; the slightly restrained coverage in the mainstream press was a pale shadow of the screaming "GILROY GOES FULL CULTIST" headlines of the blogs. Every late night comedy show for a week talked about nothing else. Jon Stewart had a particularly impressive three minute bit.
Then, with the speed of the Internet, something evolved.
First, the outskirts of Gilroy's true believers swept in a critical mass of altered-state cultists. They drew in aging and new-wave hippies, who drew in a kind of festival scene, who drew in hipsters, who drew in everybody else. Timberpine Rocks, which formerly had a population of 43, now boasts about 2,500 semi-permanent residents and five times that number of drifters and visitors, in something like a cross between Woodstock and Burning Man. Naturally, there is a lot more commercialisation, with more than a touch of worrying Heaven's Gate similarity. The locals have mostly been driven out, though there were isolated incidents of violence that, to the flocks of onlookers, only added to the mystique. The permanent party commune of Timberpine Rocks has been going on for a month now, and the pronouncements from Gilroy's followers in the booked out Timberpine Inn suggest that any minute now, the wondrous transit would happen.
(About half the party goers really want to see what's supposed to happen, especially if it's nothing, because that's blogfodder for a month; the other half are thinking of David Koresh and Jim Jones, and really don't want to be around when the 'thing' is going to happen.)
You're at the party for your own reasons. Maybe you Believe. Maybe you don't, but there are great drugs/music/fairground rides at the commune. Maybe you're tagging along with a friend. Maybe you're one of the few remaining locals trying your best to continue farming and leatherworking with all these potheads around. (The marijuana farmers aren't bothered. They're doing a roaring trade.) Maybe you're an undercover police officer trying to find out whether people should be worried that they haven't heard from Gilroy's wife for the last two months. Or maybe whatever. Whatever your origin, you're a modern-day person who's ended up in Crazy Cultist Daycare, with drugs and music and a new spiritual movement on every street corner. You probably want a lot of things. Bonus points for backstories involving dead or mysteriously missing loved ones. Mulder.
That said, don't expect the end of the party to come with a whimper.