Detroit on the eve of the 21st century

The once bustling Motor City has become all but a ghost town, with nature having reclaimed whole districts. For decades, the richer suburbs and the financial district managed to survive, while the rest of the town slowly withered. Finally, around the middle of the century, it became clear that metropolitan Detroit was dead. After that realisation, it was only a matter of months before all corporate and municipal activity were closed down. Those who could picked up and moved. Those who could not were left stranded in a dead city.

Today Detroit has become something unique, where frontier-spirit and gangland mentality has created something akin to a new Wild West. With drones and automatic weapons.

ADAMA

The Autonomous Defense/Assault Military Android (ADAMA), developed by UltraLohft Industries, Inc. is a cutting edge weapons platform, tailored for a wide variety of roles. Equally at home on the modern battlefield, on the streets, or in your home, the ADAMA is a force to be reckoned with. 

It comes off the assembly line with a powerful organic core processor, a state of the art targeting package, as well as a formidable array of leathal and non-leathal close quarters features. For customers wishing a little more bang for the buck, the ADAMA's biometric configuration allows it to be equipped with a wide variety of weapons (no hard mounts). 

WoD: Marinating on a game

Friday will see a game of more or less vanilla Mage with the lady friend and a friend of her's. They've expressed a wish for some modern day spell-slingin' action, and I've not hosted a contemporary game in, oh, about three or four years now. I've also yet to run Mage-as-written. My lady's friend is a n00b as far as Pn'P RPG's are concerned, though she's done a bit of MMO-roleplaying. All in all, I expect this'll be a very refreshing change of pace. Hopefully for the lot of us.


In this post I'll put down some of my ideas, mostly so that I can see how it fits together, and so that the girls can look it over. And who knows, some blog-sourcing may come out of it as well.

Tax Instalment: Nightfall

According to Joesky, I owe some tax, seeing as I'm prone to punch out rather lengthy posts every now and again. To settle that score, I give you the second adventure I've ever written. The first was 19 years ago, and not that big of a success. Hopefully this one isn't as bad.

Nightfall is an adventure for three to six players, using the Storytelling System. It is based on the film Pitch Black, but both scenario and plot has been modified to accommodate the chaos of roleplaying. I wrote it mostly as an exercise, but if you find it useful, I'd love to hear how it went. For that matter, should you have any comments, I'm all ears eyes.

World of Darkness: Tower of Lost Hope

 

I went to London last weekend, and while there I visited the Tate Modern. One of the exhibitions showcased brutalist architecture around the world, and it was here that I saw the lifeless, scarred concrete sculpture* of the Lebanese Burj al Murr. The thing was as tall as I am, and it slammed into my imagination with ruthless brutality.

Burj al Murr
Locus lllll

Located in down-town Beirut, this ugly 40 story tower dominates the skyline. In times not at all long past, it also dominated the city in a different way. The construction of the Murr Tower was begun in 1974, and when the Lebanese civil war erupted in -75, 28 of the tower's floors had been completed. Despite the unrest, the work continued until the whole structure had been erected. Battle-scarred even before it was finished, the tower found it's function in 1978, as a sniper-position that could dominate and terrorise the surrounding city, two kilometres out from it's base.