Cultists & Crystalwavers
I was busy at work today and the guy sitting next to me started playing Weird Al Yankovic, in particular the song Midnight Star. While the song played I was reminded of a game I wrote called Cultists & Crystalwavers. I had sketched out the rules, and written the first adventure. I had been very proud of how the adventure turned out. It had been a bit of an epithany. The Muse had been kind to me that week. Unfortunately, a hard drive crash last January wiped out all copies. I am left with my own, fragmented, memories.
The premise behind C&C is "What if those trashy, weekly tabloids were actually telling the truth." What if all the stories in them was actually true... even the ones that contradicted themselves. The kind of headlines I am talking about include "I was abducted by aliens and forced to have Bigfoot's baby" and "Ancient Freemasons' kept Hitler's brain alive in a jar" and "Elvis is undead and flipping burgers at Denny's".
The genre is made up a heavy dash of conspiracy theory, a sprinkling of horror, and a lot of tongue-in-cheek. Think a cross of X-Files with the old TV show The Night Stalker with a dose the Misfits of Science.
The players would be reporters for one of those aforementioned rags, or private occult investigators, or just mildly deranged, obsessive people. A plethora of psychic and magical powers would be available. However, they would be almost universally useless. A character might be telepathic, but can only read the mind of cats. Another might be able to talk to ghosts.. but that doesn't mean ghosts want to talk to him.
The game would be rife with government conspiracies, new age nonsense, witches, demonology, undead, voodoo, and the postal service (gotta look out for those mailpeople).
The game system would be a low-powered "supers" system (possibly champions or GURPS), with a general emphasis on making it up as you go along.
I'll have to reconstruct at least the outline of the first adventure and post it here. It involved swamp monsters, alien death rays, cassette tapes, raising the dead, drug therapy, vegetables, armored cars, some very tasty microwavable frozen dinners, and an unusual factory that would really piss off OSHA.
The premise behind C&C is "What if those trashy, weekly tabloids were actually telling the truth." What if all the stories in them was actually true... even the ones that contradicted themselves. The kind of headlines I am talking about include "I was abducted by aliens and forced to have Bigfoot's baby" and "Ancient Freemasons' kept Hitler's brain alive in a jar" and "Elvis is undead and flipping burgers at Denny's".
The genre is made up a heavy dash of conspiracy theory, a sprinkling of horror, and a lot of tongue-in-cheek. Think a cross of X-Files with the old TV show The Night Stalker with a dose the Misfits of Science.
The players would be reporters for one of those aforementioned rags, or private occult investigators, or just mildly deranged, obsessive people. A plethora of psychic and magical powers would be available. However, they would be almost universally useless. A character might be telepathic, but can only read the mind of cats. Another might be able to talk to ghosts.. but that doesn't mean ghosts want to talk to him.
The game would be rife with government conspiracies, new age nonsense, witches, demonology, undead, voodoo, and the postal service (gotta look out for those mailpeople).
The game system would be a low-powered "supers" system (possibly champions or GURPS), with a general emphasis on making it up as you go along.
I'll have to reconstruct at least the outline of the first adventure and post it here. It involved swamp monsters, alien death rays, cassette tapes, raising the dead, drug therapy, vegetables, armored cars, some very tasty microwavable frozen dinners, and an unusual factory that would really piss off OSHA.
posted by Cyrunner | 6:45 PM
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