Sidetrack

Re: Traveling in your typical modern day sewer: what rolls for illness? Hydrogen Sulfide or sewer gas is a real concern worth reading up on. http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/factsheets/hydrogensulfide.htm http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15894856

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island Thanks everyone for the creativity, I'm well on the way to a well populated island, there's a few niches I've yet to fill though. Here's a little madlib to start things off, for those who want to play. Feel free to warp and expand it to fit your needs. There are plenty of hostel type accommodations for students, volunteers, backpackers and other low budget travelers of assorted nationalities. A backpackers hostel downtown, a dorm in one of the larger hotels, a camping resort on one of the islands, and numerous smaller operations. The producer of the local 'Pirate' label ethanol/rum is even building a few rooms out behind his home distillery. During high season there is a constant exchange of people and a fair number in the off-season as well. So it's not surprising that there are a few odd characters coming through those places, especially... The [noun] he's a [noun] , [adjective] and [adjective] , [adverb] there [verb] ing at [place] . So it's odd that (s)he is so [adjective] . he'll [adverb] be seen [verb] ing near [noun] ...

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island The ghost crabs There is a great little beach on the North shore, it's secluded and takes a bit of a hike to get down to it. As with most of the beaches when you approach you catch movement out of the corner of your eye as the ghost crabs dart for their holes. Oddly though, some of them seemed to linger a bit longer, skittering back and forth before disappearing. Underlying the tracks from said skittering there are other tracks that seem a bit too organized, reminiscent perhaps of complicated calculations. In another area where movement was sighted are some washed up pages of text, most of it cyrillic, but it looks like it may be scientific in nature. While on the beach you'll get a distinct feeling of being watched.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island Similar to The Pirate... The Lycanthrope Lofi is a very clean cut presentable islander, at least on Sundays. Throughout the course of the week though he gets more and more feral, by Saturday he is barely recognizable; his nails are long, yellowed and hardened, he is hirsute well beyond six days of growth, communicates with growls and grunts and has a disturbingly wild look in his eyes. Yet on Sunday morning he can be seen cleancut and freshly shaved delivering a well received sermon at a local church. No one else seems to connect the preacher with the wild man on the streets.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island That's the thing about Tom

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island That one made me laugh out loud, I'm sitting here looking at this boat, Gladiator, as I read it. A perfect fit I think. Chester Beech definitely goes in my permanent population.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island That one guy Mitch is in is his mid fifties and very congenial, he's got a hint of a southern drawl, or maybe a Midwest lilt... East coast? Anyway, Tim is there on business, if you ask him about it he'll start to tell you about his military background, which sounds impressive, but he'll catch himself and deferringly start telling stories about Israeli Defense Force Soldiers, or RoC Marines or other guys that he's worked with. That Mick is a super nice guy, he's here on some kind of business. He can sometimes be found doing shots of tequila with an Ex Army Ranger turned restaurateur, reminiscing about a mutual acquaintance that put a bullet in Che Guevara 's head.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island Mystery Ship From time to time a large square rigged ship shows up in the harbor, it's modern enough in that the hull is painted white but there's no sign of modern equipment to be sighted on board. As a matter of fact there are no people to be seen aboard either, nor will anyone from the ship be found ashore. The characters will never see the ship move, still it never seems to stay in the same place, in the morning it may be just off town while in the afternoon it will be anchored further up the harbor or in one of the outer anchorages. The most explanation to be had from the locals is the name of the ship, Søren Larsen, everyone seems to be totally unconcerned with it. A person may show up claiming to be a paying passenger looking to get out to the ship, if the characters attempt to hail it for them they will find the radio they use to be broken... the prospective passenger will wander off and not be seen again. The radio will need to be repaired, if it belongs to someone other than the characters the radio will be gone the next day and won't be replaced for quite a while.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island The Old Dutchman He acts very young for an older guy, as if he had a new lease on life. Could have to do with his young wife, his true absolute love, or maybe it's being done with work, some bit of nonsense which he says felt like ten lifetimes of drudgery. Now he happily applies his executive skills to community projects like building and staffing the new greenhouse or the traditional sailing vakas that are crossing the Pacific, Polynesian-crewed (there's a sparkle in his eye when he talks about that one).

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island The Bone Lady She's beautiful and charming with such a lovely name, so why do people refer to her as "Anthrax" or simply "Thrax"? Thrax's accent is hard to place, if asked she'll talk about the years she spent in Kowloon... or Rhodesia... or Fiji, etc... She owns a shop where she sells jewelry fashioned from exotic bone and is generally adorned with one piece or another. Said piece always looks organically mechanical in a clockwork sort of way, as if it it might be part of a larger device that-- nahhh, ridiculous! Which is exactly what she'll reply, with a wide-eyed indignant look, if you suggest it. Maybe she's protesting just a little too much though.

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island Thanks AlHazred, and for the original thread as well. Haven't generated a great deal of response so I hope no one minds if I throw a few more character sketches up here: The Ventriloquist Spend enough time around the island and you'll need a haircut, that's when you look up Billy Snips. Billy spends a lot of his time at a beach camping resort that he runs with a couple of friends; they all met when they were circus performers. As he gives you a trim, at whichever place he can find a chair to sit you down in, he'll regale you with tales of his days as a unicycle champion in his cockney rhyming slang. Just don't ask him about the ventriloquist act. If you do he'll become distracted, nervous and agitated, usually making a hasty exit exclaiming that "Topper is a very bad doll!"

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Island The cultist Not many people have met, or even know of Alexi but every once in a while an organic farming volunteer will wander in to town with a haunted look on their face. Their stories are pretty similar if a bit vague. Answering an internet they came to the island Alexi's farm on a small outer island and were made to work long hours (it's always unclear what work was actually done). Alexi was careful to keep them and the villagers on the island separated by suggesting to each that the others didn't like them or were 'bad'. The volunteers complain of odd requests that they make him pizza or ice cream, but his kitchen wasn't stocked to make anything of the sort. Having had enough, the volunteers slip away on a a boat visiting the island. Alexi will make contact and urge them to come back so that he can help them with their 'psychological problems' and threaten to inform the volunteer coordinator of their early departure. Ted, a charter skipper, seems to remember Alexi's name as someone that was kicked out of Hawaii for trying to start up a new age cult. If the characters visit the island Alexi is never there, but there is a sweet older American lady named Mary, she originally arrived with Alexi and would really like to leave but doesn't have the money to go and is convinced that nobody back at home would want to see her. There isn't much evidence of a farm other than a small garden plot. Villagers will volunteer that the council once threw Alexi out, but mysteriously he is back and now and Alexi and the villager elders actively discourage anyone from visiting the island.

Borrowing obviousy from the creepy hotel thread and much of the text of the original post ... imagine a tropical island (well, a small island group actually) stocked with weird characters. They should be strange in a Twin Peaks/X-Files kind of way with a tropical oddball twist- they can be possibly vaguely slightly mystical (but it should never be obviously magic), or they could be vaguely slightly high-tech (in a conspiracy sort of easily-mistaken-for-something-else way), international expat/ex-military/ex-mercenary, or whatever you like. Try to capture the character in a few sentences. As a little background and flavor for the group: Living isn't too rough, there is plenty of food to go around, provided you like papayas, coconuts, taro and roast pig; other vegetables are grown but a bit sporadically. A couple of aged ferry/cargo ships bring other goods... sometimes. The main island puts up a nice front for the brief tourist season mostly centered around whale watching, but things get weird and maybe even a little sinister the remainder of the year. Electricity is available on all but the smaller remote islands and cell phone service to most of the group. There is a small town on the main island with a some cafes and small markets, hotels and hostels mostly owned by resident off-islanders. Town borders a large natural harbor that gets some commercial traffic (very large ships can't negotiate the narrow and shallow entrance though) and private sailors staying over for cyclone season. The airport services local traffic, bigger international flights have to connect from other nearby islands. In general it's a good place to tuck in and hide from the rest of the world, though it does get some outside interest from an Asian country lobbying for whaling rights and a wealthy church denomination that has a goal of converting the entire country. There is a beautiful brand new church complete with basketball and tennis courts for every village even if none of the villagers attend it and a large modern k-12 school in the main town for children of members (churches of other denominations are also present on the island).

Re: Create a Hero Theme Team! Needs to be bigger than that. I'm 6'2" 230 and living in Tonga (for the time being)... I feel like a shrimp compared to these guys. I like Tangaroa though, excellent choice.

Re: Any voip/skype super games? at all? I'd be interested, I travel a lot so I can't indulge my hobby very often, but I've almost always got voip/skype access in port.

Re: Senseless Thread A female friend tells me that selected targets at Academy Awards night were flashed and that Walmart has a darkness field.

Re: damage negation v. damage reduction Similar effects that vary a bit as you as you walk up the damage class ladder. To me, a kevlar vest would simply be Resistant Protection.

Re: Free Character Defiling Skills Creative curses and profanity 13- Graffiti and insulting caricature Artist 12- Can prepare foods that cause PC to produce noxious body odors 12-

Re: Time in a Bottle Very interesting ideas... No extra DEF for the bottle though, it should be fragile... easy to dispel is actually more what I'm going for, but AVAD Time Powers and EDM definitely fits the ticket The constant time loop sounds cool, but putting an 'expiration date' on the bottle would fit more with what I'm trying to do, a 1000 year bottle would be fine. In the interim though, the physical location would have to be variable, with the idea that the target could be collected and then toted around or shelved somewhere. So... The time limit is fairly straightforward, but how would I handle the variable physical location? The EDM itself would have no effect on physical location, the target would have to be moved by conventional means. Physical location isn't neccessarily Starting location, but would it need to be Any Physical Location?

I'm looking to build an attack that would place a target into a fragile 'bottle'. Inside the bottle no time passes. Basically, if successful, the target would be out of action and preserved until someone released them. External energy sources like heat or radiation wouldn't cause any changes/damage to the target, but just a little physical damage would break the bottle. This seems to fit the concept: ...but too cheap for the effect. Would Transform, Suppress, Entangle, Desolidify, etc... be more appropriate?

Re: Power that does less damage the larger the area The power itself ends up with caution signs and stop signs enough that it might be wise to cap the OCV. I've certainly not set out to create an unbalancing attack, just the first thing that popped into my head once the question was asked. Unfortunately, my living circumstances don't put me nearby any active gamers so I'm largely building for my own amusement at the moment. This is the kind of feedback it's nice to have.

Re: 6th Edition language table comments It doesn't seem to be perfect... I've made friends in Mexico with native Spanish speakers that love to visit Italy because they can easily understand and make themselves understood. France is much more difficult for them. I'm in Polynesia at the moment and I don't see any sort of a Polynesian Language tree. There is a pretty clear division between English settled and French settled islands but dropping back to pure Polynesian languages a lot of communication is possible with some notable gaps, i.e. Marquesans seem to be able to understand a lot of other Polynesians but the others have trouble understanding the Marquesan language. Note, I am NOT a linguist, this is just my personal experience.

Re: Power that does less damage the larger the area

Re: How do you build a vampire template in 6E?

Re: Power that does less damage the larger the area Yes, but bees are a pretty good candidate for NND (AVAD in 6e) damage, so applied separately or only once the effect would be the same. If you're immune or otherwise protected you take no damage, if not you take full damage.