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Old 06-25-2018, 10:08 PM   #131
Kesendeja
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Default Re: Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

Curious Lore
A dusty book & curio (occult) store built into the first floor of an old Victorian house. The owner, is a man in his late 20's named Christopher Price, who always has a smile for his customers.

Despite several of the local churches railing against the "Satanist" in town business is steady if secretive. Chris loves his job, "corrupting" the youth of Serenity Falls into having move open minds.

Secret, Chris isn't his real name. Extremely close scrutiny would find very little remarkable about him.

Dark Secret, He's immortal. Or at least practically so. During a long forgotten offensive in the North Western United States, he refused to execute an order to help slaughter a village of the "godless". His commanding officer shot him along with most of the tribe. The local shaman preformed a spell returning him to "life". Since then he's lived a variety of lives, but has never quite gotten over the religious hypocrisy that led to his death.
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Old 06-25-2018, 11:02 PM   #132
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

Isabela's Cleaning Service

Isabela Anjou runs a cleaning service that specializes in taking care of the homes of the wealthier families in Serenity Falls. She is known for employing young women who have messed up (drug addicts, former criminals, single mothers, etc) and helping them turn around their lives. None of her former employees have worked for her for more than two years because their luck always turns around and there are dozens of actresses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc across the county who started out working for Isabela's Cleaning Services after they had reached rock bottom.

Secret: Isabela always keeps track of the older women who she helped and uses her knowledge of them to make sure that they help other young women through subtle threats to reveal the secrets that she should not know. Of course, she rarely has to resort to such tactics, as the majority of the women who worked for her have warm feelings towards the woman who helped turn their lives around.

Dark Secret: Isabela is a Hoodoo witch who specializes in stealing bad luck and worse fates from young women. Her cleaning business has never made a profit, it exists to provide her with the misfortune of young women, but her Hoodoo business makes her a mint by providing misfortune for the enemies of her clients. For the right amount of money, she will take the misfortune of young women and give them to the enemies of her clients. The fact that it makes the lives of the young women better is just a happy accident.
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Old 06-26-2018, 04:36 AM   #133
Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2
 
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The deep dark haunted woods
Default Re: Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

Percival House

A cottage of the Swiss Ornee style, dating back to the 1890's. The Pervival family was prominent in the pre-WWI era. Their fortunes fell after the Great War, and collapsed entirely in the Great Depression. The last Percival, Edmund Percival, used the last of the family money to get degrees in various fields. But he died of cancer and the cottage has been left to the elements sonce then.

Dark Secret: Dr Edmund Percival was part of the staff of the Manhattan Project. He was also a radical and had developed a radical new theory about nuclear fission. He calculated that a one-megaton bomb could be built with fifty grams of plutonium. But his theories were too extreme to be credited.

Retiring to his family home with a hundred kilograms of smuggled plutonium, he lay dying of radiation-induced cancer. So, in a fit of total (possibly drug induced) insanity, he built the bomb.

It's still there, in the basement. But unlike most nuclear weapons, it's a "fail-dangerous" weapon. Powerful electromagnets keep it from detonating. The electromagnets are wired directly into the city power grid with twelve-hour batteries. And the principles behind it are so radical, no modern expert could comprehend it, much less disarm it.

It's been sitting there without maintenance since it's creator's death, decaying and corroding. And when the electromagnetic field fails ...
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Old 06-26-2018, 07:54 AM   #134
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

While his theories were impossible (that would represent a 90% matter-to-energy conversion), there were plenty of crackpots and lunatics associated with the early nuclear weapons program, and it is not the most insane thing that I have heard from people associated with the Manhattan Project. It was unlikely that anyone could steal 100 kg of weapons grade plutonium from the USA during the 1950s though without a global manhunt (that is a lot of potential death). Even a gram of weapons grade plutonium, if it was properly distributed, could kill a million people as a poison, so 100 kg could potentially poison the entire human population of the Earth.

A slightly more plausible scenario would involve enriched uranium, especially since the USA preferred using it over weapons grade plutonium after the 1940s. Alternatively, he could have stolen commercial grade plutonium, thinking that his crackpot theory would have allowed him to use it for nuclear weapons. Since enriched uranium is separated from normal uranium during the complicated process of enrichment and commercial grade plutonium is separated from nuclear waste in an equally complicated process, it is possible that someone could have diverted 100 kg of either over the course of a decade.

In the case of the former, you would have the equivalent of a 100 kiloton bomb under the town. In the case of the latter, you would have a radiological bomb that would make the town uninhabitable for millions of years. In either case, it is bad news for Serenity Falls.
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Old 07-28-2018, 03:59 PM   #135
Jonas
 
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Default Re: Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
While his theories were impossible (that would represent a 90% matter-to-energy conversion), there were plenty of crackpots and lunatics associated with the early nuclear weapons program, and it is not the most insane thing that I have heard from people associated with the Manhattan Project. It was unlikely that anyone could steal 100 kg of weapons grade plutonium from the USA during the 1950s though without a global manhunt (that is a lot of potential death). Even a gram of weapons grade plutonium, if it was properly distributed, could kill a million people as a poison, so 100 kg could potentially poison the entire human population of the Earth.

A slightly more plausible scenario would involve enriched uranium, especially since the USA preferred using it over weapons grade plutonium after the 1940s. Alternatively, he could have stolen commercial grade plutonium, thinking that his crackpot theory would have allowed him to use it for nuclear weapons. Since enriched uranium is separated from normal uranium during the complicated process of enrichment and commercial grade plutonium is separated from nuclear waste in an equally complicated process, it is possible that someone could have diverted 100 kg of either over the course of a decade.

In the case of the former, you would have the equivalent of a 100 kiloton bomb under the town. In the case of the latter, you would have a radiological bomb that would make the town uninhabitable for millions of years. In either case, it is bad news for Serenity Falls.
You call it bad news, I call it a GM provided "I Win" button. :D

*Realistically disarming it would be pretty easy but...plot.
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Old 07-28-2018, 04:39 PM   #136
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Join Date: Feb 2016
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The real problem would be incidental radioactivity from the weapon. If shielding has been compromised, the core could be leaking the enough gamma ray or neutron radiation to give 10 rads per second from 10 meters away (the gamma ray or neutron equivalent of a 100 W light bulb). It does not take that much energy for radiation to get real nasty real quickly.
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