Urban fantasy: plot help needed

[Lameth]

Sorry for the length....any advice would be great.

I’m running a modern game with a twist and I need some guidance on what realistically in the US law and government could happen now...

It’s 2020 on a basically normal earth. Thousands of years ago magic and the supernatural existed, but by the Antiquity Period magic was mostly faded. Some rare creatures faded into the back ground and magic use became lesss and less, and more secret. By the fall of Rome it was mostly faerie tales and legends. Centuries passed, by the late medieval period magic use was very rare and only able at the right times, in the most extreme preparations, and held to secret lone casters or rare cabals with few members. Creatures of magic where either faded, hiding, killed, or dying due to lake of magic on th earth. The world became mundane with a hidden world with some scattered members, and. A hidden war in the shadows.

Now 2010, magic starts to have ebbs and minor flows, so basically instead on -25 it’s now -20 or so. Something odd is happening but those in the know have seen things like this before every few centuries or so due to odd dimensional alignments. Some supernatural creatures are starting to feel power more through them again.

2015, these ebbs are more often and some supernatural creatures are starting to hunt again in the real world and starting to feel strong. Spell casters in secret are feeling magic is stronger now, maybe -15 now to skills or so.

March 2020. Strange things are happening. Internet is filled with ghost stories and “creature” sightings. The news is playing it off as spreading paranoia and “false news”. Mages are now -10 for magic or at times -5. Magic is changing and no one knows why and it’s scarringthe shadow world.

2020. Oct 19th. Earths reality merges with various other dimensions and magic rushes back to life on earth. Creatures from other realities slip into our reality in some historically rich supernatural sites. Vampires feel strong again and can pass on their curse. Werewolves can transform and the sickness can be passed on. Mages in secret who where mostly theoretical can now do true magic, the old spells are working again. Ghosts can pass over to our reality now. The undead can rise. Old cabals are feeling power again.

This happens in a massive day light blackout world wide for five days. No sunlight for five days! Blamed on an odd eclipse or some other form of stellar mumbo jumbo. In some areas electoral Power goes out, above and below, in some locations of old ley lines and nexus that are awoken. Dozens and dozens of locations. Planes fall from the sky, cars stop working, hospitals go dark, riots are had...a lot of people die. Many of these sites are in major cities, or very populated areas, due to the almost instinctive human need for people to gather to ley sites going back to the beginning of cities.

It’s now day six, Oct 24th. The daylight comes back and the dimensions mostly right themselves, but the “walls” that separates them are forever weakened. The true world is in chaos, just as well as the hidden world. Thousands are dead, many more missing, world wide.

The US is under national emergency and is trying to figure things out.

Over the last five days.... India is blaming Pakistan for everything. London is badly damaged by earthquakes. Stonehenge is leveled. Ruins In Rome and Greece are heavily damaged or gone. Massive plagues are spreading throughout Africa. China has gone silent, so has Russia. Japan is hit by earthquakes. East coast of US is hit by a titdlewaves and east Florida is mostly underwater. Hawaii is being ripped by dozens of erupting volcanos.

Ok so in the US what happens legally and under national emergency as chaos is everywhere in the world? How long should it last? Air travel would be stopped I would think, and banks and schools closed. In some areas martial law is enacted. Millions are still in danger or in need, but mostly is the not knowing that is the worse.

No one knows what is happening as strange things are happening. Reports of monster attacks are spreading. Reports of people able to do powers and abilities is spreading. The public is demanding the government to answer what is happening. Scientists are saying the five days of darkness is not possible. Conspiracy people are going nuts.

[hal]

Just suspicions on my part...

After multiple days of complete darkness, we're not going to see the leadership take the line "Its an eclipse".

I would largely expect that the "end days are upon us" would bare its ugly teeth in the minds of many people, and churches will suddenly become important places all of the sudden as people ask for answers.

There are some issues with your lead in - logical plot holes that you may have to reconsider. For instance, if werewolves couldn't pass on the curse prior to the great event, then how are there any present AT the big event?

Enough said on that. My take on things when I run an actual Modern Fantasy Campaign (essentially the same premise about magic as would exist in a TL 3 campaign, only switch out the numbers for TL 8 instead). Something keeps the mages in check so that they don't practice their craft openly. I have mine, but you're going to either need to borrow it from the same source I did (ARMAGEDDON or WITCHCRAFT by CJ Carella at Eden Studios - or create your own). For inspiration, I would advise you look up a copy of PENDRAGON. They can be purchased used relatively cheaply, or you can get it online as a PDF document easily enough. The gist of which is this:

"Magic may not provide youth, nor may it bring back the dead"

In the end? Based upon the scenario you outlined above in your initial post - this is what I see happening...

1) religion sees a major resurgence.
2) End of the world mentality strikes probably after 24 hours - which means that some governments, originally deterred by a M.A.D. style environment, may decide to launch suicide attacks.
3) Scientists are going to be looking at the sky and making the following determinations:
A) if we can see stars, but not the moon, then something happened to the sun itself.
B) if we can't see stars, then something is blocking all light. We're not in Kansas any more Dorothy!
4) fear will strike as time passes the 48 hour mark, and then the 72 hour mark, and then the 96 hour mark - with increasing levels of panick Chances are good, people are going to be convinced that despite the bible's prophesy of how the end times shall occur, this event must surely herald an end. That's just for the Christian religions. I don't know enough to venture a guess on how the other religions will handle it

Then we hit the stages of panic heighlighting the adage of "If this is the end, let's make the best of it". Power plants may shut down due to the lack of personnel at hand as they try to be on hand with their loved ones when the end finally comes. By now, rape murder etc may be occurring - with some people not even bothering to resist it. The authorities may very well have problems of handling the new madness not only within their own society, but within the ranks of their own soldiers and police units. The awful truth of not having solar energy at all means the end of all life on Earth. So, my guess at this point? Many of the reins of the government are going to fall slack right off the bat.

Which brings me to the other questions that would come into play. I've often joked that the one reason modern man doesn't meet up with the Devil or his minions is because if you have proof of an actual demon being there, then you have the foundation to believe in angels.

Now toss in the idea that the creatures of legend are real - and well... things get a wee bit interesting.

If the Vatican is aware of the "Truth" of the legends, and is perhaps aware of the truth of history etc. - they might have an edge for maintaining organizational strength and cohesion. What if the accord by which books were suppressed wholesale from being considered part of the Bible - held prophesies? What if some mystic foresaw this and left clues? Maybe you have those cults that kept magic functional - or at least the lore of it?

Since I don't know which magic system you intend to work off of, I can't make any other comments.


But to give you an idea of just how bad things would get after only 3 days of darkness? Every single major disaster in the United States has been local. The only reason there was stability for those disaster areas is because there was always an island of stability on the edges of the area hit by the disaster for people to simply keep their heads until help arrived. Rioting is bad enough - but if the information is world wide that the blackness is world wide? Rioting will be the least of anyone's worries. Truck drivers won't deliver goods if there is no tomorrow right? Factories won't run if no one shows up. The list will go on. Once the sun shines again? Ever wonder if mankind would be better than most animals that have received a nasty shock that shakes them to the core, and then you have them cowering in the corner because they fear a repeat of those shocking events? Just because the sun came back this time, doesn't necessarily mean it won't go away again, and possibly for good next time.

Now tell me. If the people fear the end times, and someone was dumb enough to cast a spell nearby, what do you think will happen?

If I might suggest? Get your hands on a copy of the movie "In the Mouth of Madness starring Sam Neill as John Trent. Fast forward to the ending when John Trent discovers that it is alllllllll real. The Lovecraftian horror is all real.

It probably won't be a function of when the authorities will ease up - the question really should be - whether or not society will survive the event at all, and what changes will happen at that point in time going forward.

[Lameth]

Absolutely helpful, thank you!

I’m actually using RPM per thaumaturgy: ritual path magic,, Effect Shaping, altered to fit my idea of magic. With advice and help from ghostdancers write ups. New Magic is not spontaneously or able to be created easily, but takes time as inventing and require a lot of knowledge and skill. Spells of the ancient days are still around, hidden in lost tomes or in plan site in occult lore, and now will need to be discovered. Basically any “magic” after the 1400s is hogwash and was muddled up by churches, foolish occultists, and bad translators, on purpose or accident . So ancient lore needs to be found. Secrets of the ancient classical world, hyborian Magic’s, and Atlantis itself.

As far as the werwolves comment...the disease/curse that create some vampires, zombies, undead, and werewolves has lane dormant for centuries In their hosts or in society and would only show up very rarely and most times would be too weak to truly manifest. Basically imagine a supernatural disease or sickness that required the presence of dimensional energies, magic, to actually propagate properly. A vampire could try to make another but it may weaken it so much it was not worth it. A person may be born with lycanthropy or somehow being affected by it but it may show up as something more mundane normally, with very rare exceptions... but never truly able to shape shift...more beastman, like Harry Potter’s Grayback or marvels Sabertooth, then a real wolfman.

Also I came up with an idea that I thought was cool..... As magic faded, so did places of magic as well. From mystical places, to even places that saw a lot of magic use, like a wizards home. They simply faded into the background behind a veil of obfuscation or in time just was not there anymore.

So whole areas could now be reappearing, or locations. A collection of ruins outside of Greece are “discovered” that hold an artifact of the gods. That’s wizards tower gone since the 12th century, with lore and mystical traps waiting. The area of the woods that stories in the 1500 say there was a swamp there, but it “dried up or something”, well it’s back and in it is a hungry hag. The shore of an area of Scotland now jets out hundreds of feet wider then yesterday and no one knows why. Some locals in the rain forest are saying a temple to a god that is not theirs just appeared, covered in an architecture that hurts the mind to look at it , and with it the sound of millions of serpents an be heard inside. And so on. This opens whole parts of the world and new locations to be found...true modern adventure.

Now I’m trying to figure out besides what would happen in a state of emergency of this level and caliber, what would happen at the next step. What happens when society start seeing the existence of magic? What happens when I live TV a bank is robbed by three men wielding wands and spraying fire and lightning? What happens to society when a 5 foot long spider is seen on TV quickly scurring into the sewers of New York? And so on.

[AlexanderHowl]

No sunlight for five days would destroy the ecosystem of the Earth. Within one day, global temperatures would drop 40 C. Within five days, nothing on the surface of the Earth would be alive, as the temperature would have dropped 200 C. By the time that the daylight came back, the Earth would be an iceball.

Magic coming back is a staple for modern fantasy (look at Shadowrun), so there are plenty of examples to model. When you are looking at RPM though, you are looking at a subtle magic system whose return should not be dramatic. I would suggest that the base penalty start at -10 at 2010 (meaning that only the most devoted practitioners could create even the most minor effects) and have the penalty shrink by one per year until 2020.

I would have supernatural entities start appearing gradually too, with the smallest appearing in 2011 and the largest appearing in 2020. That, more than anything else, would tell people that something was different. Having someone finally catch a Yeti would not cause a panic but having a dragon wake up and start advertising for young women to be part of his harem would be another story.

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

No sunlight for five days would destroy the ecosystem of the Earth. Within one day, global temperatures would drop 40 C. Within five days, nothing on the surface of the Earth would be alive, as the temperature would have dropped 200 C. By the time that the daylight came back, the Earth would be an iceball.

Pretty sure 5 days without sun would not be enough to get to -200. The ocean surface may freeze, but life deep below would be fine for a while. On earth, anything that can survive being buried under snow for a week should be ok. So trees, anything with spores, ...
Flyers and big mammals would suffer the most.

[AlexanderHowl]

Have you ever been out in a total eclipse? There is always a dramatic drop in temperature, around 5 C within a few minutes, and you are talking about a five day global eclipse. While the mantle and core will be fine, the surface would be quite screwed, as 130 PW of energy would be gone from the system.

The Earth would be subjected to the equivalent 'cold' of interstellar space. The atmosphere would cool quite quickly, and the oceans would freeze over within a day, as the entire system would lose 1.5*10^22 J of energy. The total heat content of the atmosphere is not even that much, so you would have massive snowstorms though out the entire world by the end of the first day. The oceans would be protected from freezing over by quickly forming ice, but the rest of the world would be screwed. Without the sunlight driving evaporation, the winds would stop transporting moisture and heat, meaning that localized freezing could be even worse.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Earth would be subjected to the equivalent 'cold' of interstellar space. The atmosphere would cool quite quickly, and the oceans would freeze over within a day . . .

Yet, the oceans do not freeze, or even cool very much, overnight. Linear extrapolation is not always correct.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Lameth

Ok so in the US what happens legally and under national emergency as chaos is everywhere in the world?

Are you asking about the legal process to make sure events are reasonable, or for speculation in broad strokes (the plot help of the title)?

There are literally hundreds of different Federal laws that take effect only when the President declares a state of emergency. Mostly they suspend all sort of other laws, like forbidding use of NBC weapons, or posse comitatus. This is why "declaring an emergency" is reported by the news. It's not just an expression of an opinion, but a gate needed to trigger a response. FEMA can't do much without a state of emergency. Not all of those hundreds of laws and over 100 specific additional Presidental powers get activated by any declaration; the declaration specifies which clauses are being invoked.

But they're also less dramatic, required for expenditures for all sorts of emergency disaster or public health reasons. There are also more obscure ones dealing with foreign transactions. (For instance, I think the longest historical state of emergency was due to President Carter, invoking the National Emergencies Act for the first time to freeze Iranian assets. That state of emergency is still in effect -- in fact, Google tells me that national emergencies have been declared 58 times since 1976, and 31 of them are still active.)

State governors also declare emergencies for their state. The National Guard, for instance, can get activated three different ways, either by the President or by governors, and they have different rules about what they can do -- and most importantly, who has to pay! -- depending on how they're activated.

There might be a plot point hiding in somewhere in those details -- maybe the PCs have to act, either as vigilantes or unofficial officers ready to be disavowed, because there's some bit of red tape preventing an official government response. But in general, you can assume that all 50 governors and the President activated all their emergency powers, and have kept them that way. (Among other things, this means that they might have suspended habeus corpus, the military can be used for domestic law enforcement, and trials for felonies not longer require indictment by a grand jury.)

[Black Leviathan]

I feel like this game needs Preppers. If folks are buying land up in the mountains and tubs of dehydrated foot in case of ecconomic collapse they aren't going to let that stuff go to waste because it turns out to be werewolves instead. I think they should be up there in their bunkers by the thousands and mad as hell if magic returning didn't cause the end of the world. Maybe they blame supernatural beasts or the established government but they're armed and ****** and running low on beer. The government has it's hands full trying to control the regular madness so periodically there are just hillbilly machinegunners tearing the town up and robbing places for supplies.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Lameth

Sorry for the length....any advice would be great.

I’m running a modern game with a twist and I need some guidance on what realistically in the US law and government could happen now...

It’s 2020 on a basically normal earth. Thousands of years ago magic and the supernatural existed, but by the Antiquity Period magic was mostly faded. Some rare creatures faded into the back ground and magic use became lesss and less, and more secret. By the fall of Rome it was mostly faerie tales and legends. Centuries passed, by the late medieval period magic use was very rare and only able at the right times, in the most extreme preparations, and held to secret lone casters or rare cabals with few members. Creatures of magic where either faded, hiding, killed, or dying due to lake of magic on th earth. The world became mundane with a hidden world with some scattered members, and. A hidden war in the shadows.

Now 2010, magic starts to have ebbs and minor flows, so basically instead on -25 it’s now -20 or so. Something odd is happening but those in the know have seen things like this before every few centuries or so due to odd dimensional alignments. Some supernatural creatures are starting to feel power more through them again.

2015, these ebbs are more often and some supernatural creatures are starting to hunt again in the real world and starting to feel strong. Spell casters in secret are feeling magic is stronger now, maybe -15 now to skills or so.

March 2020. Strange things are happening. Internet is filled with ghost stories and “creature” sightings. The news is playing it off as spreading paranoia and “false news”. Mages are now -10 for magic or at times -5. Magic is changing and no one knows why and it’s scarringthe shadow world.

2020. Oct 19th. Earths reality merges with various other dimensions and magic rushes back to life on earth. Creatures from other realities slip into our reality in some historically rich supernatural sites. Vampires feel strong again and can pass on their curse. Werewolves can transform and the sickness can be passed on. Mages in secret who where mostly theoretical can now do true magic, the old spells are working again. Ghosts can pass over to our reality now. The undead can rise. Old cabals are feeling power again.

This happens in a massive day light blackout world wide for five days. No sunlight for five days! Blamed on an odd eclipse or some other form of stellar mumbo jumbo.

As others have noted, this is Too Much. There's fair odds not a single functioning government makes it through that time, aside from the ecological and practical natural effects. This isn't the start of an urban fantasy campaign, it's the start of After The End if the PCs are lucky.

In some areas electoral Power goes out, above and below, in some locations of old ley lines and nexus that are awoken. Dozens and dozens of locations. Planes fall from the sky, cars stop working, hospitals go dark, riots are had...a lot of people die. Many of these sites are in major cities, or very populated areas, due to the almost instinctive human need for people to gather to ley sites going back to the beginning of cities.

It’s now day six, Oct 24th. The daylight comes back and the dimensions mostly right themselves, but the “walls” that separates them are forever weakened. The true world is in chaos, just as well as the hidden world. Thousands are dead, many more missing, world wide.

The US is under national emergency and is trying to figure things out.

Over the last five days.... India is blaming Pakistan for everything. London is badly damaged by earthquakes. Stonehenge is leveled. Ruins In Rome and Greece are heavily damaged or gone. Massive plagues are spreading throughout Africa. China has gone silent, so has Russia. Japan is hit by earthquakes. East coast of US is hit by a titdlewaves and east Florida is mostly underwater. Hawaii is being ripped by dozens of erupting volcanos.

Ok so in the US what happens legally and under national emergency as chaos is everywhere in the world? How long should it last? Air travel would be stopped I would think, and banks and schools closed. In some areas martial law is enacted. Millions are still in danger or in need, but mostly is the not knowing that is the worse.

The Federal Government is probably defunct at this point, realistically. Dito most other large polities. What authority is left will be local, sometimes mayors or something, often ad hoc, religious or familial. We're talking complete collapse at this point. The volcanoes and earthquakes and monsters by themselves, maybe not, but that five days of no sunlight is Something Else Again.

My advice would be to scale down. Way down, for the sake of verisimilitude and a recognizable setting.

The buildup is OK. I'd make the 'fading' of magic a little more recent, and more gradual, though, if it's been that long since magic was a major thing, the legends ought to have faded more or changed more.

Maybe magic was its strongest in the Neolithic, and the Stone Age peoples relied on it heavily, and its gradual weakening led to more reliance on mundane tech, Bronze Age metallurgy, etc. Maybe the Egyptians really did use magic to make the Pyramids and maybe they have real magical functions, but by the time of Ramses II the magic was way faded.

Maybe Mycenean times really had centaurs and the like, but by the time of the Athenians and the Spartans that was mostly legend. In such a setting, Crete might really have been the source of the Atlantis story, with real magic, but if was always fading out.

By early Christian Era, the magic was mostly gone, just rare mages in secret, monsters far weaker than they once were. Dragons might have been one of the last of the 'overt' monsters, maybe, until advancing weapons finished them off.