Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

Was there anything such as the presence or absense of totemic objects to suggest whether it was ritual cannibalism or just a bad year for food?

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

I'll start with the disclaimer that I am not an archaeologist. That said, most of what I've read about the conditions leading to the demise of the ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) culture has it that around the 12th to 14th centuries, they faced extreme drought conditions, agriculture failed, society collapsed, and people started eating each other (or at least, they ate each other a lot more frequently than they had before, if they had before). The studies I've read were from remains originating during this time of collapse. I've not heard much about ritual cannibalism among the ancestral Puebloans, but then I have never conducted an in-depth study of this culture, either, so I can't say either way. A quick read of Wikipedia suggests there are alternate interpretations as well (such as the ancestral Puebloans were attacked, butchered, and eaten by invading non-Puebloans, possibly ancestors of the Shoshone or Utes, rather than the ancestral Puebloans eating each other). Regardless, everyone agrees that some people were clearly butchered and eaten by other people.

Luke

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

Semi Auto ?

I don't think semi auto rifles were common in any of those cartridges at that time, most of them were old blackpowder cartridges and .221 fireball was used in a bolt action handgun

Hmm , you can get the Weatherby in .22-250 as early as 1980 I think and of course it could always have been rechambered

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

"Choice cuts" would be filet mignon or tenderloin, which is the psoas major muscle, in the back and pelvis.

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

Just so. 'Tenderloin' being a subset of 'loin' cuts.

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

If you were the kid whose dad drank Crown Royal, you were very popular with the gamer kids for the velvet bags to use for dice bags.

The Reading Material of One Suspect for the Big Bad Wolf
 

Due to PC-like Disadvantages and player recklessness, the PCs are at present uninvited guests in the hunting cabin of Drs. Harvey Allen and William Pinault, along with a bevy of locally important men, County Commissioner, town selectmen and local millionaires who go there annually to night hunt predators, such as wolves and coyotes.

The PCs are trapped in there due to a storm with pretty much every suspect the players have as the 'Big Bad Wolf', the hypothetical older man who might have acted as Victor Dufresne's mentor as a serial killer. Naturally, their car radio cannot reach anyone, the phone in the cabin is down and the radio in the cabin seems to be broke. The hospitable hunters in the cabin blame the storm and weight of snow on the phone lines for the lack of dial tone, but the damage to the radio is unexplained.

In any event, Special Agent Frank Corelli has a powerful hunch about Dr. William Pinault, a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who owns this luxury cabin in Maine with his close personal friend, Dr. Harvey Allen (brother of local big-wig Clayborn Allen and uncle to suspect-in-custody Victor Dufresne). Corelli believes Pinault to be a ruthless killer, a belief largely derived from looking into his eyes and seeing nothing staring back, just the vast emptiness of a sterile vessel without a soul. Also, Corelli is pretty sure that Dr. Pinault and Dr. Allen are homosexual lovers, which not only makes them more suspicious in general, but also connects with a theory that Victor Dufresne may be homosexual or bisexual and that he might have suffered sexual trauma of some sort in his youth.

Dr. Pinault is precise, poised, methodological and calm. He is also cosmopolitan, erudite and effeminate. At the moment, he is in the kitchen, wearing an apron with a purple flower print and a hairnet, decorating a cake for dessert. He moves with a gliding grace that appears languid, but is deceptively swift, and Corelli cannot help but notice how preternaturally aware Dr. Pinault seems to be of his surroundings and his own body at all times. While it is only Corelli who has this powerful hunch, the other two PCs admit that they have no trouble imagining Dr. Pinault's long, well-manicured surgeon's fingers making what investigators remarked upon as very workmanlike, competent surgical incisions on several of Dufresne's alleged victims to remove choice cuts of meat.

Agent Corelli is in the study of the cabin, presumably used either by Dr. Allen or Dr. Pinault (or possible shared by both). The book cases contain both literature and medical books, but with an unusual focus on true crime in the case of literature and forensics, pathology and abnormal physchology in the case of the scientific textbooks. On the desk, Corelli can see five books, apparently the last five that were being used, read or consulted:

Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives by Robert Ressler et al.
Spitz and Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death: Guidelines for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigation. 2nd edition.
Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.

Re: The Reading Material of One Suspect for the Big Bad Wolf
 

If the "good" doctor is consulting the latter three he has a sense of humor.

Dracula is far too fantastic & fictional (IMHO) to provide any use for a 1980s psychokiller. While Silence . . . is fun, it's not terribly authentic (again, IMHO) an account of investigative methodology. (Note that Lecter in the both has maroon eyes and twelve fingers, which makes going incognito rather difficult. Again, IMHO, more to the point in Red Dragon.

Re: The Reading Material of One Suspect for the Big Bad Wolf
 

The cabin is his vacation home. As far as the PCs know, he has been on vacation from at least Friday the 16th of December (it's Tuesday the 20th in play). According to everything the PCs have heard, Dr. Pinault comes to his Maine cabin for recreation only and he has no practice in any nearby hospital.

As a neurosurgeon, he has no obvious professional reason to consult pathology textbooks, anyway. Even the abnormal psychology is a stretch for anything directly related to his work as a neurosurgeon, though it may be of some interest to his co-owner, neurologist Dr. Harvey Allen.

Of course, the fact that Dr. Harvey Allen's nephew was arrested on the 14th of December, just six days ago, and is suspected of killing up to nineteen people, mostly with knives, is a pretty good reason for Dr. Allen and the man who might be his domestic partner to sit up in their study, drink Scotch and try to figure out whether such a shocking thing could be true, what the news reports about the murders mean, if the evidence really does point to the young man and, just possibly, if he really did it, if there were signs that they should have seen while he was a regular guest in their home all through his childhood.

Of course, this doesn't really answer why Dracula, Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were on top of the two textbooks. Unless Dr. Pinault decided that having his pseudo-nephew accused of being a serial killer reminded him of favourite books he'd like to re-read.

Or maybe Pinault had already been planning to read the new Thomas Harris book when his next vacation came up and simply decided to stick with his plan despite the shocking news. And maybe he re-read Red Dragon first. Dracula might have been there for a while or maybe there was some connection between this specific copy of the book to Victor Dufresne that led to them taking out it out while discussing his arrest.

Re: The Reading Material of One Suspect for the Big Bad Wolf
 

In the spring of this year, I emerged from the guest room in a couple of friends' house carrying that book.

"Oh," they said, "Maybe we shouldn't leave that in the guest bedroom, it might upset some people."

"Eh? This is my own copy, I didn't notice yours in there."