[MH] Caribbean by Night

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What?!

I checked and it was available on amazon.co.uk, but they wouldn't sell me stuff, because, I think, my Kindle was bought from amazon.com.

Couldn't find it on .com except in physical form.

Off to check again.

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Lonesom...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Lonesom...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

I have obtained it. Thank you very much.

Even though I should either prepare tomorrow's session tonight or get an early night to do it before we start, I'm probably going to read it right now. I've wanted to do so for years.

Thanks.

And the rest of you, please allow suggestions to flow freely, because I'll definately have too little time to prepare before starting next session in the Between, before entering the mind of Ms. Delvano.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What?!

I checked and it was available on amazon.co.uk, but they wouldn't sell me stuff, because, I think, my Kindle was bought from amazon.com.

Mine isn't bought from amazon.com but I can't buy stuff from amazon.co.uk on it. It seems they want the international ebook selling site to be .com

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Mine isn't bought from amazon.com but I can't buy stuff from amazon.co.uk on it. It seems they want the international ebook selling site to be .com

The Kindle account is tied to a specific amazon site.
If it is on .com, you can move it to a local amazon (they often suggest I move mine to FR or DE) but I am not sure you could move it back.
Your existing Kindle library would be unchanged.
+: you gain access to specific languages sub-markets.
+: you could register for Kindle unlimited (.com is very annoyingly restricted to US resident)
-: you lose access to the .com specifics items and promotions.
As I mostly read in English, I kept mine on .com.

------
Regarding the Dream Quest ... If one of the player have a medical background, Leonid Rogozov could be an element of the dream ?

And for encounters, Copepod, Tardigrad and others similar pictures would make perfect Dreamlands monster while being thematically adequate for lake Vostok

https://gcmd.nasa.gov/search/Titles....AC_1200#titles

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Regarding the Dream Quest ... If one of the player have a medical background, Leonid Rogozov could be an element of the dream ?

Possibly.

I've been looking for cool Russian characters to place at Vostok station in the backstory. Ideally, I'd want to find some guys who were there after 1980, due to the history of the setting and magic only slowly stsrting to resurface in the 1980s and 1990s.

If Rogozov's Antarctic expedition and self-surgery had happened in the 1980s or later, I'd be all over him like white on rice.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

And for encounters, Copepod, Tardigrad and others similar pictures would make perfect Dreamlands monster while being thematically adequate for lake Vostok

https://gcmd.nasa.gov/search/Titles....AC_1200#titles

YES! Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

Let us have huge, nearly unkillable tardigrades! Heck, let them amble on land as well as in water, because in the Dreamlands, the square-cube law never gets invited to parties and realistic biology and physics service the Rule of Cool like back-alley prostitutes. Let their weird mouth things gnaw through armour and suck fat and marrow from their prey like a grandmother with lamb bones. Let them regenerate everything except damage from their Achilles' Heel (which ought to be what? Fire?)

Let the waters team with parasitic Copepods. Let them be Size Modifier 0 and retain the uncanny reaction speed of the tiny Copepods. Let some live attached to truly vast, non-Euclidean, monstrous forms in the deeps. Let others seek hosts for their parasitic life cycle, their obviously lethal breeding mechanism and their feeding.

So, I'll have to stat SM 0 aquatic Copepods and SM +1 Amphibious Tardigrades with Regeneration and awesome HT.

The Cold One associated spirit that the PCs are using as a navigation system to discover the source of the corruption/possession will no longer be an Incorporeal spirit in the Dreamlands. They contain a dream analogue of his home world, from whence his spirit form is projected, and the spirit will regain his 'natural' form.

The 'spirit' was the projected ka of a member of the Third Root race, known as the Mi-Go, yeti or abominable snowmen. While such creatures had their own culture before the Lords of the Last Waste extended their icy tendrils into their world, he'll be savage, devolved and beastlike, due to the touch of the Cold Ones upon him. He is wholly their creature, a servitor without much of a sense of self.

Other things I'm considering include an analogue for Faerie or more accurately a small outpost of fey in Ms. Delvona's personal Dreamlands. The fey creatures should, as with most everything else in these corrupted Dreamlands, be infected with the hoarfrost tendrils of the Cold Ones, which behave something like a parasitic fungus which in extreme cases can replace any individual minds with a hive mind hostile to all life and desiring nothing but to consume energy, light, hope and potentiality.

I imagine that the process is not so far along with the band of Fair Folk encountered, in that they retain some individuality, but that they are given over wholly to decadent Sadism, in that their existence centres on elaborate hunts of intelligent creatures. Those they do not kill they torture for their amusement and/or sell to the Men of Leng, for unknown purposes.

[Icelander]

Being the kind and generous soul I am, I decided that Alice Talbot's ritual created appropriate arms and armour for the heroic avatars that the PCs will become in the Dreamlands.

None of it should be made of metal, but the Dreamland materials of ice-crystals, exotic leather and any other suitable things (suggestions, please?) will be far better than any mundane, Earthly equipment.

Lucien Lacoste will become the Barbarian Warrior Glorn the Barbarian. As Glorn has always been something of a wish-fulfillment avatar for Lacoste, this actually changes very little. Lacoste retains his 'modern day' outfit, his ancestral Bowie knife and LeMat revolver and the double-barreled, stockless sawed-off owned by his great-uncle Leroy, as all of these are Signature Gear. He'll receive some new stuff, though, in return for the tactical vest, guns and knives that weren't Signature Gear.

Edward Alvin Smith has a self-image that could be classified as an aquatic Ranger or Ranger/Shaman. His Signature Gear includes three enchanted tattoos, a necklace of teeth and bone, a shaman's thighbone and a mixing bowl of some weird stone. He also carries a jade disk with what he calls an 'Elder Sign' on it and his Browning Hi-Power pistol and an A-Square Hannibal rifle in .577 Tyrannosaur. I was thinking he'd receive a spearhead that could be attached to his rifle, to make a spear, but should he receive any kind of armour? Maybe a thin mail coat of mysterious crystals.

Alice Talbot has difficulty truly seeing herself as a hero, no matter how many heroic fantasy characters she has played in RPGs. In any case, she doesn't imagine herself as an armoured warrior. Nevertheless, she is going to find a sword waiting for her, which is going to surprise her, as she did not incorporate any such thing into the ritual. A bookcase, yes, that she planned, for anyone who wanted a Dreamland version of the spellbooks she knows on the Penemue, but she made no mention of a sword.

'Nonc' Morel is a druid, no matter whether he's on this plane or any other. His clothes are unimportant, I suppose, being neither Signature Gear nor special in any way. T-Papa (his staff and link with his Pact-bonded genius loci), De'poy (enchanted hatchet), Gep (magical sling) and T-Jew (jaw harp) are all Signature Gear and Morel also found a way to bring his grandfather's Colt 'Peacemaker' and Winchester 1886.

Through Morel's hallucinogenic tea ritual, there will also be a metaphorical connection with Papa Mangrove and therefore a druid's grove at the start of their journey. Morel can pick up Dreamland versions of the Herb Lore elixirs and Charms he has at home, but didn't bring to visit his nieces and nephews.

Should 'Nonc' Morel receive any fantasy armament from Ms. Talbot's ritual, the way the other PCs did? The only thing I can imagine him missing would be some armour, I guess. Should he receive a suit of Dreamland walrus-leather armour? Something else?

Lucien Lacoste:

• Waraxe, made of crystal that looks like ice.
• Mail and lamellar shirt, made of crystal that looks like ice.
• Bracers, made of black walrus leather and crystal reinforcement.
• Greaves, made of black walrus leather and crystal reinforcement.

Edward Alvin Smith:

• Spearhead, crystal.
• Mail shirt, light, crystal.
• Bracers?

Alice Talbot:

• Sword, apparently of reddish steel (shouldn't exist there unless it was brought with them as Signature Gear), glowing with faint purple glow and melting the ice around it.

'Nonc' Morel:

• Armour. The player has requested that his 'armour' consist of moss and other flora growing out of his beard and clothes.
• Anything else?

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

The Kindle account is tied to a specific amazon site.
If it is on .com, you can move it to a local amazon (they often suggest I move mine to FR or DE) but I am not sure you could move it back.
Your existing Kindle library would be unchanged.
+: you gain access to specific languages sub-markets.

The place to find Icelandic language Kindle books appears to be amazon.com. As can be seen here.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I have obtained it. Thank you very much.

Even though I should either prepare tomorrow's session tonight or get an early night to do it before we start, I'm probably going to read it right now. I've wanted to do so for years.

Thanks.

And the rest of you, please allow suggestions to flow freely, because I'll definately have too little time to prepare before starting next session in the Between, before entering the mind of Ms. Delvano.

Penguins usually come up in Antarctic adventures as sympathetic helpers and sources of comic relief, since they have all the sympathetic virtues and vices. Of course, this Dreamlands' penguins and the things which prey upon them may be a bit unusual ...

Maciej Ceglowki has an essay on what would have happened if they found gold in Antarctica in 1890 https://idlewords.com/2016/10/cape_adare.htm

In that world, the start of the 20th century brought a gold rush unlike any other. Men who had failed to get rich at the Klondike or in Nome sailed halfway round the world to Lyttleton and Bluff in hopes of joining a crew. The already secretive sealers and whalers faced a hard choice—rent out their ships to the desperate, or slip off and try their luck with their own men. The whaling industry collapsed as every available ship headed for the Antarctic. For a few brief years, Lyttleton was the richest city in the world.

The first winter saw unspeakable scenes on the ice: parties left starving by relief ships that never came, frontier justice meted out to claim jumpers, petty quarrels that escalated to murder in the long months of darkness. Some of the men found too much gold for their own good, and disappeared in the Antarctic night.

Nature proved more pitiless than the miners. Entire tent camps were blown out to sea by the astonishing winter gales. Men in the same tent could not hear each other screaming. Many simply froze to death in the darkness.

In the autumn of 1903, the men at Cape Royds stood in silence and watched their cabins burn, knowing that it was the last time in their lives they would feel warm. Four of them were found the next spring, huddled in a snow cave and incoherent with hunger.

The second summer brought the discovery of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where pieces of gold the size of a man's thumb lay out for the taking. Even after the fragile crust had been turned over with spades, and the ground no longer sparkled, new arrivals streamed in, stepping over the mummified bodies of men and mules that gave the place the look of a battlefield. ...

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Anything that people can remember can be traced.

To take an example, gold is fungible and both Swiss and US firms are often accused of buying illegally mined gold, but that doesn't mean that exchanging 125 kg of gold for goods or services is not likely to be remarked and remembered.

This isn't a binary thing, I think.

"Sure, I remember some guys who paid with a lot of gold. At the conversion rate I charged them, I didn't care to know any more than that, and all the gold has been melted down, mixed with other gold to confound any trace element analysis, and sold on."

Originally Posted by Icelander

I told the players to pick birth dates for their characters with occult significance, something related to their particular character concepts. None have yet done so, probably because none of my players believe in astrology, numerology or any other -ogy which would allow them to know whether or not a particular date is auspicious, momentous, portentous or any other kind of -ous.

As far as I can see, real-world professional astrology/numerology is largely the art of having a system which will come up with really bland hooks off which to hang the results of a cold or warm reading done by the astrologer. Nobody will ever get told "your birth date isn't auspicious for your advancement in arcane knowledge, please go away"… until they run out of money.

So in practice I'd probably just look at the decanic modifiers in Thaumatology.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Let the waters team with parasitic Copepods. Let them be Size Modifier 0 and retain the uncanny reaction speed of the tiny Copepods. Let some live attached to truly vast, non-Euclidean, monstrous forms in the deeps. Let others seek hosts for their parasitic life cycle, their obviously lethal breeding mechanism and their feeding.

I'm rather fond of deep-sea isopods, too. All they really need is Vacuum Support.

Originally Posted by Icelander

None of it should be made of metal, but the Dreamland materials of ice-crystals, exotic leather and any other suitable things (suggestions, please?) will be far better than any mundane, Earthly equipment.

I'd have thought wood ought to be a major part of the structural setup, which has lots of possibilities.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I'd have thought wood ought to be a major part of the structural setup, which has lots of possibilities.

Maybe petrified wood. I also like the idea of using jade and coral.