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12-31-2018, 09:12 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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[MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
In a new Monster Hunter campaign set in the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast, I'll be making use of biologist, cryptozoologist and paranormal writer Ivan T. Sanderson's Vile Vortices.
These areas, or Vile Vortices, will then be places where the veil of reality is weak and Other Places can seep through, opening ways for the sort of creatures that Monster Hunters, well, hunt. The world as a whole ranges from No Mana to Very Low Mana, with Ley Lines and Sacred Places sometimes reducing the penalty to use rituals and other supernatural powers down to -5 or so, but very rarely less than that. Within the Vile Vortices and ley line tangles adjacent to them, the local Mana Level is Low Mana (-5) and sometimes, in the vicinity of pathways between worlds, even approaches Normal Mana (+0). I'm not using templates from the Monster Hunter line, but I might use a lot of concepts and monsters from there. I am using the RPM magic system and additional material by Christopher R. Rice, such as Thresholds from 'Safe as Houses' (Pyramid #3/58) and the Facade from 'Mask of Humanity' (Pyramid #3/97). I want to try to achieve a sort of Ken Hite-ian effect in linking real world mythology, speculations of various occult writers and gameable detail. In short, what he did in his Suppressed Transmission, which originally appeared as an ongoing article series in Pyramid. The PCs will mainly be working in the Bermuda Triangle, the Vile Vortex closest to their home base, but I want to feature news and possible adventure hooks connected to other Vile Vortices, possibly patrolled by allies, acquaintances or rivals of the PCs' eccentric billionaire Patron. I also want to link famous Places of Power and/or Mystery somehow to the Vile Vortex theory, even if there is some geographic irregularity, but I'm looking for suggestions on how to do that. So, a few random questions to start with. 1) Among the twelve Vile Vortices listed by Sanderson, at least according to Wikipedia, there is one he calls the Algerian Megaliths, supposedly located 'south of Timbuktu'. What, precisely, is being referred to here? Most of Algeria's famous ruins or other archaeological sites are decidedly north and west of Timbuktu and, indeed, south of Timbuktu is Mali, the country Timbuktu is located in, not Algeria. Does he mean Megaliths built in an Algerian style, but located in Mali, or is this some odd way to refer to the location of archaeological sites that are in Algeria? 2) Assuming that I want to connect the historical eruption of Krakatoa to a Vile Vortex, how do I go about that? How far is it between the agreed-upon area of the Wharton Basin to Krakatoa? 3) How do I work Croatoan island into the campaign? 4) Can the Vile Vortices being areas where other worlds seep into this one somehow be contorted to explain the Tunguska Event or other notable unsolved mysteries of that nature? 5) Does anyone have thoughts, comments or suggestions?
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12-31-2018, 10:02 AM | #2 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
The Vile Vortices are somewhat ill-defined. I'd suggest you put them on the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, because that looks significant.
Given that, Krakatoa is about 17 degrees, or 1,200 miles, north of the Tropic of Capricorn, on the edge of the Wharton Basin. You would need dubious plate tectonics to make anything of that. However, the Wharton Basin is also where MH370 seems to have disappeared, which has not escaped the attention of the whole Internet, even though Wikipedia has ignored it. That event could have been what made the PCs' sponsor decide to recruit his field team.
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12-31-2018, 11:06 AM | #3 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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Depending on one's preference in crackpot theories, that could be anywhere from 500,000 square miles to a couple of million square miles each. Plate tectonics be damned, I think I'll get away with making Krakatoa the terminus of a lozenge that also reaches the Wharton Basin! A lozenge three thousand miles from end to end, a thousand miles at the widest bit in the middle, would be within the realm of possibility for what he describes. The 'Algerian Megalith' vortex is centered somewhere between Morocco ang Algeria and likely includes not only parts of Algeria, Morocco and northern Mali (inc. Timbuktu); but also a fair bit of the western Med. Quote:
Well, he's had a team in the field since the late 80s, but no doubt MH370 represents something terribly significant in the setting's history.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 12-31-2018 at 11:10 AM. |
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12-31-2018, 10:15 AM | #4 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The deep dark haunted woods
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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It's safe to assume that whoever gave it that name just assumed that anything using Timbuktu as a navigation reference would be in Algeria. Quote:
Being that close, you can easily claim some horrific supernatural event in the Basin triggered Krakatoa. Or Krakatoa triggered something horrible in the Basin. Quote:
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12-31-2018, 12:44 PM | #5 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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I discover from the original source that 'south of Timbuktu' is mostly inaccurate for the area that is meant and it would be more precise to state that the southernmost terminus of the lozenge-shaped area might be placed somewhere south of Timbuktu, with the northern end reaching into the western Mediterranean, the lozenge being tilted from SW to NE. I need have no compunctions defining the area vaguely enough to be able to justify any particular location somewhere in northern Mali and western Algeria, and even parts of Mauritania and Morocco are not excluded by the original definition. Indeed, depending on taste, I can twist and turn the lozenge as needed, having it be centered somewhere around where Mauritania, Algeria and Mali meet, but having the northern terminus be anywhere I need on the Mediterranean. As far as I can tell, the original source can be interpreted to place the northern parts of the area almost anywhere between the Straits of Gibraltar to the seas around Malta, though it would probably be most in line with the text and accompanying map* if the northern terminus were fitted somewhere between Algiers and Tunis. This gives me pretty much the whole of Algeria, as well as parts of Tunisia, even if I refrain from grabbing bits of Libya to go with it. It goes without saying that areas of Morocco and Mauritania which border Algeria and Mali can absolutely be pulled in, either because they explicitly lie within the lozenge-shaped Vile Vortex, or by reaching for magico-babble explanations in the form of ley line connections. *Which, I'll note, even the text admits is not necessarily authoritative about the exact geographic boundaries of the lozenge, with the size of the area being not entirely determined in the article, though no doubt each Vile Vortex corresponds exactly to another one on the opposite hemisphere, either matching it in area or at the very least in some metaphysical way. Quote:
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Can anyone suggest particularly interesting and gameable crackpot theories, either online or in (not astronomically priced) ebooks available on Amazon that link the Bermuda Triangle and the disappeared colony on Roanoke Island? Quote:
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Would it help if the incursions might be in some way shaped and guided by the hands (tentacles?) of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and whose existence in this reality is impossible under current natural laws? And if the presence of beings or energy from other worlds in this reality serves to weaken the fabric of our world by serving as an anchor to their own reality, meaning that the very existence of monsters, not to mention the use of magic, serves as a self-reinforcing mechanism which brings higher mana levels and enables the ever more blatant violation of the laws of reality through the existence of otherworldly beings here on Earth?
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12-31-2018, 02:56 PM | #6 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
As to Roanoke, perhaps something could have exited the Bermuda vortex traveling to the colony for mystical reasons.
One could gain inspiration from Stephen King's miniseries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_of_the_Century
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12-31-2018, 10:14 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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I can't help that it sounds Lovecraftian. As does Krakatoa, actually. And like they belong to the same antediluvian language. Yes, I know that there was a Croatan tribe of Native Americans living near Roanoke, but, as Ken Hite famously said, bad linguistics and archeology makes for the best gaming. In any case, the Croatan tribe was literally renamed by law, as if someone feared that anyone speaking or knowing the very name itself might bring the attention of things from Beyond. In any case, Croatan was allegedly the name of an island, as indeed is Roanoke, and it is far from clear to me whether the islands are named for the tribes who lived there or vice versa. Apparently, Croatan Island was most likely modern Hatteras Island. That is the sort of ambigious statement you can drive a full-sized tractor trailer, a Great Old One or a whole campaign through. To begin with, if we're no longer assuming that geography in the area was immutable (because the Vile Vortices are areas where other worlds bleed into this one), who is to say that the island which the Roanoke colonists knew as 'Croatan' is even in Virginia? Or ever was? Besides, the single word carved at Roanoke wasn't "Croatan". It was "Croatoan". Isn't it obvious that this is the True Name of the island/entity, perhaps kin to Krakatoa? And, fortunately for my campaign, I discover that the cookiest crackpots on the Internet have found no difficulty in postulating a sufficiently large Bermuda Triangle to manage the feat of extending the northern terminus to a place south of Roanoke, where the island/entity of CROATOAN might exist in an adjecent reality to this one. Indeed, on having obtained several Kindle books written by Ivan T. Sanderson, I discover that the man was, simultaneously and delightfully, a skeptical, rationalist scientist who utterly rejected ghosts and other supernatural phenomena... and the sort of chap who recounts page after page of anecdotal evidence before concluding that only a hopeless blockhead blinded by laboratory-bound, Ivory Tower confined scientific orthodoxy would bother to deny the existence of seamonsters, and, indeed freshwater longnecks like the Loch Ness Monster, there merely remains the challenge of scientifically classifying Nessie and her many evident kin. He also, quite matter of factly and without ever asserting it as positive fact, but merely a reasonable conjecture from available evidence, advanced his hypothesis that the priestly class of pre-historic civilisations were the custodians of advanced technological knowledge, couched in religious symbolism of secretive mystery cults, and that knowledge of these wonders was probably passed down from a highly advanced trans-Atlantic, if not worldwide, civilization. He never came out and said that it was Atlantis, Mu and/or Lemuria, but I couldn't help but read between the lines the expectation that Mr. Sanderson would be prepared to entertain such notions. Oh, and by the last chapter, he explained rains of frogs and fish as the results of other dimensions impinging on ours. Which, he noted in passing (presumably before hopping on a unicycle and speeding away, monocle fixed, cackling madly while juggling Parthian batteries, Ancient Egyptian movie projectors and millenia old golden icons of Central American jet planes and power tools), would also neatly explain all the other unexplained phenomena he described. Including, of course, the technologically advanced prehistoric human civilization which somehow flourished without literacy, as the Out Of Place artifacts were clearly obtained through contact with beings from other realities by the people who later became the elite priestly class, by which means they received technological devices (perhaps in trade or to help them keep the lower orders in line), but not the entire infrastructure and scientific worldview that would go with having devoloped this technology themselves. So, not Ancient Astronauts. Better. Ancient Ultraterrestials. Or, in other words, faeries, spirits, titans, gods, demons or Great Old Ones. Basically, Nyarlathotep as the Black Pharoah of Atlantis.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 12-31-2018 at 10:18 PM. |
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12-31-2018, 06:51 PM | #8 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The deep dark haunted woods
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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Have you considered the possibility that the Bermuda Triangle isn't located where everyone says it is? That it lies just outside all that heavily-trafficked Carribean area? Or that the Vortice moves with the precession of the planet's axis, so that some point it could have swept over Roanoake Island? Quote:
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12-31-2018, 11:54 PM | #9 | ||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
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In my campaign, there are other explanations. For one thing, if you want to lay traps for rabbits, you don't do it where rabbits rarely go. And when fishing, you want to be where fish congregate, not somewhere they avoid. Quote:
Happily, while Sanderson does not exclude any of the commonly accepted ca 500,000 square mile area of the Bermuda Triangle, he does insist it's not a triangle at all. It's a lozenge. This means that Sanderson's (and thus mine) Vile Vortex in the Caribbean extends at least as far south from the Bahamas as it does north. At one fell swoop, it doubles in size, at minimum. Granted, that's not in the right direction, for my purposes here (though the fact that the lozenge squarely includes both Haiti and Cuba is obviously welcome news), but so far, I've found nothing suggesting that Sanderson rejects the various theories of an expanded Bermuda Triangle shape, up to some 1,500,000 square miles. If we want to include all the areas that various crackpots have suggested as part of the expanded Bermuda Triangle, while still retaining a neat lozenge shape, we might well end up with a total of more than 3,000,000 square miles of ocean and islands, which would encompass the vast majority of the Caribbean, from a southern terminus not far north of Panama to a northern terminus that I might possibly be able to extend near enough to Roanoke Island for my purposes. Quote:
One has an Unknown Enemy from Outside Time and Space and his memories of his sojourn in the Land of the Nommo are both incomplete and unreliable. Alone among the expedition of scientists, scholars and mercenaries who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, the PC survived with his mind and body apparently intact, to come back twenty-three years later. Unfortunately, he claims to believe he had not been gone more than a couple of years and his answers as regards the specifics of his means of return are somewhat inadequate. Another is fantastically powerful as a medium and spirit magic comes naturally to him, but he is a locus of spiritual energy and serves as a beacon for all sorts of Spirit World denizens, who are drawn to his power both consciously and unconsciously. How he came to possess this power is unclear, for though the devoutly Catholic PC views it simply as a gift of God, current thaumatological research can neither confirm nor refute the existence of God in the religious sense, with no entities proven to exist whose powers come from any kind of Prime Mover, nor, indeed, any evidence that anny supernatural being claiming to be an angel or demon is in any fundamental way different from a different spirit claiming to be loa, orisha, ancestral spirit, totem animal or genius loci. The third PC, indeed, is a Cajun swamp druid who says he was Chosen to be the Sacred Guardian of 'Papa Mangrove', a mangrove grove of great apparent age and allegedly a powerful genius loci, of the local wilderness and of the Balance in the world as a whole. Other realities infringing on Earth is something that 'Nonc' Morel had decreed to be very unchill and not even remotely in tune with Nature, Balance and all that good ****. And demons, angry ghosts, wicked spirits, Outsiders or Great Old Ones have all been ruled to be invasive species. Varmint pests at best, feral hogs at worst. Need culling to protect the ecological Balance, no? Too bad you can't cook 'em and have a fais do do when you kill Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Probably give you Color Out of Space runs. Other, guest-characters, part-time PCs, may or may not be Chosen, Destined or Prophecied. Quote:
Call of Chthulu was set in New Orleans, after all.
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01-01-2019, 07:11 AM | #10 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: [MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats
That reminds me ... what forces are the Army Corps of Engineers and the city fathers of New Orleans really trying to hold back when they keep the Mississippi in its current channel? Perhaps they learned something relevant in Iraq at Ur of the Chaldees which also died when its river went away? And what powers has someone invoked to help them do this? What went wrong in the presidency of Bush Minor to let the city flood, and what THINGS BEST LEFT UNDISTURBED awoke when water slopped into their above-ground crypts which are bigger within than without?
Similarly, the University of Texas at Galveston medical school is experimenting on implanting vat-grown lungs in pigs.
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ken hite, monster hunters, monstrum, suppressed transmission, vile vortices |
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