Scroll of summoning Nicholas Cage from the film 'Knowing'

Remember when Planet Algol did that scroll of summoning Kurt Russel? Back in 2010? No? Well i did.

Then my girlfriend decided to send me an email from the living room describing all the varied roles Nicholas Cage plays in the film 'Knowing', which I was avoiding by reading upstairs.

So you can thank her for this.

In each of his embodiments Nicholas Cage believes he is a man called John Koestler. he is not. He is the actor Nicholas Cage pretending to be John Koestler.

The stats of Nicholas Cage pretending to be John Koestler are

STR 12

DEX 8

CON 13

CHA 11

WIS 9

INT 15

The number you roll on the D10 is also the level of this Nicholas Cage. Result one is a level one grieving widower, result ten is a level ten cleric of the alien angels. His HD is always a d6. Attack bonus and saves equal to a magic user.

1. Nicolas Cage: Professor of Astrophysics.

This entirely rational Nicholas Cage is an expert in Astrophysics, he knows god is a lie and the world an empty waste in which we only wait for death. He fears nothing, yet everything.

Solves any physics question, leaves everyone present feeling pretty depressed about is as the answer always necessitates entropy.

2. Nicolas Cage: Grieving widower.

This Nicholas Cage is familiar with the blows of an unjust world. He knows what love is, and how little of us can be saved by love. His wife is dead.

All intelligent beings weirdly sympathetic with the loss of this Nicholas Cage, despite the fact that he is an irritating fuck. NPC’s will help this Cage, and try to set him up on a date.

3. Nicolas Cage: Father of vaguely troubled son who needs a hearing aid but can still hear without it.

This Nicholas Cage knows how to deal with problems that are pretty bad, but overcome-able with some planning and effort. He deals empathically with his attractive and winsome child.

Extends his saves to nearby children so long as they are not that bad, not that damaged and not in that much danger.

4. Nicolas Cage: Rebellious agnostic son of a pastor

This Nicholas Cage is good at arguing with clerics, he irritates the fuck out of them. They are continually disappointed with him. They thought he had the strength to believe.

Disrupts clerical casting by whining and carrying on. Casting impossible around him while he can speak as any nearby cleric will stop what they are doing to argue with Nicholas Cage.

5. Nicolas Cage: Action hero

This Nicholas Cage loves to run the fuck about and can clear incredible distances in his attempts to save people whose death he has predicted. He never saves them. Death is inevitable.

Acts as a level 10 fighter with acrobatic abilities unless people are in danger, in which case he acts as a level 5 magic user with no spells.

6. Nicolas Cage: Prophet

This Nicholas Cage knows when bad things are going to happen because a page full of numbers he got from space alien angels has the dates and locations on it. Your characters death is on there. You will not believe him. Neither will anyone else.

His warnings become truth. He cannot protect you from any danger aimed at you, but can protect you from just crazy shit that’s generally around.

7. Nicolas Cage: Pained drunkard

This Nicholas Cage is drunk as fuck most of the time. All of his drinks are symbolic. He stares into his wine glass thinking of his wife. When he puts down his whiskey glass the ring highlights the dooms of peoples yet to be. He smashes his reflection in the mirror with the glass.

Drunk as fuck.

8. Nicolas Cage: Martyr

This Nicholas Cage is ready to die for the world. You will have a hard time stopping him from doing that.

Can protect any ailing or threatened character by sending them to live with the alien angels. They will never be seen again.

9. Nicolas Cage: Man ravaged by winds

This Nicholas Cage is always surrounded by winds. He stares, often, into the sky above his head, as if following a rapidly receding point of view. He stands, arms spread, waiting for the wind to end.

Surrounded by high speed winds at all times.

And finally...

10. Nicolas Cage: Believer

This Nicholas Cage is now a functioning cleric of the alien angels that are coming to destroy the earth. However, he doesn't have much time left. All of his powers involve destroying the earth.

Has one level twenty spell that burns everything.

You can see a number of those roles in the lst ten minutes of the film here. It's off-its'-tits crazy.

 

Zero Point

The is an 'In a Wicked Age' Oracle we did for our Byzantium/Dying Culture Ooort Cloud space station Zero Point.

Made by Noisms, a Displaced Yorkshireman and Dice & Decisions. (and myself). I'll let you guess which is which.

 

Clubs

Ace - A recently awakened clone searches out the reason for his prior's death.

Two - An artist looks for truth and meaning in their art. A non-human intelligence decides to steal his work.

Three - A usually peaceable Velociraptor clan stalks through parkland looking for prey.

Four - The League of Docking Bay Families refuses passage to any and all who would attempt ingress.

Five - Uplifted spider-monkey clans worship a pantheon of Echelon-II emulates.

Six - A starscraper lies empty, save for the man who tries to maintain it.

Seven - Cometary fragments are noticed by an amateur starwatcher, as well as the Lords of the Cloud.

Eight - A sentinel from Zero Point's reserve armoury wanders market spaces looking for signs of trouble.

Nine - A wannabe mech pilot scavenges parts to fix an old battle engine.

Ten - A HMBT stasis-pod drifts in to Zero Point's gravity well; the occupants awake.

Jack - The Engineers Guild prepares an initiation and a geneered woman flees persecution.

Queen - News of a predator stalking the Undercyst reaches a princeling looking for a challenge.

King - A militant hegemony virus propagates through the transient populations.

Diamonds

Ace - An uplifted primate is accused of murder.

Two - At the centre of the station a vast sea curves upwards towards an impossible horizon.

Three - A renegade librarian guards a vast archive in the station's lower reaches with dangerous traps.

Four - A gardener tends megafauna in enclosed biomes under the light from an artificial sun.

Five - After civilisation collapses, an AI takes the form of an ancestor spirit to relate to the survivors.

Six - A mysterious barman takes confessions from his clientele. Afterwards they find that their problems are solved in unlikely ways.

Seven - A grief-stricken soul dreams of a new life as a ship's captain.

Eight - Guerilla ontologists warp reality to their will by reworking the laws of physics and logic (Space wizards!).

Nine - A slum lord depressurizes a section of the station because his tenants can't pay the rent.

Ten - The Jungian unconsciousness invades the station's internet.

Jack - A humble dock worker is haunted by dreams of darkness and war.

Queen - Fractious love affair between an AI and a human

King - Nanites begin to build a vast citadel within the station but no construction order has been given.

Spades

Ace – An insane Robot tends an ancient mosaic, endlessly renewed.

Two – A chitinous, black mercenary arachnid alien, terrifying yet honourable guard for the elite.

Three – A brave rogue, dared by friends to attempt the circumnavigation of the station.

Four – A Doctor searching for the cure to an impossible human ailment in corroded Alien torture manuals.

Five – The discoverer of an open airlock, inside, a forgotten telescope, frozen in place, pointing at the pale blue dot of earth.

Six – A tribe of intelligent cancers, banished and ruling a peaceful realm in the recycling pipes.

Seven – An epochs-old, damaged war mech, One functioning weapons pod and cracked lenses, guarding the last repository of original art.

Eight – A cryogenic sleeper, soul-struck and melancholic refugee from a bright and optimistic age, awakening today.

Nine – A silver beast with ruby eyes that hunts only man and has forgotten how to die. The man that hunts it.

Ten – The foundation stone. A beam of Iron drawn from the heart of the Sun. The druid that serves it.

Jack – The recycled Death Scream of a world. The cult that worships it.

Queen – A trio of crippled friends, none human, all without fear and destined for adventure.

King – The intelligent computer virus, designed to kill Zero Point. Transformed by aeons, dedicated to saving it.

Hearts

Ace – An inquisitor for a forgotten inquisition tortures those he suspects of hiding secrets.

Two – A scroll-bearer for a librarians’ cult makes a discovery. 

 

Three – Three sisters, one blind, one deaf, one mute, all holy.

Four – A criminal punished with sentient stasis.

Five – An AI dreams that it is the god which created all the other gods.

Six – A serial killer seeks 24 corpses, one for each of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.

Seven – A mad architect will destroy his rival.

Eight – There are ghosts in space that worship Satan.

Nine – The daughter of a priest rebels against all he stands for.

Ten – A maker of clockwork animals and people believes he can use them for more than play.

Jack – Monks plot revenge on those they envy.

Queen – A proud queen of whores.

King – Four old men plotting abduction.

A Horde of Ice a Throne of Gold

This is cribbed from a email to a friend about a poential game of Diaspora that never quite went down. Put here because it may be useful to someone else.

I made this chart to see if it would be possible to combine the Disapora rules for generating clusters and the actual moons of Jupiter to create a playing space that seemed real but could still be improvised at the table.

This is only some of the estimated 66 moons but the names are real. The small inner moons are the ones next to Jupiter. The large Gallilean moons are arranged around them and there are three groupings of six moons each, the Carme group, the Ananke group and the Pasiphae group.. The positions on the chart aren't meant to represent their actual positions in space but to show the ease of moving between the moons. We can use the random Diaspora rules to find out how easy it is to get from moon to moon within a group. Assume you can move around the inner worlds quite easily.

The tiny moons are really tiny, like a few k's long, but thats enough for a settlement or even a conflict, if there's one set of miners on one end and another on the opposite side.

If you print off the chart and re-do the transport routes with each game then it should present an energetic simulation of a moving orbital system, but one abstract enough that you can actaully make sense of it (or that I can actaully make sense of, I found actual orbital mechanics too hard).

This fits in well with the idea of reation mass, or fuel, being quite expensive and diffucult to get. So you have to conserve your mass and think carefully about when you are going to use it and where you are going to get more.

The simplest kind of reaction mass is water. Water is also valuable to us because we can use it to make air and to fill hydroponic systems to make food. It seems that for a bunch of relativly poor (in mass) Jovian moon settlers would use water as the basis for currency.

(Europa has loads of Ice of course but it's at the bottom of a gravity well and we could assume that having access to loads of water has turned the rulers of Europa into decadent Oligarchic Ice Kings lording it over everyone else, imprisoning ice pirates in the deep oceans, trapped by the very thing they sought to steal, which seems like the kind of thing dickhead rich people would do.)

So I turned the environment chart from Disaporia into this:- 

4	This rock is pure ice, nothing else.
3	A thin skin of rock over ice, or a rock of dirty impure ice with some fragements of other stuff locked inside.
2	Large amounts of easy to find Ice, some hard to find metals.
1	Lare amounts of Ice, somewhere, if you can get to it. Rumours of other stuff deep beneath.
0	An average rock, some ice and some metals beneath the surface.
-1	Enough Ice here to export very small amounts at a very steep price. High concentrations of metals somewhere beneath the surface.
-2	Not much Ice, or very hard to get. Lare amounts of metals if you mine for them.
-3	Precious metals easily accesable. Ice locked deep beneath in very small amounts.
-4	This rock is made of almost pure gold, or some other precious heavy metal. No ice at all.

The idea is that places can have Ice, which is really valuable in the moons but almost worthless elsewhere, or rare heavy metals, which are worthless in the moons but can make you a millionare back in 'The Wells' (or The Deeps? However low-g settlers would refer to the planet bound.)

This way there is a kind of market and politics inferred by the world creation and an interesting dichotomy of choice. Do you go to the moon-of-gold where starving miner kings rule from thrones cut from pure shining gold and barter kilos of platinum for chipsof ice? If you do, will you have the ice to get back?

I made this after watching some of the Sagan Series on youtube. Anothe chart-hack for the mining cultures of the Jovian Moons.

Optimism

4	"Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there."- William Westmoreland.
3	"There can be no boundry set to rational hope." Sagan/Rodenberry level optimism. As optimistic as you can be without being nuts.
2	"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,I would still plant my apple tree." -Martin Luther
1	"Have a great day!" Standard American level optimism.
0	"Eh"
-1	"Typical" Standard British-level pessimism.
-2	"Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is. "- H.R Giger
-3	"Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities." Lovecraft
-4	"Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue." Herzog

'I burn down the space elevator'

AP reports are usually utterly boring to anyone who wasn't there so the rest of this is behind a break.

Everyone else has already made intelligent comments about the system we used, Ghost/Echo.

I wrote this as a standard relation of events but it was too long and too dull. Instead, here are a series of history fragments from 'To The Stars'

To The Stars

A Microscope - derived shared world timeline for gaming in.

The idea is that we play different games each week, place them in a particular point in the timeline, and gradually fill in the details.

After trying numerous free online Timeline creators and finding tham all bugged to fuck, I am simply posting this on my blog.

CAPITALS are long periods of time. The whole thing should take fifty to 100 thousand years, so there is a lot of figurative space between the lines. 


We played for three hours and the whole of human civilisation collapsed twice.

The Rise of a People to the Stars

***********BEGINNING***************NOTHING BEFORE THIS POINT**********

MAN HEADS TO THE NEIGHBOURING PLANETS - dark

NATION STATES ON THE FIRST WORLD BATTLE FOR LOW ORBIT SUPREMACY

(HOT/COLD WARS) – dark

• Echelon Zero's artificial consciousness emerges from a soup of logic and thought. - light
• First recorded rampant echelon system – dark

STRANGE WAR WITH THE HIDEOUS MURDERING BUG THINGS – dark

• Ill fated echelon 3 series used against the HMBT's – light
• 'Blueprints' for Zero Point Way-station stolen by spies – dark

FOUNDATION OF ZERO POINT WAYSTATION IN OORT CLOUD – light

• Ten million ships fly past Zero Point Way-station during opening ceremony – light

APEX TECH COLLAPSES ON EARTH – dark

ZERO POINT BECOMES CONSTANTINOPLE-STYLE REMNANT OF A FALLEN CULTURE – light

• The last message arrives from a collapsing technological planet – dark
• The last message is received by Zygmunt Blank, the final Soldier-Scholar, Edward Roosevelt, an Engineer and the sculptor Absolom Faringer. In a nihilistic rage Blank kills Absolom Faringer and out of regret he dedicates himself to preserving Absoloms art. Roosevelt attempts to bring Blank to justice but is himself murdered in the sculpture garden on Zero Point. The only witnesses are Roosevelt’s son Archibald and an Gene-engineered Velociraptor named Spielberg. The sublime Art of Faringer sparks a human renaissance that ultimately returns mankind to the stars. The future of mankind was midwived by murder. Both light and dark.

EXPEDITIONS HEAD INTO THE VOID SEEKING TO BRING NEW LIFE – light

• Archibald Roosevelt agrees to be the founding genome in order to re-establish humanity because it is the right thing to do. - light

RECOLONISATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM – light

FIRST SCHWÄRM LADEN WAR – light?

• Destruction of Zero Point Way-Station – dark
• Bo Lucas, insane Space Marine, destroys Zero Point whilst under the incompetent command of Sebastian Fortesque during the battle against the Schwärm Laden. Echelon V was the artificial intelligence occupying the defending ship. - dark
• Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death - dark
• The Echelon VII series leads the final strike against the Schwärm Laden proto-realm - light
• Ontological warheads are used against the Schwärm Laden for the first time – light

ECHELON IX RECREATES THE HUMAN RACE - light

• Sigmund Ross returns from Proxima Centauri – dark

THE FOUNDING OF AN INTERSTELLAR EMPIRE – light

*************END*********NOTHING BEOND THIS POINT*********************