Hello From the Great Dystopia

It's almost three years since I last posted.  It has been almost that long since I last played D&D.  Part of the reason is the lockdown, but also the two couples that were my core players recently had babies.  They are occupied with that cool adventure right now, otherwise I think I would have tried starting back up virtually.

I'm feeling pretty socially isolated and just wonder if there are any folks from the DIY gaming community still out there gaming and posting.  If so, I'm curious to here what platforms you are using to game and how it's going.  I'd also be interested if anyone has a good list of creative gamers still blogging (I never kept a blog roll). 

Anyway, I hope you are well and finding some joy in creating and gaming with others.

Update with Magic Item

My blogging computer died sometime in July.  I attempted to recover the data myself and failed.  My next step was to check local businesses with good Yelp reviews.  Found one.  And they proceeded to give me the run around for months.  I finally got my data back and the good news is that it looks like most of it is there.  The most important stuff anyway.  I'm now on what was my gaming rig trying to set up a smooth process like I had before, but little things make it feel weird (like the fact Windows 7 can't understand svgs).  It feels like swimming against the tide to get back going, but I value the conversations with you and I like making stuff, so I'm going to do my best.  I might do some mini-video game reviews as a start.  Anyway, here is a magic item I came up with right at the tail end of that last set of posts:

Aspasia's Shroud - Cover yourself with this threadbare length of linen, fall asleep, and your body will disappear until you wake.

(DM might want a table for who picked up your shroud when you were sleeping and where they took it :)

Update with 2 Colts

My old blogging computer has finally died.  It had a good run, was a free hand-me-down I got from a friend when I came home from Poland years ago.  A Pentium 4, I've run Ubuntu on it ever since.  But, alas, all my gaming files are on it.  I am working towards getting the data accessible and reorganized, but that computer was a Linux box and the one I'm currently typing on is Windows which makes it more complicated.  What that means is a few posts I was working on are going to take some time to get up.

Boring, I know, have some pictures of double-action Colts:

Milestones Update

Yeah, it isn't working.  I should have known myself better-- that a strict deadline would just stress me out and shut me down.  I just thought that it would be nice to celebrate the ~4 years of the OSR I've had symbolically.  I don't have a lot of ritual in my life and it seems I'm worse off because of it.  But as my friend said "Why does it have to be the 1000th post?" to which my answer was "I don't know.  It's a big round number."

But by tying the timeline to # of posts it made me avoid posting which I love to do.  Also posting is what fuels the ideas of what could go into my booklet, usually in unexpected ways.  So, cutting off posting cut off my main avenue of working out ideas.

Anyway, I'll still put out a celebratory booklet.  But I'm no longer holding myself to the 1000th post.  You'll have it when it's done.  And with that, I will resume posting and conversing with you all.

Milestones

Last Saturday was four years of blogging for me.  I just posted my 50th silhouette post.  I even managed to reach Pundit level.  But there is another milestone coming up.  This post is my 973rd.  That means, at a rate of a post about every other day, I'll be at 1000 in 2 months.

I know there are folks that have more posts than that or have been around for longer, but for me and my personality it feels like a big achievement.

I've had an idea for a while now that I would make some sort of publication on my 1000th post.  I figured I would let you know rather than just spring it out of nowhere (though I hate even announcing it because I can feel the fear welling up inside and the desire to procrastinate this off to some other unspecified time).

I love the blogs as an ongoing conversation and don't like the idea that to be a part of our hobby seriously you have to publish something.  That being said, there is a time for looking over all the conversations you've had and trying to build something from the whole.  A second level of making.  And with 1000 posts I think there should be plenty of meat here to make something larger than a sum of the separate posts that make it up.  So, that's what I'm aiming for.

The idea is a book to help DMs get a game going on a Friday night.  Tools basically.  And probably aimed more at the newer DM (experienced folks have probably already crafted similar tools out of necessity).  My current plan is to put it up on Lulu as a free download and a hardcover at cost.  Maybe someday I can revise this and get some awesome art and charge for it, but for now I just want to get a solid draft out the door.

There are still a few tools I don't have worked out yet.  I hope to address them in the coming months.  But whatever the results, I'm putting a book out on the 1000th post.  No excuses.  I suppose I might start trying to dodge the bullet by delaying posting, but I have to get this done by mid August because that is when my work ramps up again and I'll be out of time.

I feel odd to announce this when everyone is talking about Jack Vance's passing, but what better way to commemorate him, and Harryhausen, by making something fantastic?

Okay, wish me luck.

Anecdote

One of my employees excitedly shared with me that she had tried roleplaying for the first time.  

They all know I'm into D&D and blog, though I don't think any of them really know what D&D is except something you laugh at on an episode of Community.

She went on to say they played Fiasco.

I thought, hmm, interesting that these indie games are getting some mainstream reach.  I wonder if part of it is that they avoid any stigma attached to D&D and its "basement" players.

Then she said they all watched some of Wil Wheaton's YouTube video to learn how to create characters.  Then, after creating characters, watched more of the video to see what to do next . . .

And my heart sank.  I've got nothing against Fiasco and if you play it and love it, that's cool.  But if I care about anything I care about making D&D accessible to folks who would otherwise never try it.  And the thought that the stigma and hermetic nature of old school rpgs is so strong that a fresh-face-of-a-game can be more attractive to new players, even though you need to watch a video to understand how to play it, is just depressing to me. 

Can you imagine any other game in this context?  "We're playing bridge tonight so let's all watch this video on how to play."

Of course, I'm assuming stigma is at play here.  One other thing she mentioned is that the DM for the night was big into D&D back in the day.  So I wonder if another thing going on with indie games is "games for experienced gamers."  You've played rpgs for more than 20 years and you want to stretch your wings a bit, try something more daring with more improv required, or maybe something more focused on one aspect of what can be fun about rpgs in general-- you play an indie game.  And then you invite your non-gamer friends to play too.  And maybe they'll have fun.  But it seems to me like taking a friend who has never seen a movie before to see a Bergman film or Fellini or something.

Please Stand By

Work is full throttle.  Don't have time to think for myself or even search for cool pics.  Should slow down in another week or two.  In rare spare moments I'm still thinking of D&D.  I think I've almost figured out my white whale; the universal treasure item generator.  Hope you're all having a great 2013 so far.

Serendipity XXI

I spent many hours the last few days looking for good images to make into silhouettes, no luck.  But I did find these pics.  These are all public domain, use them or lose them.

Got a game running in a WWI setting, here's a schematic of an armored car,

a couple submarines,

and this photo of an even bigger armored car.

I saw this on OBI Scrabbook blog.  Its dual entrances seem full of possibilities.

I don't know what fusee arrows are.  Flares?

Various scaling ladders.

Britons in Coracles.

And a few images that could be of a medieval city.


p.s.  This has nothing to do with gaming, but I have to share.  I found out yesterday that two outside consultants have been hired to visit and evaluate my workplace.  My boss is freaked, but this is so absurd in the current context of where I work, that I wasn't stressed-- I laughed out loud and said something about Initech.  I forgot to ask if they were named Bob.  Oh well, don't worry about me, I'm a people person.

Merry Christmas!

Santicore came for me!  Here is what I asked for.  The gift I made hasn't been revealed yet.  I might post a few design comments when it has.  I've promised to run a New Year's Eve game for friends and have to figure that out.  I'm thinking trying out a time shifting dungeon would be appropriate.  I'm currently at my folks' just relaxing.  Hope you are all having great holidays.

Confession

I should number these confessions.  I know I have a few other posts with that title.  So, I scraped my money together and bought a new and glorious computer.  I bought Windows for the first time in my life.  I installed steam for the first time ever.  I am now beffuddled with a wonderful glut of games.

I love Ubuntu for my everyday work.  It is very stable and easy to use.  Gimp and Inkscape work without a hitch even on my older computer with it's crappy video card.  But games.  Dear games.  I have gone for decades now without them (mostly getting my fix on consoles).

Sure, people say you can run most games through Wine.  But not in my experience.  Couldn't get even big popular titles like Fallout 3 to work or popular titles that have been around forever with plenty of time for fixes to get worked out like Morrowind.

The first game I downloaded was Rome: Total War.  It was less than $3.

So, on one hand I feel a little dirty for selling out on Free Software so cheaply.  On the other hand I never got to finish exploring Morrowind and now I can (I installed the updated graphics mod last night and it looks wonderful for a game so old).

I want to keep posting here (and really need to get my campaign started back up to try out all my wilderness travel innovations) because I'm coming up on some big milestones, but expect me to be distracted and scatterbrained.  

And if you want to recommend some games in the comments feel free--I just got Legend of Grimrock which looks great and FTL which has been pretty fun.

No-Town

This town sucks.  Things were going great; been hiking everyday for a week and a half trying to get in shape, felt like I was on a roll with the blog (had 2 more cool posts in mind), the folks I played D&D with camping liked it so much that I'm running them again Sat.  In fact, I came back down so I could prepare tomorrow.  But I found out someone had robbed our apartment when I was gone.  They didn't take much, shouldn't complain.  But they took my PS3 which is how I watch Netflix (we don't have cable).

This means more if you know my last vehicle was stolen multiple times and the last time, when I'd given up on ever getting it back and bought a truck, they found it.  I had to pay a ~$300 towing fee to tell them "keep it."  Hell, buying the truck set me way back.  I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here except living in the armpit of America.

I probably shouldn't even post this, but I don't think I'm going to blog for a while, might as well give you a heads up of why.  Alright, I'm going to go drink 1d12 beers and listen to Electric Wizard.  Peace.

My Origin Story

Zak asked on G+ for folks to share their degrees/areas of interest.  In thinking about it, I doubt mine would tell you much about me.  Well, maybe as a person, what I was most curious to learn-- but not so much as a D&D blogger, why I'm so interested in simplifying and systematizing. So here's the real scoop.

I come from Okies.  On both sides.  Folks that learned to keep everything because if it isn't valuable now it might be later.  My father's parents had a wrecking yard.  I grew up playing on piles of radiators and broken batteries.  My aunt stored old clothes in broken down cars.  I got to see what ruined in the weather, what lasted-- the plastic bits and glass and brass.

In a world like that I guess you either give yourself up to chaos or your start trying to process it all.  You learn to categorize.  You learn to sift.  Someone sees a pile of trash, you see the radiators as scrap brass and the batteries as scrap lead.  Someone sees a garage full of junk, you learn to save the knick-kacks from occupied Japan as well as the family letters and photos: the ephemeral.

So when I see 1e's Psionics, I see a pile, yes, but there's some cool stuff in there-- I found a set of Russian text books in a junked car once, a lighter from the Berlin Olympics in an old shed-- and I want to pull that pile apart and organize it.

When I see all the moving parts a DM needs to be able to handle-- the potions, the rings, the spells-- I want to isolate them, one-by-one, and master each category.  I recognize that things can exist in multiple categories at once, and that sometimes all you get from digging around is something smelly on your hands and a tear in your Levis.  But you have to try.

Sometimes I see other folks talking about their games and it seems like they are sitting in lawn chairs propped up on big piles of stuff.  A roll of stiff garden hose under one foot, a shoe box of tattered romances under another.  They're smiling and having fun.  It stresses me out and puzzles me.  I want to say "Hold on, we can make this easier on everyone.  Get up from your chair and I'll sort through this for you."

And as you become familiar with the categories of things you also become a lover of the hard to find.  Someone says they have a way to model fatigue without tracking points, someone offers a way to make travelling through the abstract wilderness come alive, you say "Could you put that aside for me?  I'm driving right over with my checkbook."

So reading blogs becomes like cruising garage sales; you see the same baby clothes, the same old particle board furniture and you wonder why you're getting sun burned for this.  Then you'll see an old nail puller for a dollar or a Moon Knight comic peeking from a basket of coloring books and it gets you excited all over again and you want to tell someone and you want to hurry to the next pile to dig through.

Ze Bulette Spotted in the Wild

Ze Bulette drove down from Eugene for a visit.  He wasn't able to stay long but we were able to check out a cave, where we were told not to feed the Troglodytes hands:

  and re-commune with one of the largest living organisms on earth:

I talked his ear off about psionics, fortune telling, and starting sandboxes before he fled for his own sanity.

FLGS

I wrote a long time ago about the creepy/crappy only game store in my area.  In the years I've been blogging another has opened its doors.

I've been wanting to start another game, meet new people, get more practice at setting up a sand box from the very beginning.  I'm kind of an introvert, though, or as my mother puts it "a stick in the mud," so offering to DM a game open to anyone that wants to sit down was a little scary-making for me.  But I finally went to the shop yesterday and inquired.  Here's what I found:

The store owners would have to vet me by playing in a demo game I'd run.  No sweat, if it were my establishment I'd want to do the same.  Also, don't see why they wouldn't enjoy a game of mine.

Players have to pay $5 a night to play, or donate cans of food, or buy store product.  Aaaalright, I can understand where they're coming from but it puts a damper on the open game table aspect of it, especially for young folks.  It makes me almost want offer 20 bucks a night myself just so anyone interested in playing with me could.

I have to be playing a game they sell.  Do you carry Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry?  Haven't heard of those.  I looked at the rpg book section 1/2 Pathfinder, 1/2 4e.  Part of me wanted to say, "You realize most of these books are already destined for the bargain bin by the fact that 5e is coming out?"  But I just said "Thank you," and walked out.  : (

More Indexing

I've been slowly trying to revise and add to my blog index during boring stretches at work.  If you haven't looked in a while you should check out the printable stuff and random charts.

Makes me remember projects I would like to return to.  I think I have a one page disease chart more than half done somewhere on my computer at home.

Index II

I added a section to the monster index I'm calling "concepts."  I figured the names of monsters don't often tell you much, what you as a DM probably want is the spark of the idea.  So I tried to reduce each of my creatures to a sentence.  Is this useful for you?  My plan for now is to try the same thing for the magic items.

The distillation works better for some monsters than others.  It also looks a little busy.  If you have any suggestions on making it easier to read or more useful I'd appreciate them.

Also I found two other creatures I completely missed.

Index Page Added

I'm kinda burnt but want to keep posting momentum, so I thought I'd finally do something long overdue, an index of my blog content.  I've had a lot of ideas but they're scattered through years of blogging, at the end of unrelated posts, and often have odd names that make they hard to find and identify.  So, an index.  Some of the ideas are better than others, some I've gotten more experience through play, but revision is for later in a compilation pdf.  This is just a way to find all the original ideas in their flawed forms.

I plan to add at least two other sections, one for DM aids and one for Design ruminations.

I don't like the way adding one static page makes a whole tab bar across the blog, but I figure a link in the sidebar would be easily missed.  And maybe I could add other static pages.  Ideas?

I turned off comments to try and keep the index more indexy.  I'm hoping if people find something new they want to talk about they'll comment on the original post.  I have old comments requiring moderation so I'll see all of them.

Answers

Questions we have given Thee, in the number Twenty-three.

Can I answer these and still be a rebel?  Hah.  Here you go:

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?
I like all my fairy-tale logic magic items and spells.  I think people would benefit from more of these kinds of things in game rather than paragraph long descriptions trying to lay out every eventuality.  And, hell you can't beat when a player cuts his own eye out with an obsidian blade to give his blind friend back one of her eyes.   But you said pick one, so how about the Angel of Geometry.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

Not this Friday, but the Friday before.  (I could have played this Friday but cancelled because I was exhausted from work.)  I could probably be playing three times a week if I was independently wealthy which is crazy when I think about how hard it seemed to find kindred souls just 10 or 15 years ago.

3. When was the last time you played?

This Friday, eeeearly my time. (But wait, didn't you say you were exhausted.  Hey, I couldn't pass up a chance at the Caves of Myrddin, and it paid off I got the Spaniard's Orb of Inversion!)

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

This one seems kind of odd to me.  Why is it we haven't run this adventure?  I guess this assumes DM's having gamer ADD or something.  If I think of a cool adventure it usually happens in the next week. I'm trying to run the best game I can.  (I suppose you could think of an adventure that would be too high level for the current party, but I don't have any high level play experience so I'm not yet.  I suppose you could think of an adventure that you don't think fits your world's genre/tone, but I pretty much mash all my interests into my one psuedo-medieval/ Sinbadian smoothie.  I suppose you could just be bubbling with ideas for adventures, but why not buckle down and develop the one that's coming up in a week.  Maybe I'm just of a different temperament.)  

But also, doesn't this question push more towards adventures as stories DMs prepare?  My PCs end up having adventures shopping in Nidus.  Ok, enough, moving on . . .

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

I don't like waiting for them to do things, (unless it is part of the fun, like heist planning- but usually it's bickering about which way to go in a corridor or whether they should leave the dungeon or explore just one more door)  So I say "Ok, what are you doing?" and I roll for wandering monsters.  In combat I'm even less patient; if it's your init I start counting to 5 before I move to the next person.  I really want the combats tense and snappy.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Sometimes my players have cooked things-- potato skins, chili.  We had some nice games where everyone ate dinner together, chit-chatting before we played.  But usually just beer.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting? 

Yes.  I try to dramatize the abstract combat dice rolls and riff on previous events.  That takes attention and creativity.  It' true that I get adrenalined-up and have a hard time sleeping afterward, but I'm still wiped out.  It would probably be better if we didn't start at 7:00 pm at the end of a day, at the end of a long week, of work.  But I imagine even if we played during the day I'd just take my extra energy to try to up my game.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Climbing up a Cthulhuoid horrors's cloaca and stabbing its brain from the inside, haha.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

This is a very good question.  I find that sometimes I undermine the mood of a game by taking a joke opportunity when things were getting creepy.  Tone is tough.  But usually, goofiness and joking is meta, and my game tries to maintain a dry brutal, serious, creepiness.  You can laugh at what the goblins were doing but you're still dead.

10. What do you do with goblins?

I came to despise the idea of humanoids.  But I guess I reconciled with goblins by making them my own (which is sort of the whole point of OD&D style DMing, right?)   I reinserted kobolds and goblins as something from the mythic underworld-- hard to predict, odd, and offputting.  Why are they here?  Where do they come from?  Why are they slathering that zombie abbot's pale naked body with honey?  Of course I don't call them "goblins" and my "kobolds" are just weaker versions of the same things.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

Not sure, but probably the South Pointing Chariot, except it points to a tower in the middle of some lava-tubed, broken lands (hard to pull a chariot there).

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

Have a lot of these, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the funniest, but what comes to mind was when the PCs were running a heist on a shrine and the Cleric Toral tried to rile up the crowd of pilgrims to cause a distraction.  He succeeded so incredibly (I think he rolled the big d30, and my reaction roll was max, and he had high Char) that the crowd wasn't just distracted but became incensed and started ripping the guards limb from limb. 

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

The GURPs Goblins book at the recommendation of Richard Guy and Chris Hogan.  I'm on the lookout for any cool game innovation and it sounds like this book has several.  But I have to confess, I have a hard time sitting still and reading any more.  I think all this internet and blog reading has atrophied my attention span and I have a hard time reading more than a page before my head's spinning with other ideas and I want to get up and walk around, go do something.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

Someone that makes illustrations that tell a story.  I am so sick of pictures of people looking "badass."  Remember "no honor among thieves," from the DMG?  Or the one with the guy trapped in water and cell bars with a skeleton coming. Or the one (from a White Dwarf ad?) that showed all the dead skeletons reaching for the huge diamond?  Or, hell even the alignment illustration from Moldvay.  Yeah, more pictures like that.  Here, illustrators, I'll even give you one: couple down and out guys trapped behind iron bars, using a golden sceptre as a lever, golden crown as a fulcrum, to try to lift the bars.  Sceptre is just starting to bend.

I should say, the best art wouldn't have to have a little scene in it.  Your picture (Zak) of the obese succubus has a lot of story just in her expression for me.  She looks bored or wistful and, under the conditions she is experiencing it, that is interesting.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

I think so.  As much as any movie does (if not more).  You'd have to ask my players, but there was a time where a naked, female ghoul picked the party off one by one in the darkness.  And the time a pc who's player has arachnophobia (I didn't know) was climbing up onto a ledge and a giant spider bit his face, killing him.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

I haven't.  Part of it is NIH syndrome, a kind of cocky, thinking I can do better.  But part of it is the opposite; a complete lack of confidence "how can I remember all these facts and get this right?"  I do love looking at adventures because other than after play reports it's really the only chance you have to learn how people do this DM thing.  This usefulness is undermined by people who write modules throwing everything they do at the table out and creating something completely different, like railroads and tournament modules, because they think that's what a module is.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

Big oval table seating 10, felt covered.  Side table for my junk.  Room for me to walk around the whole table.  Well-lit.  Walking distance from where I'm staying.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

I haven't had much gamer ADD, been pretty happy with D&D and trying to make it work but I was really impressed by the way DC Heroes fit Ma Kent and Superman on the same chart.  I would like to look at that again.  And I spent a few years developing a system of magic that used sentence like structure (SVO) to cast on the spot spells, only to find Ars Magica beat me to it.  Haven't played it but was impressed.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

The Bible and Walt Disney.  (that last one completely surprised me right now, but the genre-summing-up that the original Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion do, seems a lot like what I'm attempting in my D&D.  I mean, "what does the perfect haunted house need in it?", seems very similar to "what does the perfect classic dungeon need in it?").

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

I guess the kind of person you'd want at a party; friendly, interesting, funny.  I almost said I want people that won't sit there quietly, but will be active, but I changed my mind, I want quiet players too, as long as they enjoy the game, the company, and my DMing.  It's just with quiet players it's hard to determine that.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

Hah, this terrifying raccoon. 

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

A book on DMing.  Everything I've ever read on the subject was so abstract or light as to be useless.  A lot of good questions get in depth discussion on blogs, if only they were compiled, arranged, and added to.  And I don't mean DMing tips, as if we were homemakers wanting to know how to better clean our whites (that we already know how to get partially white), I mean stuff like how do you run a campaign, when, in the real world you will have different players every week? How the hell do you start a campaign as a newbie DM?  How do you organize your junk so it doesn't slow play enough to start affecting how fun the game is?  What do you do when players show up an hour late to a session?  These probably go the opposite way and are too specific, but I guess what I want is someone to lay out DMing theory-- show how you can devise practices from it, and vice versa, show some DMing lore that has worked for a lot of DMs and try to figure out the underlying reasons.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Yeah, my blog is pretty important to my sanity and enjoyment these days.  And not just because of gaming (I've learned a lot about audience, writing, and the blog post as genre).  So, if you're in my life I'm going to be talking about it at some point.  Unfortunately, it is so alien that these folks just don't understand.  My parents and my boss don't even grok video games, so they can't even use that as a metaphor to understand our game.  In the end, I think they know I like to try and minimalize and innovate in all things and they figure I'm doing something similar in the realm of a child's game.  But there is always that sense of being wary-- wasn't this that Satanic game with demons and magic?-- which I suppose is partially warranted with some of the godawful creepy things I have goblins doing to try and mess with my players.

Email Hacked

Apparently someone took over my Yahoo account last night and changed the primary email address by adding an extra "r" then spammed the contact list.  I got back in, changed the password.  But if you ever emailed that account you probably got a spam message. Sorry.

I understand people breaking into accounts and spamming to get $$, I don't get why they would then delete all my email and contacts in that account.  Unless it's a side effect of the hacking method, just seems spiteful.

Anyway, here are a few silhouettes to try and be positive and keep moving forward:
A second humanoid:

Gnoll

His forebear:

And where they live:

My Brother's First GMing Gig

My brother's first GMing gig was also Top Secret, but the newer version that had the Casino Royale gambling rules.  I believe he was running an adventure that came with the boxed set.  My friend and I were the only players.

We were tipped off that someone was going to blow up a national landmark in San Francisco.  We could never figure out what the target could be.  Chock this up to player brain-fart, but it probably didn't help that we were more interested in gambling at the casino (not sure where, I thought we were in California) than hoofing around investigating.

So, yeah, we played roulette while terrorists blew up the Golden Gate Bridge.  End of adventure.