Awesomeness

Dorian has posted something that screams awesomeness.

Go look.

This is nearly as fun as LOLTrek, and quite possibly more geeky...

Lair of the Deep Crows

Okay, so remember that missile silo that was on sale at eBay the other week? Penny Arcade put a strip up about it yesterday. I saw it yesterday and was going to blog about it, but they didn't have a permalink up to the strip when I saw it. Paul forwarded me a link this morning, though, so I guess they put up the permalink last night. Thanks Paul!

Anyway - I love this strip. Penny Arcade is a hit-or-miss strip for me. Sometimes they're really funny, sometimes they're kinda funny, sometimes they're just mean, and sometimes I just scratch my head and wonder what planet they might be from. This is one of the funny ones. There's just something about unleashing unspeakable evil from beneath the earth that warms my heart. Plus - "Deep Crow" is an awesome name for a D&D monster. I'm surprised we don't already have one in one of the monster manuals.

I'm definitely thinking about turning that map into an adventure location of some kind. Now I want to put some Deep Crows and maybe some Magmamen into it (Magmamen are ALWAYS cooler than "Stalagmen" - seriously). Maybe it could be a location for that pulp time travel game I was speaking of earlier.

I. Hate. Slugboy.

This past weekend, loveable sometimes-poster originalslugboy sent me a link. Now, to be "fair" he did make the subject of the e-mail "Wasted afternoon", and made a point of mentioning in the e-mail that he sunk a good deal of a day into clicking around the TV Tropes wiki.

Despite the so-called "warnings" (which I think were only there so that he could claim plausible deniability later), I succeeded in sinking multiple hours into wandering through that wiki, examining links. This wiki is in some ways more addictive than Wikipedia - which taunts me constantly with its boundless knowledge. I spent hours wandering through the links on Time Travel and related tropes (especially Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act), through entries on Doctor Who and Adventure Towns. Finally I just had to shut down the whole computer, lest my excursions into Lovecraft Country and the Big Applesauce destroy what's left of my mind.

So, in conclusion: Hate. Slugboy.

On the other hand, I have a great idea for a Time Travel RPG setting that involves a city designed specifically to be an Anachronism Stew full of dinosaurs, Roman Centurions and talking apes, and where PCs travel to other times and places as Adventure Towns trying to stop the depradations of evil fey time travellers and Lovecraftian horrors who seek to bring about The End of the World As We Know It. So it's not all bad.

Anyone have a few bucks they could loan me?

How could anyone pass up an offer like THIS?

I mean, look at that map! Two underground rooms that could make for great gaming rooms. Three silos that could hold, I don't know, corn or something. Tunnels all over the place - it's like a wonderland of Cold War era nightmares all wrapped up for one low price. I mean really, how can they let this get away from them for only $1.5 million?

Seriously though - who would buy something like this? The seller even says that if you want to make the place livable you'd have to invest a few million into it. Could you make that back turning it into a "museum"? I doubt it - people don't spend that much on museums. I guess you could build a "Cold War Theme Park" on top of it and turn it into part of an amusement park, but that would cost a lot more. And it's out in the middle of nowhere - good for a missile base, bad for a theme park.

Anyone have any good adventure ideas for this place? I could see using the map for a Gamma World scenario - live missiles in the silos giving off radiation, mutated creatures roaming the tunnels, a disoriented AI in the Control Room that thinks its God - but what else? Maybe a sci-fi zombie fest? A modern covert-ops infiltration setup? Any other ideas?