A retelling of a short story written by myself for an old Horror fanzine. That story focuses on a particularly eventful evening in the life of freelance photographer Pamela Grey in the world of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. In this story game you take the place of Pamela. 

The world you live in is much like today's, only a little worse.  The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and the gap between is so much wider. So much is controlled by the mega-corporations and rich interests that large swatches of the ever expanding urban sprawl are marked as "Outlaw Territory, Enter At Own Risk" - where even the police don't go, either for fear or lack of resources.  The middle class has mostly disappeared except for the lowest echelon of corporate execs, and legislative changes have allowed many that would have previously been on the public dole to instead sell their vote to corporate interests in exchange for support. Crime is up, as are disappearances, theft, and violence. Even as bad as the world has become, there are persistent rumors that even worse things lurk in the shadows.  Many neighborhoods have abandoned houses that everyone knows better than to enter, and even in the outlaw where the police fear to tread there are rumors of entire blocks that no one but the mad or the most desperate are willing to risk going into after dark.

You and Susan, your significant other, are doing ok.  Her job with Aprico has afforded the two of you a small place in a small gated community owned by the company. A prized place in the vanishing middle class. Your home is close enough to the gates that you can still easily indulge in your favorite hobby, walking through Chicago with your trusty camera in hand, particularly at night.  The sale of these photos as art pieces to the ultrawealthy, facilitated by Susan's contacts, has helped with sporadic lump sums of money.  Susan pays the bills, but your money pays for luxuries and splurges.

In the twilight one often finds isolated moments of beauty and mystery that would never been seen in the daylight, and you work to capture these moments in the perfect clarity of your lens. You know the risks of being out alone at night outside the gates, but even Susan has had to admit that the last couple of pictures you sold would not have been possible if you hadn't been out there.  To help comfort her (and yourself to be completely honest), you recently bought a large knife to carry with you, just in case.

So, come explore the night and see what waits for you in the dark.

The job listing was simple "Earn 100K » in your sleep!" Having not been able to find a steady job for over a local year and half, you jumped at the chance.

Now, eight months later by the clock on the pod, you have suddenly been awoken from hypersleep to fulfill your role as the emergency backup crew of PrimObs 80085. There is no sign of the regular crew, and even worse, no sign of the rest of the backup crew, so it is up to you to determine what happened and hopefully get a message back to sector command for rescue.

Entry for EndMaster's Prompt Contest 4: Prompt #27) A story involving a space station.

An entry for MHD's Fairytale contest, this is a retelling of the old Appalachian Fairy Tale "The Little Princess of the Forest".

Come listen to the telling of one of the wildest fairy tales I've ever heard.    This story was originally told by Marshall Ward for a fairy tale collection, and has stuck with me ever since I first heard it.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.  Grab a seat and listen up, as it starts like this...

You have made your way through the city, state, regional, national, planetary, sector, parsec, arm, 64th-, 32nd-, 16th-, octo-, quarter- and semi-finals to arrive with a guaranteed spot in the Finals of the 169th cycle IntraGalactic Culinary Challenge brought to you by Mag King and Gal-actic Robotics held on RecStation 420 in the Lagoon Nebula. When those magnetronics need to sing, 🎶🎶 Call on Mag King 🎶🎶! Do you need a handy robot pal? Everybody wants a Gal!

You face a varied array of challengers and an even more diverse panel of judges to win over in the two round Final. Before each round, you will have time to plan your dish and explore the features of the station. Who knows, you might even find something to help in the contest! Judges and contestants are randomly selected with every read-through, and finding things is done by a random function of your stats, so every new read is a fresh game.

This was originally going to be an entry for EndMaster's Promt Contest 4, but I ran out of time and quickly wrote The Backup

This is a storygame conversion of the Minion Hunter Board Game (and Minion Nation expansion) by GDW, based on the Dark Conspiracy TTRPG by GDW and Dynasty Presentations, with some modernization updates by myself, and is set in the same world as my "A Night in Chicago" storygame.

This is a simulation of a complex boardgame and while I have done my best to add some narrative to the events, it does not have a standard ending that you are working towards.  Every movement is a "round" in the game, and while you are developing your own stats and equipment, the forces of the Dark influences are advancing their plots.  The story ends when one of the main Dark Minion races (ETs, Fae, Morlocks, or Nukids) gains 20 plot points, or you defeat enough plots to run out the plot deck.

Full rules are detailed within.  Give it a try and see if you can save Dark America from the corrupting influence of the Dark Minions.

It was just supposed to be a quick run down to the bodega. Ten minutes, tops. Then you saw something in the alley, and now everything has been turned upside down.

This is incomplete. Sorry, I just ran out time.

Entry for Sherbet's Summer's End Synergy Contest

This, moreso that any earlier entry is a tale of tragedy and surprise. A critical vote awaits you at the end.

With the addition of Milton to the ranks, morale is high and everyone is doing their best to be productive. Even the cosmos seems to favor us as more random supplies fall in cargo pods from the the grey and rainy skies. This time it was a nice leather sash and pants. Milton is fixated for some reason on the battle banner that Mitsuya recently finished sewing, and has taken to carrying it with him. He also likes to have deep conversations with the rest of the group, regardless of age.

Fresh is focused on research and RK doubles down on his cooking efforts to prepare for everyone to go on the big caravan. We are lucky that the supply site and the run down research post are practically on top of each other, so we should be able to knock both quests out in one swing. A small group of traders from the Hiberon group showed up giving us a market to sell off a bunch of crappy clothes and a single unit of medicine to buy from packaged survival meals. Meanwhile, Anthraxus is off hunting down lemurs and chinchillas to aid RK's prep efforts.

As everyone jokes and bonds while prepping for the quest caravan, Milton still takes time to work on training the sivatherium as they will be useful pack beasts to make the caravan as valuable as possible.

The Rimworld will never let you just focus on simple things however. Suddenly the ground trembles and RK has a brief flash of a vision. To the north of the base a deep pit splits open. Hideous flesh monsters with a single finger-like limb ending in a nearly meter long probiscus-like spike. A trio of these entities, called fingerspikes, leapt out of the pit and began rushing the base. Anthraxus, RK, Fresh and Mitsuya rush to the defense. Regardless of how the combat turns out, just observing them has given us some new insights into the dark, and we now can research how to summon these things should we want to in the future.

Once they came within range of our guns and bows, the fingerspikes lasted only a moment or two. Apparently word of our phenomenal researchers have spread among the nearby settlements as right after we killed the fingerspikes, the chief of our friends the Barga Tribe reached out with a message requestion to borrow one of our researchers for a few days to help them with a project. The rewards are pretty nebulous beyond improving relations, but there is more than enough time on this quest to make a decision about it after everyone comes back from the caravan.

Finally, RK has enough food to outfit the caravan for almost 5 days. Because of his skill limitations and age, Bezro is going to stay behind. Mitsuya keeps starting other tasks instead of helping loading the beasts. Out of frustration and to get the caravan moving, the decision is made to drop Mitsuya from the caravan as well. Even with a designated caravan gathering spot, the group leads in the least organized exit I have ever seen a caravan form. They finally leave the camp and set off on the two day trip around the edge of the Funforistia Jungle and White Dolphin Desolation to head south for the road and quest targets.

The trip is mostly uneventful, with a bump into a Barga trade caravan (ignored because we had nothing to trade) and an ambush by a pair of large wild Somali cats. The cats were easily dealt with without any wounds, but unfortunately the small ruins they had been using for cover held nothing of value but a few units of steel. The supply spot is an interesting cluster of ruins and we immediately set to claiming things and setting up camp to break down all of the ruins we can.

Meanwhile, back at the base, more cargo pods with weapons drop to the ground. The pop open to reveal steel throwing knives and a steel sledge hammer. Apparently good researchers are rare all around as we also receive word of another desolate genetics research post, our third. Perhaps, once we have seen how much loot we can get from the one, we will consider going after this one as well. It is nearly three days to the north, however.

After less than a day the caravan group has broken down everything worth anything at the supply spot. They load up all of the steel, hyperweave fabric, medicine and granit blocks. Just so we can use them later, they are also still hauling the bodies of the somali cats and some slag chunks. It's time to finally see what one of these abandoned research posts is like. As the caravan crests the nearest hill, they finally get a good look at the whole thing. The building is massive, far larger than our own base.

It's surprisingly still well built. We pick one of the doors on the east wall and go instead. There are strange streaks of rust an blood on the floor panels and strangly uniform cracks in the metal. The quite lead to a likely misplaced sense of confidence. Even with a strange genetic cross of a muffalo and rat jumping out at us from behind a peice of equipment, the team's response was quick and lethal for the freak. The ruins of this research post held lots of broken terminals and old equipment. None of it was directly useful, although it would no doubt yield a huge supply of steel and components. By the fifth room of nothing but destroy machines and a less-than-intimidating, everyone was idly guessing on if they would even be able to haul away all the worthwhile loot in the place.

The four friends were crowded close together as they opened the door to the next room. With a strangly snuffling roar, a genetic blend of a grizzly bear and a star-nosed mole erupted through the door. With a single swipe it downed Milton. Fresh and Anthraxus fell back a few steps while RK weilded his hatchet to keep the bearmole busy. Fresh landed one hit on it before RK was dropped. Anthraxus dropped back further, still firing wildly with the shotgun. Fresh got a good pistolwhip in on it before she was dropped. Before he can even squeeze off another shot, however, Anthraxus drops under the bearmole's charging attack. Even before I could take a screenshot, we find ourselves back at the base, the bearer of tragic terrible news.

Though they do not know why, Bezro and Mitsuya's hearts fall as the days pass without the caravan ever returning.

Well, certainly not where I was planning for this update to go. Really the only vote that matters now is whether it is worth continuing.

Vote - Should this story continue?

• Option 1: End the story here, thanks for sharing it, we don't need to see this anymore.
• Option 2: End the story here, but start up another one starring everyone who votes here as the initial group.
• Option 3: Press on with Bezro and Mitsuya to see if they can save Cystia from disappearing among the ruins of this world like so many before us.

Results:

1. Vote One: Option 3 - Risk it all. Send everybody to check it out and deal with any threat. (this will occur after we resolve the Supply site quest)
2. Vote Two: Option A - Psychophagy ritual. This allows us to psychically deaden one person to psychically sharpen another for a period of time.
3. Vote Three: Option II - Beer Brewing/Carpets. Beer brewing is already half researched, so including Carpets as an immediate low-level followup. Beer gives us a new recreation option and helps address the chemical fascination for Bezro and Anth.

While mood is not dangerously low, everyone is feeling a little stressed lately. Fortunately we have arrived at the one time a year we can hold one of the most notable religious festivals - The Cystia Fiesta. This grand party fills the storeroom with swirling lights, pounding music and cool smoke and vapors. As all the official members of the colony partied in a most hardy fashion, the sound of the party pumping through the walls inspired Mitsuya to educate Milton about the glory of the Cystian faith. He did not convert, but every conversation about it helps.

During the Fiesta everyone is hanging around and having a good human time, like humans do. This is exemplified by the totally normal conversations that Fresh and Anthraxus, both known humans with right thinking, have during the party. We don't know if he is lying but during the party Bezro also confides that it is his birthday! Now slightly older, Bezro can now try to do all kinds of useful things around the base. Perhaps not all that surprisingly given his animal calling ability, Bezro proves to have a remarkable natural talent for dealing with animals.

As part of growing up, Bezro not only developed his own quirk, that being kleptomania, but we also had to pick a new additional trait for him. Between being thin skinned and having an interest in drugs, and given that we will be moving in to drug production soonish, it only makes sense to go with the chemical interest. As the Fiesta starts to draw to a close we intercept more radio transmissions talking about anotther seemingly abandoned genetics research lab. This is shockingly like the abandoned lab quest that we already opted out of, but we have some time to think about it (and to make more food).

As the Fiesta officially comes to a close, everyone's moods are quite high and everyone is feeling good. Everyone returns to work. RK goes back to working on recruiting Mitsuya and converting Milton. Fresh jumps back on researching. Anthraxus works on mining steel and hauling wood and doing some construction work, including our first masterwork creation, a pew to sit in while listening to readings. Bezro draws on the floors alot, but also helps move some big stone chunks around.

As Fresh stands in the pouring rain to study the monolith and everyone else is puttering about there is a sudden surprise! Despite her recent conversion to Cystia and Milton's near conversion, Mitsuya leads a two man jailbreak, leveraging the obvious gap in our security - the still uncompleted vent to allow the the prison room to be cooled. Anthraxus immediately responds by charging in and opening fire with his shotgun. The first hit distracts Mitsuya from fleeing, and he blows her left off with the next shot. Milton is no fool and immediately heads for the hills as Fresh sets off in pursuit.

Having lost her other leg and an ear, and with fresh blood pouring down from just above her right peg leg, Mitsuya nearly bleeds out before Anthraxus is able to get her stabilized. With Fresh just far enough back that she is only able to take potshots with her hand cannon. It is only with a final lucky headshot that she is able to stagger Milton enough to prevent his escape. With some care she stabilizes him in the field and carries him back to the base.

While Anthraxus and Fresh worked on patching up the rebellious prisoners, RK had headed over to the steel mine as a botched construction attempt on the last cooler for the freezer had caused a sizable amount of steel to be wasted. While he was hard at work digging out ore, a lemur went mad with bloodlust and attacked RK. With his hatchet, RK was able to kill the lemur with only superficial wounds. Even so it was a harrowing situation as you never know when an infection may take hold in a wound.

While Bezro seems pretty happy with how the colony is going there is one element that really bothers the little boy. The fact that his bed is in the same room as a literal slavering monster. We will need to focus on making more bedrooms for folks, especially if Milton and Mitsuya give in and join us. As we are considering the best way to go about that, RK finally successfully converts Milton to the Cystian faith. It is only a matter of time until we have the entire Gazette staff together once again.

Flush with his success of yet another conversion, RK declares that now is the time. He gathers everyone together at the ritual circle near the monolith and begins the ritual that has been put together by himself and Fresh in her research. Strange dark energies began to swirl around the ritual circle and the candles flicker and dance in the rain and sudden wind. RK continues to chant softly, focusing on the most depressing and worrisome aspects of life and existance.

As the ritual completes a pulse of dark psychic energy washes out and away. As RK loses consciousness, he can feel somewhere not all that far away, a soft answering grunt. Before RK regains consciousness, a group of a single animated boar corpse shuffles into the area. This is the fourth anomaly entity we have found of the seven basic types. Fortunately, unless it wanders in close enough to see someone before it returns to death.

As the zombie boar shuffles around the periphary of the map, Bezro begins to exercise his newly wrought ability to mine trying to finish digging out the prison room. While that is going in RK comes in to continue his ongoing conversion attempts with Milton. Surprisingly Milton doesn't seem to understand what birthdays are, but RK sets him straight.

Meanwhile, the ritual has only peaked Fresh's interest in investigating the monolith. The fervent study has lead to a suprising breakthrough in understanding. We now know that the monolith is not only a mostly closed doorway but also a conduit of psychic energy, linking our monolith with some unknown, distance place. Because of this breakthrough, we should be able to research anomalous impacts of the monolith quicker going forward. Only a few hours after this discovery, we were pleasantly surprised with a small trio of traders from the Barga collective that showed up.

RK negotiated with them, trading gold and a couple of weapons for a small pile of pemmican. Mitsuya, now fitted with two wooden peg legs, recovers enough to begin to move about. Showing how ready they both are to join the community, Milton and Mitsuya show off their own comedic stylings.

Anthraxus remains focused on work in the wild around the base. Part of this includes cutting down the ominous Harbringer trees that has sprouted earlier. These fleshy plant masses were now taller than Anthraxus himself, their pink and red fronds in constant movement, even when there is no wind blowing. He cut them both down, leaving behind log-like twisted meat. It smells and looks vile, so for now we are leaving it in the field for the wild animals to devour. As he heads back to the steel mine, he hears a vicious growling from the undergrowth. A cougar has decided to hunt him!

Anthraxus is no fool, and setup a small hunting spot near a tall dogwood tree to try to take out the cougar before it could get a fang or claw on him. This did not work out. While Anthraxus was able to get a couple of decent shots on it, the cougar closed with shocking speed and gave Anthraxus some pretty gnarly wounds before, of all people, Bezro saved the day. From all the way back at the base, Bezro focused his power and let out a tremendous feline roar. The power of his beast call caused the couger to forget it's prey and begin wandering around, looking for someone hostile to it's temporary master. Anthraxus used this as a window to blow the cougar's whole fucking head off. His wounds were widespread and significant, and within a few hours the slash on his left arm was showing signs of infection. As if as a reward for the clever tactics a cargo pod containing a simple wooden shovel landed significantly to the south. There is no way to know why these individual tools keep dropping, but they are at least worth a little bit to other traders.

In addition to free gear, the free gifts were not done. As Anthraxus worked to treat his wounds, a pair of Sivatherium, gigantic prehistoric giraffids, self tamed and came to join us. Perhaps the world is apologizing for the death of Larimar. Fortunately Bezro has enough skill with animals to try to train them, but they don't like any of the food we have available. As we build a pen to contain them, they are left to wander freely. They spend a lot of time wandering around inside the base. RK finally has an opportunity to use one of his unique Mod abilities. Giving Anthraxus an eloquent speech that counters many of the things he whispered during the earlier ritual. This speech is so powerful that it boosts Anthraxus' ability to acquire immunity to illnesses.

After a little less than a day we received our next visitors, a group of Barga collective slavers. They hang out a little with the other Barga traders we are still hosting. While we given them a little time to get closer to the base and settle in, we have cause for celebration! Mitsuya, the peg leg prisoner, finally agrees to join us. Her intellectual skill gives us another great researcher, as well as a skilled tailor to start making some replacements for our various tattered garmets.

Just like Bezro when he joined, the start of Mitsuya's life among her fellow Cystians develops a new trait. Unlike the wholly useless and socially dangerous kleptomania Bezro developed, Mitsuya's disposition as a careful shooter slows down how quickly she will fire ranged weapons, but significantly increases her accuracy. In the prisoner room, RK and Milton continue to talk, adopting conversations I would not be surprised to see in the current Gazette discord.

Still working towards the goal of being able to send a couple people out to check out the supply stash, RK finally goes out and talks with Bear, the leader of the slave caravan. While it would be great to be able to rescue either of the slaves, we simply don't have enough money for that. As it is, we make the hard choice to swap some of our components for a substantial amount of pemmican, as most of what we traded for earlier has already been eaten. This should have been a clue to me that something was wrong, but I just didn't see it. With trading completed, we were ready to settle in and get some major improvements made. This plan was stymied by Bezro and Anthraxus both coming down with signs of Plague.

While Bezro is young enough that the Plague just doesn't hold much threat for him due to his youthful immune system, Anthraxus is not quite so lucky. This is likely made worse by the raging and septic infection that has continued to worsen in his arm. It takes all of RK's healing prayer, lots of bed rest, and Fresh's (our best doctor) tender administrations to allow him to finally get ahead of the infection and develop immunity literally only a few hours before it would have killed outright. Even though he is still working to overcome the symptoms of the Plague, his brush with near death causes him to also develop a new trait. Just like Bezro, Anthraxus has become fascinated with chemicals and drugs. With two people developing this focus we really need to get a drug lab going and plant some smokeleaf and psychite.

Mitsuya is doing what she can to help, having already cranked out a change of clothes for Bezro and making some backpacks to allow everyone to carry more stuff. But if we are going to get all the improvements made that we need, and keep the camp going when people leave for the supply stash, we are going to need Milton on our side as well. This is RK's top priority. Many may doubt the topics he uses to try to bring people into the fold, but it is hard to argue his effectiveness.

We have gotten enough people moving around now that it is difficult to keep an eye on everyone, particularly the playful scamp Bezro. That little guy runs all over. Obviously the rest of the group having been telling him about notable events in the colony's past as at some point he hauled Larimar's body and put it in a nearby empty sarcophagus that we claimed when we first landed. On the lid of the sarcophagus, Bezro carved a representation of Mitsuya's ill-fated raid and Larimar's endin gof it. It's obvious that this reflects Mitsuya's viewpoint on the whole situation. Maybe she slipped that in between discussions of board games and floor drawings.

Well, this has been quite the long update, so I will wrap it up with one final bit of good news before we move on to the votes. After far longer than I would have thought or hoped, RK was finally able to convince Milton that he was home, and our editor finally joins the group.

We are close to finishing our research into skip abduction rituals, and we will also finish our research into the Drug Lab pretty soon. We finished building our freezer (will include a picture in the next update) so can now build up a surplus to actually move on the prior vote to explore the supply drop.

Vote One: Run Down Lab quest

• Option 1: Ignore it. The situation has not changed enough since we declined the abandoned lab to pickup pretty much the exact same quest.
• Option 2: Send a small group of one or two colonists to check it out and flee if there are genetic freaks there.
• Option 3: Risk it all. Send everybody to check it out and deal with any threat. (this will occur after we resolve the Supply site quest)

Vote Two: Dark Research

• Option A: Psychophagy ritual. This allows us to psychically deaden one person to psychically sharpen another for a period of time.
• Option B: Bioferrite Extraction. This base research item is a roadblock to most other dark research options.

Vote Three: Mundane Research

• Option I: Machining. Opens up better weapon construction options and is a gateway to most other advanced research topics, such as turrents, rocket launchers and bioferrite refining (which is required for vehicles).
• Option II: Beer Brewing/Carpets. Beer brewing is already half researched, so including Carpets as an immediate low-level followup. Beer gives us a new recreation option and helps address the chemical fascination for Bezro and Anth.
• Option III: Stew/Soup/More cooking. This increases the options we have for recipes to make which will make more efficient use of our available foodstuffs.

Thank you for reading and participating in the votes. These votes will be closed on 7/31 in the early evening.