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

With two votes for Void Provocation and Two votes for researching writing, that is where our research goals are set. Everyone is keeping busy with starting construction work on the freezer and a second wind generator. Fresh is also harvesting rice and making more food. Only experience can help overcome the incompetance issue.

Almost immediately we get our first anomalous entity as a Harbinger Tree is spotted sprouting in the distance. These strange fleshy trees will consume any corpses left near their base, growing thick and tall with unknown ichors and writhing muscle masses. Eventually it can be harvested for it's twisted meat instead of the wood of normal trees. This meat might be suitable for Larimar, but will be disgusting for anyone else.

Despite this, the mood of everyone is still high and RK does his best to keep it there with numerous jokes and light hearted conversations. So far he hasn't tried telling jokes to the monolith, but that might still be on the table at some point. He has had similar conversations with Fresh, but I haven't caught one recently.

Anthraxus has his first dedicated research session on the monolith. This is pretty productive and he half-way finishes the research into Void Provocation in one session. Far to the north, Larimar had wandered away and grown hungry. He chased down and killed a boomrat, but in the ensuing fire he took a fair amount of damage. Fresh and RK run up there to save the ghoul and try to salvage the cheetah he also killed while burning. Fresh rescues Larimar, although between the fire and fighting the cheetah, the ghoul lost it's right leg. Fortunately with ghoul healing, only a small amount of treatment was needed to ensure the ghoul wouldn't die, and fitting a peg leg was added to the queue.

RK was not able to save the cheetah from the fire, but did grab some loose steel that was laying around up there. On the way back to the base, he somehow drew the attention of a large crocodile while crossing the river. Only armed with a knife, one would think that RK would flee from the ravenous reptile as Anthraxus came running with the shotgun. But out of nowhere he turned with a scream and threw himself at the crocodile. He fought valiantly as the croc bit all four of his limbs and his torso before Anthraxus was finally able to blow the chest of the beast. He stablized RK's wounds in the field and hauled him back to the base to recuperate.

Much to my surprise, while RK and Larimar were both sleeping and healing, Fresh brought up the idea of cannibalism with Athraxus. The colony is doing fine on food, so why she is already thinking about repurposing RK and Larimar is kind of sus.

The cannibalism topic was apparently just talk and no one takes any action on it. As RK heals, Fresh keeps working on sowing and harvesting rice, and Anthraxus works on cleaning up the vomit from all the food poisoning and general mess around the camp. Suddenly we intercepted some radio transmissions discussing a nearby abandoned research post. This ruin is roughly 2.5 days from base, and is likely guarded by some kind of genetic mutants. Fortunately we have 19 days to act on this information.

While the research post may be enticing, we certainly can't do anything about that until everyone gets healed up. Fortunately it only takes a couple of days for Larimar and RK to get back up and moving around. Fresh even finds the time to get a peg leg on Larimar, so his walking speed is only somewhat impacted.

Things begin to return to the normal swing of things. Conversations turns back to games while research and other errands are worked on. Suddenly, we get notified of another Gas Pack raid. Once again it is a single raider, and Larimar takes care of the concern just as quickly as last time, although the poor raider dies in the attempt. Fortunately, he leaves a gift of medicine and a cool axe behind.

Now we get to an embarrasing huge waste of time. Every ideology requires two roles, the leader and the moral guide. For the religion of Cystia, the leader is the Endmaster and the moral guide is the Mod. While we aren't big enough to require a leader yet, we do need to designate a mod. As a reward for her hard work with keeping us from starving and everyone as healthy as possible, I decided to officially make Fresh the Mod. A party with a very long winded speech ensues.

Immediately after this ceremony completed, I took a look at Fresh's new abilities. Alas, my mistake revealed! Fresh, as a novelist, is incapable of social tasks. All of the Mod abilities require social interactions. Thus Fresh, through no fault of her own, is the worst person to promote to Mod. Well, fortunately the Mod promotion ritual yields a net positive mood adjustment for everyone, so I can just promote RK to Mod instead. Well, that almost work as both RK and Anthraxus got the mood boost, but the sudden loss of her new station left Fresh with a slightly negative mood adjustment from the whole debacle. Even worse, she gave herself food poisoning as well!

As we continue to work and debate on whether to go to the research post or not, there is a sudden crack in the air overhead! A transport pod crashing just north of the base! It turned out to hold another ghoul. We don't really have a need to support another ghoul, but she could be good to study, so Anthraxus hauls her in and shackles her to the holding platform.

RK has the freezer about half built, research on writing is almost done, research into Void Provocation finally completed and research into Entity containment is started and crocodile meat meals are being prepared. Just as everyone was about to turn in to a bed, a lost Yttikian youth named Wukark shows up on the edge of our territory, begging 2 medicines to treat his sick dog. Wukark himself has little noteworthy in terms of skills or traits. About the only interesting thing the child can do is call wild animals to his aid a couple of times a day.

So voting... We've got two significant choices to make about our two quests. We still have about 14 days on the research post, but Wukark will leave in less than a day.

First Vote:

• Option A: Ignore the Research Post quest.
• Option B: Select one person we can load up with all of the remaining survival meals and send them and Larimar to check it out.
• Option C: Take the big risk and load everyone up to go hit the outpost.

Second Vote: We have 48 medicine, so giving Wukark two of them won't hurt us, but there isn't any obvious upside to giving to beggars. He is not aligned with any factions and adheres to an ideology that does not belong to any of those factions, so no faction goodwill either.

• Option 1: Ignore Wukark.
• Option 2: Give Wukark the medicine he needs for his pet.
• Option 3: Capture Wukark with an eye toward coverting him to Cystia and either enslaving him or harvesting him for organs, since he is very skill limited.

I'll have it up tonight, but in the next update you and Larimar encounter some degree of difficulty. Lar more than yourself, but it was touch-and-go for a minute.

With two votes for void provocation and two votes for writing, that is where the research will be set.

As we already have three books that our colony started with, I thought it might be worth highlight what our library currently looks like.

The Lurkers Under the Abyss

Gutzer's Research on Wildlife

Murd's Study of Markmanship

As everyone is focused on the ticking clock of the monolith, we get a sudden surprise raid from Gas Pack. Almost before the invader could be spotted, they ran into Larimar. The raid was over quickly and our first potential convert/recruit was hauled to the hallway until a better holding room could be finished.

In addition to being a potential recruit this raider was also carrying around a dozen penoxycycline, a powerful anti-infection and illness medication if taken on a regular schedule. Everybody takes one, and will continue to do so until our supply is gone.

Anthraxus stitched up our captured raider. Like good Cystians, everyone still has a healthy interest in games as Anthraxus and Fresh talked about playing some kind of dice game later. Fresh was focused on cooking by the time Anthraxus finished doctoring. So, he and RK hung out for a little bit at the table, joking about the need for more furniture in the base, as the two chairs they were sitting on was the only furniture besides the beds that have been constructed. We decided to build some in the workroom, as well as replacing the butchering table with an new shiny electric model.

Everyone also agreed that sitting in the dark was really starting to suck, so we finished clearing the trees blocking our windmill, and starting installing lights throughout the base.

Now that we can see things better, RK also setup the holding platform and proximity detector we were able to save from the ship. If our early research from the trip here is accurate, the detector should let us know if an anomalous entity approaches the base as everything related to the monolith and it's signal seem to resonate on a similar range of frequencies. Additionally the holding platform should let us securing hold any weird entities we are able to capture for study. Only a few hours remain until the the monolith will reach it's zenith.

Fresh has been taking charge as far as the cooking of simple meals. We are almost out of survival meals, and Larimar just finished eating the last of the meat we had on hand, so building a stockpile of meals is important. We'll need to build a fridge room very soon. Just holding off to see what the monolith will do.

Unfortunately, shortly after having a brief conversation about this need, with Fresh promising to make some savory meals, this went bad. Apparently Fresh was undercooking the rice she was using, leading first RK and then Anthraxus to come down with food poisoning. Someone is going to have to go hunting soon. Larimar has taken to eating the occasional nearby critter to sate it's hunger.

Shortly after dawn on the 10th day of the quadrum, the twisting of the monolith stopped and with a blast of psychic and concussive force, it erupted.

When the dust settled, it was obvious that the monolith had changed. It was taller, cleaner, and covered in faint runes and markings.

Everyone's mind was flooded by visions, although RK's was clearest. It was now obvious that the monolith was no simple stone stele of worship. It was a doorway into another dimension. A dimension of dark and horrible things. It is only cracked open the smallest amount now, but it is only a matter of time before it opens wider. The only way to control it is to achieve a deeper understanding. This will only be achievable by studying the monolith and capturing and studying the anomalous entities that it will draw towards itself from this point forward.

As if that was not enough, there was no accompanying physical threat with the awakening of the monolith. Instead a terrible grey pall has fallen over the area along with a heavy rain. The pall was a heavy fog that smelled of age and dread. It stung exposed skin and left a foul reek in the mouth and throat that took hours of breathing clean inside air to fully clear the taste of.

This problem is literally on our doorstep, so we have no choice but to deal with it, one way or another. With the visions comes a new dark understanding of the rituals and arcane workings of the monolith and it's dark powers. In addition to our regular mundane research, we now have specific dark research that we can pursue. Research the anomaly is a separate priority from normal research.

Under this new branch of science, we have three options: Void Provocation, Bioferrite extraction, and Entity containment. Void Provocation will open up the possibility to summon random anomalous entities and learn rituals for kidnapping people from other factions, summoning wild animals, or transfering psychic sensitivity between ritual members. Bioferrite is an organic metal that can theoretically be extracted from entities, and can be used as steel but also can amplify or deaden psychic emanations in certain circumstances or usages. Entity containment is focused on improving our ability to hold and extract useful resources and information from anomaly entities. Most importantly this would let use replicate the holding platform should we want to hold multiple entities at once.

VOTE ONE - Dark Research

• Option A: Continue to ignore dark research.
• Option B: Begin research into Void Provocation.
• Option C: Begin research into Bioferrite Extraction.
• Option D: Begin research into Entity Containment.

VOTE TWO - Regular Research
Our primary construction focus needs to be on making a freezer for food. We are currently researching smithing because having only one gun and a bunch of knives is a bad position to be in. However, there are other options open to us that might be worth considering:

• Option A: Once Smithing is done, Research Machining and then gun production to make better weapons as quickly as possible. Construction focus will be on the new options Smithing opens up.
• Option B: Once Smithing is done, research making soups, stews and canning to give more food options while building some of the new production options from smithing.
• Option C: Once Smithing is done, research writing and printing so that we can fulfill the core Cystian belief of promoting the written word. These won't take a lot of research, and will go quickly

Glad Rimworld Anthraxus survived the raid, although if he was a more IRL representative he probably would have beat you to the smokeleaf stash.

My vote is also for A. Being able to decide when we initiate a caravan will let us control pacing and help improve relations with nearby groups, which orbital trading won't do.