The Careful Timing of a Zombie Apocalypse

Zombie Apocalypses: We've all been through them a few dozen times. There's these painfully slow, utterly mindless critters who spread a terrible infection only if they bite someone. No worries. I mean seriously, how hard is it to avoid being bitten by a slow-moving dim-witted attacker that looks patently unnatural at first glance?

Even if you do get bit, that victim usually has to die immediately in order for them to turn instantly, and when we do get to see that happen in a zombie film, it usually involves the zombie-to-be being ripped apart limb from gory limb by a horde of shambling undead. Otherwise if they escape with just a small bite, it takes hours or days of dramatic agony for them to become a monster.

So, realistically, that first day should be rough going for a zombie plague. Sure, humanity's not ready for you, but once we do see you coming, we've got the advantages of speed, firepower, and brains. Brains...mmm.  Seriously, any city big enough to have a SWAT team should have the whole zombie thing under control on day one.

Yet despite those obvious truths,  within no more than one in-character hour of the first zombie sighting, most films have the undead outnumber the living by a factor of 100 or more to 1.  Sometimes, that's hard to swallow (unlike all those tasty brains, they go down easy).  Unless absolutely no one at the police department has ever heard of a zombie before. But I'm interested in gaming on planet earth, usually in the post-Romero world where everyone knows that a pale dead-looking thing with blood pouring from it's mouth probably isn't friendly, long before it ever shambles into biting range.

Now, if you've got fast-moving zombies with rapid-onset zombie infections you might logically be able to go from patient zero to full-blown zombie apocalypse in a day or two. But even 28 days later, the movie that started the whole "fast zombie" revolution, realized that the apocalypse doesn't happen over night, it takes 28 days or so to get to the stage where most zombie films start.

Problem is,  fast zombies with instant-conversion is really hard for table-top gaming, and this is after all a tabletop gaming blog.  Players just generally don't care too much for an endless stream of "save or die" effects that would be required for a "1 drop of blood on your face and you go zombie" scenario. How do you get attached to a character who's that expendable?

So for my recently started zombie RPG, I turned a critical eye towards how I could make a slow-zombie apocalypse happen on a time-frame that was still interesting to play out. I didn't want to jump ahead four weeks past the end of the world, I wanted to game in the last days of mankind. Nor did I want my players to have to invest hours in a character creation process that might have to be repeated every three combat rounds.

Here's a few things that I figure any slow-zombie virus needs to get it's self up to the world-threatening stage before the CDC and US Army can shut it down.

• Densely Populated Epicenter: There needed to be some event at which a large group of people were gathered, and all exposed. There can't be one Patient Zero who personally bites every other zombie, there has to be a Ground Zero mechanism for a large group to be exposed all at once. Could be contaminated food or air, could be a deliberate act of bioterrorism, but it probably can't be one dead guy and his dentures.
• Delayed Conversion Allows For Dispersion:  All those people at Ground Zero need to head home, or at least flee at human speeds. They need at least a few hours to disperse before they convert to undead status.  That first wave have to spread out, and not even realize they're a danger to themselves or others. Ideally, the early infected need to be able to travel by plane and land in other cities before they know they're sick.
• Compromised Police Response: I'm sure we've all read tragic news reports that suggest that Police under pressure tend to get trigger-happy even when there's nothing about the suspect any more threatening than the color of their skin. Now put those same cops responding to the hordes of shambling dead. Yeah, it's a 6-gun massacre writ large and gory. So if the slow zombie apocalypse wants to have a chance in the big city, something else has to distract the police, or at least complicate things for them. Such as...
• Sympathetic zombies or carriers: The zombies can't be immediately distinguishable from humans. They can look sick, they can look hurt, but they can't look like flesh-eating monsters in the first hours of the outbreak. When the healthy see the infected, their response shouldn't be "shoot it!", it should be "OMG are you okay?!" A zombie plague that makes you want to bandage or medicate the early-stage zombies, and doesn't provoke the knee-jerk reaction of heading for the hills with gun in hand, has a much better chance of catching the most flies. After you've hit critical mass, you can have the zombies enter a bloodthirstier stage, but in those fragile opening hours there probably needs to be some doubt and moral ambiguity.
• Reason not to Nuke: Dropping in a daisy cutter, tac nuke, or the like is of course a cold and calculating solution to the zombie outbreak scenario. So the zombie plague has to be damn subtle, or leave some hope for a cure. Or else it needs to strike places too valuable to nuke, and too many of them. There's a number of possible solutions to this conundrum... or the GM can just let the PCs know the nuclear option is inevitable and suggest they go hide on the other side of that mountain. You've got options.

I started my game with the President being in town, and things getting ugly at the big protest/counter-protest/counter-counter-protest rally near his speech. 8 hours later, all those protesters, and the cops they wrestled with, start turning. They aren't monstrous yet, their brains are clouded, they've got fevers, and they're scratching at pus-filled rashes.  In the meantime, there's news of some other(?) disease outbreak in another major city far away. Just enough confusion and uncertainty to let things get out of hand.

My original plan was to start with sympathetic zombies, and only show the first bloodthirsty one as the final image of the first session. It seemed like a natural cliff-hanger. However, my early sympathetic zombies were _really_ successful. There was a point where I was going to have to bridge the gap from disease victims to murderous zombies, or else the rest of the party was going to nursemaid themselves into terminal infection.  Despite springing the predatory undead ahead of schedule, we still ended the session with one PC covered in zombie blood and driving a car full of infected to the church full of survivors.  This does not bode well for that PC.

Oh well, at least there'll be no nuclear option until the motorcade makes it back to Air Force One.

1% of the population

Ran the first session today of Death Warmed Over, my new rules-light zombie RPG. It went smashingly well. Will blog more about it later this week.

Currently, the zombie infection rate is estimated at just less than 1% of the population in Albuquerque (or at least the neighborhood the PCs are in), with ominous news reports indicating it may be happening in New York City as well.

Recent Gaming Projects

Been a while since I've posted, but I've been keeping busy. Here's a brief statement of the gaming-related projects that have been keeping me busy:

• Death Warmed Over is a new Zombie Apocalypse RPG that I'm writing. The first playtest will be this Sunday.
• Interior Dredmorating 1.2.4, the latest version of my mod for the rogue-like Dungeons of Dredmor, has been released. It features new rooms (including new shops and zoos), vastly improved artwork, and miscellaneous tweaks and fixes. I've got some exciting news to announce soon about ID and DoD, but for now I must remain silent.
• My Continuum campaign continues ahead on it's two nights. Both play-groups are about a session away from major tangles with narcissists. Ron and Heilyn are about to rescue a fellow spanner from a narcy nest in 1998 London, while Declan and Casey are currently planning to foil a narcy serial killer operating in Basel, Switzerland circa 1530. Should be some exciting sessions in the next couple weeks.

So I'm keeping very busy on multiple fronts.

Bonus Fun Link: Nokia has patented vibrating tattoos that talk to your phone. Cyberpunk may actually be here by 2020 after all. You know this tech is will lead straight to sub-vocal mastoid communicators and Mr Studd implants. All night, every night, and she'll never -- wow, that's incredible sweetheart, where'd you learn how to -- no, wait, that's just my phone.

Your Princess Is In 6X Castle

About a week ago I played a short but very enjoyable game of 6X.  6X is a two-page-long settingless RPG rule-set, intended for improvisation and pick-up games. Link to 6X rules.

The core mechanic of 6X is simple, and collaborative. Whenever someone tries to do something that would logically take a die-roll in another game, the group builds a d6 chart for that roll. The player picks what happens if they roll a "1", listing off exactly what they wanted to accomplish if everything goes perfectly right. The GM picks a "6" result, basically the worst case scenario. "2" to "5" are filled in by group consensus, with "2" and "3" being good things but not the full intended success, and "4" and "5" being failures or side-effects you'd probably rather avoid.

Honestly, I was a little dubious about the system going in. I couldn't imagine I'd be happy with a flat 50% success rate for all actions, and I feared the collaborative table-making would slow things down terribly. I'm pleased to say I was wrong. Table-making is super fast and simple, and is at the heart of the fun.

Our game was set in a fantasy kingdom made up on the spot. Since we did all the charts on paper, I can easily transcribe them here as an example of play.

Theme: Medieval Fantasy
Plot: The Princess has been kidnapped

Player Characters:

Captain Midea
Captian of the Royal Guard who hails from an Amazonian land. Good at archery and swordplay. Strong leadership skills.

Fülöp the Transmutor
Duttering old court wizard several years past his prime. Powerful sorcery in a frail body. Very poor eyesight. Wielder of the Sacred Staff of Bitterness.

Bevan Rees
Plucky young annoying assistant to Fülöp. Stupid lucky, sarcastic, underpaid. Magic is not advanced.

Set-up and Pitch:
Ireeki, the Royal Princess, has gone missing, and it's our job to find her… but we don't know that yet. The PCs are all servants of the royal court of a the King of... anybody got a name for a country?  Okay, it's called Walterland. The neighboring Kingdom called... Chevalier... is very antagonistic and may or may not be involved in the kidnapping. Go!

The 3 PCs and a few NPCs are standing outside the Grand Hall of His Majesty's Castle. We've been summoned to a private audience, but then told to wait until The King calls us in. The wait was pretty long, honestly, and the party-like sounds coming from the other side of the door did nothing to make us feel that there was a mystery or adventure afoot. Our interactions with the Royal Court Jester were silly enough to keep us amused even if the plot was spinning it's wheels. I really couldn't tell if the GM was floundering, or just trying to subtly let us know that the King wasn't really too concerned about his missing daughter. We chewed the scenery, developed our character personalities, and turned Bevin's fingers intermittently invisible with a minor transmutation.

Eventually, we realized out-of-character that the King wasn't really getting to us and the plot wouldn't start till we did something.  So that's when Bevin decided to sneak into the Grand Hall.

Bevin sneaks into Grand Hall

1. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a beautiful woman in the royal court that is happy to dance with him.
2. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a slightly attractive woman to dance with.
3. Bevin sneaks in, and is about to dance with a beautiful woman, when Fülöp realizes he's gone missing and casts "summon assistant" to drag him back.
4. Bevin sneaks in, and gets himself slapped by a beautiful woman.
5. Bevin is kicked out by the guards, and it's really embarrassing.
6. Guards catch Bevin sneaking about and throw him in the dungeon.

We rolled a "1", allowing Bevin a fine time dancing with a courtier. But the player of Midea figured she really out to be doing her in-character job as Captain of the Guard. So she heads in to the Grand Hall to drag Bevin out. 

So this was our second roll, and we didn't even know the plot, yet. The rules probably would have had us roll initiative and take interwoven actions, but we figured it'd be faster and easier to just make a contested roll table. Midea's player would chose the "1" result, Bevin's player the "6", and a single roll would resolve the conflict. I feel this was a great way to handle it, and will be my preferred way to resolve PvP conflicts in the game from here on out. There's a bit of abuse potential if the PCs chose results that affected the world more than each other, but I'm pretty sure the GM could easily punish such bad behavior in later charts.

Midea heads into the Grand Hall to get Bevin

1. Midea pulls Bevin out without incident.
2. Midea pulls Bevin out, but the earlier transmutation proves contagious, and now her fingers are intermittently invisible.
3. Midea pulls Bevin out, but stops the party, causing a scene. This is NOT becoming of a guard!
4. The King sees Midea and calls her over to talk. Bevin keeps dancing.
5. "Sorry, Ma'am." The rest of the guards stop Midea from setting foot on the dance-floor.
6. Midea tries to get Bevin off the dance floor. The beautiful courtier thinks Midea is trying to cut in, and scolds her in humiliating fashion.

Looking back on it, the table was kinda stacked against Midea, but at the time it wasn't obvious. The dice favored her however, rolling another "1". She halls Bevin out, and we all now get the joy of waiting patiently once again.

The GM eventually gives us admittance to the Grand Hall, but decides to throw me a little challenge in the form of the King's  Steward deciding my wizard is too old for whatever this mission is.  So I pull a Gandalf on them: "Do not take me for a conjuror of cheap tricks!"

Convincing the King's Messenger to admit Fülöp

1. Fülöp briefly grows to 12 feet tall, wreathed in lightning and emphasized by a dramatic crash of thunder. The steward and messenger as so impressed and terrified, they show me nothing but respect forever after.
2. Minor lightning hits the messenger, who is slightly dazed and somewhat impressed by this. He lets Fülöp in.
3. The light show is kinda scary, they let Fülöp in just to get away from him.
4. Fülöp gets the targeting wrong, making Bevin 12 feet tall. The apprentice runs into the hall and the wizard hobbles after him.
5. Fülöp reverses the polarity, shrinking down to 6" tall and squeaking with minuscule rage that impresses no one.
6. Fülöp accidentally turns himself invisible and the guards cannot find him.

We rolled a "3", which got the job done well enough. The GM, however, was not yet done making things hard for me. Seriously, I can't recall ever having to struggle this much just to be told what the mission was. Anyhow, I suppose I did it to myself by being the only PC with obvious flaws to poke at. Since Fülöp is old and frail, he can't bow before The King. At least, not without magical assistance to overcome his arthritis.

The Bowing Spell

1. Fülöp successfully casts the spell, gracefully bowing despite his aged and stiff spine.
2. Fülöp successfully cast the bow spell, but with the side-effect of turning purple.
3. Fülöp successfully casts the bow spell, but lets loose a loud and undignified fart in the process.
4. Fülöp bows, but the spell haywires and causes him to do some weird acrobatic upside down levitating bow.
5. Power-word: Bow. Everyone but Fülöp feels compelled to bow. His Majesty is not amused.
6. The senile old wizard accidentally confuses the "bow" spell for the "bath" spell. It's not pretty.

A "4" has Fülöp twisting and contorting, but at least not pissing off The King.  After proper respects are paid to His Majesty, we learn the plot.

Princess Ireeki has gone missing, and was probably kidnapped. Her lady-in-waiting was present when she vanished, but The King has held off doing anything about it out of suspicion his daughter had just run away to get attention. Suitors from a nearby kingdom are due in a few more days, however, and we must get the Princess back before they arrive for political reasons.

Midea suggests we interrogate the Lady-In-Waiting. This results in a skill roll that I think came very close to stalling out the adventure before it could even get started. Clearly, there's a learning curve to 6X, and we were about to realize it.

Interviewing the Lady-In-Waiting

1. She gives us a good description of the man who kidnapped the Princess. He has a dark beard and a heavy unibrow, is 6 ft tall, and was wearing a dark cloak. When he put the cloak around the princess, they disappeared.
2. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but she thinks magic was involved.
3. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but he left behind an eyebrow hair we might be able to use for some sympathetic magic to locate or track him.
4. She won't stop crying and has nothing more to add.
5. Her thoughts are muddled. The man doesn't actually have a unibrow, that's just a masking spell that prevents her from remembering what he really looked like.
6. She saw nothing. In truth, she was busy in bed with The King, and not at her post in the Princess' Quarters at the time of the kidnapping. Her description was made up, and His Majesty will cover for her.

Isn't that horrible?  "2" and "4" are both total derailments for the plot with no further obvious direction for the plot to go. They'd be better as "5" and "6" than "2" and "4", given that they represent total failures to follow the clue trail.  Entries "3", "5" and "6" all give a tiny bit of information, coupled with another derailment that's not quite as bad as "2" or "4" but would still result in some wheel spinning.  Only "1" advances the plot or provides useful intel, and even that doesn't really give much of a "lead" to follow. Regardless of what we roll on that chart, it will require another roll just to figure out what direction to go in.  All our tables after this one were constructed to be far more dynamic and less likely to stall out the plot engine.

As it turns out, we rolled "3", and were blessed with a single hair to enchant in hopes of finding the suspect. Of course, our wizard was a bit dodgy and senile, so this was far from guaranteed to work. Knowing it had even odds to go horribly wrong, I asked for something pretty darned advantageous on the "1".

Fülöp's Follicular Flight

1. We are magically transported to the eyebrow man. We catch him with his pants down, sitting in the privy.
2. We are transported to the eyebrowed man's town. He's in a tavern.
3. We get a vision of the unibrow, and know his location.
4. Miscast! Bevin loses all his body hair!
5. The spell transports us half way to the unibrow man. We end up in a swamp.
6. The spell transports all of the unibrow man's extended family to the castle we're in.

I felt the GM was being far too kind to us, and I told her so. I was asking for the moon on the "1" result, and I felt the "6" should be just as punishing. Instead, the "6" on this chart was more directly useful than the "2" on the previous chart.

Not that it matters, since we rolled a "3". The spell revealed his location, and we had to ride all night to catch him. He was in the village of Targethorpe, staying at the Lamprey Inn. Targethorpe was also known for its large monastery full of orthodox bell-ringing monk mystics.

We arrive just after dawn, and attempt to find out from the inkeeper whether or not the kidnapper or princess are still here.

Lamprey Inn

1. They're upstairs sleeping.
2. They left at the crack of dawn, and they're less than an hour ahead.
3. They're an hour down the road, and accompanied by a platoon of soldiers from the rival Kingdom of Chevalier! Those fiends!
4. The owner leads us out back and facilitates us getting mugged.
5. He's not sure what happened to the princess, but the unibrowed one was found dead and drained of blood earlier this morning.
6. The bar keep pours you a drink to answer your questions. You are drugged, and pass out quickly.

A "5" put us back into investigation mode, despite what was almost going to be a chase or fight scene. A discussion follows about whether or not this entry on the card definitively implies that the blood-draining was vampiric in nature. I'm not sure we ever came to a consensus.

Since the only other thing that had been established about Targethorpe was the monastery, we decided to go ask the monks if they knew anything. Gwyon, the bell-loving Abbot, was a wise mystic, and old acquaintance of Fülöp's. So, once the begloved abbot was done deafening us with his bells (another great characterization by the GM), we were able to ask if he'd seen Princess Ireeki recently.

Monastery of Targethorpe

1. Good news! She's actually up in the belltower as we speak, and Gwyon thinks it will only take him a fortnight to cure her vampirism.
2. Your princess is in another temple. She's been sold for a sacrifice to the temple of Nergal.
3. The monk knows of a vampire nest in the hills, and we go to rescue the girl.
4. Gwyon hisses as you realize that he's become a vampire. He sneers "You'll never get her from our nest in the hills!" - and flies away.
5. She was captured by slavers from Solarian Wastes. Their caravan is three days ahead.
6. The Orc leader Gloksnag and his clan have been doing the bidding of the high wizard Dloththal. He has Ireeke.

Apparently the GM wasn't as enamored with the vampirism concept as some of the players were. But she had awesome NPC names, and that's cooler than undead any day. When the die rolled the GM's way, she got to tell us all about Orcish blood magic, and the dred wizard Dloththal.  Clearly, the Princess was in peril and we must ride out to save her.

We didn't get far. The orcs were waiting for us. As they sprung their ambush, mighty Amazonian Captain Midea tries to defend the dottering old wizard and his young apprentice. Yep, that would be another die-roll.

Orcs Attack

1. The orcs are all female, and are mad because the evil wizard Dloththal has stolen their men. Midea convinces them to join us.
2. There's a fight, and Fülöp's Sacred Staff of Bitterness glows so brightly the half-blinded Orcs flee in terror. They'll be back for round two after we get to prepare defenses.
3. Midea wipes out half of the orcs in a mighty battle. Bevin hides. Fülöp accidentally sets the forest on fire, scattering the rest of the attackers.
4. We defeat the orcs, but one of us loses a limb, and another of us is slain. Luckily, the slain hero is magically reincarnated as a sentient talking truffle-hunting pig.
5. The orcs capture us.
6. Fülöp turns the party into mules, hoping that orcs only drain the blood of humans. 

Again, we experienced a bit of trouble getting the 2s through 5s to fit. (Our 2 and 3 should be switched, and our 4 and 5 should probably be switched as well). This time it was my fault.

Not that that mattered, as a "6" came up on the die. We're all turned into mules!  That seemed rather silly and fitting. Plus, it was late. So, we all decided to end it there. Game over - we're mules now! Presumably, hopefully the orcs used us as pack animals instead of dinner. Then there'd be a chance for a sequel next time we're all feeling goofy.


Gotta admit, 6X was a ton of fun. It's easy to run, and great for engaging everyone at once. Even when you split the party, everybody gets to contribute to the possible results of every single die roll. I definitely recommend it for pick-up games, impromptu sessions, and groups that experience a lot of chaos at the tabletop. PCs working at cross purposes, players hogging the spotlight, lack of focus, and many other potential problems for crunchier traditional systems actually work as strengths for 6X. That's pretty cool.

Reading the rules for myself several days later, I see that the game is expecting for fights to be handled with several die rolls. The examples feature NPCs getting wounded at "1" and PCs wounded at "6". That's certainly more conventional and balanced, but I've got to say that for our purposes the wilder results tables worked just great.

On that topic, I must admit that the rules, despite being so minimal and looking ripe for abuse, turned out to be very enjoyable and really well balanced.  I tried _hard_ to break the system every time I was getting to propose a "1" result. That I could just as easily fall victim to an equally-ridiculous "6" (as we all eventually did) kept things from being too easy.  We sometimes had trouble filling in an appropriate "3" or the like, but for the most part that didn't matter as long as the best-case and worst-case scenarios were clear. The GM getting to define the 6 after the player defines the 1 is critical to keeping the game balanced and exciting.

Interior Dredmorating

A while back I blogged about how I was getting a lot of fun out of a graphical roguelike computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor. It's darned good - PC Gamer awarded it Indy Game of the Year for 2011.

I enjoy it enough to do some significant modding for it these past couple months. It's high time I provide a link here to my mod, Interior Dredmorating. ID is now on it's 1.2.1 release, and it's been pretty warmly received by the Dredmor fan base.

Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/Interior Dredmorating 1.2.1.zip

Sometimes a dungeon isn't really a dungeon.

Primarily my mod adds new rooms, items, art and flavor text to the dungeon. While there are a lot of mods out there for Dredmor, most are skill-and-spell based, the sort of thing you plug into the game to up your character's power (or your build options). Mine's not like that, it's more about providing new challenges and new things to explore. Not surprising at all to those who know me - I'm usually happier being the dungeon-master than being a player.



Those interested in the full details of what the mod adds to the game should check out the thread on the Gaslamp Games forum:  http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/interior-dredmorating-1-2-1.2158/

Continuum Conversion Overview

Just got an email from someone asking me for a few more details on my Continuum-using-Gumshoe conversion. As I typed up the response, I realized this should probably go on my blog in case anyone else wants to know what we changed to make this setting work with a different set of rules. (I think I typed something like this up a while ago, but I couldn't find it with a casual search today).

Mainly I use GUMSHOE rules, modified as needed for the setting. Here's a few things I changed that I can think of off the top of my head:

I cut the size of player character point pools down significantly (building characters from far fewer points in general than any iteration of GUMSHOE), but then made all pools refresh automatically at the start of every session. That way there's no need to remember from week to week how many points you spent in previous sessions. I figure CoNTINUUM has so much book-keeping via spanbooks and just general time-travel-related notekeeping, that I didn't want to have to waste extra effort and energy recording how many points are left over from last week.  The smaller pools are to balance that.

Off the top of my head I don't remember exactly how many points I trimmed them down to, but I've frequently thought I could have trimmed them down a lot smaller than I did without any real consequences. Gumshoe characters get so many points, since the refreshes are only at the start of entire new mysteries/adventures, and with weekly free refreshes they only need a handful of points to advance the plot. If you trim it down too far, it's pretty easy to give the PCs bonus points later, or just let them train skills via normal Continuum training over time rules. Taking points away mid-campaign because you were too generous at the start would be rather harder.

In general, I found/ruled/converted that each Continuum skill rank above Novice is roughly equivalent one point of Gumshoe skill rating. I use 'clocks' more or less like they appear on the Continuum character sheet - each spend or roll of a skill gets you 1 step closer to the next level. If a character has no points to spend but engages in a roll anyway, they also get a clock in the skill, so it's possible to advance in a skill that you don't have or have spent all your points in already. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.

I had to add a couple of skills to cover things specific to Continuum, such as the various Aquarian Skills, and a few "better at spanning" skills to compensate for the lack of a Quick stat. 

I made Gemini into a skill you could spend to have your Elder bail you out, which allows me to throw harder challenges at the player and still give them an "escape switch" for if I overdo it. These Gemini points go away when spent, and only refresh if your Span Rating increases. I did something similar with "Mentor" and "Fraternal Favors" so each PC started the campaign with a couple of "my Mentor shows up to save me" and a handful of "my chrony in the (insert specific fraternity here) owes me a favor that I can cash in right now' points. This gives the PCs a bit more narrative control than they would otherwise have in Continuum, but that's balanced by being Graceless (thus unable to spend any of those points because of too much frag, etc) feel more dangerous.

I also added a "Range" skill, of which all players have 50 points. Spending 1 point of Range lets you span a certain amount of time and/or distance, depending on your Span Rating. This was done partly to match other Gumshoe mechanics, and partly to reduce the amount of time spent calculating the exact minutes and seconds of shorter spans - while knowing your exact Age to the second is important from an in-character performance, we found it was getting in the way of keeping the plot rolling, and Range points helped make that faster. Full details at: http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2010/10/extreme-range.html

Besides adding things like I mentioned above, I simplified the gumshoe skill lists a bit. Most versions of Gumshoe have more crime scene forensics and evidence collecting type skill than Continuum really needs, but you may have to "season to taste" on that. There's a really light Gumshoe book called "FEAR ITSELF" that I recommend for this. Intended for less "CSI" style Gumshoe games, it has a smaller investigative skill list. It also has some good psionics-type skills that can be easily converted to represent your Aquarian Skills by just cutting out the creepy cthulhu bits.

I use Stability per Esoterrorists / default Gumshoe, and not any of the extra bells and whistles (sanity, sources and pillars, etc) from Trail of Cthulhu. I also added Continuum-specific Stability challenges/penalties, an early version of which can be seen at: http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2010/10/stability-chart-for-gumshoe-continuum.html   

Time Combat is basically the same, but with various Gumshoe spends and rolls instead of Continuum's reliance on the Quick stat. Incidentally, that seems to have made time combat a lot more balanced, whereas before it could be really hard on characters that were created with lower-than-average Quick. 

Physical Combat is much easier because Gumshoe is not a combat-intensive system. I was a little worried about that at first, but honestly it's turned out just fine. Continuum's weird hit location rules were way crunchier than the original game needed, anyway. One thing to be wary of is the Gumshoe rules for wrestling over a gun or getting the drop on someone. It's just too easy to surprise someone in Continuum (span in behind them), so I had to eliminate that or else every fight would be a single roll.

Obviously, that's not everything I converted to make this game run, but it's a good place to start, and about all I've got time for today. If you've got questions, drop me an email or comment.

New Year Continuum (Cart and Horse)

I'm pleased to say that my Continuum campaign successfully jumped back into full swing after the year-end break. The sessions Tuesday and Wednesday were both really good, with opportunities for the PCs to chew the scenery a bit, and both groups made some good breakthroughs on the projects and mysteries at the top of their "to-do" lists.

I did a little reflecting on the game during the break, and thought a lot about where we were now that the campaign's been going for 2 years. I've decided I'd like to speed things up a little, but we'll see if I can make that happen. As mentioned in recent posts, in a game where all the PCs can time-travel a decade or more at-will, it's hard to put any sort of "you have to do this now" pressure on them. You can keep throwing narcissists at them, but that eventually grows old (or overwhelming, if they just keep dodging instead of defeating the enemy). So my plan instead is to throw accolades and achievements at them. They've been in "slow simmer" mode for a while, working on various projects that will gain them some notoriety within the Continuum once everything is said and done. Well, everything's been said and the doing is happening in the next session or two. With any luck, they'll be climbing the ranks quickly this year.

As I see it, they've entered a period in the game where the rewards are higher, and the risks are correspondingly greater as well. Which is a little backwards from most gaming dynamics, but that's Continuum for you. We put the cart Down from the horse.

Dungeons of Dredmor

Get used to seeing this screen a lot. It ain't easy, but it's fun.

My Continuum campaign is on hold till the new year, so I've been filling my time playing (and modding) a wonderful little computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor.  It's essentially a roguelike, but with nice graphics instead of little ascii glyphs that populate that genre. So, more like Diablo, but with a wicked sense of humor (much of it fueled by anachronism and a keen understanding of the tropes of the genre. The remainder is fueled by lutefisk and booze.).

Dungeons of Dredmor has a ton of variation and is highly replayable, largely due to the various character builds interacting with the dungeon in completely different ways. It's not class-based, you chose your own combinations of 7 of the roughly 30 skill trees. If you can teleport, turn enemies into meat products, build your own armor from items found in the dungeon,  and rob from vending machines, you'll get a very different game then if you choose to be a vegan archaeologist with a pet mustache-golem. I'm not making that up.

Best part: Dungeons of Dredmor is dirt cheap. I got mine via one of the Humble Indie Bundles, but you can pick it up on Steam or Desura for $5 and the expansion is just another $3. The wife and I have logged over 170 hours playing it, and have shown no signs of slowing down. Seriously. You can't beat that value for your money.

As mentioned, I'm working on mods for the game, which I'll link to from this blog when they're ready for release.

Catalog of Continuum Corners

In Continuum, a "Corner" is a meeting place, secret lair, landing pad, fort, home or workspace for time-travelers. Some are hidden away in the middle of nowhere, others exist brazenly under the nose of the teeming masses that are unaware of the true secret history of time-travel. Corners frequently have clever nicknames, used to help spanners (time-travelers) coordinate activities in lieu of a street address. If you know a lot of Corners, it's easier to get around in time and space.

Since the PCs can travel time and space at will, the GM often needs to be prepared at a moments notice to detail a new corner. You hand the PCs a clue that's written in a dead language, and they'll suddenly go looking for Corners in remote centuries where they can learn to speak it. Which means its really helpful to a Continuum GM to have at their fingertips a list of Corners, their catchy names, and their locations in time as well as space.

The following is a lengthy snippet of the master index of Corners from my GMing files for my Continuum RPG campaign. I thought these 304 tiny summaries might be a helpful starting place for GMs launching a Continuum campaign, who want to get a running head-start on the Corners of their campaign. I have redacted all the narcissist dens and major spoilers off the list (I hope) so it shouldn't ruin anything if my players poke around on the list. The original is on a file on my computer with hyperlinks and wiki table syntax, but this version is stripped down for your use in porting it to whatever database or word processing program you find useful. In theory it's tab-delimited, but the inconsistencies of HTML and blogspot might nuke that.

You'll find there's very few corners mentioned as being in the United States, for which I apologize. It's mainly a function of the specifics of my campaign. There are clusters of corners around the times and places where the main plot has been - the UK on the Cusp, and various parts of Europe during the renaissance and reformation.

A large number of these Corners have full pages in my GMing notes which go into varying detail about the Corner and its relevant NPCs, but some Corners on the list are just a placeholder that exists as little more than the data listed below. Only a relative handful of the Corners listed here have actually been home to scenes in the game. Part of the nature of Continuum GMing is that you never really know where the PCs will go, so you have to be prepared for everything. Some are locations where my plotlines (or important events in the backstories of NPCs) have taken place, others are just moments in history that struck me as an awesome place to hide a corner.

Also on the list are mentions of every Corner I'm aware of from the official published Continuum RPG materials. The last part of each entry indicates where one can find out more about the Corner in question. "CoRPG" means the main Continuum RPG rulebook, and will usually include a page number. "FI" means the "Further Information" sourcebook, again with a page number reference. There's also a few Corners here taken from various PDF adventures that Aetherco (or fans) released, such as "Identity Is All" (which I used but heavily modified for my campaign) and "Death-Hand of St. No-One". "Short-bus" means it was a corner used in my first Continuum campaign, which may-or-may-not exist in the current campaign in the form listed elsewhere on this blog. A few entries include links to websites that cover interesting historical facts that inspired the Corner, or include search terms (such as names of historical characters) that should turn up details with a little Google-fu and elbow grease. Some include explanatory notes to help me internalize and remember the concept of a particular Corner before I got around to making a full page for it.

The list remains in its index and work-in-progress version and hasn't really been edited for public consumption (other than a quick scan for spoilers). So if there's anything on the list that puzzles someone who deems themself reasonably well-versed in Continuum jargon, just drop me an email (or comment on my most recent blog post) and I'll do my best to explain.

Entries with triple-question-marks ("???") indicate details I didn't have (or need) at the time the Corner first made it on to my list. Most have since been filled in on the individual Corner pages in my GMing notes, but if I can't be bothered to update my own index page I'm certainly not going to take the time to clean it up for this publication that might well be of zero interest to anyone. The fine art of GMing prep involves knowing which bits you need and what details you can ignore for now and improvise should they come up - and that goes double for Continuum.

Hopefully there's a couple Continuum GMs out there in the internet that will find this list useful. I sometimes fear I'm the only person running this wonderful game anymore.

Corner Name     Locality     Years     Type     Further Information is available…
Absolution     United States     2001 to 2152     Moneychangers     FI, pg 88-91
Abtu'o (the House of Abtu)     Thebes, Hat-Kaptah (Ancient Egypt)     1287 BCE to 1242 BCE     Midwives     FI pg 80-81
Aedes Saluto     Rome     249 BCE     Antiquarians     Short-bus
All The Globe's A Stage     Globe Theatre, London, UK     1599 - 1642     Thespians   
Alpha Error     CDC, Atlanta, GA United States     1970 to 2070     Physicians     false positive
Always Thursday Night     New Brunswick, NJ, United States     1983 to 2014     Novice Corner     FI, pg 19 & 24
An Nadaba     Biada (Northern Europe)     4927 BCE to 4413 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 64-69
Analytical Difference     London, United Kingdom     1820 to 1871     Engineers     following up where Charles Babbage didn't
Antiquities Survey     Atlantis, and ruins of Antedesertium     12969 BCE to 12201 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 40-45
Anyway     ???     2117 to 2212     Thespians     FI, pg 88-91
The Art of Warsaw     National Theatre, Warsaw, Poland     1831 to 1924     Thespian     National theatre was closed by the Russians in the wake of the November 1830 uprising led by Piotr Wysocki
Atavis Vox     Rome     96 BCE to 234     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Atl echiechi Atl     Aztec Empire     1376 to 1482     Thespians     FI, pg 82-87
Avenue of the Dead     Teotihuacan (Mexico)     117 BCE to 630 CE     Engineers   
Axabeneixa     Persepolis (in modern Iran), and elsewhere with Xerxes     555 BCE to 431 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 76-81
Baconiana     London, England, (United Kingdom)     1586 to 1626     Mixed Fraternal: Thespian, Scribe, Engineer     Francis Bacon
Barcode         Piscean-Aquarian Cusp     Moneychangers     "Barcode" is the name of one of the algorithms that automates stock transactions.
Barnaby's Undertaker Supply and Chemical Transportation Company     London, United Kingdom     1814 to 1902     Quicker     CoRPG, pg 82
Bartschious     Germany and Poland     1620 to 1638     Thespian     Personal travels and mysteries  of Susanna Kepler - Bartsch - Kowalska
Bavmaiachi     Vayana     6032 BCE to 5626 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 64-69
Befewa     Sut (Eastern Europe)     7006 BCE to 6847 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 58-63
Bell Telephonic     Cambridge, MA, Washington, D.C., and Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Canada     1875, 1876… 1922     Thespian Understudy performance of Alexander Graham Bell by Waith Go     CoRPG, pg 69
Benjamin's House     Hoboken, NJ, United States     1943 to 2011     Moneychangers     FI, pg 19, 24-25
Bernhard Bunker     London, UK     1943 to 1962     Moneychangers     Preventing and profiting from Nazi counterfeiters
Beverly Hills Copse     Hollywood, CA, United States     1947 to 2046     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Big Mike     Banana Fields of Panama     1950 and the Libran Era     Moneychangers preserving the Gros Michel banana     http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana
Binocular Disparity     ???     2362 and Up     Physicians Boxed Mental Institution     Psyche
Blazon     (United Kingdom)     1127 to 1492     Antiquarians     serious heralds
Blitzguides     London United Kingdom     1940 - 1944     Service Corner run by Midwives, Scribes & Antiquarians   
Blue and white diagonal descent     Red-Aqua-white (also known as "blurred clockwise from lower right, candy red - pale aqua - dull white", a telepathic representation of the city), Upsilon Andromedae 3     1830 to 4261, and 4318 to 4319     Quicker     CoRPG, pg 82
Blue Box     Cardiff     2003 to at least 2011…     Goof-off pad for geeky Antiquarians     Dr. Who starts filming here in 2004.
Blue Jewel In The Sky     Lake Puma Yumco, Tibet     1641 to 1855     Novice Corner     Penuri Pemba, and Prop A
Blue Sky Rising     West Orange, NJ, United States     1981 to 2014     Novice Corner     FI, pg 19-26
Bluestocking     Le Marais, Paris, France     1605 to 1683     Midwives     literary salon, ruelle style
Bound Periodical     St. Pancras Library, London, United Kingdom     1971 to 2022     Scribes Overdue Brigade     The British Library
Breviograph     ???     Sometime Down from the 17th Century     Scribes   
Bull Market     Manhattan Financial District, New York City, United States     1884 to 2058     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
Buthaz     Tireken     2438 BCE to 2260 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 70-75
Cada Bastu Detu     drifting boating communities of Cada Bastu (ocean-going people called the Basturo)     12707 BCE to 12366 BCE     Mixed Fraternal Corner, Spans 3's and 4s.     FI, pg 43-45
Cadency     (United Kingdom)     ??? Middle Ages or Elizabethan     Midwives     Cadency is Heraldry term for small elements that distinguish between arms within the same family
Caerphilly Cep     Caerphilly Castle, , United Kingdom     1989 to 2012     PC's Novice Corner     Caerphilly Cep
Canarias     Portugal     2077 to 2153     Midwives     FI, pg 88-91
Canting Arms     (United Kingdom)     1485 to 1603     Antiquarians     fun-loving heralds
Capitulus     Rome     69 BCE to 247     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
Capone's Vault     Lexington Hotel, Chicago, IL     1892-1978     Moneychangers   
Caress     South Asia     11902 BCE to 11709 BCE     Physicians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Casa Pasadena     Hollywood, CA, United States     1842 to 1987     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Cemetery Dogs     Greyfriars Kirkyard and Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom     1841 to 2022     Quicker   
Ch'ien     Chou     522 BCE to 457 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 76-81
Cha me hedipa     Mayan Empire     997 BCE to 762     Midwives     FI, pg 76-81
Chamberlen's Machine     London, United Kingdom     1572 to 1728     Midwives     Birthing Forceps where the Chamberlen family secret.
Cheik Utba'e'     Maihur Riki     10072 BCE to 9966 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 52-57
Chippies     London     Aquarian Cusp     Novice Corner   
CIA Headquarters     Washington, DC (with second cornerhouse in Langley, VA), United States     1947 to 2070     Foxhorn     CoRPG, pg 72
Circe's Dance     Paris, France     1581     Thespians     Ballet Comique de la Reine
Coal Boat     Cardiff     1903 to 1955     Engineers     Cardiff is the worlds largest Coal port for 50 years
Cold Storage     not far from the center of the Universe     Lower Capricornic Era, perilously close to the Big Bang     Quicker and Inheritors corner and containment facility. Matter that is unsolvably fragged is brought here to isolate it from Earth and the other inheritor systems     CoRPG pg 170
Coconut Reactor     Palymyra Atoll, in the Pacific Ocean     1959 to 2022     Engineers   
Conquest Slab     ("Building J" of Monte Alban), Zapotec culture, Oaxaca (Mexico)     393 BCE to 811 CE     mixed Foxhorn & Scribes     Wikipedia
Counterculture     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 40-45
Crystal Triangle         Piscean-Aquarian Cusp     Moneychangers     "Crystal Triangle" is the name of one of the algorithms that automates stock transactions.
Danse Peste     Strasbourg     1515-1523, 1568     Physicians     Dancing Plague
Dark Tower     New York City, United States     1872 to 1931     Foxhorn   
Delphine Tinte     Basle, Switzerland     …1568     Thespians Understudy, with some Scribes supporting.   
Dendy's House     Mrs. Dendy's Theatrical Lodging House, London, United Kingdom     1806 - 1968     Thespians     Inspired by "Tipping the Velvet"
Der Spanner     Zurich, Switzerland     ??? late 20th to early 21st Century     Engineers (Patch and Anticipare)     CoRPG, pg 70
Dheesra Yalpaht     Heerbat (Central Asia)     6534 BCE to 6312 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 58-63
Dies Magni     Rome     618 BCE to 432     Foxhorn     FI, pg 76-81
Digital Divinity     Bristol, UK     Aquarian Cusp     Engineers     inspired by name of real-life Bristol technology company
Dream of the Atlantic     sailing the Atlantic     Geminid Era     Antiquarians collection of lost ships     CoRPG pg 161 - 162
Drop By Drop     Tibet     1578 to 1959     Novice   
Dust     Southeast Asia     11759 BCE to 11644 BCE     Quicker Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
E'yt Turem     Inet'tchedese     6648 BCE to 6432 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 58-63
Ede Tre'idt     Africa     7811 BCE to 7750 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 58-63
Editio princeps     Basle, Switzerland     1468-1568     Scribes     Latin for the first printed edition of a previously hand-copied manuscript
Eithechtheikya     ???     8516 BCE to 8114 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 52-57
Empty Wrench     South-Central Asia     10850 BCE to 10537 BCE     Engineers Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Ermu Ga-re-lash     Cheth-edn (West Asia)     7129 BCE to 6984 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 58-63
Esa Thunt     Shu Siapte (Southeast Asia)     4756 BCE to 4428 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 64-69
Eyeglass Case     Central Asia     11817 BCE to 11762 BCE     Antiquarians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Eyo Ueiruh Reruh (“Hard Climb Penthouse”)     Maihur Riki (Virgin city whose ruins are hidden in north Siberia until 2023)     9952 BCE to 9899 BCE     Novice Corner     FI pg 55
Fall and Rise Again     Newark, NJ, United States     1951 to 1993     Novice Corner     FI, pg 19, 24-25
Fene Feleen     Ruabet     6766 BCE to 6497 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 58-63
Fest deer Esel     Basel, Switzerland     1431     Thespians     Feast of the Ass
Field of Cloth of Gold     Balingham, near Calais, France     1520     Thespians stage manager     2,000 tents and a fake castle for 3 weeks
Fire Formula     Constantinople, Byzantine Empire     600 to 1099     Engineers and Thespians     Greek Fire
Five Brave Hunters     “Grey Deer Men” Neanderthal tribe, north of the Fresh-Winding River (Piscean Name: river Seine, France)     Virgin Era     Neanderthal Span 4s and 5s, most born Down of the Fields of Barabande. Here with permission.     FI pg 49-50
Flicker Fusion     Trans-Asia District 2     2152 to 2222     Physicians     Dr. Lainshaw corners Here
Flying Crow With Magic Fire     Nanyang, China     1355 to 1412     Engineers     Wikipedia on Fire Dragon Manual
Flying Squadron     Paris and other parts of France     1547 to 1589     Midwives     Catherine de' Medici
Footlights     Manhattan, NY, United States     1899 to 1975     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Fortress Hanseatic     Visby, Germany     1043 to 1277     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
Fortress on the Street     Strasbourg     1349 to 1870     Foxhorn   
Fray Blue Blushing     Beijing, China     2137 to 2220     Foxhorn     FI, pg 88-91
The French Resistance     Merankea (what will be southern France)     …6231 BCE…     Engineers     Short-Bus
Frequently     Unity     2175 to 2310     Scribes     FI, pg 88-91
Frostgreen/Forestgreen/Richer Hue (This is one three-part telepathic name)     small Upsilon timeship that visits Earth frequently.     variable     Fairly typical of Inheritors spacecraft.     CoRPG pg 186 - 187
Fumo e specchi     Florence, Italy     …1504…     Engineers and Thespians. This corner spies on Michaelangelo Buonorotti and Leonardo DaVinci.     Casa Buonarroti
Galgen     Basle, Switzerland     1543     Foxhorn and Physicians    Jakob Karrer Von Gebweiler dissection
Gereg Nalgob     Uiualaga (Western Europe)     5382 BCE to 4826 BCE     Physicians     FI, pg 64-69
Geren     Urut He (South Asia)     6951 BCE to 6821 BCE     Dreamers     FI, pg 58-63
Gilt Lady     London, UK     1734 to 2152     Moneychangers     Bank of England
Givrek     Vielavayan Empire     5717 BCE to 5695 BCE     Secret Military Corner, infiltrating Vayana     FI, pg 68
Glamorgan Scrum     Cardiff (and surrounding area), United Kingdom     …2004…2010…     Foxhorn   
Goddelijke Bloesem     Amsterdam, Netherlands     … 1636 to 1638 …     Moneychangers   
The Golden Stars     Basle, Switzerland     1412 and Up     A series of Novice Corners operating out of Zum Goldenen Sternen (Golden Stars Inn)     See also Second Star, Wandering Stars, etc.
Gone Gotha Gone     London, United Kingdom     1907 - 1917     Antiquarians   
Goseck Lucidity     Goseck Circle, near what will be Berlin     4900 BCE     Short-lived Dreamers Corner that first exposed the Hunt of the Sun     Goseck Circle
Gizmonoco     St. Paul, MN, United States     1987 to 2222     Engineers     CoRPG, pg 70
The Great Librarium     Atlantis     12969 BCE to 12191 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 40-45
Green Barn     Atlantis     12969 BCE to 12191 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 40-45
Gret     Wurise     9153 BCE to 8832 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 52-57
Groeg ydy abar a ognise bod 'n lladdedig ail a ail     Illium on the Cam     …1248 BCE to 1238 BCE     Midwives     Where Troy Once Stood by Iman Wilkens, also “Short-bus”
Gurhuen     The Nurisen     8392 BCE to 7806 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 52-57
Hair Bundle     Tikal (Guatamala)     111 to 561, 682 to 812     Dreamers     Wikipedia
Happy Desertion     Watchpost cities of "Happy Valley" Pueblos (four corners region of SW North America)     1280 to 1300     Thespians     entire 4 corners region migrates out of the pueblos because farms fail at borders of the Happy Valley and the watchpost cities are emptied. Inner areas of valley collapse because they no longer have the guard/look out cities
H'iesh'håshaa-U'sÿss (Leafnest of the Visitor)     ???     106,234,822 BCE to 106,234,071 BCE     Quicker     CoRPG, pg 82
Hatchet     North America     11246 BCE to 10982 BCE     Midwives Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Hearts Singing     Well-woman clinic in West London. London, United Kingdom     1985 to 2010     Midwives     CoRPG, pg 74
Helpers Ass'n of Washington     United States (Washington, DC?)     1937 to 2017     Midwives     FI, pg 82-87
Heron Lakes Lodge     Ohio Valley, North America     106 to 1244     Foxhorn     CoRPG, pg 72
Hewing Hewer     Caerphilly     1327 and 2152, but not between them     Mixed Fraternal
Hireaunkh     Hireaunkh Forest     9869 BCE to 9723 BCE     Physicians     FI, pg 52-57
Homely     Polynesia     10762 BCE to 10544 BCE     Midwives Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Hook and Wheels     Brooklyn, New York City, United States     1993     Novice Corner     "The Death Hand of Saint No-One" adventure pdf
Horse God Thunders     Urudolyan Foothills (Russia)     5746 BCE to 5570 BCE     Foxhorn     CoRPG, pg 72
Horsemen     Cardiff, but with additional Cloisters in Clevedon, Alton Barnes, and Bristol, UK, at least     2002 to 2011     Foxhorn   
Horses and Torpedoes     Arab Syria     1271 to 1277     Engineers     The Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices
The Hospice     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Physicians and Quicker     FI, pg 40-45
House of Knowledge     Fatimid Caliphate (Egypt)     1004…     Scribes     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Knowledge
House of Wisdom     Bagdhad, Abbassid Caliphate (Iraq)     762 to 1258     Scribes     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_wisdom
House of Sleep     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Dreamers     FI, pg 40-45
Hu Nar     Brudhlk (Central Europe)     8873 BCE to 8712 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 52-57
The Hunt Club     London, United Kingdom     1797 to 1919     Foxhorn (most important Foxhorn counter this side of the Virgin Era)     CoRPG, pg 72; FI pg 82-87
Hwa     Hat-Kaptah (Ancient Egypt)     300? BCE to 2000 BCE     Physicians     FI, pg 70-75
Iakka Pneima     Kena'ani     1872 BCE to 1567 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 76-81
Ie've-ya-wast     Vayana     5966 BCE to 5634 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 64-69
Il Ridotto ("The Private Room")     Venice, Italy     1638 to 1774     Moneychangers     state-run casino whose dress code includes mandatory masks
Ilkad Ledash     Eridu     3108 BCE to 2999 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 70-75
Incunabula     Strasbourg     1440-1500     Engineers & Scribes     Incunabula are pamphlets printed before 1500 AD
Interlineation     London, United Kingdom     Not far from the Aquarian Cusp     Scribes   
Intermedio     Florence (Italy)     1513 to 1589     Thespians   
Ipt Awyut     Hat-Kaptah (Ancient Egypt)     2981 BCE to 2690 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 70-75
Iy     Mui O     6839 BCE to 6754 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 58-63
Jerda Ko     West Asia     5662 BCE to 4381 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 64-69
Jongleur Temperance     Lille, France     1091 to 1562     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Kali Yuga Moksha     Chattisgarhi, India     1582 to 2000     Midwives     CoRPG, pg 74
Kare'i Tudo'eyi     Oyo'tu village of No'pa'a     9844 BCE to 9686 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 52-57
Kejaweni     Yeberen (Asia Minor)     8321 BCE to 7972 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 52-57
Keramos Asclepiadae     Isle of Kos (off Asia Minor)     990 BCE to 182 BCE     Physicians     CoRPG, pg 80; FI pg 76-81
Klaba Chebyenami     Vayana     5721 BCE to 5350 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 64-69
King's N'cle     Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom     1834 to 1934     Physicians     Newcastle University School of Medicine and Surgery
Knight Fisching     Yugoslavia, Japan, and Iceland     1992, 2004, and 2005 - 2008, respectively     Thespians, with some Midwives     Following Bobby Fischer
Kopros Athenoi     Macedon     360 BCE to 294 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 76-81
Ks'ara yti N'stana     Pacing the traveller Tsantatur on his worldwide journeys     2725 BCE to 2661 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 70-75
Kwi-yche     Kohyo'a-e-e (Southeast Asia)     8026 BCE to 7754 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 58-63
l'innocence galvaudé (Overused Innocence )     Catacombs, and Saint Innocents cathedral/graveyard/fountain area, Paris, France         Quicker   
Lalys Bailey     Palestine     1100     Engineers     Lalys is a semi-mythical Byzantine crusader castle maker
Landscape Heraldry     (United Kingdom)     10th Century to 19th Century     Dreamers     dream-time fantasy realm
Laserwort     Cyrene, Northern tip of Africa (Libya)     circa 5th Century BCE to 1st Century     Midwives source of Silphium     http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birth-control-of-yesteryear
Lawton Cathouse     Reno, NV, United States     …1982…     Novice Corner
Lenore     Iberia (Spain)     11065 BCE to 10899 BCE     Scribes Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Let It Be     London, United Kingdom     (1963 to) 1969     Thespians     Beatles Rooftop Concert, Jan 30 1969
Level 1     United States     1932 to 2002     Engineers, Foxhorn, Physicians, and Quicker     FI, pg 82-87
Library of Congress     Washington, DC, United States     1790 to 2122     Scribes     CoRPG, pg 84
Litchfield Hills Pediatric     Bantam, CT, United States     1992 to 1998, 2043     Physicians     pertaining to a CDC containment “hot zone” in 1993
Lost and Foundation     high in the Andes mountains, (South America)     Cancerean Era     Antiquarians collection of lost buildings     CoRPG pg 161 - 162
The Louvre     Paris, France     1844 to 2045     Antiquarians     CoRPG, pg 67
Llywelyn's Head     Caerphilly, Wales, United Kingdom     1268 to 1326   
Long Land Dreaming     Northern Australia     13021 BCE to 1683     Dreamers     CoRPG, pg 68; FI pg 40-87
Lundy Lines     Chicago, IL, United States     1891 to 1979     Engineers   
Macbeth     North Asia     10969 BCE to 10628 BCE     Thespians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Maison Rousse     Neufchateau, France     1330 to 1572     Novice Corner (where Jeanne D'Arc is a novice)     CoRPG, pg 184
Mandala     Asia     ???     Quicker   
Maquahuitl Apex     Aztec Empire     1519 to 1521     Engineers     Maquahuitl = obsidian "sword"
Mercury     East Asia     11679 BCE to 11482 BCE     Moneychangers Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Middle Span     Central America     11983 BCE to 11842 BCE     Engineers Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Morse Mill     speak easy in Chicago, IL, United States     1878-1936     Novice Corner     Public name was Pop Morse's Gardens till 1914, public name changed to Green Mill thereafter.
Mosquito     Atlanta, GA United States     1942-1946     Physicians     Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities
Mound Monks     Cahokia, Mississipian culture (Illinois, North America)     892 to 1270     Moneychangers   
Mraiset Jet'th     Mrasiset     10849 BCE to 9881 BCE     Physicians     FI, pg 52-57
Mref Kafa     Afaset     9154 BCE to 8923 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 52-57
Mreten     Uen Tae (North America)     7841 BCE to 7532 BCE     Physicians     FI, pg 58-63
Musei Vaticani     Vatican City, Rome, Italy     1503 to 1778     Antiquarians     CoRPG, pg 67
Museum, Sarapeum et Caesareum     The Great Library of Alexandria, Alexandria, Hat-Kaptah/Egypt     285 BCE to 690 (with burnings at 48 BCE, 265-270 AD, 305, 391, 415, and 686 CE)     Scribes     CoRPG, pg 84; FI pg 76-81
Mut Haat     Lake Region (where Vielavaya will be)     7529 BCE to 7218 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 58-63
MWPP (Medieval Witness Protection Plan)    Strasbourg, Alsace (border of France and the Holy Roman Empire)    1515 to 1550    Service Corner created by the PCs of my campaign, relating to the dancing plague and actions against a narcissist serial-killer in Strasbourg (and Basel Switzerland)
Nate's Hardware Store     Akron, Ohio, United States     1932 to 2001     Engineers     CoRPG, pg 70
National Palace Museum     Taipei, China     1958 to 2043     Antiquarians     CoRPG, pg 67
New You     Hollywood, CA, United States     1949 to 2043     Physicians     CoRPG, pg 80; FI 82-87
The Niagra Twelve     Planned Parenthood in Buffalo, New Jersey, United States     1972 to 2018     Midwives     CoRPG, pg 74
Nmetseshi     Ur     3986 BCE to 3662 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 70-75
No Fu Go     Washington, DC, United States     1943 to 1945     Scribes (with bomb-disposal help from Engineers)     keeping Japanese attacks out of the papers
No Laughing Matter     Kashasha, Tanganyika (Tanzania)     1962 to 1963     Physicians     Tanganyika laughter epidemic
Nonsuch Knick-Knacks     Nonsuch Palace, England     1538 - 1547, 1670 - 1683     Antiquarians     Henry VIII's dream palace, torn down by Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine
North of the Moon     Northernmost plaform of Huaca de la Luna, Cerro Blanco, Moche culture (Peru)     186 to 536     Midwives     "Ayapec" ("All-Knowing") and "Wrinkle-Face" appear in oldest murals. Built by over 100 teams of laborers.
Notae Socratae     Athens, Ancient Greece (Greece)     roughly 400 BCE to 350 BCE     Scribes     Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, etc
Nuen Djaret     Zaraja (Central Asia)     9824 BCE to 9399 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 52-57
Nurgush Karinesh     Mesopotamia     3877 BCE to 3014 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 70-75
The Nursery     Atlantis     12969 BCE to 12191 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 40-45
Nuruch Heng     Heng     9436 BCE to 8976 BCE     Antiquarians     FI, pg 52-57
Nuts!     Bastogne, France     1944 - 1945     Thespians     See "Band of Brothers" for more ideas.
Oasis     In the Sahara desert     Leonid Era     Antiquarians collection of lakes, is a common stopover for Foxhorns heading to attack Antedesertium     CoRPG pg 161 - 162
Objective Reticle     ???     Aquarian Cusp     Foxhorn Strike Team   
Old Berm     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 40-45
Oraklos Dalphe     Delphi (known as Pyth prior to 617 BCE), Ancient Greece     4228 BCE to 394     Dreamers     CoRPG, pg 68; FI pg 82-87
Pethah Htakep     Hat-Keptah (Ancient Egypt)     3156 BCE to 2795 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 70-75
Phle'chea     Ibrag's Tribes     9308 BCE to 8955 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 52-57
Pie Police     Hayfork, CA, United States     1995 to 2006     Quicker?   
Plastic     South America     11560 BCE to 11429 BCE     Antiquarians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Present Moment     ???     ???     Quicker or a spiritual Retreat
Puma Plan     Qusqu, Kingdom of Cusco / Inca culture (Peru)     1207 to 1532     Engineers   
Punch In II     Unity     2162 to 2269     Engineers     FI, pg 88-91
Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent     Teotihuacan (Mexico)     161 to 298     Physicians   
Rag & Bones     London, United Kingdom     1945 - 1959     Novice Corner     Chloë Timblin
Red Carpet     then-warm expanses of Siberia and Central Asia     Virgin Era     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87, this is the most popular private party spot for high ranking Thespians
Rentes Nouvelles     Strasbourg, France     1481 to 1524     Moneychangers   
The Repository     Colon, Germany     1822 to 1937     Antiquarians     CoRPG, pg 67
Restful House     Edo, Japan     1683 to 1794     Physicians     CoRPG, pg 80
Retry     Australia     1968 to 2014     Scribes     FI, pg 82-87
The Rousers     Britain (United Kingdom)     1597 to 1616     Novice Corner to future Scribes     FI, pg 82-87
Safe House     Safehouse Nightclub, Milwaukee, WI, United States     1966-2010...     Foxhorn     safe-house dot com
Scenic View     Southern Brookhaven Township (near Brookhaven National Laboratory's particle accelerator), Upton, New York, United States (60 miles east of Manhattan, New York City )     2001 to 2020     novice (in my campaign, changed to Engineers)     vanilla "Identity is All" adventure
School of Dreaming     Thebes, Hat-Kaptah (Ancient Egypt)     2216 BCE to 891 BCE     Engineers     CoRPG, pg 70
School of Night     London (United Kingdom)     1503 to 1601     Scribes     CoRPG, pg 84
The Scribal Librarium     Jerusalem     2101 to 2400     Scribes: more Scribes here than anywhere else in the Societies     CoRPG, pg 84
Scuola Cecilia     Milano, Italy     1447 to 1620     Engineers     CoRPG, pg 70
Second Language     Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom     1963 to 2120     Thespians and Scribes     Newcastle University, School of Modern Languages
Second Star     Basle, Switzerland     …1512 to 1532…     Novice Corner operating out of Zum Goldenen Sternen (Golden Stars Inn)   
Secretary Hand     ??? - (Could be in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, United Kingdom, or maybe even Germany)     16th Century and 17th Century     Scribes     Available for GM improvisations
Seras     Yeberen (Asia Minor)     9348 BCE to 8978 BCE     Midwives     FI, pg 52-57
Serekh     Ancient Egypt     6000 BCE to 332 BCE     Antiquarians     Serekh is the word for predynastic Egyptian heraldry, a box around heiroglyphs that indicates the combined symbols are a royal name.
Seventh Belt     Amazon Basin, South America     11843 BCE to 11762 BCE     Thespians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Shih Tuan     Ch'in     260 BCE to 210 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 76-81
Shrift     Saxony     997 to 1216     Moneychangers     FI, pg 82-87
Sideways     Madagascar     11532 BCE to 10876 BCE     Quicker Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Silicon Valley     Silicon Valley, California, United States     1919 to 2103     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
Silver House of the Second Ring     Atlantis     12969 BCE and various locations in spacetime     Quicker     CoRPG, pg 82
Skivvy     West Africa     10552 BCE to 10364 BCE     Scribes Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Small Change     Mesopotamia     11246 BCE to 11243 BCE     Moneychangers Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Smithsonian Castle     Washington, D.C.     1847 to 2065     Antiquarians   
Smithy Ice Folds     Unity     2203 to 3651     Quicker and Inheritor     FI, pg 88-91
Snomalshee Lodge     Pacific Northwest of North America     4238 BCE     Individual spanners sweat lodge, arguably a Quicker corner     transitive
Soigne Démasqué     Roman Baths at Reims, France (Now gone and replaced by the Notre Dame Cathedral)     511 to 751     Midwives and Thespians,    Short-bus had rough draft, successful in this campaign
Solfjellhytte     High in the mountains of what will be Norway     …2244 BCE…     Engineers     short-bus
South Seas Bubble     London, United Kingdom     1711 to 1784     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
Speedy Danfoniad     Wales, United Kingdom     1990s     Scribes
Spelling Bee     Southern Europe     11624 BCE to 11466     Foxhorn Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Spiral Teeth Wandering     Central Asia     9824 BCE to 9399 BCE     Foxhorn     CoRPG, pg 72
Sponge     Northeast Africa     11144 BCE to 10858 BCE     Physicians Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Star Garage     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 40-45
Stratford Grammar School     King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, England (United Kingdom     1553, 1564 to 1585     Foxhorn, posing as Scribes     Protecting young William Shakespeare from narcissists.
Studio One     Caerphilly, United Kingdom     1990 - 2000     ???     Gwilym Pearson
Styx     Port Jefferson, New York, United States     1985 to 2005     novice     vanilla "Identity is All" adventure
Sublime Gate     Constantinople (Istanbul), Ottoman Empire (Turkey)     1522 to 1676     Midwives     "Sultanate of Women" era
Sunrise     Zhugguo (District Zero)     1997 to 2116     Dreamers     FI, pg 88-91
Sunstreak     Fort Meade, MD, United States     1976 to 1995     Dreamers and Quicker     CIA Project Stargate into Coordinate Remote Viewing
Surveillance State     London, UK     1991 to 2046     Foxhorn     Starting with IRA bombs in 1992, London sets up a Ring of Steel and slowly transitions into a Police State. These guys take advantage of everything that entails.
Swap Meet     Gary, Indiana, United States     1933 to 2019     Antiquarians     CoRPG, pg 67; FI pg 82-87
Swordplay     Higgins Armory Museum, Worchester, MA, United States     1978 to 2027     Antiquarians sword and armor collection   
Tangent 1     Atlantis     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Quicker, plus Inheritor/Late Aquarian     FI, pg 40-45
Tenez! (Take that!)     a monastery somewhere in France     around 1200     amusements corner? novice?     Tennis was invented by French Monks, who'd shout "Tenez!" ("Take that!") while playing. By 1200 AD, there were over 2000 tennis courts in france. Early courts were hour-glass shaped.
Tennis Anyone?     Lisle's Tennis Court, London, United Kingdom     1661 - 1705     Thespians   
Theatreland     West End, London, United Kingdom     1967 – 2012     Thespians   
Thiss Tered Aga     The Nurisen     8408 BCE to 7790 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 52-57
Threadneedle     London, United Kingdom     102 to 2140     Antiquarians and Moneychangers Service Corner     Lord Quentin Whitbread
Three Cocks     Strasbourg     1352-1354, 1547-1574, 1838-1843     Engineers     Strasbourg Astronomical Clock
Thrn Ghedl     Brudhlk (Central Europe)     9014 BCE to 8785 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 52-57
Tiger     Northern Africa     10261 BCE to 10021 BCE     Foxhorn Waystation     FI, pg 46-51
Tour la Jetée     Paris, France     1555 to 1720     Novice and Foxhorn, mentor is Jeanne D'Arc     CoRPG, pg 184, further developed in Short-bus
Trade Secrets     Atlantis     12969 BCE to 12191 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 40-45
Tui Lung     Hsien Chen     999 to 1317     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Tulpen Knop     Amsterdam, United Netherlands     … 1634 to 1638 …     Novice Corner   
Twelve Lucky Apes     British sector of Shanghai, Manchu China     1850 to 1911     Quicker     FI, pg 82-87
Umbris Dei (the shades of God)     Espana     419 to 710     Novice growing into mixed Fraternal     FI pg 86-87
UMDNJ - University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey     Newark, NJ, United States     1984 to 2133     Physicians     CoRPG, pg 80
Undercroft     Aberystwyth, Wales, (United Kingdom)     1110 to 1221, 1282 to 1294, 1307 to 1408     Engineers   
Unt Stenel'a (“Light Ascending”)     Hehang Bei, Ohistla (Mexico)     7464 BCE to 7320 BCE     Quicker     FI pg 61-63
Uroczystości     Gdansk, Poland     late 1500s, early 1600s     Novice corner     translated from Polish it means roughly "celebration", and is pronounced oo-row-shih-stow-see
Ut Torabata     Heghur     3571 BCE to 3314 BCE     Moneychangers     FI, pg 70-75
Vadistokli Arkun     somewhere in the Baltic     5236 BCE     Novice Corner     short-bus
Valves     Great Harbor     12970 BCE to 12191 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 40-45
Ventura Rosehips     Hollywood, CA, United States     1890 to 2007     Thespians     CoRPG, pg 87
Vielavayan culture     Vielavayana / Vayana     6120 BCE to 5583 BCE     Whole culture that's in league with Antedesertium.     FI 64-69
Villa Lewaro     Just North of New York City     1919 - 1931     Personal residence of A'Lelia Walker
Wandering Stars     Gypsy caravan across Europe     16th Century     Novice Corner on wheels  
The Watchman Society     London, United States     …1843…     Quicker     "Plum Pudding and Other Such" adventure pdf
We Shall Be Spartacus     Berlin, Germany     January 1919     Thespians     Rosa Luxembourg
Weekly Paper     Strasbourg     1605-1681     Scribes     Johann Carolus
Whalton     Philadelphia, PA, United States     1883 to 2077     Moneychangers     CoRPG, pg 77
When the Silence Speaks     Asia     ???     ???   
Windsor Watchers     London, United States     1917 - 1997     Midwives   
The Womb     Kish, Sumeria     …3241 BCE     Dreamers     short-bus
Words Under Water     Somewhere in Poland     around 1580 to 1670     Thespians & Scribes   
Worshipful Company of Barbers     London     1308 to 1940     Physicians     Barber-Surgeon's Guild
Yasdge     Tderegan     6532 BCE to 6086 BCE     Scribes     FI, pg 58-63
Yed dal-heht     Indus valley     7644 BCE to 7235 BCE     Foxhorn     FI, pg 58-63
Yeet     Singapore     2099 to 2140     Antiquarians     FI, pg 88-91
Yenmurta (“Moments of the Moon”)     Ethuvan I     2990 BCE to 2914 BCE     Novice Corner     FI pg 74-75
You'll Catch More With Honey     Keokuk, Iowa United States     1824 to 1849     Antiquarians engaged in the Greatest Game     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_War
Yssisha     Ikarne     4068 BCE to 3772 BCE     Thespians     FI, pg 70-75
Zedabek     Durdeka     10172 BCE to 9776 BCE     Engineers     FI, pg 52-57
Zoom     Chosen     2110 to 2210     Physicians     FI, pg 88-91
Zsidi nhi     Zsidi     8348 BCE to 8033 BCE     Quicker     FI, pg 52-57