The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Smogg

Dr. Smogg is a rich bitch industrialist who made his fortune in heavy manufacturing. Still, his methods are wasteful and produce many toxic by-products, which he disposes of in environmentally irresponsible ways. His next scheme is to pump massive amounts of toxic smog into the atmosphere from the smokestacks of his factory. Once airborne, the pollution will condense into solid waste particles and rain down upon the unsuspecting countryside. 

Fortunately, Professor Rusty Sauernoggin is on the case! Rusty Sauernoggin has dedicated his life to finding ways to transform toxic waste into good and useful products. One blast from his rooftop "Smog-o-matic" ray gun and the cloud will rain down delicious sour candy balls... an outcome Dr. Smogg is less than pleased about!

unpublished blog post

in an attempt to declutter my ttrgp space at home i've decided to burn some old campaign books and transcribe some bits i may reuse. 

the following is from a small thousand thousand islands campaign. i'd link to their zines online but i'm pretty sure everything has been removed by the creators.

The zines require a lot of preparation to run smoothly so here's some shit I prepped for the sessions I ran.

Late Feather Scale Village NPCs:

1. Wet Beak (Snipe, Bird-folk) - red tattoos, avoids moonlight because it makes their feathers glow with cult like runes, they are here to establish bleaching hexes, they're a saboteur of the "Ingido God"

2. Paw Dew - dancer (Man-folk) - missing a hand, harassed by a trio

3. Twelve Roaring Tooth - artist (Monitor-folk) - toothless

4. Ear Wall (she/her) - girlfriend ran off with the drummer Paw (Man-Folk) 

5. Rum What - clammer (Man-folk) - covered in suck marks (like from octopus tentacles I guess, "suck marks" is straight from the zine), bleeding, wants revenge (this part was from the zine too, I guess they want revenge for the octopus sucking on them).

I started to write number 6 on the table here but then thought "i don't really care about any of this" and now I'm going outback to burn some notebooks.

the signalwave series part two: Top "Signalwave" Albums to "Liminal Horror" to (2024)

 

My best guess is that the album cover is a YouTube screenshot.

tracking by antenna decay (released February 21, 2024)

Is there a constant beeping in the background, or is it tinnitus? I take my left air pod out, and the beeping stops, but now track two is playing, and I still hear the beeping. I checked my surroundings and removed the air pod again, and I realized it was the album’s heart monitor.

The first two songs are piano and nice and short, but track 3, “found,” is where the album begins to shine. It sounds like a slowed-down oldie with a full band (strings, winds, drums, etc).

Track 4, “slow,” has big Weather Channel vibes (a staple of the genre) with its piano tones, electric guitar riffs, and jazz flute! It also begins what I’m going to call The Trilogy, which, if you put all the single-word song titles together, makes “Slow Days Fading.” The album is also tagged as “Sentimental Transmission.” I recommend that fans of the soft rock bands Chicago and Bread start here, as well as anyone limited to time. The album sounds like a tragic love affair, good times and bad. It felt like the pace of the beeping varied at times.

Track 7, “worn,” is a melody I know from somewhere, and research is still ongoing.

Track 8, “gone,” I recommend to fans of dunegon synth and cottagecore.

The whole time, I was waiting for the beeping to cease or remain in the steady drone of death you see in the movies, but it never came. Which is fine; you live another day.

The album description is like the gray text box from an adventure:

viewing the memories of a soon-to-be-gone tape.

---

you walk into the attic.

the dust dances in the air around you.

there it sits, in the exact spot where you once stood, sun-bleached.

you feel a sense of familiarity.

you walk into your bedroom.

the smell of your past greets you.

there it lies, as if it were waiting for you, wishing for your return.

you choose to face yourself.

you walk into the living room.

the carpet feels softer than usual.

there it lies, gone in a moment, never to be seen again.

you watch as it all passes.

Many artists will write some micro-fiction, or poetry.

I love that the artist is Floridian and works for a government space agency.

***

I’ve battling a bit of scope creep with finishing the next draft of my submission to the Liminal Horror Twisted Classics Jam.

Writing and sketching the writing and sketching writing.

I drew this after writing, “Her Bible is white, and she holds it in both hands, like a big sandwich.” When I need a break from the writing and frustrations and it's too hot to skateboard, I’ll draw the writing.

i ran the chair by zach hazard vaupen ask me anything!

Play reports are so exhausting to write. This will be brief.

Two friends and I met up and played Liminal Horror the last two days for about an hour each session. It was my first time running Liminal Horror, and it was their first time playing. I didn't prep anything and hadn't even read all of the rooms prior, but I invited Bolt Neck Possum to play, who joined the call but just as a listener while working and answering a few questions I had on rules. 

They both rolled the same result on the "What Brought You to the House" table: "Greed made you into a fugitive, and you needed a place to lay low." 

At one point, Jason went into the air duct, which led to a heated room. He sat in the chair and teleported between the bathroom walls. He lost all control and became an NPC that started to break through the walls. 

Peyton heard the thuds and went to investigate and help their friend, but after using the rock hammer to break the drywall, they saw their friend's eyes were solid black and abandoned them.

In the end, Peyton drove off, but curiosity took over, and he turned around to dig up that grave he saw in the garden. 

The Chair is easy to run and incorporate into your ongoing campaign or a great start to a new one. I think it took us 2.5 hours to complete the scenario. If I were to run this again, I would change the NPCs into something else—another type of creature, perhaps, or at least reskinned. The creep factor in this one is easy to achieve, and it has a few things players who like puzzles or problem-solving will enjoy. 

If I run Liminal Horror for the same group again, I hope we can continue where we left off. 

Thorn: I didn't realize the fallout card for this game wasn't included in the pamphlet pdf, even though I downloaded and read the card a few days before the game and had the card open in a window during the game. So we didn't roll on the new fallouts in The Chair, which is kind of a bummer. I just totally spaced. 

Rose:  I pulled a few things from Gonin that I used in the sessions. Like starting the players off sitting in a car in the rain. Turning the whole fugitive hook into a heist gone wrong, as well as using the film to add more to the recent grave in the garden in the adventure.

Other news: I've been reading a lot of manga this summer (I recommend Hideout [short and more traditional horror and psychological] by Masasumi Kakizaki, and Paranoia Street [a more twisted slice of life and the first story was my favorite in this collection] by Shintarō Kago). 

 

The night before the game, I watched Gonin. It's a yakuza film from 1995 directed by Takashi Ishii, who began his career making outlaw comics. Beat Takashi is awesome in the movie, as he always is. 

Top "Signalwave" Albums to "Liminal Horror" to (2024)

 Warning: reading this post may result in spending money on cassettes, vinyl, CDs, and MINIDISCS.

“Signalwave” and “Broken Transmission” are subgenres of “Slushwave,” which has been one of the best musical discoveries I’ve made this year.

They’re the soundtrack to decay.

I think of them as concept albums portraying memories of good days long gone.

It’s what Liches listen to when playing Second Life online to feel human again.

These artists have their entire catalogs hugely discounted on Bandcamp.

On the other hand, the Liminal Horror Twisted Classics Jam has begun.

So what’s so great about “Signalwave?”

Look at CT57’s discography.

Their album art is a ready-to-go d10 table you can insert into whatever “Twisted Classic” you’re working on. You even got an NPC in the top right corner.

All of their albums are amazing.

My favorite release is “Distant Sounds of Desolation.” Released March 22, 2024, It sounds like what I picture corpse dance lessons to be. May the track list be your spark table. You can purchase any of their albums for $1 or their entire discography for $6.

The songs aren't too short but aren't too long, and the pace is great. The tracks blend smoothly into each other to give you enough time to "meditate." I like that there are no commercial ads. The melodic vocals in "Weeping Willow" are haunting. I feel like this album has a lot of up-and-down movement, like the lovely pipes in "Memories of Good Days Long Gone." Maybe it's not even pipes; it's got chimes or wood blocks. 

Let’s look at another release from this year. Dead Hues by Localdecay. Released April 3, 2024, are you starting to see a pattern of the genre yet?

The first song is a fucking banger. It just rips you right into the rhythm. Pulsating piano with saxophone and fucking railroading drums. Just all drenched with reverb. You could work out to this one. Then it ends with a raven-sounding synth that caws, and I fall into the track "Analog Decay." I feel like this is what it sounds like to be in a hot spring in Iceland. With the mud. If you see foggy power lines on a cover, it's a banger.

街灯 by ビリヤード場 (Street light by Billiard Hall) Released February 2, 2024, this one is great because not only does it introduce UFOs (or whatever the government refers to them as now) to our countdown, but we finally get some vocals sampled. Sampling is mostly all “Signalwave” is.

The track titles are listed in Japanese, so I’d like to translate them here to use as a spark table after you purchase their album.

1. i'm still wearing the shirt you gave me

2. a midnight walk in the middle of nowhere

3. the streetlights shine a subtle blue

4. don't look at me

5. i shouldn’t

6. bird

7. starlight / city of light bulbs

8. it’s getting late…

I recommend viewing your “Twisted Classic” through multiple lenses, like a copy of All Dogs Go to Heaven on VHS. However, the VCR is connected to a projector, and there’s no screen. It’s playing on a garage door, being filmed by a Sony Nex 6 camera that’s had its sensor converted to infrared and streaming to the internet.

Next week, we’ll sink our brain fangs deeper into “Signalwave” and “Liminal Horror.” I promise to challenge your tastes.

Until Next Time, Consider the following inspiration:

Outlaw Comics:
Battalion: The Return of the Living Dead, or more recently, Junji Ito’s adaption of the Lighthouse, among many other “Twisted Classics.” Battalion is a bootleg manga released in a Japanese magazine at the time of the American Film’s Japan release. This blog takes a deep dive into it. Manga has filled my summer reading.

Vacuum Decay. All five issues of this horror comic by various artists are free to read online or can be purchased via their website. It’s worth reading each issue for the overarching “Twisted Classic” take on The Simpsons, “Shadows Over Springfield,” which is also available to purchase standalone.

Literature:
The Sword-wielding Statue of Liberty in Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika. Kafka never visited America, but he saw many pictures and wrote his own twisted version. The ebook is free to read, and it’s hilarious.

codex r review

I recommend reading high. 

The attention span is shrunken, but the focus is heightened and very intense. 

For me, the reading experience becomes more vertical. 

In this case, I like to read books of a certain depth. 

You want to avoid reading something you've seen before because you're absorbing things more sentence by sentence. It will be a smooth ride down if you do, and it will lead to no exciting experience.

You want an experience where there are a lot of hand and foot holes, but some of them are jagged, some will cut you up, and some will require you to leap from one spot to another over the chasm, and you have to trust it, but you may also die.

Codex R is among The Top 5 OSR Zines to Read When You're High as Balls.

When I first read this zine, it was hard to position myself because I was utterly mystified. 

Its page on Itch.io describes it as:

"A kaleidoscopic excursion in space-time, cataloging headless farmers, party deities, apocalyptic critters, bad hair days and totalitarian practices." 

It doesn't take many pages to excite and activate some unused neural pathways in the brain when reading Codex R.

It's a catalog of an entire culture in an alternate reality. It has 46 objects or beasts (I consider this zine a bestiary), each with its own full-color illustration that invites you to understand them. They pull you in and lead you around with their descriptions, like a tour guide (sometimes it's like encyclopedia entries). The people, the objects, the places, but still familiar enough. 

I think it's intended to be used as an "in-game" artifact. 

Codex R is an endless source of fascination. Definitely buy yourself a copy and check out what else the creators have made: here and here. 

im a fucking thrill mimic btw