The bizarre stuff for your B&E adventure.
Ten weirdo things in people’s bedrooms
You scratch around and find…
Roll 1d10 or choose.
1. DEODORANT SPRAY CAN
A can of Old Spice that one hundred minutes after being sprayed on a surface turns into super glue. It reverts back to Old Spice one hundred minutes later.
2. A REINFORCED AND WELDED-SHUT METAL BRIEF CASE
If the briefcase is eventually opened it holds a white pages for Corpus Christi, Texas. If investigated the area codes are wrong (seven digits) and all the people listed are all dead.
3. A WATER PISTOL
Any water in the water pistol is transmuted into bleach when someone within earshot says “Klitzoplatz”.
4. GQ MAGAZINE
The magazine is from December 1999. All the pages are adverts – not one article or publishers box. Although similar, no page holds the same advert twice. Ads also add and remove themselves at whim.
5. MINERAL WATER
A bottle of Torgny Glacier Spring Water that never runs dry and its temperature is always 1 degree Centigrade. If it is drunk before it warms up too much all the drinkers Body Skills increase by +1%. The increase functions once only and is permanent. The bottle continues to refill.
6. A KEYRING AND CAR ALARM BEEPER
A little plastic electronic door locker with a VW ignition-key. When the toggle is pressed, whatever car it was pointed at automatically locks the car’s central locking mechanism. Even if the car doesn’t have a central locking mechanism. Even if the car is a stripped wreck propped up on bricks. The electronic key doesn’t unlock the doors though. If the car doesn’t have any locking mechanism, it won’t lock.
If the object can plausibly have remote central locking the electronic key will lock it.
7. A HANGING MOBILE
A colourfully painted baby’s mobile made from thread and bird bones.
8. A SCRAPBOOK OF RECIPES
A scrapbook cookbook made by gumming recipes down on pages. Hand-written on a Post-it Note between the recipes for Clam Lasagne and Beef Brownie Burgers, is the Spittle Blessing Rite, a minor ritual. It takes is one experience point to memorise the ritual – spit on the weapon, recite fifteen lines of Latin poetry, and a magical skill roll.
Any weapon that can have +3 damage bonuses (hand-held weapons) has the damage bonuses increased to +5. The effect is permanent. Any damage that is not hand-to-hand is unaffected by the ritual but still registers as enchanted.
9. A NEWSPAPER CUT OUT
An ad out of the classifieds, it reads: HARD & WET! BOYS & GIRLS! DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR IN 10 MINUTES! $1.00! NOT AND PENNY MORE! NOT A PENNY LESS! PHONE NOW! 0-888-555-4183!
Scribbled around the note, in red ink is: “This is the third time this month. This damn nest keeps popping up. Now they’re not answering my calls.”
10. HAND-LABELLED COMPUTER DISKETTE
It reads Danger – The Yellow Sign Virus! There is one file on the diskette called the Yellow Sign it takes up 182 KB in 9 files in 3 folders. One of the files is YSIGN.EXE.
#9 is perfect. Strange, complex, disturbingly unexplained and creepy as hell.
Glad you like it.
Do some of your own and submit them. Maybe we’ll get enough for a full d100 list.
And that would rock!
Later,
Chris.
I was looking for Yellow Sign and King in yellow References when I found your #10. It’s evocative, but not too much developed (Not at all). I would like to know more, if it could be possible. For the rest of the list, I think it’s pretty original, but I´m not sure about the usefulness in in-game situations.
I pretty much wrote up the items as magic exhaust – the stuff that pops up after unnatural events.
All the items are there to flavour your game or provide plot hooks.
Maybe the Yellow Sign Virus makes computers link up to carcosa.rpg.net a terrifying computer game that starts impacting in the players real lives if they do finish the quests and puzzles in the game. The game is always one up with a deadlier puzzle.
Think of The Ring but as an on-line computer RPG.
Cheers,
Chris.
I also did the King in Yellow playing card deck as one of these ten random items.
Chris.
Streets of Carcosa
increasingly well-known MMORPG
Everyone’s been talking about it for weeks, anticipating the release and stuff, but you never heard of it before the day you got bored and ran YSIGN.EXE. The day the game was released.
It’s got the best graphics you’ve ever seen. Better than real life.
The “virus” just opened Explorer, showed you a pop-up ad for the game, deleted itself.
You’ve played it for 60 hours at a stretch. Nothing outiside the game can distract you while you’re playing: not a bad smell, not your house burning down around you, not even serious physical injury so long as you still have an uninterrupted veiw of the screen and can operate the keyboard.
The best part is, it’s cheap. Cheaper than free.