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Good evening Arkheologorodok! This is Lara Kiseleva of Orbita News bring you this weeks news round up! Let's get to it!
Now is the second week of campaigning and it's looking to be a tight race! Polls can't quite agree who is currently in the lead, but all agree it's either Governor Yevseyev's Refurbishment Party or Radinka Menshchikova's Bright Future Party. Both are riding high on recent crime suppression and economic initiatives respectively, more on both later.
Coming in a close third is Inna Illina's Faith & Works Party, polling high with active Orthodox Christians as well as religious Central Asian workers. Promises for both expansion of city aide services as well as upholding public morality finding support across religious lines. Well, except for the atheists, but no one cares about them anyway.
Ervin Tsitrusovyye's youth oriented New National Bolshevik Party of Eurasia is showing a better account for itself than expected, managing to very effectively mobilize the youth vote. Whether or not this will be enough to carry them further into a position of influence isn't yet clear, but those kids are showing some real enthusiasm. It's good to see the youth getting off those phones and doing something for once!
Finally, Ivan Ligachev and the Communist Party are remaining at a very stable 5th place. Unionized skilled workers are proving to be solidly backing their man, a sizeable block that could put Ligachev in position of king maker, or maybe spoiler.
When we last left the Archaeology Dorks, they had just emerged from the underground frontier into the polyclinic's domed cavern only too see the building consumed by flams, a large group of shuffling figures silhouetted by the inferno.
Out of sight from the arsonists, the party decides to observe and listen in before doing anything hasty. They're quickly able to ascertain that nine figures, all but the smoking woman in black robes in undead, and of those three are intelligent and willing participants. Quite a few of the shuffling husks look to be commuters killed in the subway bombings of a few weeks ago, along with a few skeletons, and a teenage girl with slits down her forearms and feral hatred in her eyes is the second in command. She reports to the smoking woman that two of them managed to slide through some cracks before they set fire to the whole place and begs to be allowed to start a hunt. The smoking woman calmly, sweetly speaks to her as a mother would to a daughter, saying that all the evidence of the transaction was destroyed, and the two who escaped will "get what's coming to them in time, like everyone else."
Here's a little tome I cooked up when helping someone brainstorm for items to put in a green box during their run of Impossible Landscapes. I based a lot of this on previously held historical knowledge and information from Brett Kramer's free pdf Notes on the Turner Codex, as published by Sentinel Hill Press. I highly recommend you go check them out.
You can access the Google Documents version here:
A slim leather bound book with yellowing paper, the diary shows signs of water damage but is, for the most part, legible. Beginning on April 12, 1855, the journal identifies the author as one Augustus Castaigne of Natchez, Mississippi, a southern gentleman, member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and self-described adventurer. The first few passages consist of Augustus detailing his early life as a scion of a slave holding plantation family, his passionate belief in the “Southern Cause” and “Southern Rights,” in Manifest Destiny, and his own destiny to be an integral part for the furtherance of all three. The description is immensely self aggrandizing, but what concrete facts that can be gleaned from it are that his family was in massive debt to creditors, his first and only marriage ended with the death of his wife Camilla of Yellow Fever in 1844, and that in 1855 he has traveled to San Francisco with his 12 year old daughter Cassandra to meet with the filibuster William Walker with the intention of joining his private military invasion of Nicaragua.
The entries from May 3, 1855 to April of 1857 detail the travel of himself and roughly 60 other mercenaries to Nicaragua, the subsequent battles, the establishment of Walker’s Republic of Nicaragua, and finally the losing war with the Central American Alliance. Augusts spares no effort in vividly describing his role in the battles and the subsequent administration, much of which to anyone with a History or Military Science (Land) of 40% will find highly unlikely. However, the reader will also note an increasing sort of mania in Augustus’s writing, as well as his notably lurid descriptions of battlefield violence.
The diary takes a notable turn after the fall of San Juan del Sur on April 17, 1857 to Central American troops. Castaigne elects to flee into the jungle with his daughter. The entries from this point onwards get increasingly fantastical, and a reader with Medicine of 60% or a Psychotherapy of 40% can conclude he is rapidly entering delirium, likely from malaria induced fever. He eventually describes finding an ancient temple complex, with several pages dedicated to his sketches of the temple as well as the strange glyphs he finds hammered onto “plates of a alloy forgotten to men of this darkling era.” Any skill rating of Archaeology, Anthropology, or History above base will note all of these are reminiscent of the ancient Maya, but an Archeaology of 40, Anthropology of 60, or a History of 70 will recognize substantial divergences from the norm of Mayan architecture and that the glyphs match no know form of Mayan writing. An Occult of 70 will instead recognize these glyphs to be similar to that of Muvian High-Naacal as described in the much derided Otto Dostmann’s Remnants of Lost Empires. Agents who have read Rites of the Ancient Maya Revealed (aka the Turner Codex) by Maplethorpe Turner will provide the same information about the glyphs, as well as confirming the temple to be consistent with his descriptions of the worship of Kaiwan, “The Invisible One”, “The Unspeakable”, “Lord of the Great Sign”, and “Whisperer of Truth”.
Augusts final entries are dominated by him decrying the folly of the Founding Fathers in abandoning monarchy, saying that the “Golden Empire of America is a throne upon which a king anointed by the Lord of the Great Sign must sit.” He then meticulously details his ambitious plan for conquering Nicaragua from his redoubt, and then from there the entire continent, upon which with his daughter he will “found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen, one that shall produce history as others produce plays."
Agents reading this diary in full with a Military Science of 60% and sufficiently enough King in Yellow corruption as decided by the keeper will see the utter brilliance of Augustus’s strategy as well as be able to deduce how to get to his “temple redoubt”, all it would need to start are a handful of armed men and the right leader…
The PC (or more likely at this point, NPC) trying to enact this plan get a +20% to all military related rolls (artillery, navigate land, military science, etc.) while operating out of the temple redoubt. GMs can either choose to use this as a scenario hook (someone who read the diary operating as a KiY Colonel Kurtz in the jungles of Central America) or as a poignant conclusion to a King in Yellow focused campaign (like Impossible Landscapes).
The Diary of Augustus Castaigne 1855-1857
By Augusts Castaigne
In English, study time: 2 weeks. Artillery +2%, Firearms +1%, Military Science (Land) +3%, Occult +4%, Survival 1%, Unnatural +3%, Muvian Hieretical Naacal +1%; SAN loss 1D4+1
