RPG: Image

Artist unknown. Google Image Search came up blank.

Cross reference between A Colder War by Stross and Crooked by Grossman.

“Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now.

Crooked by Austin Grossman

Delta Green: Vietnam Highlands

From Dispatches by Michael Herr

Because the Highlands of Vietnam are spooky, unbearably spooky, spooky beyond belief. They are a run of erratic mountain ranges, gnarled valleys, jungled ravines and abrupt plains where Montagnard villages cluster. thin and disappear as the terrain steepens. The Montagnards in all of their tribal components make up the most primitive and mysterious portion of the Vietnamese population, a population that has always confused Americans even in its most Westernized segments…
…in the Highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the nighttime cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off. It is ghost-story country,…
Oh, that terrain! The bloody, maddening uncanniness of it! …
Spooky. Everything up there was spooky, and it would have been that way even if there had been no war. You were there in a place where you didn’t belong, where things were glimpsed for which you would have to pay and where things went unglimpsed for which you would also have to pay, a place where they didn’t play with the mystery but killed you straight off for trespassing.

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Now that is some Lovecraftian description! That’s where you’re some out of contact LURP team trying to track NVA movements coming in across the Laotian border and you stumble on some forgotten, some LONG FORGOTTEN temple and then shit goes sideways.

Back in my high school days, I actually wrote something like that for a creative writing class. Had just finished re-reading Dispatches for the umptyumth time. Main character was a Green Beanie working with a Montagnard team.

Video: Comet

This is stunning and amazing. Real deep space footage. Awe inspiring.

the Comet from Christian Stangl on Vimeo.

From Vimeo:

In 2016 an exciting mission was ended. 
The Rosetta spacecraft made its final manouver. A controlled hard-landing on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67p).
Before that Rosetta accompanied the Comet for more then 2 years. It researched valuable scientific data, brought a lander on to the comets surface and took a vast number of pictures.

2017 Esa released over 400000 images from Rosettas comet mission. 
Based on these material Motion Designer Christian Stangl and Composer Wolfgang Stangl worked together to create this shortfilm.
The sequences are digitally enhanced real-footage from the probe.

RPG Music: Ambience

We’re talking 50 thirty minute tracks by Michaël Ghelfi ! Background, non-intrusive audio for such places like:
Medieval Village
Swamps 
Back Alley Tavern

And this is just volume 1! If you’re running any sort of table top FRPG, these would be a great investment.

Person of interest: Lafcadio Hearn

Two articles by authors who I really admire and respect on a topic that sounds very fascinating.

Lafcadio Hearn.

The Many Lives of Lafcadio Hearn
The first is by Andrei Codrescu


Hearn’s ultra-realist exposés were drenched in the wounded sensibility of a writer with a merciless eye who had Greek myths and Celtic fairy tales in his blood.

The second is by Bruce Sterling.


–Hearn was your basic congenital SF saint-perv, but in a nineteenth century environment. Hearn was, in brief, a rootless oddball with severe personality problems and a pronounced gloating taste for the horrific and bizarre.


From SCIENCE FICTION EYE #6 CATSCAN 6 “Shinkansen”