Things from the Flood

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If the idea of moving scene by scene makes Things from the Flood feel as if it has a TV series vibe to it, then it might be interesting to know that it has a ‘GM mode’ that might make it feel a bit like a computer game. You can run Things from the Flood with episodic Mysteries. This is the style that most D&D groups would use; effectively chaining scenarios together under the wider auspices of a campaign. In Things from the Flood, you can use the ‘Mystery Landscape’ approach instead. It’s not always possible to prevent floods, but it is often possible to minimize flood damage. Structures around rivers, lakes, and the sea can contain flood waters. Levees, runoff canals, and reservoirs can stop water from overflowing. The sequel to Simon Stålenhag’s previous art book Tales from the Loop, set in The '90s as the particle accelerator causes strange, grotesque phenomena that ultimately results in a disaster and the Loop’s ultimate dismantlement. A spinoff set in America, The Electric State, was released in 2018.

There are few places on Earth where flooding is not a concern. Any area where rain falls is vulnerable to floods, though rain is not the only cause. How floods form Natural and artificial reservoirs help prevent flooding. Natural reservoirs are basins where fresh water collects. Man-made reservoirs collect water behind a dam. They can hold more water in times of heavy rainfall. In April 2011, the government of Ethiopia announced plans for a large dam on the Blue Nile River. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which would be the largest dam in Africa, would create a reservoir capable of holding 67 billion cubic meters (2.4 trillion cubic feet) of water. The dam would prevent flooding downstream and provide the nation with hydroelectric energy.As you might hope, what brings this RPG to life in a visual way is the fantastic art from Simon Stalenhag (and Reine Rosenberg). Usually, I would credit the artists for successfully bringing the game creator’s world to life. It is the other way around for Things from the Flood, the exciting world created by Stalenhag and which we can see in the game’s illustrations, is done justice by the RPG design and considerations. Speaking of numbers, something notable about most RPGs is combat; Things From The Flood is almost without a combat system, and even then it's more about a scene of threat, known as a Trouble, that the player characters find themselves in. Tales From The Loop had an exemption from death for your character, given you play a 10-15 year old. Things From The Flood keeps much of the same mechanics but now gone is that plot armour. Things from the Flood comes with a 4 adventure long campaign that takes up a good chunk of the book. Each adventure can be ran independently, though the fourth one might require a bit more work to do so. The adventures themselves are not too long, and each one can, in theory, be done in a single 4-5h session, though most groups will likely take longer (my group took 2-3 sessions per adventure). It feels like the adventures were written with the Swedish location in mind first and foremost, and the US location mentions were added after the fact.

Rebuilding Johnstown took years—the bodies of some victims were not found until 20 years later. Although the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club failed to maintain the dam, members of the club successfully argued that the disaster was an “ act of God.” The] mix of science fiction and real world pop-culture nostalgia is instantly compelling, but there are layers to The Electric State that take the story beyond surface value. . . . In a way, it is an extremely American story, bringing together themes like the intersection of war and technology; fire-and-brimstone religion and its effect on LGBT youth; families separated by great physical distance while still being a part of the same country."— Los Angeles Times on The Electric State China's Yellow River valley has seen some of the world's worst floods in the past 100 years. The 1931 Yellow River flood is one of the most devastating natural disasters ever recorded—almost a million people drowned, and even more were left homeless. In August 2010, Pakistan experienced some of the worst floods of the century. The annual monsoon, on which Pakistani farmers and consumers rely, was unusually strong. Tons of water drenched the nation. The Indus River burst its banks. Because the river flows almost directly through the narrow country, almost all of Pakistan was affected by flooding.After the flood at The Loop, the machine cancer came. This is a weird condition that effects electronics and machines that causes them to sprout strange brown growths and fall into disrepair. It’s spreading. If that was not bad enough, many machines started showing weird fleshy growths. This phenomena was dubbed the “machine cancer”, and it resulted in the destruction of a lot of machines. The exact cause of the machine cancer could not be determined, but some point their fingers at KRAFTA, the Swedish corporation who were tasked with cleaning up around the loop and recover any data. Others have even more outlandish ideas, like this being some kind of space virus. No matter the cause though, the machine cancer keeps spreading.

Combat forms can strike with devastating force, move with tremendous speed and agility, and jump to great heights, displaying physical abilities far beyond those of the host organism while it was alive. Engineers may also intentionally flood areas to prevent the possibility of worse flooding. When heavy rains caused the Souris River to flood in 2011, for example, the water level nearly reached the top of the Alameda Reservoir in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Canada. Faced with the prospect of catastrophic flooding if the entire dam broke, engineers chose to release huge amounts of water. The reservoir remained intact, but the release contributed to massive floods in both Saskatchewan and the U.S. city of Minot, North Dakota. A popular story concerns a young boy from the town of Haarlem, Netherlands, who notices a leak in the town's dike. The Spaarne River is flowing through a tiny hole in the barrier, threatening to flood the town. The young boy plugs the leak with his finger, and stays there all night. Adults find him the next morning and permanently repair the leak. Although first written about by an American (Mary Mapes Dodge, in her book Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates), the story is from the Netherlands. In the Interstellar stage, the Flood take control of space-faring technology which they use to consume the local star system. Subsequently, they spread throughout the galaxy to infect more hosts. [3]Over ten million years before present day, a civilization of supremely advanced beings known as the Precursors thrived in the cosmos. Having assumed the Mantle - the responsibility for the guardianship of all life in the galaxy - they seeded numerous worlds with life, bringing forth a wide range of sentient species across the galaxy. Under their guardianship, numerous intelligent species developed and flourished, including the Forerunners and humanity. The Precursors would eventually choose humanity to be the rightful successors to their Mantle, while judging the Forerunners unworthy. Refusing to accept their creators' judgment, the Forerunners staged a massive rebellion against the Precursors. [8] One of the many things I like about Things from the Flood is its native and elegant system to let GMs toggle up the threat and danger levels. When the core mechanic is merely a bunch of d6s with a single 6 being needed then it straightforward to layer over complexities. The adventures do a good job at showing what kind of things can be done with Things from the Flood, and are easy to run and modify. There’s also enough support in the adventures for someone who’s not an experienced GM that they would probably not be too hard to do either. Some parts of the adventures can get pretty dark though, and they deal with things that could potentially hit close to home for some people, so a GM might want to keep that in mind when running these and keep an eye on how their players react. The Flood changes everything. Not just flesh. Space itself is infected. That's the power the Precursors once had... isn't it?" — The Ur-Didact to the IsoDidact. [69] The Flood grew exponentially, spreading from system to system with the intent to infect the Forerunner population, not to wage war with Forerunner battle groups which were poorly adapted to such strategy. As the Flood spread further, entire planetary biospheres were converted to Flood biomass. These planet-sized key minds, locuses of Gravemind intelligence that began to outcompete the Forerunners through raw computational might alone. [23] [24] The logic plague continued to take on more adaptive forms, defying all defenses the Forerunners devised and eventually spreading itself between AIs and data networks. As the Forerunners relied significantly on AI automation in combat, this severely hindered Forerunner military efforts against the Flood. Adding to these difficulties was the disturbing revelation that the Flood was capable of manipulating Precursor technology: towards the close of the war, the Flood began to appropriate Precursor megastructures such as the star roads, wielding the previously-inert strands to pummel Forerunner planets and naval forces. This ability was a result of the Flood's Precursor origins; being corrupted Precursors, they could tap into neural physics and activate Precursor artifacts. The proliferation of high-level key mind nodes also enabled the Flood to use the Precursors' neural physics-based superluminal transit, which in turn encumbered Forerunner slipspace travel. Towards the end of the infestation, Forerunners noted that space itself seemed to become hostile and unpleasant from mere perception, an artefact of Flood-based Neural Physics. [23] The Halos' firing [ edit ] Main article: Great Purification

Later character advancement is straightforward. It costs 5xp to raise any skill by 1. Attributes don’t change. All characters get at least 1xp per session, with the possibility of up to 5, but I would guess characters will generally pull in at least 3 (participation, learning something new, and one of three other options). A flood occurs when water inundates land that's normally dry, which can happen in a multitude of ways. In The Loop Universe of the 90s life is far bleaker than it was in the 80s. The innocence and wonder of being a kid are gone, and it has been replaced by the angst and drama of being a teen. People walk on a catwalk in a flooded St. Mark's Square during a period of seasonal high water in Venice, Italy, on October 29, 2018. Photograph by Manuel Silvestri, Reuters Impacts of flooding

In Things from the Flood, characters are known as teens, and they’re easy to generate. Teens have four attributes; body, tech, heart and mind. Those four attributes each have three skills. That’s not quite it. Fleshing the teen PCs out are drives, shames, relationships, hooks and anchors. These are all story hooks, plot twists in waiting and reasons why the Teens are hanging around together to investigate mysteries in the first place. Things from the Flood is an Earth setting (ish) with mixed technology, and I think this mix of everything changing and the old world, the old wonders, falling apart is a dominant aspect of the game. Within, the UNSC forces discovered that the Flood had managed to infest the interior of the shield world as well, though not to as massive of a degree as the surface planet itself. While rescuing Anders, Forge had to save her from three Flood infection forms and ran into some trouble with Flood forces on his following missions, though not to the massive extent they had been seen on the exterior planet.