Episode 2: Vent
http://www.vajraenterprises.com/podcasts/Vajra_Enterprises_Fiction_Podcast_002_Vent.mp3
Episode 6: Room in My Head
http://www.vajraenterprises.com/podcasts/Vajra_Enterprises_Fiction_Podcast_006_Room_in_my_Head.mp3
Episode 14: Narrative Character Class Test
From a discussion on Burn Immediately.
This references material from the GM-Only section of In Dark Alleys and should not be read by players.
The purpose of most elements of modern society is to keep people distracted so they don’t find out any of the important truths. Thus the collapse of society after some apocalyptic event would be a bad thing for the powers-from-beyond, who would go about trying to rebuild society as quickly as possible. If there were any of the powers-that-be left, the p-f-b would give them a large amount of power (more than they would have deemed prudent in less challenging circumstances). This means, among other things, flooding the world with a lot of “holy” objects, and that the powers-that-be would start exposing naked supernatural power to the masses (rather than keeping things subtle). If none of the powers-that-be survived (which is certainly possible if whatever happened killed off a large portion of the population and there wasn’t enough warning to get into bomb shelters) then the powers-from-beyond would choose whoever is championing the rebuilding of society and make them the new powers-that-be. The problem here is that these people may not have the population to follow order blindly and may turn against the powers-from-beyond.
If an accident that kills a few hundred people, like a train crash, can create a new Survivor, then a massive global apocalypse could create many Survivors. Survivors may even outnumber regular people. Things may have gotten so backed up in the land of the dead that many human souls (ghosts) may have escaped back into this world or even into other worlds.
A massive population loss would cause many places to become abandoned, and so after a few decades one would find the ruins of cities full of Dances, and with many psychologically-damaged survivors wandering about there is no lack of people to be made into Faustians.
With the powers-that-be no longer able to actively suppress such movements, Scribblers, Cannibals, Animists and Androgynes may become large scale movements. A wanderer in the post-apocalyptic world may find entire cities based on these ideologies.
Another consequence of the powers-that-be losing much of their power is that a lot of hidden monsters might decide that they no longer need to keep themselves in check and only hunt those who won’t be missed. Instead, many monsters (especially Torturers, IDA p.233) would start openly hunting and attacking people whenever and wherever they please.
Then there’s the problem of souls. If most people had souls when the population of the world was nearly three billion, then what will the powers-from-beyond do with all those souls when the population drops to a matter of millions? One thing they could do is expand the land of the dead and let souls stay there longer. Yet souls cannot stay in that state indefinitely (if they could, there would be no need for this world), and doing this increases the chance of a soul becoming semi-awakened. The powers-from-beyond may start putting human souls in animals (this is something that occasionally happens by accident, but now it would be done on purpose), and one would find a lot more supernaturally-smart animals in the post-apocalyptic world, yet this is also not without consequences. Another possible strategy would be to purposefully put multiple souls in each human body. As we have seen, when one human body accidentally gets two souls (see IDA, p.238), and that second soul usually becomes a sort of super-powerful-psychodynamic, capable of occasionally taking over the person’s body entirely. What would happen if many souls were put in a single person? Would they take on the roles of psychodynamics, each more self-aware of what they are than any normal psychodynamic and each trying to take over the conscious body? Might there be people with no dominant personality but multiple personalities, each of which has its own soul?
Now Available!
They have been abandoned by the people who once lived and worked in them. The paint has been left to peel, dust to blanket every surface, windows to break, weeds to grow up through cracks, birds and mice to chew things up and build nests.
Yet just because all the people have left doesn’t mean that there is nothing still living there. It doesn’t mean that eyes won’t watch you from the darkness as you make your way slowly down the darkened corridors, the beam of your flashlight falling everywhere except for the one spot where something waits for you.
198 pages – softcover – 8.5″x11″
Printed Version: $22.95 – Buy at Lulu
PDF: $4.95 – Buy at DriveThru Buy at Lulu
Anyone who buys a printed copy of the book can get the pdf here.
220 Pages Softbound
$35.95
If you look down the wrong alley in the middle of the night, you may see something happening which is terrible, inexplicable, alien. If you are like most, you will keep driving and try to forget what you’ve seen.
Yet some pain or hunger inside you may drive you to turn back, to try to gain another glimpse. You may spend sleepless nights peering down dark alleys, reading heretical texts, performing strange rituals, exploring abandoned places, trying to grasp the sensations that squirm at the back of your mind. Along the way you will discover that you are developing incredible and dangerous powers.
And there will come a day when you catch a glimpse of something that sees you looking at it, that realizes that you know things that you’re not supposed to know. And without a
Want to find out more? Read the IDA Game Overview (also available in espanol 
,français 
, Hebrew 
and Swedish 
)
Cosmology- IDA has a unique cosmology, terrible secrets of the nature of the universe, that players will have to discover during game play. You won’t find much about this cosmology on the website, because we want to keep it truly secret. The cosmology was created by taking pieces of every philosophy that has been discredited or suppressed because it has unpleasant things to say about the nature of the universe, from Gnosticism to Freudian Psychoanalysis to Paglian Feminism. Not only are secrets of the world revealed through gameplay, the GM section of the book has several ‘documents,’ all suitable for copying and giving to players, each of which helps unravel a small piece of the mystery of the game world.
Player Characters- Players are not ordinary people, they are people with supernatural powers, yet they don’t start off understanding what’s happening to them. The bizarre and terrible things that have given them powers have left them with more questions than answers about the nature of the universe. Each type of the Touched knows a little about what’s going on, but each holds only one piece of the puzzle. Each type of the Touched has a different experience of the supernatural and different types of powers. Character types are not just frameworks for buying powers, they are a complete experience.
Style- Like Cthulhu, IDA doesn’t have ‘traditional’ monsters (e.g. vampires, werewolves, typical western-style ghosts). Unlike Cthulhu, we tried to borrow from the aesthetic of recent Japanese horror films in building the terrors of the IDA universe. At no point will PCs find themselves confronted with traditional monsters that they are sure they know how to defeat. Some monsters will attack as physical beings, some will be invisible and intangible and will manipulate the world around the PCs, some will attack via the PCs’ own minds. IDA monsters are not goblins that you kill twenty of for XP. Figuring out how to defeat or escape a monster will take up an entire IDA adventure.
Anyone who has purchased a printed copy of In Dark Alleys, This if a Dark Ride or Abandoned from any source can download a pdf copy here.
In the world of In Dark Alleys, pleasant façades hide terrible secrets, and there is no more pleasant façade than that of the happiest amusement park in the world. Hiding behind the smiling faces, cotton candy, princesses, rides and fantastic décor, there are creatures that hunt us, people who experiment on us, powers-that-be who watch us, and alien worlds waiting to swallow us up.
This is a Dark Ride is a sourcebook detailing the world’s most famous amusement park as it exists in the In Dark Alleys setting. Included is in-depth info on the mundane park, various supernatural entities, NPCs and groups, guidelines for creating a park employee character and a complete adventure.
Anyone who buys the printed book can download the pdf for free here.
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Click Here to download Little Boy Lost (1 MB pdf), a stand-alone adventure set in the IDA universe. The players play a college-aged babysitter and her friends who must investigate the disappearance of an odd little boy. Little Boy Lost has pre-generated characters and a condensed version of the rules, everything someone would need to play the adventure. Little Boy Lost was a giveaway at the 2007 Free RPG Day. You can read a review of Little Boy Lost here. | |
