OK, so I'm reading into a couple of pages og Ghost Cartels on the train heading home @3am, and as I'm reading along the second page, them mention of "Royal Jelly coming out of Chicago" caught my attention.

Anyone have more info on this?

Think "bug spirits."

Like Amber Gel from Queen Euphoria? Ewwwwww...

corrected that for you

More will be revealed when you pick up Feral Cities.

6-7 Mentions of it in FC just looked at them all after a search. No real hard or fast rules on its mechanics though?
Just a flat protection against the effects mentioned?

It has become the new standard that location books not have mechanics in them. Saves people from having to dig through thirteen books to find mechanics. With any luck, we'll stat it out at some point. At least, I fully intend to.

How is it you manage to sound like a drug dealer, wearing nothing but a trench coat and funny hat outside a preschool?

because this forum sometimes gives people the feeling of being back at preschool?

Goo-goo, then.

I swear to Prime, if some drooling rugrat comes at me......I'll be setting a new field-goal world-record.

My main boogieman in my 3rd Edition campaign was an Ant Shaman heading up a Seoulpa Ring out of Detroit. He and the ant queen spirit dosed eight balls with her pheromones which "compelled" users to become even more addicted. If they were important folks that happened to pick up a nasty drug habit it would compel then to do activities that would benefit the Hive or the Seoulpa Ring. I called the new combo Suga, but I kept it local to Detroit and sprawls where he had connections. He used the money to finance terrorist activities against the Japanese in San Francisco and aid the Queen in undermining Ares on their home turf. I ran that story for YEARS. I got a lot of mileage out of that plot. I really like Ghost Cartels, but to half of my 4th Ed players, it might seem like old hat since I essentially did the Spirit/Drug combo game already.

But there is "The Secret" yet to be told, as to why tempo was being spread.

Peter

I thought "The Secret" was a giant money grab via trite self-enlightenment mantras and pattern recognition? Now I know the Ghost Cartels wanted the money, but drugs are, in general, more a form of social control (like selling crack in Harlem) than self-enlightenment.

I though it was to make key people vulnerable to possession.

Uh-huh. And all the street people being addicted to tempo? How do they factor in?

Collateral Damage?

I tend to think getting the non-street level people was just an added perk. If 99.9% of your audience is collateral damage, you are doing something wrong.

or maybe it was just one really nasty side effect?

Or maybe we have something else in mind.

heh, fool us ones, shame on you, fool us twice, shame on us

In the November chat, Peter said "sourcebooks would always cater to the metaplots being developed". He wants to link the campaign books to sourcebooks. Now we just had Ghost Cartels released and Vice is on approach. (After the First DotA release according to the Nov. Chat)

Campaign book to launch a mob war, sourcebook to explore the organized crime syndicates? Seems to be a connection...

wasn't Royal Jelly the Drug from the Alien Queen in the Ellen Ripley Universe?

Exactly. It heals cancer and stuff. But only in the "Expanded Universe" of the novels.

Let's not forget Xeno-Zip, which was derived from the Alien Queen's Royal Jelly. Reading the mention of the Royal Jelly in GC sparked my memory about Xeno-Zip.

I can see Ares putting together a Norbert robot to gather jelly.

Or trying to, anyway.

Every army needs cannon fodder.

That sounds very interesting.

Anything involving royal jelly - be it bug spirits or Aliens, scares the absolute shit out of me.

- J.

My thoughts exactly, Tachi...of course, now that we have figured that out, it cannot be it..

Unless, of course, they do it any way because we thought of it and we now don't think that'll be it. Double bait-and-switch?

It's kinda like when you know, but they know that you know, but you know that they know that you know they know, so, nobody really knows shit. You know what I mean?


LOL I make me laugh.

oh you gave me evil gm ideas... thanks!

me too:p

Now that the secret of tempo is in the hands of the Azzies, I'm banking its to allow blood spirits or Horrors to possess scores of metahumans and pave the way for The Enemy.

That's just a hunch though.

- J.

OK, thanks for the nightmares, folks. Like I need to lose more sleep now. Sheesh!

I hypothesize tempo is the first pass at making the creatures of Earth ready to repel the Enemy when next they come. The sacrifice of a few million possessed children of Gaia is nothing compared to the consumption of all that lives.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it... until They come to eat me.

Bad Anthropologist. No more Cthulhu cookies for you.

Incidently, I also favor the cannon fodder theory. More accurately, every leader bent on conquering the world needs an army.

This might indicated something different...

Massive, distributed magical power source. Like unknowing batteries.

Or another surge, this time not just furry but also (or primarily) flora based. Treants in the Boardroom. If you want people to care about plant rights turn a bunch of them them into plants. I'm twigging on some old horrorish short story about metaphorphing into plantish things at the celluar level. But that was grade school, a LONG time ago, and the name escapes me.

I must have spent to much time playing Delta Green. The last page of this thread has been giving me the hebbie jebbies.

Gotta go update my drawing showing the connections between "Things Man was NMTK", "Micro$oft", the CIA, "Vampires", Kraft, "Werewolves", the Department of Horrendous Stupidity, the Azzie blood cults, Livingston Massacre, Coke'a'cola, the secret research facility in Antarctica, Kaiser Sosay, the secret Intel/AMD alliance, and canned cheese spread.

Roald Dahl, perhaps?

On the planet Wormulon?

Thats funny because I have been rewriting Queen Euphoria for 2070 with bees rather than ants. Oh and my Queen is the rock star from my rewrite of Mecurial for 2070.

I haven't read Ghost Cartels yet, but if Tempo is like most other drugs there will be side-effects and withdrawals. The greater the high, the worse the fall. Many addicts suffer physical pain if their supply is interrupted.

Using that as a given I'll throw my hat into the ring:

Somebody is getting ready for a grand magical ritual. The architects of the ritual have made the very addictive Tempo drug available across the globe. When they are ready, they will kill off the source of the Tempo drug supply (perhaps via magic or maybe by bio/nano weaponry) sending a large portion of the planet's population into devastating withdrawal. The casters will draw power from the suffering of a world full of addicts to fuel the major mojo they're cooking up. It'll be something big- world changing, or at the very least have a major impact on a large region.