Sons of Liberty: The Swamp Fox
May 17
One of the more challenging design goals I set for myself when developing the core “good guys” in the Sons of Liberty – a sort of early 18th-Century American Avengers — was to ensure that every character had a relatively familiar counterpart in the meta-myth of the comic book universes players were likely to me familiar with. The characters are deliberate pastiches, or...
Unreal Worlds: Return to Lake Vostok
Mar 08
It’s been a while since the last time we talked about the fortean potential of the scientific expeditions to Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, at which point we mercilessly teased you with the idea that there would soon be a post about Antarctica-as-Atlantis that never came. Still, since the subject is somewhat close to our conspiratorial hearts here at the Illuminerdy, it was with some glee...
Unreal Worlds: Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
Mar 01
It’s important to remember that Secret Histories need not be limited to, well, actual history. You can get a lot of dramatic mileage out of taking any story that everyone thinks they know and then putting a new spin on it — or, in this case, just spinning it a little faster or a little harder in a direction it was already going. We’ve already demonstrated that we’re not...
Unreal Worlds: Rocks from Space and the Fine Art of News Hacking
Feb 20
So sometimes the inspiration for a good game just falls out of the sky. And then, of course, it crashes into Russia with the force of a nuclear explosion. In case it’s not completely clear, I’m talking about the exploding meteoroid that caused massive amounts of damage in and around the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk, ending in an explosion that, according to the New York Times,...
Unreal Worlds: Me and Merovee
Dec 17
So when it comes down to it, Europe was born the child of a giant five-horned sea monster: Merovech, or maybe Merovee. We've briefly mentioned the story before, when we accused Napoleon of making a Faustian (or at least Lovecraftian) deal with a Dagon-esque creature in a bid to become emperor of Europe. But let's go over it again. A 5th century Frankish king named Chlodio conquered a good chunk of what is today France and Germany.
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