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A rowdy bunch of biker mice, looking to make their bones pulling off a big score, are about to learn a lesson about hubris.

The mentor of an impetuous adventure attempts to tease out the story of how their student has most recently misapplied their patient instruction.

Further ruminations of why pillaging the people of the past for “good stock” is morally, and existentially, perilous.

Trapped in time-loop that resets upon death, formerly cautious chrononauts resort to more and more desperate strategies, trying to dodge their own previous iterations.

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The tiny band of survivors are all that’s left of Humanity. They don’t have the right skills, or enough people, to rebuild, but they do have a time machine and the ability to pluck people out of history who’d otherwise have died in various disasters, and those people would have the skills.
Everyone in the past knew this sort of stuff, right?
And they’d be really grateful, and be happy to do what we said, wouldn’t they?

Volcanic activity caused by the gravity of a nearby body moves across the planet in a regular and predictable way, so a sufficiently daring crew could take advantage of that to run their heist when they know that everyone will have cleared out.
Of course, that does mean dealing with the eruption.

It’s one thing to find that you’re living in a simulation & try to step outside of it, to meet the entities who created you. What happens when you get access to the controls?

Explorers find the under-construction robotic invasion fleet which someday soon will wipe out Humanity.
Right now, it has no idea they’re there, but that’s going to change if they’re not very careful indeed.

The reason we’ve never found aliens is that humanity from an alternate timeline has been wiping them out to ‘protect’ us, whether we want them to or not. The trail of genocide is, apparently, for our own good.

Without money, the orphanage will close. The folks who should have solved the problem are in jail or on the run, so it’s up to a strange time-traveller and their companions to set things right.

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A quirky fraternal order is stranded far from home and their charitable objective.  Can trans-dimensional bar-flies help them fulfill their task?

The lodges of the Shriners protect arcane secrets as it’s members protect our sleeping world from nameless horrors.

The drifts of nigh-invisible infra-red laser lensing  creatures lie between you and your objective.  But as you forge ahead, they start changing their behaviour in unsettling ways.

Your parent’s fantasy gaming junk is weirdly authentic and the journal of their “games” entirely too detailed.  Did they actually save a world long ago?

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Craig’s GenCon 2018 Ramblings!

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We are living in a detailed and exacting simulation of the most boring possible universe.
Once you know that, can you reach outside the simulated environment to other environments? Or maybe to the people who are doing the simulations?
Alternatively, can you hack your own simulation?

The reason that our part of the universe looks like it does is that we live in a heritage cluster with a strong & boring Galactic Home Owners Association, who really aren’t prepared for what Humanity is going to be like as a neighbor.

Dinosaurs, as a species, guarantee their own discontinuous existence by being constantly recreated by races who come along after they die out.

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The Temporal Survey team SHOULD have reported back by now. They SHOULD have been back a moment after they left. But they’re not, and while the standard dead-drop messages they left prove that they made it, they also give no sign that they ran into trouble.
Which means you need to send ANOTHER team back to see what happened to them, haul them out of trouble, and not screw up the timeline.

Xenoarchaeologists digging through alien trash find a still-working device from an ancient culture. It wants to serve its new masters, but there’s the little question of what that might mean in practice.

Ben rants about how difficult it is to build a trap that’ll last long enough to endanger someone exploring the ruins of your civilization, to the extent that it’s almost like everyone is working towards the same goal.

Humanity goes out there, finds horrifying stuff, and makes use of it; It’s just what they do.
The dread that comes along with it is really just a by-product.

When your best option is to miniaturise the rest of your team and inject them into your own body to keep them safe, you’ve got problems.
When you’re trying not to dies from your injuries, while your miniature team-mates battle the equally miniature causes of those injuries, you’ve all got problems.

The Antarctic survey team are on their way back, working along the chain of supply drops.
They’re making suspiciously good time for people on foot in a blizzard, and their reports are … kind of creepy.

Mapping out ruins is very much a part of archaeology, but according to the survey, those two rooms overlap, …

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Quarreling Gods look for arbitrators among the very mortals they are supposed to guide.

In a society that worships rational concepts as if they were competing supernatural powers, a disruptive and mercenary acolyte is tampering with a delicate balance.

Justice can be automated.  And now he’s got the tools to do it, that’s just what the Son of Justice plans to do.

Between the machinery that keeps him alive and mentor that is erring on the side of vengeance, this side-kick has a lot to deal with.

The latest celebrity super-power-couple are from across the divide between hero and villain.  City-wide peace requires that they get along, but their friends are left to mange the fallout.

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In a transhumanist post-mortality world, it makes sense to store memories and knowledge in a secure cloud, bringing them into local storage only when needed.
And that works fine until something goes wrong, the cloud is rendered inaccessible, and neither you nor the vaguely-familiar folks you’re stuck with remember how to get your memories back.

Post-Mortality doesn’t mean post-scarcity, so not everyone is alive at one time. Which becomes a problem when the information you need is locked up in the memories of one person who’s currently dead, and isn’t due for instantiation for another 50 years.

Every time you ‘access’ your memory, you change it, so to preserve those precious moments, you need to remove them & put them somewhere safe.
Which leaves the question of what fills the hole left behind.

A group of people wake up in a beautifully appointed memory treatment spa, feeling refreshed, and with absolutely no idea why they’re there. Or where the staff are.
And then they find the bloody handprint.

It was only by pure fluke that the storm disrupted the Signal enough for you to realise that your memories were false, being beamed out to overwrite the whole history of the world.
Now, with the Storm of the Century bearing down, you’re planning to find out what’s being kept from you. And why.

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A handful of children explore the crumbling, deserted ruins of a world torn asunder by conflict.

Returning to an evacuated orbiting O’Neill colony after the “hot” war finally cools, it’s original inhabitants find it overgrown…     …and overrun?

Would-be diplomats from space recount their escape from the doomed planet below, and the sacrifices of the people that helped them return home.

In an ash-smothered nightmare world, those preparing to survive on other planets have the best chance of saving this one.

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