Things from the Flood

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The Flood become truly dangerous during the Coordinated stage: at this point, they are controlled by the Gravemind that was created in the first stage. [3] Biggest disappointment is the indigenous language, costume, hair design and makeup which is very misleading of the time period. There’s been a Pole shift. In the mythology of the game, scientists discovered a way to harness the Earth’s magnetic fields so that huge magnetrine ships could float over land and this enabled cheap and efficient transportation of cargo. Now, in Things from the Flood, the Earth’s magnetic poles flipped, and the magnetrine ships are now useless, most of them rusting hulks left to dot the landscape. That pole shift feels like the change from the carefree wonders of the 80s to the conflicts of the 90s. 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.” Determining the amount of runoff in an area can also provide clues about the possibility of flooding. Runoff happens when there is more water than soil can absorb. Excess water overflows and runs on top of the land. Runoff can come from natural processes, such as icemelt. It can also come from human activity, such as excess irrigation, sewage, and industrial waste. Controlling runoff can help control floods.

Conserving wetlands also reduces the impact of floods. Wetlands provide a natural barrier, acting as a giant sponge for storm surges and flood plains. The swamps and bayous of America's southern Louisiana and Mississippi, for instance, protect inland areas from both coastal and riverine flooding. Wetlands absorb the storm surge from hurricanes that hit the area from the Gulf of Mexico. Wetland riparian zones that line the Mississippi River protect fertile flood plains as the river overflows its banks. All the player characters in Things from the Flood are teenagers ages 14-19, living regular lives in a small community near one of the loops. Life is, for the most part, dull and mundane. But weird things are happening and the adults are too out of touch or too pre-occupied with other things to notice. It fed on intelligent life and, in doing so, became ever more intelligent itself. The Flood was unique; it used their very strength against them." — Cortana on the Forerunners' war against the Flood. Our urge to create is immutable; we must create. But the beings we create shall never again reach out in strength against us. All that is created will suffer. All will be born in suffering, endless grayness shall be their lot. All creation will tailor to failure and pain, that never again shall the offspring of the eternal Fount rise up against their creators. Listen to the silence. Ten million years of deep silence. And now, whimpers and cries; not of birth. That is what we bring: a great crushing weight to press down youth and hope. No more will. No more freedom. Nothing new but agonizing death and never good shall come of it. We are the last of those who gave you breath and form, millions of years ago. We are the last of those your kind defied and ruthlessly destroyed. We are the last Precursors. And now we are legion ." — The Gravemind to Catalog in the endgame of the Forerunner-Flood war. [8]The Pillar of Autumn - exploding, with its fusion reactor becoming destabilized, destroying both the ship and the ringworld, to prevent the Installation from being fired and taking the threat of the Flood with it. The Year Zero Engine is a dice pool system where, when you’re performing a task, you roll a number of 6-sided dice equal to your characters skill and associated attribute and any roll of a six is a success. Most tests only requires one success but exceptionally difficult ones might requires more. Any additional successes can then be used to buy additional effects depending on the skill being used. What sets the Year Zero engine apart from other dice pool systems is that if you’re not happy with a roll you can choose to “push” it. When pushing a roll you re-roll all dice that did not come up as a six, but you also take a condition. Although the first firing of the Halo Array starved the Flood that were at large in the Milky Way Galaxy, Flood specimens were kept in stasis within installations around the galaxy, including Installation 04 and various Forerunner research facilities. This would prove to be a grave mistake, as both humanity and the Covenant stumbled upon one of the abandoned Halo rings thousands of years after the firing of the Array. The UNSC AI Cortana, aboard the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, made what was presumed to be a "blind" jump through Slipspace (in reality, she used translated co-ordinates from a Forerunner artifact found on Sigma Octanus IV) to evade Covenant pursuers. This led both groups to Installation 04, and in turn, the Flood that were kept there in stasis. After the crash of the Pillar of Autumn on the Halo ring, piloted by Captain Jacob Keyes, the surviving crewmembers dug in for what they believed would be a long and brutal guerrilla campaign against the Covenant forces on the ring.

In the world of Things from the Flood, it seems the adults aren’t much better than the machines. The economy is in tatters, many adults are depressed, or willfully ignorant or solely dedicated to being able to feed their family for one more day. It’s an implicitly dark setting and one that explains why the teens of the world are the only ones able to see when something’s not right and the only ones who might do something about it. Did you enjoy Tales from the Loop but wanted something with a slightly darker tone? Then Things from the Flood is pretty much exactly what you wished for! Much like Tales from the Loop before it Things from the Flood is a really fun RPG that plays very differently from most other RPGs. You’re after all playing in a world that’s very similar to our own but with just a touch of the fantastical. The setting is flexible and allows a crafty GM to come up with all kinds of interesting adventures, as a lot of the finer points about what is going on is left intentionally vague. This can also be the games biggest weakness though, as the open-ended setting might end up being overwhelming for some people, who might find it hard to come up with ideas for what to run. And you really can’t lean on the games mechanics to make things fun, as they’re so light.Although the Flood is biological on the most basic level, as an outbreak advances, it becomes a highly powerful self-replicating swarm which will seek to harness any mechanism — philosophical, ideological or technological — to perpetuate itself and its goals. These aspects were most prominently demonstrated during the two major outbreaks in the Forerunner era, particularly the Forerunner-Flood war. [70] Floods occur naturally. They are part of the water cycle, and the environment is adapted to flooding. Wetlands along river banks, lakes, and estuaries absorb flood waters. Wetland vegetation, such as trees, grasses, and sedges, slow the speed of flood waters and more evenly distribute their energy. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the wetlands along the Mississippi River once stored at least 60 days of flood water. (Today, Mississippi wetlands store only 12 days of flood water. Most wetlands have been filled or drained.) A flood can develop in a many ways. The most common is when rivers or streams overflow their banks. These floods are called riverine floods. Heavy rain, a broken dam or levee, rapid icemelt in the mountains, or even a beaver dam in a vulnerable spot can overwhelm a river and send it spreading over nearby land. The land surrounding a river is called a flood plain. These forms are the natural flood form and are produced depending on need and amount of biomass available. Meanwhile, the pursuing Covenant cruisers, among them the Truth and Reconciliation, amassed their ground forces on the surface, where they soon discovered an underground Forerunner Flood containment facility in the swamps of the ring. Due to the secure nature of the facility, the Covenant came to use it as a fortified base of operations and as a storage area for weapons and ammunition, oblivious to its true nature and purpose.

But this is only an estimate. What “100-year flood” actually means is that there is a 1 percent chance that such a flood could happen in any given year. In recent decades, 100-year floods have occurred more frequently. This may be due to global warming, the current period of climate change. A lot of what was going on with the particle accelerators, or loops as they would be called, ended up being classified, but people living in the areas around them started reporting strange events. Creatures from different time periods appeared, robots were acting weird and all manner of events happened. Most of this could never be verified, and would remain in the realm of fodder for the tabloids at best. The loops were still seen as a force for good, something that would help advance humanity’s understanding of the world, and any reports of wrongdoings could easily be brushed off as if not outright fabrications then at least overexaggerations. 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. Oregon Trail Board Game Strategy | The Gamers Guides on Review – Oregon Trail Journey to Willamette Valley Everything came crashing down in the 90’s. It happened in Sweden first, brown sludge would flood the loop, appearing out of seemingly nowhere, and a lot of that sludge would flood up to the surface. The people who had been living over the loop had to be evacuated as their homes were ruined and the roads became unsafe. Not long thereafter the same thing happened under Boulder City culminating in the Hoover dam collapsing. If the collapse was caused by the events surrounding the loop is still unclear, but much like in Sweden large areas became uninhabitable. These areas are considered off limit to anyone who does not have official business there.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, U.S., was on a floodplain at the meeting of the Stony Creek and Little Conemaugh rivers. As more people moved to the city, the banks of the rivers were paved and narrowed, causing yearly flooding. Residents were prepared for this. They watched the river and moved their belongings upstairs or onto rooftops as the city flooded. Floods can also devastate an environment. The most vulnerable regions are those that experience frequent floods and those that have not flooded for many years. In the first case, the environment does not have time to recover between floods. In the second case, the environment may not be able to adapt to flood conditions. Walter Pitman accepts that there is controversy on this part of his thesis, but can't resist one final irreverent geologist's observation: "When you look at the settlements those people built," he says, "not one of them is less than 150 feet above sea level!" 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.

During their expansion throughout the Orion Arm, the Covenant would find and occasionally release the Flood, employing Zealots and their Temple Wraiths to contain the outbreaks. [27] [28] Outbreak on the Etran Harborage [ edit ] Main article: Battle of the Etran Harborage Conditions are the standard form of ‘damage’ or other consequences in Things from the Flood. The four standard conditions represent temporary, fairly mild, harm: Upset, Scared, Exhausted, and Injured. Characters take a 1-die penalty for each of these Conditions they have, but they are generally easily dealt with (e.g., by being comforted, or resting). The fifth condition, Broken, is more serious. A character can get to Broken if they already have the four standard Conditions and have to take a Condition. Or they might go there directly, if the harm is serious enough (e.g., they get shot). A teen who is broken is out for now, and has a permanent Scar (which may be physical or mental). Starting with the second Scar, every time a teen is Scarred they might be removed from play (this might be death, but it also might be something like child protective services placing them in a foster home elsewhere) – the more Scars, the more likely removal is. Stålenhag was far and away my favorite sci-fi artist of 2015, and Tales From the Loop will show you why. His universe is a dystopia you wouldn’t mind exploring, one that oppresses you with mystery and beauty rather than drab soldiers or vacuous 'you have this emotion, therefore you belong in this group' regimes. The Loop is sophisticated sci-fi buried under snowy Swedish dirt. And I can’t wait to dig deeper.”During these developments, the ring's Sentinels failed to effectively contain the Flood, and because of this, the Covenant and the UNSC sustained heavy losses. The Flood occupied areas of the ring formerly held by the Covenant, although Covenant and Flood forces continued to wage war on the massive ice plains of the ring. Although the Covenant had the benefit of Shade stationary plasma turrets and vehicular/aerial support, the Flood had captured both UNSC and Covenant weapons and because of this had significant numerical superiority. It was this event that Pitman and Ryan believe could be the flood recorded in the Book of Genesis. The salt water poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls (anyone who has ever traveled to the base of the falls on the Maid of the Mist will have a sense of the power involved). In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth at least two times the height of the World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away. Anyone living in the fertile farmlands on the northern rim of the sea would have had the harrowing experience of seeing the boundary of the ocean move inland at the rate of a mile a day. You are here: Home / Games / Tabletop & RPGs / Dangerous Things: A review of Things from the Flood RPG Dangerous Things: A review of Things from the Flood RPG Disaster experts classify floods according to their likelihood of occurring in a given time period. The most common classifications are a 10-year flood, a 50-year flood, and a 100-year flood. A 100-year flood, for example, is an extremely large, destructive event that would be expected to happen only once every century. 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.