OT: Ghost Town

[kato13]

shrike6 04-12-2004, 09:10 PM I don't know if you guys have seen this or not, but I just saw this today and read through it. Its a photo journal of a Ukraninan woman who took a bike trip through the Chernobyl hot zone. I hope you guys find this as fascinating as I did.


http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

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TR 04-12-2004, 09:45 PM For Twilight this is all a little too close to home, there's plenty of areas in Russia and here in the States that would become Ghost Towns over night.Vast population centers entered and devoid of life due to the radiation and blast damage where only a few venture...


Chernobyl will be one of those things if you didn't grow up through it won't mean much. I think we can all recall where we were the news broke... and the stories that followed in the months and years to follow.


Until Later


TR

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ReHerakhte 04-13-2004, 04:56 AM This seems a little off topic and it's long but it is related so please bear with me...


A while back I saw a pessimistic movie called "Stalker" by the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky, it deals with three people entering a forbidden "Zone" somewhere in an un-named totalitarian country - (not hard to think Soviet Union). The stalker of the title is a half-outlaw, half-madman who is a guide into the Zone. The Zone itself is the result of 'something', no-one really seems to know and the government deals with the problem by trying to seal it off and generally ignoring it. The movie was released in 1979 (for reference Chernobyl went critical on April 26th 1986).

It was directly inspired by a novella called "Roadside Picnic" by a Russian writing duo, the brothers Arkady & Boris Strugatsky who had a more Westernized take on the story, the Stalker being a Canadian from memory and the Zone was not a single zone but one of several scattered around the globe. The novella was released sometime in the early 1970s with the first English translation being in 1975 or 76.

Either (or both) of these served as an inspiration for John Tyne (of Pagan Publishing, the people who do the Delta Green modern Cthulhu game) for his game world setting entitled "The Zone" which can be found at http://www.johntynes.com/rl_thezone.html (This link was posted to this forum way back when it was still on the Townhall forum board as a possible alternate Twilight game world).


A review of Stalker can be found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/ and for Roadside Picnic at http://www.sfsite.com/11b/rp93.htm


I've seen the movie, read the book and still am not certain that I "get it". But if you have the patience and can also locate the movie, it's worth viewing by your Twilight game group. It's long (155 mins) but the settings are quite bleak and a lot of the filming makes use of some real world abandoned complex scattered about with ruined buildings and abandoned railway lines etc. The small group never see another living soul while in the Zone except for a dog. There's scenes showing old weapons and gear abandoned in a shallow stream.

I think that if you told your game group that this is the way parts of the world are in Twilight, they would see things in a very different light (like "Oh Sh*t, I didn't think things were THAT bad!).


Anyway, this leads me to the point... finally.

The movie & novella have served as an inspiration for a computer game coming sometime mid-late 2004. It's called STALKER: Oblivion Lost and there are a number of websites showing screenshots for the developmental version of the game. The creators set it in the 50km zone of Chernobyl based on photo research they did during travels into the Chernobyl zone (so the screenshots can serve as Player visual aids if you're so inclined). One of the people involved in the research trips into the Chernobyl village said that the most haunting sight for him was of the soccer stadium, completely abandoned now except for the young trees growing out of the pitch.


Sorry about the length but if nothing else, hopefully this will give you guys some other inspirational material for your Twilight campaigns.


Cheers,

Kevin

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