Cyprus? Hell, we've got our own ghost city here in Michigan, just crawling with photographers...

Damn, Marc, why'd you have to go and do that? Isn't that the impression everyone has of Detroit already? It's bad enough that Rush calls us "Little Fallujah. " I bet not ONE person on this blog would recognize some of the new/nice neighborhoods that are in Detroit. Because, according to the rest of the country, they don't exist. We may have a shitty mayor, and some run down buildings, but there IS more to this city than that.

Ace, you nerd, get out of my head. I just sent that link to my players and another RPG buddy with three plot hooks for the city.

Was thinking of running it with Spycraft.

Heeeey, isn't that where they filmed Robocop?

"Bitches, leave!"

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

NO! It was filmed in Dallas.

carin:

sorry - I don't mean to offend. And if you look into dETROITfUNK, you can tell that the author (and in fact most of those who do urban exploration and have blogs around Detroit) really love the city and hope for its resurgance, as do I.

But the fact is still that Detroit remains, in large sections, a ghost town, to the point that a proposal was once made to leave the downtown skyscrapers abandoned as a sort of american ruins. So in a sense I look at Detroit as the end result of generations of leftist- and racially driven-politics. It's a cautionary tale that people need to know about.

Detroit is a poster-child for the failure of liberal politics. That being said, it's just gets my goat that it's always the abandoned building being shown. There are actually BRAND NEW BUILDINGS in Detroit. In the Downtown area. OFFICE buildings. The waterfront is being overhauled. We have two beautiful new stadiums (if only we had two new teams to play in 'em.) There have been renovations to some very glorious old buildings (The Fox Theater, for example.) Maybe tomorrow I'll drive around town and take some shots. I live in a beautiful neighborhood IN DETROIT. Not one crackhouse anywhere.

The Detroit pics could just as well have come from parts of Albany NY. Democrats managed to turn that place into a "workers paradise" too.

Hi all,

Robocop may have been filmed in Dallas - I have no knowledge of this myself, but also no reason to doubt carin's word - but the story was definitely set in a fictionalized, cyberpunk-clichéd future Detroit.

<GEEK>

The places look like they'd make excellent maps for GURPS adventures, and the inspiration they stir up seems as good an excuse as any to test-drive the shiny new GURPS 4th Edition rules, but my first thought on actually seeing the pics of both Cyprus and Detroit was along the lines of, "man, Zipper Interactive and Guerilla/SCEE should be down there with digital cameras and laser scanners getting new maps for SOCOM 4 and the next Killzone!"

GURPS' best genre books have always been modern day conspiracy/High Weirdness stuff - Cabal, Black Ops, Technomancer, Voodoo, etc. And Cyprus fits beautifully into such games, having been owned by the Templars themselves at one point. An ex-King of Jerusalem bought it from them, and his heirs ruled it for centuries, long after the rest of the Crusaders had been expelled from the Holy Land. Richard the Lion-Hearted himself was married in Limassol on the way to the Crusades. So who knows, really, what the true significance is of that particular seemingly-mundane spot, among all the many historical sites in Cyprus, being the one cordoned off and forbidden to all but 33rd degree initiates of...er, the general public.

So with all that in mind, here's a scenario for ya, Ace: the moonbat blogosphere, convinced that the Ghost Town is where the Evil Neocon Conspiracy is hiding Osama bin Laden until they need to exploit his capture in the next election cycle, cranks up its fundraising machine to sponsor a discredited major-network anchorman's comeback exposé tour into the place to blow the lid off the cover-up. He finds no Osama, but following maps obtained from unimpeachable sources in a Nicosia Kinko's, he blunders into O'chubb'fuugly'blogr, Daemon Pharoah of Pathetically Unjustified Megalomania, breaking his arcane binding-sigils and rousing him from the torpor of eons. Your hastily-assembled crew of hard-bitten "executive security firm" special operators and ivory-tower scholars of esoteric occult lore must team up to slice like a fuckin' hammer and "clean house" in a Ghost Town showdown with the Daemon Pharoah and his hellish minions!

Have fun with it, and best of luck with the campaign! :)

</GEEK>

So basically you mean we do a raid on Howard Dean's crib?

OK.