Lovely propaganda, but the letter is fake

Today, #OccupyOakland (#OO) carried out what was termed a "mass propaganda action". I was unable to participate myself, but my understanding is that the plan was to meet at Oscar Grant Plaza at 11am, split into small groups of three to ten people, and fan out over the city, visiting stores, banks, offices, the DMV, and the street corners to "talk to the people". I think propaganda is fascinating. I took a class on it in college, and I've always been interested in psychology in general, so the idea of they psychology behind changing someone's mind or reinforcing an opinion is certainly something I find interesting. So, as I said, I was unable to participate myself, but I wanted to check the internets to see how things were going.

As I looked over my twitter feed, I found this picture of a document being distributed by the #OO people: https://p.twimg.com/Ac8dJg0CMAA8SOG.jpg:large. I read over it and thought, wow, if Jean Quan is endorsing the strike, that's pretty big. But it seems kinda fishy; shouldn't I have heard about that already? Especially given that the letter is dated Thursday October 27th. And really, that letter has some fairly inciting rhetoric in it; I'm frankly a bit surprised that Mayor Quan would say some of the things in that letter, even if she does support the strike. So I started doing a bit of investigation. First off, I visited the website in the letterhead - http://www.oaklandmayor.com. It seems very legit. Go ahead, check it out. Looks like the city of Oakland's website. It has everything you might expect from a city's website: recent news, recent events, commemorations of past events, information for residents, businesses, visitors, etc. And right there on the front page, Mayor Quan's statement to Occupy Oakland, "heartily endors[ing]" the call for a general strike. So I clicked the link to "read the full statement", which took me here: http://www.oaklandmayor.com/docs/apologyletter.pdf, and this is where I really started to get confused. Two things caught my eye - first, the date on the letter was different. The letter I saw a picture of on Twitter was dated Thursday, October 27th, 6pm, but the one on the website is dated Friday, October 28th, 6pm, yet the text is the same. Secondly, take a look at the signatures on both letters - completely different.

I wondered why the official City of Oakland website would specifically reference the Mayor in its URL; that seemed odd to me (and I remembered a different URL from the other day when Anonymous took down the OPD's website), so I googled "City of Oakland", and found this, the official city website: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/. Take a look at it; compare it to http://www.oaklandmayor.com. They are nearly identical. You can switch back and forth between tabs and hardly see any difference. You can click links and explore the sub-pages and not find any difference. The only _real_ difference is the text on the homepage under Mayor Quan's Statement to Occupy Oakland (and, okay, on www2.oaklandnet.com, when you reload, the header banner sometimes changes, and it doesn't seem to do so on www.oaklandmayor.com).

My next stop was http://www.whois.net/whois/oaklandmayor.com. Sure enough: "Creation date: 28 Oct 2011 22:22:00". I don't know who registered and built the website; the Administrative and Technical Contacts listed on whois.net both refer to WhoisGuard, a service intended to protect the private information of domain owners and prevent their information from being harvested by spammers. Anyone who needs to contact the domain owner contacts WhoisGuard instead, and they pass "legitimate contacts" on to the actual domain owner (i.e. "When some one sends an email to your uniquely generated xyz.protect@whoisguard.com address, we will in-turn forward it your real email address which you specify", trying to filter out the spam in the process).

So, my conclusion is that the letter is totally fake. Jean Quan has not endorsed the strike. However, whoever is behind this did a remarkably good job of producing some pretty convincing (on the surface) propaganda in a short amount of time. The letter's fake, but I'm impressed. ;)

P.S. One final note - the date/time on the letter from the Twitter picture, 27 Oct 6PM, is the same date/time on the _actual_ statement Jean Quan made to #OO, which can be found here: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca/groups/cityadministrator/documents/report/oak031951.pdf. Take a look at the signature on that page; totally different than either of the other two. ;)

P.P.S. For the record, I do totally support #OO in general, and the idea of the general strike, although I am probably not going to strike on November 2nd personally, for a number of reasons I won't go into here. I just thought this was some interesting work being done for the propaganda action. I'm not even condemning the fake letter; I actually think it's pretty funny and cool. Whoever made it did a good job. I just want people to be fully informed about realities.

The Iron Wardens in 'Dusk' - DM's Perspective

So I recently ran an adventure for the Iron Wardens, and I wanted to get a few thoughts about it down while it's still relatively fresh in my mind. The advenure I ran for them was "Dusk", written by Mike Krahulik of Penny-Arcade fame. (Mike, if you ever see this, and you want me to take the Dusk PDF off of kage23.com, just let me know; I wanted to link to it on penny-arcade.com, but couldn't find it anymore.) Anyway, my first, and overwhelming, thought/response to our session Sunday night is that it was totally awesome. It had been a long time since I had played D&D, and I hope the next time comes sooner. ;)

The adventure itself was quite entertaining. At least, I thought so, and my players seemed to be having a good time. ;) It's a take on Twilight. A traveling crew of actors and stagehands is in town to perform the play "Dusk", and the Iron Wardens must investigate what happened to the missing daughter of the owner of the town's bakery. As it turns out [SPOILERS AHEAD!], the stagecrew are vampires, and they stole the daughter. In the process of discovering this, the IWs talk to the family of actors, each of whom is a colorful character of varying sorts. It was interesting and a bit different for me as a DM to have to actually roleplay various NPCs with differing motivations, that don't necessarily want to help the PCs out. But the characters were all pretty much melodramatic caricatures anyway, so they were pretty easy to roleplay, and I think I did an alright job.

As with any good D&D game, however, things didn't really go to plan. The main difference between the adventure as written and our game was that I combined the second and third encounters into one. Or, more accurately, I dragged (most of) the monsters from the third encounter into the second. The second encounter happens when the players confront the stage manager. He casts a spell on the fangirls in the audience, who proceed to attack the players. According to the "script", as the players fight these "monsters" into which the daughters of the townsfolk have been (probably temporarily) transformed, the stage crew packs up all their shit and gets out of there on their wagons. The players finish the encounter just in time to see the stage crew leaving on their wagons, so the players steal one of the remaining wagons to give chase. They have an intense wagon-to-wagon fight while careening down the road. (I might adapt this idea for some later adventure some time, since we didn't do it in our game.) But the Iron Wardens are upstanding citizens of Fallcrest. They were not going to hurt the fangirls if they could possibly avoid it. They quickly determined that the girls were, in fact, still human, under a spell, and not actually vampires or other undead creatures themselves. As such, they speculated that, if they were to kill the creature that put them under that spell, perhaps they'd come out of it. This sounded reasonable to me, and I knew that if the stage manager tried to go pack up the wagons while the Iron Wardens fought the fangirls, that just wouldn't work. The Wardens wouldn't stand for that. They would defend themselves against the fangirls as best as they could without attacking them, and they would chase after the stage manager until they caught and killed him. So, I just brought him into the encounter, along with a few bats from the final encounter as well. The final encounter also has a few other vampires, and I wasn't sure if I should bring them in or not, so initially, I didn't. Actually, I rolled their initiative at the start of combat along with all my other creatures. My initial plan was to bring them in on the 2nd or 3rd round of combat, but I ended up not doing that. I decided that they had to come in at some point, however; after all, there's a whole stage crew's worth of vampires here. They're not just going to stand around as their leader is killed. They didn't join the fight until right after the stage manager was killed, though. Luckily for the Iron Wardens, it's a small stage crew. ;) I think I only brought two in, whereas the third encounter had three. WIth them, and with the bats, I figured it wasn't fair to bring two full encounters' worth of monsters into one encounter, if I wasn't going to let the players recharge their powers or take a short rest or anything in between, so I left a few of them out.

The whole thing makes me wonder, though ... What would have been the repercussions if they had fought the fangirls? Would the townsfolk understand that the girls were under a spell, or would they think the Iron Wardens just went crazy and had a murderous rampage? Even if they did understand that the girls were under a spell, would they approve of fighting them, hurting and probably killing them, even in the sake of self-defense? Or would the townsfolk have believed there would have to have been another way? Or would I, the DM, have let the players kill the fangirls in the first place? Maybe hitting one of the "monsters" just once would have broken the spell, causing the girl to run away, crying, in pain, actually injured, but not badly and not permanently, making it a really easy fight for the Wardens. I don't know. As it went in our game, as soon as the stage manager was destroyed, the enthralled girls passed out, unconscious but unhurt. Although it just now occurs to me as I write this that we don't necessarily know what happened to those girls afterward. We wrapped up the story, but only to the point of that night in the game-world, not days or weeks later. For all we know, those girls are all still in a coma months later. ;) That's probably something I should address in the follow-up email I told the Wardens I might write. ;)

The other thing I wanted to talk about was earlier in the adventure, when the players are investigating the wagons. They, of course, went straight to the crew wagon, the one that is magically sealed. One of the dwarves believed he could pick even a magic lock, but this one was beyond his ken. Of course, in meta-gaming actuality, it was basically a plot door. They simply weren't going to be able to get into this wagon until it was time. Of course, this was the first of the six wagons that they checked out, and if they had opened the door at that point, or if they had disassembled the wagon, as the dwarves attempted, to no avail, it would have been, you found the girl, there are a bunch of vampires, it's daytime, so they die as soon as you open their coffin lid and the sunlight gets in, so game over, we didn't even have any combat encounters. I think there was also talk of burning this wagon down, and I have to say, I don't think the Iron Wardens would have been too happy with the result, had they done that. ;) The way I was conceiving of the vampires, during the daytime, when they're asleep, they're dead asleep. I'm not sure there's anything that could wake them before sundown. Burning down the place they're sleeping certainly wouldn't do it. If the Wardens had torched the wagon, they would have found several charred, but empty, coffins (because the bodies disintegrate as soon as they are destroyed in the fire), and a charred, unidentifiable body that might have belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl. Oh, and the gold coins and the gems. Those probably wouldn't have been destroyed in the fire. ;) The dwarves did almost tip the wagon, though, but they were interrupted when they had to go save the elves from a pack of wolves in the forest. ;) Not that tipping the wagon would have had any effect, either, though, really. It wouldn't have woken the vampires, and the girl they were trying to rescue was unconscious, so it wouldn't have woken her, either.

But all in all, it was a great game, even (or especially) if it did stretch my DMing a bit. One should never expect a game to go as planned, so it's good to get practice in adapting on the fly. ;) And, when you're railroading your players and not letting them open plot-doors, hopefully making it seem not too extremely railroady in-game. ;)

Bike Wreck, Sort Of

So, it's Monday morning, and I'm biking to work. I'm heading south on 9th Street, intending to turn left onto Channing. As I approach the intersection, some frakking ... dude (I'm trying to be nice here) is riding west on Channing. I slow down a bit, with the intention of letting him pass through the intersection before I get to it. As he approached the intersection, he pulled his bike up into a wheelie. But, he wheelied it back too far, and fell over backwards. I was successful in my attempt to not laugh. And I figure, I can speed up and get through the intersection, turning onto Channing, while he's picking himself up and getting re-situated on his bike. So I start making my turn.

But, he apparently got himself picked up and re-situated fairly quickly, because as I'm turning, he starts riding ... right into me. I try to swerve out of the way, but don't make it. He crashes into the right side of me and my bike. Luckily, he had hardly any speed, and neither did I, as I braked while swerving, so it didn't even knock me over. My immediate reaction is to say, "Oh shit! Sorry, dude!" He looks at me for a few moments, and then says, "Are you alright?", to which I reply, "Yeah, I'm fine." (Which was true. My leg was slightly sore where he hit it, but no actual injuries.)

I'm about to ask him if he's okay, when ... he proceeds to FAKE-SLAP ME. Seriously. He makes a slapping motion with his hand, about a foot away from my face, as he makes a "Pssshhht" sound with his mouth. So I just ride away.

What a frakking way to start the week, eh?