reality into adventure (CONTEST)(pogre and teflon billy win!)

stick with me, the contest rules are below

i am currently trying to read a terrible book called "the gnostics".

as i was slogging through the nearly unreadable text, full of names i couldn't pronounce and filled with references i didn't get(oh, to be a bear of very little brain) i came upon the following bit.

i am quoting straight form the book here-

" Beneath the sand the jar was a kind of still womb. inside the jar a small moment of history was silently hidden-unknown to the whole world. Empires will arise and decline, kings and queens will come and go, fashions will change, earth is plowed and seeds are sown a thousand, thousand times. Blood is spilt, the sun shines, hopes appear and die again, an advance here, a retreat there. The texts lie silent in the unmoved air. Visions and prophets and sweat and toil. Struggles ensue: gunpowder, printing, voyages of discovery, genocide, inflation and fire; ages of reason, ages of faith, ages of magic, ages of war and ages of peace. The grains of sand are transplaced a million times. Far, far away: steam engines, electricity, blood and glory, monarchy and republic, riches and poverty, penicillin and gas; a million joys, a trillion tears; the telephone, the aeroplane and then, in August 1945 two atomic bombs fall on two cities in japan.

How many times was it said that year that the 'sea shall give up her dead'? She does not always surrender to archeologists, assorted salvage teams and bounty hunters. Sometime in the December of 1945, three sons of Ali and Umm-Ahmad of the al-samman clan, Muhammad, Khalifa and Abu al-Majd were out diggin for sabakh with four camel-drivers not far from their home in al-Qasr, a village six kilometers from the town of Nag Hammadi on the main line to cairo. Sabakh is bird-lime and a good place to find it is beneath the high cliffs of the Jabal al-Tarif, a kilometer away from the village of Hamra Dum. It was near a large boulder, long since fallen from the cliff that the youngest brother, Abu, unearthed the jar. Muhammad, who was ten years older, assumed the responsibility for dealing with the discovery.

Just over forty years later, Border Television's filmcrew were in the neighborhood with Gilles Quispel, Professor of New Testament studies at the University of Utrecht, in order to film the location fo the discovery. Our production manager, Valerie Kaye, ws walking down the main street of al-Qasr with a copy of Biblical Archeologist (Fall 1979) which featured a color photograph of Muhamma Ali al-Samman on its cover. A rather serene-looking man in his mid-soixties walked up to her and, seeing the picture, pointed to it and then himself. He was the man responsible for discovering the Nag Hammadi Library.

This is how he tells the story......"

it goes on, but this part struck me as being a fantastic intro to an adventure.

SO- here is my challenge. find a bit of real world writing (non-fiction) that is not game oriented but which makes for a great adventure intro. there is no minimum or maximum length, except what bores folks

post it here. cite the book like you would for a paper in school.

best adventure lead in wins a die roller from me and bragging rights forever, as well as the gratitude of many dm's

i will find 1 or 2 other people to help me judge, any genre or time period is o.k.

the contest will run till december 19.

any takers?

sounds cool

I'm in.

Me too. Sounds fun.

I'll help judge

well, that is one of the tow i invited to judge, any players?

why is someone holding a gun at the gnome?

"For very nearly twenty years beforehand these two men had corresponded regularly about the finer points of English lexicography, but they had never met. Dr. Minor never seemed willing or able to leave his home at Crowthorne, never willing to come to Oxford. He was unable to offer any kind of explanation, or to do more than offer his regrets.

Dr. Murray, who himself was rarely free from the burdens of his work at the dictionary headquarters, the famous Scriptorium in Oxford, had nonetheless dearly wished to see and thank his mysterious helper. And particularly so by the late 1890's, with the dictionary well on its way to being half completed: Official honors were being showered upon all its creators, and Murray wanted to make sure that all those involved - even men so apparently bashful as Dr. Minor - were recognized for the valuable work they had done. He decided he would pay a visit.

.....

Once he had made up his mind to go, he telegraphed his intentions, adding that he would find it most convenient to take a train that arrived at Crowthorne Station ... just after two on a certain Wednesday in November. Dr. Minor sent a wire by return to say that he was indeed expected and would be made most welcome. On the Journey from Oxford the weather was fine; the trains were on time; the auguries, in short, were good.

At the railway station a polished landau and liveried coachman were waiting, and with James Murray aboard they clip-clopped back through the lanes of rural Berkshire. After twenty minutes or so the carriage turned up a long drive lined with tall poplars, drawing up eventually outside a huge and rather forbidding red-brick mansion. A solemn servant showed the lexicographer upstairs, and into a book-lined study, where behind immense mahoganey desk stood a man of undoubted importance. Dr. Murray bowed gravely, and launched into the brief speech of greeting he had rehearsed:

'A very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society, and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is indeed an honour and privilege to at long last make your acquaintance - for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr. W. C. Minor?'

There was a brief pause, a momentary air of mutual embarassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and spoke:

'I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.'"

Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman:A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Harper Collins, New York, New York (1998).

There has got to be a Cthulhu adventure here!

pogre said:

"
'A very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society, and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is indeed an honour and privilege to at long last make your acquaintance - for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr. W. C. Minor?'

There was a brief pause, a momentary air of mutual embarassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and spoke:

'I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.'"

Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman:A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Harper Collins, New York, New York (1998).

Click to expand...

However, as Winchester also notes, that encounter is entirely fictional, invented by an unscrupulous "journalist" many years after the fact.
Nag Hammadi was a cool discovery too.

alsih2o said:

well, that is one of the tow i invited to judge, any players?

Click to expand...

What, my piss story wasn't good enough for you?