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In June of 1832, the 57 Irish migrant workers arrived at the docks of Philadelphia. Their job was to lance a flat path for the track through steep, hilly terrain. In railroad parlance, this is known as a ‘cut’ and thereafter that stretch of track would be known as Duffy’s Cut. Six weeks later, they would all be dead. History would blame cholera for their deaths, but history is always written by the winners, and the winners—in this case the railroad company and the landed gentry of Chester County—would be best served by such an explanation. But in fact there is a lot about the historical record that doesn’t add up.

It’s a really interesting article of cover up, death, big business exploiting the workers and people doing each other over for profit. Not to mention ghosts. Lots and lots of ghosts.

A nice atmospheric quote from the full article.

A dark shadow looms over the valley at Duffy’s Cut, dubbed Dead Horse Hollow because the carcasses of dead horses were allegedly dumped there back in the day. Some say it’s cursed, other say it’s haunted. But for the 178 years since the 57 Irishmen died there, the valley has remained untouched by development or, for that matter, any manifestation of modernity.

Something tells me I’ll be using this in a one off at some point.

Read the full article over at the Philadelphia Weekly.

Last night the mystery project was revealedto be a new web series called Dragon Age: Redemption. That’s right, EA/Bioware have asked her to do to Dragon Age what she’s unofficially done to World of War craft. Make it cool and bring it to a different kind of audience. Details are a little thin on the ground but USA Today had the scoop and also did a nice little Gamer Profile on Day.

She has also blogged a little about the project, but no doubt the best place to get more info as it happens is to follow @FeliciaDay on twitter. She tweets a lot.

So info dump aside, what do I think? I think this is super cool. I’m not a huge Guild fan, but think that it’s pretty impressive that it’s been going for 4 whole seasons, and was bank rolled for the first season by fan donations. Day also then managed to keep total creative control when she signed a distribution deal with Microsoft. Also Felicia Day is a real gamer, she plays games, loves games and understands why the rest of us do. A quick quote from the USA Today article:

A life-long game player, Day is fully aware they have a poor track record when it comes to adaptation. “I am an organic gamer and I love games, and I particularly love this franchise,” she says. “I put every single effort into making this something that gamers will be proud of. Even though we were constrained a lot as a Web series, none of the people who were involved took that as a constraint. They took that as a challenge.”

So yeah, I look forward to seeing this when it comes out. I doubt it will be at the same time as Dragon Age 2, but hopefully not too long after.

As soon as I have a computer which isn’t a netbook running Ubuntu I’ll be heading to GoG and spending way too much money on games almost 20 years old.

• Start a new campaign set in a homebrew world. I’m currently working through my ideas and am hoping to start in late February or early March. Interestingly I finally checked out True20 to see if it would fit my ideas for a low magic world, with a not too heavy system and it’s great.
• Continue to get plenty of playing in. I can see one or two of my current games winding up at some stage soon and while one of those will be replaced with my own campaign I hope to fill the other with another longish term game.
• Get a PC. There are heaps of good CRPGs coming out this year and I’m sick of playing on the Xbox 360. I want a PC again, rather than using my TV.
• Talking of non table top games this year I’m looking forward to Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and maybe even my first MMO, The Old Republic.
• I’m going to continue to LARP in one off parlour games.
• Write and run a small LARP (for about 15 people). My ideas at the moment are running towards a steampunk-esque Society of Explorers.

And I think that should keep me pretty busy. What about you? Any plans for this year?

The one-hour drama will find Gellar playing a woman on the run from the mob (still a prevalent and menacing force in TV land, apparently), and whose efforts to evade them involve pretending to be her wealthy twin sister. Unfortunately, she soon discovers that said twin sister is also being targeted…

This brief synopsis doesn’t fill me with interest, it has to be said. But it is also being written by a couple Supernatural writers. So there may be something there. Or it could just end up being lots of shots of Geller running across various American cities in different outfits to represent each character. We will just have to wait and see, but it doesn’t sound like much of a Buffy replacment to me.

Over on io9.com they’ve got a heap of info on a new BBC show call Outcasts. Basically the premise is that Earth becomes uninhabitable so a brave group set off to a new world to start again, doing it right this time. Only it’s never that easy, is it? Check out the trailer and detailed synopsis. It looks good.

Well now you can play them again! I just stumbled across Sarien.net where you can play these old games through your browser.

Or if you’re more into reliving the expirence with friends check out the Parsely Games from Momento Mori. A great way to waste half an hour or so.

And remember folks, don’t forget to save!!