From the author of the imaginative and “awe-inspiring” ( New York Journal of Books) graphic novel The Electric Statecomes the haunting sequel to his remarkable Tales from the Loop.

These forms can produce a variety of Flood forms and release them once its internal pressure has reached a certain point. Despite their efforts, people can also radically fail to control floods. The most famous flood in American history, the Johnstown Flood, was an artificial disaster. The tragedy killed 2,209 people and made headlines around the country. Things from the Flood is often a thoughtful RPG. I mean by this that game designer Nils Hintze has thought of questions GMs and players might have and answered them. An example of this is the table that converts the tumbles of d6s into the percentage probability of success.Conserving wetlands also reduces the impact of floods. Wetlands provide a natural barrier, acting as a giant sponge for storm surges and flood plains. The swamps and bayous of America's southern Louisiana and Mississippi, for instance, protect inland areas from both coastal and riverine flooding. Wetlands absorb the storm surge from hurricanes that hit the area from the Gulf of Mexico. Wetland riparian zones that line the Mississippi River protect fertile flood plains as the river overflows its banks. Engineers may also intentionally flood areas to prevent the possibility of worse flooding. When heavy rains caused the Souris River to flood in 2011, for example, the water level nearly reached the top of the Alameda Reservoir in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Canada. Faced with the prospect of catastrophic flooding if the entire dam broke, engineers chose to release huge amounts of water. The reservoir remained intact, but the release contributed to massive floods in both Saskatchewan and the U.S. city of Minot, North Dakota. When the Flood have amassed enough sentient hosts to form a Gravemind, then their behavior becomes far more coordinated, and the Flood collective becomes much more deadly as a result. The Gravemind may also speak directly through combat forms and pure forms under its control. Key minds are nodes for the Flood's collective consciousness, ranging from mobile coordinating forms to compound minds spanning entire planets. [24] Juggernaut [ edit ] Main article: Flood Juggernaut It was this event that Pitman and Ryan believe could be the flood recorded in the Book of Genesis. The salt water poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls (anyone who has ever traveled to the base of the falls on the Maid of the Mist will have a sense of the power involved). In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth at least two times the height of the World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away. Anyone living in the fertile farmlands on the northern rim of the sea would have had the harrowing experience of seeing the boundary of the ocean move inland at the rate of a mile a day.

Things from the Flood is an Earth setting (ish) with mixed technology, and I think this mix of everything changing and the old world, the old wonders, falling apart is a dominant aspect of the game. Determining the amount of runoff in an area can also provide clues about the possibility of flooding. Runoff happens when there is more water than soil can absorb. Excess water overflows and runs on top of the land. Runoff can come from natural processes, such as icemelt. It can also come from human activity, such as excess irrigation, sewage, and industrial waste. Controlling runoff can help control floods. If that was not bad enough, many machines started showing weird fleshy growths. This phenomena was dubbed the “machine cancer”, and it resulted in the destruction of a lot of machines. The exact cause of the machine cancer could not be determined, but some point their fingers at KRAFTA, the Swedish corporation who were tasked with cleaning up around the loop and recover any data. Others have even more outlandish ideas, like this being some kind of space virus. No matter the cause though, the machine cancer keeps spreading. Although the Flood is biological on the most basic level, as an outbreak advances, it becomes a highly powerful self-replicating swarm which will seek to harness any mechanism — philosophical, ideological or technological — to perpetuate itself and its goals. These aspects were most prominently demonstrated during the two major outbreaks in the Forerunner era, particularly the Forerunner-Flood war. [70]Simon Stalenhag takes us to an extraordinary world, a world of fear and discovery, in a story told through his gut-punchingly spare narrative and lush illustrations. A flood can develop in a many ways. The most common is when rivers or streams overflow their banks. These floods are called riverine floods. Heavy rain, a broken dam or levee, rapid icemelt in the mountains, or even a beaver dam in a vulnerable spot can overwhelm a river and send it spreading over nearby land. The land surrounding a river is called a flood plain. It fed on intelligent life and, in doing so, became ever more intelligent itself. The Flood was unique; it used their very strength against them." — Cortana on the Forerunners' war against the Flood. Characters have four attributes – Body, Tech, Heart, and Mind. Each of these attributes has three connected skills. Characters buy points in the attributes and skills, starting with an average of 2-3 in each attribute, and having to make a call between maxing out key skills (which will eat up almost all of the available skills points) or having a broader spread.