The Legend of the "Black Knight"

Head over to GNDN to check out their write up on creating a backstory for the Black Knight.  No, not the mounted heavy cavalry, clanking armor kind.  This Black Knight is an alien spacecraft that has been orbiting the Earth for thousands of years, or so a certain sub-sect of conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

For “fun,” I’ve been poking at the Google Newspaper Archive and Wikipedia, and trying to dig up some more articles / background info. Inspired by Ken Hite’s “The Dracula Dossier,” I briefly thought I might phony up a whole, physical mock dossier, but that would be a lot of work, so I’m just going to post my copy-pasted bullet points.

The idea is that you can use this ‘raw material’ to flesh out some RPG thing you’re writing background for. Periodic alien visitation, ancient alien satellite left in orbit, prehistoric human space-faring evidence, etc. Maybe change the names / dates / locations if you need to. I’ve got most of the Black Knight Satellite ‘events’ on my list, and I’ve added some more arguably ‘relevant’ material.

What follows is a great example of Yog-Sothery, brewing up an entire mythology based on a few hard facts and a whole lot of creative conjecture. It's an incredibly effective narrative technique that I'm surprised isn't used more often. Most of the modern Alternate Reality Games do it using faux websites to build up the game world. It's far more effective when you can take our world and make it part of the game, so to speak, by putting a believable spin on actual events.