In keeping with the latest meme doing the rounds I thought I’d take my online usernames* and create something that may be of use to anyone out there in RPG land.

Bojira
The origins of the beast known as Bojira are shrouded in mystery but over the years one story seems to crop up over and over again. Can we take any truth from this popular story or is it just that… a story.

At some point during the late 1990’s the Spanish island of Tenerife not far off the coast of Africa was the destination of choice for many families looking for a quiet holiday but it also contained a more youthful element that liked to take their partying seriously and could be seen dancing, drinking and fighting their way through into the very small hours of the night.

A group of young Scotsmen arrived one summer and stayed in the lovely Los Christianos which was off the beaten track for most of the party animals and the beasts that stalk the night. Little did they know that on the forth night of their stay on the island something terrible would happen.

The evening started as usual with a few beers in the apartment before the long walk into Playa de las Americas. They had noticed the forest fires burning near the peak of the volcano in Teide National Park and at night it looked like the volcano was close to erupting. Little did they know just how close that came to being true. They started off at one end of the strip with the intent on reaching The Crows Nest at the other end by 2am with everyone hopefully still standing. What the didn’t bank on was getting lost and split up in amongst some of the pubs deep within the maze of buildings that comprise the strip.

Three of the friends managed to find a friendly looking bar where the locals took great joy in buying them drinks and as the night went on they soon forgot about their rendezvous at the other end of the street. Then they started to lose one another as well. First Paul was dragged away to another pub by some Liverpudlian he met and then Barry was seduced by a tall African woman dressed head to toe in leather. At that point they really should have seen it coming. Finally the last friend, Bob, was piled into the back of a taxi by a few of the locals and taken away.

The next morning everyone awoke to find the living room of the apartment ransacked. Bob’s bed was in pieces on the floor and the fridge door had been literally ripped from it’s hinges. Empty packets of biscuits and cakes strewn all over the floor and empty bottles of alcohol thrown against the walls. The front door was lying wide open as well. No one could remember the previous night after leaving the apartment and they were worried. The police turned up to take statements but nothing else was said. You could tell by the fear in their eyes though that something was up.

That night a local supermarket was ransacked and 2 of the staff were dismembered and chewed upon. The CCTV footage recovered was very limited but you could definitely work out that whatever did it was not a human or at least wasn’t a human any more. For the next few weeks as the forest fire burned farmers talked of losing the occasional sheep or cow to a predator and it was happening more often as time went on.

The final part to the story that any local is willing to talk about is of seeing a young man that looked very much like Bob from the beginning of the story enter one of the busy nightclubs on the strip. About 30 minutes later something more akin to a giant bear crawled out leaving behind a trail of destruction that left nobody alive within the walls of that club.

The stories go that whatever happened that first night he was changed and it was the power of the volcano that drove him insane and provided the means to create so much destruction. The locals fear this so much they have taken to providing sacrifices to the volcano again in the hope that it will appease it and keep the beast known locally as Bojira from destroying their island and their homes.

* Over most of the internet I am known as Bobzilla and this is actually very close to how I came to be given that name. No animals were hurt in the production of story and characters may be based on real life individuals though if they can remember that night they are doing far better than I straight away.

So yeah how did this come about? Well there was a bit of chat on Twitter about The Chatty DM actually being the Chatty Den Mother. Hammer took it from there and on to the RPG Bloggers Google Group and Vulcan Steve is hosting the list of them. Amazing what can come from a few throw away lines on Twitter isn’t it?

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