You may wish to read Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (from which come the quotes at the beginning of the San Francisco and Las Vegas chapters) and Moore & Campbell’s From Hell. For more about Vegas in this time period, I recommend Steve Fischer’s When the Mob Ran Vegas: Stories of Money, Mayhem and Murder.
Other inspirational stories can include Ocean’s 11, the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas movie, The Cooler, and Moulin Rouge. Albums of interest should include Billy Holiday’s Ella in Berlin, Frank Sinatra’s Live in Australia with the Red Norvo Quartet, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s Starring Sammy Davis Jr.
The swarm are inspired by Grant Morrison’s writings, The Matrix, and icky insects in general. They are a primordial evil, an ant-colony horror. They are utterly alien.
The Las Vegas Moulin Rouge is real. After searching for interesting events in “Las Vegas 1955” and discovering the story of the Moulin Rouge, it quickly took over that half of the adventure like some science fiction infestation.
We have no mercy for you
This is a fiction based around real events, some of them horrific. There is evil in the world we do not understand. We may never know who Jack the ripper was, or who the zodiac was, but we do know that they were real, and that they needed no fantasy demon to goad them into killing. The death angels didn’t need an Autumnal Swarm to tell them to hack apart a man until “his skin hung in bloody strips from his skull”. The weathermen killed and severely wounded police officers using a nail-lined pipe bomb without any help from the supernatural. No interdimensional bugs created the Manson family, nor motivated weathermen leaders to “dig” the Manson victims’ treatment and dedicate their manual on revolution to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan.
That was real. That was our world. It may still be.
San Francisco timeline
Depending on how you want to handle this adventure, there are several useful insertion points in 1969. I chose August 5 so that the headlines will read “This is the Zodiac speaking” and the deciphered message will appear a few days later. There are other important events that could be moderately related to the adventure but aren’t specifically tied to it, however.
Italicized items are fictional parts of this adventure.
| March 20 | Chicago 8 indicted. |
| March 21 | San Francisco State University student strike ends with the institution of a School of Ethnic Studies. |
| May 15 | National Guard called out in Berkeley to put down the Bloody Thursday People's Park student riots. |
| May 26-June 2 | John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “bed-in-peace” demonstration in Montreal; record “Give Peace a Chance”. |
| June 18-22 | At the Students for a Democratic Society’s Chicago national convention, the Weathermen split from the SDS. |
| June 28 | Stonewall Riots, New York City. |
| July 4 | Vallejo Zodiac killing. |
| July 20 | Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, land on moon. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” |
| August 1 | San Francisco newspapers receive letters from Zodiac with cipher. |
| August 2 | Zodiac letters appear in San Francisco Chronicle. |
| August 4 | San Francisco Examiner receives a letter: “This is the Zodiac speaking”. |
| August 5 | The characters arrive; waning moon; new moon will be August 13, full moon August 27. |
| August 6 | Manson returns to southern California. |
| August 8 | Zodiac cipher cracked. |
| August 8 | August Wey returns from Washington DC. |
| August 9 | Decoded cipher printed. |
| August 9 | August Wey’s Market Street speech. |
| August 9-10 | Tate-LaBianca Manson family murders (Los Angeles; not known as a Manson murder until November). |
| August 15-17 | Woodstock: more than 450,000 people in Bethel, New York. |
| August 17-19 | Hurricane Camille, worst U.S. hurricane since 1935, hits Mississippi, continues killing all the way to Virginia. |
| August 16 | Manson and Family arrested at Spahn Ranch on suspicion of auto theft, and released a few days later. |
| August 22-24 | The Grateful Dead, Wild West Festival. |
| September 27 | Lake Berryessa Zodiac killing. |
| September 30 | Lake Berryessa killing printed in Chronicle. |
| October 1 | 5.6 earthquake in Santa Rosa at 9:56 PM and 11:19 PM felt in San Francisco. |
| October 8 | Days of Rage, Chicago Weathermen riots. |
| October 11 | Presidio Heights, San Francisco, Zodiac killing. |
| October 10-12 | Manson family arrested at Barker Ranch (Death Valley) on arson charges, leading to murder rap. |
| October 15 | Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, national walk-out and demonstrations across the United States. |
| November 9 | 78 Indians seize Alcatraz Island and offer to buy it for $24 worth of beads; occupation lasts a year. |
| November 12 | "I've killed seven" Zodiac letter printed. |
| November 12 | My Lai massacre story breaks. |
| November 15 | Second Moratorium to End the War draws 200,000 people in San Francisco. |
| December 3 | Manson story breaks. |
| December 4 | Black Panther Fred Hampton assassinated by police in Chicago. |
| December 6 | Rolling Stones at Altamont; Hell’s Angel kills black man. |
