The GLOW 1992: Agent Johnny Blue vs The Kid, Part 0 - the Surprise Arc [Launch]

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About The GLOW: 1992: Agent Johnny Blue vs the Kid

Agent Johnny Blue is sent on a mission into mid-Florida to find Finley "Farsight" Estevan, a powerful remote sensing psychic. His only clue is a hedge mage — Maria "Madame Sinister" Salas — who seems equally powerful at reading the future using tarot cards. Estevan and Salas are involved with a backwoods cult trying to find the Illuminated Codex: a grimoire tied to a mysterious figure known as The Kid. Just exactly what The Kid is, why the cult is trying to summon him, and what Estevan looks to gain from it is unknown. This is the story of Johnny's worst case ever and his biggest failure.

Content Warning: Occasionally very foul language, lots of smoking, quite intense violence, drinking, gambling, non-graphic sex, drugs, criminal behavior, and black magic. References to slavery and racism and related concepts show up. The GLOW is a world of spiritual torture and weird horror.

Part of The GLOW series of adventures.

This post is in the standard Doug Alone post style. See Anatomy of a Post for more details.

Attribution for the tools and materials used—including the splash art—can be found in the Credits below along with some details.

The GLOW 1992: Agent Johnny Blue vs The Kid, Part 0 - the Surprise Arc

The Surprise Arc and Making Do with a Smaller Toolset

Somewhat shortly after my "Taking a Nap" post, the movers came in and took the computer and the rest of our stuff. We were left with basically the books/etc I mentioned in that post, a couple of chairs, a bed that a friend loaned us for our final week in the states, and a suit case full of clothes each. We also had some food and various bits to figure out what to do with before we left.

The next day, I went ahead and built up a binder of select Tricube Tales one-sheets along with a few other bits-and-bobs — the Tricube Tactics extension and the more universal Micro Tales sheet — and then snagged a notebook, some dice, a deck of cards and a few other tools and got to playing. We did not have a computer at the time so it was a fairly analog experience. I ended up whittling down my resource pool to just the following items:

  • Richard Woolcock's Tricube Tales Solo
  • The associated deck of cards that has four jokers instead of two
  • Arcane Agents one-sheet
  • Cezar Capacle's Random Realities

And that was it. Very nearly. I also used Glumdark's "A Mysterious Tower" tool [I'm not sure if you need access to see that or not] while playing around on their website and my first result had been "A wooden tower built of detritus" which was "surrounded by a snake infested moat" with "a single mage [imprisoned]". I took big-time liberties with that but it was fresh in my head when I started so it kind of filtered through. A bit. Snake-filled moat became a whole swamp. Tower of detritus became more Southern-fried. The mage became a psychic who was doing something...odd. Everything else was basically going to have to come from using those tools or just making it up. While I still had a phone — one whose plan was winding down since we opted to cancel over the month of July — it ended up feeling better to just wing most facts and details.

And so I kicked off The GLOW 1995: Agent Johnny Blue. Only, that title did not last for long.

Why Return to The GLOW?

By the time I started playing, I had a binder with around thirty different one-sheets. Why return to Arcane Agents and The GLOW? The quick answer is that it was the first one that caught my eye, partially because it was the first one I had printed. I had printed that one out before playing the OG Johnny Blue mini-campaign. It was originally to play a GM-less co-op game.

Besides, Johnny Blue's storyline was fairly well ended by the end of his and Eustace's tale but the implication had been that he had a lot of story prior to what was his final The GLOW case. He had a stack of allies and enemies. He's the kind of character where I could do prequels going back into The GLOW's 1980s and dig up all kind of things.

But also I had finished reading Carl Hiassen's Tourist Season and that idea of a kind of Florida Keys vs Modernity vibe interested me. Something like a more folksy crime story. Bad guys who might not be all bad and good guys who are not all good. Folks playing out their little dramas and getting in over their head. Something that had a city setting but also a fair amount of swamp and squalor. I did not want to use Miami since that was too known and would have made me felt like research was necessary. Instead I came up with the town of Arbuck — a very oblique reference to Robert Bloch → R Block → R Bock → I have no idea why my brain pulled that — set on a [presumably] fictional Highway 117 between Gaston and Wales.

Gaston is all cheesy ante-bellum splendor. A tourist trap that pushes fictional and over the top sourthern splendor and water parks only more bigly and more GLOW. Wales is a high-aether-tech city where key components of the Harrowing are made. Arbuck is just the little bit of nowhere in-between whose two claims-to-fame are a mystery writer from the 1950s and The Cloister — an old Spanish monastery turned into greasy spoon diner. See, Dr. Lamark worked in Wales for a bit during the war and he lived in Gaston, but he stopped off to eat in Arbuck.

The biggest landmark in Arbuck is the Waukepsie Swamp.

The kind of place where the Medical Mall has a tobacco shop.

A Plot Develops and Things Shift, Pretty Quickly

In the opening scene, I asked a question: "Wait, is this the Florida adventure?" and got a yes. A big yes. Essentially what you would consider a Critical Yes. And this changed some things. 1995 was picked when it was a minor adventure in a long career of varying adventures. Now, it is 1992. Also, this can't be a shorter story but needs some length. Finally, whatever happens: Johnny fails.

In 1996, he considers "The Florida Incident" to be a failure bad enough he essentially refuses to talk about it.

Through the first and second sessions characters showed up. You have a bumbling foursome who are kind of a tribute to the Shiners in Tourist Season but are also nods to my college-era friend group. You get a cult who are bad white surpremacists (bad for it and bad at it). Maria is introduced and made into the kind of femme fatale that Amy Patel was meant to be before that went off the rails. There are magical relics and old statues and plantations.

It has gone from a "just play a half dozen scenes" to something like a major bit of lore for The GLOW.

And, as of writing right now — currently July 24, 2025 — I am maybe half or one-third finished. Possibly even less. I have over forty pages of notes in my "pocket journal." I figured now was a good time — we are in Belgium and I have an internet connection and computer — to go ahead and transcribe the first few scenes into blog format and then continue from that point in a more "straight to blog" approach.

So we can find out together how bad this is going to get.

But What about The Bleak + The Pearl?

From the viewpoint of Doug Alone, it will be something like two months since I posted that The Bleak + The Pearl season 2 was going to be the next story. Behind the scenes, this is still essentially true. I have posts related to it sitting in my draft folder right now but still need a session or so before they get complete enough to queue up. I think what I'll do is alternate between these two storylines. It's just a matter of having a backlog and neither choice necessarily being "the right one" at the cost of the other.

CREDITS

The GLOW 1992: Agent Johnny Blue vs The Kid is played using Richard Woolcock's Tricube Tales Solo and associated card deck, the Arcane Agents one-sheet, Cesar Capacle's Random Realities, and a hefty dose of the imagination. Some inspo was taking from a GlumDark table though technically that was unrelated...until it wasn't.

ART CREDIT AND EXPLANATION

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