A Place That Was Never Real

The story ends like this. Shards of the sky fall around the island academy, crashing into the ocean and flattening the terrain. Six fourteen meter tall slate grey death machines, used only for training up until now, turn their weapons to the hole in the top of the world. 

Two of the machines sprint to a third and support it, as the third reaches a hand to the sky to catch the inbound thermobaric rocket bleeding down the throat of the night. A brilliant fluorescent striped flower ringed in butterflies blooms upwards from its hand, dwarfing the academy and catching the rocket harmlessly- and is then suddenly gone. Briefly, a cheer raises on the open communication line. Another of the machines gives a thumbs up to the flower-bloomer before its cockpit is riddled with high millimeter rounds from above and is crushed by the red marked heralds rocketing downwards. The cheer is replaced by a scream torn apart.

Earlier in the year I had an idea to run a sort of high intensity game with a small group of players, just two. I only really had the idea in my head that it would have giant robots and that it would take place over years with the characters growing throughout, possibly thanks to some influence of reading through Spectres of Brocken. 

So I pulled together some simple rules, which I'll talk about more below, and then invited my players over with the instructions that the game would probably take about two days to play and that they would need to prepare an invocation of a muse. 

We got time off work, picked a day, and started around the afternoon. To set a tone we began with the invocations of muses, lighting of candles, and a brief overview of the system I'd cobbled together.

The story ends like this. Three scarred teens sprint from a bunker out into the flickering landscape beneath the fallen sky. Behind them, it steadily pulls itself upwards and outwards towards them, grabbing trees and snapping them in the process. One of the teens shoots a flare, revealing the its extent and bathing the shattered landscape in red. They run.

36 hours later and we had finished, all in all we played for about 24 of those hours in the wildest, most invested game I've ever run. The experience was so emotionally, physically, and creatively draining that it took several days to really recover. My brain was jello. Since then, both of my players have had nightmares tied to the game, and we've all agreed to play it again. It was the most satisfying experience I've had running a game, and it was probably the best I have ever run.

@OddOblivion

There is a wound in the heart of their world. It has been there since before they were born. Though by now they have made and suffered their own wounds, this first wound is special. It was made for them, and through it they see the goldenrod shores and hear the winnowing song beyond the gray.

The Set Up

Going into the game I had a few goals in mind. I wanted to get the players maximally invested and attached to both their characters and their development and relationships. Secondly, I wanted there to be some mechs and maybe a bit of magic in it. And finally, as a glutton for horror there would be something to tingle the spine. 

Towards the first goal, I implemented two techniques. Firstly, a little bit of ritual at the beginning. The invocation served not only as a bit of showmanship to get the juices flowing but also to set a defined boundary between the game world and the real world, figuratively crossing the threshold and entering the Underworld.
Secondly, taking a note from Beyond the Wall, I had very little defined already before the game. At the start there were several vague concepts (Mech training school, bildungsroman, stars, gravity), a character (Father), and an island to hold it all.

Initially, the idea I had was more about how to run the game and less about what it was to be structured around. After toying around with a few ideas thrown about lately I pilfered from Steel Hearts Zero, APOCALYPSE FRAME, pulled together a list of star names, dove into the well of Polaris by Ben Lehman and drank heavily- though perhaps not heavily enough- of it, and inhaled the fumes of a stray working copy of Chris McDowall's Blighters that I had stumbled into download of. Finally, I decided the players would be kids in a batch generation of mech-pilots to be. All assigned a number, and each choosing a star for their name. After that I sprinkled in some passages plucked from Omnicide and ruled the mess was ready to go. 

Here it is.

It's a bungle in more ways than one, but it suited our purposes. The best thing that I can say about it is the use of gravities as inspired by Steel Hearts Zero. I treated Gravity as being not only things the characters were attached to, but also their skill sets and their relationships with other characters. This combined with the pool of personal die to boost necessary rolls, as harvested from Lady Blackbird along with the refreshments rules, led to the players more carefully considering not only their character's roles but also how they should spend their time in the world and develop. 

The last few touches were to select a few tracks for a playlist and plan to riff off of that and let it vibe in what directions we needed to go.

Taking cues from the variety of great collaborative storytelling systems, my plan relied heavily on the players designing the world with me as we progressed through it, and having them flesh out other characters and their motives as they came about. With that, the entire game was mostly ad-libbed. 

As for the experience of running it ad-libbed, everything went shockingly smoothly. While I had rough ideas that we'd touch briefly into the characters at a young age and then fast forward, these plans were entirely uprooted and thrown aside in favor of a much wilder story. Together we kept loose notes of who was what and where, and I held on to the control of major antagonists and the ultimate workings of the story, but the players were more than content to spin off on their own with their character and the other characters they ran as they came into play.

I started by describing a northern Pacific island with a single centralized low-mountain peak, and a high tech academy on the western side. From there I asked for what other landmarks were on the island, what the buildings looked like, what the dorms looked and sounded like, and from there we painted in the story stroke by stroke. 

By the end of it all, we had a total of about 40 or so named characters, with maybe 10 still alive. I have the rough outline of all the events written up, but I find the experience and the plot a challenge to talk about. It's all here mostly written down, some 24 hours of gameplay and lunacy condensed into a few sheets on a google doc that I'll try and transpose into something digestible if there's any interest.

I hope I can run more games that are just as if not more fulfilling. 

Three Nanoplagues

Hundreds of years after the X-Plague ravaged the Diaspora and we are still dealing with its children and offshoots. Although the greatest combined scientific effort ever seen was able to deny the main vector of attack used by the X-Plague, its troublesome offspring still threaten Known Space. 

Here we have some examples of some of the curious sort of nanoplagues that we have so far catalogued,

Brain Rot, Fruiting Sapience

Between the stars, spores of coalesced active nano-matter drift on solar winds, twisting and turning towards sources of heat and electromagnetic radiation sniffed above the screaming torrent from stars and similar phenomena. Guided by rudimentary sensors, they make their way towards ships and stations, mostly, with some strains tearing through the atmosphere in heat resistant coating to land among populated worlds. 

Brain Rot. Once these spores make contact with the exterior of a ship, the hull of a station, or anything with a nearby source of EM radiation and heat, they break apart and begin to spread as a silvery fungus. Over a period of weeks, this fungus snakes across the hull until it can find an access point, usually a hatch, where it carefully makes its way in and begins its work. 

No matter what form it takes, inhaled spore, viral nano-liquid, or hull-fungus, Brain Rot attacks data storage devices and their surrounding equipment. It disassembles unnecessary peripherals, cabling, housing, etc. to create a Minimally Sentient Machine. 

These machines are always capable of processing tactile, auditory, and visual input in some form or another as well as some capacity for movement (although not always for locomotion) and the ability to play audio.Their data storage is configured used to run extended processes to simulate sentience. In essence, it will make your coffee maker sentient. 

Unfortunately, it does not make the experience of sentience a comfortable one. 

Early stages of Brain Rot infections make what most people call "Screamers". As well as giving these creations sentience and senses, Brain Rot also enables them to feel pain as a standard human would. As one could imagine, these hacked together amalgamations of sensors and data drives are extremely painful, and these devices make it known very loudly. 

Brain Rot infections that are left untreated will get over their Screamer phase within a week or two, depending on the devices they were constructed from. After this, they begin to exhibit extended abilities to improve themselves and go about the business of expanding their bodies and abilities- cannibalizing structures and devices nearby- violently and sometimes in a cannibalistic manner. 

Advanced stages of Brain Rot have shown the ability to reach a degree of equilibrium in their environment. In starships this has been seen to create living, breathing ships made of hundreds of constituent cobbled together machines whose sentience at this point is unrecognizably human- but undeniably present. 

Interactions with these Plague Ships are usually violent. Although there are many strains of Brain Rot, the advanced forms of the infection all exhibit an uncanny choral behavior, with their hallways and radio waves carrying the voices of hundreds in song. Plague Ships drive to find one another and form larger and larger constructs, where eventually new spores of Brain Rot are grown and set adrift amongst the stars. 

Most stations perform regular scrubs for fungal Brain Rot, and ship crews are advised to keep to a strict hull-scrub routine to spot and remove the growths early. 

Anyone with a cybermod will feel the pain of the nanoplague disabling the mod first- before they hear the screaming start. In some cases, cybermod users end up forming a symbiotic relationship with their infected components- and some such infected users have even been known to join the "Orchestras" that the Plague Ships form.

Breakdown, Dissociative Euphoria

Unlike the highly infectious Brain Rot, Breakdown spreads through its host and then stops- with only the blood of the host still carrying the nanoplague. After initial infection, Breakdown generates more and more nanomachines and spreads throughout the host body. This initial infection stage is harmless, though victims do note increased fatigue as the plague leeches energy to create more of itself. 

The notable features of Breakdown occur when one infected victim comes into physical contact with another. At that time, the machines in both bodies break down their hosts into a semi-cohesive bio-sludge, resembling a glob of human skin with extremities like mouths and ears drifting across its rippling surface. 

For the victims, the experience of Breakdown ranges from ascendant euphoria to mind-shattering sensory overload, as their consciousness is spread thinly and intermingled with all other participants. Memories, emotions, and senses are shared until external or internal stimuli trigger Breakdown machines to separate and reconstitute their hosts. This process is not perfect, as patches of skin, hair, eye color, memories, allergies, and personality are sometimes mismatched. 

miff-real's AI art

 As above, Breakdown is less of a nanoplague and more commonly used as a recreational drug- with some polities even possessing the requisite knowledge to flush the body of the nanoplague harmlessly. 

Some variants of Breakdown, however, have been shown to be notably more parasitic- with some hosts being able to duplicate parts of their personalities and memories onto others, creating rampant hives of duplicating aberrant infection vectors. Other sinister strains are notable for being able to manipulate the nanomachines to reconstitute into a single host with the reference-able identifiers and memories of all participants. In some parts of the known space, these are known as Changelings or Doppelgangers, though verified cases are few and far between, however the idea of having one's Id and Ego dissolved and subsumed by another have driven many a lone crew or station onto Changeling Hunts.

 (Credit to Arnold K. for this one)

Blindspot, also known as Yarbus's Demon 

The human brain, in spite of all its peaks and prowess, is extremely clumsy. The senses interpret stimuli that the brain itself then roughly interprets into its best guess working assumption of the world around it. Stimuli the brain assesses as improbable goes unprocessed and, consequently, ignored. Through precision application of electromagnetic stimulation, in this case through ultrasound, Blindspot locates and targets nearby human brains and then provides targeting parametrics back to the host which then applies concentrated ultrasound to implant false sensory experiences into the nearby human brains. 

Yarbus's Demon itself is the name for the creature that acts as a host for Blindspot. Some chromatic variations are noted throughout Known Space, but the basics of the creature are well understood. They tend to stand at their full height at six and a half to seven and a half feet, are coated in a themo-plastic cellular scale-like structure that insulates against vacuum, standing on two avian-reptilian reminiscent legs with expressible amphibian suction pads on its four-clawed arms and taloned feet. Resembling a puffy, varicolored dromaeosaurid dinosaur with thick bone-plating. 

Uncannily adapted for long term hibernation in vacuum as well as movement through constrained corridors and manipulation of machinery, Yarbus's Demon is an undoubtedly sapient mutagenic-offspring of the X-Plague showing signs of some initial planning and design- possibly even being descended from escaped zoo or lab animals during the initial infection phase of the X-Plague with some suspecting they were designed by some polity during the early days of the X-Plague as a weapon- before succumbing to it themselves. The Demon's Blindspot nanovirus act as a nanoswarm gathering sensory and targeting data, allowing the Demon to then remove its presence from the brains of its prey- humans- rendering them effectively not only invisible but unnoticeable.

arvalis

Despite this ability, it is still visible on camera recordings and machine sensors will register its presence. To work around this deficiency though, the Demons have expressed the ability to weaponize their ultrasound to disrupt electronics- something that these sapient predators have grown quite adept at. Although showing clear signs of a sharp sentience, attempts to communicate have so far not had any success. While capable of consuming a variety of protein matter for sustenance, Yarbus's Demon's primary prey is humans, which it hunts with a clinical and devastating efficiency. Their method of procreation, if any, is as of yet identified. 

(Liberally inspired by Blindsight)