1KM1KT Free RPG Community

The recent talk about stealth mechanics, and card mechanics has got me slightly energized to get back to writing.
So I'm thinking of fleshing out my ideas on a card mechanic in a survival styled sci-fi/horror game.
So I'm looking at settings/sites being on space stations, transports and possible lunar/asteroid mining installations.

I'm thinking future, but not so far advanced that we have FLT, or completely energy based weapons/shields.
Possibly will include sporadic "alien" encounters, but I'm trying to figure a plausible horror-esque type foe aside
from going with a straight zombie type foe.

I would like to do a combo-type deal . . . where there is some sort of "mental illness/phobia" (think Pandorum - decent movie btw) that causes some to go maniacal/insane and others to basically shut down/zombiefy.

Thoughts?

The "zombie" kinda of foes wouldn't be the undead flesh hungry type, more unaware, but violently reactive when
encountered/provoked/disturbed kind.

The "insane" foes would be along the lines of over the top zealots, willing to kill/die for some perceived "greater good/cause", possible some even believing they are "god-like."

Question I'm trying to figure out is how do I make this plausible, as a mental affliction isn't really "infectious" . . .
Can I make it infectious? Should I link it to some-type of contaminant or side effect from the "hyper-sleep solution" used for long distance space travel . . . I do want the baseline "cause" to be something the PC's/Heroes have to content with,
(Ie) they should be worried about anyone exhibiting symptoms, including themselves.

For clarification the feel of the "sites" should/will be close to the atmosphere of Alien, Aliens, Pandorum, and Moon (another interesting movie . . .), meaning close, confined and claustrophobic. The site maps will be placed on the game surface, and made up of playing cards laid out in a specific design.

Thoughts? Advice? Suggestions?

Let me introduce you to ... or better yet, don't! Its a parasitic disease that attacks organs and has been linked to various mental disorders including ADD,OCD, and schizophrenia. T. gondii protozoa are also known for making infected rodents take bigger risks around cats, which leads to them being caught, and passing on the infection, continuing the disease's life cycle.

Usually there are biological barriers in place that generally don't allow alien spores or germs to affect Earth creatures. However, as BSE, Bird Flu, and the aforementioned cat disease show, jumping species is alarmingly possible. If were talking about recycled air when everyone is in close proximity due to the small size of exo-planetary settlements, then rapid dissemination could be a major concern.

Now that I've addressed your comment about "mental disorders not being infectious", lets look at the somewhat bigger picture. No FTL is going to mostly limit us to this solar system, and generally the inner part if we want any sort of reasonable travel times (ie less than six years). Per usual, here is a link the the site for hard science concerns. Moon and Mars bases could be intersting, and there is nothing against habitats around asteroids - either the belt or the Jupiter . Well, there is expense and complexity so some sort of McGuffin that encourages near term exo-settlements because we could have had colonies decades ago if we really wanted to. Or perhaps an alternate history approach would be in order (where the soviets hit the moon first, and then the race moves to mars?) placing this all in our very near future (2020-2025) rather than later.

What if the terror is just other people, and nothing necessarily disease or alien based? The problem of how you govern people with access to spaceships can lead to some distressing scenarios just by itself. If you want to get around the solar system quickly, you need to rely on scary stuff and won't have entire armies aboard ship to protect it. Solar panels get less efficient farther from the sun, so atomic reactors are probably going to be used out of necessity for life support, before we even get to exhaust temperature and thrust potential of something like the old nuclear engines. If you go the Orion route, then the ships are literally toating around hundreds of atomic bombs. How about we remove those atomic piles from individual ships and just go for ? Fine, though keep in mind the lasers may be dozens of megawatts, and it only takes about 1200 kilowatts to cut steel - the beam control centers would be the kind of thing Bond villains and Lex Luthor dream about! An aircraft hitting a building at 500 MPH is terrible, a spacecraft on a kamikaze run at orbital velocity... Oh, and don't forget that good old hypergolic rocket fuels like unsemetrical dimethylhydrazine have roughly the same affect on human bodies as nerve gas mixed with sulpheric acid.

There are reasons why I stopped wanting to be an astronaut around age 8.

So this could be a game of Counter-terror in space, where the players stop insane people ]aboard ships. (If you don't write the game like that, someone should. .) The Deadspace video game series already covered the "alien artifact with psychic and mutagen properties" though there may be some other elements to mine from that. Speaking of other influences - "Firefly" had no FTL but wasn't set in Earth's solar system so this could some how involve transplanted humans, or sufficiently human aliens in a system with more planets. This entry on my blog might have something to inspire you as well as could () and for good measure, this one and this one is an argument for space zeppelins ().

Don't forget, this is just me throwing things out there to be helpful. The idea that its all a side effect of the lowest bidder contaminated cryogenic suspension drugs you already mentioned has a lot of potential. It explains why help would be so slow to arrive, how the problem got so widespread, and allows for weaker/slower ships that don't involve everyone having having access to atomic piles. (Though poorly built reactors leaking radioactive steam into the ship would add to the terror anyway. Just ignore the whole shadow shield and the idea the reactor isn't connected to the life areas construction principle)

Yeah, I'm going to have fun coming up with more ideas for this, but here is a start at least.

The "McGuffin" for the near term exo-settlements/installations I'm considering is an enviro-economic one. Basically the cost of doing any resource business on earth is getting out of hand and the cost-effort ratio (when including items such as permits, brides, bid-bonds, environmental-trust funds, law suits, etc) is lower when considering being able to send smaller work forces into space to "strip mine" floating rocks.

While this is far from a perfect idea (as if it was really plausible companies would be actively working towards lunar/asteroid resource gathering), but I find it more genuine than just saying some ultra rare material we can't live without is only mine-able in space.

This base assumption also lends credence to the "lowest-bidder" syndrome that would allow for sub-par cryo-drugs, and shuttles, with a further twist it would also allow for lower tech/equipment for "emergency crews.", which I'm thinking will be the "main career" for PCs. (I'm thinking base gear would include "low-tech" breaching tools (like crowbars, halligans, sledge hammers) right now I'm kinda looking into wither the "rumor" that flechette ammo is better than buckshot for preventing hull penetrations.)

This "situation" can also allow for the "counter-terror" ideas to also be played out with in the system, as disgruntled-slave worked employees seek pay back and such.

Adding to the research/look into items would be the actual length of let's say a 2 year contract, that doesn't include travel time to the work site, and is counted from a year at the work site as opposed to the earth. (ie does 2 years at asteroid d726 actually mean the employee works for 6 years in earth time?)

Still reading and considering options/ideas . . . one that has really moved to the front of my thinking is that for the most part combat is going to have to be "non-lethal", on the part of the PCs. Namely if I follow the "rescue squad" type notion then their primary requirement is going to be capture & containment of hostiles. (picture local law enforcement dealing with a bar fight.)

This means for the most part I'm going to have to create a "scaled" combat system, that accounts for "hostiles" who are intent on causing physical harm(insane/crazies/fanatics), or unable to do anything but cause physical harm("zombies") versus the PCs who are obligated to "prevent casualties".

That is going to be interesting. Of course Players will be able to "up the ante" and also inflict lethal damage if needed, but the main premise is they will be entering most situations under the order/impression that they are there to prevent/mitigate a situation rather than increase the body count.

Though I do freely admit the PCs will have an advantage over many "foes" as they will have body armor, while most foes will not, that of course also doesn't account for high pain tolerances of possible "zombiefied" foes.

A portion of the game will revolve around resource management (ie limited inventory and access to replacement resources) . . . ie PCs will have to in the gear up phase of a story/game session to decide if they are taking additional ammo, alternate tool sets, or even extra rations, medi-kits. (still brewing this one over in my head as to what would be a reasonable amount of Inventory space.)

While you mentioned the idea of "near future" - would you consider a near "Retro-future"? I've discussed before how the microchip allowed us to explore space at reduced risk and cost, therefore removing the need for placing humans on colonies. If you stick to a setting where the machines are still the size of houses, many possibles come up.

If two astronauts with slide-rules weigh 500 pounds, and a computer 5000, then the focus is going to be on people in space. 1930s ideas about weather forecasting was teams of meteorologists watching earth from telescopes in orbiting labs and radioing their direct observations down. No computer aided ground penetrating sonar also impedes resource extraction on earth (reason to go to space) and the limits of physical book-keeping drive up expense as well. A lack of microchips also means no cell-phones, and all their isolation breaking implications.

There are any number of plausible reasons to not have body-armor in space. More mass means more inertia and thus harder movement in micro-g. Metal plates plus cosmic rays yields brelingstrum (ie it microwaves/irradiates the user). It doesn't fit under or over your spacesuit very well. Kevlar (if it exists) doesn't do well against sharp objects like knives and tools, you still need a pretty hefty amount of the stuff to stop a shotgun, and mining explosives just liquefy everything - so why bother? Or the employer is too cheap to send it up. Furthermore, vests do wear out and are generally single use so they're going to be careful about when to actually wear one.

As to the differing levels of damage. The easiest way would probably to follow the Fuzion/hero system and have two pools of HP - Hits and Stun - that heal at different rates. A more involved system might have both wound levels and HP, with a rule for each. So you have levels of consciousness, and can make a save based on your endurance and training to resit non-lethal effects, but positive thinking doesn't close bullet holes. (ie d6/WoD system wound levels for stun, and D&D HP for major injuries).

My casual web-surfing came across a quick into to , other videos by the same team may also be helpful. The old 1km1kt.net game is based around blackjack and thus may hold some good ideas for your mechanics.

So going through materials (including some of my stuff for "the Silent Void") I'm slowly getting the concept for what I want to try and accomplish. I plan on sticking with the "mining in space" premise again using environmental-economic justification for the foray towards this business venture.

Even went back to read the plot-synopsis on "Moon" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(film); which has helped reaffirm my un-voiced thought on having small crews for these operations . . . the mining labor would be done by robotics/drones, but monitored at collection/processing stations by only skeleton crews (maybe 4 to 7 individuals per station).

"Lowest-Bidder Syndrome" will be the cause for many issues, including a growing crisis of erratic behavior in site personnel. (ranging from total disassociation, to homicidal actions.), coupled with extreme isolation psychosis, brought on by the elongated time spent away from earth (possible 12 year round trip coupled with say a 2 year term in the belt equaling 6 to 12 years earth time.)

PC's would be make up a "Rescue/Emergency Response Squad" based at a hub point allowing for them to reach "problems" with in a week to a couple of months. Resources will be limited to the point where "each shot has to count".

Most likely will be moving from the "zombie" foe. . . irrational People are scarier anyway.

Now much of this is all setting concepts, mechanic wise it will be card system, I feel like forgoing the HP/health ideas in favor of using an injury/conditions system including items like "Bleeding", "Stun" and "Shock" as check/modifier values.

-- This is starting to get complex . . .
-- might just have to do a short story or two to help gauge/expand the premise before diving straight into how to get the mechanics to work . . .

One thing to consider if you're going to lean heavily upon the people in isolation tend to go psychotic thing is to consider what happens when a small group of people are in isolation. Look at something like the Children of the Corn; if you want players to have to face something really horrifying they could be stuck as outsiders in essentially what is a Planet of the Corn; a vast metropolitan society where a vastly different culture has massive xenophobia, and the players, whether they're remnants of a past expedition just finally waking up after some time as icecubes or part of the second wave of settlers in a non-FTL setting must try to blend into an alien, often dangerous, culture.

Actually a lot of the fear could be the disease spreading into a major metropolitan area. The teams that go to handle these situations are often viewed with suspicion, are they a carrier of the disease?

Large automated facilities, a handful of crazy people. That sounds like an interesting environment to game in. The crazy people have the root passwords to the computers and all the robots. These aren't combat robots, but an automated forklift can give you a bad day.

They also know about all the hiding places in this facility. Maybe part of the disease is a paranoia that makes them create little rat nest fortresses.

Then there's the idea of a facility that keeps going bad because of the guy that everyone thought was blown out an airlock but he's really been hiding. Each time a new crew shows up they get sick in really short order.

So I'm taking slow steps forward. Figured I do a quick short story to help give me an idea of the mood I want.

Not a best seller, but I like it enough to say this is the type of mood, situations I'll be looking at replicating with the game mechanics.

Uploaded to Google Drive . . . sharing to view is anyone with the link.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8q-nGE ... sp=sharing