One of the major influences on Tesseracti, was, weirdly enough, Half-Life and Half-Life 2; every PC party had their own Controller, my spin on Half-Life's G-Man. It probably would trigger every anti-authoritarian impulse the players had, but I liked the idea of having an enigmatic advisor who was on your side, for once.

NPCS THAT YOU MIGHT MEET ON YOUR WAY DOWN TO HELL

DR. HENGE: Dr. Henge is the Tesseracti's primary medical advisor, which is quite a feat considering the range of medical staff that the Tesseracti has to choose from. Dr. Henge's expertise, however, doesn't entirely derive from the medical training that he's picked up over the years. Rather, it comes from the fact that he's the penultimate of his own fallen echo. Two hundred thousand people died to grant him the ability to know almost everything there is to know about the human body. 

He's managed to avoid a lot of the arrogance that marks specialists, but he's still not a terrifically pleasant person to be around. His personality is cold and detached, and frequently contemptuous - he's never rude or unpleasant to the people he treats, but his diary is a laundry list of his opinion of the IQ's of the people that he's had to mend. None of them are laudatory. People speaking to him usually get the impression that he's only giving them enough attention to maintain the impression that he's listening to them, while the rest of his mind continues on what it was doing before you bothered him. If you're injured, he's attentive - and even vaguely sympathetic - but he's too engaged in his work to concentrate on the feelings of the person that he's working on, leaving that to his assistant. 

Dr. Henge, while nominally the director of the Tesseracti's medical department, is actually more of its chief surgeon. He's delegated much of his authority to the individual heads of different departments so as to be able to concentrate on his own pursuits, and department heads now wield approximately as much power as he does when making decisions for their department. Conflicts between departments are usually settled by Dr. Henge by what he calls the Solomonic method - one department loses everything, while the other department gains it. Of course, this usually causes an overload of work on behalf of the winner, which makes department heads reluctant to bother Dr. Henge. Dr. Henge himself likes to be present for the first test run of new surgical techniques, which simultaneously allows him to offer his expertise to the operation while ensuring that he gains some measure of credit for its success. 

He's six feet tall, with short gray hair that's chopped fairly close to his skull in order to make it easier for him to wear surgical headgear. His skin is sallow, a little coarse and faintly yellowish. His nose has been broken and carefully reset, but it's easy to see that the surgery wasn't perfect. Dr. Henge keeps the injury as a memento of his old echo. His accent is clipped - it sounds Germanic, but after hearing it for a while, it's obviously not from Earth. 

DOCTOR TEACHER:

Doctor Teacher isn't a doctor or a teacher; it's the name given to him by his parents, who hoped that he'd live up to either occupation. He became neither, instead choosing to become a diplomat for his country. During a tour of a neighboring country's new cloning vats, he became aware that the cloning vats weren't cloning humans, as agreed on by treaty, but were instead creating...things whose presence caused local physics to begin acting weirdly. Doctor Teacher was the only survivor on his team, and only then because three other members of his team died to ensure that he would escape to his home arcology. As the news spread of what the neighboring country was doing, the Tesseracti caught word. A week after Doctor Teacher returned, the Tesseracti began to launch raids on the Xyacti-infected areas. Doctor Teacher was on the list of infectees, since he had directly seen what the antihives of the Xyacti had created. Shortly after the first societal eradication memes appeared, Doctor Teacher was abducted and forcibly integrated into the Tesseracti's ranks. 

That was thirty years ago. Since then, Doctor Teacher has become an invaluable resource to the Tesseracti because of what he offers to new recruits: a sense of sanity. Most Tesseracti operatives have Doctor Teacher as their initial contact once inside the Tesseracti, and his calm and reasoned explanation of what the Tesseracti are about - and what the Tesseracti can do for the operative - are some of the most reassuring that new operatives get. On particularly dangerous missions, he's used to brief the teams going in, as a morale booster. 

He's approximately five foot eight, middle-aged, a little heavy, with most of his face hidden behind a copper-red beard and a pair of spectacles. A lifetime of diplomacy has left him with a calm, even voice that helps people calm down - it's difficult to rant and rave when he's talking to you, since you become more and more aware of how extreme you sound. He tends to dress like an Oxford don, down to the tweed suit with the leather elbows and the penny loafers. He's got a Controller's disease rank and is infected with Link-AD4, although with a remarkably strict cap on how often agents are allowed to use his brain. He's got a variety of short-range weapons embedded within him, including a small nanofactory that allows him to lactate single-malt scotch. 

THE MARION:

The Puppet Hives echo is a fairly recent discovery, and an echo that treads the edge of being neutroned by the Tesseracti. As it stands, it's currently on the watchlist for potential eradication. From birth, every human within the echo has his body linked up to a computer network by what appear to be puppet strings, metal cables which wrap around the long bones of the body and connect the person with the ceiling of whatever room they're in. The strings allow for assisted movement, which tends to cause muscle degeneration and, as time passes, the deformation of the attached bones. They also, however, allow every human being to form his own datafort within the massive computer network of the Puppet Hive echo, allowing a subliminal democracy to form. If the hivemind turns authotarian, then the Tesseracti have orders to bomb it flat - but until then, it's on the watchlist. 

The Marion was an assassin for the government. It was also entirely inhuman, constructed out of cybernetics that were intended as replacements, but which became components instread. The Marion's goals were simple: it tracked down those who were trying to interfere with the net, then severed their strings with its fingers. It was a fearsome opponent, and served the hivemind pretty well when it came time for wetwork. When it was sent after a Tesseracti scouting group, however, its own strings were severed in short order, driving it insane. Figuring that it would make a good agent for the Tesseracti, the group brought it back, then left it in the care of Research and Deviancy. 

Since then, the Marion works for the Tesseracti. Even close up, it looks like an unusually tall human being, with a simple sculpture of a human face glued to the front of its head. The skin, however, has the same dirty, yellowish-white cast as dirty porcelain, and the arms and legs are a little too long in comparison to the torso. Most significantly, the strings that kept it aloft now trail behind it like a wedding veil of steel cabling, creating a thready little hissing noise whenever it walks. (Research and Deviancy attached some devices to the cables to make that noise, the same way that you can stick a playing card in the spokes of your bicycle.) It's good at assassination, but it's lousy when it comes to a stand-up fight - not out of cowardice, but out of a lack of long-range firepower; its fingers are too sharp to hold a gun.  

The Marion basically takes the role of the Shadowy Menacing Figure. It stalks through the Iron Labyrinth on what it thinks are security patrols, but what everybody else recognizes as an excuse to terrify anybody who doesn't know its backstory. When it was back in the Puppet Hive, it was controlled by five people who gave it advice; now that it's been severed, the only mind that it has are crude copies of its controller's minds, all of whom are fighting for more control of the Marion. Two minds have already eaten one mind each, and the third survives only by hiding and dodging through the labyrinth of the Marion's thoughts. 

The Xyacti merit some description; they're the mortal enemy of the Tesseracti, an unknowable alien force which corrupts echoes - pocket dimensions - until they're basically nightmare dimensions. Rather than being actively malevolent, though, the Xyacti are curious and trying to understand the world around them - like Jason Sartin said, they're radioactive toddlers, damaging their environs without really understanding what they're doing. They spread through memes, which means that they have to be fought through contradicting information - although, to be honest, I never sat down and wrote out what they were like. You can get some clues as to what they're like from the below.

XYACTI VICTORIA:

The Tesseracti live in mortal fear of the Xyacti because of exactly what happened to the Victorian Station echo. When it was discovered, it was an analogue of Victorian England, including fog-shrouded streets, a dirty sky the color of sepia photographs, a skyline festooned with smokestacks, and a steam-powered monorail that hung some five hundred feet over the city. (You boarded it by taking an elevator up to the top of a building.) There wasn't much in the way of technology that the Tesseracti could burgle, and so the dimension was used as a third-tier recruiting source for disposable muscle. 

In 1982, contact was lost with two Tesseracti operatives, both Anglophiles who had decided that they wanted to honeymoon in pseudo-Victorian London. A casual expedition to bring them back resulted in the deaths - well, as "dead" as you can get in an Xyacti-invaded echo - of eight Tesseracti operatives and the abrupt cessation of echo travel for approximately six days as the upper echelons fought a panicky civil war over what to do next. When communications were re-established with the expedition, the Xyacti used an open channel to jump into the Iron Labyrinth, spreading as a concept though three different levels before it ran out of people to infect. 

The Tesseracti burned a number of favors with the NanoBaja sublimed dimension in order to find out what was going on. NanoBaja, having already sealed themselves off from the threat of Xyacti invasion, sold a number of concept-armor devices which offered the Tesseracti some protection. 

The second expedition into Xyacti Victoria revealed what had happened. The darkness was broken only by faintly luminescent blue fog and the fluorescent alien witchlight that beamed from what used to be gaslamps; the bricks in the walls seemed to vibrate according to some unfelt frequency. A brief exploration into a record shop revealed rows of severed human heads, each encased in a weird sort of wax and still attempting to speak as Xyacti implants explored the neural pathways of their minds. The monorail had taken on the aspects of a living creature, sections of monorail track dipping down to gnaw entire stories off of buildings. 

The authorization for destruction by neutron bomb went through in record time. Once they'd been dropped, though, the followup expedition found out that nothing had happened, and lost a couple of bunnymen in the process. The neutrons bombs had simply been chewed up. 

Xyacti Victoria was finally subsumed into the Xyacti home dimension in 1994. However, interactions with the Xyacti have revealed that much of the Victorian Station's elements were integrated into the Xyacti home dimension. Xyacti invasions now frequently include Xyacti versions of Victorian Station-style architecture, clothing and music making their way into the invaded dimension. Apaprently, the Xyacti are under the impression that humanity's natural state is that of Victorian Station, and the dimensions that it invades are simply odd offshoots of the original genus. Given that the Xyacti are unable to tell the difference beteeen human life and the things that it produces, the Tesseracti have begun a systemic purge of anything that could be considered Victorian in their technology or architecture. So far, it's been pretty successful. They think.  

This is from a role-playing game that I wrote called Tesseracti; the idea, heavily influenced by Grant Morrison's "The Filth", was that you were an operative recruited by a shadowy, mysterious organization called the Tesseracti who basically acted like border police between a variety of pocket dimensions and Earth. For a variety of reasons, I never got it done, but I think that the concept is interesting. Anyways, these are some details from one of the pocket dimensions, Alien US.

Shaking the dirt from the cellar floor onto your bacon and eggs is a neat image, I think.

 ALIEN US:

Alien US is the United States circa 1954 or so, complete with drive-in movie theaters, soda shops, a strong military - and its skies are swarming with alien spacecraft. As far as the Tesseracti can determine, the echo was created from the paranoid fear that the Russians would someday invade or infiltrate the United States, a theme which was reinforced by the pop culture of the time. In the case of Alien US, the aliens have already infiltrated and invaded, and the United States is now under military occupation from an alien culture. 

A lot of the major capitals have been flattened, resulting in the human populace transferring itself into a multitude of small towns which look disturbingly similar - a fountain in front of city hall, a Main Street populated with various Mom and Pop stores, a high school with a football team, and the occasional punk just to liven things up. Everybody lives normally. Rock and roll is still on the rise, there's a television in every home and everybody's just repressed enough to keep the society working - for the moment. 

But the shadows of flying saucers still sweep over the town at regular enough intervals that nobody looks up anymore. There's no government anymore; just a puppet President who lets the people know what the aliens are planning. Periodically, the saucers land in order to disgorge squads of bug-eyed men, complete with spacesuits, fishbowl helmets, and green, slimy skin. They don't do anything to you unless you happen to provoke them - and they're kind hard to provoke, what with their alien emotions - but they do strange things when they land, ranging from mechanically throwing a ball for a stray dog while recording the results with an enormous array of scientific equipment, to systematically disassembling a store and moving the parts into one of their craft, apparently with the intention of rebuilding it somewhere else. For alien invaders from beyond the stars, they're pretty benevolent. They don't experiment on humans, they don't mutilate cattle, and while they do rule the Earth, they do so as a looming background presence. If you aren't in the resistance, you don't have anything to worry about. 

Of course, there's a level of resistance. People gather together in lonely farmhouses, or in the basements of drugstores, or in disused schoolrooms to plan out a way to resist the alien invaders - whether to poison their supplies, knock one of them out of the sky with a stolen National Guard artillery piece, or attempt a raid on one of their science squads. Every one of them lives in mortal fear of suddenly being caught up in the brilliant searchlight of a flying saucer, but they resist just the same. Occasionally, they even score successes.

In the present day, the resistance movement in Alien USA has managed to claim one or two "shadow communities" using alien technology to keep hidden; they've also riddled the skeleton of the United States' government with enough moles to be able to bring the weight of the US army on the aliens when they day comes. The alien plan has become somewhat clear: They're trying to build an exact replica of Earth on another planet - the buildings remain the same, but the terrain around it is very much like the moon. The resistance currently theorizes that the aliens are trying to recreate our planet on Planet X, with the eventual intention of transferring the human race to it, then strip-mining our world down to its molten core. 

Initial Tesseracti analyses have revealed a number of things. As the reigning echo theory suggests, the echo's world has been frozen in both cultural and technological development - a "doll world" effect, where everything is the same despite the development that should be taking place. Despite fifty years worth of cultural development, it's still the 1950's - duck's-ass haircuts, poodle skirts and live, black and white TV are the order of the day. The Tesseracti have found that technological progress literally can't occur. Force-seeding scientists with advanced technical knowledge simply didn't work, as the scientists seemingly forget what they were taught a few days later. 

Tesseracti activity in this dimension is fairly energetic. It's a good place to rest and recover, as long as you wear the appropriate hostileflague and don't screw around with any of the natives. Of course, since the dimension is so peaceful, some of the Tesseracti have created a new sport that they refer to as "duck-hunting." After attracting the attention of a flying saucer, the group tears down a road until the flying saucer is far enough away from civilization, then takes it down with something appropriate from the weapon orchards. All that's left to do once it hits the ground is to get the barbecue started, and you can have as much bug-eyed alien as you can eat. Those in the know say that bug-eyed alien tastes a lot like human flesh, which is gamy, like venison. The Tesseracti has put a one-per-month limit on saucers, to avoid drawing too much attention, but the ban is largely self-enforced. 

POTENTIAL RECRUIT TYPES:

THE HOOD MADE GOOD:

 You were in the resistance since you were twelve, helping your father set up the meetings for the resistance cells in the neighborhood, standing watch for saucers, shadowing alien sentries if they happened to wander through your neighborhood, and always, always watching the skies. When you were fourteen, the aliens captured your dad and two of his friends on their way home from a fishing trip, replacing him with a waxy-skinned automaton that said all the right things - but wasn't your dad. Your mother tried to kill him every day - a butcher knife in the throat, poison in his food, a back-shattering blow from a sledgehammer - but he would just regenerate, showing up the next day in his chair, shaking the dirt of the cellar floor off of his shoulders and into his bacon and eggs. 

You missed your dad, but you hated your neighbors worse than the aliens. They had just abducted your dad. Your neighbors knew that they'd replaced him, but they were too scared of the aliens to do anything but treat the replicant as if he was the real thing. You hated that. Hated them. You became a hood to scare them, to make them as much afraid of you as they were afraid of the aliens. You got rid of the automaton for good one night, tying it to a chair in your father's old rec room and setting it on fire, and driving your mother to live with her relatives in one of the hidden communities. 

On your way back, you had to almost drive off the road in order to avoid a car that was fleeing from a saucer, somebody in the back blazing away the pursuing craft with a tommygun. You'd dropped out of the resistance, but you followed them anyways, hoping that you could rescue at > least one of them from the inevitable abduction beam. When they brought down the saucer with what looked like a cross between a typewriter and a handgun, you couldn't have been more surprised. When they inducted you into the Tesseracti, and told you that you'd be fighting for something much larger than just the freedom of your echo, it nearly broke you - but you recovered. The grafts itch a little, but you've found out that the taste of bug-eyed man tastes a lot like victory. And vengeance. 

ALIEN QUISLING:

You always resented the aliens. You fired your slingshot at them whenever they flew overhead - you never hit them, but not for lack of trying. You always hid from them when they touched down, but you found yourself drawn to them anyways. You watched them arrest somebody that they thought was in the resistance, using beetles the size of your two clenched fists in order to hunt him down and paralyze him, all inside of his own house. As you grew up, you reailzed just how deep their influence went. They were the driving force behind your world, and everybody was terrified of them. And you started to envy that power, especially when you realized that for all of your friend's talk, they were just as afraid of the aliens as everybody else.

It started out small. You stood around and watched the aliens for a while while they cracked open a mailbox and scanned the letters with something that looked like a baseball-sized alien eye suspended in a cross between a specimen vat and a handgun.  They ignored you while you watched them, but when they were finished, one of them gave you a flat sheet of metal with a glyph engraved on it. You stared at it while they left, thinking.

It took you two nights to finish mowing the vacant lot so that the unmowed grass formed the shape on the sheet. It took you five minutes to pour the gasoline, one minute of fumbling before you lit the match, and a year of your life as the aliens trained you as their agent on earth. At least, you think it was a year. You kind of lost track of time when you were in the learning wombs, and when you came back, you knew that you couldn't ask anybody how long it had been since you'd been away. You've lost contact with everybody who knew you before, and you can't re-establish contact without arousing suspicion. It's not so bad, really.

You have to admit that the Tesseracti made the aliens look like a bunch of chumps. They had you out of your echo and into a liquid containment tank in two seconds, and by the time that you figured out that you could breathe the liquid, they'd deactivated every implant in your body and made it quite clear that you were on your own. You didn't kick at all. You were used to the idea of being in service of somebody more powerful than you were, and the Tesseracti had become that new somebody. Now, you're a double agent. Triple agent, really, since you've got a low rank in the resistance. The Tesseracti have called upon you a few times to do some external missions, and you've become aware that your world was just one of many - one of the better ones, but not as good as primal Earth. You're trying to find a way to play all three sides off against each other so that they'll let you free - but you can't talk about that now. They might be listening. Shhh. Shhhh.

POODLE-SKIRTED VALKYRIE

Two! Four! Six! Eight! Two in that diner, four when the collaborators tried to escape and ran into you on the way out, six in that raid on the National Guard outpost - you kinda regret that cute soldier that stumbled onto your team - and eight when you finally got aboard one of those saucers. Well, okay, the eight was your team's score, not your score, but you did kill five - one human, four aliens. Two, four, six, five just sounds like you forgot to count by twos, though, so it's always two, four, six eight when you hit the field and start cheering for your home team. 

You were exactly like everybody else. You did track and gym when you were in junior high, then moved to cheerleading when the time came - all of your friends said that you were pretty enough to do it. You were nervous that you'd start feeling the blood on your hands again when the time came to audition, but you came through without a hitch. You threw up a little afterwards, but it was okay. 

When the Tesseracti recruited you, you made a point of why you were so good at killing things. They checked you over, and they told you the truth: You were an exceptional human being, but you hadn't been enhanced. And you weren't psychopathic, even though killing didn't particularly bother you. 

So, you're doing the usual until the Tesseracti needs you again - spying, killing collaborators whenever you can, and enjoying the nervous silence that you get whenever you're around other members of the resistance. You'd never hurt any of them, of course, but it tends to be a little easier to get your way if they don't know that. You're living a pretty happy life, all things considered.

Blood's a bitch to get out of a poodle skirt, though.

BUG-EYED MONSTER OUT OF ITS DEPTH

This is _so_ not how it was supposed to work out. You were supposed to be a third-glanded corporal, occupation-phylum in the Ninth Private Army of Klortho the Magnificent, a member of a unit that had managed to bid high enough  - with the aid of your own small fortune - to get the plum duty of occupying Earth.  Every member of the unit had been married to each other before you left for the duty, and you even had a clutch of eggs that you thought would come to term, perhaps inspired by the Earth's chill climate. 

You were in pursuit of some thralls who had dared to fire at your craft when one of them suddenly flash-froze half of your saucer, rendering the metal so brittle that it only took a stiff crosswind to break it cleanly in half. You succumbed to the reflexive cannibalism of your species as you were plummeting towards the ground, and landed with your teeth buried in your love-brother's throat. 

When you woke up, you were on an operating table, with a surgeon-thrall leaning over you. You released the pheromones that should have incapacitated him, but he just laughed and squirted you in the face with water, which was humiliating. He explained, matter-of-factly, what you were - just a figment of the collective unconsciousness made solid - and what the Tesseracti had revived you for. You would never see your unit again, which was a relief, considering that most of them would still want to eat you. 

You'll never be able to work on primal Earth, of course, but you are cleared for the weirder kinds of echo work. You've still got a good idea of how your race's hyperscience works, and while it's a little primitive when compared to the Tesseracti's, it does the job. The man who introduced you to the Tesseracti, Dr. Henge, has actually become a friend of yours, since you both share the same black sense of humor and the ability to enjoy a good dissection. Maybe someday you'll go back and assassinate Klortho, gorge yourself on larval caviar and become the new Father-Mother of your race, but for now, you're enjoying the sense of superiority that your position brings. 

Daidoji Yomito

The below is a writeup for an villainous NPC that I created for Legend of the Five Rings, a Crane samurai-ko who used the law of Kiri-sute Gonen to basically indulge her sociopathy; it was intended as a criticism of the law, which wasn't particularly detailed in the L5R corebooks. In the Wikipedia article I'm linking, it's pretty clear that striking down a commoner had a bunch of repercussions and, if abused, could easily lead to the forced seppuku of the samurai in question, but that's not information that I had at the time that I wrote the below. 

So, then: Write the truth, or the legend? 

Daidoji Yomito

Yomito is an excellent samurai-ko. She's honorable, brave, fights well and comports herself in court, as befits a member of the Crane clan. She can be charming, subtle, belligerent or demure as the situation dictates. She's been marked as somebody that the Crane clan may call upon in the future to uphold the honor of the clan, a potential clan champion - she's even gone on a warrior's journey across Rokugan in order to develop her skills.

 

She's a sociopath. And a murderer. And she gets away with it because of Rokugan's social structure.

 

Yomito realized at an early age that the peasantry were not like her; she was samurai, and they were the peasantry, and the samurai ruled over the peasantry. When she split the head of a peasant child at the age of ten - not for any particular reason - the consequences were hushed up by her doting father. A little water cleansed the bokken, she was lightly scolded and that was all. Why should anything further befall her? Obviously she was provoked, and by a peasant.

 

After her gempekku, she lured an ox-driver into the woods and stabbed him in the stomach, then watched him die. When she was betrothed, she decapitated a peasant farmer - the father of two - and claimed that he'd stumbled into her. When her betrothed died from a snakebite near his bed (how sad for her!), she vented her fury on a pair of nightsoil collectors whose odor offended her. Nobody said anything. They were just peasants. When she slew a husband and wife whose porcelain tea sets were the pride of the Daidoji, on the pretext that they had been rude to her, it was agreed that it would be a good idea for her to go on a warrior's journey somewhere else. (And vent her fury on peasants who weren't nearly as valuable to the Crane.)

 

Yomito knows that the peasantry are considered a resource to the lords of the lands that she travels through, so her murders follow a nomadic pattern. Her typical operandum is to move into an area, engage in a few first-blood duels - just to establish her bonafides as a duellist - and then to settle in as just another ronin passing through the area. Then, drunk peasants start getting remarkbly clumsy around her. Who would doubt the word of a Crane duellist on a warrior's quest? Yomito is very good at professing innocence, and her high Honor and Status give her a lot of protection. Stoked on her seeming invincibility, she'll plan a spree murder, execute it, then move on before anybody can find her. 

 

Despite her intelligence, she's fully capable of making stupid mistakes that can incriminate her. If she kills a peasant on impulse, she'll use her katana, despite the fact that it identifies the murderer as a samurai, and a trained one at that. Even if she uses methods that don't identify her as a samurai, there are other clues - the force put into the blow of a wooden club, or the use of a piece of Crane-woven sash as a garrotte. She's already been identified as a sociopathic murderer by at least two Imperial magistrates, but one is dead (in a duel) and the other was recalled on an unrelated political matter and hasn't been able to find her again. 

 

How long she can continue her murders is up to the players.

So, this is an adventure that I actually ran with some degree of success, but it basically falls into one of the weaknesses that I have as a GM - rather than giving the characters something to interact with and poke at, it's more a series of weird events that the players have to react to, which means that they're basically along for the ride instead of doing the driving.

This isn't conducive to a fun time. It works out okay for a little while, but it doesn't make for a good long-term game session. It's a habit that I'm endeavoring to break with more experience as a GM.

I should note that there's section where rules were meant to be inserted; I probably should have just bitten the bullet and done it in Call of Cthulhu, but it can probably be run in just about any modern-day occult system. In the original playtest, the players were able to make it into the spaceship, but wound up dragging it through Denver and causing massive casualties.

Content warning for self-mutilation and some gore.

THE BROKEN CATHEDRAL

The mountains are calling and I must go.

- John Muir

PLAYER INFORMATION

The characters are driving through the mountains on their way somewhere - it's not going to matter where or why in a few minutes. They chatter in the shadows of the mountains. One of them dozes.

They dream. They're aboard an ancient whaling ship, sailing a roiling sea of acid. The only light to navigate by is a single obscene star, periodically visible through thunderheads composed of winged mites. The rowers in the hull - but isn't this a sailing ship? - are exhausted, no matter what tortures are visited upon them. The weaker members of the crew have already eaten each other. Only the strong are left, and they're all waiting for one another to drop their guard just enough to take a bite. That's all they need. Just a bite.

The ship sails. Rocks erupt from the green sea, covered in tiny ecosystems - civilizations rendered in scum, clinging to ancient basalt. The captain's attention is focused, through every host body - but isn't this a man steering the ship? - steering it between the rocks, seeing through the hideous thing strapped to the front of the ship as a living figurehead. And then there's a sudden pain in the captain's thigh as the first mate's host body bites through cloth and skin and chitin and mind. The first mate dies instantly, slain by the captain, but when he turns back to the wheel, it's too late. The rock, covered in the living slime of human civilization, is unavoidable. And the ship crashes - 

The character awakes. They're aware, just barely, that the ship is crashing here, on this planet - and then the shockwave hits.

KEEPER INFORMATION

A dimensional transport craft - invisible, multidimensional, living - has crashed on the top of Mount Rainside, killing most of its invisible, cannibal crew. The survivors, starved and desperate from a disastrous journey, set off a telepathic bomb which instills a strong urge to climb to the top of Mount Rainside, where they'll be used in various ways to repair the spaceship. The US government, fully aware of what's happened, plans to detonate a nuclear weapon at the summit of the mountain to destroy the ship before the telepathic summons winds up depopulating most of the state. The characters - unwittingly poisoned with radiation - now have to get to the ship and decide what has to be done to save the situation.

HERE'S WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THE NON-SHIP AND THE ALIENS

The ship isn't a ship. It's a self-contained, tiny pocket dimension which extrudes itself into our reality via a sixth-dimensional shape. The entities inside move the shape around our universe, and when they arrive, use the shape as a gateway into our reality. As humans aren't equipped to view sixth-dimensional shapes, or even conceive of them, they see the ship as a giant mass of crystalline, transparent planes. Within, its alien masters control gravity, space, even time to a limited degree, creating secondary subdimensions to run experiments and collapsing them just as quickly.

To the aliens, it's the equivalent of a '68 Volkswagon with a scientific kit in the trunk. The aliens are out on a day trip that went wrong and crashed their car when the food ran out. Keep that in mind when thinking of the scale that the aliens are working on.

The aliens themselves are split into two groups; the Explorers, who are bodiless energy fields capable of possessing just about anything, and the Rowing Beasts, who are only able to possess grotesque slave bodies whose pain drives the ship. Grown beyond the need to avoid pain, a Explorer will typically learn about an entity by possessing it, then by having it torn apart or vivisected. (The Explorer experiences all of the pain, rather than the host organism. To them, agonizing pain is like a highlighter. It just makes existing information more vivid.) Aboard the ship, the Explorers inhabit a variety of useful host bodies which keep the Rowing Beasts in line, perform the necessary vivisections, breed the seeds of what'll eventually be new Explorer and so on. A single Explorer energy field can possess a football stadium's worth of host bodies, which comes in handy when cheering for a home team.

The Rowing Beasts are bodiless energy fields as well, failed children who never got past the third or fourth stage of growing into a proper Explorer. In this specific case, a few hundred of the Rowing Beasts have been stuffed into the hold of the ship and are tortured with a variety of existential and philosophical quandaries. This produces an excitation of the Rowing Beasts and, in turn, moves the ship around our universe. Their host bodies strongly resemble albino walruses - masses of fat propelled through nutrient fluid by asymetrical flippers, scarred by fights for dominance and for mating rights.

As mentioned above, the crash of the ship is the result of an internal famine caused by a shortage of food. Desperate, the Explorers started cannibalizing each other. The weakest went first, but the remainder were too strong to kill each other in a one-on-one battle and too afraid of betrayal to join forces. When the first mate equivalent, maddened by hunger, took a bite out of the captain, the ship crashed. Now that they've hit the ground, they're mostly interested in returning home, but they want to stock up on food (human minds) and maybe do a little casual reproduction (in human minds) and research (on human bodies) before they fix their ship (with human minds) and leave. The Rowing Beasts, meanwhile, are interested in human bodies, because human bodies are nimble and have pain and pleasure receptors, and their reproduction is relatively easy. They want to stay in human bodies and aren't interested in going back unless they're forced to, which is what the Explorers want. In short, it's a hell of a situation, and the player characters are caught right in the middle.

MOUNT RAINSIDE

Mount Rainside is a part of a series of small mountains, collectively called the Small Sisters. Approximately fifteen hundred feet from sea level, it plays host to a pair of ranger stations - one abandoned, one not - a scenic outlook, and a cabin approximately halfway up its slope, inhabited by a locally famous hermit. It's too rocky to ski, but it gets the occasional climbing team looking for an easy summit. A forest covers the bottom half of the mountain, with the tree line at seven hundred and fifty feet. The mountain has two "peaks", a lower one accessible on foot, and the actual, nearly-vertical summit which is attainable only with dedicated climbing gear. Wildlife includes an unlucky tribe of mountain goats, dozens of deer, and a black bear whose possession by the alien entities will produce much delightful jumping about and fleeing on the part of the player characters. A highway - Route 87 - snakes through the valley between Mount Rainside and its sisters, hugging the low ground. Runoff from the top of the mountain has produced a small, unnamed lake at its base. (The locals call it "Out of Luck Lake", as the fishing is poor.)

A single road runs up the mountain from the highway, splitting in two after the tree line; one fork leads to a scenic outlook and a ranger station, while the other leads to an abandoned ranger's station and the home of Art Jenkins, a notorious misanthrope and crank who makes his home on the mountain during the summer in an effort to get away from the human race. 

ACT ONE:

The characters are in a car, driving past Mount Rainside on their way to do something - maybe it's an academic conference, maybe they're going hunting, maybe they're just bored and want to get out of the city. It's a bright, clear morning around eight in the morning. when the gust of wind hits; or, more specifically, when the forest gets pushed over onto the road.

What's happened is that the alien ship has just crashed on the mountain, generating a 120-mile an hour straight-line wind directly down the mountain. The view outside of the car is abruptly turned into a smashing fog of leaves, pine needles, dirt and rocks. Every window in the car breaks, the character driving must make a (INSERT RULES HERE) driving check to avoid smashing into something - and another just to stay on the road - while ahead of them, trees of all sizes snap and fall onto the road.

The road is a mishmash of crashed cars, tree trunks and debris from upslope. People mill about, clearing paths through the debris or tending to the injured; a few talk on cell phones, summoning help or talking with family. To their left, the characters can see a number of rock and snow slides coming down the mountain's surface - but a successful Perception check (RULES HERE) allows the characters to realize that there's something massive and invisible sitting on top of the mountain. (Note that the ship itself is invisible, but alters light passing through it. Anything seen through the ship's body is distorted in odd and often disturbing ways.) However, further attempts to see it from this vantage point will prove futile.

Allow characters time to try to help - there's cars to push out of ditches, injuries to tend, and calls to make. Emergency services calls will be taken by harried operators, who promise that aid is on the way. And then, as if a switch is flipped, everybody starts walking into the shattered woods, headed towards Mount Rainside. The PCs feel the same urge, a steady subliminal buzz that says that there's something at the top of the mountain that needs to be fixed. Even the injured will want to go, although the more severely hurt will not make much of an effort to get there.

The PCs aren't the only ones who can resist the call. There's enough left behind to tend to the injured, so the PCs needn't worry about that. What do they do?

OUT OF LUCK LAKE

The only way to drive up Mount Rainside is to drive across the bridge crossing Out of Luck Lake, which is half a mile away from the PC's location. The ride there is tricky, requiring repeated Drive rolls (RULES HERE) in order to navigate past cars and fallen trees. The bridge itself is metal, with giant wooden planks offering a sturdy road; it's covered with fallen branches and chunks of stone. They're easy to clear away on foot, easy to drive around in a car, but if the players aren't careful, they'll drive into the sizable hole left by a piece of falling alien ship in the bridge's surface. (RULES HERE) If they fail, there's every chance that the car will topple through the hole and into the waters of Out of Luck Lake.

The hole was made by a chunk of the alien ship - in this case, part of its navigation system. Out of Luck lake is only fifteen feet deep at its deepest point; underneath the bridge, it's only ten feet or so. It can be spotted from the bridge, since it periodically emits a blue-green flash of light (and radiation). Like the alien ship, it's invisible, but its outlines can be determined by the distortion it leaves behind. PC's touching it will experience a brief vison:

The affected PC finds himself gently hovering over a field of what looks like red-gray lichen-grass. The sky above is alien, a poisonous green cataract of stars sitting low near the horizon. Something's making its way through the grass, but the grass is too tall to see. The PC feels an invisible hand - their invisible hand - reach out into the brush and pick up the animal inside. It looks sort of like a cross between a mosquito hawk and a raccoon, a mixture of spindly legs, fur, teeth, and a pair of eyes on stalks that frantically flail as the animal(?) tries to make an escape from the invisible field holding it. 

The navigation system's weight seems to vary as it's held. Most of the time, it's two pounds, but somewhat unwieldy to carry, requiring two hands; at random intervals, its weight will suddenly jump up to thirty pounds, necessitating a sudden Dexterity check to prevent from dropping it. Functionally invisible, it also seems to randomly change shape as the characters handle it. (This doesn't mean anything, but the players don't have to know that.) Dropping it won't hurt it, but the characters don't have to know that either.

BAD GRAVITY 

The characters are proceeding - it doesn't matter where - when a deer drops out of the sky and hits the ground, splattering them with blood and bits of deer. Thanks to the malfunctioning artificial gravity of the ship, the mountain is now being orbited by a halo of miscellaneous objects - wildlife, cars, chunks of rock the size of small buildings - which the characters can see drifting by overhead. However, as the ship's repair systems kick in and out, objects drop in and out of the halo. As soon as the characters think to look up, they see a chunk of rock approximately the size of an SUV headed in their direction, falling fast out of a belt of floating objects.

It'll miss them unless they do something stupid like trying to catch them, but the existence of the belt is going to keep them pretty distracted. If you're feeling sadistic, then one of the characters suddenly drifts off the ground, slowly enough that the other characters have time to catch him. Then it's a battle of strength versus an alien gravitational device. It's winnable, but any critical success on a Strength roll will inflict 2d3 damage as the character's shoulders are accidentally pulled out of their sockets. Critical failure causes the character to be pulled, wailing and screaming, into the gravitational belt, where they're promptly squashed between one of those building-sized rocks and a car.

When the characters reach the SNOW BELT section of the mountain, the gravity belt suddenly collapses, causing dozens of small avalanches towards the base of the mountain.

FINGERS AND TOES

The characters come across a group of six people sitting on the ground, relaxing as if they're at a picnic. The illusion is spoiled upon closer inspection. A middle-aged woman in a parka repeats the word "flesh", over and over again, in a rapid chant. An elderly couple explores the wrinkled texture of the other's face, casually dislodging an eye in the process. (A quick Medicine/First Aid roll fixes the damage.) A bald man in a Radiohead T-shirt lolls back, his fearfully blank face staring at the empty sky overhead. A teenager with severe acne meditatively pulls hanks of hair out of his head, then carefully eats them. All of them are missing their ring and pinky fingers, and the wounds are fresh and bleeding. The fingers lie on the ground, curled into pink commas. Closer inspection reveals that the wounds are self-inflicted, bitten through at the joint. Some of the people have teeth injuries where they chipped on bone. 

Any attempts to communicate with the people will be unsuccessful. Attempts to stop them from self-mutilating only work for as long as the characters are willing to physically restrain the people from hurting themselves. However, as the characters interact with the people, they find that their ring and pinky fingers - on both hands - are beginning to itch, then go numb. The characters will begin to think of three fingers as correct, and five fingers as wrong - so it's only natural to bite them off. Biting them off feels good, in fact.

If the characters don't leave, have them make Intelligence rolls. Success results in sensation abruptly returning to the affected limbs; failure results in a few points of damage as the characters, without realizing it, attempt to bite off their fingers. GMs may decide as to whether the characters are successful in removing the fingers.

EXPLORATORY SURGERY

The characters see a man erupting from the woods, approximately two hundred feet ahead, moving across their path and downslope. He's tearing at his clothing frantically as he runs, and if the characters make successful Spot Hidden rolls, they realize that he's bleeding copiously from the mouth. As they watch, he falls to his knees, then out of sight, into tall grass. But when they arrive, there's nothing there except a ragged, bloody white shirt. Nothing's left of him except for some bloodstains and a depression in the tall grass where he fell.

Allow them all to make Spot Hidden rolls; the lowest score "wins" and spots something nearby. It's one of their possessions - a cell phone, a wallet, an eyeglasses case. The item's owner has no memory of having lost it, but it's theirs nonetheless, and it's missing from their person. Their group is now under the eye of an Explorer mind, this one particularly interested in human anatomy.

The next thing to vanish is somebody's shirt, which disappears from underneath their jacket. It's found some two hundred meters ahead, stretched over a waist-high pile of rocks, arranged into a perfect pyramid. As soon as the pyramid is touched, the force holding them in that shapes dissipates and it collapses into a pile. The shirt's ruined, of course. The characters now become aware of a buzzing in the air, like a radio tuned to the space between channels. For some reason, the characters will start thinking of explorers - Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong.

A few minutes later, one of the characters experiences the sudden loss of a tooth, which disappears out of their head - there's no pain initially, but the raw socket rapidly fills with blood and starts hurting shortly thereafter. The buzzing is now loud enough that everybody can hear it audibly. The tooth is found embedded in a tree trunk, in a human face freshly carved out of the side of a tree trunk - their face, in incredible detail. One side of the face is carved in layers, with skin giving way to muscle and then to the bones of the skull. The tooth is there, rooted firmly in the skull portion of the carving. It can be removed with some difficulty, although it's too late to replace it in the character's mouth without dental surgery. Characters are now thinking about doctors - specifically, anatomists, and dissections.

A character's clothes disappear entirely, leaving them suddenly naked. Ahead, loose rocks and leaves abruptly form themselves into a perfect replica of the character whose clothes were stolen. Its pose suggest the Vetruvian man - one leg and one arm outstretched as if on a dissection table. Again, the statue dissolves when the character retrieves their clothes. The buzzing is coming from the air itself, and now the characters think of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each touching something larger without being able to see. One of the characters realizes that whatever's hunting them can only identify the characters by their clothing; it doesn't understand flesh, they think.

The characters have a chance to rescue themselves by switching a piece of clothing with each other, or by divesting themselves of clothes altogether; this confuses the alien doctor-mind so much that it leaves, and the buzzing fades. 

if they don't, one of the characters suddenly falls over as the bones of his legs abruptly disappear, followed a second later by most of his internal viscera - heart, spleen, kidney, lungs. The character will seem to collapse from within, like a ghastly invisible vacuum is pulling them away into someplace else. Within ten seconds, all that's left is an empty skin, which is pulled into an invisible hole in the air with an awful slurp.

The affected characters isn't dead. After a few moments of pain, he finds himself pinned to a surface of black glass, staring up at a hurricane of green alien stars. Around him, resting on black crystals just as they are, are other humans, dissected with surgical care, some into impossibly thin slices, others flayed. Thankfully, none are alive. Hundreds of other black crystals jut from the ground as far as the eye can see, each decorated with a dissected body, almost all of which aren't human. Stars from the hurricane begin to drop from the sky like poisoned snowflakes, slowly forming into tendrils. When they get close enough - which takes seemingly no time at all - the character can see that each green light is a fist-sized, asymmetrical insect, each a  jag of luminescent chitin, wings twitching as they prepare for the dissection.

The character's mind is abruptly invaded by one of the Explorers. The character watches his body from above as the insects, each insect corresponding to a finger in the character's mind - although the sensory input of having ten thousand fingers is an entirely unique one.

The Ship's Doctor is trying to figure out whether or not the character's body is suitable as a replacement host. During the attempt, however, it's left its own mind open to the character. Roll the character's INT:

More than INT X 5: The character is in the interior of the spaceship, somehow teleported here with the last dying remnants of the ship's power. The alien intelligence is the doctor/biologist of the ship, collecting specimens - but the character is unsuitable for the purpose. 

Less than INT X 5: As above, but the character also realizes that the alien intelligence never had a body. It is pure mind, inhabiting a succession of host bodies, most of which were killed when the ship crashed. 

Less than INT X 3: As above. There are other alien intelligences aboard the ship, some of whom have been thrown across the planet, others who are still inhabiting the ship.

Less than INT x 1: As above - but the character can now access the alien's skills and thoughts, granting Pilot Alien Ship at 50% / 3 dots.

The character suddenly finds himself being spat back into reality, a few seconds after he disappeared - this time, the skeleton appears first, then musculature, skin and clothing, faster than the eye can take it in. The character is back, but all of his clothes are inside out. Better hope that their organs are still in the right place. (They aren't, but it won't matter for this scenario.)

Cell Phones on the Mountain

Characters will no doubt be interested in using cell phones to call for additional help, communicate with the police, call in airstrikes or just chat with their favorite buddies. Unfortunately for them, the same frequencies used by cell phones are the same frequences that the alien ship uses to transmit its piloting data. Making a phone call results in a sudden mental swap: An old skill is abruptly replaced by a new skill. Take the investigator's highest skill, and remove -20% / 1 dot from it and reassign it to "Pilot Spacecraft".

THE STRANGER

As the characters walk, they become aware, slowly, that there's one more person in the group than there should be. The problem is that unless the characters explicitly stop and count their numbers, it's very difficult to tell which one of them is the extra person - take your eye off somebody and you can't remember if it was just one person or two. 

The characters will likely stop and count off. The first time that they do, everybody is there and nobody is extra. After a few minutes of travel, the sensation returns - there's an extra person here, for sure. A subsequent count-off forces the characters to realize that there's an extra body here, but it's somehow preventing itself from being seen. Everybody has a mental block that's preventing them from recognizing the extra person. If the characters split up, the sensation goes away - but if there's more than two together, then the feeling that there's an extra person with them returns. 

Any clever plan that the characters come up with will reveal the intruder. It's taken over the body of one of the people who died on the way to the top of the mountain, the head neatly snipped away from the body. All that's left where the head should be is a mishmash of broken black glass, slowly rotating above the bloody stump of the neck. When it's discovered, the glass disappears, and the headless body drops to the ground.

THE HELICOPTER CRASH SITE

The helicopter - an MH-60 - lies on its side, merrily burning away. Military equipment lies scattered across the snow, most of it broken from the collision with the spacecraft. The players, being players, will immediately want to kit their characters out with the remaining military equipment.

The discouragement to this scavenging will take the form of a surviving Special Forces veteran - Captain John Coover - crouched in the cover of the tail end of the copter, who's currently out of his mind from direct contact with the alien crew. As soon as he can draw a clear shot on one of the characters, he'll fire his weapon. Unfortunately for the players, he won't miss. Fortunately for the players, he's out of ammo. Unfortunately for the players, he's tapped into part of the alien ship that allows him to use his weapon to literally shoot skills out of the character's heads. Yeah. Didn't see that one coming, did you?

STATS FOR JOHN COOVER, SPECIAL FORCES OPERATIVE

RULES FOR SHOOTING SKILLS RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HEAD HERE

The characters will eventually overcome the Special Forces operative. If they manage to capture him, he simply raves to himself and spits out bits of alien code through his mouth; listening to him will grant an extra 20% / +1 skill dice for piloting the alien ship. 

Searching near the ship, the characters can pick up a trio of MP-5 submachineguns, about two hundred rounds of ammunition, twelve hand grenades and a LAW rocket. This will do nothing for them in the battle to come except to provide a spectacular way of committing suicide, but hey, players like big guns. They also find, resting in a snowbank, a heavy metal suitcase with a numeric keypad on it. The code can be found on the Special Forces operative's body - it's 4412270605. Inside is a metal cylinder, neatly encased in foam. An intelligence check will reveal what it actually is: A suitcase nuke, probably in the megaton range. It's been modified so that all that's needed is to pull out the handle, twist it and reinsert it, followed by turning a key. Ten seconds later, the nuke will go off and take off the top of Mount Rainside.

It's possible that the characters will agree to detonate the nuke here; if so, go to the section marked NUKING THE SHIP. Note that every member of the party must agree to detonate the nuke in order for this to take place. (It's too easy otherwise for some wise guy to end the adventure prematurely with a nuclear detonation.) If not, the nuke can easily be disarmed (by removing the handle entirely) or carried with the characters into the ship itself.

WHAT'S GOING ON AT THE BASE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Half an hour after the characters leave, the police show up in order to establish a cordon and to treat the injured; they're baffled by the number of people leaving to head towards the summit and try to intercept a few, resulting in a few scuffles and some arrests. A small team of police is sent to the ranger's station while the remainder stays below and tries to figure out what's going on. 

Fifteen minutes after that, the minds of the rowing beasts jump into the bodies of everybody who's left behind at the base of the mountain. Exultant in their newfound freedom, they start enthusiastically coupling with each other - heedless of gender - then move onto torturing each other when coupling gets boring. When a military convoy arrives, the rowing beasts jump ship to the soldiers, leaving behind traumatized cops. Shortly thereafter, a firefight breaks out between the cops and the military, audible and visible from just about any part of the mountain.

An hour after the firefight, a permanent cordon has been established around the mountain, enforced by a shoot on sight policy - it's possible for PCs to slip through this net, although it'll take some doing. The rowing beast minds are eventually killed with their host bodies or are taken into custody after being tranquilized. However, since the government isn't taking chances, a brace of bombs is dropped on the car jam where the adventure began, annihilating anybody left and causing a conflagration visible from twenty miles away.

THE RANGER STATION

The ranger station is a one-room building, some two hundred feet away from the lookout. Its original purpose is twofold - part of it is an information booth and tourist trap for the local mountains, but it's also outfitted to rescue hikers and mountain climbers. As such, it's been split into two halves.

- There's a Geiger counter display on the wall, along with a panel of different rocks retrieved from the nearby countryside. The object of the display is to see how much radiation is spat out of each type of rock, with the last - a small amount of depleted uranium - showing the most radiation. The characters will undoubtedly point the Geiger counter at themselves, at which point it'll start clicking merrily along. Anybody with even minimal scientific training will immediately understand that the number of clicks that the Geiger counter is emitting is bad; a successful Science roll will indicate that the characters have been heavily irradiated, most likely as a side effect of the crash. A successful Medicine roll fills in the blanks. The characters have approximately seventy-two hours or so left before radiation poisoning kills them.

- The back of the ranger station has a pretty decent selection of outdoor gear: Four full sets of snow clothing, four sets of snowshoes, walkie-talkies and a hunting rifle. The walkie-talkies don't work - they simply play the descending/ascending alien tones that the cell phones do, interspersed with panicky blurts of conversation from the base of the mountain.

- There's also a television in the back room. When the characters enter, the emergency broadcasting system is displaying an standby message. Shortly after the characters enter, the television displays - for a few seconds - an image of a blast radius over a map of Mount Rainside, and then cuts to a local news anchor. The anchor opens his mouth to speak, then abruptly jams his ring and pinky fingers into his mouth, biting them free with a sharp yank of his head. The screen goes dark and remains dark, then cuts back to the standby message.

PRELIMINARY NOTES

- Something huge and invisible and alien has crashed on the mountainside and is trying to pull itself free from our world, but it needs human minds as a way to pull free, and it's sending out an "all-call" to see how many it can snag up to provide power for it. 

- The characters are investigating a plane crash on the upper slope of a mountain that they saw while driving past it - it looked as if it was a larger plane, but it didn't go down hard enough to preclude the possibility of survivors.

     - The plane seemed to run into something solid - a flash of green - when it crashed, which was odd.

     - The characters have the impression that there's people on the mountain who desperately need their help, but aren't sure why

- The character see that there's several groups of people headed upslope in order to rescue the plane, but at an extreme distance, so they can't meet up with them to coordinate.

DOWNSLOPE:

- The characters find a deer smashed flat, as if by some enormous force - blood's splattered everywhere, and the deer corpse is only an quarter-inch thick, a pancake of fur and broken bones. There's no sign of what caused it. 

- Cell phones just play a complicated, tuneless series of notes when somebody tries to make a phone call.

- The characters encounter a group of people who have gnawed off their ring and pinky fingers, so as to better imitate the alien entities that have possessed them.

- The characters have a vision of being aboard a ship that's crashing, but the coast keeps changing - at the last minute, it turns into top of the mountain.

     - The characters have another vision in which the crew is revolting because there's nothing to eat, but the only bodies are of the wrong caste to be eaten.

- Things start disappearing out of people's packs and reappearing on the trail a few minutes later, including notebooks and spare clothing.

- Strange lights in the sky, like aurora borealis, but in the clear sky.

- For a few minutes, there appear to be two suns in the sky - everybody agrees on it - even to the point of double shadows, but then the second sun winks out as if it never existed.

- A pair of military helicopters buzz overhead, but seem like they're in a hell of a hurry.

- The characters keep thinking of a broken cathedral on top of the mountain, but aren't sure why.

- A sudden wind blasts from up the mountain, momentarily blinding the characters.

- The characters suddenly realize that there's one more person in their party than there actually is - he's been in line with them the whole time, but they didn't notice him. When they realize this, one of the characters has the impression that the person in line has a face composed entirely of black, shifting angles. If they attack, it turns out just to be the next person in line.

- One of the characters is walking in line and suddenly realizes that he doesn't know how to read - he can make out the shapes, but doesn't really understand what they mean. A successful SAN roll snaps them back to normal.

- The characters encounter an old man living in a cabin - they can't find him, but the cabin is well lit and there's a truck in his driveway. When they do find him, he's out back, having fallen down while chopping wood, with frost covering his clothing. An unsuccessful SAN roll reveals that he's still alive and muttering something underneath his breath; if they lean in, he transmits a big chunk of alien piloting code into the character's mind.

UPSLOPE:

- A burning military helicopter, with a raving madman in a special ops outfit nearby, the only survivor. His gun is empty, but he keeps firing it anyways, mostly at things that the investigators can't see. Halfway through, his gun suddenly starts firing bullets again - but they're purely products of his own insanity. Investigators can put him down by shooting him with their finger-guns, which actually work now.

- The characters find out that they're lethally irradiated by using the geiger counters left in the helicopter. Can the radiation be removed, or are the characters doomed?

- They find an alien artifact of some sort that soaks up the radiation, but prevents them from thinking clearly - or it sucks up radiation, but they can't think clearly of how to make the radiation loss stick.

- The artifact is a clear globe that appears a solid sickly blue from one angle, but appears transparent when turned to another angle. It "sucks up" radiation. It was contained within a steel case, but it split open during the crash.

- If the character make a CON X 4 roll, they can retrieve the case from the burning ruin, but take 1d4 points in burn damage, -1d3 if they immediately apply snow to the affected area.

- The documentation in the case has burned, but there's enough of it to indicate that it was retrieved from a Japanese mountain in 1953, and notes that it somehow absorbs radiation within a limited area, but that radioactive sources continue to emit particles after the object is removed. It makes reference to subsequent tests, but doesn't follow up. 

- Explosions from the base of the mountain; using binoculars, the characters can see police and military vehicles surrounding the base of the mountain, but they seem to be fighting each other. The popping sound of gunfire echoes up the slope.

- The characters find the ruins of the plane, but the survivors have all walked towards the top of the mountain.

     - A few people have dropped dead from the cold, but the rest are still moving.

PEAK TERROR

- What's the win condition for the characters?

- Cleaning themselves of the radiation that they've encountered is a definite must; otherwise, they'll die no matter what.

- They're threatened with a TPK on three fronts: the atomic bomb, the ship going nuclear or taking the ship into space. So how do they solve the situation?

     - The best solution is to put the ship on "autopilot" and escape, which will take a big chunk of the mountain with it.

     - Maybe use the ship's built-in defense system to kill the plane before it drops its payload?

- There's doesn't have to be a single way to win the scenario - it's entirely possible for them to fuck up enough to cause a TPK, that's Call of Cthulhu.

- The US military is going to drop a small atomic bomb on the top of the mountain to destroy the spacecraft before it can do something - how do the characters escape? Maybe they have to use the spacecraft to escape for themselves, but how do they do it?

- The peak has been crushed by the multidimensional spacecraft - there's "doors" to the interior of the spacecraft all over the mountain. Maybe the survivors from the plane are here, acting as backup computers for the spacecraft itself. So is the other military helicopter, with the military inside all suffering from the same dementia that the others are.

- How do you work with a ship that's largely invisible?  

- Certain areas of the mountain correspond to areas of the spaceship. 

- The characters find the pilot of the ship - a swastika of scorched flesh lying in the snow, having dragged itself from the wreck of its ship.

- The characters have to figure out how to get the ship started so that it leaves the mountain - what is required? Needing a sacrifice is unncessary, and that's been done many a time...so what then? 

- They need to start sacrificing memories? Maybe they need to interact with the alien spacecraft through their memories - maybe they have to roll against their skills, and if they succeed, they completely lose the skill but use the brain space in order to understand how the ship works. 

- A normal human mind can't approximate an alien mind, but several working in concert - like the PCs can be - can get the ship repowered and working again. But they'll have to use the minds of the special ops teams and the survivors of the plane crash to do it, burning them out like fuel.

- Maybe the ship is going to blow up unless it's stabilized? The characters have to pull it off the mountainside before it destabilizes the earth's tectonic plates...but then what impetus do they have to sacrifice themselves if they're all going to die? Maybe one person can be the pilot or something...

- Maybe the different parts of the ship are composed of memories of the aliens that have gotten broken - the characters have to "correct" the memories, most of which are horrific, in order to repair the ship. For instance, cannibalizing a fellow shipmate, or experimenting on humans.

MECHANICS

- The characters are going to lose important parts of their minds in exchange for learning certain skills, so it basically evens out.

- Two skills? One skill? Three skills?