A review of Hunter: The Vigil's Slashers

 An aborted review of a Hunter: The Vigil sourcebook: Slashers, which I never finished.

 

I'm not really even sure how to approach Slashers, because the book itself isn't really sure what it's about. It's simultaneously a book about the ways that hunters can go wrong and become the thing that they're hunting, a book about mechanically emulating slasher films, and a book about playing those same slashers. It is, in a nutshell, a bit schizophrenic in its approach.

When I first read about slashers in the Hunter: The Vigil corebook, they didn't seem functionally different from people who picked up an axe or a knife or whatever and decided to start killing; they might have been driven by their husband's ghost, or they may have gone exclusively after vampires, but they were essentially normal people. The easiest way to explain Slashers is also the laziest: It's Friday the 13th: The Stabbening, complete with different splats for the various types of insane killer that you can play.

It's not as simple or as stupid as it sounds, but it does suffer from a fundamental sense of unease with its own premise. Slashers, as the book presents them, are essentially degraded versions of hunters - people whose personal crusades against evil have taken them from being normal people fighting the darkness to basically being the darkness themselves. The opening fiction describes a hunter whose attempts to retrieve a stolen baby from the hands of the True Fae shades from simply intense and aggressive to straight-up evil.

The book's fluff opens up with a selection of historical slashers and a number of theories as to why slashers exist, including - right up front - a reference to The Beginning Was the End, a book about how the discovery of cranial cannibalism among apes resulted in the human race being damaged on a permanent level. If it sounds familiar, it's because the very same book was the inspiration for one of the greatest nerd rock bands of all time, DEVO; so that's a point in its favor. (Even better would be stats for DEVO itself, but I will take what I can get.)

The section feels somewhat irrelevant. Serial killers exist, they kill. Any attempt to give them a common origin forces you to come up with a reason for both Jason and Dexter to kill, despite one being essentially an angry prepubescent ghost and the other a trauma victim whose coping mechanism is justice in the form of serial murder. And despite their best efforts, a crazy guy who kills a bunch of people is pretty much going be the same whether he's in 1930's Chicago, India in the 1870's, or in the trenches of World War I.

Let me take a moment to say this: When I was a kid, I used to be way into the occult - Kirlian photography, Bigfoot, horoscopes, the Bermuda Triangle, what have you. As I grew older, I began to realize that a lot of the stuff that I was reading about was omitting certain facts that might have been useful in putting the stuff I was reading in perspective, like, say, ACTUAL TRUTH. So the claims about Kirlian photography were false, horoscopes were bullshit, the Bermuda Triangle mystery was SOLVED! (love that book) - once the mask came off Old Man Withers, it was difficult to believe in the monster again.

The new World of Darkness sort of feels like an extended episode of In Search Of, or Kolchak, where all of the various baloney theories that kept people's mind off their hideous 70's decor and their awful 70's haircuts and their awful 70's lives are treated semi-seriously. And really, I just do not understand why the new World of Darkness takes inspiration from old 70's TV shows - I mean, there's a plot hook in Tales from the 13th District that's almost a direct steal from the first episode of Kolchak. I wasn't even a sperm when these shows had their heyday, and yet it's almost thirty years later and they seem to be the new hot thing. Why? What am I missing here? What's going on? I've got an interest in the culture of the 70's, but mostly because it was just such an astonishingly ugly and vulgar decade. One of the reasons why White Wolf was so successful was because it was able to hone in on the zeitgeist of the 1990's and ride it like a tiger until around 2000, at which point the adolescent millennial tension that drove Vampire kind of disappeared and they were left struggling to find a strong direction. Regressing to the 1970's as the golden age of horror - which it totally is not - seems indicative of a problem with the larger approach. 

The authors of the book do find a particularly useful way to tie the Slasher phenomenon in with Hunter: it's very easy for Hunters to step over the line from just hunting down monsters to hunting down their own kind. Every compact gets a breakdown of their interactions with slashers, and a bit about how one of their members crossed the line - the intellectual Loyalists of Thule have one of their own create a gas-filled death maze, while a member of the Long Night might just decide that everybody's sinful and decide to wipe everybody out. The Cheiron group actually nicknames members who become slashers "Batemans", after the protagonist of American Psycho, which is kind of a nice little shout-out.

As every cobra needs its mongoose, the book introduces VASCU - Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit - a new Compact of hunters drawing its members from the ranks of the federal government, dedicated to hunting down serial killers. The obvious comparison to Delta Green is pretty much inevitable, except that instead of simply gunning down the cultists on the spot, as a good investigator should, you're trying to bring slashers to justice through the legal system. In keeping with shows like Millenium and Profiler, agents of VASCU are all psychic in various ways - and if they're not psychic, then they can be made psychic.

What really hurts VASCU is the fact that its members have to, in theory, try to bring the various non-supernatural slashers to justice, which is kind of like trying to get a unicorn a low-interest fixed-rate mortgage on its magic tree stump: Even if you do manage to accomplish it, it's not really keeping in tone of the genre and is fucking boring. 

I mean, seriously, what's the average trial for a slasher going to look like? I tell you what it's going to look like: a subhuman murder engine named Murderlurch whipping machetes at various court personnel at every available opportunity, interspersed with breaks to hose the blood off the walls. And, in keeping with the broken, clanking logic of comic book justice - designed to keep the Joker at large despite the obvious utility of just killing the son of a bitch - the murder will inevitably break out of prison and make a beeline for the nearest PC loved one, as reliable as the return of the swallows of Capistrano. At a certain point, the actions of the people in a story about serial killers less resembles the actions of free-willed individuals and more like an inevitable biological process, as if the pheromones necessary to the reproduction of the human race are only released if the children of the heroic prosecutor are menaced by the sadistic, puzzle-themed serial killer.

 The book does address this problem - and really, I like that little play too much to delete it - by pointing out that most serial killers and/or slashers are shot down after they butcher up a few FBI agents, and that obviously supernatural creatures are packed off to the Lansing facility without going through a trial. But it also suggests that if a slasher does go to trial, then an agent is going to have to carefully put together a case that allows him to present evidence that works around the fact that the agent has psychic powers, and that a charismatic serial killer - particularly one with the Genius undertaking - is going to be able to run rings around a judge and jury. In the previous chapter, it's suggested that one of the reasons why VASCU agents go nuts and go over to the dark side is because serial killers keep skating free from the legal system. It seems like such a frustrating, deliberately balky way to approach the problem, giving all of the drawbacks of the legal system - its inability to create an immediate and satisfying result - while granting none of its benefits, like a society that can deal with problems without having to resort to vigilante justice. I mean, this is the end of Dirty Harry in a nutshell: The hero can't cope with the bureaucratic subversion of justice, chucks his badge into the water and walks away. Delta Green solved the conundrum neatly by placing its agents firmly outside of the law to begin with, cutting the Gordian Knot with gusto. Why doesn't Slashers do the same?

I suppose that using the alternate morality system from Hunter: The Vigil would work to fix the problem of VASCU agents who simply headshot people that they know to be serial killers. Put it this way: You're going to have to make your own decision as to whether or not it's acceptable for FBI agents to headshot serial killers that they know to be serial killers.

The book introduces a new antagonist in the form of the Hunt Club, which is essentially a society of serial killers who meet up to compete with each other for kills. I'm reminded of Dan Simmon's Carrion Comfort - which had mind-controlling bastards competing for the best kill - and the serial killer convention in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where serial killers get together to rub elbows. (Fun fact: I never liked Sandman, still don't.) It's much like Ashwood Abbey, except that they've slid over the line from slapping werewolves in the face with their junk over to full-scale murder of human beings. It's essentially a club for slashers, although more likely the charming/seducing/genius types more than the Brutes and Freaks. There's even different rules, by the country - Melbourne rules are different than London rules, which are different than Boston's rules. Each modifies the central concept enough to make it interesting, but not so much that it divorces itself from the original concept.

This points to one of the broader problems with the concept of playing the antagonist to a serial killer.  All of the tropes that make serial killer films work - the last girl, the pack of halfwitted idiots that the slasher picks off, the various gory setpieces in which the halfwits are dispatched - are things that just don't work within the context of a role-playing game. And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has been tried; for instance, in It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show - a friend of mine is a huge fan of it - it's actually part of the game that the players will have their actors do stupid stuff in exchange for the equivalent of Willpower points. In fact, Cynthia Celeste Miller did something very similar with Slasher Flick, where people gain points they can use for doing stupid stuff.

But the average player isn't going to march his carefully constructed PC into a trap because it's genre-appropriate. Nobody wants to play the halfwit who grabs for the shiny piece of candy and gets both of his arms chopped off; they want to be the guy who says "It's a trick. Get an axe." They want to be the smart guy who outwits the killer, the guy who happens to have brought along a .50 Desert Eagle - for once, appropriately - to put some holes in Jason, they want to be the guy who outfoxes Freddy Krueger at his own game and who just fills the lair of the inbred cannibal clan with gasoline and lights a match instead of wandering down with a look of credulous boobery on their face. They will put safety shots into corpses - lots of safety shots - they will stick close to each other and not wander off alone into the killer's lair, they will use their Tactics and teamwork in order to fight the villain. If the villain falls down, then they will be aware of the old "sudden return from the dead" trick from the movies and go to extremes to make sure that there's no plausible way that the slasher can get up again.

(There was a Robot Chicken sketch where somebody uses a minigun to turn a werewolf into red slush, then dries out and snorts the remains, then poops said remains into the sewer system - and then we cut to some guys playing D&D, one of whom assures the others that according to the rules, the werewolf can only be killed by silver and is still alive. Don't think that your players won't try it.)

They will be, in short, player characters - an army of Final Girls, as David Giles (a friend of mine) put it. (One of the reasons why Night of the Living Dead is so scary is that everybody acts like a rational adult, but bad luck, ego and the weight of numbers fuck everything up. You can look at the people dying and easily think "That could have been me", as opposed to "How fucking stupid do you have to be to go out alone when you know that there's a serial killer on the loose?") If you're going to play the game, you're going to have to accomodate for this.

One problem with Slashers is that it suffers from the same problem that anybody gets when they're trying to write about serial killers: It's very hard to write them. If you're not absolutely careful, you slip over that fine line seperating the cleverness of Hannibal Lecter into writing Insane Clown Posse lyrics. The little blurb on the back, a rewritten version of "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" - including the lines "mutilated maiden's meat" and "little dirty flirty feet" - reminds me a lot of FATAL. On the other hand, FATAL's a pretty good examination of an unwell mind, so there's kind of a chicken or the egg scenario going on there.

Slashers also tries to replicate the genius serial killer genre; if you're thinking of Silence of the Lambs, then you've got it in a nutshell; Saw too.

One problem with an emulation of these kind of killers is the same problem that dogged a particular scenario in Blood Brothers, Nemesis Strikes, which attempted to replicate the Dr. Phibes movies. Phibes would go about creating elaborate, Rube-Goldberg death traps to dispatch his enemies in poetically appropriate ways, much like the five Saw sequels force people to gouge out their eyes or eat a big plate of snakes in order to escape from certain death. (I've never seen the Saw movies myself, so...) The problem is that the entire point of those movies is to watch the elaborate deathrap do its thing; the deathtrap is the protagonist. If you stop it from happening, then you  essentially stop the movie. Having somebody explain just how the deathtrap would have gouged both your eyes out and squirted lemon juice in the sockets is kinda boring.

Slashers tries to also replicate what it's like to hunt genius serial killers, and the first thing that popped into your mind is Hannibal Lecter. Silence of the Lambs can essentially be seen as a movie-length escape scene, as Lecter manipulates everybody around him in order to get what he wants: his own freedom.

(And here it ends. Pity; I should have finished the review.)

Atomic Highway Place Notes

This was created for Atomic Highway, which was free, but whose system wasn't quite versatile enough for me to really get into - we played a single session, and then had a problem when we ran into the chase/pursuit/combat rules for cars; you had to deal with a lot of numbers instead of range bands, or something similar.

I've lost the map that went with the below, but it basically mapped on North Carolina - Rally is Raleigh, for instance, although I will go on record as saying that about 95% of the below is pure invention and has nothing to do with the actual geography of the area. I'll add notes as we go. I think that one problem that I had is that there's not enough conflict in the setting to make the players necessary. Everybody has fixed most of the major local problems and are trying to spread outwards, which would in turn lead to conflicts between the city-states, but you don't start with the problems solved - you give it to the players and let them do the work. All of the places mentioned below are far too safe for the players to really make a difference.

WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR WORLD
 
Yours is the fourth generation after the destruction of civilization. After forty years of pitiless struggle, some semblance of civilization has slowly returned to the wasteland. Rally threw off the Slaughter Dynasty, ending years of pointless bloodshed. Fall City's factions, finally united under a single charismatic leader, made peace with the Tragic Kingdom in order to exploit the fertile fields of The Grow together. Murt Beach's continued exploitation of its oil resources have given it the resources to defend itself against the raider attacks. Even the anarchic tribes of Carpark have managed to secure their own defense.
 
This grip on civilization is fragile. The raider tribes are in retreat, but caravans are regularly attacked from the Rough Tracks, where dozens of minor raider tribes have made their home. Mutated creatures from The Wild have made Route 20 a dangerous journey for anything but heavily armed convoys, and there's been sightings of beastmen in The Grow as well. Spartanburg's deathgrip on access to the Northwest has prevented trade from the stronger tribes, since the cost of the toll roads is so high, while Jawnsan teeters on becoming either a failed state or a puppet of Spartanburg. Meanwhile, the scavenging communities of Lossleader and Rockill continue to rake the ruins of Char and the Big Sixty, threatening to bring destabilizing technology from the ruins of the old world, despite the death toll. The Hell Miles make any sort of trip through the Big Sixty a nightmare, threatening to strangle Rally. 
 
Your group has been chosen, by your mentors and your leaders, to be given one of the most valuable commodities any community can offer: A vehicle, and gas enough to drive it. Like the knights of old, you're elevated above your fellow man by steel and steed. But like the knights of old, your community looks to you for leadership and inspiration. 
 

FALL CITY
 
Fall City is a state based around tall buildings, connected by dozens of reinforced steel catwalks and fed by vertical and horizontal gardens. Each building used to comprise its own individual city state, protecting itself from beastmen and raiders by staying off the ground, but clan politics and a scarcity of resources contributed to constant wars between the buildings. Eventually, three clans - Mutual Insurance, the Mirrors and Pittfield Technologies - created a seemingly unsolvable stalemate. Five years ago, Datane Mirror united all three clans to utterly decimate a raider attack, then opened diplomatic relations with the Tragic Kingdom to lay mutual claim to the Grow. 
 
The Current State of Fall City: 
 
Under Datane Mirror, Fall City is slowly moving from a loose cluster of tribes into one of the region's first city states. Its next ambition is to merge with the Tragic Kingdom and its resources, but Datane Mirror's time and resources are already consumed with soothing inter-clan rivalries, and the Tragic Kingdom's xenophobia presents a stiff obstacle to that goal.
 
TRAGIC KINGDOM
 
The Tragic Kingdom was once a fancy amusement park, staffed by animatronic robots and home to dozens of fancy rides and attractions. When the apocalypse came, it shut itself off from the outside world, using its technical expertise to convert the park's security systems to a potent internal defense, and converting its robots into lethal killing machines. While the Kingdom has ample access to technological resources - many of them useless in a wasteland - its lack of arable land kept its population artificially low. It wasn't until Datane Mirror struck a temporary alliance with them to reclaim the Grow that the Tragic Kingdom began to blossom. 
 
The Current State of the Tragic Kingdom
 
The Tragic Kingdom is xenophobic, but its access to the Grow is allowing its population to expand for the first time in years. Nominally led by the mysterious Forest King, the Tragic Kingdom is currently breaking into two rough factions, one isolationist and the other expansionist. So far, the expansionist faction is in the ascendant, but if the Tragic Kingdom gets its fingers burned by raiders or by politics, that may change.
 
THE GROW
 
The Grow is a giant farmland; formerly a loose conglomeration of farmsteads who suffered under constant beastman and raider attacks, they're now under the mutual protection of Fall City and the Tragic Kingdom, who engaged in full-scale war to drive both out. The farmsteads now have a symbiotic relationship with their patrons; in exchange for protection and some limited technology, they provide food. 
 
The Current State of the Grow
 
For some unknown reason, the Grow has seen a rapid rise in beastman activity, to the point where Fall City has sent its militia out to fight them. So far the flow of food is uninterrupted, but why the beastmen have shown such interest in an area that provides nothing to them is a mystery.
 
BIG SIXTY
 
The Big Sixty wasteland is the remnants of one of the larger cities in the region; nobody quite knows how it got the name, but the speculation is that it took a sixty-megaton hit during the Apocalypse. Whatever happened, the city is an utter wasteland of broken, caved-in buildings, debris-choked streets, tunnels, dead ends and ancient bones crunching underfoot. It's a scavenger's paradise; it's also heavily populated by a variety of threats, ranging from feral beastmen to raiders to stranger creatures that supposedly inhabit the ruins. 
 
The highway that runs through the Big Sixty is kept clear of major obstructions, but only so that anything passing through can run the gauntlet of attacks from a wide range of threats - caravans passing through Big Sixty usually have as many people designated for protection as they do for actual transport, and even then, it's risky. This has given the highway running through the Big Sixty the nickname of the Hell Miles.
 
LOSSLEADER
 
Positioned between the Char and The Big Sixty, Lossleader is a goldrush town fueled entirely by scavenging in the Big Sixty and Char. If you find something in the ruins that you can't sell - or don't know the worth of - then Lossleader is the place to take it, sell it, or trade it for something else. Lossleader is also one of the few places where you can buy, repair or upgrade a working automobile, but it'll cost you a lot. Cars are cheap, but know-how isn't. Lossleader has always been a wild card due to the amount of disruptive technology that comes out of it - functioning guns, working reactors, gasoline stores and points related. Its government runs entirely through commerce, with different commercial interests funding community defense, justice, cleanup and so forth. At the moment, Otto's Wreckers - a caravan escort service with a dozen vehicles - is the strongest and richest faction. 
 
The Current State of Lossleader
 
There's been an uptick in strange technology found in Lossleader's ruins, some of which is bouncing around for remarkably cheap prices because nobody knows what to do with it. One item, initially sold for scrap, turned out to be a high-end plasma torch, which then made a lucky buyer wealthy enough to buy his own bar (Squat's Brewery). Scavenging teams are now tearing apart both Char and the Big Sixty, but casualties are high and getting higher all the time thanks to claimjumping and the normal dangers of both areas.
 
RALLY
 
Rally is the largest community in the wasteland, and one of the most powerful. It suffered through thirty years of misrule under the Slaughter Dynasty, a group of raiders turned despots, before a rebellion shattered their power and executed any Slaughter that they could lay their hands on. In the ten years intervening, the families of Rally have built a stable, almost thriving community - but one that's beginning to push at the seams of its limitations, thanks to food shortages, raider attacks and pressure on the amount of oil that it can draw and refine from its pumps.
 
Rally is the home of the Circuit, which is a race car track, justice system, gladiatorial arena and political system all in one. Seats on Rally's ruling council aren't determined by victory in a Circuit race, but consistent and spectacular victory on the track gives its backers a lot of influence. It's entirely possible to win a judicial gladiatorial fight, be hired onto a car crew, excel in the bloodfights and advance into politics - in fact, it's happened several times. 
 
Rally's convoys are the primary mover of goods through the wasteland; its caravans, seasoned by decades of fights with raiders and beastmen, make a circuit every three months or so, travelling down Route 95 until hitting Fall City, and then returning to Rally again. There's been a few convoys pushed through to Spartanburg - it's easy for Rally to pay the toll, but the caravans do not fare well on the Hell Miles and the long way takes too long and stretches supply and reinforcement lines too thin.
 
The Current State of Rally
 
Rally is a city obsessed by racing, to the point where elections and races are almost synonymous. There's eight major factions, each supporting its own gladiatorial/racing team, and two dozen minor factions that focus on a particular area, like the Just Fist judicial fight team. At present, no faction has been able to win enough victories to really be able to lead Rally in any meaningful way, which in turn has left it vulnerable to a variety of threats. The lack of a concerted effort in keeping the raiders of the Rough Tracks under control, for instance, may make the next caravan that Rally sends out a lost cause...
 
COMB CITY
 
Comb City was struck hard by the Apocalypse, and what was left of its population made its way to Fall City and the Tragic Kingdom, leaving behind a radioactive ruin. When the radiation slacked off, small groups of scavengers began to move back into the ruins; when they brought their finds to Fall City, Fall City decided that it would be a good idea to start mining the ruins in earnest. Using resources provided by Fall City, including excavators, a mall that had been partially crushed by a falling building was unearthed and looted thoroughly.
 
The influx of wealth into Fall City came with a price. Raider attacks on the ruins stretched Fall City's resources thin and eventually caused its political breakup, stranding the excavation teams in Comb City. Left on their own, the excavation teams began their own primitive civilization, only to see it immediately come under heavy attack by both raiders and beastmen coming down from the Wild. Unable to gain reinforcements, the excavation teams split into two tribes: the stealthy, nearly feral Excavs, who retreated to the suburbs, and the Mallrats, who turned the mall into a maze of traps and deadfalls and retreated into it.
 
The Current State of Comb City
 
A warzone. Comb City is close enough to the Wild that beastmen regularly make incursions into Comb City to hunt down humans; raiders pass through looking for slaves or to allow their own scavenging teams a shot at what's left of Comb City's treasures.
 
THE WILD
 
Nobody knows much about the Wild save that it's a big, thick forest and that it's crawling with beastmen. It's possible to pass the Wild if you drive as fast as you can, but the various branch effigies and obstacles left on the road by beastmen make it difficult to floor it down that stretch of highway. 
 
CARPARK
 
Carpark is a community under siege. Originally a raider community, it slowly coalesced into a tribe, and then from there into an actual community, turning from raiding to metalwork and agriculture instead of pillaging their neighboring communities. (A stinging defeat at the hands of Rally also helped.) However, sitting right next to the Rough Tracks means that Carpark is a community under constant siege from raiders and beastmen. In order to keep them out, Carpark has essentially built a series of metal shells around itsef, using ruined automobiles as raw material. The walls aren't high, but there's a lot of them, and they're tough to knock over, which has made Carpark one of the safer areas in the wasteland.
 
Carpark is also home to the only movie theater within five hundred miles, and regularly rotates movies out for new ones. This makes Carpark a popular spot for entertainment - and, on occasion, education, since there's a few movies that detail certain steps in automobile repairs. It also pays extremely well for new reels, if they can be found...
 
The Current State of Carpark
 
Carpark is a city in stasis, kept from developing by raider attacks and by a relative dearth of natural resources. Its tribal government also doesn't do much favors, as there's been a lot of criticism - none of it spoken aloud - of the current chief, Chief Shade. Carpark is surviving, but not much more.
 
MURT BEACH
 
Murt Beach is where the gasoline comes from; thanks to an offshore platform some two miles away from the city itself, it's able to provide a steady flow of petroleum products to the rest of the region. With that prosperity comes a fair amount of paranoia, because Murt Beach is under constant attack from a wide variety of sources - raiders, beastmen, even the occasional attack from Carpark. In order to prevent any one faction from ganging up and taking it over, Murt Beach sells to everybody - even raiders, if they have the barter - but that doesn't stop people from trying to grab all of the marbles.
 
Thanks to its oil wealth, however, Murt Beach is in pretty good shape. Becoming a citizen involves buying your way into the quasi-corporation that runs Murt Beach, either through barter or by service - there's entire families that have spent generations on various construction projects, working towards acceptance into Murt Beach's gentry. Murt Beach's oil runs are protected by a heavily-modified yacht that's essentially a giant gunboat / boarding platform, which gives Murt Beach a lot of military might - it's even done night raids on raider communities that got too close to the coast, with devastating results.
 
The Current state of Murt Beach
 
Murt Beach is rapidly becoming a major power in the region thanks to its control on oil resources and its military might. It's limited by an insular viewpoint and its proximity to the Rough Tracks, which keeps it regularly attacked by gas-hungry raiders. Without the Rough Tracks to keep it back, it's entirely possible that Murt Beach might become the capital city of the region, replacing the relatively resource-poor Rally.
 
THE ROUGH TRACKS
 
Information about the area around the Rough Tracks is comparatively scarce thanks to the region's habit of ending the life of any attempt to map or scout the area - the raiders may not all get along, but they don't like outsiders and will team up to make sure that they don't escape. The heavy woods and twisting roads make it easy to trap and ambush anybody who comes in.
 
The few brave scouts who did make it out - usually with no small amount of casualties - report that the Rough Tracks are essentially a raider homeland, using the resources of the various small towns and factories of the region to support their forays into more civilized areas. Most of their economy is based around slavery, using captured scavengers and residents of various cities to grow food and other menial tasks. Weirdly, thick smoke has been seen rising into the sky, which suggests some kind of heavy industry - but what?
 
THE BIG BURN
 
The Big Burn is one of the region's mysteries, a giant canyon carved into the earth by an unknown force; at its deepest point, the canyon goes some five hundred feet into the earth. A small mining community has formed around the Big Burn, under the protection of Rally but becoming more independent by the day. So far, all that's been pulled out of the earth is iron, but the deeper mine shafts have brought up rarer metals and even the occasional chunk of silver. The sides of the canyon are decorated with dozens of catwalks and small homes drilled into the side of the rock, which makes for an easy defense in the event of raider or beastman attack. (The Big Burn was created by a gigantic Akira-style orbital laser that went off and carved a big hole in the ground; the original plot for Fallout 3 was that the player would go into orbit to destroy a menacing space station, so I figured I'd do the same here.)

If you go down in the woods today...

 Somebody on Reddit was asking for scenes in the woods that could occur in a Blair Witch-style scenario, where the Agents are lost in the woods and trying to find their way out, and things get weird for them. I kind of got inspired and came up with the below.

- The Agents keep seeing somebody ahead of them who's holding a flashlight, but they're so far ahead that they can't make out who it is, and they don't stop no matter how loud the Agents yell. If the Agents charge fast enough, they only find the flashlight lying on the ground, still on.

- As the Agents proceed, the full moon seems to shift in the sky - one minute it's in front of them, then they walk for five minutes and it seems to be behind them. If anybody succeeds in a Survival or Navigate roll, or has any points in Science: Astronomy, they'll realize that there's two moons in the sky. If all of them look into the sky at the two moons, one of them suddenly flickers out, leaving only one behind. (Hat tip to the movie The Endless.)

- One of the Agents becomes absolutely sure that the moon is watching them from the sky, like an enormous, unblinking eye, and has to make a Sanity roll to avoid hiding from its awful gaze. Who's watching when, just for a second, it seems to blink?

- A stag stumbles towards them, its intestines hanging out of an enormous wound in its belly; it croaks out something that sounds like a word, then drops dead. Are the wounds from a bear, or something worse? And what was the word?

- There's a drumming noise in the distance, but it's irregular - sometimes very fast, sometimes irregular and slow. It begins to become more steady when one of the investigators realizes that it's synced to their own heartbeat, and rises and falls with their pulse.

- They find a fairy circle of mushrooms, each mushroom arranged exactly two feet away from the skeleton of a fox. The skeleton shows visible signs of deformation - the left side of the skull has two eyesockets, and the ribcage has too many ribs.

- They find an abandoned campsite, with a crude firepit littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. There's empty .30-06 shells scattered around the nearby area, and a successful Search roll finds a rifle raggedly broken in half as if by some tremendous force. Underneath the rifle, there's a skeletal human lower arm and hand, that's clearly been chewed on for a while; the marrow has been sucked out.

- The Agents find a cell phone lying on a nearby dead tree, seemingly placed so that they notice it. It still has a little bit of juice left in it, long enough for the Agents to watch a video of teenagers clowning around with flashlights before one of them is suddenly pulled up into the trees. The video ends with a freshly severed leg falling out of the trees and onto the ground before the cellphone goes dead.

- The Agents find a tree with the bark stripped off, and I CAN'T GET OUT carved into the blank wood underneath.

- The Agents find a tree with the face of an Agent perfectly rendered into the bark, as if the tree spontaneously grew into that shape. The face is screaming in agony. Or maybe it's perfectly serene, accepting. As the Agents proceed, the other Agent's faces are found in the bark, then the faces of others that the Agents don't know.

- The Agents notice that the trees here are a lot bigger than before, and seem to get larger and larger as they continue to walk, until they're the size of redwoods. Looking up, the trees seem to go up forever, with only a tiny patch of starry sky visible seemingly miles away.

- The Agents find a wrecked, abandoned car that's been thoroughly overgrown, left here to rot for years. A tree sprouts through the empty space where the engine used to be.

- The Agents become aware that there's small animals watching them, their flashlights reflecting from their eyes. Most of the animals have two eyes. A few have three, or more. They scamper away into the darkness after a few seconds.

- The Agents find a complete set of clothing that's been left behind to rot in the grass, seemingly for months. It matches up exactly with what one of the Agents is wearing, down to any identifying marks made on the Agent's clothing.  (I did come up with this one before seeing Backrooms, I should note.)

- One of the Agents becomes convinced that a tree is now occupying a space that it wasn't a second before - is he just disoriented from only seeing what's lit by his flashlight? Maybe.

- A sizable moth beats itself against somebody's flashlight for a few seconds, then flies off again.

- The remnants of some litterbug's picnic, with trash strewn around the plastic cloth on the ground. The trash looks exactly like normal food wrappers, except written in an alphabet that the Agents have never seen before. Anthropology or Archaeology rolls reveal that it's no recognized human language. Or maybe they're all in Linear B.

- What looks like blood is slowly oozing out of an old bullet hole in a tree. Tasting it results in the Agent hearing a constant low conversation that they can't make out while they're in the forest. Get it to the lab, and it's just tree sap.

- Every blade of grass, every sprouting plant, every dropped twig is leaning in one direction in this glade. They're not pointing to anything. Probably.

- Somebody's disassembled a sizable wind chime and has restrung it from a tree branch. Between each chime is a human bone. When the wind blows, the noise the chimes make seem to to echo for a long time, as if they're in a much larger space than just this clearing. An Alertness roll reveals that the noise sounds like it's bouncing off the walls of a titanic cathedral.

- The characters can see a set of blinking red lights through the trees, arranged into a vertical straight line - the warning lights on a cell phone tower, or power pylon. One of the lights detaches itself from the line and flies off, irregularly.

- An ancient television that somebody threw away, resting on a stump. A crude glyph has been painted on the cracked screen - it seems to depict somebody huddled over, as if they're trying to avoid the notice of something much larger. It takes a successful Sanity roll to tear your attention away from it once you've seen it.

- They find tire tracks leading to the remains of a pyre, apparently the aftermath of somebody's party in the woods. It looks like they were burning Mythos tomes for fuel, but none of them have survived the fire. (Or maybe one or two have.)

- A trio of deer suspended from a branch, their throats freshly cut and their guts lying on the ground beneath them. No sign of the hunters.

- Actually: After the Agents discover the trio of deer hanging upside down, they wander around for a while doing whatever. Then they find a trio of hunters, their throats slit, dangling upside down from a tree with their guts in a pile beneath them. There’s a discarded, stained paper plate with a piece of raw meat on it that’s been rubbed thoroughly with Buttery Garlic steak seasoning. It’s from one of the hunters.

- They find a body crumpled at the foot of a tree - maybe it's a park ranger, maybe it's a cultist, maybe it's a hunter. The tree has had most of the accessible bark removed, and the wood underneath has been carved with hundreds of lines of writing, not in English. There's a Swiss army knife nearby, with all of the blades broken off, coated in sap and wood pulp. The corpse's fingers are horribly damaged, with the distal phalanages visible. When the knife broke, he used his fingernails, and when his fingernails couldn't do the job…

- There’s bear traps all over the place, but there’s been no attempt made to hide them. They’re covered in Christian crosses and excerpts from the Bible, written in what looks like house paint. All of them are unsnapped, except for the last one they find - the bear trap has snapped, but there’s nothing in it. There is a sizable, circular indentation in the crest of the jaws that would match a human limb, melted into the metal of the trap, as if the trap closed around something tremendously hot. There’s an oversized footprint of what looks like a goat hoof nearby, stinking of brimstone.   (This one might not be mine - I think that I’m remembering it and thinking of it as my own.)

Delta Green and Me

I have yet to formally play it yet, but I find that the new version of Delta Green is too bleak and depressing to really enjoy - there’s enough world-ending threats now to play a game about an inevitable apocalypse to feel fun to play. I am fundamentally an optimist, mostly because I have to be just to keep on going; I think that we can overcome the threats that humanity faces.

But Delta Green is almost relentlessly bleak, and winning a scenario feels less like giving the human race some temporarily relief and more like a pointless gesture against an inevitable end. I have enough despondency in my life without adding it to my entertainment.

The world has moved on...

I really like Unknown Armies - I played a short campaign with some friends a long time ago, and had a great time playing “Jailbreak” with a group that hadn’t played anything but D&D and Legend of the Five Rings - but I am going on record as saying that it derives from a world that doesn’t exist. The concept of something being underground just doesn’t exist anymore - even the most obscure bit of information is available in two seconds with a Google search, or, if you’re really unlucky, a visit to archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Information just travels too fast and replicates itself too quickly for something like the occult underground to stay underground and be even vaguely plausible. Set it before, say…2002, and you’ll do okay, but we went through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution with the invention of the Internet, and you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. Although there’s probably a school of magic that’d let you do it.

The same thing holds true to some degree with Call of Cthulhu - Delta Green has some rationales for why the Mythos hasn’t become common knowledge, and I guess it’s plausible enough to explain why you can’t immediately access a copy of the Necronomicon on the Internet with two clicks. Delta Green is certainly popular enough as a game to justify its own concept - the government suppressing Mythos activity at any cost - but it would be interesting to sit down and see what would happen if you wrote a setting where knowledge of the Mythos had grown to the point where it actively affected society and civilization. Everybody knows that the human race in its current form is doomed, and they’re all scrambling either for an escape hatch or an accommodation with the Mythos; the people who aren’t doing either are resigned to their fate. I started writing up a setting based on the human race essentially going into quiet insanity all at the same time, with the PCs being the only ones who were able to maintain their sanity - by avoiding contact with human social structures - but I was writing it wrong, and it didn't go anywhere. I may pick it up back up again.

I think, in fact, that there was a section in a Delta Green book which essentially stated that the human race would eventually become a Mythos race of its own, like the byakhee or the Deep Ones. God only knows where, though - I think that it was before the reboot into a new game, maybe in the chapbooks. I think that there was also a section where they specifically say that people become Mythos sorcerers because they know that the human race is doomed, but again, I don’t remember where they said that.

The Night Floors: Even if you leave this room...

 Here’s the thing: I almost guarantee you that this particular vignette has been done by somebody else, because it feels familiar - I’m probably plagiarizing without realizing it. If you happen to know where this shows up, let me know.

This is for the Delta Green scenario The Night Floors, available most recently in Impossible Landscapes.

This is something to spring on the characters when they leave the Night Floors to regroup or recuperate. They return to their homes, kiss their loved ones, shower up - but as they’re about to relax, they collectively get an urgent call to a downtown diner from their Handler; they need to be debriefed immediately. When they arrive, the Handler isn’t there. The only occupants of the diner are the waitress and a cook in the back who never seems to turn around as he works at the grill; a successful Notice roll reveals that her left arm is a prosthetic. A critical success reveals that all of her limbs are prosthetic, but move like real limbs; SAN loss 1/1d3. If asked, she says that she’s always been like that, but simply grunts and moves away if they press her for more answers.

A car screeches to a halt in front of the diner and bullets rip through the front windows. The waitress falls to the ground, one of her limbs skittering across the ground sounding like a wooden baseball bat. Stuffing leaks from her shattered head. The Agents can return fire if they want, but the bullets continue and intensify. The only escape is through the back door - make the Agents roll Dodge if they want to make a break for it.

When they go through the door, temporarily remove them from play. When the last goes through, the Agents find themselves back in the Night Floors, in a small private library whose books have all been completely pasted shut, page by page. The door is still open. If they go back through the door, the diner is still there, but the far wall is wooden panelling and both the cook and the waitress are wooden mannequins.

“Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room.” - Room 1418

 SAN loss 1d4/1d6 - and the Agents will now have to contend with the knowledge that the Night Floors are no longer confined to the Macallistar building.

A restarting from scratch

A word: I do not want to be an influencer, or to have a big following, and I for damn sure don’t want to be famous - I’ve seen people in the limelight before, and it usually fucks them up pretty good. The typical arc seems to be somebody getting notable for saying something incisive or interesting, then getting a following, then having that following turn against them when they put their own foot in their mouth up to the knee, cue the drama explosion and public knife fight - this has happened over and over again, and I don’t want any part of it.

I don’t have a Bluesky account, I don’t post on X/Twitter, I don’t dialogue or beef with notable gaming personalities - I don’t want to; I have nothing to say to them and I imagine that they have anything to say to me. I don’t have a Youtube channel or a podcast and I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to appear on either. I’m anonymous on Reddit and should probably close my Facebook account, as it’s become a stress-delivering shitpit.

I am content to be a silent nobody; even this blog is a risk.

I moderated RPGnet for a long time and I wrote the FATAL review, but the FATAL review was a long time ago and I stopped being an active moderator for RPGnet in about 2020 or so. I’m a creature of the old Internet. This new stuff confuses and frightens me.

I am also going to say this: This isn’t RPGnet. I’m going to say and do things that I wouldn’t be able to do on RPGnet because it’s my own blog. (I’ve had people suggest that I represented RPGnet on the greater Internet because of my position on RPGnet; fuck that. This was back in the infancy of RPGnet, mind you; nobody’s pulled shit that stupid since.) That’s not a license for me to act the fool, but I’m not going to self-censor to obey rules that don’t apply here.

 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?