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.
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?
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