Before I ran The Haunting of Harrowstone, I came up with an extremely rough outline for possibly turning it into a sort of steampunk or cyberpunk campaign instead. In my defense I was heavily into the TRON: Legacy Soundtrack. I'm looking to see if anyone here has any critiques on how I can make it better or what kind of system would be a good one to run it.
So it'd be like a steampunk/cyberpunk kind of world, where people wore clockwork clothing and monocles that held more than just clearer sight. The prevalent color was blue, and although everything looked at felt so futuristic, they didn’t have automobiles. They had carriages. Carriages drawn by jet black organic horses if you were rich, and automaton clockwork horses if you were poor. True organic bred animals would be hard to find, and mages and folks of a magical nature with familiars were hard to come by, at least those who you felt were doing their job correctly. An automated cat or raven just didn’t seem to hold the right kind of feeling.
The horses and automated animals would also have monocles.
The feel of Ravengro would be a poor Steampunk town, with run down gears and shops and carriages. Merchants came rarely, but when they did they would bring the finest metals and gears and clockworks from Lepidstadt or wherever they had come from. But, even as rarely as they came—their visits kept getting shorter and shorter. There was rumor coming from Ravengro. And not just rumors, but uncomfortable feelings.
The mill house at the top of the hill. It holds the source of power for Ravengro—the electricity and sense of security. But something’s wrong with the mill house, and the people of Ravengro can tell. Their monocles are breaking. The problem with the monocles is that in this world, you’re born with it. So when it breaks, a part of you breaks. The people of Ravengro are slowly going insane.
Professor Lorrimor takes it upon himself to go to Harrowstone, the mill house, to figure out what’s going on.
& that’s when the player characters come in, after his untimely demise.
Long story short, The Whispering Way had implanted a series of viruses in the main computer of Harrowstone, and it had spread throughout the levels of the mill house, reaching the supply that held the information for the Warden Program, that held back the numerous problems that the mill house could cause Ravengro and the monocles if a virus were to penetrate the system. But the virus presented by The Whispering Way was incredibly powerful and didn’t take long to infiltrate. It released the programs being held back by the Warden Program—viruses placed as a failsafe incase something were to happen and the information regarding the people of Ravengro needed to be destroyed. Of course, these 5 programs are only supposed to be released if the entire city of Ravengro has been destroyed—the programs target the systems relaying to the monocles, the systems that record the lives and the powers and the history of the city and its people.
Your mission is to enter the millhouse and discover the codes to disable all 5 programs: Splatter, Charlatan, Axe, Mosswater, and Piper.
That’s really all I was able to come up with. What do you guys think? I know it's a rough sketch with a bunch of loopholes. I know it goes through being steampunk and then cyberpunk--it's really just a jumble in my brain.