Hey peeps, hoping to get some feedback.
I'm putting together a game based on the old(ish) sci Fi movie Pandorum, with some lovecraftian mystery mixed in.
The players will wake up without any memories, and will basically just have to survive and escape.
Blurb to the Players- pick any class or race (-android) in the core rulebook
You have no memory of who you are, where you are, or where you're going.
The only "skills" you have are brought about by muscle memory, you may know HOW to do a thing, but you don’t know why you know it or why you know it.
You will discover your memories as we go, at the beginning simply make choices and actions that make sense to you. As memories are uncovered/revealed you will have to reconcile who you think you are with who you were.
This is a serious rp heavy game
Map note-
Will be using roll20, so dynamic lighting (limited view) and background noises ( creaking hull and other ambient noise) will add to the setting and suspense.
Intro game
The team wakes up slowly to a darkened cryo storage room. With only their name and designation, the team sets out to find more information about themselves and what happened to them. Perception
- 1-5 - the darkness and confusion of cryo prevents you from seeing anything of import in the din
- 6-11- you notice that the majority of the cryo pods in the bay are still active, and can imply there is at least some emergency power is active.
- 12-16- you notice that you also see that several pods are deactivated, some of which are open and empty while others clearly have unfortunate passengers still entombed within.
- 17-20+- there is a pod that’s been clearly torn apart. With shattered glass, bloody remains, and sizeable clawmarks in the interior of the pod, the thing is a sight to behold. They will also see an air vent that may be big enough for someone to wiggle through.
Upon further inspection of the bay you find a torn notebook (see pages column, entry one), a single flashlight, a fire extinguisher, a screwdriver, and some assorted wires and circuit boards that can be pulled from broken pods. If seen, shards of broken glass can be taken from the fractured pod for impromptu weapons.
The players will find a locked door as the only obvious way out.
Possible exits and afterward
- Override the doorlock using the battery of the flashlight and some spare wire, or other tech skill
○ The door opens to a dark hallway. Both directions are unmarked and fairly unassuming, until a swarm of rodents emerges from the right, sprinting across the adventurers path. After the critters pass an eyrie silence settles for just a moment, after which a blood curling scream emits from the direction in which the rat swarm emerged. The scream is cut off with an abrupt snapping sound.
○ If the crew chooses to run towards the danger, they will die.
○ If the crew runs from the noise they will pass by several doors (other cryo bays, a storage closet (items inside), and a broken elevator.
○ Nearby emergency exit stairs will lead them to a abandoned hangar deck.
- Use the screwdriver to pull the vent grate off and crawl through
○ The vent exits thee doors to the left of original cryo bay door. They can open the door from the other side for the crew
- Blow a hole in the wall/floor (I don’t know how they would do this, but I wouldn’t put it passed this group)
Hangar Bay
- this will be the stopping point. The crew would need to turn the power on and open the bay doors to leave, will expand later
Endgame Goals
- Uncover more journal pages
- Discover one of the crew is the research assistant that wrote the journal
- Discover The creatures are experimented on passengers
- escape
Any feedback or tips would be appreciated!
Notebook pages
- Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
- His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research.
- Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realized.
- It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work.
- We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present.
- luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Sumner’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.
- It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid—it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists—and we were glad when our spades struck wood.
- On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type—large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired—a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for—a real dead man of the ideal kind,
- The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional “soul” of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the incision securely.
- The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centred all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.
Human it could not have been—it is not in man to make such sounds