S L A I N D U S T R I E S
Words from Head Office
M a i n T a i n i n G T h e f e e l o f T h e c a n n i B a l
s e c T o R s
One of the hardest things to pull off in role-play-ing successfully is horror, and it takes a truly skilled Games Master to make their players feel some of the fear that their characters do. Establishing a mood of heart-stopping terror is difficult enough when all you have are words and dice, let alone when there is snack food laying around and you are playing in a well-lit room. Hopefully some of the advice and techniques presented in this section will help you deal with presenting horror and disgust in an effective way. To start with, here is some basic advice…
1. play in the dark: The Cannibal Sectors are rainy, overcast, without power and dark in many other senses beyond the absence of light. Play-ing in a brightly lit room is not goPlay-ing to establish that mood, and bright sunshine or warm lighting is going to run counter to the feel you are trying to establish. Switch off some of the lights, run by lamplight or partially shut the curtains; anything to make things a little dimmer and to increase that feeling of claustrophobia. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t try playing in total darkness un-less you like stepping on dice and snacks.
2. play in the Quiet: The Cannibal Sectors are silent most of the time, relieved only by screams and gunshots when something happens. If you have music blaring or the TV on, people will be
distracted and less able to concentrate; your words will have less effect on them and their imagination will be less powerful. It can be very effective to use different levels of volume and speed in your voice to convey feeling, urgency or horror. If things still seem too quiet and too still, then you’ve probably got the balance just right. That’s how things are out in the sectors. Don’t be afraid to duplicate the feeling. If you slowly drop your voice to a whisper, people will strain to listen to you and will begin to feel more isolated and unsettled, especially if you couple this with speaking slowly. If you contrast that with a sudden shout and a speeding up of the cadence of your speech when something attacks, then your players will get a rush, and will be off guard. While this may seem to be a good tactic, it rarely works in the way you want it to. If your players jump, then you’ve startled them and prob-ably given them a swift jolt of adrenalin. Adrenalin is marvellous for the purpose of preparing the body for flight or fight - neither of which are conducive to thinking and talking, which is what goes on around an RPG table. Don’t make the mistake of trying to get the players to be completely in their characters. Their characters are stuck in hell on earth, but they’ve had the training that the play-ers haven’t; so, while playplay-ers truly would be run-ning around like headless chickens, the characters have had some experience with this sort of thing and shouldn’t be killed just because their player couldn’t handle being yelled at. As such, this tactic can be used once or twice on most groups, so save it for times when you really need it.
3. language: Language skills aren’t used half as much as they could be. Bear in mind that most of the species in the Cannibal Sector don’t speak Killian, so it should be very rare that players over-hear anything that sounds like voices. Instead, it is worth generating other noises: the clicks and whis-tles of Carrien and Scavs, the grunts and moans of the Cannibals and the Mutants, the sharp hisses of the Manchine. All of these are far more likely to be heard than actual voices. It is easily possible to keep players on edge merely by repeating sounds that they heard just before they were ambushed last time, particularly if you have exactly the same noise in the same pattern. Players will quickly associate certain noises with certain actions, and it is easy to play the players if the proper time is invested.
4. Music: There isn’t any out there, usually best to leave it at that. The problem inherent with music is that players get used to the melody, they get used to the words and the tunes, they find
themselves getting comfortable with the rhythm.
If one thing is making them comfortable, then trying to make them unsettled will be twice as hard, especially if they’re up on the air guitar while you’re orchestrating a Scav ambush. Scores from various films can be of use, but unless they’ve been engineered for the purpose (there are some special-ist RPG music stockspecial-ists out there), then sooner or later, the players will get comfortable with them as well. One particular method used in various con-vention games that has had success is the Prokofiev approach, whereby each particular creature or haz-ard has a particular piece of music, all of which are distinct in some way. This makes the players pay attention to the music, but only so they can try and determine what’s up ahead. This also allows misdi-rection, as once the players have become used to a piece of music signifying a certain thing, you can play it to give them a false sense of security (they’re expecting Carrien, when the only Carrien around the corner is one that the Scav tribe are skinning).
The Cannibal Sector is as much of a character as your players and your non-player characters. It is a malevolent brute lying at the door to Mort City and it wants to get in. It wants to brutalise and terrify the Operatives. Cannibal Sector One espe-cially has the strange Ebb effects and the power of The Dream that gives it a personal and vindictive quality. While you should be fair to your players and always give them a chance, the Cannibal Sector is unrelentingly harsh and is determined to kill or damage as many people as possible.
s T y l e s o f h o R R o R
As stated before, horror, along with comedy, is about the most difficult of genres to create the mood for, but when it works it works very well.
There are several styles of horror that you can mix and match within your game to produce the style that you want to play. These broad categories are…
splatter: Splatter is the genre of violent horror, of Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of the innumer-able Freddy or Jason flicks. Splatter is about gore, disfigurement and mutilation and often takes place around some sort of moral framework so that the victims are made out to almost deserve to be killed.
Splatter is probably the easiest mood to create and is made more effective by evocative and gory de-scriptions of wounds. Good antagonists and items to use in a splatter are serial killers, mutants and Scavs, all of whom fit the typical splatter
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nist profile well.
personal: Personal horror is intense and difficult to properly portray, requiring a great deal of commu-nication and teamwork between the player and the Games Master. Personal horror maps the descent into madness, or some other horrifying end, of a character. Because of the amount of time and ef-fort needed to do it justice, I recommend that you don’t try to get a feel of personal horror going in a game with more than three players. Personal hor-ror requires that you have a great understanding of the character the player has created: it needs to play on the needs of the character so that you can create the kind of stories that will slowly erode ideals, val-ues, friendships and even humanity itself. Personal horror games can be amongst the most rewarding stories told. Good antagonists for personal horror stories are Soft Company agents or reflections of the characters themselves, as well as people from their old communities who they must choose to support or damn against their other priorities.
psychological: Psychological horror is based around potential threat, paranoia and the creeping possibility of insanity. Any game using this should have people questioning motives and getting caught up in performing unsavoury tasks. Every-one involved should have some kind of secret or agenda, and behind it all there should be something
disturbing and horrific. The best antagonists for psychological horror are the characters themselves or their bosses. SLA has many hidden secrets and many agendas that are less than savoury. Finding out that your employer is not all that they appear to be, questioning loyalty: these are some of the key themes to SLA.
existential: Existential horror is covered by the discovery of things and powers beyond compre-hension and beyond the capability of the charac-ters to handle. The World of Progress has several entities and forces at this power level. Mr. Slayer, head of SLA Industries, is such a power: a mind that has shaped and changed the universe, head of a powerful corporate cult devoted to his well be-ing, given of mysterious ways and powers and pos-sessed of the secret knowledge of The Big Picture.
The Dream is another suitable foe: a completely unknowable force connected to the Ebb and capa-ble of the strangest reality warping capabilities. . What are their motives? Unknowable. What are they? Unknown. How can you fight them? You cannot.
Each of these types of horror can be mixed and matched to produce an overall horrific theme. A horror-based campaign might include every aspect as the players discover a horrific serial killer is in fact a rogue biogenetic experiment escaped from a
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lab, designed to a specification and psychology de-termined directly by Mr. Slayer. Why does he want such a creature? What is his purpose? How does it fit into The Big Picture and can we, or should we, oppose him?
d e s c R i B i n G T h e s e c T o R
The Cannibal Sector is a vast area of ruins and 00-year old artefacts. In much of the sector, everything is left just as it was when the disaster hit. Cannibal Sector One resembles a town at am: empty, quiet and Human-made but without the people in it to bring it to life. Any movement you do spot is likely to be hostile or someone like you.
Every sense is fed information by the sector and in describing it you can paint a far more vivid pic-ture if you describe how it feels to each of those senses.
smell: Cannibal Sector One stinks. The smell is cloying and invasive. It clings to armour, weapons, clothing, skin, hair - everything. It can make you choke and vomit when it is strong. SLA is so keen to keep the stink from entering Mort City, even the Downtown areas, that it has installed giant fans along the perimeter of the Cannibal Sector walls to keep as much of the stink back as possible. The smell is 00 years of detritus and neglect washed over with the shit of billions of Mort citizens and capped off with the stink of a million freshly rotting corpses. Even the stink of cordite is rapidly eaten by the smell. If you become inured to the stench, its constant variations in content and strength will still be able to catch you by surprise. It is either that or the dry rubbery smell of a respirator.
Taste: Everything in the Cannibal Sector tastes rotten. Even sealed ration packs go sour as soon as they are opened. Every breath tastes like bile;
every sip of water is foul and gritty. Spitting does not help, and even licking your lips will make you feel nauseous.
Touch: Nothing is smooth, nothing is intact and nothing stays intact. Armour becomes dented, scratched, and rough. Everything is cold and damp. The ground is hard and covered in broken glass or spent bullet casings. The walls are broken and shattered; nails and pieces of broken steel pro-trude. The only way to hide from it all is in your armour and as most PCs won’t be taking off their armour, this sense is the hardest to pass on.
hearing: Sound is the herald of doom within the Cannibal Sector. Most alarms are based on sound, and most things that live in the sector are quiet, stealthy and careful. Only the fall of the rain and the howl of the wind make any noise, occasionally interspersed with the tumble of some rubble or the collapse of an ancient building finally giving way.
When another sound is heard, it might be the whir-ring of a Manchine’s servos, the howl of a Carrien or the rasping of a Scav’s breath. Sound is always significant and usually spells trouble.
sight: Even during the day the Cannibal Sector is dark. Deep shadows hide who-knows-what and whatever is visible is painful to see: rotting corpses, bleached bones, the shattered remains of other Operatives and fly-blown masses of unidentifiable flesh. It is a world of brown and grey and rust, of harsh edges and twisted shapes. The apartments are not so different to your own apartments, just smashed and flooded. Little details of 00-year old lives remain in the rubble: a doll’s head in the mud, an ancient magazine and a rotting sofa in front of a shattered TV. Everywhere is familiar and strange all at once.
6th sense: Everyone gets feelings about places.
The room where someone died might make you feel cold and, if someone is looking at you, the hairs on your neck rise. These feelings, this sixth sense, should not be ignored when describing the Cannibal Sectors. Treading on the broken dreams of 00 years of hate and death creates a thick psy-chic atmosphere than can affect even the crudest of Stormers and the most blasé of Humans. There is the constant feeling of being watched and fol-lowed. Every corner feels like it has a dozen Car-rien hiding behind it, and every hole feels like it contains fresh horrors. The anticipation and the gut feelings are worse than the reality.
i M p a c T
The first visit to the Cannibal Sector should be one of profound significance and the impact of the mo-ment when the player characters move through the gates into the world beyond everything they have known should not be underplayed. The best way to really make the Cannibal Sector have an impact on the characters as well as their players is to play up the contrasts.
The trip to the wall should be as gregarious as possible. Emphasise the press of the people, the crowds on the streets, standing room only on the
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gauss rail, the omnipresent advertising and televi-sion, the clamour of car horns and people shouting, the endless fall of the rain.
Once they get to the wall, it is brisk, corporate ef-ficiency, hustle and bustle. A thousand procedures to go through, from weapon checks to vaccinations and then a klaxon sounds, the door opens and they step forth into the sector, into…
Silence.
The low rumble of the city behind them is the only sound. The rain is cold and it stings. There is no one but the characters in sight - just the bleak sector wall rising overhead and the broken-tooth skyline of the Cannibal Sector before them. No advertising, no TV, no people, no noise - nothing.
Then, before they even get very far into the sec-tor, its deadliness should assert itself: a sinkhole in the ground, an attack by wandering Carrien or a potshot from a concealed sniper, even a mistaken attack from the wall itself.
This is just a taste of things to come.
T h e d R e a M
The Dream is something new for SLA, taken from a few hints secreted in a couple of obscure sentences in previous material. The Dream is an embodiment of reality gone wrong; a whorl in the Ebb of psychic pain and it is carte blanche for the Games Master to
introduce the most peculiar and surreal aspects to their game. The Dream needs no definition; it sim-ply is and it can cause problems for the characters directly or through its manifested agents.
s u R R e a l i s M
The Dream is a surreal experience, and the surreal is described by the juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar to create new and unsettling experienc-es. In terms of The Dream this means it can draw upon familiar scenes and experiences from within the characters’ minds, mixing them with aspects of the Cannibal Sector and the purely imaginary to form a new whole.
A character might feel a strange shimmer or shud-der and then turn a corner to find a Carrien pack sat around a table in suits conducting a business meeting on how best to maximise their hunting potential or how to market ‘Human fingers’ to an unresponsive Carrien public. They might hear what sounds like a child crying in a tunnel; only to explore and find an ancient gauss train rearing up like a serpent. They might begin to see each other as the enemy or see visions of Mr. Slayer be-ing gnawed upon by Cannibals. For the duration of The Dream, all of this will be absolutely real.
A more subtle application of the power of The Dream is simply to feed the players false sensory information without telling them that it is The
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Dream. Strange inexplicable odours, odd sights, coloured lights, gunshots that lead to nothing, armour malfunctions or insects crawling in their suits, seeing each other as monsters and allowing them to fire upon each other: all of these things can bring the sense of insecurity that The Dream thrives on.
n a T u R a l h a z a R d s
There are many natural hazards across Mort, but most of them only come into play when Opera-tives are exploring the unmaintained and unpro-tected Cannibal Sectors or the wilderness. Rules for each of these types of natural hazard are pre-sented here.
M a s s i v e d a M a G e
Regular SLA armour does not protect against the types of damage presented in the next few pages.
It is designed for small-scale impact resistance, such as bullets and weapons, not the onslaught of a few tons of junk. While the armour itself may survive relatively unscathed, it’s likely that the per-son within will not be quite so lucky. In the tables indicated below, there are no scores for PV, which is because the damage done is not from the impact
It is designed for small-scale impact resistance, such as bullets and weapons, not the onslaught of a few tons of junk. While the armour itself may survive relatively unscathed, it’s likely that the per-son within will not be quite so lucky. In the tables indicated below, there are no scores for PV, which is because the damage done is not from the impact