Description
Fear is similar to fire, it almost lives but doesn't quite. It feeds on situations and on smaller fears that are roused in us, it can spread from person to person infectiously and it can grow to such a height that it spawns other, lesser fears in us, phobias deriving from our main fear. What if fear was alive? What if that creeping, crawling
panic sensation was alive in the same way that memes and other mind virii can be said to be alive, only more alive, more cunning, stronger and developing into something stronger still?
Isolated and vulnerable the characters begin to get preyed upon by their fears, every horrific imagining and phobia increasing and increasing until they are driven utterly insane by their own panic. Every fear that the playds suggest their characters might be feeling should be played up and enhanced, every horrific imaging that they vocalise should start to take place driving their characters further and further down the spiral of fear.
Twist
The fear in one of the character's minds has achieved a primitive and predatory sentience of its own, reaching out to trigger the fears in the others around them. That player becomes strengthened and empowered by absorbing the fear of the other characters, spawns no smaller fears and is immune to everything save their own fears which will not form at the whim of their own fear-creature. If the characters can work this out they can bring an end to the horror by disabling that character.
53
Twist
The site where they are isolated has an overgrown meteor crater and no animals around it. The meteor was some manner of star-spawned creature that has recently begun to stir in its shell, reaching out to feed on the fears of those around it. The characters are the only people or animals that haven't fled in a long time and are feeding it well with their terrors. Not long after they work out that their fears are hallucinatory and unfounded the creature will have absorbed enough energy to hunt and will come looking for them, just when they might think it is not real...
Twist
The fear is being enhanced by subsonics in the area caused by earth tremors and rumblings underground. The subsonics have a profound psychological effect on those exposed to them heightening their fears and causing compelling hallucinations after prolonged exposure. The characters may find a scientific station near where they are where this phenomenon was being examined which may give them enough information to get away.
Epilogue
.
Going with the subsonics theory, the horror bemg in the way people react, the frequency has now been thoroughly studied and used in short doses in labs. The technicians believe it may be a good alternative to storming buildings in hostage situations or of dispersing crowds. The first true test will be against some native American activists who have seized hostages at a
government building. The characters will, of course, be some of the people trapped in that building when the gun toting activists begin to see their fears and terrors made manifest.
Ideas
This game will be hard to run without a system that makes a big deal of
psychological issues or some preparation that takes into account the fears of the characters even if there is no real mechanic for them. Some background to the
characters wi II also give plenty of hooks that are relevant to them.
waa� �ll���W:Wll\�i
Adventure 48
Technozombies
Description
Science is always moving ever onwards with new discoveries and new applications of old technology. Robotics is a difficult science to move fotwards since it is limited by electrical and computing power and cracking the science of a lot of movement problems that humans deal with instinctively. Robotic soldiers or similar applications of walking, talking problem solving robotics are extremely unlikely in even the medium term future.
However, there are resources that exist already
reprogrammed with all instincts that are needed, which need minimal power to run and which could make useful suicide troops.
That resource is the dead.
Muscles need little energy compared to motors, brains require the tiniest current to work and already contain all the necessary knowledge to walk, talk and perform other tasks. Resuscitating the bodies of the dead with mechanical hearts, computer chips, filaments and artificial blood nutrients appears to have accomplished the desired resurrection but what if they remember some of what they were?
Twist
The subjects used were three members of a brutal gang, shot dead by federal agents during a foiled drug deal. They had been betrayed by the opposing gang to the FBI in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The technozom bies slowly begin to remember who and what they were and what happened to them, breaking out and seeking revenge which leads to a seemingly unstoppable string of murders zeroing in on their betrayers.
Twist
The revived criminals prove uncontrollable and their filament networks seem capable of limited, intuitive interface with the facility's computer networks. They use this to initiate a lockdown and to turn upon the staff of the facility, even those unwitting of what went on within, dubbing them all 'Frankensteins' who don't deserve to live for what they have done.
Twist
One of the researchers is obsessed by the idea of bringing back his dead wife, currently stored in a cryonics facility, or rather, just her head being stored in a cryonics facility. He sends the technozombies out to kill, trying to patch together a perfect body for her before he aims to reattach the head and perform the process on her, bringing her back to him.
Epilogue
While there have been problems, the process works and is developed to its conclusion. The characters in the epilogue are insurgents or other opposing forces to the latest overseas expedition of the US Military. Always sensitive to the loss of US troops the zorn bie project is being used to clean up certain troublesome areas, sold to the media and to unknowing commanders as simply
a new brand of Special Forces. The characters find themselves up against an unstoppable 'undead' threat that can shrug off heavy bullet wounds and that does not mind dying in order to kill some of their number.
Idea
Universal Soldier while a rather crap film can give a few ideas on deployment of these troops.