Running a PbP game for some friends and looking for some ideas to help flesh out a scenario/campaign. I haven't read too much of the lore, but feel reasonably familiar with the setting and the ideas and what I guess I am looking to crowdsource is putting meat on the bones of the story seed I am starting with.
This is designed to be an introduction to the setting and get the characters "into" Firewall. What I am toying with is them working as gatecrashers for one of the hypercorps and heading through to help out with an expedition/research run already in progress (but not a fully established colony). They will arrive and find it wrecked/abandoned and will have no way of contacting back until the link is reestablished later. I suspect I will have some sort of ex-threat that brought about the downfall. I want the big twist or reveal of this story arc to be that this wasn't the first time that they have been sent through, but they have just been restored from a backup that was made right before they stepped through the first time.
Things I like:
- The idea of a hypercorp "throwing money at the problem" by shelling out for morphs to just send the same batch through until they take care of the problem and return.
- The possibilities of encountering other versions of themselves or finding old stacks and the decision of whether to reintegrate or not (since to my understanding it would essentially be like alpha forks, but it wasn't really a copy?)
- The isolation aspect (no way to get more help) and the panic to reach the rendezvous, especially after they discover that the hypercorp will likely just throw another set through if they aren't at the gate at the appointed time
Hiccups/Things to work through:
- Egos not realizing that time has passed since they supposedly arrived (e.g. if they are the 3rd sleeved set, how to trick them into thinking everything is on the level)
- If it even makes sense that a hypercorp would do this sort of thing to keep it on the DL
- What the hypercorp would plan to do to the egos if they did return (likely kill and restore from backup with claims of great heroism I suspect)
- How to structure the settlement as I want to have it be fairly large and abandoned (one of my players likes the idea of atmospheric exploration and investigation which also works well for PbP)
- If gates are isolated enough for something like this to happen (solar system side that is)
- Any other issues I missed
So I may regret this, but please give me any feedback you can think of. None of my players are too familiar with the setting (which I why I want it to be intro and thought putting it out of system would make it less overwhelming since they are contained) so it should help introduce them to a lot of the concepts. At the end I will have them approached by Firewall to induct them, but other than that, I just want input on how to make this a really interesting (and hopefully unsettling/creepy scenario). If that means saying that something sucks or doesn't make sense, let me know that too. Thanks!