Yaaaay, I designed the Samsa!
Transhuman KS backers got the PDF of the guide.
Really? Neat, was there anything else from Transhuman that you came up with?
Also since I had the day off from work today I decided to pen down some scenario ideas I've had bouncing around in my head for a while. Here they all are:
No Space Like Home[spoiler]The crew of an outer system asteroid mining vessel stumbles across a seemingly-derelict brinker habitat in the middle of open space. When they find nothing of interest aboard they initially dismiss it as a failed rimward habitat before continuing on, only to find the exact same habitat directly in their path some time later...and it's no longer empty. There is now a single transhuman occupant who cheerfully invites them aboard, and if they refuse and continue on they soon find the habitat in their viewport once again. Each time they refuse to board the station the next one they find is noticeably more "realistic" than the last, the occupants losing their uncanny valley features and mannerisms and becoming more lifelike and familiar to the crew. The miners must get to the bottom of the station's secret and find a way to escape it before they either succumb to its lure or go insane from the looping iterations.
[The miners are trapped in a honeypot simulspace after stumbling across an early-model TITAN probe in meatspace; it hacked their ship's mesh and forcibly linked them into the simulspace, which is a conversion program designed to force transhuman minds into a state to allow them to be more efficiently uploaded into a gestalt consciousness. Every time the miners reject the habitat offered to them, the next one adjusts itself to be more tempting by scanning their memories; station inhabitants might remind the miners of loved ones or friends, the interior itself might change to resemble childhood homes, etc etc. If any of the miners give in and remain on one of the habitats their minds are flagged as "ready" and placed in cold storage; if any of them lose too many SV from the endless cycle and go insane they are flagged as "broken" and placed in a separate server in the probe to be dissected for useful information. The only way to escape the simulation is to reject its offers in some radical or violent fashion, ie: ramming their ship into it, gunning down everyone inside, spacing the habitat, etc etc. When they manage to break out of the honeypot they may choose to A. get the fuck away from the probe B. attempt to destroy it with the ship's mining charges or C. trace its signal back to the hub controlling it to destroy that with mining charges.][/spoiler]
Ruster Roulette[spoiler]The player characters are mesh friends from across the inner and outer system who egocast to Olympus on Mars for their annual meatspace get-together. During the debauchery and partying, however, they are horrified to discover that one among them has been violently murdered in the night and their stack is missing. When the Tharsis League authorities prove to be less than helpful, the group takes it upon themselves to track down the killer and recover their stack...but they soon find themselves in entangled in a much greater web of conspiracy and betrayal. How does the killer know so much about them all? Is one among them the culprit? Why can none of them remember exactly how or when they all met, and why are they so surprisingly proficient with guns and explosives?
[The "mesh friends" are actually well-pruned beta forks of a team of Firewall sentinels sent to Olympus to investigate a hot spot in the TQZ; in order to avoid attracting further attention after a mishap with the local Rangers, the team forked themselves into rented bodies with implanted false memories so that the betas could act out their cover as partying offworlders while the alphas drove off into the desert to take care of business. The main team didn't expect to be gone long, a few days at most, but something went wrong and they were nearly two days overdue; while preparing to blast a rediscovered Fall-era bunker off the face of Mars one among them became infected with a YGBM hack (Known in Firewall as Friend/Foe) that disrupted their brain's ability to assign emotional responses to familiar faces. This resulted in the sudden onset of severe paranoia in the infected sentinel, followed by the delusion that all their teammates had been 'replaced' with Exsurgent clones somehow. The infectee killed their teammates one by one and took their stacks for interrogation, but when they could find no evidence to support their theory they decided to hunt down the beta forks in Olympus as well-they have to have missed something. The infected alpha fork is the killer, and at some point during the game of cat and mouse they will attempt to contact their beta in secret to try and convince them of their delusion; furthermore, a backup sentinel arrives in Olympus when the original team does not report in to investigate and attempts to get in touch with the betas, but they do not remember what Firewall is and thus have no reason to trust this mysterious new stranger who seems to know them. This should be a paranoia-heavy game, with the GM attempting to subtly play the PCs off one another and drop hints that one or more of them might know more than they're letting on while also playing up the mystery of "how the fuck do I have 80 in energy weapons? I've never held a plasma rifle in my life!"][/spoiler]
Original Sin[spoiler]This scenario is actually a three-part arc:
Part One: "Paradise Found" make a spot hidden check to find itAfter receiving word of a black market salvage auction set to take place on Paradise, Firewall dispatches a hastily-assembled team of sentinels to infiltrate the various attending parties and ensure that none of the items up for bid could be dangerous TITAN relics. When the team learns that one of the lots is a Fall-era ark ship loaded with terraforming devices and genetic samples of every living species on Earth, however, their mandate is suddenly overridden from above their local Proxy: secure the location of the ship, track it down, and destroy it at any cost. Doing so could be easier said than done, considering the varying factions all seeking to get their hands on such a valuable prize: hardcore reclaimers, barsoomian extremists, Lunar triad gangsters, and Oversight counterespionage agents all want a piece of the pie.
Part Two: "Out of the Garden"After capturing and interrogating the beta fork of the Argonaut attempting to auction the location of the ark ship, the team catches a shuttle to the scientist's home habitat of Mitre to track them down and question them properly. The Argonaut is one step ahead of them, however, and finding him or her won't be an easy task; especially not if one of the prospective auctioneers from Paradise also manages to get a bead on their quarry. With multiple disgruntled buyers on their tail the Argonaut attempts to flee to a passing scum swarm for safety, and the sentinels have no choice but to track them aboard and capture them without incurring the wrath of the Assclown Rodeo.
Part Three: "And Gnashing Of Teeth"Having finally secured the spatial coordinates of ARC-001 from the Argonaut, the team egocasts out to Saturn's orbit before acquiring a suitable vessel for their "salvage op" of the lost ark. When they approach the drifting vessel they discover that someone has beaten them to the punch; another vessel has already docked with the ark and presumably boarded. Upon reporting this new information to Firewall, their orders change once again: they must board the ark before destroying it, find out who the would-be salvagers are, and see if they have transmitted any information from the derelict's mainframe. After boarding the ghost vessel the team is confronted with a bizarre alien ecology in a bottle, complete with flora, fauna...and a food chain that places them near the bottom. The sentinels must call upon every element of their training and experience to survive the horrors of the ark, learn who or what discovered the ship before them, and face the darkest secret of Firewall's history.
[The 'secret' Firewall is so keen for the sentinels to bury by destroying the ship is the existence of the Prometheans, one of whom was supposed to be operating the Ark during its voyage out of the solar system in the height of the Fall. Despite the AI's best efforts, it became infected with the Exsurgent virus and was forced to cut off portions of its own code in order to prevent itself from becoming a full-blown TITAN; these amputated bits of code were cordoned off into relatively minor systems aboard the Ark, such as the environmental controls and body bank (Left over from the ship's hasty conversion from bulk freighter to colony ship), hence the Pandora-esque interior. The ship attached to the Ark belongs to a group of exhuman brinker salvagers who just happened to stumble across the Ark as it drifted within range of their habitat; the sentinels will undoubtedly be wary of the surviving exhumans if they manage to make contact, but the hostile environment of the Ark might force them into teaming up with them in order to accomplish their objective...although even if they manage to blow up the ship there's always a chance one of the exhumans could escape with a bit of proto-TITAN code using the ship's egocasting array, setting up a potential threat for a future game or campaign.]
Apologies for the pretentious names on this one, I was having a hard time coming up with something fitting.[/spoiler]
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
