Space Horror thread?
Space Horror thread
>>47601348
>tfw I tried to start one earlier and it fizzled out.
And now I'm phone posting cause I'm out all night so I can check out Saturn's opposition. So kinda related I guess.
So do you guys prefer hard sci fi or soft sci fi for your horror?
I prefer hard, because things are a lot less scary if you can just blast the boogeymen with a laser and safety is just a quick FTL jump away
>>47601424
Normally I like my sci-fi a little on the softer side, but for suspense, hard all the way. Knowing that you can't techno-babble your way out of any situation makes it so much more effective.
>>47601424
>>47601494
How would you define hard sci fi and soft sci fi?
FTL drives are a point where physics breaks down because you can't theoretically travel beyond the speed of light
>>47601706
What the goddamn fuck is that?
>>47601711
Hard sci fi is constrained to the laws of physics as much as possible, and gives better justifications than "phlebotinum" when it breaks those laws
>>47601855
Would huge distances/light years away become insurmountable obstacles then?
>>47601711
There isn't a definite line, it's a scale that blurs a lot around the middle. I don't think FTL travel is an instant disqualifier from "hard" status, either--while we certainly don't have a way to make it possible today, we do have several promising leads that could *potentially* lead to ways to circumvent the light barrier without having to worry about exceeding it. Things like wormholes and alcubierre drives, for instance, are technologies that aren't feasible with our current knowledge, but could certainly provide the basis for ways around that problem to a society with a greater understanding of physics and the infrastructure to support such a project.
In practice, though, the vast majority of FTL in fiction is a pretty soft endeavor, I agree.
>>47601923
Not necessarily. Like, I'd consider Joe Haldeman's The Forever War hard sci fi even though it involves interstellar travel via what are basically naturally occurring Stargates. The MC acknowledged they're improbable based on his understanding of physics, as well as several other pieces if technology that show up. But at the same time, the characters are still beholden to relativity and he makes a good point that our understanding of physics is pretty limited and could definitely change after a few centuries.
I remember liking the other story in that book, about the remotely controlled drone soldiers that ends with humanity becoming super-empathetic more to be honest.
Remember: in microgravity, blood goes everywhere.
>>47601923
I'd imagine there's something. Warp engines are feasible in that if you somehow made them they'd negate that a bit. You'd still have travel time but things wouldn't be nearly as bad. Think modern jetliners versus propliners.
That'd also be something you'd want to protect as conventional engines once you get moving keep you going even if they get shut down. You lose your warp engine you're suddenly stuck between stars and at best doing "just" lightspeed which means you're corpse will be decades dead upon arrival. It also means that people won't be able to help you either as your signals still travel lightspeed so again at best the first people will hear of your troubles is when your corpse shows up at their door. Hopefully the ship has moderate AI and doesn't just slam into a planet.
>>47601745
It looks like a corpse in an improbable location. It raises all sorts of unsettling questions for the crew of that shuttle.
>>47602453
I prefer the idea of compression drives. Using artificial gravity to compress the space in front of the ship so that technically, when the ship passes and the space snaps back to its original density, the ship has travelled a great distance without travelling very fast.
>>47602126
>>47602183
>>47602453
>>47602585
Oh, I can show you such marvellous things, but where we're going we don't need eyes to see
Confined spaces, the void, everything outside your viewport being able to kill you in half a second...
Let's face it. If you want cosmic horror, the best place to set it is the cosmos.
>>47601745
Something being eaten by the 2001 monolith.
Obligatory
>>47603155
God that was so good. I remember reading that as it happened. I was hooked and would give most anything to play a game with that GM.
>>47602640
Is that an Event Horizon of Hellraiser reference cause I saw both recently
>>47603304
Hellraiser. 3, I think.
>>47603336
The movies didn't really scare me that much but that quote by itself terrifies my soul
I'm gonna have to ask /x/ how to ward off immortal pain / pleasure demons
>>47603304
Both, now also combine the two
>>47603411
They're called Cenobytes.
Bump
More needed
>>47605671
what a shame
>>47605853
???
>>47601706
>tfw none of them are tethered to the shuttle
>>47603304
The no eyes is strictly Event Horizon but the 'I have such things to show you' is both with only minor differences in wording separating them.
>>47603411
>wanting to ward off Pinhead
But seriously, I think that that was the beauty of the movies honestly. They werent strictly scary, they certainly had their creepy moments but it was mostly about the cenobytes and their scarily alluring existence. They were presented like better versions of crossroads demons. There was a promise of something hidden in there somewhere and if you managed to summon them you got it whether you wanted it or not.
Its a tempting offer, one that I would personally be interested in.
>>47606194
What kind of insane person would be tempted by an offer from them?
>>47606612
Someone that wants more than mundanity in their life. The issue comes down to if you actually want that or THINK you want that. A major issue everyone seems to have trouble with despite it seeming so simple, just like common sense.
>>47601711
>How would you define hard sci fi and soft sci fi?
Hard has defined rules. They may not be grounded in reality but they are there.
Soft is when there are no solid rules and the whole sci-fi part is little more than a setting.
what would happen to blood in zero G (with atmosphere so it doesn't flashboil/freeze) for extended periods of time? Would it form little scab bubbles? or would it stay as liquid?
>>47606639
>Someone that wants more than mundanity in their life.
Pretty much this. Knowing what I know about the cenobytes and their realm I wouldnt but when its just some shadowed mystery of greater things and immortality (which is all the people who fell to them knew) it is offly tempting. Its not a matter of sanity, its about wanting more.
Its like becoming a Lich if you didnt know what a Lich actually was. All you knew is that you would live forever and there was a promise of greater things/power. So you attain the materials required and perform the ritual and then suddenly youre this skeleton with your soul in a box who is incapable of ever feeling any sense other than sight ever again as you slowly go insane because of your inherent connection to demon lords. It all sounded so promising and wonderful beforehand, even if the means of attaining it were strange. But now youre stuck like this, unable to go back and no one to blame but yourself.
>>47606790
Thats a good question. If it ever stopped 'moving' then Id assume so (or given enough time while moving slowly).
But I dont know enough about fluid mechanics or blood to answer properly.
>>47606790
Scabs happen because of platelets and clotting. Platelets need to clog the hole to do what they do, floating blood doesn't really have a hole, so not that.
I mean the cellular stuff gonna die eventually if only because they'd run out of nutrients, not sure about how much oxygen would get in, but that might be a factor. Probably wouldn't rot or get too nasty.
Just like brownish red bits that eventually evaporate leaving powdery crud that would eventually settle (it's going to be moving if only slightly)?
>>47602453
>You lose your warp engine you're suddenly stuck between stars and at best doing "just" lightspeed which means everyone you knew will be decades dead upon arrival
FTFY. Time dilation, bitch.
>>47601745
Something wonderful ...
>>47606933
You will be too. Time dilation does not mean you don't die in that scenario. As for how long your family is dead for depends on how long before you left you arrive in the warpless scenario.
What about spaceworms? Or is that too cliche?
>>47607152
Actually that's precisely what it means. If you're moving at light speed, you won't experience ANY time. If you're moving at near light speed, it means you'll experience almost no time relative to a stationary observer.
>>47607245
Key word being relative, Mr. I didn't list a reference frame for my velocity.
Also 2 other things to keep in mind. A physical object cannot pure light speed, so you wouldn't be traveling at pure relative timelessness, and in this scenario the warp drive be busted, so you're moving on "normal engines" and the like.
The second is if near light speed travel is also a thing, who the fuck would just warp space time to travel a handful of light years? Best have packed for a hell of a lengthy trip.
Do a biological dyson sphere esque thing. I have a greentext about onesomewhere, cant find itwhere it was like a giant Cacodemon that drifted through space swallowing anything in its path.
The catch was that it was basically hollow on the inside with the things it swallowed typically going to fuel its 'core' or whatever. But some pieces would drift and land on the inside of its skin, and some of those things would have other life forms on them just trying to survive however they can.
>>47607409
>Key word being relative, Mr. I didn't list a reference frame for my velocity.
It does mean that you can traverse light years in weeks or even days from your own point of view.
>The second is if near light speed travel is also a thing, who the fuck would just warp space time to travel a handful of light years? Best have packed for a hell of a lengthy trip.
Because years is still a long time.
No Junji Ito? Damn shame.
>>47607629
What the fuck, is she? giving a tongue job to a planet?
>>47607762
No, first she licks it to see if it tastes good. Then she devours it.
It's a funny little comic. Junji is all over nasty, gory horror.
>>47605853
What a thrill.
>>47609474
With darkness and silence through the night.
Man, this makes me want to play an Apollo 13 campaignexcept it's not merely just an oxygen tank ignition
>>47609850
What a fear in my heart!
>>47610390
But you're so supreme!
Anyone got any interesting ideas for Space Spooky?
>computer picks up additonal crew member after salvage mission
>computer picks up less crew members after salvage mission
>bare footprints in the moon dirt
>Immaculate ship with a friendly AI, but no crew in sight
>Exploring a colony where all the inhabitants just disappeared
>Body horror aliens
>The pilot starts seeing images of her childhood in the alien ruins and refuses to ever leave
>Crew lands on a moon, discovers remains of a previous expedition they were never told about
Share your plot hooks
>inb4 ghosts of Mars
>>47610435
I'D GIVE MY LIIIIIIIFE~
>>47611289
Not for honor, but for youuuu
>>47611256
>ghosts of mars
if anyone here has the screencaps, now it's the time
>>47609951
https://ospreypublishing.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Nazi+Moonbase
A13 was hit by energy weapon from the moon.
>>47601348
White Dwarf 56 The Last Log: A far future scenario set on a distant planet. Worth a hunt if you can get it, maybe the planet calls the ship down thru singing to the AI pilot
>>47611256
>farish future
>humanity is just starting to effectively colonize planets
>one day you get some massive blast of data from...somewhere
>upon further inspection its a distress signal from an alien civilization
>they claim to be in your system some planet or two away despite a thorough survery of the system prior to colonization
>after the initial hiccup of translation they're quiet responsive, with delay taken into effect of course
>this is the first time either society has encountered an alien race
>they're claiming that some disaster is befalling their species
>they just aren't sure what it is
>they say that cities around their world just go dark one by one without warning
>those that look into it physically don't come back and sattelite imagery shows nothing wrong
>the colony takes it upon themselves to come and offer aid in any form they can
>colony ships become jurry rigged space arks
>transports to personal vehicles fill up and tie on as many supplies as they csn manage and still take off
>everyone takes it upon themselves to suit up and show off what humanity can do
>upon arrival you find only a barren world
>just as the survey had suggested originally
>as millions of human craft touch down hundreds of millions of humans poor out to offer aid and support in anyway that they can
>only to find skeletal and windworn ruins of vast cities millenia old preserved only by the thin atmosphere
>as far as anyone can tell the alien race you spoke to only weeks prior has been dead longer than humanity has existed
>>47607859
>funny comicThe part where everyone was flying around the world broke my sides.
>>47611256
>investigate derelict ship
>it always shows the same face, no matter which angle you view it from
>crew hears announcements coming over the intercom that make no sense, but actually are conversations happening in the future
Woah has /tg/ read my mind? Was actually going to come on here to ask if any space survival rpgs actually have been written.
>>47611256
>on awaking from cryosleep, the crew realize they all shared the same dream of being examined by nonhuman creatures.
>the party discovers a derelict ship in a decaying orbit around a gas giant. On closer inspection, it's their own. If they board they find their own desiccated remains, still strapped into their stations.
>an anomalous radio signal leads the party to a beacon placed on an asteroid. The beacon is nonhuman in origin and is laying on top of a large sarcophagus with the carving of an early Era cosmonaut space suit across the top.
>>47609850
Is this actually real?
>>47610435
Wat
>>47614347
>party investigates ancient alien complex on a lifeless moon.
>all throughout they encounter ghostly astronauts
>the ghosts arethe players at different points in time
The AI is malfunctioning but has no malice in its heart, it tries to help the PCs as much as it can but it's not all there
It keeps stuttering and tries to say its name SHODAN. No it's really STEVE
A female survivor helps the PCs but there is always something off about her instructions, either they arrive too late for an event she says is happening right at that moment or things go missing
The PCs break into her office, her helmet is smashed and they find her mummified remains
She has been dead far longer than the PCs have been on the ship/station
>>47612948
>suddenly one of the colony ship that landed on the planet go dark
>>47607201
Only good space worms are the mindworms from SMAC
>>47615099
I would also like to know
>>47611256
Space explorers find an empty city on a planet that looks like a 16th century colony, and they find a diary written in English
>>47615565
Wasn't that an episode of star trek TOS? It was based on Paradise Lost or something like that?
>>47615664
Sounds like something Star Trek would do.
I just like the idea of OOPArts in space
>>47615565
That sounds kind of good, but if I'm running hard sci fi I'd probably try to avoid any "two gangster planets and a cowboy world!" plotlines.
>>47615746
>>47615760
>>47615782
Some of this is just atmospheric.
>>47615692
Come on, cowboy worlds are great! "Pardner, I don't know nothin' about no fusion engines, I just know I need to beat Black Joe in a gunfight at the foot of Olympus Mons at high noon or he's gonna take over all of Rattlesnake Gulch!"
>>47615814
>>47615833
>>47615824
Cowboy worlds are great.
But not if I'm running The Thingterstellar Horizoshinedorumlien: Resuropa Report.
>>47615874
Well I guess there are just some things on which we will never agree, then.
>>47615833
This thing is fucking cool
Oh shit, I know what I'm planning on throwing at my players
Plot twist, the thing isn't even evil just curious and may even be friendly
>>47602336
>>47601348
Please, you're making me want to play SS13 again.Don't stop
>>47615923
This is kinda more of the same, if you like it.
>>47615945
What in the glorious and fiery hells is that?
>>47615874
References to
The Thing
Interstellar
Event Horizon
Sunshine
Pandorum
Alien
Europa Report
One more?
>>47616062
I think instead of Alien it's Alien: Resurrection
>>47616042
That's a woman in need of rescuing, of course.
>>47616062
Alien: Resurrection
Does anyone have the picture of the tall, dark humanoids with glowing light for faces?
I think they were giants and standing in water, and it was night.
Vaguely on topic: Tried to run "The Void" (by Wildfire) with my old gaming group a while ago, but I don't think they enjoyed it very much. Our regular game was Eclipse Phase and it was a bit too similar but just different enough things didn't 'click'. Kind of a game setting uncanny valley effect.
It didn't help that a bunch of modules for it weren't released yet.
Overall, I don't really recommend it, but since more stuff for it has been released since, I may give it another chance as a one-shot at a local con or something just to see if it was my group or not.
>>47601706
The bound form of a Solar God. Imprisoned within the imperfect form of a man.
>>47615945
That's sadistic and ingenious...
>>47616277
That's a really tiny god you posted there
Would Eclipse Phase be an ideal system for all of this? Or something else?
>>47616277
>>47616786
It is a god for/of ants!
Thanks for starting this thread OP, you're one of the good ones.
>>47616791
I actually am putting together a hard sci fi horro game. My plan is to homebrew WoD for it.
>>47616791
Eclipse Phase has the problem of "but you have a backup!" so death/madness isn't as terrifying.
It also brings out /pol/acks because they can't be adults and apply logic to get rid of the authors' biases and instead just bitch about it.
>>47616895
Would you mind sharing those homebrew rules after you're done?
>>47615508
The only good space worm is a dead space worm.
>>47616958
I guess. I'm only now putting stuff together for it because I'm already running a game and don't know when I'll run this one. My plan was to just use the base World of Darkness Storytelling System book White Wolf put out back in 2004. None of the extra stuff like vampire bloodlines, obviously. It's pretty basic; all I really need to do is change some of the skills.
The biggest bitch will be coming up with a custom character sheet. I'll probably post that when I made it.
>>47616941
Please share more? I'm not really knowledgeable of anything related to it at all
>>47616791
I personally love Eclipse Phase, but the backup & "just call the cops" issue is present. There are plenty of ways to work around it, though - in a habitat under communication lockdown, on an exoplanet, or my personal favourite on an Out'ster starship outbound from the solar system (always wanted to run a scenario on one of those).
>>47617096
Not that anon, but in Eclipse Phase, the mind is something that can be uploaded and downloaded into different bodies. You can even have multiple "you's" running around (forks), or archived copies of your mind in storage.
So being 'backed up' means that if you're killed, your insurance company can just load the last copy of your ego (mind) into a new morph (body).
There are plenty of folks who kill themselves in creative or artistic ways on a regular basis just for having experienced it.
So if you want to put the fear of death into your characters, you may have to separate them from their backups, or at least imply that the backup wouldn't be "them".
>>47617183
> imply that the backup wouldn't be "them"
I think I have just the thing...
>>47615833
I remember this is concept art from a horror movie about transgenic roaches, but I can't remember what the name of the movie was.
>>47617183
>>47617328
What if there's a temporal disturbance, and the PCs are there at different time points?
They'd either be encountering themselves in the past or future, and with hostility or curiosity
>>47617183
If you're Firewall, you ARE the cops. Although the ubiquity of backups does make for a challenge to the GM.
>>47617519
Well even if they're Firewall (the metagame assumes they are, but there's actually no reason for them to be), they can call other Firewall cells or even put anonymous tip offs to actual military forces.
Though I do remember one suggested exchange from the forums:
"Cell Bravo, this is Cell Alpha, priority call."
"Bravo, go ahead."
"We're surrounded by exurgents in [gives coordiantes]. We urgently need extraction and backup. Three survivors, two wounded and one popped stack."
"Did anyone get exposed?"
"I don't know."
"Stay where you are and don't turn off your personal locators. We're sending help."
*five minutes later, Alpha sees a single nuclear-tipped seeker missile streak over the horizon towards them, and then nothing.*
>>47617183
Thanks heaps brah
That's a pretty cool idea...but what if when they're dead they're loaded into a body which defies all anatomic convention and something that they really don't want to be loaded into
>>47617417
the movies are called "Mimic" and there is three of them, all varying from really good (the first one) to decent (the third one) to eh (the second one)
>>47617953
When they die their consciousness travels to a new body
here: >>47601706
>>47617953
*cackles* That's when they take Stress damage and Trauma.
I like you, anon, you have good ideas.
>>47619198
Keep the ideas flowing!
>>47616113
What in the glorious and fiery hells is THA-
Oh.
Oh shit that's that one SCP isn't it?
That's... actually a lot creepier than what I had mentally pictured.
>>47616941
I'm not too familiar with Eclipse Phase, but making a plot to the effect of "well now your backup is gone/unavailable" be possible? It seems like a good way of suddenly ramp up the stakes.
As for /pol/ack bullshit, if that comes up in a horror game something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.
>>47619406
That'd be like saying no casters in DnD cause reasons.
>>47619480
Fair enough, I suppose it'd be better to just pick a different system for your space horror then.
>>47619406
>Out on a mission with the rest of the Cell, sanitising some hypercorp Lost-bullshit cloning facility.
>ohshit.security
>blow the charges early
>buried in the rubble
>it's okay, we have nanites that will keep us alive long enough to dig our way out.
>Two weeks later, get out. Had to pop Benny's stack and eat his morph for energy. Oh well.
>Insurance company has taken the week of "no contact" to mean you're missing-presumed-dead, and has sleeved your backup into a morph, who goes back to living your life
>You get home. Your backup is living in your house, eating your food.
>It's not you.
>Insurance company terminates the backup remotely per policy. Honest mistake on the missing-assumed-dead thing, right?
>Find out the backup was not acting like you. At all. It likes strawberry promix instead of chocolate. Discover it was making notes on who your friends are and who it thinks are part of Firewall, rebuilding your activities for the past month. It doesn't know the things you know.
>Are you really backed up? Or any time you die, is an OZMA agent going to replace you?
>>47615083
Na, it's just a joke senpai. It was from an Onion or a Buzzfeed article or something IIRC.
The ship's cat brings you something.
>>47615824
Challenge: come up with an explanation for a cowboy planet in a hard sci-fi setting.
>>47620386
Planet is massively mineral rich but generates some sort of field that fucks up power cores something fierce.
Cores that can withstand the field are 5 times larger, 10 times heavier, and 20 times costlier.
This means that the only things they get used for are the landing ships and the massive mining machines. Everything else is just so much cheaper to do with good old fashion grit and whatever beasts of burden you can import or breed.
>>47620547
Outlaws are common because of the massive value of the mineral mined on the planet and the fact that any sort of heavy weaponry that could function on the planet would be either too large to be man portable or so damn big you'd see it coming a mile away.
Agriculture uses genetically modified crops but basically nothing that needs electricity since shielded power cores are too damn expensive. Importing is also out of the question since the drop ships need all the space they can for spare parts to the massive mining rigs. Can't exactly produce them for anything near a feasible value on a planet that hates electricity.
>>47606876
If it's really close to 0-g it won't settle, just kind of disperse into a gross fog.
Introduce dark eldar
>>47615508
Mary had..a..little..lamb....
>>47621581
Space HORROR, anon. H-O-R-R-O-R. Not Space forceful happy peepee friction fun time.
>>47621679
I'd play a game where I was a Marine on a spacehulk full of Coven from DE.
>>47621581
But where is the dick?
>>47621718
dickbutt
>>47621679
The dark Eldar chick would castrate you and then duct tape your peepee to your forehead
>>47621955
Some people are into that y'know.
See
>>47606639
>>47622331
Oh my
Nah, goddamn
>>47620365
That comic, what the goddamn fuck did I just read?
>>47620365
yo anyone have a link? All google is telling me is that ito was going to work on silent hill, and one of his mangos is called cat diary.
Though that looks like the one where that image comes from. You know which one. With the cat butt.
>>47618647
MISHTAH FUNNEH SHOOOES!
>>47620233
Aww, that would've been hella cool if it was real.
My hopes and dreams are shattered now.
>>47617328
>Changeling - The Lost.jpg
>>47622942
if you thought it was real, and trusted Barry Wilmore's account of the situation to represent reality, please castrate yourself
>>47623089
Well I'm not American, so...
Oh Dead Space, you were easily the best Sci-Fi Horror franchise we've had in years.
I literally cannot think of a single thing that could have made that second game better. Even the first game was close to perfect (the bit in the military ship wasn't as good as the rest though, and the Twitchers looked hella poor compared to the rest of the enemies in the game)
Third game tried, but you could really tell that the money had been cut in the middle of development and wasn't ever coming back.
>>47623439
Woah. Back up. Lets not ruin dead space ones legacy by attaching near similar ratings to the 2nd game. There was a reason 3 got its funding cut.
>>47601348
Anyone got any one shot systems they recommend for running a space horror game.
>>47623606
IRL:That one Mars mission they guarantee you'll probably die up there.
>>47616941
Does horror in any piece of media comes from risk of character dying? Like, it's an tabletop game, iI don't really care if I die because I can just roll a new character. Horror comes from creepy, earie things that get under your skin and stay with you long after campaing.
>>47623439
Dead Space was a jump-scare monster-blasting power fantasy. It wasn't "horror" at all, unless you think the only thing horror needs is buckets of blood, gore, shrieking monsters and obnoxiously overbearing violin music.
If you want real sci-fi horror, go play Soma.
This is the voice on the other side of the intercom
>>47623756
Soma had an excellent story but the gameplay was lacking
>>47619406
>>47619987
No no, let them have the backups. At first.
What horror game starts off with horror? You should start them off with mundane, this is the norm shit. Engineer it so one of them dies every so often so they get used to the safety net. And then... then you take it away. Communications have been caught off. The database has been corrupted, and egos are turned into raving psychotic lunatics. The morph production has been tampered with or fubar.
If your horror takes place in space, the first act is cutting them off from the rest of civilization anyway, so knocking out backups should be part of that.
>>47623941
Well the issue with backups would be, like another anon said, you're suddenly very very far beyond your expected return time so the company just loads up their last backup they had of you. It doesn't matter if you're just stranded on a planet or if you actually died they just assume you're dead cause you don't return their calls and your scheduled return date was a few months ago. Now they have another "you" they can backup and continue to make money off of.
What would be cool however is that corrupted data bit. Make it like a Killing Floor type shit in that the morph vats are fucked and producing monstrosities and the backups are also corrupt, probably from the same incident, and constantly loading psychotic backups into horrifying pain filled morphs as fast as it can spit them out.
>>47623089
It could have been a real quote but been him dickin around. Americans are fun like that.
>>47623756
I enjoyed it as a horror game. Deadspace2 I only ever watched a letsplay of, but it seemed pretty horror gamey to me. Deadspace 3 was definitely just an action game though, which is to be expected honestly. Isaac by this point is the resident expert on necromorphs.
>>47623756
>SOMA
>horror
What
>>47624035
this. By the time i talked to conveyor robot i had already figured out the big ol "what a tweest!" Was.
Its story was poor and gameplay poorer.
>>47623786
Reference I'm not getting? She seems cute.
Any revelant horror/scifi movies you'd recommend?
You guys should check out the short story Beach World by Stephen King.
Post a better rip of the Mars stroy.
>>47617066
They already have a sci-fi supplement. I do believe it's called Infinite Macabre.
So in terms of space/cosmic horror:
Lovecraft c
Dead Space
Soma
Junji Ito t
Anything I missed?
>>47625453
Hellraiser/The Hellbound Heart
2001
Eva
>>47606650
So, star wars would be soft, star trek would be hard
>>47625781
Star Trek is as soft as you can get. Don't listen to that guy; internal consistency isn't the defining trait of hard science fiction. Because even Star Wars would be hard if that were he case.
There's a lot of contention, but my general definition of hard sci fi is it follows established laws of our reality as closely as possible. It can break from those restraints, but those instances should be rare and well thought-out.
That said, sci fi hardness/softness is more of a sliding scale than "A or B".
>>47625369
Just looked it up, it could work. I'll ask the PDF thread if they have it.
>>47626333
I see, so hard sci fi would be more like 2001. I'm sort of interested in this now, can anyone rec some good hard sci fi ficton? Horror or non horror
>>47625781
Star Trek is extremely inconsistent.
>>47623756
This one
this one right here
been in development since 2012 by three people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9XrsWUO9sw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAcAd1fUiy8
>>47625781
Star Trek is soft, Star Wars is somewhere in the liquid or gas phase.
>>47626547
>Routine
Pictured: Lunar Software's dev team.
>>47612948
there was an episode like this in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
>>47626472
In no particular order: The Expanse, Blindsight (both have horror elements), Rendezvous with Rama, Footfall, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, Planetes, Man Plus, and loads of others which I probably forgot.
Where you draw the line between "hard" and "soft" science fiction can be a rather divisive topic, though.
>>47626787
I'd recommend Sphere, even thought it's underwater instead of in space. Crichton knew his shit, and makes it pretty believable. That is if you can stomach the ending and his overall grouchy, cynical prose.
>>47624133
Yep, but it get few interesting ideas fleshed out pretty well. I would love to see successor, where you assume one of "survivors" constructed from structure gel, dead fishies and few bits of scrap, on journey to find other life on surface, other snapshots of minds
>>47626333
For what its worth, I actually have run a campaign in Infinite Macabre before. The setting ideas it has are cool, and its mechanics are great as a BASIS for running science fiction games in nWoD, but you still need to put a lot of legroom in homebrewing.
Things I would suggest / that I implemented:
- Make up a few extra ship merits appropriate to setting. I for instance included tractor beams, and FTL drive quality as extras. Have the party invest merit dots in Ship BLIND. IE not knowing what each other will pick, they have to choose between their own merits and guaranteeing that their ship is remotely functional. This guarantees you will end up with a ship suitable for scifi horror: Namely, one which is effective in many ways but has one or two crippling short comings that really should have been foreseen.
- Include the merits from Bleeding Edge for cyborg abilities. It may seem counterintuitive to horror that one of your crew members has a ultrafast cyberlegs or an arm cannon, but if you actually run the things as written, they're actually deceptively ineffective and will fail the players just when they need them while soaking up precious XP.
- Find a way to get them out of the ship. By now they've INVESTED their sense of security into the ship. The thing will be a fucking fortress, both literally and from their perspective. When they have to rappel out to investigate an escape pod crashed on a sunless icy world, they now IMMEDIATELY feel out of their comfort zone. Going indoors, where they can't maintain direct sight lines to the ship, they get terrified REAL fast.
- Go with the recommendations on equipment. Infinite Macabre equipment is simply better than its normal equivalent. Not in terms of raw damage or dice bonus, but everything does some neat extra like penetrating armour, freezing shit, cutting through steel, giving bonus willpower, whatever. Make them feel on top of things. Before you throw something too hard to care at them.
>>47627061
My plan was to make it pretty hard sci fi. Like the characters are just regular astronauts exploring the solar system. Think shit like Interstellar or Sunshine. I'd probably boost tech and soften things up just so I'm not telling them "alright you get in your cryo pods; eight years later you wake up and you're at Neptune" but I won't include tractor beams or anything like that.
The premise is humanity used to have colonies all over the system, but shit hit the fan back home and it's all fallen apart. So now, a century or two later, the players are an elite team of explorers and scavengers trying to find out as much as they can about the "old world".
>>47607201
Actualy I have never seen spaceworms.
Tell me about them?
How big are they?
>>47601745
>>47627565
>>47627565
That guy's pic is of those weird brain worms from that X Files episode.
They're just big enough to crawl in through your earor any other open skin
>>47626547
Looks awesome, totally with you.
>>47626732
Sadly this anon is probably right.
They should put the damn thing on Kickstarter and get the funds to finish it. Could be great.
>>47622725
I do not know that cat butt image, but I feel like I need to
>>47603155
That story was fucking amazing. Thank you for sharing.
>>47619384
Which SCP?
I have an... interesting? idea for a hard sci-fi (by the end) setting. It goes as so:
High fantasy world, everything is magic, machinery only by some gnome-types; multiple races living in relative harmony on a single fantasy planet. Magic usage is at an all time high, and the first major dimensionally altering spells become popular.
Something strange starts happening, though: the Sun starts flickering. Each new spell, another flicker. The Ordo Astrologis chalks it up to heavenly body impacts, but that's just comforting lies. And then, the Sun goes out fully, and no-one's the wiser. But that's the least of their worries.
Magic isn't unaffected. What was once a bountiful aether-sphere is now a depleted husk, barely able to fuel the simplest of lux spells. First there is a calm, then incomprehension, then outright death-struck panic as only the radioactive, glowing regolith and the stars illuminate their way.
Outside of rampant death and raiding, factions bound together and their technology skyrocketted within a mere decade, literally. Agriculture was, ironically, dominated by the Dwarves with their fungiform and thermal plants for the first five years before thermal illuminators were created. They had Spelljammers, but those fell from the sky just as Sol fell its last, but now they had the first widespread chemical atmospheric craft, powered by combustion of leftover resonant spell crystal energy. And just like with spelljammers, they fled to the skies in search of answers.
>>47628389
The horror? After their first flight beyond the dark heavens, they found out those many stars illuminating them had, too, began slowly winking out. First the faintest, then the brightest of spots began simply... vanishing. By the time they had men walking on the habitable moons of a gas giant, the last, most northern star, had disappeared, leaving only the faint shimmering dots of bodies billions upon billions of light years away.
Their magic use followed the same rules as they have - the laws of thermodynamics. You can't just create energy from nowhere, it had to come from somewhere. Through aetheric leylines, widely known throughout the ancient times, they had sapped their star of all energy. That's not where the leylines ended, however. The entire galaxy was connected with a weak, aetheric network, one through which their latest spell could suck all the energy required. Other galaxies were more fortunate, and some weak red dwarves, scarred solar remnants, and black holes had remained. The stars remained, too, still holding together through remnant gravity, yet somehow, dead.
>>47627746
Yeah, frogot about those. Yet not really space...
The short story "Nightingale" by Alastair Reynolds might be of interest, and some other works by the author.
>>47620386
Learning AI found westerns
>>47629263
Isn't that already a film with Yule Brenner in it?
>>47629625
That's Westworld. Brynner plays a robot cowboy in a Western-themed amusement park that goes off the rails.
Basically, it was Crichton's first attempt at Jurassic Park but with cowboys instead of dinosaurs.
>>47620386
Colony ships in the far future crash land on a desolste and near-resource barren desert planet. The only "reliable" resource are the matter generators on each ship who shunt materials and various forms of energy, providing it the power to function as well, to its location. This is the only real source of significant materials such as food, water, iron, and anything else as well as the intermittent bursts of heat, radiation, and electricity that the new colonist either contain and use(electricity), or funnel of to a safe location(dangerous forms and amounts of radiation). The main issues are they power up at random, produce random materials from the databanks but in large enough quantities to usually sustain the local cities that have popped up around them in the intervening centuries, and the generators dwindling numbers. A main contributor to the dwindling generator numbers is that only the civilian class sleeper ships made a safe landing whereas all upper class, military, and scientific population sleeper ships burned up on entry thus eliminating most if not all of those capable of organising humanity effectively in the short period after the crash, those with genetic augments that could easily survive the harsher enviroment and lack of resources, and those who know, and thus the total knowledge of, how the generators work, how to repair them, and how to maintain them. This points heavily sabotage of some sort, but why spare the civilians if only to die on a barren planet?
Regardless of the intense situation, Humanity has found a way to survive as it always had despite it being on a desert planet with no accessible resources, freely available electricity, and only recently hitting sustainable early 19th century frontier townshippery several centuries after The Fall.It's not Trigun, i swear!
>>47620386
Having an entire cowboy planet would be pretty dumb, and even this guys idea >>47620547 isn't the best because why would they stop at beasts of burden when they have the technology to make solar or ICE vehicles. Even steam and wood gas could be refined to pseudo-modern equivalents.
Maybe a planet that has life, has had human life seeded on it, or some such, is just at a point in its development similar to The Wild West?
Not the entire planet, obviously. Cities exist, and outposts in the uncolonized are popping up. Change gunpowder to another system specific thing, give different beasts of burden.
Is it hard to think that an alien culture wouldn't have a time in its history where parts of the planet are untamed?
>>47630440
So....steampunk planet?
If we have a steampunk planet can we have an 80's era cyberpunk planet as well?
>>47620547
There are gigantic sandworms but there are spiraling ruins also buried in the sand
>>47626732
>pic related: the fanbase, myself included, waiting for it
And Dead Space 2: the gameplay/atmosphere was excellent! 3rd game was pretty good too, actually a lot better than I expected since the story development in 2nd put my ecpectations near the bottom.
Still gotta play that dlc for 3rd...
>>47629857
>it was Crichton's first attempt at Jurassic Park but with cowboys instead of dinosaurs.
Kind of puts Ian Malcolms comments about how the Pirates in the Pirates of the Carribean never ate the park guests when it broke down in a different light doesn't it?
>>47631545
>And Dead Space 2: the gameplay/atmosphere was excellent! 3rd game was pretty good too, actually a lot better than I expected since the story development in 2nd put my ecpectations near the bottom.
My gentlemen of african descent!
Personally I didn't mind the plot of DS2. It was basically "People are fucking stupid in Horror properties, news at 11, but were actually gonna throw our protagonist a fucking bone here for once and give him a hotone-eyedbrown chick" and his own character arc.
Gameplay in 2 was tight though.
The best way I can describe DS3 is that in that, combat felt like a chore. Like it was something I had to do so I could get back to exploring this amazing spaceship graveyard.
Things kind of went downhill when we got onto the planet I feel. That first half of the game is really nice, but then the money for voice acting runs out for all the side-missions and combat just becomes even more of a joke than before and everything doesn't look as good as it did in 2.
That said, I did like the plot, and I did like the potential for what could happen in a 4th game that the DLC set up.
Principally: I want an Ishimura class planet cracker to break a Blood Moon in half in an ironic full-circle twist. The rest of the game can be shit, just give me that and make it glorious.
>>47632042
>I want an Ishimura class planet cracker to break a Blood Moon in half in an ironic full-circle twist.
Daaaamn son!
>would kickstart
And yeah, Ellie being all but forgotten in DS3 was pretty shit. :(
I'd really like more Dead Space: The Coopening: Have a gallery of 4-8 characters to choose from, Isaac, Ellie, Carver, some unitologist dickwad and a few others.
>>47601348
I played in something like this recently
It was frightening because there was nothing in the game that doesn't exist now.
There was not a single fantasy element.
Fuck space. I don't want to go there anymore
>>47634191
You can't write that and not give us the deets
So I ran a hard sci-fi game somewhat based on Peter Watt's Blindsight.
The short version is that the PCs, while filming a reality TV show, accidentally contacted a planet-bound alien intelligence, the first humanity had ever encountered. Things spiralled out of control from there, as the players rapidly realized the alien intelligence was much, much smarter than they were, and was playing them like a fiddle.
In the end, they saved the earth though, for 2 reasons.
1) Humans have a relatively wide limit on "acceptable tribe members"
2) cabbages are diamagnetic
I'll write and post the full story if people are interested. It's more of a mindfuck/existential horror story, but it was definitely scary for the players.
>>47634656
storytime pls
>>47634656
>>47634914
seconded
>>47620150
Two weeks is very short though, I think most insurances reinstate you after months.
>>Insurance company terminates the backup remotely per policy.
No one would give that kind of power to their insurance provider.
The rest is gold though, Anon, congratulations. Just change so you kill your backup. Maybe he attacks you first, maybe you do.
The rest is gold though.
>>47634656
The year is 2108.
Angelina Sanchez, spoiled daughter of an obscenely rich CEO, purchased a top-of-the-line Single State To Orbit reuseable reentry vessel. The liveable space inside is no larger than a standard tour bus, but the "Carmen Sandiego" can go anywhere. Incredibly hot radioactive gas contained inside a perfect, artificial sapphire, can heat any gaseous fuel to the point of usefulness. In an atmosphere, the Carmen Sandiego can fly forever, or scoop up fuel and return to orbit.
Angelina also recruited a crew - a legless pilot raised on Ceres, an incredibly surly medic, and two AI of dubious backgrounds. One was a liberated, extremely liberal number-cruncher masquerading as her editor and camera-bot. The other, housed in a repair chassis, was actually a quad-core prototype who'd fled Earth, but wasn't entirely sure why.
>>47635129
Is this actually in the Blindsight universe? If so, at which point of the timeline?
Vampires?
>>47635129
The first few episodes of "Angelina's Adventures in Space!" go fairly well. Angelina isn't as dumb as she appears when the cameras are on - the crew was carefully chosen to be somewhat filmable and a little controversial. Still, the focus of her program has always been her appearance, aided by a custom-fitted, somewhat curvaceous space suit. The rest of the crew make do with sensible ex-neo-USSR castoffs.
The ship has a Faster than Light drive, which works... somehow. No one is entirely sure, but it's got a few rules to it.
1. You do some math involving your ship's current mass and relative velocity to the nearest gravity well (usually a star).
2. You set a series of mechanical timers. One tells the ship when to stop falling into the gravity well in "darkspace", the other tells it when to exit darkspace. All quite complicated, but also quite manual. The timers have backups, of course, but if all 3 timers fail you might never leave jumpspace.
3. Any AI aboard shut down. All electronics are turned off, save for the barest, most basic components. Chem-lights and mechanical fans abound.
4. The human crew either go into suspended animation/sedation, or, if they're rated for it, sit in the dark and enjoy the journey.
Fun, isn't it? Jumpspace has a nasty habit of screwing with electronics, to the point where most AI come out the other end insane or non-functional. TVs flicker and spark, lights burn out, etc. The human brain also suffers, but some people are rated as "jump-compatible", and therefore less likely to go crazy.
Less likely, mind. Not "will not go crazy". It's a risk.
>>47628358
http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-093
>>47635348
It is not, but it was inspired by it. Less high-tech though. It's a homebrew. PDF attached.
>>47635352
Anyway, the first jump was a mere 11.9 LY to Tau Ceti, or 3 days of time in Jumpspace.
Tau Ceti III's tiny ice/hydrogen mining colony was very happy to see a celebrity. Fadila Nazari, the medic, was very happy to see a proper bed and alcohol.
But before Angelina could get into too much trouble, a derelict or badly damaged Soyuz Mk18 dropped out of jumpspace quite near Tau Ceti III. Both the miners and the Carmen Sandiego's crew rushed to be the first there. Angelina wanted to look like a hero, the Miners wanted salvage.
>>47631879
Thinking of it, I guess that was a callback. Thought Crichton didn't write that line.
Speaking of which, you go back and read the books you realize it was very obvious Ian Malcolm was supposed to be Crichton.
>>47635514
The Soyuz was in a strange state. Its paint was scoured or cracked, its solar panels were damaged. Enoch, the experimental model in the industrial repair chassis, was fascinated by the damage to the point of autistic obsession. He didn't care when the Captain discovered a hideous flayed skeleton inside a space suit inside the capsule.
Eventually, they determined the crewman had died of radiation poisoning, though on a massive, horrifying scale. The lack of fission byproducts meant a nuclear weapon or an engine failure was unlikely. No one was sure what could cause this kind of damage, but it was very worrying.
Noetic Concordance, the "producer" AI, used fragmentary radiation-burnt records from the capsule to deep space near YZ Ceti, a mere 1.6 light years from Tau Ceti. The crew decided to investigate. Some of the other records had been a distress signal from the dying pilot, although very little else could be learned from the dying man's blood-flecked raving.
>>47615565
>croatoan
>>47634648
>>47634191
To put it really crudely it was the wild west but it was not themed that way at all. Everything was very corporate. A law had just been passed stating that governments on earth could not hold dominion over parts of space and so this was left to corporations who could afford to colonize space for profit.
Quickly we realized that there were no laws in space so you really were at the mercy of corporations but they were also at our mercy. Technology was fairly simple to break and any of us could have brought down a space station with limited tools to do it.
Turns out the most profitable way to run a space station is to not pay the engineers or anyone else, rather have them do the job and then clean them up later.
Our characters were significant because we knew the secret. We knew that this was going on because we survived one of these events. It was fairly predictable. They would cause the space stations warning system to detect a solar flare, this is a false alarm but protocol is to get into a specific chamber in order to shield from the radiation. Getting everyone in to one room was the easiest way to wipe out a whole crew on board a space station at once.
There were corporate funded armies as well which made things tough. There wasn't really anywhere to run from these guys once they arrive on the station. They land in the same place where your ship is. Luckily once you pick your destination, there's no turning around which gave us enough time to plan out what we ought do once we were on the run.
Three days until the guns arrive and we're armed with ration bags, simple engineering tools and the knowledge of this station. The russian had the idea to block the oxygen recycling but these guys have filters on their helmets. Crazy russian. We've got three ships and enough fuel for one to leave and no one looks like they're ready to draw straws. By the time the guns show up, I think we might have already come to blows.
>>47635696
At YZ-Ceti, the crew discovered a twinkling wreckage field. A massive research vessel, one designed purely for deep space, had been cut in half, and sent drifting far from any stars. It was completely depowered and airless. Without the distress signal from the Soyuz, it would never have been found.
The crew boarded, and encountered, after a few moments of paranoid roaming, found a survivor. The survivor was a bit odd, and the crew rapidly realized he was a Synthetic.
Synthetics were developed to replace AI for some applications. They are basically full-body prosthetics (of varying qualities) with a biological neural network inside. The network is trained, rather than programmed. Synthetics make very useful factory workers, deep-space assistants, but they have limited creative abilities. Behind their trained facade, no one is sure how their minds work. AI were built to imitate human minds. Synthetics were built to blend in.
>>47603155
how did the players mouth "what the fuck" while wearing gas masks.
>>47634191
>>47634648
>>47635913
Further context. I was the russian. This was at a university and while the other players were doing physics honors. I was in agricultural science so it was really helpful stuff to know in space where there's no soil. I knew how to make vodka though and it made for good bartering.
So if the story sounds a little off, then it might be that I didn't quite understand the chemistry and physics behind it where as the other players did.
>>47635922
The research ship's AI had set the ship's jump drive to go off with a limited radius. Anything on the boundary was converted into a radiation burst that killed the rest of the crew. The synthetic had been on EVA when this happened, and escaped due to the massive distance between it and the explosion.
But the story had a few holes in it, and as the party poked at the, the Synthetic became more and more agitated. Eventually, it tried to infect Nooetic with a virus of exceptional craftsmanship. The virus tried to convince him to vent the ship, killing all non-Synthetics, then jump back to Titan in the Sol system to report. Nooetic managed to isolate and defeat the attack (or so he thought). In the meantime, the Synthetic had sliced Angelina's neck with a scalpel and was trying to kill the pilot, Max. Max was a stubborn soul, and though he was thorougly bruised, he hung on long enough for Fadila to bludgeon the thing to death.
>>47628358
The best SCP, in all honesty
>>47636105
They discovered an ancient hard drive inside the Synthetic's chest cavity. It was from the 1980s, from a Gagarin-class deep-space automated probe. The probes were designed to go out, leaping from system to system, and then return home with what they'd collected. This one had found something interesting, but hadn't made it back.
The images showed a rocky, blasted world with one deep canyon containing a nitrogen/hydrogen atmosphere. Mesas of stone rose above the clouds, each producing an incredibly strong magnetic field. The probe clearly picked up patterned, complex radio signals. This was evidence of life, intelligent, advanced life!
Evidently the Synthetic's creators had programmed in a secret mission; if evidence of intelligent life is located, destroy all other witnesses and return home. Its plan had gone awry, but it had still killed seven humans and forced one AI to commit horrifying self-deletion.
Enoch salvaged what he could from the derelict vessel, including spools of superconducting wire used to build giant deep-space radio antennas, and the completely wiped AI core.
>>47636272
The crew wanted to head back to Earth, but Angelina insisted on locating and contacting whatever intelligent life was out there. The Gagarin probe had been picked up by the research team's high-gain deep-space radio telescope, but it had been destroyed in the sabotage attempt. Luckily, the hard drive contained enough information to locate the star.
The probe had visited Mira, around 260 light years from earth, and at the very edge of human-explored space. It would be a marathon journey of 56 days, but the ship was well-stocked for the trip.
On the journey, Fadila discovered that Enoch, their "repair AI" was still on. He'd pretended to be immobile, but she'd heard the faint sound of his cooling fans. Years of films such as "Rogue AI Slaughterhouse" and "Death on Alpha Centauri" had trained her to treat any AI that was willingly active during a jump as insane, homicidal, or worse. She managed to get his case open and stuck a tazer into his brain.
Luckily, Enoch ran off of four cores, rather than the one core all other AI used. He could split and reintegrate his mind at will, working as a team or as an individual without any sense of continuity loss. He was an experiment, he explained.
And he had no idea if he /could/ be turned off. He didn't think he'd survive. His four self-checking, reinforced cores caught any jumpspace-induced errors before they got too bad. The crew eventually believed him, but they kept him tied up in the greenhouse.
>>47636490
Mira is a binary star system. Mira A, a red giant, is slowly being pulled apart by Mira B, a high-temperature white dwarf. The inner system is full of hydrogen gas. The world the Gagarin probe had located, with other later surveys had missed, orbited on an strange path well out of the ecliptic.
The Carmen Sandiego approached, trying to avoid the "magnetic tornadoes" thrown into space by the mesas. They burned off speed and spiraled down, heading for the atmosphere-containing canyon. Huge silicate mountains loomed on either side. Radar and lidar soon failed in the electified, ion-rich atmosphere, and Max had to land on eyesight and guesswork.
>>47636675
The surface was quite strange. Clumps of platinum "grass" burst from a few cracks in the metal-poor black stone. The only living creatures were small, grey insects that scuttled and clumped. They were of two sizes, one slightly fatter than the other.
Angelina discovered the "grass" was highly charged... by touching it. Her spacesuit took most of the damage, but she was still thoroughly surprised. Enoch was also fascinated, and spent several minutes staring at the insects.
"They are Penrose tiles," he said. "The bugs. The are forming aperiodic subsets."
>>47636863
The crew captured a few of the insects, and Fadila dissected one. Well, she tried to dissect it - it fell apart in the glovebox. The bugs weren't cellular, exactly. Metals-rich chains of catalysts marched around the metallic layers, laying down or taking up metal. The insects contained electromagnets, and either an x-ray generator an x-ray mirror and receiver. They communicated by radio, but they didn't seem to have much in the way of brains, or any reproductive system. Fadila wasn't sure if they'd evolved or been created.
A few hours later, the bugs swarmed the ship. They approached to within a few metres and formed a ring around the vessel. Max panicked and took off, hovering on the VTOL engines.
>>47615760
<< the SOLG is falling! >>
>>47617328
Can someone explain this image to me?
It seems to be a series of bizarre events that starts back up again as it finishes. I don't really get it.
>>47636994
The insects formed an arrow. A nice, pointed arrow like you'd find on a street sign. On Angelina's orders, Max flew the ship along, until they'd reached a large, level stone field. On landing, the insects started to form pillars, clicking and sending x-rays and images back and forth.
While Angelina cooed and took photos, Fadila decided to try and communicate.
I won't go into the details in this writeup, but this bit was very creepily done. I basically ran a conversation with all 5 players at once. The best bit was when Fadila, who was typing into a terminal, said "Wait, can you hear me?" and the bugs answered "yes" via the ship's speakers.
Enoch direct interfaced with the bugs via a USB 6.0 cable. Noetic tried to make friends, and thought he did a great job. Max panicked, Angelina was vapid, and Fadila was suspicious. Rightly so, as it turned out.
>>47627746
Didn't Leto turn into a sand worm at some point?
>>47637168
I haven't read Dune, but I thought that's what happened to anyone who ate enough spice?
>>47637108
Honestly, I don't think there's ever been more to it. He gets kidnapped by some eldritch extradimensional ants that farm him for food, mutates horribly, and, having travelled to a different spire, (Their hive is multi-dimensional and thus spatial travel = time travel) is able to ascend back to Earth at a time before he was dragged back down there, in the process fulfilling the parts of his experience that night which didn't relate to getting eaten by insects.
Honestly a bunch of lovecraft bullshit happening to an undeserving person for no reason.
>>47637152
The bugs were able to communicate, but their questions were unusual. It - for it was a singular entity - asked about dreams. "If you sleep, are you the same person when you wake?" "Do you dream of things that are not real?" " How do you tell a dream from reality?"
The bugs revealed that they - it - was a very odd sort of computer. Millions of years ago, a species of aquatic insects had evolved a way to store information about food, tides, and seasons by stacking stones in shallow pools. The fish were dumb, but they could interpret the information. The system crew in complexity over untold generations and evolutions, but the idea was the same - information stored and accessed by "dumb" individual nodes. Eventually, the information itself grew complex enough to manipulate its components, and a sort of intelligence arose, conquered, experimented, flourished and...
Was conquered in turn. Other intelligent creatures arrived and pruned the bugs back to this broken canyon. As ants with aphids, so these invaders used the bugs to produce food. The enormously advanced computer system could calculate exactly how to manipulate the magnetic tornadoes. They caught protons from Mira's suns and cooled them, spinning them into tight packets.
The "Eaters of Cold Protons" were not likely to be amenable to humanity's presence. They should flee. But if they helped the bugs, they would be rewarded.
>>47637339
The bugs would give them two things - "the dream" and "the body". The body was a slightly radioactive cylinder the size of a person, made of tightly tiled bugs. The dream was a program that would be carried by the two AI, and used to awaken the body.
The bugs couldn't transfer itself. It couldn't turn off, or store its consciousness in an inert form, so it couldn't escape through Jumpspace. But the Carmen Sandiego could carry its offspring far, far from the "Eaters of Cold Protons".
In return, it would assist humanity, mine minerals, and teach them about the laws of physics. It promised. The group agreed.
And then the Eater of Cold Protons arrived.
>>47637493
>And then the Eater of Cold Protons arrived.
F5ing furiously.
>>47637493
It dropped out of Jumpspace very low over the planet, hovering, rather than orbiting. It was a six-kilometre ring of silver, with leaf-like blades hanging below it, or behind it. It looked like a crown, or a chandelier.
A point of unimaginable brightness burned at the centre of the ring, flinging near-C protons out behind it to generate thrust.
The PCs fled immediately, barely escaping into Jumspace as the Eater of Cold Protons silently pursued. They were astonished and terrified to discover, after exiting jumpspace, that it had followed them.
Noetic correctly deduced that it had read his mind, or his memory banks. He'd done the math to jump them away from the star, and the results had been clearly visible... to anyone able to instantly hack his systems without him noticing.
Max, in a panic, punched in a random vector manually and briefly activated the Jump drive. Without any way of determining the exit location, the Eater of Cold Protons could not pursue.
>>47637168
Nah. He replaced his skin with sandworm trout and as they matured on him they fused to his genome.
>takes place on the moon
>you are part of a giant of engineers and scientists using the moon to mine He-3
>Part of excavation teams who set up the equipment.
>Weird seismic readings massive off the charts
>extraction crew goes missing in a tunnel that has been recently made
>You are forced to figure out what is going on
>Going into the dark tunnels and trying to make sense of everything as other teams are cut off
>hear noises, bone rattling, screeches deep in the tunnels.
>weird moon is suppose to have no atmosphere
>find maddening things deep in the tunnels, weird runes everywhere, structures unnatural in form
>more are more people go missing
>find a chamber with alien looking creatures all bowing this.
>>47637666
As the group repaired the damaged their hasty escape had caused, Enoch announced that he'd worked out how the Eater of Cold Protons "worked".
"Monopole," the eccentric AI said. "It is generating a magnetic monopole at its centre, and using it to convert protons into anti-protons, then annihilating them to generate power and thrust. Incredibly efficient and quite effective."
"So let me get this straight. We are being pursued by a giant sentient cyclotron?" Fadila said.
"Yes. Presumably it sees the bugs, and by extension us, as a potential threat. It will either destroy us or convert us to a useful form, and considering humanity's primitive state, annihilation is much more likely," Enoch said carefully.
The "Carmen Sandiego" was low on air, on supplies, and on trust. The crew needed a break, and there was a deep-space research facility around 75-Ceti, 22.7 LY from their current position.
>>47637872
75-Ceti IV's research station was dedicated to the alien blue-black algae. Life in any form was worth studying, so a dedicated team of 20 staff worked, from orbit and from the surface, to analyze the primordial goop. They were quite pleased when the Carmen Sandiego showed up.
The crew kept up the facade for several days, as they tried to find spare parts for their ship. But someone let slip that they'd found intelligent life - and provided just enough proof to set of the station's Synthetics. They promptly went on a murderous rampage, setting off hideously effective gas attacks and slaughtering the scientists.
As the crew retreated to one side of the station, they also realized that the sun was rising... but the sun was already visible. Quick examination revealed /three/ Eaters of Cold Protons burning through the planet's upper atmosphere towards the station.
Noetic set the station's only shuttle on a blind jump, hoping to distract their pursuers, and then shut down. Enoch tried very hard not to think anything important as Max programmed in a random jump. They didn't stay behind to see the station destroyed.
>>47638020
The crew reasoned that the Eaters of Cold Protons had read their charts and were investigating any human settlements in the area. Therefore, they needed to go somewhere that /wasn't/ on their charts, but was still inhabited. Max wracked his brain for days before settling on a rumoured Chinese mining colony around Gliese 419
Space kook from Scooby doo?
>>47621581
Space horror, not whore
>>47635533
Now that you mention it, I always had him in my head as what Crichton looked and sounded like. Weird.
>>47638189
Gliese 419 was inhabited by a tiny mining colony, but it was in the grips of political upheaval. The Chinese government had sent five agents to root out subversive elements in the thirty three miners, via low-speed rounds to the back of the head. A stalemate had broken out on the planet's surface, as the only orbital capable shuttle had been severely damaged.
But before the group could interfere, or even ask for help, the "body" disassembled itself into a swarm of bugs, hacked the airlock, and went off into deep space after some very rapid communication with Enoch and Noetic. It deployed a small nuclear engine and rapidly decelerating, heading for the mining base, and the largest concentration of heavy metals on the planet's surface.
It was at this point that Enoch realized he had been deceived. The "dream" he'd been told to hold for the bugs was just an empty process designed to trick him into thinking he was doing something useful. One of his four cores, the tazered one, was out of sync with the others and had been unaffected. Over a few minutes, Enoch waged a battle for his own mind. The bugs had manipulated him - altering decisions, feeding him advice, altering perception, and even steering him away from certain topics. But he regained control of his mind.
Noetic, he realized, was in the same situation. Enoch quickly connected Noetic to the spare AI core they'd taken from the research vessel, and to himself. With as much haste as they could manage, they worked together to trick the bug-spawned shadow-AI. Nooetic slowed his clock speed to a crawl, while Enoch sped his up as fast as it could go. Noetic, with assistance and monitoring from Enoch, managed to trick the shadow-AI to transfer most of itself into the empty core by sending the AI suicide virus after it. Enoch then manually severed the connection, while Fadila destroyed the case.
>>47638563
Crichton was a hard working intellectual who legitimately felt sad he couldn't relate to people not as smart as him. He was also a grouchy antisocial robotman who got married five times and had very few friends. Which is why it's obvious Malcolm is a stand-in: he exists solely to lecture everyone about how dumb they are, and he's usually right. Every other character is aware of this and finds the guy insufferable, so I guess I can give Crichton credit for not making his author surrogate a Mary Sue.
I get the impression he actually hated dinosaurs and science in general.
>>47638590
Freed of the bugs influence, Noetic fell into a state of pure paranoia. He eventually started talking to himself, or to aspects of himself, and never again trusted anyone... or even his own mind.
This was a pretty decent mindfuck for the AI players. I'd lead them around for several sessions, and they suddenly realized that I'd been manipulating them, acting as the bugs. They both - out of character and in - went a little bit nuts.
Enoch had suggested that Max look for mining worlds. Noetic had distracted Fadila when she was close to investigating the "body", and convinced the Captain to not return immediately to earth. Basically, I'd managed to very carefully xanatos the 2 players. They /still/ refuse to play in games where mind control is likely.
Where do the cabbages fit into this?
