A couple months back, when the world was young and new, I had occasion – at my brother’s behest – to start a backup campaign for weeks when a couple of my players were unavailable. With her fibro, Kansas is something of a plague for Miss Jonikka, which makes her frequently unequal to sitting at her computer in an upright position for any period of time after work. And Brian is pretty much living at the epicenter of chaos with his job and recent move. So… yeah. Seemed like a reasonable request.
When I first started running Savage Worlds games back in the days of yore, before the Mayans tried to kill us all with diminishing numeration, I allowed my players to select our first adventure from a collection of available scenarios. Perhaps they were just in tune with my predilections, but they picked the space horror game. And that’s what we did.
With 3 of my 4 players now being fairly new to the game outside of some convention one-shots, I thought I’d go back to that well and pick something with a similar vibe. I sifted through my published adventures from the PEG Kickstarters and found Moon at the Edge of Oblivion. While I had to find ways to play up the horror element, the tense sci-fi adventure had a pretty solid premise that I felt would be easy to knock out in a couple of sessions. Which they did.
As always, I looked for opportunities to tie the episodic scenario into a big picture development, and the answer essentially fell into my lap. The principal foil in the scenario was an AI that was malingering in a derelict cruise ship. And my brother had been canny enough to provide us with a robotic PC. So naturally, when he happened to be the last person to interact with the ship’s systems, I had the AI jump into his system.
Last week we had a chance to revisit these characters, and I selected yet another published scenario – a one-sheet for The Last Parsec setting called Ghosts in the Machine – and parted it out a bit to fit my theme. We finished it up last night, and toward the end of the mission the AI made itself known to the PC who had been kind enough to bring it along and helped them – with strong encouragement, as it happens – escape the mine. And of course, it copied itself to the local system so it could hack into the alien tech that was taking the facility apart and use it for undisclosed chicanery.
While the horror elements were still pretty light, the players are now starting to imagine the possibilities of setting this rogue AI loose with a bunch of powerful new toys. At this point, it pretty much writes itself.
What I find intriguing is that this wasn’t the direction I had intended to go with game at the outset. The first scenario took place near a black hole, and I was going to introduce some seemingly supernatural BS to make everyone jumpy… but the vibe of that mission wasn’t really lending itself to that effect, and so I followed my players’ lead. Now I’m working with a far less mysterious villain, but I’ll go with the alien technology angle to give it some terrifying twists and turns.
I honestly haven’t put a ton of thought into it. It is, after all, a backup game that will only hit the table on occasion. Which is why I’ve used published scenarios thus far. But I, too, am starting to imagine the possibilities… and my imagination is informed by decades of scaring the pants off of players.
At this point, I have quite a collection.
