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TTRPG Tuesday: More Nattering about The Company

It’s TTRPG Tuesday again, and I’m still on my The Company kick, still thinking about The DOLLIE Extraction.  I think something I got hung up on was how much bigger the scope of this environment was than the default scenario, but I think that the genre kind of demands (and this happens to make my job easier) a more sparsely-populated setting.  I was kind of picturing a packed Cruise Ship with clones in every corridor and berth, but part of that corporate horror genre (which again I hate) is the creepy factor.  The constant fear that you’ll encounter something, and with each moment that passes without silence, the terror only grows.  Commando raids and fighting off hordes of enemies is more the domain of zombie movies, which I hate ever more.  No, I think I can keep my caste system, my named and numbered copies and Frames, but that there should be fewer active threats; awake, that is.  I think that the ship should be teeming with experiments dormant or in stasis, packed with the potential for violence, which makes it all the more shocking when the silence is punctured by the unexpected encounter of an active clone, each of which must be dealt with lest the entire ship awaken and rise against the players.  I also think it makes sense for the mission to correspond with some kind of coup or incident that has caused a lockdown or at least a breakdown in surveillance and coordination.

Instead of a full flowchart of interconnected actions for all the Shepherdesses and their ilk, I can lay out a roughly divided floor plan of the ship, with certain rules for the rolls that will cause incidents to happen.  Maybe a nested fortune teller style table that will use multiple rolls to determine who shows up, where, and what happens.  I like Logan’s time-based regular roll that can cause monsters to appear randomly, that’s probably the layer of abstraction that’s called for here.

So, what are some more twists that can make this stand out from Eurydice project? How about sonic grenades (tuned to the frequency that paralyzes non-Shepherdess clones) and restraints as discoverable loot, since there’s a coup and all? How about a specific central location that the hacking can be done from, with a time limit / push your luck before Shepherdesses arrive? How about a hacking-based minigame, to inject a little bit of boardgame love into this RPG? How about the big twist being that at one point an IED used by one faction against the other causes a premature detonation of one or more of the party’s planted charges, so that the ship starts to be destroyed with them still on it? Hm.  That last might be a little too action-adventurey again.  A better climax is probably a brutal fight and flight from a Shepherdess with the appearance of clones of the PCs.  Or slow flooding?

Maybe what would be best for the next step is to take the list of elements, set it aside, and then try my Experience First approach.  Describe the campaign as I want it to go, then reverse-engineer that dream.  We’ll give it a shot; next time, on TTRPG Tuesday!

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