Advice for an upcoming adventure

[nameless]

If you want to put in a little combat, make some of the visions more difficult to tell from reality. If you don't mind changing the premise, put a little conflict into the story. Maybe there was a mutiny that caused the ship to lose control, or maybe they were waylaid by corsairs.

When the ship replays scenes to the players, the scenes can have the players replace the original crew, and try to fight off hostiles. Even though it's all in their heads, the illusion can be convincing enough to make them fight. I also happen to disagree with some of the other posters on the pacing. Yes, is can be dramatic to have false shadows and noises around every corner, but this works a lot better in film where the audience doesn't participate in the pacing. Unless you have an inordinate amount of content, the 5 seconds of suspense will only annoy the players after the first few times.

As far as the malignant force goes, I would even arrange for the pilot to be a Ghost (per the template) at some point, which would allow him a final rest. Of course, YMMV.

-nameless

 

[clockworkjoe]

The ship is nuts? Ok, all nutty people think they're sane.

So, the ship represses its memories of what happened. It wakes up to see the players walking around. Remembers that people are dead. Decides to blame the players. But can't kill them yet, have to make them suffer for their sins. It has to make them feel guilty. So it starts with the creepiness and goes from there. Of course, it locks them in the ship preventing their escape. But it wants a loonnnggg painful death, so it provides food, water, and air for the players. They just can't leave. And they can't shut out the horrible mental screams of "WHY DID YOU KILL THEM?"

The players have to find out what happened, find the ship's core, and force the ship to face the truth. Otherwise, they will be slowly driven insane by the ship.

Dangerous encounters could include 'psychic' battle with the ship. The players suddenly find themselves on the ship with the living passengers back in the past. The passengers turn on them and battle breaks out. If they kill them or die, they wake up and take wisdom damage. If they escape or subdue them, they wake up with no damage and learn some useful info.

edit: go play system shock 2

 

[Xarlen]

I should mention that there are absolutely no signs of any of this carnage on board. The ship's soul put its maintenance robots to work after everyone was dead, loading their remains into the escape pods and firing them off as a sort of "burial in space".

Why not use the robots? Perhaps not initially as hostil, but if the PCs stat going through and breaking stuff...

I don't think that the ship or pilot should be made the 'bad guy'. This is a tortured soul. Let's not be angry, blaming them for it.

 

[Delemental]

I like this. This is sweet. You need a journal though, or at least a few monitors showing folks having a discussion on the subject.

Some sort of record that is left by some person/group of the last folks to die. They don't know whats killing them, so they speculate. Only, they don't think its the ship. Maybe they think its some form of alien or energy beastie that came during the teleport accident.

I think these folks need to stress that it isn't the pilot - the pilot is doing good even with all the added pressure and responsibilities. And then they need to panic and debate heavily what is killing them, how to best defeat it and go their separate ways. The party can later see footage of all of them dead (just their bodies, not the actual act) just to spook things more.

In my original concept, I'd decided that only the senior officers knew about the ship's soul. But I could easily put in some sort of scene when the players reach the bridge with this sort of discussion. Or perhaps a vision of the command crew, trapped on the bridge, frantically trying to reach "Markus" (that's the pilot's name) as the bridge fills with poisonous gases. I could even have the bridge be the only place on board where there are any bodies, the skeletal remains left there in Markus' recognition of the naval tradition of the captain going down with the ship. A search of the computer files would reveal that there was no one named Markus on the crew, and digging deeper into personal logs would reveal clues about the ship's nature.

Maybe one group thinks there is some sort of maintenance bot or other "soul mech"-ish thing that's gone haywire, ready to drop elevators or send people out airlocks. Maybe they speculate that in order to do that, he has to be within 200 meters of the elevator or airlock. Maybe that will get the party running around crazy when they see an elevator go nuts....

"Quick! It must be that crazy maintenance bot! Its got to be within 200 meters for the broadcast range on its control antenna to function! Lets find it and kill it!"

Only, of course, there is no maintenance bot causing problems ... just a broken down ship and a very, very sad pilot.

I think I'll definitely have some "crazed" bots on board, perhaps tied in with some of the visions (party gets an image of a haywire bot with a cutting torch coming down the corridor, cutting through passengers as it heads straight for them. Then, as the vision fades, the same bot is coming at them again, but this time for real). As far as alien invaders or what not, I'll let my players draw their own early conclusions.

Clockworkjoe also mentioned the idea of taking Wisdom damage. I may just incorporate this in some of the "bad" visions (player makes Will save or takes one point temporary Wisdom damage). Maybe even culminating in the final scenes when they find the secret chamber where the pilot's neural net lies, and multiple Will saves are required because of the sheer amount of raw emotion radiating from the system this close (adding an element of risk to an otherwise routine Disable Device check).

As far as pacing, which nameless mentioned, I was planning on having the visions manifest slowly, and grow in intensity. Start with one player getting a pleasant scene of people partying. Then next time, one player gets a good vision while someone else sees a scene of carnage in the same room. Increase it slowly until everyone in the party is seeing the visions simultaneously (and hopefully reacting to them). I agree that belabouring the "strange noises and shadows around every corner" would get boring quickly; my players have seen enough movies of this type to insert this kind of stuff into their own minds.

 

[Kugar]

What if the ship starts slipping into delirium and mistakes some of the PCs as people it knew.

The combat heavy person may be the pilot's old war buddy.
The techie the maintenance engineer.
Others may be thought of as passangers.

Think of a scene where "Secur-o-bots" force half the party to relax on deck and make the other half "fix" various systems.
The party thinks everythings ok when power starts back up and the ship moves - until they realize the pilot-mechis calculating a 'port to the middle of the sun in the original destination system. The old LED style output starts to blink "5:00", "4:59",... as the speakers announce: "Five minutes to transdimentional travel, please return to your cabins and secure yourselves". The Secur-o-Bots intend to follow orders. The PCs must either abandon, disable or negotiate with the ship.

 

[Delemental]

Just thought I'd give everyone an update.

I ran the adventure I talked about in this thread last Sunday, and it went very well. I'd like to thank everyone for their advice, I really think it helped pull the adventure together.

For those who wonder, I ended up not having a single combat encounter. I had a few crazed robots written up just in case, as well as malfunctioning security systems, but I never used them. The characters were so creeped out by the ship that I decided throwing "monsters" at them would only take away from the mood.

I have to give compliments to my players. They got into the mood quickly. They interacted with the visions (one player had his character empty his shotgun into the wall when he had a vision of a crazed robot tearing apart passengers). When they reached the bridge, and saw the captain's dead body in his chair (this was the only body on board the whole ship), their reactions were priceless - they were convinced it was going to jump up and attack them. Even my combat-monkey got into the mood, and didn't seem to mind the lack of encounters (especially later in the adventure, as the story unfolded; he's a soulmech himself, so there was an instant connection with the ship's plight).

I ended up saving the Wisdom damage for the end, when they finally found the vault containing the pilot's soul. It was used as an obstacle; waves of raw emotion beating against them as they raced to disconnect the system (just destroying it would have been bad, and the mechanist character has a low Wisdom to begin with, so it added a sense of urgency - she ended the scene with a Wisdom of 4).

I received several positive comments for the adventure, both directly and indirectly. We played a full hour and a half past our normal stopping time, so I must have kept them interested. And the next day I heard that my players were talking about the game to people not involved, which to me is the best praise (it's one thing when players tell a GM they had fun, it's another when they tell a third party they had fun). One player commented that she'd felt the tension of a night of combat, without the tedium of dice rolls.

Thanks to everyone again. Now I'll have a few weeks off (we rotate games), so I was glad to end on a high note.