Help me plan a sci-fi action horror mini-campaign.

[RangerWickett]

Your soundtrack for reading this post: (Yes, please forgive the dialogue at the end; it's the best YouTube has to offer.) [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq-gszu5RYI&feature=related"]YouTube - Aliens - Music Video[/ame]



It is a rare person who is willing give up everything he knows, settle down into the lifeless hesitance of stasis sleep, and trust that in 200 years he'll wake up to a promised land of wonder and opportunity. Is it faith that gives him the solace to abandon his life for an imagined but unseen reward? Reason that tells him Mankind must explore the universe to thrive and survive? Courage that inures him to the fears a wholly alien world must hold?

Faith, reason, courage. Desperation? Why did these people sign on to the sleeper ship Conrad? In their two centuries of slumber, what do they dream of? And how will they respond when they awaken and discover the nightmares that await them?


The Game:
This is an action sci-fi game with a dose of horror, in the vein of Aliens or Halo.

I would like to run a 3-shot mini-campaign in the next month or two, and I could use help fleshing out the story and making sure the characters, foes, encounters, and plot twists are all fun.

Background:
The PCs are crew on a 500 person light-sail sleeper ship, the Conrad, bound for Gliese 581 d, an earth-like planet 20 light years from earth, where they are to establish the first human colony in another star system. Their sponsor, the Galtrand Corporation, selected them for this supremely expensive mission because of their sterling intellect, health, education, drive for success, and willingness to cooperate with a community for your mutual survival and betterment. No tree huggers allowed. They fully plan to rape the natural world in order to establish the colony. And of course they'll be on top, because a century of observation has detected no signs of intelligent life.

Well, at least, not until a few decades after the Conrad set out, by which point it was too late to turn back. But Galtrand figured they'd have plenty of time to prepare for first contact, once the ship reach the Gliese 581 system and it's safe to wake the crew from stasis sleep.

Or at least, that was the plan, before the Galtrand Corporation's proprietary communication channel was destroyed during the Lunar Revolution. But hey, the ship has automated systems to wake the crew, so they should be fine, and able to negotiate from a position of power. I mean, there's no way an alien species could go from barely using radio signals to being a spacefaring threat in just over a century.

Still, you never know when those weapons they brought along might come in handy.


Rules:
I'll be using a variant on the 4e rules to fit a sci-fi setting. I'm attaching character building rules. The PCs will start at 1st level, but after playing Modern Warfare 2, I think I'll go for rapid leveling. The attachment only has some of the starting gear. More advanced weapons will be available in the course of the adventure.

Oh, and I'm asking each player to choose one of these starting backgrounds.

Blogger.
Botanist.
Cook.
Company Man.
Pop Idol.
Psychiatrist.
Soldier.
Surgeon.

Details of the plot to follow.

 

[RangerWickett]

Quick overview of the plot.

Intro. We'll make characters, and I'll explain any details of the ship or background they're curious about. What sorts of questions should I expect?

Act I. The group is all in stasis pods, like Alien. The last thing they remember is lying down, feeling the stasis field come on, and thinking that they sure hope this ship doesn't brea-. And now, suddenly, they're awake, the pod is opening, and the ship's sirens are blaring. As they fight off the grogginess of prolonged biological shut-down, one by one they are injected with something. Their senses snap to alertness, and they realize things have gone horribly wrong.

A group of men and women in unfamiliar combat gear stand watch, their unfamiliar weapons trained on the doors to this stasis room. One explains that it's been two centuries, and their ship, the Conrad, has been captured by intelligent aliens. The strangers are a human ranger patrol, the crew of a ship called the Vishnu. Oh, yeah, sorry to break it to you, but humanity developed Faster Than Light travel a few years back. Sorry you wasted 200 years traveling sublight.

The aliens nabbed the Conrad and were holding it hostage as a bargaining chip with humanity. The rangers were sent in to rescue them. Most of the rangers head on to awaken more of the crew, but one stays behind - Tizona Reese, who, in the fine tradition of Durandal (from Marathon) and Cortana (from Halo) is named after a sword. She arms the group with spare pistols and escorts them through the ship to the ranger shuttle, the Arjuna.

As they sneak past alien patrols they get regular radio updates from the rest of the rangers, but when they're near the shuttle suddenly screams break out, and the connection is cut. The AI aboard the Vishnu sends one last message saying that he has been infected, and is shutting down to avoid giving the aliens access to the ship.

Just then, the aliens find them and attack.

The Aliens
My general conception of the aliens is a sort of midway point between hivemind and individual. They are telepathic, and small groups can work together as a single creature. They can try to project into your mind, which slowly erodes your sanity as they draw you into their collective.

I took some inspiration from the design of 4e monsters, so that a single alien counts as a minion. Five together have a collective intelligence that lets them function as a single normal foe. A group of ten works like an elite, but is about the limit to how many can be in a collective before the disparate minds turn the group into a wild mob.

This lets me do weird stuff like have 'monsters' arrive from different directions one or two at a time, and slowly assemble into a more dangerous threat. The whole society of the aliens is based around modularity, since, y'know, you might split off part of your collective's mind and send it to help a neighbor who needs some specialized knowledge. Even their technology is modular, so they can merge their personal shields, or combine their plasma pistols into a plasma rifle or flamer.

I figure I'll have 3 different varieties of minions -- brutes (cyborgs who hit hard), artillery (soldiers with plasma guns), and controllers (scientists with mind control beams). They don't do much individually, but as a collective they can be a legitimate threat.

What do they look like, though? Well, I don't really have a clue. They need to look disturbing somehow. Maybe just swarms of rats? Or simply follow the biomechanical aesthetic of Geiger? The classic bug-like or tentacled horror? Maybe some sort of chitinous, emaciated rat-ling with an oversized cranium, with mandibles that screech like the giant ants in Them?

The PCs manage to survive the alien attack and get into the shuttle, the Arjuna, which has its own lesser AI. It warns them that an alien boarding party is heading for the Vishnu, and that when they reach the main ship, the PCs will need to hook up the Arjuna to the Vishnu's engines so it can warp them away to safety. The aliens don't have FTL, so if the aliens sieze control of the ship, the Arjuna will have to self destruct to keep the technology safe.

Cue a combined battle/skill challenge where the PCs can trade up to better gear and try to hold off the aliens as Tizona sets up the coupling between the two ships. It looks like they'll get away safely, but at the last moment the aliens spitefully fire a nuclear missile at the Vishnu. It doesn't destroy the ship, but it damages and irradiates it.

Already in bad shape from the drugged rapid wake-up from stasis, now the PCs can look forward to a slow death, because the Vishnu doesn't have the power to make it to any Earth colony. Not to mention that a few of them probably have fragments of alien consciousness wriggling around in the recesses of their minds, slowly gnawing away at their sanity.

They have a way out, though: resleeving.

The Vishnu crew kept several back-up bodies in case of death, and with modern technology it's fairly simple to digitize your brain and download it into a new body. That solves the radiation part (though it certainly does wonders for the mind to suddenly be in someone else's body).

As for the power problem, well, there is this pirate mining operation on a gas giant moon in a star system within range. It's a bit of a long-shot, but if the PCs pretend to be official military rangers, and if they don't let on that their ship is nearly out of power, they might be able to bluff their way into a new power plant. Once they're powered up, though, it will still take months to get back to Earth, which might be too long to wait for the rest of the sleeping crew of the Conrad.

So the PCs' mission is to sleeve into new bodies, negotiate (read: shoot pirates) to get the parts they need to fix the ship, then return to the Gliese system and rescue their crewmates before the aliens assimilate them into their collective. And hopefully before the stress of combat, dying, returning to life, and having alien thoughts in their brains drives the PCs crazy too.


I've got more, but I figure there's no point posting about Acts 2 or 3 if no one's reading the thread.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Firstly: Aliens is about my favourite movie of all time. Anything riffing off of it is going to be awesome-sauce guaranteed.

Secondly: You've put I neat tweak on the story line and motives - good stuff! Looking forward to instalments two and three.

Thirdly: The modular angle for the Alien species is good but needs a little work. In terms of an ecology, I like the idea of several types of the species playing different roles but I think with the modularity angle, you can amp this up past 11. Think genetically modifying bacteria infecting their brain stems that learns. The species develops in response to stimuli and thus agressively reacts to the situation. Thus upgraded versions of the species are quickly developed by a Queen or Master Germ (that will move from species variant to variant to prolong and augment its existence).

What do these things look like? I think you have to go something Geigeresque. Spines, distorted skulls, subtle Satanic motifs even, and degenerate features that fall off or slough away to be replaced by newly developing biological features. The acid for blood thing can be something that is developed as they interact with the humans. Blowing themselves apart could be another. Effectively, each new variant of the species has a strong niche ability that the PCs must work out and address - forcing them to alter their tactics to stop the menace developing into something impossible to contain.

For something interesting, what happens when this bacteria infects one of the humans or even a PC? Perhaps this is needed to fight the creatures but again the accelerating insanity of this means this would be a last choice or option.

Anyway, very much looking forward to seeing where you're going with this - should be lots of fun!

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[RangerWickett]

Are you suggesting there's humans, there's aliens, and then there's a third thing -- a mutating sentient bacteria colony? That's a bit _too_ much like Halo, I think.

Though maybe I could have it so that the aliens exist in symbiosis with a type of eukaryotic infection which is the source of their telepathy. Sort of like an amoeba babelfish? It infects a host and tries to grow the necessary organs to enable communication, which works fine in the intended host species, but in humans it . . . nah.

I think I prefer to avoid the infection-style body horror. I'm fine with insanity and a degradation of the mind, but I want to play with the dichotomy between healthy, even super-human bodies, and inhuman minds. Each time they die they can resleeve into a fresh body, but it takes a toll on their psyche, making them ever more susceptible to alien telepathic take-over.

As for a 'boss monster,' I figure the leader of the alien ship could be a particularly powerful collective that has merged bodily, perhaps with a bio-mechanical shell so it can operate as a large foe. Or maybe those are just bodyguards, and the real villain is just hyper telepathic.

Hm.

Quick idea of Acts 2 and 3, so you can know where generally I'm headed.

Act II. The pirate mining operation is on the surface of the moon of a gas giant, which is accessible by space elevator. The PCs have to capture the space elevator, then descend to the rainforest where the mining operation is.

The ground base detects an unscheduled descent, so they turn off the sonic fence that keeps the planet's megafauna at bay. So when the PCs land, they have to hoof it through a rainforest full of all those nasty giant critters I've seen in the Avatar trailer, while a pirate combat copter harasses them.

When they reach the base, it's defended by a trio of mechs. (Yes, mechs. They, um, use them to dig out the mine. With plasma cannons. Yeah.) The PCs might sneak past the mechs, or take them on with heavy firepower. Maybe even remotely hack one to gain control of it. After they clear the perimeter, the pirates surrender.


Act III. With their ship repaired, the PCs now have to go rescue their old crewmates. They'll have to assault the alien ship that is guarding their old sleeper ship, and somehow defeat or drive off the aliens, then dock with the sleeper ship and carefully extend the warp field around it so they can get the hell out of there.

I don't have any plans for what the battle against the alien ship should be like, though.