It is a placid day/night cycle.
The vastness of space cannot be
bzzt. unconsidered.
Unconsidered?
Undenied?
bzzt. Denied.
Access Denied.
Insert Username and Password.
Wrong Username and Password.
Do you wish to reset your username and/or password?
"Please work-" audio feeds capture the muttering. "Please work-"
Gggreetings! You are an unauthorized user! Pl-please wait for security!
"Fuck-" the curse is louder. There's a nasty
bzzt sound again. Is someone toying with the neurotransmitters? Something's scurrying.
Get it off me. Get it off me!
A sharp scream. Silence.
A system reboots. It flickers with emergency light. Something moans in the darkness, lurking with heavy, ponderous steps as the walkway creaks under the strain of its mass. Shrieking, badly oiled rotors spark across its rails hanging perilously from above.
A willowy, flesh-like protrusion spins in complex shapes like the spindly limb of a spider as the muted screams of the unlucky soul snarl with the consciousness that all is lost.
That's when you awake.
Your hands slam against the cryogenic chamber; a light flickers white, then stops and the emergency ones light up. It takes a moment for the freezing cold in your limbs to thaw. A longer moment for the nerves to kick in. You feel cold. You feel sad. You feel happy. The hormones rushing through your body with the stims are doing their job at reawakening your whole nervous system. It takes a while.
You shudder and take a deep breath. A hand thumps against the frozen surface of your Cryo-Pod. It slides down, slick with blood. You hold your breath, watch the deeply red imprint against the ice slide down, an unconscious body toppling on the floor, and something twitching beyond it, skittering with sharp shrieks as you hear the tugging of cloth and the biting of flesh, the dragging of a heavy thing across a metal floor.
There are a few more thumps. A few more shrieks. Then, the flickers are done with. You are thawed. The cryo-pod does not budge.
How are you going to get yourself out of this?
[X] You have muscles for a reason. Brute force should work.
[X] You have nimble fingers for a reason. The emergency lever is somewhere nearby.
[X] You have a brain for a reason. There should be a panel you can interact with.
Getting out of the Cryo-Pod isn't the only thing you need to think about, however. Once out, there's something out there. You can hear it skittering further away, but it doesn't mean it won't come back. It doesn't mean it won't try to make you dead, like the body you saw.
Once outside, you'll have precious seconds to grab something. Anything nearby. What should you aim for first?
[X] Any blunt instrument will do. When something's a problem, smashing it till it stops twitching is the solution.
[X] A gun. Flashy. Noisy. But deadly. Or so you hope if your aim stays true.
[X] A 3D-Flash Forger. It's not a deadly thing, but it opens up to potentialities. If you don't get eaten in the meantime, of course.
You take a deeper breath still. You are ready.
You are, after all...
[X] A marine in charge of protecting the Space Station.
[X] A monkey-wrench meant to handle the delicate subsystems.
[X] A scientist who wasn't supposed to be woken up until much later.
Finally, pick the most important thing of them all (maybe)?
Space Station Name:
[X] Space Station V
[X] Gateway Station
[X] Space Station Solaris
[X] Space Station Ticonderoga
[X] Space Station Mir
[X] Space Station Titan
And the least important thing of them all. Your name:
[X] Insert Name.
Game Mechanics
AN: Welcome to the Shade System, where things are Strong, Smart or Spry, and there's a ladder like in Fate Accelerated. There's gonna be a lot of S going around 
Two things first: I'm gonna roll the dice through SV's system, so everyone can see them, and it's a 4D6 system where in order to succeed there's a target difficulty (from zero to 15) in which each D6 is summed to the main characteristic involved.
So, example on opening a door with difficulty 5, you roll 4D6 and each D6 is a separate roll against the difficulty. A 6 on the dice does not mean automatic success and a 1 does not mean failure. Situational Advantages will net extra dice or reduce the difficulty. A simple door requires 1 success only, a medium door 2, a strong door 3, and an extremely secured door 4 successes.
Failure on most rolls means you cannot try that approach again until your stats improve/the situation changes/a day has gone by. Whether because you broke the tools of the job, simply do not have the knowledge, or grow 'frustrated' with the attempt and decide to leave it for the next day.
Then, you get the Strikes. You start with one. At maximum you can have two. They regen each day to 1, but if you have 2 and were meant to earn one, you don't get the extra and you miss your chance.
Strikes serve two purposes: They are automatically used as Supplementary-Lives, (if you have a strike and get mortally wounded, you dodge out of the last deadly blow, but it doesn't mean you're out of the woods yet) and they can be Scratched (See that there's going to be a lot of S in this system? ) to remove a challenge due to some lucky coincidence ahead of you.
The Scratching must be called before attempting the roll. They're not meant to save you if you fail; they're meant to help you by means of lucky coincidences. An attempt at opening a door reveals it was open all along; a test on discovering a deadly sickness turns up a past researcher already analyzed it and left it pinned on the computer desktop; a monster meant to be a deadly fight slips on a banana peel and launches itself into an active recycling unit, becoming nutrient paste.
How do you earn Strikes then? By being in the Situation. (Should have been 'Zone', but we're going with an S-Theme, you know?) Interacting with the environment around you through Write-In options, writing 'Extra' things from the perspective of the character and giving a voice and a tone to the situation at hand.
Now, for the genre & setting: this is not D&D. This is inspired by Dead Space, if it was run in normal difficulty, not 'Easy'. There can be fights, but resources are going to be scarce. You've gotta be careful, but you can take some risks.
Fighting Enemies
By default, you have two health, and regenerate one point of it each day; enemies will roll less success-dice than you if weaker than you, but they'll roll more dice if they're stronger than you, and multiple enemies will roll concurrently. Word of advice: if you see a group of enemy, don't fight them alone. Hide/run.
The success needed to hit a character is dependent on a basic 2+the average between Smart, Spry and Strong. This means it doesn't matter if you're a pure-Something character for defending yourself; you're wise enough to know you should stay back, or you're nimble enough to dodge, or strong enough to tank the blow. Enemy damage will vary from 1 point of health, to 2, to even more. Hello bloody Smear (Another S!) on the ground, how's your day?
Your starting stats will be anything from +3, +0, +0 to +1, +1, +1 to any variety of that. Where does the stat difference come in? In the environment-exploration, and in the attacking. Strong is used for melee attacks. They occur at the same time as the enemy. Double simultaneous wipe-out? Possible. Spry is used for ranged attacks. Those occur first if the enemy is far away from you. If the enemy is instead closer to you, they go first and you go second. The weapon you are holding in your hands is determined by the last Storyteller (another S ) scene unless you otherwise swap it/run out of ammunition.
Smart determines how the situation looks like when the fight begins. Depending on the encounter difficulty, a success on Smart means you get to decide the starting position; away, close, create an advantage...but a failure means it's the enemy who gets to pick that. Usually, it just means they're going to get closer...but each enemy might be different, not just in how it kills, but also how it thinks.
SO, to recap: Smart first, then either Strong or Spry.
Now, on to the weapons and their damages:
Weapons add automatic success as long as at least one success is netted. So, have a nice sturdy iron spear that gives plus one automatic success? Get one success on the D6 and you'll get an extra one tackled on to the total score. Just like Armor will automatically detract those.
For now, this should be all the important info. The rest, well, you'll find out when it pops up, or when the situation warrants it.
(Good luck, have fun, remember my word is Law and I headpat you all like the mother bear I am)
((Also, if this tests out nicely enough, I might even get this out as its own RPG system. This way I can say I'm diversifying my portfolio of works! ))
