Blame
@OneirosTheWriter for this one, because the Captain's Logs in
To Boldly Go... were scratching an itch that has returned. There's also been a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head for 4X games where you don't just fill up a meter on a research bar with "Science" but that you go out and
do things. Finally, as much as I want to do some more standard quest fare there can be a lot of busywork in many management style quests. Going "One more turn" can be incredibly addictive in a computer game where all the fiddly bits are automated away, and over a few hours of gameplay in a computer game a couple of +5% research speed bonuses will add up in a satisfying way, but for a quest that takes forever and is very taxing on the QM.
As such, I am cutting straight to the narrative core here. Welcome to Incident Response! Where humanity pokes things they probably shouldn't poke, and the survivors learn
something... eventually. It might take a while for there to be survivors, but we're only really interested in the stories of those who make it out intact enough to give a report. The quest structure will essentially be a few short questions to set up a scenario, and then basically a short horror story with a few decision points, and then an aftermath section that will set the stage for the
next horror story - possibly even generations later. In Stellaris terms, imagine if rare techs could only be obtained through anomalies, events, and archaeological expeditions; all concept of balancing rare techs was tossed out the window because you have to
earn those techs, not just grind through the tech tree; and The Worm was the standard for event chains in terms of difficulty, complexity, and narrative impact.
So! The first decision will begin by establishing initial genre conventions by picking the general setting for the first Incident. Your choices are:
- The Silent City - The town of Fox Point is about as "middle of nowhere" you can get while still having a population of over a hundred thousand. There was nothing particularly significant there as far as anyone knew, until one day all communication went silent. What horrors have happened here?
- The Crevasse - As the ice sheets on Antarctica recede, things long buried are revealed. A massive crack on the scale of continents has opened up on the glaciers, exposing a world sealed away for eons. The first research team isn't answering calls though, and a rescue/investigation mission is being prepared.
- On the Dark Side - Moonbase Selene-3 is the first successful long term human settlement off Earth, but as they dig beneath the lunar regolith strange things are being stirred up. A distress beacon was activated and the base is no longer responding to hails, so a recovery mission has been launched.
- Liminality - There are people and places caught between people and places. These are the forgotten, the dispossessed, that which has no place, and an extended stay is often unhealthy. Strange and sinister forces are stirring in the cracks of human civilization, casting unwelcome and unwholesome light and shadow upon the rest of society. The levees are about to be topped by something outside all standard context.
[] The Silent City
[] The Crevasse
[] On the Dark Side
[] Liminality
Once we have the location and a blurry idea of genre sorted, we will then choose the players for this story, which will refine the genre a bit more, and then the
FUN™️ can start. If I could I would speed it up, but each of these settings has a different set of players to work with.
