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Adaptive_Radiation4 days ago

I think the adventure location and premise are solid, but it really kneecapped by both a lack of specific "here's what's going on" information and too much extraneous background information. Scenarios with a strong investigative bent really need to have an early "Here's what's happening" paragraph for the GM so they can understand the plot early on and have that info in the back of their minds while the PCs are moving through the adventure. In the scenario's current state, I'm not really clear on what actually happened in the adventure location. Did the drones kill all the employees when they tried to sabotage it? Where are the bodies and bloodstains if the drones killed the crew? Why was their sabotage only partial?

There's a lot of tension building, which is great, but not really any kind of cathartic release of a big combat or a horror moment. You have a potential antagonist in the drone intelligence, but there aren't any details about it's plan or how it's going to be a threat to the PCs beyond just fucking with the doors and lights. It should be a threat to a group of PCs even without full station power. I think a lot of readers and players are gonna feel cheated without some big fight, struggle, or something to make all that tension worth it.

Having things change as the power situation changes is great, but each area needs it's own specific notes about what has power and what doesn't. That information is present, but it could be conveyed better with some changes to the scenario's organization.

This is also a scenario that could really use a map given how many areas you have. 

I think this scenario has a lot of potential, but it really needs more work done it. The location premise is great and I would love to see a more polished version of it.

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Leon4 days ago

I agree with you on the map. Where I took on the no art and system agnostic challenges, it did hamstring more than I thought it would. The tables used are very much a stopgap that worked just enough. Not worked well, just enough. 

How I work is that when I write for a particular system, I know the characters, so I can stat them. Here I tried to approximate best matches of skills, equipment and abilities. I think that worked well enough. At the cost of me having clear character concepts for the people around the player group. 

Where I disagree is the idea of breaking the tension. I've run something similar to this a while back as an intro to ttrpg adventure session. One that was more horror focused. The horror I'm leaning on here is very much not showing the monster at all. I'm leaving the space for uncomfortable implications and incomplete answers. 

Where I'm wondering if you missed some context, implications is that the drone intelligence is meant to target ships. It doesn't hunt people, it hunts ships. It has limits in its abilities. Freaking people out, psychological warfare? Get under the skin of a crew to make them abandon ship fits with its purpose. Outright murder and Saw type of traps? Not so much. 

Another factor I'm wondering about your perspective on, is that some of this isn't meant to give any answers. Going into this expecting answers and finding none? That's meant to be part of the problem, the mystery and the subversion of expectation. The sabotage being so incomplete but the evacuation so thorough? 

I chose to make the tension so slow burn I didn't need a release in the middle of the story. When it's at the peak, the entity's escape and reset, refresh. 

If there's another weakness it has is that it is very much written for me to run. The Running Guide I put was an attempt to answer some of your questions. 

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Adaptive_Radiation4 days ago

Again, I don't think the nature of the secret drone intelligence is conveyed very well in this draft of the scenario. I run and play a lot of investigative horror scenarios and a "Here's what's going on" paragraph is crucial for the GM to understand the scenario. Putting in your explanation of the drone network and how it works in an early paragraph would fix a lot of my issues. 

The point of a mystery is the clue hunt and eventually piecing together the story of the crime, haunting, or whatever. You need to at least answer the core question of "Why is this place abandoned?" You do have an answer in the drone intelligence. Not having an explicit answer is fine for tangential stuff that can just be eerie, but you should have an answer to that core question and clues for PCs to get a good approximation of what happened here. 

If you are releasing a scenario for wide release, it needs to be written for other people to be able to run. I think the scenario has a lot of potential, but it needs some revisions.

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Leon4 days ago

To me some of the point of horror is that you don't know what's going on. To have the normal rules of the situation not apply. 

Alien to me works because the monster is so rarely shown. Event Horizon works for me because the rules are subverted and nothing is really explained. There's suggestion to be sure, it's still never expressly said either way. Hellraiser from 2022, stands on its own for me for the difference between the people who know and the people who don't. The more you know, the less you you want anything to do with. 

You take out most of the tension in something once you know there's the trap and that there the trigger. At least my PTSD brain goes from threat recognition to threat response. You've lost me in that moment.

Some of the better introductions to Trail of Cthulhu I've run, my own system have been more horror based and they've never expressly answered the question. The Antithesis is something that you can see the actions and the reactions to. Yet it's also selective. It simply is. 

Here, the station has been evacuated, not abandoned. Some attempts at sabotage done. Why? The people here felt the need to leave and stop people getting in. Let the uncertainty drive some of the horror. Give the people who run it a chance to fill elements in of their own, as well. 

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