itch.io

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. 

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. 

I thought about that and I think I decided against it for good reason. It's one think to understand the region and it's another thing to think the job is worth taking. 

Old Mo is something of a complex character. Giving her the background to help game runners understand her perspective  fits in better with the Pitch than the Background in my mind. 

I wrote this on almost a haunted house story foundation. Get them in, constrain them and pull them in deeper. 

I think I've run something similar as introductory adventure in format. One I padded out a little. 

I wish I played up the puppet angle a little more. Scattered them around for a bit of colour, flavour, someone with a mostly appreciated sense of humour making the station a bit brighter. Or perhaps used them to be the occasional scare, like Jonesy in Alien. 

If it does have a weakness, it is that you need a tighter grasp of the group. You have to be able to play with them. Cut off the right discussions and let the right discussions go on to keep the tone, tension.