One-shot: Punkbusters

2055 Los Angeles has expanded subterraneously. Elon Musk’s legacy tunnels and bootleg basement construction provide a place for people of all sorts to escape the heat–literally and figuratively.

You’re a member of the LA Special Containment Patrol (LA:SCP), sort of like a cyberpunk ghostbusting unit. Weird things are happening. Good luck out there.

Spoiler warning for Introductory Antimemetics. This is a one-shot based heavily on SCP lore, and new missions can be adapted from the files there. If your players are already familiar with Introductory Antimemetics, the last battle will be too easy for them.

This follows the story format 1, 2, Twist: There are two official missions, then an encounter with a twist. Run time is between 2-5 hours. The more people, the longer this will take.

A few documents should be printed out ahead of time.

Characters

Director Mary Hutchinson, your team’s dispatcher for the day. She shows up on a large screen in the LA:SCP base, as well as communicating through your badge.

Alastair Grey, appearing as a business executive. Only asks questions. Not fully conscious, just a representation of a human.

Setting and Flavor

Travel underground happens by autonomous vehicles hailed via almost any electronic device. Boston Dynamics “Doggos” roam pedestrian and off-map tunnels as delivery vehicles and cop mounts.

Bootleg augments are done underground at street clinics. Implanted LEDs powered by skin conductivity are the most common one. Dramatic plastic surgery, sense enhancements, and electronic tattoos are also popular.

The lights in the tunnel reflect time of day outside: blue in the day, red at night.

“Cheapest dentist you’ll ever find!”
Genetically modified giant rat pet on leash
A man missing one of his eyes is standing in the middle of the street, shouting about the evils and inherent sin of bioagumentation. “Shut up, Peter, you’re just saying that cuz you can’t afford augs!”
An old woman wearing a VR visor bumps into the party
“She Blinded Me With Science!” blasts from a bar
Shady dealer notices badges, smiles, backs away. “I’m getting the stuff from my car!” and ditches
8 legged bootleg Doggo passes over the party
Converted ambulance with cut off top drives by with disco lights

The Base

The base is a large converted warehouse in the LA warehouse district. Characters begin in the sleeping area. The tools room has all of the tools they bought with their point buys. The training room contains some mats, weights, and punching bags. They enter the underground through a large elevator.

LA:SCP Base Map JPG Download

The server room contains tables full of monitors and several large server towers. Take care to describe this. The tables have usb sticks scattered across them, as well as some on the floor.

The medical bay has four vats with naked bodies floating in some sort of fluid, as well as a locked chest with blue amnestic drugs. If a character dies in the first mission, they are replaced by one of the spare bodies.

Missions

The Trashbeast

“A humanoid entity is roaming the underground near the city downtown. It was reported after removing the hand of one victim. There are no known fatalities at this time. Your job is to neutralize the target, one way or another.” – Director Hutchinson

The beast is reportedly last seen in the utility tunnels, and might be in the dark off-the-grid tunnels by now. It can be tracked by its weird sonic signature, the screams of victims, or whatever the party needs.

When located, it looks like nothing more than a pile of trash, containing pots and pans, a refrigerator, cardboard. It will attack and advance on the party when disturbed, doing bash attacks with parts of its body. If it overwhelms someone, begins to consume their body parts like a woodchipper.

It’s vulnerable to fire. Inside the refrigerator is a phylactery that looks like an overgrown terrarium, but of flesh. Destroying this will make the trashbeast collapse.

Info Spiders

“A series of unusual reports are coming from a mall down in Beverly Hills. People coming in as one person and leaving thinking they are someone else, down to speaking new foreign languages. We ruled out drugs. There are no signs of violence except for circular bruises on the victim’s legs and arms.” – Director Hutchinson

“This may be a memetic or antimemetic hazard, so we are authorizing you to use the kits in the med cabinet.” Tools in this cupboard include syringes full of blue serum.. These are amnesiac drugs that cause forgetting of all info for 5 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day. There are enough for each player to have one full set.

“New task: Recover at least one of the spider bodies. Keep it as intact as you can.”

The Spiders resemble a virus, with a plunger and injector located on the bottom of them. They work in groups to inject garbage data into their targets. Easy to kill with a solid hit, but there are a lot of them.

They inject information to an overwhelming degree, overwriting memory or filling brain with out of context facts and skills. When a hit lands, draw garbage data from the page “Junk Data”. This works well cut up and stuffed in an envelope.

Junk Info Dump PDF Download

The Nest unfolds out of the fiberoptic data line in a maintenance area of the mall. It resembles a grotesque metal octopus, with no visible center, just a twitching, pulsing mess of cables melted together spewing new spiders and electric sparks. A large amount of damage will cause the nest to retreat back inside the data line, while destroying the data line itself will starve it out.

When the Nest makes direct contact with the party, they need to save to avoid getting a major delusion:

Belief that your body map is that of a velociraptor: 3 feet tall with talons
UFOs are terrifyingly true. You have been abducted, once. Bright lights remind you of this.
You believe that you’re a spy for another agency.
Any injectables (amnestics and mnestics) are disgusting pro-vaxxer paraphernalia
You have a lot of imposter syndrome. Should they really let you on these missions, using these dangerous tools?
Intense phobia of the dark.
You’ve been a plumber your whole life. You constantly notice water piping and always find how the situation relates to plumbing.

Blue amnestic drugs will prevent delusions and junk information from taking hold.

Alastair Grey

“Hell of a first day, isn’t it?” – Alastair Grey

When the team returns to the base after the Infospiders mission, they’re greeted by Alastair Grey.

“What do you mean? This isn’t your first day. Who’s talking? I don’t see anyone. My memetic shielding software isn’t letting me see you either, this is bad news.” – Director Hutchinson

The information in the Alastair Grey PDF will noisily begin printing from a computer in the server room.

Alastair Grey Information PDF Download

Attacks: Alastair Grey will go up to a player and ask them an innocuous question. They roll a save (DC 14) and forget that information on a failure. The severity of the memory loss elevates.

(2) Name, family, job, friends, hobbies
(2) Appearance, personality, ability to recognize self / team members, layout of the building
(2) Ability to read, unique skills, understanding of objects around you, understanding of languages
(1) How breathe, talk, see, stand
Death

Weakness: Anything full of data will hit him, causing an “Ow” or description of Alastair in pain. There are numerous computers, servers, and usb sticks around the base. Hitting him with enough servers will kill him, reconnecting the party with the real world.

Ending

If Alistair Grey is defeated, Mary Hutchinson will come back online and tell the characters that their training has served them well. This was not their first day, they’ve been working at LA:SCP for 4 years now. They’ll put their heads together again, no doubt. They’ve done it before.

If Alistair Grey isn’t defeated, the vats will break open, and Director Hutchinson will great the new players, saying that there has been a tragic mishap and that their service will be needed now. There is no sign of Alastair Grey, for now…

Rules

This is rules light so as not to need prep on the part of the players, and is inclusive of people new to RPGs.

There are three stats: Brawn (Strength / Constitution), Brains (Intelligence / Wisdom), and Moxie (Dexterity / Charisma). Each character has one strong stat that they roll with advantage, one stat they’re ok at, and one dump stat that they roll with disadvantage.

You’ll need a lot of D20s. Advantage = roll with 2 D20s, take higher number. Disadvantage = roll 2 D20s, take the lower number.

Each character has 2 wounds. If they are strong in Brawn, they have 3. Wound levels are mild / moderate / severe.

Character Build

All characters get a name, a background, and points to buy items. This should take less than 30 minutes.

Background gives them a +2 for their specialty skills. No promises of balance.

Occult Historian (Occult, History, Perception)
Bruiser (Intimidate, Unarmed combat)
Fast Talker (Persuade, Doublethink)
Iron Man (Carry, +1 health)
Acrobat (Acrobatics, Climb, Jump)
Medic (First Aid, Medicine)
Investigator (Communications, Arts/Crafts/Photography)
Head Doctor (Psychology, Doublethink)
Sharpshooter (Firearms, Ranged Weapons)
Mad Scientist (Chemistry, Physics, Biology)
Hacker (Research, Computers)
Light Fingers (Slight of Hand, Stealth, Drive)

Players get 5 buy points to start, and as a DM you can reward players with points after missions as seems fit. Also not particularly balanced.

1 point	2 points	3 points
Shooting earmuff + blindfold	Taser	First aid kit
Sharpies + duct tape	Heavy hammer	Pistol and ammo
Flashlight	Grenade	Rifle and ammo
GoPro	Flashbang x 2	Bulletproof vest
Polaroid camera	Bowie Knife	Industrial vacuum cleaner (backpack style)
Hard drive	Fire extinguisher	Rocket skates
Lighter x 2	Bow and arrows x10	Infrared goggles
Spray paint x 2	Nootropic spray x3
Baseball bat
Hand radio set

RPG Self

This Google Doc is my todo list.

I’ve played a lot of video games and RPGs, and the way characters in them pursue goals feels so compelling. I’ve been writing up goals as quests and self-improvement tasks as ways to increase stats, and my meaning-maker loves this. Being productive is awesome.

I don’t force my perception of life to line up with the system, but rather try to make the system match my real life—while adding a good dose of dramatic and whimsical flair.

The RPG sheet is for me, not me for the RPG sheet. Sometimes my overall path changes out from under me, and none of the quests are applicable anymore. Then it’s time to find new goals that are compelling and write those up.

The framework is highly inspired by Mage: The Ascension.

In general, stats go up by an order of magnitude. 0 is below average, 1 is average for a human adult, 2 is average for someone who has put in a good amount of deliberate effort, 3 is the level of someone who has dedicated their life to this, and so on. 5 is incredibly rare. 0, Unskilled: No training in the ability; rely on natural talent.

So for something like reputation, being well-regarded by 1000 people might be Reputation 1. The next level would be at least 10,000 and so on.

Traits are mostly for flavor. Next up, quests:

For quests, the difficulty of them is related to the Impact Level. I can comfortably do Level 0 and 1 quests, maybe taking a month for the hard ones. Doing a Level 2 quest might take me half a year or longer or a lot of resources I don’t have yet. One day I’ll get to Level 3. Like with Skills, the difficulty goes up approximately an order of magnitude with each increase in number.

Poiesis

Poiesis is bringing into existence what did not exist before. It is the power of manifestation and reification. Mage: The Ascension refers to this as Prime. And that is what I’m doing now, by writing this.

A few months ago, I tried to manifest an idea of mine into an organization (a startup). But the more progress I made at manifesting it in the larger world, the less buy-in I had with myself. At some point I couldn’t convince myself (let alone anyone else) that it was worth the effort to try to manifest it anymore. This was disheartening! It still seems like a good idea. So why couldn’t I realize it in the world?

I think there’s a missing skill. Some people seem to have lots of it. And I don’t yet have enough of it. So, how does one get better at the skill of raw manifestation?

Here’s my model for how poiesis works so far:

Vision. This will determine how much energy is necessary to manifest it. Proper nouns / naming, consistency, repetition, and details enhance vision. The more vision, the less susceptible this is to distortion from others. Sarah Constantin wrote up this advice for reifying her organization.
Buy-in. This can be from yourself, your friends, a target audience, etc. They can lend their poiesis to co-manifest your vision. Subskills are getting, keeping, and controlling buy-in.
Reaction to challenges. When met with opposing poiesis, what happens? Some strategies are avoiding, ignoring, and convincing. Lack of ability to stand up to opposing poiesis is a reason why some people HAVE TO surround themselves with yes-men or disconnect from reality to go forward.

More examples of the thing I’m talking about:

Improv is all poiesis. If I walk into a scene and say, “Stop stealing my horse!” and the other person says “I’m not stealing your horse,” it’s hard to move forward. Buy-in is key, but this also teaches strategies to maintain poiesis in the face of resistance. “Oh, you would deny it, thief? The nerve!”

In Dungeons and Dragons as GM, I’m learning that consistency of the world over time and small details add to the realism and player buy-in. You can’t lead DnD if the players don’t buy-in.

An event can happen by telling 100 people to come to a place at a time. If there are too many setbacks, I lose the ability to feel like I can really make 100 people come to this place at a time. Losing the feeling of confidence is similar to losing the ability.

“Where do you want to eat?” “Let’s go to Angeline’s unless you have a strong preference against that.” This has gotten easier over time.

Poiesis is a skill that could be valued and sought-after in the same way that one might train up in Charisma. I don’t see much about it in the common discourse. What are ways to train up in poiesis?

Mindscapes

3 years ago, I stared at a crystal ball until I happened to hallucinate a house on a hill. Over time, that house became my mindscape, a consistent internal visualization that I’ve checked in on over the years.

It’s no place I’ve been before. A log cabin / hewn stone castle is half-buried on a craggy hill studded with lichen-covered rocks. No trees around. Steep stairs. Mist.

In the center of the cabin is a pillaring fireplace, around which the floor is sunken in and filled with sheepskins and pillows. To the left, there’s a staircase that goes up one level and down.. who knows how many levels down. I can’t see much down there. It’s dark.

My mindscape is also a memory palace. I put a strand of rope on the mantel above the fireplace three years ago, and it’s still there. More recently I added a bottle filled with a brightly glowing spark.

I also like to summon models of people I know (“daemons”) and talk with them. It’s a good exercise for empathy. And tiring.

I can only access this place while sitting down. My eyes can be open if not much is going on. I tend to see myself in 3rd person, probably because of how many video games I’ve played. I wonder what that does for my sense of internal cohesion (“self” as one).

Sitting in my mindscape feels peaceful and safe, more safe than I’ve been in a long time. Surprisingly, when I’m there I don’t feel alone.