Coalescent Organism

[Mason]

Are there any stats for coda (or any other rule set) that for the coalescent organism? I'm thinking about doing a "Phantoms" inspired episode or two for my new game.

[selek]

Give each of the characters short-term memory loss, and then toss them into the mission in media res. (TNG: Conundrum is a good example of the technique).

Little hints and tell-tales should reveal that there's a coalescent life form aboard: trails of goo, a blob that replicates the doctor's hand, etc.

As the story advances, have each of the characters make Willpower tests to avoid behaving strangely. At first, the lapses should be relatively minor (such as absolutely craving a food they normally avoid, scuplting the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes, cuddling with the Klingon doctor, etc).

As the story advances, the TNs for the Willpower gets harder and harder and the impulses get wierder and wierder.

Your heroes should pick up on the situation fairly quickly: the idea is to keep the players guessing about which one of their characters (if any) actually is the alien.

Finally, one of the characters suffers a Disastrous failure and reverts back to its gelatinous form, leading to the climactic battle, etc.

Once it's over with, the previous host can be found stashed inside an air duct or taped to the underside of a vending machine ( or whatever floats your boat).

Instead of simply absorbing/killing the previous victim, this version of the creature creates a symbiotic link and feeds off the energy of its host until the latter dies of starvation or dehydration, at which point it moves on.

[Mason]

That's an interesting idea, I'm going with the haunted house in space feel of it. They find an old star fleet vessel orbiting a world, completely empty, everything put away neatly, nothing touched.

Little by little as they explore the vessel, phantoms are spotted, and then disappear, after a while, several extras begin to disappear only to reappear in another place.

Going for very creepy here.

[selek]

That's an interesting idea, I'm going with the haunted house in space feel of it. They find an old star fleet vessel orbiting a world, completely empty, everything put away neatly, nothing touched.

Little by little as they explore the vessel, phantoms are spotted, and then disappear, after a while, several extras begin to disappear only to reappear in another place.

Going for very creepy here.

Make sure you use your mood lighting. Good descriptions and good plots aside, it's hard to creep out players in a brightly lit, orderly gaming room...

[Tricky]

Situation almost sounds like John Carpenter's The Thing, with paranoia setting in amongst a group of people who have worked together for months and or years, after encountering an unknowable and almost unbelieveable enemy.

Do you plan on using the organism as it's shown on the episode, or using a modified version of it? One thing I thought of was something I remember from an old Dr. Who (Tom Baker) episode, with giant space wasps and a sleeper ship. Somehow, a queen of this race of giant space wasps got aboard the ship, and laid an egg on a sleeping crewman. The normal host for these wasps was something like cattle on their homeworld, but somehow the larva that formed from absorbing a sentient human also became intelligent (and it retained traces of his memories and personality), making a dangerous lifeform into an extreme threat (i mean, now they understood how to run a ship, what guns were, etc.).

What if your organisim now LIKED being a person, and didnt want to go back to absorbing more primative species? As Wilford Brimley said in The Thing

http://youtu.be/aIUdssOAn0s?t=1m35s

[Mason]

I'm probably going to modify it a bit, I was inspired by both The Thing and Phantoms, figured it would be something interesting for the players.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

A short version of a long interpretation of the Carpenter Thing: it's actual intelligence is directly related to whether or not it is actively expressing the potential to have the biological apparatus for intelligence. If it's in the shape of a dog, it has the intelligence of a dog. If it's in the shape of a human, it is as intelligent as that human. (This means that the whole spaceship-building thing has to be operating at some sort of reflexive level—the guy building the spaceship might not understand the compulsion.) As we see in the film, it generally only turns into a giant hybrid monster if it feels threatened. This might be the same with Rocha / the dog.

[Tomcat]

Our latest episode of Star Trek is called Ghosts in the Machine - although the game is currently on hold, as I am heavy into Star Wars Saga right now.

Anyway, the premise of the story is sort of what you are looking at doing. The creepy feel was attained for my players using eerie descriptions and stressing the alone feeling.

In our story, the Merrimac is discovered outside a star cluster floating amongst an asteroid field. Her hull is open to the vacuum of space and her warp core is cold. The impulse engines show signs of their destruction from a large piece of rock hitting the ship. The ships auxilliary reactor is functioning and so some lights still are lit; gravity still functions; and a transponder still weakly transmits.

The captain orders a shuttle to be launched and our players go over to the derelict ship. They find crewmembers scattered about the ship, dead and frozen in place. They also find there is a darker presence that seems to hate the fact that they are there and trouble commences.

I used things like hearing whispers; seeing motion down a corridor littered with frozen corpses; lights that go on or off; and also the occassional thump or slam against the hull of the shuttle as it's parked in the Mac's shuttle bay.

The game is a blast!

[Tricky]

Ok, a quick question, and then an idea that formed in my head just now.
The ship is open to space, right? Are they going to close it up and restore atmosphere, or explore in suits? I was wondering about that last part: If they stayed in suits, a CO couldn't get to them (a normal one, anyway), but would they want to deal with all those bodies once they restored atmosphere?

My idea though, might mitigate that part. Instead of a CO, what if it was some kind of energy being. It used to live near the star cluster; just soaking up the solar wind and whatnot. Then, the Merrimack came by, in serious distress. This creature had never encountered the energy types the ship gave off, and they were delicious: electrical, subspace, exotic particles and more. The ship was a banquet.
Then it got to the psychic energies, specificly the little flashes of emotion and thoughts that occured when the members of the crew died. It was like a heady drink to the creature, and it drank deep. Not out of malice, but simply out of instinct. And then, the crew and their psychic energies were gone. Then, slowly, the other engergies went away too, until just one back up power source remained. It wasn't enough to keep him going, so the creature went to sleep.
Then, a new ship, and more minds. But this time, it knows it needs to drag out the experience, so it's attempting to manipulate them into A) mental states that give it the most energy, and B) taking it back to the Cluster (it doesn't quite know about the ship....yet).

Long story short: this thing has basicly became a classic haunting entity (it can recreate elements of the 'death echos' of the Merrimac crew, and uses them to scare/manipulate the pcs), and in the end, they can Ghostbuster it (using some tech or ability to disrupt it) or they can Ghost it (take it back to the cluster, where it belongs, freeing it from its imprisonment/addiction).

[Tomcat]

You almost pegged down my story, but it is a bit different -

In our game, the entities that soar around the star cluster are huge beings made of radiation - peaceful, harmonious with life around them. They are of simple intelligence but vast power. If you were to think of a comparison, it would be the equivalent to whales or dolphins.

Anyway, the Mac is attacked by Orions, damaged and drifts into the asteroid field. Her surviving crew trying desparately to communicate a distress call along with keep themselves alive. The ship's impulse engines are destroyed, the warp core goes cold, and APR can only last so long. Then the ship is opened to space and the crew begin to die.

The radiation beings, sympathetic to the crews distress create a portal within the ship's hull that will transform any who pas through into a new state of living - radiation energy. But some who cross are scared, angry, or in some other grief or turmoil - all of these emotions are alien to the luminal beings and so they do not accept these new 'spirits'.

These transferred crew become shades of life, haunting the Mac and hating what has happened to them. They are not able to directly infuence the material world, but they use fear, whispers, darkness, and lies to cause people to hurt themselves.

So when our players arrive, they are new fodder for these unhappy beings that move through the Mac's fiber-optic lines. As energy beings, they make it to the PC's own starship by moving through communication transmission waves and by stowing away within the PC's machinery and shuttle.

[Doug Taylor]

Very interesting concepts here!

In our supers game (V&V), one GM once had something pretty similar when we were doing a space mission. He had zombies attacking the crew, phasing in and out like ghosts.

In a recent Halloween-themed story (also V&V), I did a spooky-vibed session. Like was said, lighting and sound effects can be huge towards getting the right effect. I had only candlelight, and borrowed a friend's sountracks from scary movies. This contributed immensely to the Haunted House feel I was going for, and my players really enjoyed it.

[Mason]

I'm planning on using music from Prometheus for the game.

[Mason]

Since I'm going to be starting my first game missing one player due to real life problems I'm putting this story off for awhile.