FIREWALL BRIEFING

SUMMONS: PCs are summoned to Nova York. No indication of what their mission may be. Fake IDs are not required, although caution never hurt anyone.

RESEARCH (-20): May allow PCs to pick up some of the details from the briefing before arriving.

VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: Hosted in a VR simulspace as soon as the last PCs’ transport is close enough to mitigate transmission delays.

HOST: Depicted as a featureless shadow. Infomorph in a heavily secured eidolon using a suite of kinesic-denying software.

ITINERARY: Firewall has been tracking a series of apparent async events on Nova York over the past six weeks. Rumors or confirmed reports include:

• A telepathic blast allowing someone to summon medical assistance for someone injured in one of the nickel mines.
• A beaten wife causing her husband to collapse through sheer anger. (The muslim community on Nova York is interpreting the incident as a punishment of sin.)
• A series of minor robberies which may have been aided by post-hypnotic suggestions. (Although traditional cyberbrain-hacking may be the actual culprit.)
• Everyone in an area reportedly “sharing the same thoughts”.

Firewall’s initial suspicion was this might be evidence for a new async. Or possibly an async gang trying to expand into Nova York.

Over the last ten days (which may have been while the PCs were in transit), however, there have been three major incidents:

• Over the course of a week, roughly a dozen people were struck with complete and total amnesia. (They’ve been restored from backups. Medical examinations have found no physical cause for their condition.)
• Twenty people in a Banco de Nova York facility simultaneously experienced a “shared delusion” in which they all dived into the caldera of Olympus Mons.
• A fifty-foot-long section of corridor in the Skin was found transmuted into gold.

A fourth incident – the most significant to date – occurred last night at a club named the Black Light.

• Initial reports suggest a massive incident featuring Casimir force repulsion. To date, only exsurgent asyncs have demonstrated the ability to manipulate the Casimir effect.
• The Black Light is located on the 276^th sunward floor of the Harrington Torque, one of the kilometers-tall spindle-scrapers that crisscross Nova York.

The Black Light Incident represents our best lead. Your mission is to identify the cause of the Nova York Events and, if it represents a threat, put an end to it.

BACKGROUND – NOVA YORK (9 METIS)

Nova York is described in detail in Rimward, pg. 26. This section is a brief summary of information from Rimward and also contains original material pertinent to this scenario.

• Population: 500,000 (third largest habitat in the belt)
• 9 Metis: Large nickel-iron and silicate asteroid. (Not to be confused with the moon of Jupiter by the same name.)

THE CAVERN

• CENTRAL CAVERN: Spherical, 4 km in diameter, 200m beneath the asteroid’s surface.
• LIGHTING: Huge light tubes in the outer walls. At night, the lights of the buildings cause the surface of the sphere to resemble an enormous geode.
• GRAVITY: Microgravity of 1/140^th g. (Up and down have little meaning. Falling is irrelevant as air pressure and low gravity eliminate any risk of injury.)
• SPINDLE-SPIRES: Thousands of exceptionally tall and fragile-looking buildings that extend between 100 and 150m above the surface, with a large number that extend all the way across the cavern.
  • Durable frame, with reflective or translucent materials that play with ambient light in the cavern.
  • Residents often jump from one building to another.

THE SKIN: Refers to all the tunnels burrowing through the asteroid around the central cavern. Most of these are the result of mining, but many have been converted to low-rent housing and the like.

NOYO ECONOMICS

• NOYO: The locally produced currency. No other form of currency is accepted.
  • Value of the noyo decreases over time from the date of issue, which is meant to stimulate spending, discourage currency speculation, and prevent wealth accumulation.
  • Value of noyo is pegged to local reputation network, so people with high Noyo rep have their currency devalue at a slower pace.
  • Tends to warp the local rep economy – people tend to avoid “narcing” on their friends because it can create a negative feedback loop when money is on the line.

• BANCO de NOVA YORK (BdNY): Manages all financial transactions and is the habitat’s legal custodian.
  • Residents and businesses rent their roofs; no one owns property.

• EXTROPIAN: Other than the Noyo and BdNY, Nova York is generally extropian.
  • Private contracts for security, insurance, legal code, etc.
  • Each building is often a collective (either closely-knit or purely functional), often sharing contractural services.

NOYO CULTURE

• Cultural melting pot.
  • Wide variety of religious memeplexes.
• Heavily based around visual arts – sculpture, architecture, light-sculpting, sensory experiences, AR experiences, aerial dance routines, etc.
  • Planning to host an Intergalactic Art and Culture Show next year to draw tourists and residents.

BACKGROUND – PSI-EPSILON OPENER

Psi-opener drugs, as described in the core rulebook (pg. 325), are a variant of the Watts-MacLeod strain that temporarily imbue users with the ability to use one particular psi sleight. Neuralite (a well-cloaked subsidiary of the Cognite hypercorp) has been developing an experimental psi-epsilon opener. They’re hoping to unlock the powerful psi-epsilon abilities available only to exsurgents, but crossing the relatively benign Watts-MacLeod virus with active strains of the exsurgent virus is obviously incredibly dangerous.

The psi-epsilon opener is a binary compound: The epsilon primer and the epsilon psike-out. The opener only becomes fully active when the epsilon psike-out is taken by a primed subject.

Testing of the compound proved difficult because it had a very low success rate in laboratory trials. Neuralite’s scientists estimated that for every 1,000 test subjects they brought in, only one might actually manifest psi powers due to the safeguards they had added to the virus’ DNA.

As a result, Neuralite decided to test the compound by pumping the first part of the compound into the H2O supply of Nova York in order to saturate the population in preparation for the “activation event”. Their theory is that when they add the epsilon psike-out to the water supply in a few days, they’ll create roughly 500 powerful asyncs.

The early, minor async events in Nova York are due to an unexpected side effect from the epsilon primer: Citizens who are already asyncs (many of them minor asyncs who don’t even realize they have powers) are experiencing spontaneous and uncontrollable outbursts of psi energy.

The major async events in the last few weeks are the result of Neuralite performing isolated tests of the epsilon psike-out compound.

Epsilon Primer: The primer is essentially a complicated receptive capsid and does not contain any active exsurgent virus. This means that most people exposed to the virus are at no risk and their bodies will flush the primer out of their system within two weeks. The exception to this are asyncs, who must make a Moxie x 20 test once per day while exposed to the drug. On a failure, they’ll manifest a powerful and out-of-control version of a psi sleight. This experience generally inflicts 1d10+5 SV.

Epsilon Psike-Out: If taken by someone under the effects of the epsilon primer, the victim must make a Moxie x 10 test. (An async suffers a -30 penalty on this check.) On a success, the drug only has the effect of a normal psi-opener and psike-out (see Eclipse Phase, pg. 325). On a failure, the victim receives the permanent use of a random psi-epsilon sleight and also benefits from the effects of psike-out. Unfortunately, this also means that he victim is infected with the haunting version of the exsurgent virus (see Eclipse Phase, pg. 366). Each time they use the psi-epsilon sleight, there is a 10% chance that this will upgrade to the mindstealer version of the exsurgent virus (see Eclipse Phase, pg. 367).

ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

The epsilon psike-out is scheduled to be released 1d10+1 days after the PCs arrive. (It may happen sooner if Neuralite realizes they’re being investigated and Radom or Vangelis decide to pull the trigger.)

If the PCs fail to prevent the release of the epsilon psike-out, it’s a catastrophe: Neuralite’s estimates are off by a factor of ten (and they also don’t realize they’re creating exsurgents instead of empowered transhuamns). 5,000 psi exsurgents will be created in Nova York (emerging over the course of 1-2 weeks). At fully 1% of the population, they probably can’t be contained. The end result is that Nova York is likely to be quarantined or destroyed.

REVELATION LIST

INVESTIGATING OTHER INCIDENTS

Following up on the events prior to the Black Light is not necessarily fruitless, but there’s not much to go on:

• The people who experienced the telepathic blast have not repeated the experience (although one is, in fact, a weak async and just doesn’t know it).
• The beaten wife is currently being sheltered by her mosque. (She’s an async trying to deny her abilities due to a religious belief that they come from Shaitan.)
• There are no functional leads on the robberies.
• The people suffering from amnesia have no memory of the event (no pun intended). None of them are responsible for the amnesia and neither their egos nor their morphs have anything abnormal about them.
• There’s no indication of who (or what) was responsible for the transmutation (and the owners of the mine have sealed the area off).

Tissue samples taken from the telepath or the beaten wife contain high concentrations of the psi-epsilon opener. It’s difficult to isolate by itself (-20 modifier), but comparing these samples to other relevant samples provides a +10 modifier to those checks. (See Node 3.)

Go to Node 1: The Black Light

One of the problems with running military games in an RPG is the chain of command: Realistically speaking, even on remote missions with a small team (i.e., ideal RPG fodder) there should still be one guy who’s actually in charge of the op. This can either be an NPC (which can lead to railroading or, for the GM not interested in railroading, a really tricky balancing act between having the NPC commander do their job vs. letting the players take the initiative). Or it can be one of the PCs (which can remove the dilemma created by requiring the GM to issue literal orders to the PCs, but can also result in incredibly fragile gameplay that’s highly dependent on the player running the captain).

On my bucket list is running a Star Trek-like open table campaign where every player designs a captain and their bridge crew. When a player requests a session, that player would be running the captain and anyone else who shows up for the session would pick up the roles of their crew troupe-style (meaning that those roles would, over time, be played by a variety of people). This doesn’t so much solve the problem as work around it by giving everyone their turn in the captain’s chair.

Here’s another thought: Everyone at the table takes on the role of a bridge crew member. But then you also have an Everyone is John-style cap system which gives everybody at the table control over one “slice” of the captain’s personality / skill set and the ability to bid for immediate control over the situation. Unlike Everyone is John — where the character being portrayed is literally suffering from multiple personality order — the goal of the table here is still to portray a coherent character; it’s just that the disproportionate agency possessed by the commanding officer is now jointly shared by the entire table. (Which makes it much more closely resemble the rough-and-tumble democracy of a typical RPG group where everybody usually gets a say in what the next course of action will be, but occasionally somebody will just charge off and force people to follow in their wake.)

First Secret of Prep: It will always, always, always add value to your game and make for a better session IF (and this is a very important if) you focus your prep on the stuff you can’t improvise at the table.

Second Secret of Prep: What you can improvise effectively will depend on your own strengths as a GM, it will change over time, and it will vary based on the system you’re running. I talked about one facet of this in The Hierarchy of Reference, but it applies across the board. Maybe you struggle with having dynamic battles featuring clever tactics, so you spend a little effort prepping Tucker’s Kobolds. Maybe you find it easier to run Pathfinder monsters if you make a point of highlighting feats you’re unfamiliar with and jotting down a note about what they do. Personally, I know that I get too tight-lipped with NPCs revealing the deep secrets of a campaign (because I ruined a campaign once by getting too loose-lipped with those secrets and it’s a Pandora’s Box you can’t close — if the PCs don’t know something they can always learn it later; if they learn too much they can’t forget it), so personally I focus a certain amount of effort on prepping exactly what NPCs know.

Third Secret of Prep: Some stuff you find hard to improvise can be made easy to improvise if you prep the right tools. Procedural content generators are an obvious example of this. But it can also include stuff like “if you’re bad at coming up with names on the fly, prep a list of names”.

Particularly valuable prep targets, of course, are the things that can never be improvised on the fly. Props and handouts are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

Go to Part 1

THE BLACK POUCH

The black pouch is an insidious device, designed to punish the greedy and prey upon the indigent. It appears as a normal coin bag, made out of black leather. When it is first found, the black pouch will contain a single gold coin. When someone withdraws the coin, they will lose 1 hp as the black pouch drains the living energy from their body. Unfortunately, the magic of the pouch will also work to disguise this parasitic act from the victim’s consciousness: The victim must make a Wisdom check (DC 20). If the check is a failure, the DM should keep a secret total of the victim’s total hit points (this damage heals normally).

The next time the pouch is opened, it will contain 1+1d6 coins. Each coin removed will, once again, inflict 1 hp of damage. (A Wisdom check should be made each time a character reaches into the pouch. Note that characters can remove more than one coin each time they reach into the bag.) Each time the black pouch is opened after it has been emptied of coins, it will have generated the same number of coins as the last time, plus an additional 1d6 coins.

Recipients of the black pouch will often count themselves blessed – but if they are not careful, they will be killed by their supposed boon. If the character withdraws a number of coins from the pouch sufficient to result in death, have them roll a Fortitude save (DC 20). If successful they will survive with 1 hp remaining (and be aware of what the black pouch is doing to them, if they weren’t already). If the roll is a failure, then the black pouch has drained the last of their life from them.

Those who discover the truth of the black pouch will at least count themselves lucky for the wealth it has given them. But even that, unfortunately, is nothing more than a cruel trick: The black pouch does not create the gold it offers, it merely teleports it from the nearest available source… which is almost always the money pouch of the very person drawing from the pouch.

Caster Level: 9^th
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, vampiric touch, teleport
Market Price: 50,000 gp

CHEST OF ENTANGLEMENT

In many tomes of arcane knowledge, the chest of entanglement is known by the name of kingbane. To most, the origins of this obscure title are lost to the long tides of time. Those fortunate enough to have obtained a rare copy of Nardonne’s A History of the Kings and Their Follies, however, know of a tale that may lie at the heart of this matter: King Edan XIII of Oldren (a kingdom long since lost to the surface of the world), it is written, waged a long and terrible war with the elves of the wood.

In the end, Edan was victorious. But the elves were bitter in their loss, and so they plotted their revenge even as their enemies celebrated their triumph: When King Edan demanded that his new subjects gather his bounty, they did so – placing it within great chests of oaked, each carved with all the skill the elves could muster. Such skill was great, and, indeed, the chests themselves were a treasure beyond value.

But they were also a trap. King Edan marveled at their beauty, and stepped down from his throne of war when they arrived at his woodland court. “And so,” Nardonne writes, “Their trap was sprung. The king was bound and those who lurked in ambush struck. And King Edan was no more.”

Although Nardonne’s narrative does not positively identify the nature of the trap contained in the chests, the description he provides of the chests leads many to suspect they may have been chests of entanglement – the bane of King Edan.

A chest of entanglement is an ordinary, wooden chest, decorated with exquisite carvings of vines and foliage. Attempts to detect traps – either with the Rogue class ability or the find traps spell, for example – will fail, as the chest is not trapped. A successful Search check (DC 25), however, will reveal that one of the carved leaves is a concealed panel, which can be swiveled to one side to reveal a small hole, no larger than a man’s thumb. A detect magic spell will reveal a faint aura emanating from inside the chest.

A chest of entanglement is filled with two thousand gold coins. When the chest is opened, the coins will fly out of the chest and begin clinging to the skin and clothes of whoever opened the chest (if more than one character opened the chest, the coins will attack one of them randomly). The afflicted character must make a Reflex save at DC 20 once every round in order to evade the coins – a failure, however, indicates that the coins have successfully coated the character’s body, placing them under the effects of an entangle spell (-2 penalty to attack rolls, -4 penalty to effective Dexterity – characters attempting to cast a spell in this condition, or while being attacked by the coins, must make a Concentration check at DC 15 or lose the spell).

As with the spell entangle the character can escape the coins with a successful Strength check at DC 20, but the coins will continue to pursue them (forcing them to, once gain, make Reflex saves). The coins will not relent until the lid of the chest has been closed – at which point they will fly back into the chest through the concealed panel.

Caster Level: 3rd
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, entangle
Market Price: 6,000 gp

REFLECTIONS ON COINS OF THE DAMNED

The first thing I remembered upon rediscovering this article was the difficulty I had writing a new introduction that basically covered the exact same ground as the introduction from the first article.

I think this similarity of introductions also contributed to why the article lay forgotten on my hard drive for so long: I’d see the file, but end up just assuming that it was a different title for “Gilted Fiends”. In fact, “Coins of the Damned” was the original title of “Gilted Fiends” and it was changed during the development process because Dragon Magazine didn’t want the word “damned” appearing in their pages. Campaign Magazine didn’t have such qualms, and so it made sense to recycle the title for the sequel. (Which no doubt also contributed to my confusion.)

Go to Part 1

I was playing in a sci-fi game and my hacker wanted to set up a dead man’s switch on the environmental systems in a space station: When the melee characters launched their assault, I’d pull the dead man’s switch. The GM had me roll to set up the dead man switch… and then roll every single round to maintain it… and then roll again to throw it even after I’d set it up successfully.

Eventually, given the endless series of checks, I inevitably failed.

Laying aside the fundamental misunderstanding of what a dead man switch is, the negative effect of this sort of thing can be quite severe in an RPG session. In this case, the group quickly realized that we should never, ever try to make a plan: If we just improvised something, it would be resolved in a single roll and we’d have a chance to succeed. If we actually put together a plan, on the other hand, it would just invite lots and lots of dice rolling until the plan failed.

The solution is fairly simple: Let It Ride. Have the character make a single skill check that determines the ultimate success or failure of their endeavor.

Another solution is a complex skill check (making multiple checks until X successes are achieved). These tend to be very elegant in dice pool systems, and when you want multiple checks to be made they’re an effective framework for allowing that without the all-or-nothing of a single check ruining the entire attempt.

GM DON’T #2.1: FAILURE IS POINTLESS

The flip-side of rolling to failure is the “roll pointlessly until you succeed” thing. For example, you’ll often run into games where the PCs need to unlock a door: There’s no time pressure and no consequences for failure, and yet the GM will sit there and have the PCs roll over and over and over again until they finally succeed.

One way to deal with that is something like the Take 20 mechanic: If you can eventually succeed at this, then we can assume that you will eventually succeed at it and we can move on. Letting it ride can also solve this problem by providing the opposite outcome: Your failure on this Open Locks check tells us you are simply not good enough to pick this lock at this time and in this way. (The single check determines your relationship with the lock and until you can substantially change the situation, your character is going to be stymied by that lock).

GM DON’T #2.2: TOO MANY SEARCH CHECKS

A somewhat related problem is when a multi-step action resolution gets broken down into too many discrete parts. This can take many forms, but the most cancerous form I’ve seen in the wild came from GMs who took the Search guidelines for 3rd Edition D&D way too seriously. Those guidelines specified that it took a full action to search a 5-foot square. That’s a useful guideline for combat (when you might want to know how much area you can search during a single round), but some GMs took this to mean that you needed to make a separate Search check for every 5 foot square. So if you searched a 10-foot-wide hallway that was 40 feet long, you’d have to make sixteen (!) separate Search checks.

This isn’t rolling to failure because each chunk is a legitimately separate task. (Failing to search in Square #1 doesn’t mean you won’t find anything in Square #2.) But it murders pace – which is either directly undesirable or undesirable because it discourages players from using the specialties affected by the problem.

The solution here is to collect the tests into meaningful chunks: Searching an entire room (or even suite of rooms) is obvious. Alternatively, if they want to search the dungeon hallways as they move along, let the result of the check ride until they either make a meaningful choice to do something other than search down the hall OR until that check result produces a result (either success or failure) that they can recognize as such (i.e., until that check either finds a trap or secret door or until it fails to do so and the trap happens to them or the ambush pours out of the secret door they missed).

Sometimes you’ll end up with a player who demands multiple checks. In some cases this is because they, too, are following bad mechanical advice (like the “make a check for every 5 feet” misinterpretation of the Search rules). In other cases, it’s a manipulation of metagame information (“I know I rolled poorly, so let’s have that only apply to this one specific area and then I’ll make another check”). Often it’s because they’re irrationally trying to manage risk (“I’ll only search this little chunk so that if I roll poorly the effects will be minimalized” — which doesn’t make sense because your odds of discovering any given hazard remain unaltered, but that doesn’t mean people don’t do it).

Most of the time your response to this is fairly simple: You tell them no.

The exception would be the rare instance where it’s actually effective pacing to stretch out the mechanical resolution. Like a slow motion shot in a film, these are the times when specifically highlighting each small, discreet, tension-filled moment serves to escalate the crisis and leave the table on the edge of their seats.

Identifying these moments is a gut-check, not a science. For example, I was just about to say that it would never be Search checks down a dungeon hall… but then I realized that there actually was a time that I followed a player’s lead in the Tomb of Horrors to separately search every single inch of corridor because that mechanical resolution was so completely right in capturing the paranoia and terror the group was experiencing in that moment.

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL

On a closing note, let’s be clear that not every series of sequential rolls with a non-discrete outcome is rolling to failure. We’ve already discussed the situation where each individual check is a separate, meaningful accomplishment. But it’s also true that, for example, combat isn’t a roll to failure even though it involves multiple checks culminating in a single outcome of life-or-death.

It’s also useful to note that rolling to failure can be an effective choice if you’re actually looking at a situation where failure is assured and the interesting question is how long a character can stave off that failure. For example, how long can you say conscious in a vacuum? How long can you hold the door against the werewolves pounding on it from the other side?

Go to Part 3: Resolution Dithering