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emptynesters2017-04-04 08:54 am
onemind) wrote in emptynesters2017-04-04 08:54 am
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TEST DRIVE :003
TEST DRIVE :003
WELCOME to the test drive and thank you for your interest in Station 72! To allow players to experiment with game mechanics, flexibility and to account for the fact that our TDMs tend to span a number of months to make up for our low player turnover, we've put together a game-themes random scenario generator for you to play with. Mix and match prompts at will, pick your own broodmates, experiment with abilities and specializations, talk to each other and maybe make up some pre-established CR, and generally play around however you like.
This test drive is not game canon, so take this chance to go nuts! Current in game players are also welcome to make top levels here and aren't beholden to their in-game characterizations (so if it makes more sense to be a broodmates of a character test driving, feel free to do so for the sake of these threads).
For the full experience, we strongly encourage players to write up a short blurb about what their fellow characters might know about them either through shared time on the Station or through the Nest mental link. Handy links can be found at the bottom of this entry if you have any questions and APPLICATIONS are always open if you decide you'd like to jump into the game proper. If you're having trouble coming up with a symbiote ability for your character for use in either the TDM or for your application, we have an ability workshop post located HERE.
(Mix and match these prompts at will to create your own TDM scenario - there's no obligation to use something from every category. Feel free to make up anything that isn't covered in the prompt if it lends to your playing.)
THE PLACE
1. STATION 72 consists of massive, alien sprawl. While large sections of the Station might be mistaken for a Station manufactured for use by humanoid beings - the hangar is relatively standard other than its massive size, the Life Support deck with its series of living quarters seems normal enough (if you ignore the part where none of the rooms have doors on them), and there's even a Jai Alai court -, beyond the most well trod paths the Station quickly cedes to the utterly bizarre. Corridors twist and loop back in on themselves, great verandas overlook massive empty rooms, ramps because stairs which lead to dead ends. It's easy to get lost if you don't have a destination in mind. Strangely enough, if you do know where you want to be, the Station's twisting paths will eventually get you there as long as you keep your goal firmly in mind. Knowing that is another thing entirely.
2. THE MELTED WORLD was once beautiful. Then again, maybe it's always been a toughened old rock, but at some point the planet called Ojan was glassed in the throes of a brutal war. The planet's entire surface has become a twisted, mirror-like substance by whatever super hot biological weapon was poured into it. The material isn't actually that horrible, consuming black; it perfectly reflects the empty, quiet space that surrounds Ojan: a foreboding testament to a war long forgotten. But what lies below the surface of the desolated world?
3. THE SCEPTRE is a fabulous building structure suspended from an asteroid in orbit around a planet. The Sceptre pierces down through the atmosphere of the planet below and over the course of the asteroid's orbit, The Sceptre has an opportunity to pass through every habitat and climate the world below it has to offer. The Sceptre is sleek and beautiful (or it is? Maybe it's fallen into disrepair and only ghosts remain) and its massive windows look out onto a varied, verdant world (or do they? What state is the planet below in, exactly? Has it been so thoroughly paved over that the atmosphere is the only place left to build?).
4. PENTARA PRIME is the ancient, meandering capital of the lush garden world of Pentara. Unlike most cities, it is a large, verdant sprawl, made up eighteen clustered centers - groups of low, elegant stone buildings, strung together by winding roads populated with quietly humming pods moving people from spoke to spoke. The capital is built around leisure, not production and there are far more gardens and orchards than there are buildings. The sun is heavy and low, and the air is still and buzzes with the sounds of fat-bodied insects. It’s so still, so calm. It seems empty and there is something unsettling in the quiet. --Or is it? Maybe it's bustling with energy, just as vibrant and delightful as it seems on the surface.
5. CHORIUS is not quite a planet. Not anymore. Once long ago it was, but over time it has changed - been stripped clean of every valuable mineral, every scrap of rare metal, and eventually even of atmosphere. The core has cooled perceptibly and now even its rotation period has slowed dramatically. Now it is a made up of shaped carbon and steel that bridge over the stripped surface of the planet, pulsing with energies, shielded from the harshness of the sun by a webbed dome that keeps the electric scented air from escaping into the space around it. Here nothing is wasted. Everything - everyone - is recycled and reconstituted into new forms. Every one of the cities changes daily, reformatted to meet new goals and new needs. It is a dead world filled with the living. But whether it is thriving or dying is hard to say - and what the newest change will bring with it is even more difficult to guess.
6. SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER. There's a lot of it in every direction.
THE PEOPLE
1. THE OUTLANDERS consist of small bands of settlers and explorers who have quested out into the unknown, the remote, and the dessicated parts of this galaxy looking for either new opportunities or forgotten mysteries. They are mostly upright though only vaguely humanoid, remnants of a civilization driven from their own failing world, each group is bound only by their own codes and personal laws. They're traders and nomads, largely peaceful but wary of the harsh, dangerous environment and beings they've crossed paths with. Don't cross a deal with an Outlander - they'll make you regret it.
2. A VERITABLE MELTING POT, the beings of this metropolis are as vibrant and diverse as is imaginable. These are a people developed by a myriad of cultural influences, technological insights, overlapping interests and clashing societal norms shaken up and spit out into something that more or less works as long as there's a whole lot of bureaucracy to keep it in order. And boy is there a lot of that. Mind your p's and q's - someone might haul you in for questioning if you cause too much of an uproar.
3. A RUINED GHOST is all that remains of this ancient civilization. Once there were people here leading brilliant or lives, or quiet ones, but all that's left are their ruined structures, old half-functional consoles and signs of lives abruptly arrested. What destroyed these people is initially unclear, but their extinction appears to have been absolute. --Or was it?
4. THE COURT is elegant and beautiful and perfect. Every being is shrouded in delicate, gauzy fabrics layered so densely as to obscure their elongated squirming bodies from head to toe. Each step sounds like a bell ringing from the the small metal plates at the bottom of their soft slippers; every gloved finger glints with small golden threads. The queens sweep through their secret insect gardens and their royal technomancers walk the halls with the glitter of hologlyphs sparkling at their fingertips and in the wake of their sweeping robes.
5. THE GREAT MILITARY is larger even than it’s name suggests. Every member of their civilization plays some part in it, every person has a rank, every family an insignia. The structure is rigid and inflexible and all-encompassing, and it has made them into ferocious enemies. They have been at war for as long as they have been a people, and their battle will never end, because if it did, they would go with it. The harshness of their life is painted on the sharp planes of their grey faces, but there is an indomitability and a pride to them that is hidden by their stern, unchanging expressions.
6. SCUM ALWAYS LIVES at the edge of the universe. Beware the dark of the space and the seedier underbelly of cities or the shadows of forgotten planet - pirates make their living there and these are desperate times, friend.
THE OBJECTIVE
1. GET UP from where you've fallen. Or get up from the nesting deck pod where you've just woken up on the Station. Or get up to Level 672 where there's a ship waiting for you. Or get up from the knee you've taken before this alien queen. Get up.
2. THE RESCUE might be saving a city from a disaster engineered by an enemy force, playing bodyguard for a government official, or liberating a rare artifact from a crumbling structure.
3. IT'S A RACE AGAINST TIME to collect the relic you've been sent to retrieve from the collapsing ruin. Or to make your way free of the military blockade. Or to make your escape from a crumbling world.
4. THE MASQUERADE is all a cover - for an assassination. For a heist. For a political coup.
5. INFILTRATE you know what you need. And you know who has it. With a little help you’ll be able to break into the place no one is supposed to go. You could sneak in… or smash in. Or maybe just talk your way past every little problem.
6. COME ON AND SLAM and welcome to the jam. It’s a ritual or maybe it’s just a pastime, but whichever it is there are rules and there is a goal. There’s probably even points. If you’re lucky, you just might score one. Avoid the spiky pits? Or maybe the thrown fruit. Or perhaps just the other team...
6. EXPLORE and uncover the secrets this place have to offer. There’s a mystery here if you know where to find it. And all you have to do is look.
7. DON'T DIE is easy to say and hard to do when you're under the guns of an armada. Or when you're trying to outwit spies. Or when the ground is literally crumbling under your feet.
INSPIRATION
Sara Ryder | Mass Effect: Andromeda
Abandoned cities are nothing new for Ryder. Even in the Milky Way, she had worked on recovering Protean artifacts, and spent plenty of time digging into ancient, old ruins. But this was different. These weren't old, crumbling ruins that she was poking around, untouched for hundreds of years. This city was still alive--gardens flourishing, fruit heavy on branches. And yet, not a single person to be seen.
It was unnerving, to say the least.
Cautiously, half-expecting some kind of...something to jump out at her, Ryder takes slow steps across the garden, armored boot sinking into the soft grass. If Liam were here, he'd be telling me about a horror movie similar to this, she muses, picking a strange fruit off of a branch. And if Cora were here, she continues in thought, as she scans the fruit with her omnitool, she'd finally have her rose garden. And if any of her crew were here, they would probably be giving her shit for dissecting their potential reactions to this place. They'd tease her for missing them.
They'd be right.
"This just in, famous pathfinders saves the Nexus, defeats the Kett, hailed hero of the Andromeda galaxy, dies from single piece of fruit." And despite her pessimistic mutterings, she holds the strange fruit up to take a bite.
2. Chorus: Get up
When Ryder had been at the summit of the pit, she had thought to herself, That's a long way down. Having promptly thereafter plunged to what she had been sure would be an incredibly ironic death, she had assumed that her last thought would be confirmation that it was, indeed, a long way down.
But she didn't die. In fact, sprawled at the bottom of the pit in an inelegant heap as she was, she felt more alive than she had any right to feel. She didn't feel great, but she was definitely at least one step up from 'horrible, painful death'. Maybe two. Slowly, with low grunts of pain, she experimentally moved her limbs. They all hurt, but that was a good sign. And they all moved, which was even better. An attempt at standing, however, was quickly put down--that is, it was Ryder that was downed, but the idea was, too. Metaphorically.
Hopefully, no scavengers were desperate enough to try poking around and see an easy target. Knowing her luck, she decided against taking the chance. A quick and elegant scoot across the bottom of the pit put her back against a bolder, and her pistol was pulled out. If a group happened across her, she'd be screwed, but at least it'd put off any lone idiots.
Time to try out that weird...symbiote...telepathy thing. She was generally disinclined to trying it out, but. Well. It beat nothing. Closing her eyes, she took a breath, and tried to reach out. Hello...? Checking, checking, one two three. This...is probably wrong. At least no one else can witness me being embarrassing. Unless this is working, in which case. Hi. I'm Sara Ryder and I'm embarrassing.
no subject
Shepard was busy, the first time she heard Sara Ryder's voice. Or-- 'voice' since the tone was less about anyone's voice, and more an impression, devoid of association. Physically, Shepard was most of the way through a box of granola bars, masquerading as a chalky, sub-par kind of chocolate bar, when she first heard it. You got this, every now and then, with new people. You were all interconnected, bound by the brainstem, and yet you didn't actually meet one another until much later.
( Hold your position. ) The mental reply to Sara's SOS is implacable and burning, like the almost physical weight of summer sunlight's worst days,( I'm on my way. )
So, Shepard put down her box, let the others know she had the emergency handled, and set off from camp. It's not like she was doing anything important, but still: how you gonna wander off on an alien planet, and then fall down a hole?
"You Ryder?" She calls down into the sinkhole, perhaps twenty minutes walk later, "How the hell did you even get down there?"
no subject
When Shepard finally arrives, Ryder is very busy with important matters, like playing games on her omnitool. At Shepard's call, she squints up at the figure. Hard to make too much out from here, but...the armor looks more familiar than most people's around here. Was that N7 armor? And the woman herself, oddly enough, manages to perfectly match that intimidating 'voice'. Somehow. Even if Ryder doesn't really get it.
"Have you ever gone sledding? I don't recommend trying it here. Dirt? Not a good replacement for snow." The grin that's given along with that explanation is easy and unruffled, like this was just a minor bump in the ol' road. "Are you an N7? My dad was one of those."
no subject
"I'm Commander Shepard," She said aloud, as if that were explanation enough. Well, it ought to be, shouldn't it? "I'm a biotic. Think you can handle me lifting you out?"
She didn't have great control at the best of times, but even Shepard can probably handle pulling something with Ryder's mass, without crushing it. Her. Whatever.
no subject
"I mean, I--Did you say you're Commander Shepard?" There's a pause, because who hasn't heard of Commander Shepard, and then: "Didn't you drive a Mako through a Mass Effect gate?" Which is, as far as Ryder is concerned, the important part. "Did your chief engineer have a heart attack, because mine is always having a conniption whenever my Nomad gets stuck at, like, the bottom of a ravine or whatever."
no subject
God, please let that be right.
Blue and white, dark matter sublimates around Ryder's body, lifting her, with only a little wobble, towards the lip of the pit. Shepard struggles, not with the effort of lifting her, but sweating with the effort of not simply throwing Ryder into near-orbit. Vanguards are powerful biotics, but not known for finesse.
"...That did happen," She says, eventually, as Sara's feet near solid ground, "My uh... Chief Engineer, wasn't in charge of Mako repairs, at the time. That was Garrus' duty. But, he never complained...Turians, y'know? It's that stoic militarism thing-- or maybe he just didn't want to give me a reason to fire him."
no subject
"Yeah, I've met turians like that. Though the one on my ship was pretty different. Used to be a smuggler. Did you even know turians did smuggling? But she's great, I'd never have been able to get popcorn in Andromeda without her." It's the important stuff, you know? As Ryder speaks, she starts touching her legs gently, poking and prodding to figure out where the majority of the damage seems to be.
"But, um. If you're Commander Shepard, that means..." She pauses, to look up at her. "...You know Liara T'Soni, right? Is she here? Do you think you could introduce us? When I was in the Alliance, I worked with Prothean researchers, and I read a lot of her papers. If I could pick her mind, I'd love to ask about her reasoning behind--"
Pause.
"--Anyway. Is she here?"
no subject
It is entirely possible that Liara's line of work is not actually a relevant topic of conversation here, but then-- is it ever? Is there ever a good situation in which to simply blurt my friend is the Shadow Broker?
No wait, no.
No.
The other line of work. Right. Shepard only hopes that spike of incredulity didn't get too far past her shields.
"Yeah, sorry, no. Liara's not here, so far as I know," Come to think of it, that's probably a good thing. Shepard loved Liara, really, and they had always been friends, but she didn't think she could handle Liara on a statio with this few people, let alone inside her head, "I'm not sure she's really into Prothean archeology these days, anyways. You know she's an information broker now, right?"
1
"What are you eating?" Perfect timing.
no subject
"No clue." Her reply is cheerful, if somewhat wry. "But if I die eating it, my last request is for everyone to be told that I died saving orphans from a burning building, or something." Not that she makes any more attempts to eat it. Being stupid in front of strangers is so much more embarrassing than doing it by yourself.
no subject
"Personally I'd be a bit more careful about eating the fruit in a city where all the people have just, uh. Gone." She glances around, as if the residents might pop out and announce themselves at an opportune moment.
"But I'll let them know you sacrificed yourself for the greater good, no problem. What name do I have them tell tales about?" Aloy actually laughs quietly. She's doing her best to ignore her own discomfort in these empty parks and the laughter helps.
no subject
Ryder, like any mature adult, has to take a moment to snicker to herself at her hilarious joke, before casting a glance around the area, like the vanished residents might feel someone cracking jokes and their expense and rise forth. When no antagonistic anti-joke ghosts appear, Ryder turns back to Aloy, a cheerful smile on her face.
"Sara Ryder. Human pathfinder, for what it's worth here. Which. Isn't much."
no subject
"Aloy of the Nora. And a Seeker, for what that's worth here. Not that I expect it's much, either."
no subject
"What are you seeking, exactly?"
1
Megan arrives in a panicked flurry of fairy dust--don't breathe that in, Ryder--by landing right next to her and skidding to an ignominious halt.
She has to take a moment to cough her way back to stability, her wings fluttering anxiously in the meanwhile. Once she's more or less put together, she has to brush dust off her front and clear her throat to maintain her dignity.
"Um!"
Great start.
"Don't eat the fruit! It could be dangerous! I think? I mean, I saw a guy choke earlier and--well, I thought it was because it was toxic but I guess it could have just been a large seed or something--anyway, you should probably get it tested first!"
no subject
"I had...my omnitool scan it?" She offers sheepishly, already lowering the fruit. But a quick scan doesn't cover everything, it's true, so Ryder tucks the fruit in her pocket instead. Maybe somebody aboard that weird station can give her a more exact idea.
"I guess my inevitable embarrassing death can wait. For now."
no subject
"I mean, it's probably fine, but you can't be too careful, yeah? Wouldn't want you to grow an alien in your stomach or something. Us pinks gotta look out for each other!"
She means the hair.