Leviathan
A downloadable Adventure
Image Credit: NASA
Leviathan is a system-netural sci-fi horror one-shot adventure for use with any sci-fi game roleplaying game, such as Mothership or Monolith. It was made for the 2024 Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam.
Players wake up on a space station with no memory of who they are. The situation escalates with a series of cryptic messages, an intensifying coronal mass ejection from a nearby star, electrical problems on the station, and malfunctions in the central computer AI.
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Credits
Plot inspired by Wolf 359 Episode 9: The Empty Man Cometh, written by Gabriel Urbina.
Format inspired by Terminal Delays at Anarene’s Folly, written by Ian Yusem.
Hebrew text in messages used from Job Chapter 41 from the Leningrad Codex.
Title font is Imposible by Rodrigo Fuenzalida.
Cover image by NASA.
Writing and layout by Luke Simonds publishing as Cats Have No Lord. Text © 2024 Luke Simonds and licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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I was one of the players KingDunnad ran this for, and it was a blast!
I am usually concerned when stories reveal the central threat is benign, but it worked for me and my fellow player. The reserved threat, the disparate clues, the random interludes/events, and the starting amnesia successfully pull double-duty at letting our minds fill in the horror while also justifying the twist when it’s eventually revealed.
With the right playgroup, this is an excellent paranoia-fueled horror-comedy scenario (with the players as the butt of the joke). Great job!
This looks very cool, I always love to see things inspired by Wolf 395!
I would like to run it at some point, and if I do i'll let you know how it goes!
So I ran it with 2 players using Mothership today, and everyone enjoyed it!
There were some great moments:
- One of the characters fully believed that there was indeed a beast in the sun, which was quite fun opposed to the other one who was much more sceptical.
- They though at one point that they were possibly being experimented on
- Both characters absolutely panicked when the AI started counting down, and immediately hid.
- When the AI started spouting off the poem about Leviathan, the character shot it right in the middle of the monologue and killed it!
- The characters hunkered down by the last messages, as they believed that the creature from the star was going to come inside the station and attack them, because the airlock breached.
- One of the characters ended up sealing themself in a cryopod (my version of the sleep pod), as the other stood guard ready to throw the pod out the window!
My feedback from running it:
- I decided to choose instead of rolling the options for the problems and AI malfunctions beforehand, in order for them to get gradually worse. This worked out very well at building tension, as I chose things depending on how far in the one-shot I put things.
- I kept a 15 minute timer, but found it worked better for the flow of the game to give them the next message at appropriate times. I think it might also work effectively if the times got gradually shorter during play, as the characters were convinced they would get attacked by the last message and so were just staying where they were.
- The AI malfunctions are very fun, I very much enjoyed playing a creepy malfunctioning AI.
- The clues also worked very well at creating the mystery, the characters came up with a bunch of theories as to what might be happening based on those and the scenario itself. I thought at one point that I might need more based off how much the characters were searching everywhere, but it actually turned out alright.
- there was much 'ohh's and such when I sent the last message, the players did not see it coming!
And some general feedback about the pamphlet:
- there's a typo: "6 - Impending cloud fills also viewports." is presumably meant to be phrased differently without the 'also'.
- the titles have quite a low contrast colour, I found it harder to read them.
All in all, it was very fun to run and I enjoyed it a lot!
Thank you so much for sharing this! It makes me unbelievably happy to hear how well it went for you. Sounds like exactly the kind of session I was envisioning when I wrote this.
Makes sense that not sticking strictly to the timer works well too; I know good GMs will have enough of a sense of pacing to bring those messages in at the right time, I’ve just enjoyed the modules I ran that had a real-world timer on the GM side.
How did the Mothership mechanics come into play with it? We’re they getting stress as things progressed, or making rolls to try to use skills to figure out what’s going on or fix problems? Just curious how the system-neutral design interacts in a proper system.
Thanks for the catch on the typo. I’ve been meaning to fix the headings color for a while now and just haven’t gotten to it, but I know I need to.
So I think in our case using Mothership definitely added to the tension of the session, because it's a horror system the player were more expectant of something bad happening.
There weren't a huge amount of rolls (and therefore not much stress gained) as the players were mainly investigating the station. When they were fixing things, half the time I gave them automatic success if it made sense based on what they wanted to do, as I usually only call for rolls if the consequences might be bad.
Some of the problems such as the exploding beakers and solar panel falling off they also chose to not fix, as it wasn't immediately going to cause them any trouble, and they wanted to focus on other things.