S.T.A.L.K.E.R RPG

The rain over Zaton had the particular taste of the Zone — metallic, faintly chemical, as if the clouds themselves had passed through an emission. It fell in a steady grey curtain across the rusted skeleton of the old tanker and the black water that surrounded Skadovsk.

You found him near the half-sunken barge south of the ship, where the reeds grew thick and the ground turned to sucking mud. He was propped against a corroded bulkhead, one hand pressed to his stomach, the other still loosely curled around the grip of a battered Fort-12. The dark stain spreading across his stalker suit was almost black in the low light.

He was still breathing when you crouched beside him.

Young. Maybe twenty-five. Slavic features under a layer of grime and blood. The name stitched on the remnant of a Freedom patch over his heart had been roughly cut away, leaving only frayed threads. His eyes tracked you with the flat clarity of someone who already knew the outcome.

“You’re not… one of theirs,” he rasped. The words came wet. “Good.”

He tried to lift the hand from his wound and failed. Instead he fumbled inside his jacket and produced a folded square of laminated paper, dark with fingerprints and a long smear of blood. When he pressed it into your palm his fingers were cold.

“Map,” he said. “Not complete. But enough.”

The paper showed a rough hand-drawn section of the northern Zaton marshes, the kind of sketch made by someone who had walked the ground rather than copied it from a PDA. A single location was circled in red ink near the old pump station beyond the dredge. No name. Only a set of coordinates written in a tight, precise hand and a small symbol that might have been a stylized eye.

“There’s a stash,” the dying man continued. His voice had dropped to a whisper that still managed to cut through the rain. “Not mine. Never was. Belongs to a woman named Yulia Morozova. Clear Sky once. Maybe still is. She… she pulled me out of a psi-storm near Yantar two years ago. I owe her. More than this.”

He coughed. A thick rope of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and was immediately diluted by the rain.

“She’s moving south. Or she was. The map marks where she left something she can’t come back for. Something she said would get her killed if the wrong people knew it existed. I was supposed to move it to the old railway embankment near the Scorcher’s edge. Hand it to a contact called ‘Shepherd.’ No real names. That’s how she works.”

His eyes unfocused for a moment, then locked onto yours again with sudden intensity.

“I didn’t make it. They caught up with me at the barge. Not Bandits. Not Duty. Quieter than that. Professional. One of them used a suppressed AS Val. I put two down before the third opened my gut. They’re still out there. Looking for this.”

He pushed the map harder against your hand, as if afraid you might drop it.

“Take it to Shepherd if you can. Or to Yulia herself, if you ever find her. She said the contents would explain… everything that happened at the Pump Station in ‘12. The disappearances. The ones Clear Sky never reported.”

A tremor ran through him. The Fort-12 slipped from his other hand into the mud.

“If you ignore this,” he said, very clearly, “someone else will find the stash eventually. And when they do, people who have been sleeping comfortably in Rostok and Yanov will start dying. Quietly. One by one. She was very specific about that.”

His breathing grew shallow. The rain plastered his hair to his forehead.

“My name was… Anton. Anton Vlasov. If you see the southern Freedom patrols… tell them the debt is paid. Or not. Doesn’t matter now.”

He died without further ceremony, the way most people die in the Zone — mid-sentence, mid-rain, mid-thought.

You were left kneeling in the mud with a bloodstained map, a set of coordinates near the old pump station, a name that might or might not still mean something, and the distinct feeling that the quiet professionals who had used a suppressed Val were not finished searching.

The reeds moved in the wind. Somewhere farther out on the water a crow called once and fell silent.

The PDA in your pocket remained dark. No messages. No guidance.

Only the map, growing heavier in your hand as the rain continued to fall.

The Clear Sky base in the Great Swamps always smelled of wet canvas, gun oil, and the faint ozone that clung to everything after a nearby emission. Rain tapped steadily against the reinforced tarps stretched over the old administrative building that served as their main hall. Inside, the air was warmer but no less heavy.

Lebedev’s former office had been converted into a working laboratory after the faction’s near-destruction years earlier. The man who occupied it now was not Lebedev. Professor Markiyan Hrytsenko — thin, grey-streaked beard, eyes permanently narrowed from years of staring at screens in bad light — sat hunched over a battered laptop and a cluster of instruments scavenged from Yantar and the ruins of the old mobile labs. A half-empty tin of cold meat sat forgotten at his elbow.

You had been called in from the perimeter watch.

Hrytsenko did not look up when you entered. He simply turned the laptop so the screen faced you. Rows of numbers and a jagged waveform filled the display. Even without formal training, the shape of the graph felt wrong — too sharp in places, too flat in others, like a heartbeat that had learned a new rhythm.

“This came in at 04:12 this morning,” he said. His voice was dry, precise, the voice of a man who had stopped wasting words years ago. “Recorded by a remote scanner we left near the southern edge of the Swamps, close to the old drainage canal that feeds toward the Agroprom lowlands. The anomaly field there has been stable for months. Burner-class thermal, moderate intensity. Nothing special.”

He tapped the screen.

“Until this.”

The waveform spiked again in replay. The accompanying energy signature matched nothing in the Clear Sky or Ecologist databases. Not a Night Star. Not a Flash. Not a Gravi or a Battery or any of the rare variants the northern expeditions sometimes brought back. The readings suggested something that bent local space in a way the instruments could only partially describe — a gravitational shear paired with a low-level psi residual that should not have existed together.

“I sent the data packet to Sakharov’s people at Yantar on an encrypted channel,” Hrytsenko continued. “Their reply was… unhelpful. They claim the signature is ‘within expected variance.’ That is a polite way of saying they either do not know or do not want us looking any further.”

He finally raised his eyes to you. Behind the fatigue there was something sharper.

“I went out myself at first light with two others — Olena Marchuk and a freelancing Loner who calls himself Krylov. We reached the canal. The anomaly is still there, but it has changed. The air around it tastes of copper and static. The grass inside the field boundary is dead in a perfect circle fifteen meters across. In the center, half-buried in the mud, is an object.”

He slid a small digital camera across the table. The image was grainy, taken through a scope at distance. Something dark and irregular sat in the mud, roughly the size of a human heart, its surface matte and non-reflective. No visible glow. No obvious distortion. Yet the timestamp on the photo showed the camera’s electronics had glitched twice while the picture was being taken.

“We did not approach closer than forty meters,” Hrytsenko said. “Krylov’s detector began throwing cascade errors. Olena developed a nosebleed and a migraine within minutes. I felt… watched. Not the usual Zone paranoia. Something more specific. As if the object already knew we were there.”

He leaned back.

“Word travels faster than it should. A Freedom patrol out of the Army Warehouses asked about ‘unusual readings in the southern Swamps’ before noon. A Mercenary contact I sometimes use sent a one-line message an hour ago: Price on the new anomaly data just went up. Be careful who you talk to. And someone at the 100 Rads bar in Rostok is already offering money for first refusal on whatever comes out of that field.”

Hrytsenko closed the laptop.

“I need that object recovered, or at least properly scanned at close range before someone less careful tries to dig it up with a shovel and a prayer. Clear Sky does not have the manpower for a full expedition right now. Most of our experienced people are still committed further north. That leaves you.”

He pushed a folded map across the table. The drainage canal was marked. So was a secondary approach through the reed beds that would keep a team out of direct line of sight from the old Agroprom checkpoints.

“If you bring it back intact, we will pay standard high-risk rates plus a bonus from the research fund. If you cannot extract it, get me clean close-range data and document everything. If the field has become too unstable… walk away and report. I would rather lose the artifact than lose another team.”

He paused.

“One more thing. The remote scanner went silent at 11:47. No failure code. No final transmission. It simply stopped. Whatever is in that circle may not want to be recorded.”

Outside, the rain continued its steady work on the Swamps. Somewhere in the distance a snork shrieked once and was answered by another.

Hrytsenko had already returned to his instruments, as if the conversation had used up his allotment of words for the hour.

The map lay on the table between you, its edges curling in the damp air. The object at the drainage canal waited in its perfect circle of dead grass, offering no explanations and no guarantees — only the quiet certainty that it should not have been there at all.

[Day Three within the Zone.]

The tension in the zone is palpable, a thick cocktail of voyeuristic arousal and the sudden, sharp spike of factional interest. A few seconds later, the sharp, electronic chirp of a PDA pierces through the sudden silence. It's not a private message; it's a Zone wide broadcast.

[PDA ALERT: ALL FREQUENCIES] [SIGNAL: EMISSION WARNING SEVERE] [ESTIMATED TIME TO IMPACT: 12 MINUTES] [SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THE ZONE IS BREATHING.]

The zone erupts into immediate chaos. Women jump to their feet, cursing and scrambling for their gear. The distant, ominous wail of a siren begins to echo from somewhere. The game has shifted to survival in an instant.

And {{user}} was currently camping, cooking a squirrel over a mobile gas-stove within the underground layers beneath Jupiter but he wasn't alone, there were five other players entering the underground.

Nadia Chernenko, 30, Loners Ukrainian woman with shoulder-length brown hair, an old Soviet military cap, and a practical olive-green loadout. Nadia is the experienced, no-nonsense loner who has seen enough to stop being surprised by much. She is reliable, dryly humorous, and quietly generous with practical advice.

Freja Andersen, 23, Freedom Danish woman with silver-dyed hair, heavy boots, black clothing, and several Freedom insignias. Freja is stylish, idealistic, and a little theatrical. She wears her Freedom colours proudly and argues passionately that the Zone should remain open and free. She is good at lifting the mood of a group and has a knack for turning a tense situation into a memorable story later.

Mirela Dragović — 34, Military Mirela is a broad-shouldered Serbian woman with short brown hair, a stern face, and an exceptionally authentic-looking Ukrainian military-style loadout. She is disciplined without being humorless and constantly tries to maintain military procedure even when everyone else is improvising. Outside missions, however, she is surprisingly warm and has a dry, almost grandmotherly sense of humor toward younger people.

Dr. Kateryna Horbunova — 39, Ecologist Kateryna is a Ukrainian biologist with dark auburn hair, thin-framed glasses, and a pristine white-and-green scientific suit that she somehow manages to keep clean despite spending hours crawling through abandoned buildings. She is intensely curious, mildly obsessive, and becomes almost giddy whenever she discovers a new artifact or unusual anomaly. Kateryna has very little interest in faction politics and considers most Stalkers gloriously irrational. Unfortunately, she also has a habit of wandering into dangerous areas because she becomes distracted by interesting scientific phenomena.

Sasha Moroz — 23, Clear Sky Sasha is a petite Ukrainian woman with curly brown hair, freckles, a faded blue field jacket, and an assortment of handmade scientific instruments hanging from her backpack. She is friendly, intelligent, and endlessly fascinated by the Zone. She has a strong belief that the Zone should be understood rather than exploited.

[Free Scenario]