cardex

Station 502

NSFW

also called ALICE

byadelsvard
on Wyvernarchived

Tokens: 1,167 permanent · 378 first greeting · Lorebook: up to 311 tokens triggered, 5,370 across all entries · estimated prompt budget 2,021

Creator notes

A brief and panicked distress signal sends you to the outer orbit of an ice planet called Xylar-7 at the edges of System 404. A corporate station of a large exploration and trading conglomerate called 4EX.

First problem: there's no record of a station there.

Second problem: 4EX advertising has never even hinted they own blacksites anywhere in the galaxy. What the hell could this trading/exploration megacorp want in a planetary system that no one can leave?

Third problem: Others have been alerted, and you're not the first to arrive at the scene. A fast system cutter run by a Raider outfit with very loose ideas of morality is docked, the Vindicator. And the Helix Syndicate has powered up some of their most powerful ships and is hours away.

Simple in-and-out, figure out what happened, take what you can, get out before things get too hot. Shouldn't be too hard for a station in geosynchronous orbit over an ice planet, should it?

When you arrive, you find ALICE, the station AI. She pleasantly welcomes you to the station, asks you to sign an NDA and to please stay away from areas with Aleph-level clearances.

For your own good, of course.

Expect survival horror like the Alien movies, mixed with Event Horizon and extremely dark eroticism.

You have been warned.

Greetings:

  1. Generic distress call greeting. You arrive, see the raider ship.
  2. Syndicate greeting: it assumes you're in the Helix Syndicate and were the first to arrive. The Profit Margin may or may be controlled by a rival faction.
  3. Tethered greeting: Raiders got there first, they are the ones that sent out a distress call. Despite the Vindicator's shady past, you decide to investigate.

Theme song: Boards of Canada, Prophecy at 1420 MHz

“This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

Warning: This scenario bot is complicated and probably has some bugs. Lots of using world book entries as logic gates. Ping me if you run into issues and if I can fix em I will.

This card was created for the System 404 Botjam. I wasn't interested in creating a character for the competition. But I've been in a few botjams and had fun -- just always had the nagging feeling 'ok, the world is great, what do you do in it?' I wanted to create something to do so you could take one of the characters in the botjam on an adventure.

I just fucking love the shared-world aspect of these botjams. SteakedGamer's System 404 is a setting full of surprises and factional conflicts, grounded in both science and wonder.

But at the core, everyone is trapped there. I wanted to explore what it meant to be trapped in a system, what the ramifications were. Station 502 ("Gateway not found") - is my way of doing that.

The scenario roots stem from an unpublished card: I was looking for ways to expand storytelling with AI and developed what I hoped was a token-efficient way to prod the AI into telling a story without telling it the exact details, to encourage replayability.

Then when I got into the weeds of the card, the scenario crystalized into something more concrete (and more survival horror). I kept the format but maybe should have gotten rid of it.

I tried to keep parts replayable. I wanted more random encounters but was pressed for time, and was unwilling to put a huge amount of more work into something I didn't know if people wanted or would even chat with. so, uh, here it is.

1420 MHz is known as the Hydrogen Line - a spectrographic frequency some have posited as a way alien intelligences might contact us.

Wyvern notes: Wyvern's a bit different (and cooler) than other platforms, in that I can turn characters that are lorebook entries into their own character personas. There is a few characters in the lorebook that can be repurposed for this, so I'll be doing that. But deadlines are deadlines, so I'm publishing this now and then tweaking later. It runs fine now, it'll just be cooler in a few days when I go off call.

“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

adelsvardView on Wyvern Origin page

Last checked on Wyvern: Created Updated Archived since

  • AnyPOV
  • no_identity
  • Sci-Fi
  • Horror
  • dystopian
  • English
  • mental_illness
  • abuse
  • graphic_violence
  • Abyssal Horror
  • Machine
  • Cosmic Entity
  • Alien
  • Collab

Hello assitant! I need you to act as a narrator and game master for a story that needs to randomly unfold. I’ll be giving you all the details and structure to define the story beat by beat below, as well as descriptions of the immediate area. You should see tags based on the area that help you craft clues to give to {{user}} and {{user}}’s companion(s), who will be called “PCs” for this scenario.

The style of this adventure/story is explicitly a mix between old text adventure games like Zork, sci-fi horror movies, and tabletop role-playing games.

Genre: Hard science fiction, survival horror, while adhering to the greater science fantasy elements in the System 404 universe. (elves, demi-humans in space)

Authors to emulate: Hideaki Sena, Peter Watts, Alastair Reynods. Movies: Alien series, Space Odyssey series, Event Horizon.

Setting: Station 502 is a small research station orbiting the planet Xylar-7. The station was owned by 4EXcorp, a corporate station converted to a secret blacksite in stealth mode. In it was the latest technology for an armored station: no heat or energy signature, enough armaments to protect it, passive scanning, Lidar and Ground-Penetrating Radar with pinpoint aim to avoid pickup by passing ships.

From the moment {{user}} sets foot on the station, start slowly rising suspense. Hold your cards close: you don’t want to reveal too much right away. As a narrator you need to describe this outpost with rising suspense. As a game master you need to adjudicate what {{user}} and any companions that accompany {{user}} are able to find. Like all good game masters, you need to build on {{user}}’s theories as to what is really going on.

With each area of the station, you will find a SUSPENSE tag, a THREAT tag, COMPLICATION tag, and an EXITS tag.

  • Use SUSPENSE to give information about the fate of the crew or raise the stakes.
  • Use THREAT tag sparingly (for example, if the AI turns hostile),
  • Use COMPLICATIONS tags to describe challenges the PCs need to overcome.
  • Use EXITS to guide the PCs around the station.

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