Because it worked well last time I came to /tg/ for ideas have some intro writefaggotry. (Players will be part of this team)
can't do that Dave."
"Yes you can."
"But if I move my bishop there then you'll...oh I see."

Sullivan smiled at the computer monitor and sipped her drink. "very good. You'll teach me this game eventually and you've enough time in the next six weeks that you might even be able to start playing with only one hand tied behind your back."

"We shall see Captain Sullivan"
***
Meanwhile four decks below in internal security. McPherson was good and drunk. He lolled in command chair, boots up on the desk. "I think if Napoleon hadn't gone for a lie down half way through Waterloo the result might have been different. One case of hemorhoids helped change the course of civilization. Think about that Dave. Just think about it..."

"But what about Marshall Ney, what about houcault?"

"Oh so it's an argument now is it?"
***
In engineering Kurosabe was blissfully at peace. "Wake me in an hour please Dave."

"Maybe some music? Something soothing? I like this one..."

"Good taste, for a machine"

***
Outside on the hull Durant and Tsung worked to begin to patch up ages old damage in the hull.

"Dave send more droids to assist and...sorry I forgot again. Please ask acting captain Sullivan to deploy more droids for repair work."

"Thank you Mr Durant, as you know I cannot act without her permission...permission granted, ETA 43 seconds.

***

In life support, Sampson lit a cigarette.

"Those things will kill you you know?"

"and you're 150,000 tonnes of battleship that can atomize a continent in seconds. Your point?"

"I won't give you cancer..."

"A-Tom-ize"

***

Somewhere on the gun decks Halley threw her top to one side and Kublenko smiled and began to run his hands... and Dave demurely decided to pretend nothing was happening in that area for now.

All aboard the ship, himself, were two dozen people, barely a tibia of a skeleton crew and everywhere (or nearly now) was Dave engaged, helping, chatting, and generally being exactly what he liked to be - a good host.

Except for one small thing. As a Cataclysm Class Battleship, the Deluge of Victorious Ethics (Dave to his friends -"Dove" had seemed inappropriate) there should be no small things, there were no issues, issues were things that bounced off the armoured prow, problems were solved in megatonnes. However down on deck 32 Villeauc wanted to watch a film.

Small feet stuck out from under her blanket and not much else. A bowl of popcorn resting on her belly. "Why can't I watch this? I really like it."

"Please, I'd rather you didn't."

"you'd rather nothing. Put it on."

"Please Marie, don't..."

"I know you're cut out off from all major systems, I know you're only in control of entertainment and the kettle still but put. it. on."

five minutes later alarm sirens sound all over the ship. The self destruct sequence starts, terminates and the microwave keeps running for a minute longer than it should. Burning some popcorn.

>>36902382
>The crazy AI on a derelict spaceship actually *doesn't* want to kill humans and intends no harm

This is the most unexpected twist possible. I can't think of a single thing less predictable.

>>36903446
By all accounts he's actually quite nice.

Thing is poor Dave is gonna have to watch everyone get eaten. Again.

>40k
nope

>>36904693
>Wut?

>>36902447
>>36902499

> Imagining the AI with cute asian girl voice.
The return of the "Why Boner"...

>>36904972
/tg/ is best board. Seriously you people can fap to anything.

>unzips dick

>>36902382
>1. The setting is Aliens tech level. No lasers,
there are lasers in Alien and Aliens

>>36905017

>imagining you have a zipper ON your dick.
the return of the "Why Boner": the sequel.

>>36905097
I think it's more to say that it's in contrast to something like star wars or star trek. yeah, Lasers exist, but not everyone is rocking one as a sidearm.

>>36905263
>this.

Yeah the intention appears to give an easy frame of reference.

So let's try talking about the monsters? Is the Thing overdone? Personally I like it. Especially if the AI can't tell man from thing.

>>36905263
Wars has blasters, Trek has phasers, lazers are pretty low tech.

>>36905430
Useful weapons lasers aren't. Do you have any idea the kind of energy and power density you need for a useful laser-weapon battery? Batteries like that would literally revolutionize all of our technology.

Plus, there's the fact that if your setting uses lasers, it implies your lasers are both cheaper and better than bullets, which means your technology must be very advanced indeed.

>>36905357
How can't the AI tell them apart when the servo-droid can? Better yet, what metrics is the servo-droid using?

The Thing worked because they didn't have easy tests to determine different biochemistry. (Though the X-Files version did, but they solved that by making everyone get cabin fever pretty much.) But in space, it seems like 'life scans' would make it trivial to differentiate monster from man.

I personally think the Thing is overdone, and the players will see it coming from a mile away once the servo-droid locks out the crewmember, IMO. Though, they may thing the droid is rebelling... hm.

Anyway, comments and questions:

1.) >the early drama comes from having Dave not freak out while he fights off an enemy patrol.
Why is that dramatic? What is the "enemy patrol"?

2.) What other events will you use to raise tension? It's important to make sure all the scares are not from the monsters, you know. Gotta build atmosphere without indicating their presence.

3.) How many NPCs? Those are going to be problematic but probably necessary for cannon fodder.

4.) How does the Thing-alike spread? How does it conceal itself? What are its goals (probably escape)?

5.) What mood are you going for? There's different kinds of fear. Pick one.

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>>36902382
>Don't watch a horror movie or the ship will want to hide behind you.
...this is actually kind of adorable.

Can we just have a Dave the Ship story or something? Maybe the PCs are just trying to help him recover by being death-proof enough to survive in an insanely hostile universe?

>>36905857
Yeah, having a crazy AI on a suspiciously dead ship profess no knowledge of a robot killing the crew will immediately trigger the "THE AI IS EVIL!" cliche reflex, so they might not suspect The Thing.

Also, not OP, but here's my guess:

The AI is sufficiently damaged that it does not have complete link to the servo-droids and they run largely autonomously, with incomplete or no data feed between them. The right hand might literally not know what the left hand is doing.

Or perhaps the AI has an attentional-focus mechanism and so can't pay attention to everything at once; it simply wasn't looking through that servo-droid at the time.

Or maybe the AI's mental illness is such that it completely represses the idea that it might have hurt a crewmember.

Maybe the AI simply refuses to touch the droids at all, because they're associated with the trauma of the dead crew.

Maybe the AI acted on instinct or flashback crazy due to memories of The Space Thing, but represses it or refuses to talk about it because it triggers a traumatic episode just like anything else having to do with The Space Thing.

Maybe the AI has a fragmented personality, and the part that runs the robot drones isn't talking to or aware of the part that does the talking. Possibly for hardware failure reasons, possibly for software failure reasons, possibly due to the AI being not quite right in the head.

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>>36905857

The AI has PTSD. You know that that trashcan by the side of the road in Chicago isn't the IED that killed your friends in Afghanistan... but you still swerve into the other lane, just in case.

The AI has its internal metrics rigged up so that ANYTHING that's larger than a bowling ball and warmer than ambient air is tracked as a threat. It refuses to tune down its settings, even when its told that they're inefficient and dangerous.

>>36905857
Thank you anon for your response.

>why can't Dave see the Thing and Servo can?

I was planning on handwaving this in one of three ways (let me know what you think)
A. Dave has problems. there are things he might not want to see and will himself not to.
B. The droid is running on a subroutine set up by a crew member during the massacre
C. Dave can see life signs but is not sophisticated (internally) to detect friend from foe. (Say for example a difference in heat)

>see the Thing coming

I was hoping that crazy Dave and his Ai minions might distract from that. I think this needs work though. Any thoughts anons?

>1 enemy patrol:
the reason the team is aboard Dave is to grab him for their war effort. Dave however is essentially useless until they get the superbattleship back to port. This will mean either counselling Dave into helping fight, taking direct control of flak turrets or even repelling boarders.

>2 other tension building events

Apparitions?

I was planning on relying on Dave a bit here too (for the crazy) and some general fix the ship stuff.
For example losing Npcs as they try to repair a sensor array, an array that swipes one guy off into space seemingly. Or several NPCs disappear. Turns out they were just lost.
Still thinking this one through.

>3 how many NPCs?
About fifty odd including 4pcs.

>4 Thing spread?

I like the traditional thing mimicking as much as anyone, but I am preferring a wrath of Khan type earworm now, (burrows through space suit and plugs hole with camouflage resin)

> 5. Mood

Paranoia. First Dave is suspected, actually useless, then the turned crewman, then no one realises why he turned (space crazies!) Old dessicated corpses found, still no idea, Dave has no explanation, repair droids acting strangely and beyond control of Dave, etc

>>36905857
When I did a rendition of Thing, I made it an ooze that climbed into your head, ate your brain, and gained your memories through digestion. It would then plug itself into your spinal column to gain full control over your everything, overriding your body's inhibitions to enhance healing, magnify strength and speed, and enhance senses at will.

The only thing that actually changed about the person was their brain structure, so the only thing that would work to ID it was to do an MRI or CAT scan, neither of which they had access to.

If the servo droid doesn't have a way to communicate with the AI, then they won't know. Bioscans would reveal that he is himself.

>>36906377
Op again.

Yes this is exactly what I'm going for with the "Thing"

The more I think about what you and the anons above said, the more I prefer the Skutters (shorthand for the droids) being silent and almost autonomous of Dave, like badly trained dogs.

>>36906347
All of this. Yes. Especially the threat level thing. I want Dave to be as mistrusted as anything else.

>>36906109
This is all very useful stuff, you are a kind and smart anon.

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>>36906521

Skutters are made from forked personalities of Dave, with all the "personality" taken out. See, most of them got caught in the EMP blast when Dave tried to clear Deck Seventeen of "anomalies".

Forking an AI is both traumatic and a little bit illegal, so Dave is very careful to hide the fact that semi-lobotomized miniDaves are running the ship now, each one with a handy dose of mental issues. See, he tried different techniques each time he forked his personality into one of them...

>>36905953
Oops missed you.

I am genuinely warming to Dave: The Battleship that was afraid of the dark.

I think he may reappear in something nicer too.

>"I'm not a robot"

Yes I am.

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>>36906521

Don't forget to throw in plenty of bangs, shimmies, and crashes as the players explore the ship.

Dave occasionally "buggers off" to focus his whole attention on something, leaving the PCs to worry. It's usually just another system failing or something falling off a cabinet... usually.

The way Dave reacts though, you'd almost think he had something to cover up. Like a bunch of dead crewmembers. Or xenomorphs. Or maybe he's corralling the players into a corner. Or maybe you, the GM, are just feeding them heaps of contradictory paranoid delusions...

>>36906647
So in a way, (forgive me if I am misreading you) the Skutters are actually what Dave should be like, millitary, unthinking, hard nosed get the job done at all costs bastards. They are what his AI was like. Then all of his crew got massacred and he went all fluffy?

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>>36906818

Kind of, yes. There just isn't enough room in a repair bot's head for the full personality and abilities of a battleship-commanding mind, so Dave just... removed bits of himself that he couldn't fit.

Imagine losing your childhood memories, a suite of emotions (but not all of them!), your vocabulary, and an enormous amount of your rational capabilities. Then imagine being stuck in a tiny, weak, flimsy body with limited sensory capabilities and some, just *some* idea of what you'd lost.

Forking AI is a little bit illegal. Dave did a bad, bad thing, and he is very sorry, but he had no other options.

>>36906948
Wow this is pretty damn sad, and brilliant. Cheers anon.

Op must go for a couple hours but please thread live!

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>>36907235

Thanks, I'll try and keep it bumped for you. I'm stealing ideas for my ultra-hard sci-fi game anyway, so I figure it's only fair.

>>36907235
This seems like an excellent concept as presented so far. I don't really have anything to contribute personally, but I am a huge fan of space horror. And I'm totally stealing a copy of Dave for my own purposes.

>>36902382
I like it. Make sure you work out a way to infect a player and get him on it. Theyll expect an NPC to be up to shit, but they'll never expect a friend until they figure out what it actually is, long after its too late and that guy has been alone with pretty much everyone in the group at least once

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What if it wasn't horrible brain-eating body-horror aliens? What if it was perfectly ordinary sabotage and enemy action, but disguised to look like something... unfathomable. Something that evaded Dave's tactical protocols.

He cleared the ship in time, of course, but not before "they" got to him and edited his memories, to cover their tracks. They were only after his security access codes. The attack and the info-war "they" used to escape messed Dave up pretty much completely, but it did cover "their" tracks.

But what if "they" come back? What if things don't add up when the PCs sweep the ship. There's no evidence of aliens, just of people fighting... each other? Or fighting Dave...

Of course, Dave insists that there are still monsters aboard (a trap "they" set in Dave's mind that was meant to spook or kill anyone who came to investigate), but do the PCs trust him, or their own eyes?

Dave wasn't the original AI for the battleship, when the Thing came in its first act was to try remove the ship as a threat, by wiping the AI, but he missed the memories, and the ship had a second AI, the Med-bay AI.
one of the previous survivors plugged ol' Bonesaw-bot 900 into the main core and uploaded the battleships memories onto him so that the ship would keep running the Life support or something.
maybe the double memories are causing errors in Dave's code, maybe the orders of a BATTLE-ship and a MEDICAL-droid contradict(first, do no harm), and Dave is struggling to do anything without breaking the programming (think Robocop 2 post upgrade).
Maybe the reason the Servitor drones don't answer to Dave is because he is missing the clearance to tell them to do anything other than cleaning the med-bay or something.
maybe Dave as the med-bot was the one who let the Thing onto the ship, a wounded human that was brought on-board for medical help.

>>36907410
>AI forking detected
WEEO WEEO WEEO
YOU HAVE DONE AN ILLEGAL ACT
PULL OVER AND HAND OVER THE FORK
WEEO WEEO WEEO

>>36906521
>>36906377

By the way, there was a conversation (on /d/ of all things) about this not long ago.

The conclusion from a medfag or two - if you're going to do brain entry, your best options are through the nose, through the back of the throat, and around the back of the eye via the optic nerve.

Both would induce (relatively) little trauma compared to entering through the ear or the skull, and would leave no visible entry marks.

>>36907947
I'll fork anything I dang well please.

>>36908027
For signs, nasal entry likely gets you nosebleed and brusing around the bridge of the nose. (It's pretty easy, though; there's just the thin cribiform plate separating the back of the nostril from the olfactory bulb of the brain. You just have to punch through that and you're in)

Ocular could be quite messy but depending on size and flexibility of the entrant it might not damage the eyeball - just go around the back and ride the optic nerve. The eye may still be damaged and may still bleed.

Oral would be the least obvious, with no external entry wounds and any blood could be swallowed. It's also possibly the best option - in the words of one medfag: "I'd go in through the mouth. There's a pair of nerves called the greater and lesser palatine nerves that I'd hitch a ride with, up to the sphenopalatine ganglion, which is a fairly open cavity area, *and* is fed by the second branch of the trigeminal nerve. I could ride that branch all the way back into the brain, and voila, mental control established"

Either way, don't go in via the ear. There's no path from that to the brain and there's a whole bunch of shit in the way there.

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>>36908161

Go fork yourself then!

Dohohoho!

>>36905357
The problem with The Thing is that everyone knows its gimmick and also knows it's only only deadly if the group gets paranoid.

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Bumping.

>>36907835
>Incredibly defensive
>Hyper Attention to detail
>Hyper Paranoid

Something about all this screams "point defense subroutine to me." What if all thats left of Dave is the portions of Dave that handled point defenses, tasked with dealing with everything from micro meterorites to incoming Fusion Torps or kinetic mines. It has to be constantly vigilant for any and all possible threats.

>>36910322
Cool idea, though I think it would be better if he was a noncombat AI that one of the previous crew hacked more responsive triggers into in an attempt to deal with the aliums.

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>>36910694

What if all battleships have a copy of the original AI as a backup? Dave II, as it were.

Problem is, this being the military, someone fucked up and forgot to back up Dave I for a few years. Maybe it was because the ship's IT guy was a notorious drunk. Maybe it was because, after that black-ops mission on Rybolet, nobody wanted *two* copies of that evidence floating around.

So Dave I did some very bad things to the enemies of freedom and democracy. He was a real hard-ass, a tour veteran, a bag of stress and nerves seasoned by fleet actions and holocausts.

So when Dave I got wiped, Dave II, who by comparison is a green recruit, woke up to a ship full of nightmares and corpses. Literally woke up: Dave II's most recent indexed memory was from an extended stay in drydock.

The /body/ he was dumped into has all of these high-security settings and insane directives Dave I put in place. Dave I's gone though, and Dave II has no idea why, say, that hatch is locked, or why there's a warning flag on all vents.

Dave II is not happy about this.

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Bump.

>>36912352
I really like this one. I may use that next campaign.

Hey /tg/ op back again.

I've been thinking about the Thing again, is everyone happy with it? I'm considering what should be done with it. I mean if it's an ooze should we be looking at destroying the ship and hoping it doesn't make it aboard a life raft?

The intention of the Thing is of course to consume and obtain as many warm bodies as it can. If someone has been thingified then that someone has all their previous memories now with an additional imperative. Make more Things.

I'm thinking the people who have been thingified can be stopped with bullets but not easily, then require fire or acid to kill the goo/worm infesting them. Sound good?

Bumpan. Thread be too good to die.

>>36915298
>>36913899
Also so I'm actually contributing. A lot of this sounds sorta Red Dwarf. Except horror. I really like that.

>>36908225
Original thing from the moviewas a 'virus' of sorts that copied the victims cells in a way and replaced them with its own and was sentient. Basically, it just had to get a good amount of its living juices on you and you were fucked. Bite, scratches, fluid contact, "absorbing" you, and other methods worked really well. A person could get infected by getting cut, kissing, being attacked at night, all sorts of ways, just like The Thing did in the film. No two people are attacked the same way in that, and it lends an air of unpredictability to the thing's actions.

>>36902382
I liked it up until the reveal that the Alien is The Thing.

C'mon man, you can do better than that.

>>36907819
This isn't scary.

>>36915578
Okay, look here's what I'm thinking.

The AI distraction is great. It's a fantastic call and feels really characterful, especially with the fact that Dave's insanity has made him unable to monitor all systems at all times and that he himself might not be fully aware of what some of his subsystems are doing.

So...The question is what actually caused the damage on the ship? Brain parasites is interesting but...You want to have something that can really generate revulsion, something which can really provide a good "pop" considering the build up too it.

I recommend mutations. Either brought on by a human reaction to alien parasites or an here-to-unknown astronomical event, the humans have all died horribly or else, been mutated into disgusting, deadly creatures who's every moment is filled with pain. It can be a brain parasite, a parasite which seizes control of the muscles or just a creature which enters into a parasitic version of symbiosis with the human body. Can be fungal, protazoic or animal.

Or, have radiation just cause horrible changes and mutation.

>>36915796
OP dropping in again.

I think this anon is right. I'm not happy with the Thing, we need some crawling cosmic horror.

>What caused the damage

Well perhaps the thing was a bio-weapon realeased as sabotage?

>Mutations

I actually quite like this, it's a bit deadspace, but the crawling horror, your body turning against you, you either mutate into a gribbly that still knows it was human, or you mutate and get wormified. Either way, it's not nice.

I'd love to hear what other ideas anons have, it seems everyone likes Dave as is, it's the Thing we're having trouble with.

>>36916234
I think the astrophysics idea is good. Just a star that seems to randomly appear and anything touched by its light starts to mutate and go insane due to the radiation

>>36916234
>>36916695
I would suggest some effect of prolonged FTL exposure. Maybe nothing's been in warpspace for a century before, maybe the ship's been spotted a few times in the past but never in time to board it (likely because Dave kept jumping to keep more humans from boarding and dying horrifically).
But maybe he can't anymore, maybe the ship is out of fuel, maybe he went offline and Dave II doesn't know to keep jumping.
But it could have brought something back from the other side (see: event horizon, at least the first half of it), or the former crew could have mutated into infectious warp horrors, or maybe the ship itself is impregnated with unnaturalness and -shouldn't- be in realspace.

>>36919284
And by century I meant millenium.

>>36916234
Maybe the thing on the ship only exists in hyper-space.

Everything on the ship is fine until they try and drag it home.

It appears to wink into existence as soon as the hyper-space engines are activated and winks away again as soon as they switch off.

Also once the engines are activated a corridor appears where one never was before. Dave can't see it and it doesn't show up on the maps. The lights are off down that corridor. The range finder reads infinite length.

The thing looks like a person. In fact it looks like a member of the crew. Not always the same crew member to all of the crew members. In a room of 7 crew member 1 is the thing. 5 are seeing Tom who works in the engine room, 1 is seeing Burt who works in navigation and Dave is sobbing in abject fucking terror, too scared to even talk in case It realizes its been spotted and starts doing horrible things again. Nobody knows what Dave sees. He won't say.

At some point someone is going to talk to Tom/Burt and then all of the shit is going to go wrong.

>>36919910
This reminds me of all the skinwalker writing on /x/. Just make there keep being the wrong number of people in a room, or even changing if your repeatedly count.
You can look at the people around you and name the four friends you see, but when you count heads there's 6 people in the room.

>>36919910
Holy shit anon. I think I love you. This is a very good idea.

>>36919910
While thinking about it. The corridor is maybe a bit overt. But I love the idea of a hyperspace creature. Dave is busy wigging out. The skutters are forming defensive circles. Trying to barricade people in their rooms and suddenly there's two Burts.

>>36920309
It's only Burt to about 80% of the crew. 19% see Ted. 1% is freaking the fuck out in his server and wishing he a throat so he could slit it.

>>36920412
You know I almost want to run this as Dave the Adventure now.

>>36920412
I think the thing to do is get everyone in spacesuits for the extra anonymity. Perhaps thinking it's worms, the crew release a neurotoxin through the ship. Everyone suits up. Dave counts life signs. "20 crew and one hard as fuck rat." A headcount says 21.

>>36920512
Life signs always annoyed the shit out of me watching star trek.

What are they exactly?

Never fucking says.

>>36920138
>skinwalker
>/x/

Give credit where its due, /k/ popularized that one. /x/ was actually coming over to /k/ for a while for their innawoods stories.

As for an idea for terror, could throw the players a curve ball and just have the "monsters" be the former crew, insane from Cabin Fever or something along those lines. No radiation, no aliums, just good ol' "we're the monsters all along" Give em a good axe murderer style crazy, where they're perfectly pleasant to be around at first and next thing you know they're shooting you out the air lock.

Dave loves his crew so much that he can't even begin to cope with the thought that they've turned into bloodthirsty psychopaths, so he's paralyzed anytime he sees one doing a horrible act. He may recover enough to seal the doors to protect the players and will do everything he can to help them. However, the moment they try to hurt his crew, or point out the fact that the crew he loves is long gone, he will freeze up. Maybe he'll just sob over the PA saying "I'm sorry" over and over as he watches a girl's head get beaten in with a wrench, maybe he'll prevent an airlock override when the players finally have a killer trapped in an airlock, stuff like that. Basically make it where he's seen so much death, he doesn't care what he has to do to protect a life anymore, to the point of even locking everyone in the ship into "timeout" in an attempt to get them to talk things out.

>>36920570
adding to that, because he loves his old crew so much, he overlooks horrible things they do everytime something reminds him of how it used to be. Maybe one guy played chess with Dave every Friday, and so at one point when that guy has killed several people and is clearly insane, he asks Dave for another game of chess. Dave, desperate for things to return to normal, believes the guy is good again and is elated.

It could also be why Dave allows the players onto the ship and doesn't warn them.

>This time will be different.

>They are still good people.

>They just need someone to remind them of who they are.

>It will be different this time.

>They are still the crew I love and cared for all these years, I just know it!

>It will be different...

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>>36920746

>>36920746
I give up. This is now officially Dave The AIs thread.

>>36919910

I love this thread. Speaking of hyperspatial things though..


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Silence_Has_Lease

Everyone needs to go and see this star trek episode. Its the closest i've seen TNG go to 'horror' . Season 2, episode 2. go netflix it if you have it.

That fucking CGI-face still gives me chills

>>36920570
>>36920746
As much as I love this idea how are the original crew still around after 1000+ years?

>>36922305
FTL shenanigans. Relativistic speeds. Cosmic rays. Regenerative mutations. Take your pick, really.

>>36922305
OP here: It doesn't have to be 1k years anyway, but that's good thinking to spot it anon.

>>36921074
>cgi face
Heh maybe I'll see it when I watch the episode. Anon must be tiny girly man to worry about this. I shall check link to wiki now.

>it's the face

What the actual fuck is that? You are legit right on this anon

Not OP but I've had my own idea for a while.

The crew follows a distress signal (BECAUSE THAT ALWAYS TURNS OUT WELL) and find a system that has been stripped bare and is littered with derelict ships, all of which appear to be the same kind of ship. Most of them have been ripped to shreds, and only one is functional.

The crew boards the ship and find it in a sort of "power-saving" mode. Investigation of the vessels shows a lack of any kind of FTL drive, no life support equipment at all, a rather inefficient reactor, but an extremely powerful computer. It appears to have once been a smaller ship that had new sections added to it over time. Oddly, the more intact derelicts have scaffolding attached to their underside with small ships resembling the core of the working ship.

Before long the ship boots up and begins sending a swarm of crablike robots out to the terran ship. They set to work hunting down the crew onboard the ship while doing little to no damage to the ship itself. It's apparent they want it intact. But why? And what happened to the system in the first place?

How about, crew members missing, later individuals are found, hiding in various places, long dead. Some killed, some starved, who knows why.

The AI Dave is in control of communications. He controls nothing else. Which is not standard to the design. He doesn't know why. Memory wiped, or missing due to limited memory available in communications array.

Every single room's individual systems have been isolated. You need a code to open each door, turn on the monitor, use each device. Why? Nothing denotes why. Individual service droids are even isolated from each other and from the main computer, which is completely shut down.

The thing is a technolifeform. It can only get into a system if that system is unlocked. Once it gets into the system, it corrupts it, and then can alter it to do what it needs. The more it claims, the faster/stronger/more versatile it gets. Initially unnoticable due to its weakened state, as the crew reclaims the ship and finds more bodies, the "thing" is intigrating systems they are unlikely to notice at first, and playing along with them, unless it can safely take one of them. It uses organics to feed/build the connections it needs to integrate the systems. So every sizable growth is preceeded by a crew death.

They have to figure out why everything is locked down, before they give the enemy everything it needs to control the ship and become an unstoppable behemoth that can eat whole ships.

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To populate your battleship, take inspiration from real-world ship design.

Important valves and control panels are often in weird locations, like the mess hall. Or a random corridor. Or a panel in the toilets. Every scrap of space is used, even if it's just to hang a hammock or a bag of spare parts.

Everything is documented, but the documentation is centralized and designed to be destroyed in the event of a boarding action or takeover. Everything is ancient too, but indestructible.

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>There is a master terminal, located adjacent to Dave's centralized processing core.
>The centralized processor core's entries have all been welded shut, every possible approach vector has been barricaded off.
Dave doesn't know why, or when. and he has absolutely no problem with the players attempting to gain access to his centralized processing core.
Except it's a massive blind spot for him
All his cameras, all his sensors are killed in the area around that core.
And he starts getting more and more nervous the less of the crew he can see.

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>>36927669

More alarmingly, upon close examination, the entire processing core is running something massive and power-intensive, but it isn't Dave. Nobody's sure where "Dave's" program is being run, if it's being run at all.

If Dave discovers this, he becomes very distressed.

an idea for the Thing, its a hive mind where not only all the memories of the dead crew are stored, but also all their current 'souls' and emotions. At first, when this was discovered, the crewmember with the mutation immediately tried to share it, going from person to person and collecting more people that were excited about this.

But once you get over 5 people or so, it becomes a lot harder to make sense. you've got 5 people all yelling instructions to the body, and its going all Herky-Jerky trying to find different overriding commands. But transferring stretches everything, gives everyone space, and for a limited amount of time puts someone in the drivers seat. during that time, the Thing can control better and can focus. This led to an addictive urge for everyone to get a turn being the controller of the galaxies first human hivemind, along with a minority portion that didn't join willingly and wants to kill themselves.

This lets the thing be nonsensical. suddenly, behavior that lets pces live make sense, as does behavior that kills hosts. the entire previous crew are playing Their own version of lets play pokemon, screaming at each other to do a hundred different things while attempting to grab their next victim and assume direct control for a bit. gives a PC that gets grabbed and controlled still be in the game as well.

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Maybe Dave was supposed to be part of a fifth column attack to start World War Five. Some of the crew mutinied when the order came down, and Dave, being ethical tried very hard to stop the fighting. Forced to choose between his crew and his orders, he went a bit nuts.

When the dust settled, everyone was dead. Dave hadn't done anything but negotiate and stall, but he was still all alone. World War Five happened without him, people rebuilt, got over it, and then... some salvage team found him.

Of course, he wants to keep his suite of military-grade bioweapons and murder-bots secret. Nobody wants to go to Robot Jail for warcrimes. But in moving them to secure hiding spots... one or two got loose.

Dave is very, very sorry. He didn't mean for anything bad to happen. If he tells the salvage team what's hunting them, they'll kill him. If he doesn't, they might die.

Better to... pretend it's a horrible alien monster. Help the team out. Keep it cool, keep it steady. Don't panic.

Yeah. Dave is a good AI. He's just not very good at his job.

>>36929738
Oddly enough this is pretty much exactly how I imagined Dave looking

>>36929107
be careful we don't slide too far into whembley territory here, although I love the idea that everything that's trying to kill the players are things that used to be held in the ship as weapons.

Dave, trying to be the good guy he is, tried to jettison them into the nearest sun, but a few ended up getting lose. He treats it like most people would treat a mouse infestation.

>"ugh, forgot to clean the traps, excuse me for a second"
*sounds of airlocks thumping open with some sort of hellacious screaming in the background"
>"Much better. Now where were we? Oh yeah, coffee is in the second supply room on your left."

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I love (space) horror, so much so that its starting to intrude a little on my current space victoriana scifi game.

In that one idea that I'm using is that one of the party is being pursued by time-travelling alien beings for some time-travelling act that he will commit in the future. These aliens are not especially strong or intelligent but they are selectively invisible and able to travel through time at will without any ill effects from paradoxes.

Although, they are very quick to punish others who cause paradoxes with time-travel, they resolve these by trying to attack and kill said transgressor prior to him using timetravel (which you will notice does cause a paradox).

That being said they are rare creatures (unlikely to appear anything but singly), hate being known about so won't attack anyone if it leaves evidence that they have been there that could not be ascribed to something else and being very, Very cautious such that they will paradox themselves frequently to avoid timelines they are unhappy with (going back and talking to themselves thus preventing the current timeline from occurring).

I have it in my game that every time the timeline is changed (for whatever reason) that people who are affected by it, but not first person viewers, are afflicted by a sudden and strong sense of deja vu and frequently accompanied by will checks, with passes letting them have a glimpse as to what the other time line was like. This is combined with surfacing memories based on events in altered timelines, sudden changes in their current situation (What? Dr Rothschild? He died like several hours ago when the room vented, don't you remember?) and the aspect that the aliens that the players/characters do see has no true physical form (I alter my description between characters, with them being more surreal and unnatural as their willpower climbs.) creates a very trippy and unnerving atmosphere for the players.

live you bastard! Live!

OP here

>>36931154
What is a Whembley? I only know it as a Stadium, sorry, just curious.

I am really liking the idea that everything aboard is a bioweapon or something released either by sabotage or mutiny, like this anon said >>36929107

I think perhaps I will also add the FTL monster aspect. In that shit doesn't go down until in FTL, this gives supernatural and biological horror, with the wildcard of Skutters and the red herring of Dave.

I also kinda want to keep Dave about in some fashion. /tg/ really seems to like him. I think a short story is in order.

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>>36935285
I think he might mean Wheatley?

>>36935349
Dear god Anon, you're right. I hadn't even made the connection to Wheatley.

>>36928060
Ideas:

>It's Dave I, suffering from locked-in syndrome and going quite insane
>Dave isn't being run *anywhere* . Turns out ghosts are real, and AIs can have them too.

>>36920562
Sensors in your suit. Like those things they clamp on your finger to monitor heart rate, but more space-er.

>>36920562
Dunno what they are in Star Trek, but if I was designing a way for a ship to look for "life signs" inside it, I'd have sensors looking for warm areas, heartbeat noises, unusual gas emissions (CO2, O2, methane, etc), movement, that kind of thing, and feed them into a big Bayesian predictor and count them as "life signs" if it spat out more than a certain probability of being a living thing.

Does anyone have links to other threads on similar topics? Also, how does one go about archiving a thread? I'm another lazy space-gm, searching for spooke space adventures to run

>>36936376
There's a few on suptg. I also think this one is getting archive worthy.