Control-Alt-Delete – A Modern-day SciFi Campaign

This evocative illustration is by Greg Scherer, aka s1kick.
I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply threw away the excess that I couldn’t use; since CM came along, it’s been my practice to give these away for free to the readers here.
Yesterday, I woke up with a complete campaign outline in my head. Since it would take almost as long to make notes on everything I had thought of as it would to write it up for everyone here, I’ve chosen to do the latter.
This article is the outline of a campaign suitable for 4-5 players, using any reasonably modern-day game system – GURPS, Hero System, d20 Modern, or whatever. Heck, you could probably adapt it to run with Paranoia, for that matter. It’s largely inspired by a number of movies and TV shows from the last 20 years or so – you’ll probably spot the references as they come up – but I’m not going to name them explicitly (a) in case I leave one out, and (b) because I want to put some distance between them and this concept.
The Premise
The PCs are all agents for a shadowy government agency. Rather than risk their highly-trained agents in the field, they have built up a bank of volunteers. These get cash, or a problem solved, or have their sentences reduced, in return for letting the minds of the trained agents be downloaded into their cortexes for a mission. If the deal is for a problem to be solved, that forms part of the mission objectives. The donors all know that this is a high-risk deal, but either they or their families will come out of it better-off. It’s an especially popular choice for the terminally ill, as all medical bills get covered, but all sorts of people have volunteered for every possible reason under the sun – and they receive some benefits simply for remaining “on standby” as a host. Some hosts have even been used multiple times and can almost be said to do this for a living.
Unknown to the donors but not the agents, it’s not just the modern-day bodies of the hosts that gets used; the agents are actually downloaded into a past version of the host. Some will know what’s going on because the hosting event will occur in a time-frame after they signed up for the programme; others will have no clue.
There are also times when one or more of the agents’ physical capabilities will be needed, and an edited upload of a given skillset from the volunteer to the agent will then occur. Most missions contain a mixture of the two.
The Missions
The Agency is supposedly not the only ones who know how to do this. Somewhere, there is an organization named Scorpion who want to arrange things so that they are in charge. No-one knows who Scorpion are or where they are based. The Original Mandate was to function in a similar fashion to the Backstep Programme in Seven Days, a series that I greatly enjoyed when it was showing. All that changed when Scorpion was discovered, which occurs pre-campaign.
These days the missions comprise of a mixture of fixing problems before they become emergencies (original premise), countering some manipulation of history by Scorpion or some attempt to take advantage of the outside-sourced emergency by Scorpion, and fixing whatever personal problem the host contracted to have solved – preventing some mistake they made with their lives, reuniting the family, or whatever, in the Quantum Leap style.
Eventually, it is anticipated that missions will be directed against Scorpion itself, but until the Agency knows who and where to target, intelligence-gathering in that area is the current order of the day.
PCs
The PCs should be a mixture of traditional James-Bond style characters (The Brawn) and a few people with indispensable skills that are completely unable to function on a physical level but whose minds are still sharp and clear (The Brains). The latter could be people tethered to life-support machines or in wheelchairs or whatever. However, they should all be within the normal-human range in abilities.
Each mission, the GM hands each player a dossier which specifies the physical characteristics of the host that they will be occupying, with any skills that the host has. The original personality will function as an NPC with the same body, who can even take it over in periods of high stress or when the agent-in-charge is knocked unconscious. Once again, these are ordinary people built within the normal human range of abilities. It’s the combination that gives PCs (and their enemies from Scorpion) their advantage over the normal population. Most of the time, they will simply offer “suggestions” – some of which will occasionally be useful – and interact, personality-to-personality, with the PC.
From amongst the many volunteers “on file”, these hosts have been computer-matched as having potentially-necessary skills and being physically able to reach the intervention point in time. There are times when beggars can’t be choosers, and the agents will be saddled with someone whose sole qualification for the mission is being able to take part in it. Other times, they may have someone with particular expertise relevant to what the mission appears to be. The Caveat is because these missions can actually turn out to be something completely different to expectations when the PCs start investigating.
Because they are involved in Temporal Manipulation, outside of the limited scope of their missions, the agents have to keep changes to history as tightly confined as possible. History has some elastic “give” but there may be limits that the Agency doesn’t want to push. That’s also why they aren’t trying for really big changes like eliminating Hitler – these are too unpredictable. Small, specific, isolated, changes are the scope of the mission profile.
On a mission, then, the PCs are hybrids of two characters – the original PC and the “host” (if in a host body) or the original PC and the “donor” (if in the PCs body).
At the end of the mission, after debriefing, the PCs are “rebooted” from backup copies of their pre-integration state, clearing away the “acquired” skills and personality, restoring the Agent to being “himself”. This also scrambles somewhat his memories of the actual mission; an important post-mission phase is using the debriefings to enable them to reintegrate those memories into a coherent whole. If this doesn’t happen, the memories will eventually return, but may contain erroneous bits that the subconscious of the PC has “created” or “romanticized” to fill the gaps.
It would also be an important phase of each adventure to have news footage or some other reports showing the impact on history that the PCs had in the course of the mission.
The “personal problems” angle is important because it permits the ongoing experiencing of “ordinary lives” within the game world. You’ll see why that matters in a little while.
The Technology Timeline
A key to making the campaign work will be plausibility in the source and limitations of the temporal “insertion” technology. From what’s been written in the preceding paragraph, it should be clear that the Agency doesn’t really understand, on a theoretical level, how it works. Deciding the answers should be left to each GM.
My inclination would be to have this be an accidental discovery seized on by the military or an intelligence agency and pressed into practical application before the researchers were ready, especially when they couldn’t give any clear answer as to how long it would take to get those answers. Assuming that the research was being funded by the military / agency (explaining how they came to know of it), it then becomes understandable why they would want to start seeing some returns on their investment before all the whys, wherefores – and bugs – were worked out.
Of course, once Scorpion was discovered, all bets were off. There could no longer be an argument about using, or not using, the technology.
An ongoing concern should be the possibility that Scorpion understands the technology better than the PCs do. This gives the GM a way to introduce anything that he wants the PCs to be able to do – by posing it as a problem for them to overcome. This inherently limits the scope of the technology so that it doesn’t get out of hand and destroy the campaign.
The Campaign
Here’s a complete outline of the campaign that I foresee:
- Mission One should be a typical anti-Scorpion mission so that all the elements of the campaign can be introduced.
- Missions Two-Five should be a mixed blend of the mission types. Add more if you come up with more good plots, or if necessary to have the PCs “gel” as a team. I would suggest at least two should be “prevent a disaster” in nature, one more should be “anti-Scorpion” and Scorpion should win that confrontation, one should expose the limits of the technology by sending the PCs on a mission that turns out to be unnecessary, and one should be a defensive move aimed at making sure that one of the agents actually survives to be recruited when it is discovered that he died in the past.
- Somewhere around Mission Six or Seven, the PCs should discover that their debriefings are being edited to keep classified information The Agency doesn’t want them to know, taking advantage of the principle that the “subconscious fills-in-the-blanks” with something which quite probably has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth. In the course of missions six through ten, the PCs should become aware that life in general outside the agency is slowly becoming more and more dystopian, despite their best efforts. So far as the personnel of the Agency are concerned, this is in the agent’s imaginations, the world is exactly the same as it was aside from the changes they – or Scorpion – have made. The mission mix should be similar to the first five.
- “Mission 11” should be a typical mission, but the PCs should discover – in the course of it – hints that they have actually participated in a mission in between Mission 10 and the current one and have no memory of it. They should start burying hints in their debriefings of this discovery while leaving out any direct mention of their suspicion. There are three possibilities: One, the agency has found a way to edit the recorded personalities used for the “reintegration” process, or two, Scorpion has infiltrated The Agency, or three – both of these have happened.
- Missions 12 and 13 should be “normal”.
- Mission 14 should include evidence of a second “Lost Mission” that the PCs (and players) have no memories of. Perhaps they have acquired a skill each that they don’t remember ever studying. What’s more, Mission 14 involves direct contact with an agent of Scorpion, which the PCs remember post-mission in flashbacks, but of which there is no mention in their official debriefing.
- Mission 15 should again be fairly normal, though it may involve doing something the PCs consider morally “gray” at best. Throughout Missions 11 to 15, the trend toward Dystopia should continue.
- Mission 16 is when you start the buildup to the big finish. The PCs have to nobble a supposedly-friendly agency because the latter is about to launch some action that The Agency considers premature. Agents of Scorpion are encountered with exactly the same mission objective, and it is an entirely permissible outcome for Scorpion to complete the PCs mission for them.
- Mission 17 should be normal, but – for a third time – there should be a “missing mission” discovered.
- Mission 18, the first part of an unannounced two-part adventure, should appear superficially to be a normal mission, but the consequences of the mission should be very different from expectations. Mission 19 should be an intervention to undo the success of Mission 18, and the PCs should encounter agents of Scorpion who are trying to ensure that Mission 18 succeeded as the PCs remember it.
- Mission 20, so far as the Agency is concerned, should be an entirely normal anti-Scorpion mission. HOWEVER, the problem to be solved is that Scorpion agents have done “X” where X is actually what the PCs accomplished back in one of missions 1-5, and in order to stop Scorpion getting in the way, the PCs have to pretend to be agents of Scorpion themselves. Prior to the mission commencing but after Integration, one of the PCs will overhear a technician being ordered to redact the entire mission briefing from his recorded memories.
In other words, the “missing missions” are all times when the PCs are acting as agents of Scorpion, and The Agency hasn’t just been infiltrated by Scorpion, they are Scorpion!- There are several parts to the resulting climactic adventure. First, they have to decide how to handle their current mission – they can either try to succeed or deliberately fail.
- Then there comes the mission debriefing. They should realize that because changes to history flow downward with the timestream, they can tell the Agency anything they want in the debriefing because the Agency receiving their reports is one that has already been affected by the change in history (if any) and won’t know any better. They will also have to find some way of communicating their discovery to their “reintegrated” selves.
- After that comes the double-agents part of the adventure, in which the PCs properly investigate the Agency and discover who is really in charge of it. There are lots of possible solutions, some of which I’ll detail in a minute. At first, it might seem that they have unlimited time to decide what to do, but in reality, they only have until the next covert mission (when their memory records will be examined for “redacting” and possibly only until the next mission, when fresh “backups” will be made and might be examined. So they really only have a very tight window in which to get to the bottom of things…
- …and take action, in the campaign finale.
Resolution
There are a number of possible solutions as to who is behind Scorpion. Here are some of my favorites;
- It could be a shadowy government conspiracy, a-la X-files;
- It could be a less-shadowy conspiracy who see the world going to hell in a hand-basket and are desperately doing what they think is the right thing in order to save it;
- …or a less-shadowy cabal trying to undo the damage from some colossal mistake very early in the program (before the PCs joined);
- It could be aliens, manipulating the leaders of the agency using the same technology that the PCs have been employing, thereby explaining where the tech really came from in the first place…
- Or, lastly (and my favorite) it could be older versions of the PCs trying to prepare the world to fend off some even-worse disaster (eg an alien invasion thirty years in the future, or a global war) at any cost;
- or some combination of the above!
For example, I like the by-the-bootstraps of the aliens idea, but that can also be used in conjunction with the “undoing the vast mistake” or “future selves” solutions. If I were writing this as a novel, that’s probably the solution I would aim toward, writing the missions as a series of short stories. However, in an RPG, this leaves you open to complaints of “My character wouldn’t do that no matter how bad things got” – so I would probably go with one of the other solutions in a game, simply to remove the conflict between Villains and Players.
Time travel mechanics
I haven’t gone into these extensively in this article. The discussion of the “big finish” covers most of what you need to know. The only “soft spots” in the campaign concept are two:
- The whole “into a past self” process needs explanation, even if it’s pseudo-science at its worst. My present thought is that by “Integrating” the two minds in the present-day, that this somehow travels back along the personal timeline of the “host” until it reaches a point at which the combination is somehow “conditioned” to begin manifesting itself. But I think a better answer is needed, if one can be found. If not, you can probably get away with hand-waving it with my current answer and inserting some sort of “conditioning” phase in the mission prep.
- If the agency that the PCs come back to each time is one that has already been affected by the changes in history, then so have the recordings of the agents minds, which undermines the entire premise of the campaign which relies on the PCs retaining knowledge of the way things were. My best answer to this is that the temporal condition itself (ie, mechanics problem #1 above) acts to “insulate” the PCs throughout their timelines. Thus both the hosts and the sources would be aware of the way things were because they were joined mentally at the time of the change, and hence the recordings of their mental states would also be preserved.
The real problem is that you can’t protect the recordings without having the technology to protect the Agency part of the campaign, and you can’t protect the agency from the changes in history without eliminating one of the key elements from the big finale, giving the PCs the ability to lie to The Agency and buy the time they need to investigate and take action. This is at the heart of both the specific mechanical problems described above. Solve them and you solve the real problem, or vice-versa.
Wrap-up
This is a campaign that I think would be a lot of fun. I hope it provides some inspiration for someone out there looking for a cool idea for their next game :)
Some additional resources
I should point readers to my past series here at Campaign Mastery on the subject of Time Travel in RPGs (3 parts)
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September 26th, 2014 at 5:40 am
What if the device were limited to sending people into their own ancestors? This would naturally have some limitations for recent events, but they would have more people to pick from in the distant past.
Regarding the retention of travelers’ memories, have the device fully enclose the travelers. Any changes made to the timeline while the device is active don’t penetrate the interior. Upon disconnect, those memories get a partial wipe in the same way that removing a USB drive without ejecting it can corrupt the contents.
September 26th, 2014 at 1:48 pm
I like the USB analogy and it’s application, Christopher. Nice idea.
The ‘sending into ancestors’ both expands the scope of the campaign and restricts it at the same time. It means that root causes and fundamental changes are easier to make, which in turn involves a lot more work in tracking those changes on the part of the GM, while restricting the number of choices available for modern-era and recent activity, which is when events would occur of greatest interest to the players, GM, and to the Agency itself. So I’m a bit more ambivalent about that idea. Maybe once for a missed jump, or something. It also raises additional ethical questions – volunteers may be able to sign up their own past lives, especially if it prevents some horrible mistake in their own lives, but volunteering the life of an ancestor is another matter. Finally, it ensures that the GM needs to solve the grandfather paradox – the whole point of using meat vehicles for the agents is that it doesn’t put the (highly experienced and trained) agents at risk. The risk of death of an ancestor to the current body being worn by the agent would make them far more cautious with their meat vehicles, when the notion was for these to be expendable at need, permitting the action to be ramped up to ultra-heroic action-movie standards. So it would cause major changes to the concept.
I think that they would work with a longer-term or ongoing campaign, but with a limited-scope limited duration campaign such as the one I have proposed, it would be too restrictive in a number of ways.
But the suggestion raised some interesting points for discussion :)