I’m pretty sure I am not the first person to come up with this idea, but I wanted to write it up anyway in case it helps someone else. The reason we wanted to work in other Panic Engine games is to be able to change up genre/tone sometimes. The table loves sci-fi + horror, but we also love fantasy and sometimes still play a D&D 5e one-shot here and there. Using the vehicle of sims or virtual reality (VR), we can work in this other content. I like to think of these diversions as “holodeck episodes”.
SPOILER ALERT: Small spoilers ahead for The Unseen City module for Cloud Empress.
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What is a holodeck episode?
[Trekkies, you probably know what this is and can skip ahead.]
In Star Trek series, from The Next Generation and forward, there are usually a handful of episodes that take place wholly or partially on the holodeck (a completely immersive virtual reality, essentually, that doesn’t need special equipment like headsets; all you need to do is enter a room and the holodeck creates everything for you using technology similar to that of the transporters and replicators). Often, the stories being played out on the holodeck are a different genre than the science fiction of Star Trek - Picard’s Dixon Hill mysteries, Bashir’s Bond-like spy adventures, and the crew of Voyager’s Fairhaven are a few examples. In these episodes, we usually have a story inside the holodeck and a story on the ship/station that are intertwined/connected or that intersect at some point in the episode. Frequently, there is some sort of malfunction that traps people inside the holodeck and the crew outside has to try to help them. But sometimes the holodeck is used to explore complex ethical questions or serious content dealing with topics such as addiction, PTSD, or self-harm. They are stories within a story, which gives them a lot of possibility.
What can a holodeck episode add to a Mothership campaign?
Well, like the folks in Star Trek, sometimes you might want a break from the genre or your campaign or just to have some fun. That’s okay! It’s nice to have variety sometimes. If your campaign has been going on a while, it can be nice to go play in a different sandbox. Taking a small break can allow you to return to the campaign refreshed and with renewed focus. Maybe you want to play something that leans towards goofy/ridiculous to break up the sometimes dismal tone that unrelenting horror plus capitalism can have.
These episodes can add risk and reward to your campaign. Everything has consequences in Mothership, right? You can play with how much the effects, stress, and damage inside the holodeck episode spill back out into reality. For instance, if one of the player characters plays a magician in a Cloud Empress sim, they might have some time shaved off their life or take damage since magic takes a toll in Cloud Empress and there are no old magicians. Since violence affects people with stress more directly in Cloud Empress, maybe a player character comes out of the sim more sensitive to violence in the real world and temporarily accumulates stress in the same way (if they enact violence or it is acted upon them). Or maybe if a spell or item provided an AP boost, stress relief, or other benefits, those also spill outside. If a holodeck episode was especially rewarding, maybe the party gets some stress relieved.
It can also function as it does in many Star Trek episodes: as a place to be trapped with additional dangers. Your crew can enter a sim thinking they are getting some well-deserved downtime until they become trapped and discover that safety mechanisms have been disabled and they are really taking damage.
This can also be a chance for further character development and team cohesion (or fracturing) that then bleeds out into the main campaign. Perhaps two player characters didn’t fully trust each other going into the sim, but the experience helped build up trust in a way that the “real” world didn’t. Perhaps a well-integrated team goes into a sim, loses themselves there a bit, and it creates some rifts that they have to deal with back in reality.
A holodeck episode can also be a space to gather information in a more interesting way. Maybe someone on a station wants to give you some sensitive information, but doesn’t want to risk an in-person meeting or reveal their identity. They might want to meet within a sim where they can patch in from anywhere on the station and wear a complete digital disguise. If that contact is especially paranoid, they might add various other security measures within the sim that you have to overcome first before they even talk with you. Their enemies could also be trying to locate them and injecting hostile obstacles into the sim. Or perhaps your crew is trying to do some hacking or research on the down low and they route their search through a sim in order to hide their activities from prying eyes (more on this below).
The setup for including The Unseen City in my Mothership campaign
Our crew has recently had a few really good scores, so their reputation continues to rise, but less-savory folks are taking notice in a bad way. One such group has kidnapped our crew’s corporate handler, Brighton, and made an AI deepfake video showing the crew killing him. They are threatening to send that video to TRG (the crew’s employer), which would really make things bad for the crew. TRG owns their ship and they are operating on Hardlight Station under the auspices of TRG. They could be arrested, possibly executed, imprisoned, their ship impounded, and be kicked out of the Nakatomi Sector altogether. They really don’t want that as they have been getting established here and have gotten a bit comfortable.
This group is sending a ship for them to take them on an unknown errand. Once they complete this vague errand, they have been told that Brighton will be released. They are pretty stuck with limited options. However, Susan L’Estnom (who has been with the crew since Prison Station Echo) had an idea to give them some more choices. She would route a bunch of data about the group that kidnapped Brighton through a sim that the players would enter. She could not control how the data manifested as a sim, but she crafted an algorithm to help identify potentially useful information such a location data. Their objective inside the sim was to locate that useful information.
The execution
Since I was focused on location data, I decided that a couple of jump coordinates would be the target pieces of information: one that would contain Brighton’s location and the other the set of coordinates where the kidnappers were likely sending them on the errand. Real life research on trying to narrow down a location would require filtering out non-viable options and cross-referencing other data. To simulate this proces, I created a puzzle for the players to complete for each set of coordinates. I first decided that a set of jump coordinates contained three numbers. Players would have to find the correct three numbers. I started with a half page with an array of numbers on it, then made “filters” that were pieces of paper with cutouts that, if lined up correctly, would reveal only three numbers. Here are some photos of this puzzle.
Because I had two sets of coordinates for them to find, I added some symbols to the corners of the set of numbers and a symbol on the filter pages to show them how they lined up. Here are some photos of how everything looks once the filters are laid in place.
The group entered the sim in the Lowland Wastes, not too far from the closest reported location of the Unseen City. One of my players made an excellent play choice that we adopted for everyone: once in the sim, they didn’t really remember who they were before; they were completely immersed only with a sense that they might have known their companions a while and that they were looking for something (the details of which eluded them). We also decided that they would not know who in the sim was a “real” person versus a completely simulated person. Additionally, something that bled through to the sim was the fact that these players expected the worst at every turn (especially having recently survived The Year of the Rat) and were a bit jumpy and often quick to shoot first. This, of course, has consequences in Cloud Empress and added some very real-feeling stakes immediately.
They encountered travellers on the road extolling the potential riches and strange items that could be found in the Unseen City. So, everyone decided to head for it since the group felt strongly they were looking for something out of the ordinary. Once in the city, they decided that they wanted to try to collect exotic spores to sell/trade. One of the first Mystlings they encountered helpfully directed them to a spore forest on the level, but also gave them a piece of paper with a single number - 433 - on it. As they were collecting spores and following the paths that the Children of the Forest made, they came across a strange scroll. This scroll had a 10x5 array of numbers on it. In this case, the scroll they found did not contain the number 433, but they held onto it and began to look for and ask about other such scrolls. This led them to exploring almost every location in the city that I had mapped out and find all of the scrolls.
Everyone was having so much fun playing in the Cloud Empress sandbox that I let the session flow as long as they were having fun, so we explored the Unseen City for 3 sessions. As they spent more time in the sim, they started remembering a bit about themselves from the real world, which created a great opportunity for sanity checks as they grappled with the fact that they had two very distinct personalities and set of experiences in their minds. Once out of the sim, we did another round of sanity checks as folks had to come back to reality. Stress taken rolled into reality, my player who chose a magician took some damage and her teeth hurt like hell, and a player who’d received an AP boost of 20 due to a spell miscast got to keep that and I will let him take it through the next session.
Once they exited the sim, Susan looked at the data they found and was able to pull up the locations and they checked out with other research she had done. They now have some more options as a crew and have decided to split up: one group will go attempt to rescue Brighton while the other fulfills the bargain with the kidnappers (and has some backup coming on their own ship).
Concluding thoughts
I chose to make searching for information a richer experience than a character saying “I want to search for information on this group”, having them roll if necessary, and giving them something off a table of 1d10 pieces of info. For some folks, what I have done here is far too long a diversion to get information that could be dispensed with in-campaign more efficiently. For others, maybe this provides an extra tool. You certainly wouldn’t have to let it go on for as many sessions as I did and cut it short instead, pulling the players out when they only had gathered some information and handle what they do with it in the real world.
While my own Mothership campaign is coming close to a natural off-ramp, I would like to use this idea in the future. Additionally, The Unseen City was a perfect module for this, and there is a Backerkit campaign for The Twisting Unseen for Zinetopia that allows you to connect Mothership and Cloud Empress worlds really nicely. The dungeon creation mechanics in the zine were really well done and made creation simple, but also really fun for me as Warden, so I, for one, consider this an instant back.
You also don’t have to stick to Panic Engine games, either. I chose to do this because it was easier to hop into a sim game where the mechanics are fundamentally the same. We didn’t need to have a full session 0 - just a bit of intro to the world of Cloud Empress and we were off and running. Also, we wanted to try out some other Panic Engine games. If your table is familiar with other systems, feel free to slot those in. The technology of a sim/VR/holodeck really allows for almost anything to be used as an episodic adventure inside your campaign. And I hope I have shown that, with a little creativity, you can make that episode matter in a variety of ways. Happy simming!
Some Panic Engine games and other modules/hacks to try in your holodeck episode
This may not be a complete list, but here are the games I have found that use the Panic Engine:
- Cloud Empress
- Ruination Pilgrimage
- Bite the Hand
- 5 Million Worlds
- Dive
- Mountain Resonance (forthcoming)
- Anomalous Investigations
- Gordinaak
- Summer of Lovecraft
- Order of the Black Chalice