From The Zones: A New Field Report!

From the Zones is a community project curated here at Fate SF. It is a way of honoring and celebrating the Soviet SF novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, as well as the film based on the novel, Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER.

To see previous Field Reports from the Zones, visit here.

For information on how to participate in From the Zones, as well as resources, visit here.

To get inspired, check out Hereticwerks' new Field Report, Images From An Abandoned Camera (2), a perfect example of how Zones can be deadly and unpredictable, where seemingly everyday phenomena can have quite startling effects.

From the Zones logos courtesy of Hereticwerks. If you like them, check out their Zazzle store for other neat things!

The Golden Sphere

Art by Tom J. Manning

Think of it as a Wrecking Ball: the Golden Sphere is said to be able to fulfill your innermost desire. Conscious or unconscious, but it often turns out to be the latter. It's at the very heart of the labyrinth, the heart's desire of the heart's desire.

In some (maybe most) Zones, it's not there at all. There might just be a Room at the heart of the labyrinth which does the same thing. And the antechamber to the Room, oh that liquid floor. Watch your step.

It's a danger. For whose intentions are fully conscious, or entirely pure? Sometimes people don't know themselves at all until they're face-to-face with this thing.

A mirror.

It's no wonder that governments and militaries take a dim view of stalkers, and often just want them dead.

Recent Field Reports From the Zones

This is a week The Strange is everywhere. So I thought it would be timely to remind folks about From the Zones - an ongoing community project inspired by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's classic SF novel Roadside Picnic - as well as by Andrei Tarkovsky's great film STALKER, which is itself based on the Strugatskys' novel.

Background on the project and how to participate can be found right here. The collection of Field Reports by contributors describing new Zones, taxonomic tables, new phenomena, artifacts, threats, and more can be found right here. We welcome new Field Reports at any time.

We've had a recent Field Report by Bruce Baugh! Meet Moira Tesla, and her Glass Pistol! Bruce uses the new Valiant RPG to stat out a Stalker and a picnic in the Valiant Universe. We're a big fan of Cosmic Patrol, which uses the same game system as Valiant Universe, so we may be meeting Moira on her home turf once the Valiant HC comes out!

And hot on the heels of Bruce's post is a new interstellar campaign seed by Mark Carroll, called The Picnic Basket. Mark's Field Report calls on the Cosmic Patrol for help! You're going to want to read the comments for this one, which riff on Vernor Vinge, Roadside Picnic's Golden Sphere, and Hellraiser's Lemarchand devices.

From the Zones logo courtesy of Hereticwerks.

The Edge Of The Zone

Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker"

At the Edge of almost every Zone is a cordon sanitaire. If militaries, paramilitaries, or corporations can seal off a Zone, they will. Your best bet in breaking through the cordon is a small, fast, quiet vehicle - and bribery.

Especially bribery.

There are Free Zones however. These are either in areas that are too geographically remote to seal off and patrol effectively, or are Zones that have gone entirely overlooked. This latter category is also likely to be geographically isolated. And if there isn't an overlay of civilization at the site of the Zone, there may not be enough oddness to the natural environment for a Zone to be detected - certainly not by satellite.

But never fear. This is where drones are your friend. If a Zone is suspected in an area, drones can be deployed to detect them. Once you lose a drone, you know that something is happening.  This is how the Institute and a number of corporations scout out Zones in new areas.

There are also "Edgeless Zones". Conventional Zones have an Edge; they are easy to imagine as a set of concentric circles with ever increasing intensity and weirdness as one progresses toward the center of the Zone. In contrast, the boundaries of Edgeless Zones fluctuate so wildly that it is usually difficult to tell where the Zone is at any moment. Imagine an amorphous, constantly shifting amoeba, rather than a series of concentric circles.

Even worse, at least one Edgeless Zone has become unfixed even in relative terms. It's migrating, and has already swallowed a few towns and moved on with a rather unpredictable, saltatory gambol. Behind it lies a path of destruction - and its inexplicable leavings.

Logo courtesy of Hereticwerks.

Device

Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker"

You're old. Cold. Tired. Beat up. Bedraggled. Out of booze. 

That's bad in Russia, and worse in the Zone.

Hexcrawl. Dungeon crawl. Zone crawl.

Is there a difference?

Maybe not. But at least you made it this far.

Right to the threshold, right to the edge of the Room.

There's only one thing left to do.

But can you do it?

Phone Home?

Scientist calls the lab (in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker")

What do you do when you find an operating phone in the midst of a long-abandoned dungeon? You're on the threshold of the final room on the final level. This is the kind of dungeon that has a destination.

Do you pick the phone up when it rings? Do you phone the people back in the lab? The ones who didn't believe in you? The ones who thought you'd never make it, that you didn't know what you were talking about in the first place?

The ones who ratted you out to the authorities.

When the phone's just there ringing at the threshold, it's strange to pick it up and answer. It's probably just as weird to phone home and brag that you were right after all.

But maybe understandable.

Cobbled Zones

Near Factor's Walk, Savannah

"Graviconcentrates" is what the scientists of the Institute call them; Zones are filled with them. They are anomalies, gravitational singularities that defy the normal, one gravity, up/down gravitational field found on Earth and most other worlds.

Each graviconcentrate has an orientation. It may pull down or pull up. Some pull sideways, or at strange angles. Most have a field strength far greater than one gravity. They can be killers, hurling someone straight up into the air (or through a ceiling), or crushing them against the ground. Maps are useless in avoiding graviconcentrates, as they shift location constantly.

The Savannah Zone has particularly dense patches of graviconcentrates on the stone stairways and cobblestone streets of the River Historic District. Singletons are often encountered on the stone stairways that connect the three tiers of the River District. Pity the Stalker who encounters one and falls 30' from West Bay Street onto the cobblestones of Factor's Walk.

Still worse are the clusters of cobbles on the streets that make up the Zone. These often bring several discrete graviconcentrates into close proximity. Where you stand matters. Step on two different cobbles and you could be torn apart, hurled along different gravitational vectors simultaneously. This is why experienced Stalkers always test the paths in front of them, casting several small stones, metallic nuts, or other small objects in several directions in an effort to discover which paths seem the safest.

OGL MECHANICS

Graviconcentrates are typically stable in a location for one Scene.

The vector orientation of a graviconcentrate (or the net orientation of a cluster) can be determined by the roll of a single Fate die: a + result indicates an upward vector, a - result the opposite vector, while a blank face indicates a lateral vector of some kind. (This leaves out a multitude of other possible vectors, we know.)

Each graviconcentrate (or a cluster of them in close proximity) has a Field Intensity typically rated from 1-4; the higher the relative gravity of the anomaly, the higher the rating should be (you don't need to increase the rating by one per gravity after 4Gs). Each  level of intensity is considered a Red Die for the purposes of damage, as described in the Fate System Toolkit.

Characters may Create an Advantage to help detect the presence of graviconcentrates and avoid stepping on them by using the Careful Approach or the Skill of Wisdom or Notice. This action requires some kind of tool, such as small stones or metallic nuts that can be cast in several directions to detect these traps. Alternatively, in some settings characters may have access to high technology devices such as gravity detectors which can be used to detect graviconcentrates.

When a character steps close to or near a graviconcentrate they must Defend by rolling their Quick Approach, or a Skill such as Dexterity or Athletics to avoid the trap. The GM rolls 4DF plus the Field Intensity of the graviconcentrate for its Attack. Damage from graviconcentrates causes Physical Stress.

From the Zones logo courtesy of Hereticwerks

The Savannah Zone: Street Milk

Factor's Walk, Savannah

One of the most insidious threats in the Savannah Zone is Street Milk. It's an organic syrup that smells faintly of alcohol and molasses. It seeps up from the seams where cobblestones and the foundations of buildings intersect.

Street Milk is particularly common along Factor's Walk, the interstitial street between West Bay Street up above, and River Street down below.  Street Milk is easy to spot during daytime. While it clings to the built environment, Street Milk never lurks indoors. It's always found on the outside of buildings. clinging to paved surfaces. Street Milk pools in patches up to 5 cm deep. It catches and reflects the sun. You can't miss it.

The night time is a different story. When it's dark, Street Milk absorbs rather than reflects light from artificial sources. It simply looks like a dark patch on a street. Observers often mistake Street Milk for a new pothole or a sinkhole.

The stuff seeps and moves about slowly on Factor's Walk during the daytime. But it migrates more broadly at night, and often thins itself down to the point of near invisibility. At night, Street Milk often seeps out of Factor's Walk, and onto the old stone stairs and walkways that join Factor's Walk to West Bay Street up above, and to River Street below.  It can easily seep into cracks in footwear. It is also slick and often causes deadly falls.

There's an illicit market for the stuff. A sub-type of Stalker, the Sloshers or Milkmen sneak into the Savannah Zone to collect the stuff. This generally requires an overnight stay in the Zone. Sloshers sneak-in during the evening, and find a place to hide and sleep. They rise with the sun, siphoning/hand-pumping up as much Street Milk as they can carry out in a few portable gas cans. Then they hide again, and sneak back out of the Zone at night.

A few Milk Labs under the historic district know how to cook Street Milk down into a solid pellet of pure Milk Rock.  About a half liter is required for one pure rock. This is then cut numerous times - sometimes with inert substances, and sometimes with other drugs.

The final street product's effects are similar to amphetamines. However, the drug also produces mild teratogenic changes in the repeat user, and even first-timers have reported experiencing a rather unique side effect of Milk Rock use, called Seeing Ghosts. These hallucinations are ghost-like apparitions, usually of people who went missing in the Zone at the time of The Visitation, but increasingly also of Stalkers who went missing or died there. Repeated users of the drug frequently report that their visions are frequently accompanied by extrasensory input including the perceptions and memories of people who disappeared during The Visitation, or of Stalkers who died in the Zone.

Most real Stalkers consequently have a superstitious fear of Street Milk and of the drug derived from it. They also avoid contact with Milk Rock users.

Stalkers look down on Sloshers; they say the Milkmen have no genuine interest in or connection to the Zone beyond the collection of Street Milk. The ill-paid security forces have a somewhat different point of view: they appreciate the bribes taken from Sloshers, Milk Labs, and Shosh Houses where Street Milk addicts congregate.

From the Zones logo courtesy of Hereticwerks

The Savannah Zone

The face on the door says it all. Even the pretty places got hit during The Visitation. No one should have considered themselves immune.

Not even Savannah, Georgia, the first planned-on-a-grid city in North America. The city's historic riverfront has gone a bit off-the-grid now, with the irruption of a Zone across a quarter mile of this former tourist attraction.

Now it's just another zone of exclusion.

One that extends halfway across the river, causing all sorts of interesting problems and hazards to navigation.

"From the Zones" logo is courtesy of Hereticwerks.

Warehouse-Cathedral And The Quiet Zone

http://newyorkhistoryblog.org

The Warehouse-Cathedral is what the university students have called the building for decades. The locals call it The Quiet Zone.

It's a Zone-in-one-building in a decaying Eastern U.S. city. A century ago, when the ribbon was cut by the City Fathers and County officials, it was called the Municipal Coal Repository. It was the county's central distribution center for coal, the supplier for households and industry alike in both the City, and its two adjacent subsidiary towns.

"A bit gothic" is how people describe it today, but back then people were pretty proud of it. The building was right in the middle of the industrial neighborhood of the town. It did the job it was designed to do for decades. Sure there were dust clouds from time-to-time, especially when big loads of coal were being transferred, but nobody complained too much. The Warehouse-Cathedral kept the city running.

But by the end of the 60s, many thins had changed. The industries of the zone were starting to fail, and demand for coal consequently decreased. The edges of the neighborhood started to fray into cheap student housing and antique stores.

Coal Bohemia.

So the City finally closed the Warehouse-Cathedral. There it stood abandoned, boarded-up, and quiet for most of the next decade. (Of course, kids used to break-in from time to time and mess around there. They called it "The Castle" for a while. People got high in the "Tower"; grudges got settled in the "Dungeon". These two location-names persist to this day and are legendary among local Stalkers.)

Things got even worse. By the 80s, the City's tax base had severely eroded. The downward spiral of unemployment and crime really kicked-off. Parts of the industrial zone became quite unsavory. Pedestrian tunnels connecting the neighborhood with adjacent ones became quite unsafe. And once the economy started to go bad, the cash-strapped City decided to sell off the Warehouse-Cathedral.

In the 80s and 90s, the Warehouse-Cathedral changed hands many times. First it was used for chemical storage, and then for experiments with crude robotics. In the depths of the Reagan era, the University used grant money to purchase the building for dubious military-sponsored psychotronics experiments. (The Soviets were so much more advanced in psychotronics, of course; and the Star Wars era was all about catching-up with and eventually surpassing the Soviets on every economic, technological, and military front.)

At the beginning of the Clinton era and shortly before the Visit, the University itself decided to sell off the Warehouse-Cathedral to a real estate developer. Anything to make a buck. Anything to avoid yet another capital campaign. Unfortunately, that developer soon ran afoul of the City's Planning Commission and Revenue Department, and ran off. The Warehouse-Cathedral's ownership became in doubt and its future again uncertain.

It was boarded-up once more. The City then put it on the EPA list for eventual clean-up.

Then one night, the Visit came from out of the midnight blue with a BOOM!  The BOOM didn't register on any sound level meters, but due to the Visit, people in several city blocks went deaf for good. The BOOM was accompanied by a blazing Silent Light.

All of it came from that one building. The light burst from every window of the Warehouse-Cathedral. It stayed that bright for days - day and night - and then suddenly guttered out.

The police quickly cordoned off the area. Things calmed down again. Those who could, moved out - especially if they had been away from the neighborhood at work, their children away at school, when their neighbors went deaf from the blinding light.

But the Silent Light has returned three times since the Visit. So a second blighted zone has wrapped itself around the Quiet Zone. There are many checkpoints, all designed to keep out the amateur "Stalkers" (i.e., university kids).

But the locals know a few ways in. Most of them run under the streets. And there are people at the University who will pay top dollar for things that the real Stalkers bring back out.  You'd be surprised how much one of the Chemistry professors will fork over for a jar of coal dust from the Quiet Zone... and there are others just as willing to pay.

"From the Zones" logo courtesy of Hereticwerks

Recent Field Reports From The Zones

UPDATE: +Mark Craddock has just submitted a monster for 13th Age: the Carcassmen. You can see all the entries here.

Over the weekend, some great posts came in for From the Zones Community Project from a few different contributors! On Friday, +Brett Slocum posted a short fiction piece on a Stalker and Zone in Africa. Then Sunday morning, +Brad Murray published a piece on G+ about a Zone in Calgary, and +trey causey did a great post on weird Zone Phenomena.

More is on the way as well: +Bruce Baugh is planning to contribute something, as is +G Kohls of Gorgonmilk!

And there is still plenty of time to contribute! Here is a brief description of the community project, including a brief summary of the sources that inspired the project, and guidelines about how to contribute. It's really all you need to make something of your own, and get in on the action. That's exactly what Brett Slocum and Brad Murray did with their posts, and I think they both hit the nail on the head.

Brad may have had some kind of lateral cognition going on with his. In contrast to the Zone in the movie Stalker - wet Zone fulled with drips, puddles, streams, and drizzle - the Calgary Zone is dry, dessicated, dessicating place. One of the interesting facts about the movie Stalker is that Tarkovsky's first filming site was dry: it was a desert mining facility deep in Soviet Central Asia. Because of a devastating earthquake in the region the film crew switched to a hydroelectric plant that was abandoned during the Nazi invasion during World War II. So the Calgary Zone is what Stalker might have looked like minus an earthquake!

Here's a table with the content that people have created so far.

So, is there a Zone near you? Do you have ideas for locations, inexplicable alien artifacts, or weird phenomena? We now have content for Fate, as well as more old-school inspired material. It would be great to see more system-free posts, as well as more content for Fate, OSR systems, as well as other games like Unknown Armies and WaRP/Over the Edge.

Please join in the fun!

"From the Zones" and "Zones" images are courtesy of Hereticwerks.

Deck of Fridays 3: The Zone As Character

Welcome back to DECK OF FRIDAYS here at FATE SF, our new weekly feature in which we make a draw from the Deck of Fate, our deck of  RPG Inspiration Cards, or another Aspect-generative randomizer - and then do something interesting with it - using the Aspect as inspiration for a campaign or scenario seed, a situation, scene, location, NPC, thingie, etc.

This week's draw from the Deck of Fate was pulled on Thursday morning, for Bujilli, the weekly experimental literary and gaming serial over at Hereticwerks.

We pulled a card with two useful Aspects: Low Morale and Slippery. We're using them both in today's post. The Aspects tie into our "From the Zones" cross-blog collaboration. Check it out and consider joining it!

The Zones are places where the Visits occurred. Finding new Zones around the globe wasn't difficult. Their pattern of distribution was very predictable. The so-called Pillman Radiant* resembles a series of shots from a gun, with each shot landing at a different-but-predictable point on the surface of a rotating sphere.

But the results of the Visits were anything but predictable. The Zones changed the local environments, twisting and in some cases breaking both the local built environment and local landscape. The effects were sometimes subtle but often quite dramatic. The changes were often quite inexplicable, as were so many of the artifacts and phenomena resulting from the Visits.

One of the things you experience when entering a Zone is the feeling of constantly being watched. The Zones feel alive and self-aware. The often feel like subtle and clever adversaries, slippery, constantly placing traps underfoot and treasures just out of reach.

As a result, the Zones are bad for morale. They are stressful places, both physically and psychologically, as well as ontologically. Stalkers expect people to breakdowns in the Zones. They select their hirelings and companions carefully, and prepare for sudden desertions.

*The Pillman Radiant was based on simple Newtonian physics, but won its discoverer a Nobel Prize.

OGL MECHANICS

The Zones
Otherworldly environments

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: The Visit happened here - and maybe it's still happening
• Trouble:  Everyone wants in - until they get here  
• Aspect: A slippery place filled with subtle traps and inexplicable treasures
• Aspect: Expect breakdowns and suddent desertions
• Aspect: No one leaves unchanged

APPROACHES

• Careful: +2
• Clever: +1
• Flashy: +1
• Forceful: +2
• Quick: 0
• Sneaky: +3

STUNTS:

• Innermost Wish - Once per campaign, if a player reaches a special place in the Zone known as The Room, or the object called the Golden Sphere, the Zone will grant their innermost (subconscious) wish. This often relates to their Trouble aspect, but will always touch on some aspect.
• Low Morale - The Zone may take a +2 to its Forceful Approach to Attack a PC or group of mooks. This is almost always a psychological attack, and Consequences will manifest accordingly. Mooks which are taken out flee the scene.
• Ontological Slipperiness - Traps and treasures constantly move around in the Zone. No map is ever completely reliable, and no Stalker's memories of the safe path are ever entirely accurate. Once per scene, a treasure, danger, or both can move to a different place. Also, with the expenditure of 1 FT, one of the Zone's Approaches in any given scene may increase in intensity by +2 for the entire scene.

REFRESH: 3

"From the Zones" and "Zones" images are courtesy of Hereticwerks.

From The Zones Community Project Table

Project Contributions:

1. Zone-age Rumors (1d30) by Porky's Expanse!
2. "Zones" and "From the Zones" logos by Hereticwerks
3. Things Found In the Zone - List A by FATE SF
4. The Zone As A Character by FATE SF
5. Jack Moulsen, Stalker by The Eye of Joyful Sitting Among Friends
6. The Calgary Zone by +Brad Murray 
7. Zone Phenomena by From the Sorcerer's Skull
8. Carcassmen for 13th Age - by CrossPlanes
9. The Library Holes by +Bruce Baugh
10. STALKER: IEC Incident 6447 (NO PICNIC) by +Mark Carroll 
11. Zone Anomalies by Book Scorpion's Lair
12. Classification scheme for objects found in Zone 6N by Rachel Kronick
13. Zone Tigers by Dungeon of Signs
14. Brain Jelly by Carapace King
15. Galactic Outfitters reverse-engineered alien tech by Exonauts!
16. Fading Zones: A Nightroadside Picnic by Armchair Gamer
17. Fading Zones: Husks by Armchair Gamer
18. Fading Zones: Tech from the Zones by Armchair Gamer 
19. The Warehouse-Cathedral and The Quiet Zone by FATE SF
20. From the Zones: Phenomena by The City of Iron
21. From the Zones...a few things by Hereticwerks
22. Near Future Wor*Fare by Porky's Expanse!
23. The Savannah Zone by FATE SF
24. The Savannah Zone: Street Milk by FATE SF
25. Cobbled Zones by FATE SF
26. The Edge of the Zone by FATE SF
27. Moira Tesla by +Bruce Baugh
28. The Picnic Basket by +Mark Carroll
29. Cthonospheric Compass (Exploring Lovecraftian Zones) by Hereticwerks 
30. Images From An Abandoned Camera by Hereticwerks 
31. Images From An Abandoned Camera (2) by Hereticwerks
32. Images From An Abandoned Camera (3) by Hereticwerks
33. Images From An Abandoned Camera (4) by Hereticwerks

Project Resources: 

• "From the Zones" Community Project Description and Guidelines
• "Zones" and "From the Zones" logos - by Hereticwerks
• Zone Index - FATE SF's collection of Zone-inspired posts
• Still not sure what a Zone is? Check out this link!

Feel free to leave links to your own project contributions in the comments below here, or in the comments of the original Project Description and Guidelines Post.

"From the Zones" and "Zones" images are courtesy of Hereticwerks.

This is a non-commercial fan project inspired by the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.

From The Zones - A Community Project!

FATE SF invites you to participate in a cross-blog community project about the Zones, starting now! 

Let's start with a little background.  

The Visit ended almost as soon as it began. Aliens landed in several places. They departed without any communication or cultural exchange with us.  They left behind a ruined landscape. One littered with wrecked buildings, alien waste byproducts, inexplicable technologies, lesser extraterrestrial life forms, and various otherworldly traps, dangers, and strange phenomena.

The military moved into the Zones quickly, trying to conquer and dominate them. This was folly. Most of the soldiers never returned. Plagues broke out in the towns near the Zone. Many residents cleared out. Of course, many also stayed behind.

The paramilitaries and police erected cordon sanitaires around the Zones. The Institute was established to study what remained after the Visit. They hired some of the locals who stayed behind as Stalkers, holy fools who risked death to help scientists enter the Zones and recover artifacts left behind by the Visit. A black market for recovered artifacts began to grow in the towns outside the Zones. Various governments, corporations, and wealthy individuals put together their own covert shopping lists. 

Some Stalkers began moonlighting, offering their services to the highest bidder, and leading freelance missions into the Zones in search of artifacts. The job is dangerous; most Stalkers live short lives.  

***

For more than a decade, Andrei Tarkovsky's SF film Stalker has been a major influence on RPG campaigns I have played-in and run. In October, I had the chance to see Stalker on the big screen for the first time. This led me to read the fresh, uncensored translation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic, about the aftermath of an inexplicable encounter with aliens. It was the book which inspired the movie. About the same time I was getting ready to publish my first post on Stalker, Porky was getting ready to publish a review of the film. We saw this as a sign that the time might be right for a community fan project about Stalker and Roadside Picnic.

***

FROM THE ZONES is a cross-blog project about the Zones. Here are the details:

1. Write something about the Zones for the system of your choice. Describe a specific Zone, or an artifact, or a location within the Zone, a strange threat or phenomenon found in the Zone, a Zone scenario, a table of encounters, a Stalker character class, or something else.
2. This project is cross-system. Write for a system you love. I'll be writing for Fate Core/FAE, but you may want to write for a different system, such as Labyrinth Lord/Mutant Future, X-plorers, Diaspora, Stars Without Numbers, WaRP, Open D6, or something else. System-neutral is also fine!
3. Post your content to your own blog. You own whatever you write and post to your own blog.
4. If you don't have a blog you can write a document in Google docs (aka Google Drive) OR publish your content as a public G+ post.
5. Download one of the From the Zones or Zones logos from Hereticwerks right here; use it in your blog post or Google doc! The art is courtesy of Hereticwerks and you may use it on your blog for non-commercial purposes related to this project. Please credit Hereticwerks and provide a link back to the site. You can use the credit example at the end of this post as a guide.
6. Leave a comment in the comments section of this post (see below) with a link to your blog post, Google doc, or public G+ post. 
7. We will create a table with all the links and a brief/title description of each item here at FATE SF.
8. STILL NOT SURE WHAT A ZONE IS? Check out this link. 

The table itself is now live at FATE SF! This will be an ongoing project, so share a link to your blog post or Google doc whenever it is ready.

This is a non-commercial fan project inspired by the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and by the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.

"From the Zones" and "Zones" images are courtesy of Hereticwerks.

Roadside Picnic

Penguin's 1979 edition of "Roadside Picnic"

This cover looks like something we'd see in the Starblazer Adventures comic or RPG, no?

It is perhaps the most bizarre cover done for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's classic SF novel Roadside Picnic, but it got two things right. Stalkers in the novel do wear suits when they enter the Zone on the Institute's official research business. The suits are called specsuits. I think this poor fellow forgot his gloves. Or he just took them off to inspect the device he just found.

Let's hope that's not a mistake.

The second thing the cover got right is that the landscape inside the Zone has altered from what it once was. Inside the Zone there are a variety of environmental hazards - graviconcentrates, hell slime, and silver cobwebs to name just a few - that have resulted in both the natural environment and the ruins of the built environment inside the Zone becoming otherworldly and dangerous.

That's why it's fenced off.

So what is the Zone?  We know it resulted from an alien Visit. But let's have the Strugatsky Brothers explain it in their own worlds. They do that through a conversation in which the Visit is described as an event which is prosaic for the aliens, but nearly unintelligible for the humans. What's left behind as the Zone are like the leavings from a "roadside picnic":

"A picnic. Imagine a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras...A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about...Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp... and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone's handkerchief, someone's penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow..."

"I get it" said Noonan. "A roadside picnic."

"Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they'll come back."  

Things Found In The Zone - List A

Art by +j garrison of Hereticwerks

Stalkers go into the Zone looking for things to bring back out with them. They may have shopping lists from scientists at the Institute or from various brokers and  black marketeers. It's not unusual for Stalkers to bring back items that blur the lines between living things, chemicals, and/or other kinds of environmental hazards. Others things they bring back are more obviously manufactured items, even if their purpose and use is often inexplicable. Anything that Stalkers bring back has the potential to fuel new scientific investigation, black marketeering, and even violent attempts by others to acquire the item.

Areas of town near the Zone frequently have hidden caches of items that Stalkers have brought back. Weirdness potentially lurks inside every loading dock, warehouse, or apparently abandoned building in town. And sometimes it leaks out and spreads.

Almost all the items on the List A Table below are named items mentioned by the Strugatsky Brothers in Roadside Picnic. In a couple of cases (#8, 20, and 21) I had to come up with a name for something the authors had described without naming. As in life, not all experiences have names.

We'll be writing item descriptions in individuals posts (we already have a couple), and may be adding a bit more to the list as we finish the novel in the next few days.

1. Hell Slime
2. Burning Fuzz
3. Silver Cobwebs
4. Wispy Hairs
5. Graviconcentrates aka Bug Traps
6. Magnetic Traps 
7. Living Corpses
8. Autonomous Viabilities (parts severed from Living Corpses that have a life of their own)
9. Happy Ghosts
10. Spacells
11. Black Sparks
12. Empties
13. Full Empties
14. Bracelets
15. White Whirligigs
16. Lobster Eyes
17. Dick the Tramp (a wind-up mechanical doll)
18. Bitches' Rattles
19. Rattling Napkins
20. Short-shocks
21. Coal Pit
22. Green Slime
23. The Death Lamp
24. Grinder (sometimes localized as a tunnel called The Meat Grinder)
25. The Golden Sphere (sometimes localized as The Room)

Omega House: Scientist K. Panov

Art by Juan Ochoa

Centuries ago, Scientist K. Panov ventured into the Zone with a shopping list. He never came back. Perhaps he backed into something, maybe one of the crackling Silver Cobwebs. Or he stepped into hell slime? Who can tell?

What matters is that the Stalker who brought Panov into the Zone didn't bring him out. Scientist Panov was never seen again on Earth.

But the physicist was found centuries later by a salvage crew trawling space junk in the ring of a gas giant. He was encased within some kind of alien life support vacuole. The crew brought the vacuole on board; they cut Panov out using lasers. A few clean cuts were all it took.

But he wasn't the old Panov.  No legs, no hands. Only one good eye. A torso covered in alien polyps.

The salvage crew froze him, and took Panov to a nearby R.U.R externality within the Empire for medical treatment and further study. The R.U.R. of course repaired him. Just like they would any machine. R.U.R. artisans custom-built new replacement parts for Panov, including cybernetic forearms and a perambulator frame. They also gave him numerous implants and neural augmentations like most organics who live with the R.U.R.

Panov recovered quickly. He started learning about the world he had awakened and joined. He absorbed hundreds of years of technological advancement in a few months. Panov branched out from physics to also learn a few new languages:

• The Prate - the common tongue of humanoids in the Empire
• Afuera - an ancient galactic language from the long-consumed core worlds, used to communicate with other-planar entities
• Glopnic - the R.U.R. language for communicating with space-time itself, as well as with other universes 

Panov fit right in here: so many of the aliens and fellow humans who chose to live on R.U.R. externality were scientists, technicians, and inventors. Or philosophers, linguists, and mentats.

But a few of the organics were salvagers and smugglers like the ones who brought him to the R.U.R. From one of them he learned of Omega House. Their work sounded like something familiar; work he could do.

The smuggler invited Panov to visit Omegapoint.

When the ship reached there, Panov signed-on.  He now crews for Captain Amargura on the Omega House Vessel Iboy.  They have a nickname for him. (He doesn't like it.) They think he's a little weird. (But aren't they all?) They say he has disgusting habits. (He wouldn't disagree.)

Scientist Panov

Science Specialist on the OHV Iboy

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: Multi-legged cyborg physicist
• Trouble: After spending centuries in an alien vacuole, there's a lot I don't know
• Aspect: Please, don't call me "Tapdancer"
• Aspect: I'd love to get a look under the hood of Clay
• Aspect: Science comes easy to me

APPROACHES

• Careful: +2
• Clever: +3 
• Flashy: 0
• Forceful: +2
• Quick: +1
• Sneaky: +1

STUNTS:

• Deadly Handstand - Once per session, Panov can go first in combat, by making a backflip to stand on his cyborg hands. Then take a +2 to Flashy Approach to Attack using the metallic pincer-like legs of your perambulator frame. 
• Figure It Out - Because you are an expert scientist with R.U.R. cognitive augmentations, take a +2 to Clever Approach to Create an Advantage while analyzing new scientific phenomena in your lab.
• Gauntlet Sensors - When you are studying something within hands' reach, you may take +2 to Careful Approach to Create an Advantage using the sensors in your cyberhands. 
• Master Linguist - Once per session, you can master a new language - or crack a code.
• My Children - It's painful, but Panov can tear the alien polyps from his skin, and send them off 1-3 Zones to check things out for him. He takes 1 Stress for every polyp he sends off. When the polyps are spying for him, Panov takes a +2 on his Careful Approach to smell, see, and hear what they experience in real time. Panov re-attaches the polyps to their source wounds when their mission is completed. We did say the crew thinks he's a little weird...do you believe us now?

REFRESH: 1

The Fateless Momentaries

http://exhibits.slpl.org/lpe/data/LPE240022874.asp?thread=240029400

The Fateless Momentaries only appear at night. They have forgotten most of who and what they were in life. They're shadow people, remnants and revenants, wandering inside the Zone, or in the lonely neighborhoods and places contiguous with it.

The Momentaries came from people killed by Silver Cobwebs. When the webs touch people, some die immediately. Others appear to be fine right after contact with the Silver Cobwebs, but start to sicken and die some 12-24 hours later. Fateless Momentaries can come from either kind of fatality.

Most  were Stalkers, or people that Stalkers escorted into the Zone. However, there are a few left who are soldiers or paramilitaries. These spectral unfortunates were sent into the Zone right after the Visitation in a futile attempt to subdue and reclaim sovereignty over it.

The ones still in the Zone today are recently created. They're trying to find their way out. All of them have forgotten exactly who they were, but they're all looking for clues about their past. When they arrive in town from the Zone, Momentaries roam places that look familiar to them, haunting their old neighborhood, the public squares, a favorite haunt in the city (you can sometimes find them sitting at a table in the shadowy back of a dingy bar, or in a place that resembles a distant home.

No Stalker tries to harm a Fateless Momentary; it's considered bad for the trade. The Fateless have trade secrets to share. Momentaries are constantly muttering. A few people who are good at listening to them can tease something intelligible from their babble. The skill of listening to, understanding, and bargaining with the Fateless Momentaries has created a small cottage industry of listener-brokers.

These intermediaries converse with the Momentaries and help Stalkers learn about new caches of artifacts in the Zone. The Momentaries know where the good swag is buried.  The Stalkers are often very well connected. They can often help the Fateless Momentaries learn something about the lives they lost and who they were. The listener-brokers make a bundle setting up these exchanges.

While Stalkers never try to harm a Momentary, the military, paramilitaries, and police are quite aggressive in dealing with them. These forces won't enter the Zone, and can't control it. But they seek to maintain the zone of exclusion around it. Part of their containment effort is clearing whatever weird things cross from the Zone into town. Bullets don't bother the Momentaries very much, but they are uniquely vulnerable to bright flashes of light. Flash-bulbs, flash bang grenades, and strobe lights are very effective weapons against the Momentaries.

OGL MECHANICS

Fateless Momentaries
Spectral shadow people from the Zone (neutral)

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: They've come back but forgotten who they were
• Trouble: Bullets don't harm them much but flashing lights do
• Aspect: Constantly muttering
• Aspect: Know where the good swag is  buried
• Aspect: They'll bargain for memories

APPROACHES

• Careful: +2
• Clever: +2
• Flashy: 0
• Forceful: +1
• Quick: +1
• Sneaky: +3

STUNTS:

All Fateless Momentaries have these two Stunts:

• Hide in Shadows - Take +2 to Sneaky Approach to Create an Advantage by hiding.
• Insubstantial - Take +2 to Forceful Approach when Defending against physical attacks from melee or ranged weapons.

Momentaries also have at least one of the following Stunts: 

• Double Doppel - Once per session, one of the Fateless Momentaries may create a lasting double of itself. Both the original and its double will work together to find clues about its past existence.
• Silver Touch - Once per session, one of the Fateless Momentaries may remove a patch of Silver Cobweb and transplant it to another location. The transplanted web will grow in its new location. The transplantation creates a spatial bridge between the two webs (see Webcrawl, below). 
• Webcrawl - Once per session, one of the Fateless Momentaries may touch and pass through a Silver Cobweb in one location, and enter The Webwork, a kind of Tidal Pool that radiates from Zones. They can pass through The Webwork and will step out in another location where there is a Silver Cobweb. Once a Fateless Momentary lspends some time in that other-space and learns the local Webwork, they will be able to reliably navigate it to desired exit locations. 

REFRESH: 1-3

The Silver Cobwebs

Art by Jim Garrison of Hereticwerks

The Silver Cobwebs provide more evidence of how little we really know about the Zone. There are no bugs anywhere in the Zone - we have that on good authority - but Silver Cobwebs can be found anywhere there are remains of the built environment in the Zone. There are big patches of them, sometimes a meter or two across in some of the old buildings, structures, and tunnels.

Unlike Hell Slime, nobody tries to bring Silver Cobwebs out of the Zone. They're easy to overlook; sometimes they almost seem to creep up on you. Stalkers often keep Stalk Rock with them to hurl at the webs. These special salts are the only safe thing to use against the webs.

The Silver Cobwebs are considered bad luck. They mess with Fate. If you see them, back away slowly. Keep an eye over your shoulder, in case there's more nearby.

They make an unusually loud crackling sound if you touch them.

Hours later, you die.


The silver cobwebs or crackling cobwebs are based on Boris and Arkady Strugatsy's SF novel Roadside Picnic.

OGL MECHANICS

Silvery Cobwebs
Strands that break Fate

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: Big silver cobwebs
• Trouble:  Vulnerable to certain salts  
• Aspect: They crackle when you touch them
• Aspect: They break your Fate
• Aspect: You don't want to see the spiders these came from

APPROACHES

• Careful: 0
• Clever: 0
• Flashy: 0
• Forceful: +3
• Quick: +2
• Sneaky: +2

STUNTS:

• Fatebreaker - Touching or being touched by a Silver Cobweb (including with touching the webs with poles, tools, or handheld weapons) kills Mooks immediately. With PCs and major NPCs, such a touch triggers an immediate Forceful Attack by the web. When the Attack Succeeds with Style, characters immediately gain the Temporary Aspect Broken Fate. They have 12 hours to obtain some kind of superscience or magical healing or they will begin to sicken and die. Death invariably occurs within 24 hours of the touch. Many of the dead will subsequently come back as one of the Fateless Momentaries.
• Hard to See - Take +2 to Sneaky Approach to Create an Advantage by hiding in plain sight.
• Right Behind You - Silver Cobwebs can move behind people who are in the same Zone as the web. 
• Sudden Draft - A Silver Cobweb takes +2 to its Quick Approach to Create an Advantage and touch someone standing adjacent to the web.

REFRESH: 2

SPECIAL: Stalk Rock, the special salt crystals used by Stalkers as a defense against the Silver Webs; they allow the user to make ranged Attacks on the webs. 

Hell Slime

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

On Monday, we posted about Andrei Tarkovsky's classic SF film Stalker, as well as about the novel upon which the film was based: Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. Within a few minutes of our post, our friend Porky posted his own review of the film.

With this kind of synchronicity; we think something is definitely in the air. Or in the ether. Perhaps someone has come back for another roadside picnic, and new Zones are forming?

So where do we go from here? For FATE SF, I am planning a series of posts inspired  by the book and the movie, dealing with how to run a Zone-based campaign, including pertinent Aspects, encounters, and the alien junk (aka "treasures") that might be encountered in the Zone.

This is a creative exercise, though, so we'll be doing things inspired by the book and film, as well as striking out in new directions, using the source material as a jumping off point for extrapolation and divergent exploration.

We're making a Zone of our own.

Today's post deals with one of the Zone's most ubiquitous, insidious, and deadly menaces, as featured in the novel Roadside Picnic.

HELL SLIME

One of the ever-present dangers of the Zone is hell slime. It's a sometimes viscous, sometimes runny, always drippy substance that burns through organic materials. One reason that Hell slime is so insidious is because it is difficult to discriminate from other goopy agrottments in the Zone. Hell slime is usually blue or green - when it can be seen clearly (which is almost never in situ) - and it can be difficult to distinguish from other slime and muck such as oils and other industrial effluent that has leaked from machines or spilled from containers onto the floors of long-abandoned buildings, the detritus of the built environment that remains in the  Zone. Another reason that hell slime is so insidious is that it sometimes drips up, climbing up a boot and ducking under a pant leg until it finds exposed flesh.

Hell slime is commonly found in pools of water or other moist areas on the lower levels of structures such as basements, tunnels, sludge channels, and wells. But it can be found in any damp area, even on walls, so caution is always advisable. Look for accumulations of scum or dark fluids on floors made of concrete, wood, and tile.  Be wary of open containers such as paint cans, corroded steel drums, and cracked plastic drums, as well as uncapped bottles and jugs. Any of these are likely places where hell slime readily congregates.

The extremities are usually the first part of the body infected with hell slime. The stuff is invasive, able to penetrate through clothes, shoe leather, and cracks in boot heels to reach exposed skin. Once on the skin, it quickly gets into capillaries and pores, and begins to burn away subcutaneous tissues. Within a few minutes, it can dissolve connective tissue, muscle, cartilage, and bone. What's left is a gooey slurry that eventually bursts through the skin and leaves a new puddle of slime below the victim.  Immediate amputation of the infected limb is the best course of action to avoid losing the entire patient within a few hours. 

The tragedy of hell slime is that many stalkers in the Zone are victims of their own greed. Outside forces commission stalkers to go into the Zone and collect hell slime. It fetches a good price on black market.  The substance is opening up new avenues of basic research and development for chemical and biological weapons. An arms manufacturer is developing ammunition with a hollow tip reservoir for hell slime. There are reports of a government spraying "liquid prions" on remote mountain villages to cut off a rebel insurgency's base of support. And whistleblowers in yet another government have published allegations that their intelligence services are using hell slime in so-called "single drip waterboarding" sessions to extract information from captured foes and dissidents. 

What the substance is - and is for - remains entirely a mystery. Is it a lubricant? A waste product? A stardrive exudate or other-planar chemical ectoplasm? An intelligent alien life form?

Only time will tell.

OGL MECHANICS

Hell Slime
Otherworldly sarcophagic sludge (inimical)

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: "I think you just touched Hell Slime"
• Trouble:  Burns easily  
• Aspect: Is there just a bit in here or is it the whole room?
• Aspect: That just dripped up
• Aspect: You can burn it but there are consequences

APPROACHES

• Careful: +2
• Clever: +2
• Flashy: 0
• Forceful: 0
• Quick: 0
• Sneaky: +3

STUNTS:

• Burns It's Way In: When hell slime Succeeds with Style on a Sneaky Attack, it gets under the skin of a surprised victim and begins to dissolve one or more of its limbs. The infection does +2 automatic Stress per turn unless some form of super science or magical healing is used to destroy the infection. The victim takes a Moderate Consequence when a limb turns to slush. A Severe Consequence means two limbs have turned to slush, or major organs are failing.
• It Gets Around: In any given scene, hell slime is restricted to the location (i.e., zone with a small "z") where it starts the scene. But once per session, hell slime may propagate itself into another adjacent zone. For the purpose of tracking stress, the hell slime in the adjacent zone becomes a distinct creature from its parent.
• Not So Nice To Burn:  Hell slime burns easily, but the smoke when inhaled produces extremely unpleasant effects: the victim will begin to experience fierce hallucinations of alien voices, places, memories, and worlds. Consider this a Flashy Attack which does mental stress.
• Remote Access: Even when a victim's infected body parts have been amputated, the hell slime that infected the victim has some degree of access to the victim's thoughts. The victim's thoughts and experiences will be recorded continuously on the physical medium of the hell slime as long as victim and slime remain on the same planet and plane.
• Spacetime Lubricant: Once per session, hell slime may shift itself (and part or all of a victim) into an spacio-temporally contiguous tidal pool. It can't be attacked physically when in this contiguous zone without the use of superscience technology or magic.

REFRESH: 1