Deja Vu is a story that utilizes the settings and conspiracies presented in the Over the Edge role-playing game published by Atlas Games. If you don't own a copy, don't worry; you won't need it to run this story.
The city of The Edge (where this little tale takes place) is on a small island called Al Amarja, which lies just south and a little east of Italy. The whole place is a kind of weirdness magnet that attracts all sorts of strange activity. The reality of Over The Edge is you can run jusr about any game vou want on Al Amarja because the game is about the setting, not the system. The intent of Deja Vu is to bring a group of characters to Al Amarja without their players knowing about it. Since the game system of OTE is completely supplemental to the setting, it doesn't matter what kind of system you use when run this story. With this understanding, it should be easy to get your players to roll up any old characters with any old system they want, and then -- quite suddenly -- when they find themselves in the wild world of Al Amarja, they'll never be able to leave... even if they wanted to.
Prelude
Sit down with your players and invite them to create characters for your favorite game system. Go through all the motions of creating the characters with them, but all the while, keep looking out of the corner of your eye for ways to get them in trouble. Find ways to get them in contact with power conspiracies. One way to do this is to make sure that every one of them has a "Dark Secret", that is something about their character that should never he revealed. Also, make sure that each of them has a detailed list of three close friends for their character. Then, sit I down and give each of these "close friends" a Dark Secret. This gives you four excuses to get their character into trouble. The theme here is Conspiracy (if you haven't figured that out by now) and you are going to want to get them embroiled in as many as possible.
The characters your players mane could be from any role-playing setting: dark future, modern horror, science fiction or even fantasy. The further away they are from the modern setting of OTE, the more challenging the transition will be, but "challenge" is a GM's middle name, so deal with it. The way I play-tested Deja Vu was by using the GURPS rules. I invited the players to write themselves up as GURPS characters without telling them the genre. I left clues all around: my Copies of Cthulu book by my bed and my GURPS: Illumnti by my writing desk were ample red herrings. I even left my video copies of The Prisoner lying around to throw them off the trail. By the time I was done with them, they didn't know what was going to happen. That's just the way I like 'em.
After you've created the characters together, get them started on your basic stock "adventure." The best way to do this is to get a published adventure and start running it. Run it straight for about two or three sessions, just long enough for them to get interested in the plot, and when you run that third session (I found that's just about the time everyone gets real interested and the Monty Python references dwindle to a minimum), take extensive notes on everything they do. Make sure that you write down as much as possible so you would be able to run the exact same session again if you had to.
Why?
Because that's exactly what you're going to do.
The Beginning
As I said above, make sure that you duplicate the session as much as possible. Your players will obviously take note of the fact that they've flashed back for some reason and will begin to ask questions like: "Hey, didn't we do this last week?" Before anyone can say anything, be sure to cut in: "You know, you sure feel that way. It's called Deja Vu, that feeling like you've experienced something before."
Run the entire session exactly the same way you did last time. If the players respond differently, that's fine, make sure you run it as close as possible. We all know how obnoxious players can be, and if they begin to diverge too far off the track, start making secret die rolls. If you want to "play fair," you can let them make some kind of resistance roll or willpower check, etc. to keep it up, but if you want to have some real fun, try this out..
- Take some random dice and roll them. Look over them carefully, pick up the character sheets one by one, scrutinize them carefully, then look them dead in the eyes and say, "But you have this strange feeling that you really should be doing this," and repeat to them they way they acted last time.
- Or, if you're feeling really mean, take some dice that don't belong in the game (like 6-siders in the Storyteller system or d10's in GURPS), roll those and follow the above instructions.
Advanced Tecyhnology: Now if all this superscience doesn't fit in your campaign, don't sweat it. There are plenty of conspiracies on the island which have very valid reasons for having such advanced technology. But for right now, all the characters need are clues to their captor's identities. Besides, there are so many reasons why your part should get shanghied. I wouldn't dream of limiting your imagination.
This little technique will accomplish three things:
- 1) it will get the players confused and off balance;
2) it will give the players a sense that circumstances are way beyond their control; and
3) it will let them know that something in their lives has gone dreadfully wrong.
To add to their slowly growing paranoia, all through the session, place people standing on street corners, hiding in the shadows and peering over newspapers. Make these folks stand out. Dress them in black with black shades and black hats, driving long black Lincolns. Whenever one of your players tries to confront one of these folks, make sure they have an escape route. Either they just disappear into a crowd or around a blind corner or into a Lincoln, or some other mysterious way. Of course, dropping them down manhole covers could lead to some interesting chase scenes.
By the time you're wrapping things up for the evening, your players will be obviously frustrated (and rightly so!). You should give them a carrot to keep their interest up, so give them one. Give them one of the Watchers.
They'll use some kind of clever PC tactic that you haven't counted on (they always do), and you'll be caught with letting them catch a Watcher. That's cool, it's always good to reward the players when they out-think you. It also gives them a false sense of security, lulling them into the false belief that you don't have complete control over their fates.
Once they've gotten hold of him, he'll start to panic. He'll scream, "Wait! Wait! Abort! Abort!" That's when everything will start to melt around them. Buildings will look like candles in a microwave. The people around them will fall apart into squirming globules. Then, everything will go black, and you'll say, "That's it for this week. See you again next time."
What's Really Going On
The characters are in big trouble.
At the end of the very first session, just when things were getting interesting, some Heavy Powerful Fellas got very interested in their activities. The characters have found out a little bit too much, and the Heavies decided to bring them to an underground facility, hooked up to a virtual reality program to find out just how much they know. For the last two sessions, the PCs have been locked up in cold storage, running through a VR program under the streets of Al Amarja.
There is a second reason the party's been hooked up to the chambers (and not just tortured to death). Their captors have found the characters to have great potential. If they can break the characters' minds, the party could make very valuable allies indeed. These are the reasons for the VR lightshow, and if the party can't figure a way out, they'll be nothing more than brainwashed lackeys.
Back to Shadis #25 Table of Contents
Back to Shadis List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master List of Magazines
© Copyright 1996 by Alderac Entertainment Group
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com