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Introduction
This time my wife and I played Foretold: From Earth by James Mullen with my younger brothers. Like Foretold: In Its Shadow, this one takes inspiration from such GM-less games as For the Queen, Women Are Werewolves, and In a Wicked Age, as far as its mechanics go. Story-wise, it’s derived from the common sci-fi trope of receiving a message from space and mounting a response. To quote the intro, it “is a story of hope, wonder, and the exploration of the heavens.” And sometimes a bit of silliness, as you will read in the session report below!
This session: An ill-fitted crew heads out to answer a distress call sent across space. Will they prove more successful than humanity’s previous failed attempt?
Session Report
Set-Up
Message Type #1: a distress message pleading for help
The Vessel
We chose the option of drawing one prompt card per player, but rather than select just one of those, we combined some ideas.
Draws: 3, K, J, 9
Our ship is a leviathan, an analog/biological system. We’ll be spending the majority of our time aboard in sleeper pods to minimize exposure, during which a virtual reality environment will keep our minds active.
Dramatis Personae
(developed over the course of play)
McTaggert, inexperienced mid-level comms officer, he/him
Tylos, retired military veteran, he/him
Sandy, investigative journalist, she/her
Luna, actor and influencer, she/her
Planning
McTaggert/6: Everyone is surprised when McTaggert is appointed commander on his first interplanetary mission, including himself. He’s inexperienced and newly promoted, but everyone above him was involved in a failed mission the last time Earth received a distress call. McTaggert was just a ground-based comms officer during that. When the Earth ship arrived, the message senders were under attack, and the crew wasn’t able to save them. So intersystem travel is already part of the human experience.
Tylos/2: Tylos is conscripted out of retirement. A veteran Navy pilot, he has space experience, but only on near-Earth missions. In retirement, he was starting to raise a family with his spouse, and they have two children, 6 and 2, all of whom he must now leave behind. He had no connection to the previous distress call debacle and has been brought on to “steer the ship” both literally and figuratively. He’s worked with rocket ships before but not leviathan ships. Tylos is proud of his previous service, but he wanted it to stay in the past. He is grouchy rather than defiant about this conscription.
Sandy/5: The media believes the message from space is a fake, a distraction from the previous mission that ended so poorly. Sandy Ego is an investigative journalist who involves herself to document the truth. She remains skeptical of the project due to the VR component. That seems a lot of expense for something not real.
Luna/A: Luna comes from a long line of movie stars and directors. Her family is funding a chunk of the expedition, perhaps with an eye to the VR tech. When her connections get her a place on the crew, a legitimate scientist is bumped. Luna goes along with her cellphone to record everything reality TV/selfie style.
McTaggert/8: Everybody in the crew gets a medical implant in their temple for their VR interface, along with a drug cocktail. The latter will help with zero-G sickness and inoculates them against the leviathan’s immune system so that they won’t be rejected by the ship. Possible side effects of the inoculation include DNA degradation because there’s a chance of genetic crossover. Also, food sensitivities. And maybe a need for gills. Everyone is advised not to go outside the allowed areas on the leviathan during transit, lest they risk further contamination.
Tylos/3: Tylos has top secret orders that the security of the human species is paramount. He must make sure that whatever the aliens need rescuing from doesn’t get back to Earth. (Though if he can neutralize a threat, he can bring it back home for study).
Sandy/9: Sandy has been a war correspondent and a science reporter. After trying out the VR prototypes, she reassures the crew about their safety. She’s tried them out for educational purposes, like historical reconstructions, and found them both interesting and mentally stimulating.
Luna/K: Luna did not go to the public media event about the upcoming mission because it was hosted by a rival, the scientist she bumped from the mission. She’s been playing up the rivalry and generating needless drama for views. On her social media platforms, she trash-talked the scientist as bitter, so now she refuses to go because of ill will.
Twist/Black Joker: A rival mission launches first, having cut corners. They haven’t invested in VR tech to protect their minds, and their bodies are at risk of leviathan contamination. Worse, from Luna’s perspective, is that they have no social media presence. Some of the junior scientists involved in the preparation for the main mission have abandoned their work to join that crew.
Traveling
McTaggert/K: On the voyage, McTaggert hones his philosophical position that, unlike humans, all alien species are truly benevolent. (So the attackers in the previous debacle were actually benevolent, and stopping humans from helping out the victims was also benevolent. The humans were somehow at fault.) This is the Truth according to McTaggert. He asks Tylos how he squares this. Tylos reflects that surely humans can’t be the only bastards out in space, especially given that they’ve put together two missions to opposite ends of the galaxy to rescue strangers.
Tylos/Q: While doing an out-of-VR system check, Tylos suffers a severe wound at the border of the safe zone in the leviathan when he catches his leg on a sharp exposed edge. Luna has the same blood type, so she provides a transfusion. She tells Tylos not to feel bad about imposing on her; she doesn’t really belong on the mission anyway and there’s no big loss if she’s laid up for a while. The whole time the transfusion is going on she yacks constantly at Tylos about who he follows and so on. She has a fabulous time, glad about all the great content she’s recording. She throws a #supportourtroops onto her “Thank you for your service” snapshot of Tylos.
Sandy/J: Sandy lodges a complaint with McTaggert that Luna has been wandering around the leviathan outside VR. The ship’s communication buffers have videos from unauthorized areas. Luna claims she’s justified because her clicks are what pay for this trip! McTaggert notes that her family’s wealth is only needed because the project lost World Science Foundation funding when the scientist was booted in favor of her. McTaggert checks the rulebook and imposes limits on where else Luna can go, but he also tells Sandy to censor mention of Luna’s wandering from any articles sent to the Associated Press. The trip will already take months, and McTaggert doesn’t want a lengthy quarantine also imposed on them when they finally do get back to Earth.
Luna/3: Tylos catches Luna stealing—that is, recording footage where she’s not supposed to be—but doesn’t report it to the commander. Luna is causing more complications than he would like, but he owes her for giving him blood. He warns her that this will only fly once! If he sees her in that part of the creature again, he’ll report her. She snaps more shots of him and labels them #besties and #bloodbrothers.
McTaggert/7: McTaggert apologizes to Luna for the tone of voice he adopted earlier when dressing her down in front of Sandy. In truth, he’s a fan of Luna’s work. The increasing social media presence he now has, has really alerted him to the value of extending this mission’s purpose, hijacking it away from its original goal by seeking out unknown planets. Luna’s fine with this; she’s long thought the message might be fake and would love to use these resources to find something new. As she puts it, “The universe is vast and full of wonders. A fake distress beacon is not.” So there is a mutiny of sorts, but one led by the commander.
Tylos/8: Tylos is getting overwhelmed by the amount of piloting work, so he brings on Sandy to help with the double shifts. He doesn’t want to burden the commander with such mundane details, and adding Luna to the roster would actually create more work. Plus Sandy has experience as a science reporter and an investigative journalist, so he hopes she can help him figure out why the ship keeps going in new directions and not following the original plan. Together they manage a course correct. Tylos makes a note about this, but he doesn’t report it up-chain. He figures that if something like this happens again, it will mean there is a double agent abroad trying to slow this ship down so that the rival mission can succeed first.
Sandy/6: In order to protect the rest of the crew from leviathan contamination, Luna is put in quarantine. She’s been spending too much time poking around the ship’s innards, and it risks spreading a dangerous infection among the crew.
Luna/2: The vessel is struck and damaged, requiring someone to space walk along the leviathan’s exterior. Sandy is chosen, since Tylos is busy keeping the ship steady and McTaggert is reading out instructions from the manual over comms. Luna is of course in her isolation chamber, where she’s recording a black-and-white Blair Witch style confession-cam vid hypothesizing about whether a rival ship or space pirates attacked the vessel.
Twist/Red Joker: New orders come in from Earth in support of the silent mutiny that was already underway. The media conglomerate run by Luna’s family has exerted more control over the mission and now prioritizes exploration (with drama) over rescue.
Exploring
McTaggert/10: Once down on the planet to explore, the crew comes across massive skeletal structures three to four times the size of the leviathan ship. The creatures died recently and are picked clean, but there is no sign of a cataclysm. Could something even more enormous have done them in? The enormous canyons the crew have seen, are those in fact the slithering trail tracks of what killed these? A boa constrictor of sorts, but on a planetary scale! And the beacon is in the direction of one end of the canyon.
Tylos/5: Tylos begins to hear strange music, and unconsciously he keeps veering off towards it. Its source is the opposite canyon end as the beacon, so this results in a zigzagging path for the crew.
Sandy/7: An insanely large superboa passes near, confirming earlier suspicions. Sandy encourages the crew closer for the sake of science. Plus if they can all latch on, they’ll have a fast ride to the beacon at the end of the canyon, as this superboa is headed in the right direction.
Luna/3: A baby superboa, small and still furry, takes a liking to Luna. When she falls off the superboa, it tries to attract attention so she can be rescued. This is something it has in common with Luna, and she grows fond of it in turn.
McTaggert/A: McTaggert detects an unknown energy that he thinks they can harness and feed into the leviathan to enable it to travel faster than light. This would help them all get home to their families faster. But the energy emanates from the superboa, and sapping that energy would likely kill it. (McTaggert reflects that his human impulse to kill the creature for its energy fits his Truth that aliens are benevolent but humans are not.) Luna hides the baby superboa to protect it, though a few social media posts including it unintentionally get out. Tylos is torn about the alternate energy source. It seems it would be quicker, but not really better. He retired from the military to live a life with less daily danger, and using an untried technology to get home would be nerve-wracking. It’s too reckless.
Tylos/6: In the wreckage of the rival mission, Tylos finds one of his old military buddies who that group had recruited. The cause of the crash appears to be a rough landing due to no VR rest for the crew. They find the remains of some people, but there could be other survivors.
Sandy/2: McTaggert begins to detect the superboa energy coming off of Sandy, who has been stung by a local insect. Luna wonders if Sandy could sacrifice herself to power the ship home and save the superboa. But really she’s thinking of her small baby superboa friend, hidden in her jacket.
Luna/4: The group passes through an abandoned city. The structures are intact, but the technology broke down. With no air conditioning, it became unlivable. This city had run off superboa power, and its inhabitants used up the creatures in an unsustainable fashion.
Epilogue
It is too late to save whoever sent the rescue message. And there is no sign of any humans from the rival crew. It is time to discuss the return trip. If they can manage this new energy source, the crew can go home and others will be able to explore the galaxy at great speed. McTaggert proposes catching the insects that stung Sandy and using them to infect the leviathan so it can produce the energy itself.
Luna, meanwhile, already has ideas about marketing baby superboa plushies. Now that McTaggert is no longer looking to harvest the energy from superboas, she is free to make her little friend more public. Earth has been following Luna’s posts closely, and Sandy can help include the messaging about the new energy science. This power source has to be properly managed with some form of husbandry.
The leviathan returns home and everyone except Luna goes back down to the Earth’s surface. She is too mutated from excessive leviathan exposure. Tylos assures his superiors that she is not a threat, and she is allowed to remain free, as long as she stays off-planet. That’s fine with Luna. She has decided to be a space pirate, with baby space boa as her first mate. There is much to explore.
Comments
We got some of the same prompts as in the Crystalline Reflections adventure we played with our friends, but they turned into something new and different here, demonstrating From Earth’s replayability. My brothers have some roleplaying experience with GURPS and Genesys, and they adapted quickly to this type of GM-less story game.