I haven't played the game and I haven't seen the movie in quite a long time, but I want to run a game based on the concept of a creature that takes over the bodies of people and then uses them to do its bidding. I don't want to use anything canon, in otherwords, I need something completely new. I'm setting the game up on a cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic. It will have suffered engine trouble, then the creature woke up and killed most of the crew. I want the game to have a huge paranoia factor. Any ideas you guys have that I can steal? I'm creating the running team and handing them out when I get there. What kind of characters do you think would be fit for a mission like this? Thanks for the help.

Any characters should be fine, but I would recommend either giving the creature some sort of masking or making all of the PCs mundane. Otherwise, you may run into troubles with astrally-perceiving characters.

I wouldn't make the characters like normal runners. Make them part of the crew cause thats what everyone was in the movie. Give them skills appropriate for thier jobs on the ship, medic, engineer ect ect. I agree with bwdemon all the characters should be normal.
Then you have to think what kind of frieghter it is? Is it a comercial frieghter? A science/exploration vessle, oil. This will also help you decide what kind of crew it would have, and what kind of weapons improvised or other wise would be available. Or better yet make it so the group comes across or gets a distress signal from a ship of some kind maybe a millitary ship... ala Alien.

Just some suggestions hope they help a bit.

Ah, you want the Protean as the 'thing' then. Here's a Cthulu webpage that has a blurb on it under the header "Hey, That's No Cow!" Proteans are pretty nasty critters.

I'm going to run it with the runners as a military merc team answering a distress call. They will helicopter to the ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with parts for the engine. I'm going to run it as a small tournament, so each character will have set goals worth victory points, just as an extra incentive to play along. One character will be a rigger who is in charge of getting the ship moving again, and he will have two mechanic NPC's to watch over.

I think the creature will be more biological than magical, that way the mage of the group won't be clued in. The ship will be a standard commercial freighter, but with a twist. The creature was discovered by some Corp and is being transferred to a research facility in Southern South America. The cargo will be bodies of previous researchers infested with the creature, kind of like Alien: Ressurection. I think it will be a funny twist when they discover the true cargo is preserved people.

Another thing, the creature will respond to caffeine like a super-stimulant. I have placed many sources of it on the ship and it will be a good way for the runners to kill it, since it's a nasty S.O.B. There's even a shipment of coffee beans onboard as the legal cargo. I'll post the results when I get home, after the Holiday. Thanks for the feedback.


Will Run for

There is a critter called a Protean in the Paranormal Animals of Europe book and in Critters. It has all ithe same attributes as The Thing, even a weakness to fire.