I'm in the process of writing up a scenario for my PCs and I can't seem to generate a satisfying ending. I'd really appreciate any help you guys could offer.

Nova, Sunday_Gamer et al... do yourselves a favour and stop reading now. You'll just blow it for yourselves.

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Okay, so the basic idea is this: near the conclusion of their last run, the PCs were taken prisoner. I hadn't planned for it to happen, but it did. Without going into the nitty-gritty, they're prisoners of a group who are conducting experiments with metahuman matrix immersion. Put simply, the PCs have been jacked into a UV host without their knowledge and are being run through a series of simulations. These simulations are designed to test metahuman responses to specific stimuli when said individual is unaware that they're jacked in.

When we next convene to game (next week), the characters will "wake up" in a cell. There'll be opportunities to escape and an "adventure" will ensue. What they don't know is that none of it is real: it's all taking place inside a UV host. Furthermore, this is nth time the group has run through the "escape" simulation: every other time they've failed to escape and been "killed." Cue the rewind, start the sim over without any of the test subjects being the wiser.

Now, I want the adventure we actually run next week to be the final simulation, the one where the characters finally (after x run-throughs) figure out that they're in a UV host and not "really" running through this prison facility. The final act of the adventure should feature the PCs realizing what's happening to them.

Specifically, I want the decker character to figure it out. The PC has been sidelined during the last few runs, so I really want him to shine here. My questions to you are these:

1. How can I leave clues to the true nature of the place they're in? The clues have to be obvious enough that a player will eventually figure it out but subtle enough to justify it having taken the PC ten or fifty or a hundred runs to figure it out.

2. How can I avoid a cheesy re-hash of Neo's awakening at the end of The Matrix? "There is no spoon..." is most emphatically not the feel I'm going for here.

One idea I'm toying with is that the decker had already started to figure it out on previous runs, but always clued in a fraction of a second too late to do anything about it. However, he managed to leave a minor clue for himself in the simulation itself by quickly (on-the-fly) programming an adjustment to the system's architecture. An adjustment so subtle that it was missed by the system's "administrator" but sufficiently permanent to survive the "reboot" that occurs between simulations.

The next time he ran through the sim, the decker saw the clue but again was too late to do anything about it. However, he built on the clue for his "next run." After a few clues left like this, the evidence has accrued to the point where he has a chance to see the truth in time to act on it.

(is any of this making sense?)

As a final bit of background data, the group is composed of three runners:

1. Nova, a street sam with a background as a Lone Star agent;
2. Kong, a shaman of Monkey and a Grade 3 Initiate who loves illusions;
3. Gage, a penetration decker who specializes in data sifting and is a competent back-up sam;

All the characters are quite competent (~150 Karma) and have forged good teamwork skills. They trust each other and have risked their lives to help their teammates in the past.

Gage is the PC who should figure out the truth. The player is an IT professional with an amateur interest in cryptography and puzzles. Gage's Matrix persona is named 'Hex' so I was toying with the idea of a clue written in hexadecimal.

Okay, kids--gimme whatcha got.

This just sounds too much like the Matrix not to at least suggest a couple of things from there. One would be to have the "deja vu" effect, where something gets changed in the UV host and the characters see something repeat itselfs. Or at least that could be what clued Gage in on it in a previous attempt.

I'd have it be that Gage was able to create a glitch in the system. If you ever watched the Animatrix, you'll know what I mean. A spot within which the laws of physics or nature don't function properly or function erratically. One of the stories in the Animatrix had this happening to a particular abondoned building within the Matrix. There were spots where gravity stopped just short of the ground (if a bird tried to land on the ground it would be sit on thin air a couple inches above the surfact). Another was that an object broken against the ground would shatter and then reverse itself back into the original form. Rain coming out of a perfectly clear sky, strong wind coming down an empty hallway, etc.

Oh I wasn't saying the idea is a bad one. I rather like it. I just couldn't help myself from suggesting Matrix related ideas.

Well, if Kong were to try anything magical, most UV hosts would just send an error message back.

If it's an intelligently made UV host, it will try to mimic a high background count by just tazing the mage every time he tries to use mana while in the system. If it's an amazingly made UV host, it will have a magic subroutine that is fairly convincing and may even keep the mage tricked until he tries something it doesn't support and provides an error response.

As for the clues, I can't suggest anything intelligently without knowing your players and PCs in a much better sense than can easily be conveyed.

I'm thinkng of a MMORPG video game. Every once in a while the system "hiccups". For instance you're running with your character and you end up somewhere else, like through a wall or partially through a wall. Or someone lags and the enemy is 20 feet away, then they are ten feet away. Have everybody notice these things (through perception tests of course), which could be interpreted as a drug induced hallucination. Maybe because the decker has headware his "connection" might be faster than the rest of the team's so he can see things like this occurring more frequently.

Maybe a bad guy could pixelate for a second? The sky could do something strange?

Oooh... I love hyzmarca's idea. Full points on subtle but informative there.

You could do something Star Trek, "it was caught in my positronic buffer" sort of thing. Either have something in the decker's deck, or something in the system (one time he was tricky enough both to figure out the secret and to actually break out of the host, or otherwise get to a segment that isn't rewritten every time, and left a message for him. Something very quick, since he was in a rush, like "check the guns").

Personally, the whole matrix stuff IS over done. But that doesn't keep you from doing other tricky things like ahve been suggested. Once the decker knows whats going on, he can introduce clipping problems, or really frag things up and you end up with scenes like something from the Cell. Of course, if he's not careful, you get a full crash and deadly dumpshock, but I think it would be a fun part 2 to be in a world where physics randomly stop applying and you just need to get out before they stop applying on YOU.

The decker should have tattooed a symmetric key (description here) on himself. Because the monitors are concerned with maintaining the prison more so than the prisoners, they could have missed this (especially if he puts it in a subtle place).

Couple this with patterns written on the wall or lights and encrypted using the key he has on him. Once he notices both parts it will be a simple matter for him to use his own math SPU or whatever else he's got to compute the message.

I also really love the gun idea. That and similar minor glitches could maintain the air of suspense quite nicely and keep the characters guessing.

What about throwing the shaman into a sim before-hand where he thinks he's been told by Monkey that he(the shaman) is outside the bounds of Monkey's protection?

If the people behind this don't know what sort of shaman Kong is, they could make him seem extremely vague until Kong mentions that he's talking to Monkey, "Monkey why can't you protect me?"
EDIT*: At this point the guys behind the scenes know who the totem is and can have the host respond accordingly.


This way, Kong has reasoning as to why the magic won't work.

Or else go with HoV's background count idea.


*I'm an idiot and posted without adding that sentence in to explain a wee bit more.

Sure there are likely drugs that do that, but does he want to leave his players an out or kill them?

Personally I think you're being to rough on the Matrix since that's basically what you're running. Use the GitS reference along with some matrix cinematography and you have a game.

But highly intricate or not, how does it know which spell he is casting?

IIRC, there was one case in the fiction of a mage in a top of the line UV host that had the best magic emulation possible at that time. He got dumped or something when he tried to astrally percieve. (someone with memory of the fiction would be helpful)

Aside from the "unknown input, response with taze" or other way of trying to mimic a dangerously high background count, it would take an amazing UV host (as in, amazing for UV hosts, not just reduntantly stating that UV hosts are amazing) to have a passably convincing magic emulation.

My advice is to go with the black IC waiting in the mage's datajack that just smacks him every time he tries to do something outside the (vast) parameters of the simulation. If the decker's smart, he'll notice that the effects the mage gets at every spell attempt look more like black IC attacks than what the mage normally faces from bad drain. I still can't advise you on how to give subtle hints (although I like the texture and model re-use one).

I'm suprised no one mentioned it, but is there not an adventure in super tuesday (Danklezhans)that addressed things like these??

I remember one part being that the system, actually read the "optermisium" of the character. If they thought they would succed then they were more likely too, gain if they thought they were doomed....

Unfortunatly though i own Super Tuesday, it's not in my possession.

Well, hell: the scenario "Dry Run" in Super Tuesday operates under an identical premise to the run I'm constructing here. Should make for some instructive reading...

Things that can go wrong in a UV simulation for magic:

1) He tries to project.
2) He tries to cast a spell.
3) He tries to Cleanse/Filter the Background Count.
4) He tries to initiate.

The sticky thing is that if you can somehow nullify the shaman's abilities, I do not see how the UV system cannot counter anything the decker can come up with.

Personally? I'd leave little clues for each of the players, something their specialty would notice.

The mage notices that the astral signatures don't quite look right, or that magic feels wrong when he tries to cast it.

The street sam notes that all the guard they encounter are using the exact same tactics. There's no variety, little flow with the actions of the characters... the guards just repeatedly use the same motion in hand to hand, or always patrol in a specific way, etc.

Finally, the decker has problems when accessing computer systems or just with the nature of the place itself. He's become attuned to full-immersion, so he starts to notice the "feel" of the VR, sees "rendering errors" or happens to see a bit of the code running on the computer terminals he's trying to access.

Programmers and designers often plant signatures inside their work. It's possible that the decker could recognize something like this, which could be as simple as noting that the logo on the guard's uniforms is inverted or a specific type of lamp that is found in Doom 23 and not anywhere else in the universe to a complex sequence of actions to lights flickering in binary sequence.

How about NPCs? The Decker could have altered their voices to have a dreamy, unreal quality to them. If the alteration is minor enough, it won't be noticed by those running the experiments but the PCs would certainly notice. Maybe also include minor flaws in how the NPCs act.