player-handout

Unscheduled Maintenance

Metropolis.

Mediocrity is Systemic

The world could have been cybernetic dreams and neon wonderlands—but every leap forward got jammed by bureaucracy, paranoia, or cost-cutting. Now, everything feels… off-brand.*

Unscheduled Maintenance uses Call of Cthulhu rules. You are encouraged to familiarize yourself with them. If you have any question about anything, rules, translating CoC to modern, let your keepers know.

World Details

Imagine your entire existence was being decided today by a PowerPoint presentation.
The year is 2015. The world is a bleak and dull place. Every system and institution has been bogged down with mediocrity, bureaucracy, rules. Progress didn’t grind to a halt. It just went in a… less optimal direction. Wireless and broadband never took off, instead they just kept releasing the same shit over and over again. Like we used to call the internet AOL, cause that’s what we knew from it. Now imagine we never stopped doing that.
Information is slow moving. Next to telephone booths are email booths. Data and time is expensive. To send an email typically you would go to a booth, plug your credentials, and then print out a large receipt paper that has your messages in compressed code. People compress because it’s cheaper. Then either you talk to a cipher, basically a homeless person who can speak in code hanging outside the terminals, or you rent a booth at a cafe and decipher the compression yourself.
Real data is expensive. But the important stuff goes through the data brokers. Large conglomerates who specialize in your data. Anything that needs to get stored gets pressed into large metal cubes and thrown in a warehouse for archiving.
Need to pull up archived data? You’ll need to fill out a form for that, and pray Betty Sue or whoever working in the basement got her cinnabon and newports this morning, or your request might find itself piled on top of the rest of shit.
The people are tired, by design. On the tips of everyone’s tongues is a Desire, Graciously awaiting something between the mundane and the extraordinary.

Metropolis is a large city. It’s bleak and dull. The main streets are littered with advertisements. NETSCAPE, 10$ PER KB CREDITS, VIAGRA. And behind the ads are years of different cable standards piled up on top of one another. Everybody chainsmokes. Nobody is rich. Everything that seems like it could be extraordinary, has a boring explanation.
There are guns, and most modern 90-era weapons.

Themes / Things to Expect

• Dial up
• Intrigue
• Investigation
• Hacking
• Combat
• Gangs
• Police
• Office Workers

Inspirations

• Dark City 1998
• Office Space
• Half-Life
• The Matrix
• Event Horizon
• Lovecraft
• The Thing
• Jacobs Ladder

Your character

No furries. You are a human. You don’t have occult/magic to start with, unless you can come up with something really really really good.
You are not a hero, at least yet. But you are someone who has great potential. Could be a person of note. You have something special about you.
You are not evil, you are at least mostly good.
Example: You are a hacker who anonymously dismantled a bomb threat and then told no one. Just cause it had to be done.

Choose an occupation. Example: Author, Journalist, Detective, Hacker, Professor, Data Runner

Think of some skills that your character would have. What are they good at?

Write a brief backstory.

Example: Susan writes “Born and raised in New York,” under Meaningful Locations, “Never without my trusty pistol,” for Treasured Possessions, and “Science can explain everything,” for her journalist’s Ideology/Beliefs.

Campaign Flow

As you advance through the campaign your character will grow in many ways. You will earn money, and gear. Your skills will grow (as you use them). And you will learn spells as you dive into this world.
Your character has 2 health pools. Physical and Sanity.
Your sanity works a little differently from physical. You have a much much larger sanity pool. As you delve deeper into madness and lose sanity points, you will also trade off with knowledge and skills with the magical world.
Your sanity doesn’t recover like physical does. Recovering sanity is a much slower process. And sometimes your sanity cannot return to a certain point.