Catoptrics - a cosmic horror survival story

[PTTG]

Below is my write-up for a campaign built around the themes of disaster survival, cosmic horror, Fortean apocalypse, and conspiracy. It's compatible with the Infinite Worlds campaign setting, but doesn't directly depend on it. Also, it's pretty flexible on if you want to focus on straight combat or on a more survival-challenge oriented approach. I don't think I'm actually going to run this, but maybe it'll inspire someone out there, in which case, please tell me about it!

Normally, it takes a great deal of energy to transfer matter between worldlines. However, in the n-dimensional space containing the worldline branes, there are a number of phenomena which can shift that. Ozmic energy flows, topological defects, and kinematic shifts driven by cliodynamical effects on the paratemporal manifolds all can cause worldlines to move- though perhaps it is more accurate to think of such 'movement' as more like n-space growing smaller in some areas and larger in others. Regardless, these phenomena are understood only broadly, as is their connection to any number of Fortean phenomena. Banestorms, for instance, can be described as a osculating interface of two branes, briefly reducing the parachronic gating threshold below normal quantum fluctuations, resulting in random shifts mediated by little more than chemical bonds.

This is all highly speculative, you understand. But if it is true, then other, more exotic phenomena are highly likely to be possible. We know that some circumstances are capable of triggering banestorms, but that's merely a point contact. With the right - or, rather, worst possible - conditions, one might see a planar collision between two branes. Not a point contact, but a two or even one-way border all throughout two entire worlds. What might that look like? The equations are as of yet, unclear...

For Homeline, that is a hypothesis. For Catoptrics, it's reality.

In Catoptrics' 1942, a 17-year-old Ilya Kiselev somehow survived the obliteration of his entire platoon by invading Wehrmacht, then capture, then years of movement between various camps. Eventually liberated by the western Allies in '45, he befriended a US army officer and immigrated to the United States. Kiselev would go on to earn a doctorate in quantum physics and study with the finest minds of the era, though it would be decades before his contributions were more broadly known.

Kept in seclusion by the US government, Dr. Kiselev and his team spent the 50s uncovering how to create a paratemporal 'capturing' system. Their version of the technology could not send travelers to other worldlines, but it could pull in desired objects temporarily or even permanently. Targeting proved to be a problem, but energy was not; some worlds proved to be very easy to capture from. Kiselev referred to alternate worlds as Mirs, a term which his colleagues eventually rendered Mirrors or reflections. The most easily accessed worldline was thought of as a particularly clear, or 'specular,' mirror, while others were clouded. In turn, the field became known as catoptrics, after the study of optical mirrors.

The secret could not be preserved for long. The scientific project needed input from the western world, and no conspiracy remains perfect forever. By 1970, most major nations had their own mirror programs. Manned spaceflight never exceeded a few brief trips to orbit; instead, the race to perfect access to mirrors took its place, and promised far more than a few dead rocks as a prize. As such, public knowledge expanded slowly and the technological core remained top secret. By the time that efforts were starting to bear fruit, secrecy was somewhere between that of nuclear reactor design and nuclear warhead design in OTL, with the public generally being aware of the existence of these programs, but only a few experts allowed to know the fundamentals.

While Kiselev's early experiments brought over a few ml of catoptric seawater, by the 2010s, top research institutions around the world had labs capable of capturing artifacts from a number of mirrors, temporarily or permanently, and there were even several commercial programs to capture rare raw materials at a profit. These efforts naturally focused on the Specular mirror. While Kiselev maintained that humans could potentially cross the threshold into Mirs, his efforts never publicly bore fruit. At least, not before 2012.

Catoptric' researchers never were able to understand what made the Specular mirror so accessible, and thus energetically favorable to harvest from. What they did not anticipate is that there might be a force on the other side of the threshold just waiting for someone to reach out. Specular was not simply a dead world with plentiful resources. It was a snare, a baited trap. As material was pulled through, the branes grew closer, and the bonds formed from captured matter and energy conformed the two n-dimensional surfaces ever closer. On November 3rd, 2012, the trap sprung.

Uncontrolled catoptric events occurred across the face of the planet. Beings that the public had never seen (and even researchers deep within the bowels of the USA's DCR only knew by traces) soon stalked down major thoroughfares and slaughtered anyone caught in the open. As matter and energy shifted between the mirs, earthquakes, ozmic discharges, massive storms, fires, and weirder phenomena struck essentially everywhere at once. Specular's denizens included intelligent beings, but also their servitors, pets, and parasites, and any number of hardy generalists capable of outlasting their planets by adapting to a hostile new world. These were easily clever, resilient, or fierce enough to overcome human efforts to contain them.

You were minding your own business at some point on November 3rd, 2012, when thunder rumbled, the ground shook, and the world very suddenly stopped making sense.

The adventure here is one of survival in a world which is growing increasingly unstable as it is pulled into the maw of a dimension which is both populated by a swarm of malicious aliens, and is itself a form of malicious alien life, persisting by consuming other worlds. At the start, you will be a somebody just trying to survive in a world-spanning industrial accident which combines the worst elements of an invasion, a swarm of wild animals, a major earthquake, a hurricane, a nuclear meltdown, and a Fortean apocalypse. In time, you will realize that you're in a world of deep secrets which should have very well known better than to step on Cthulhu's tentacles... secrets which also provide the potential for escape from what remains of this cosmos.