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.

[PTTG]

Been working on threats and challenges. These are triggers for dice rolls that generally don't involve shooting things.

The initial incursion wave represented a peak of activity as countless incursion events occurred across the planet. After this initial spike, the rate of events declined somewhat due to two factors: firstly, some of the inital built-up 'charge' between the two Mirs was dissipated, and secondly, the moderating influence of the intelligent specular agent, i.e., the alien empire residing within Mir Specular. Further events would be tied to intentional incursions by the specular agency, or to surges of EM activity on Earthside triggering brief threshold breakdown events.

Natural:
Power Failure
Incursion events have a connection to EM discharges, triggering and being triggered by sharp spikes in electrical and magnetic fields. This is a double whammy for electrical grids, as the event causes severe power spikes in energy grids, and backups springing to life attracted new incursion events directly to vital infrastructure.

Earthquake
Rarely, specular matter and energy condenses into areas within Earth's crust, displacing and disrupting terrestrial matter. This results in significant earthquakes, often in unusual locations.

Vulcanism
Some of this tectonic activity in turn triggers volcanic eruptions; almost exclusively in preexisting volcanic regions. Nonetheless, smoke, ash, and toxic fumes from these events affected large regions.

Fire
Electrical failures, earthquakes, lightning, and conflict all contribute to sudden fires being quite common after the event, especially as regions grow increasingly abandoned.

Smoke
With many uncontrolled fires, volcanoes, and conflicts, smoke is nearly omnipresent. Additionally, dust storms and even infalling dust particles contribute to smokey, smoggy conditions on Earth. Dust masks are advised, even goggles.

Extreme Wind
A significant amount of infalling specular mass is various atmospheric gasses, these generally being humid and extremely hot air. This tends to disrupt atmospheric behavior on Earth, triggering extreme storm cells. Tornadoes become possible anywhere on Earth, as are hurricane-like storm systems.

Electrical Discharges
This increased rate of storm formation also results in more frequent lightning storms. More common but less extreme are electrical hazards created by damage related to the event; in many cases, even after first response efforts arrive, the jury-rigged solutions built by survivors are far less safe than what was built before.

Flooding
In addition to the increased storm activity, and earthquake-induced tidal waves, some major incursion events deposit matter in the ocean, resulting in particularly odd waves. Also, damage to infrastructure also results in relatively minor flooding. Finally, some incursion events are made up of water from Specular's seas, which is highly alkaline and extremely salty.

Radiation
The widespread damage includes disruption of service at nearly every nuclear power plant. 95% of all nuclear power plants avoided major disaster, but that still left 25 plants around the world facing severe leaks. With infrastructure down and emergency response in the best of times able to handle about one nuclear emergency at a time, these disasters bloomed out of control, resulting in large radioactive regions scattered relatively evenly over the planet (wealthy regions have many more plants, but they are generally more reliable). Additionally, some major incursions are associated with brief flashes of high-energy photons.

Hunger
Due to breakdown in logistics, food supplies almost immediately stopped flowing around the world. Supplies of food in densely populated areas grew scarce within days, in part due to incursions of Specular wildlife capable of attacking even well-secured stockpiles.

Thirst
Fresh water was an even more pressing concern. Not only were distribution systems shut down, microbes and other specular biota rapidly infested terrestrial water supplies. All drinking water should be boiled and ideally filtered.

Chemical Hazard
Many industrial accidents were triggered by the tremors, resulting in spills of practically every industrial chemical from hydroflouric acid to crude oil. Additionally, the invasive seawater is highly alkaline and much saltier than terrestrial seawater, resulting in toxic brine pools appearing in unexpected places.

Excessive Cold
The extreme climate shifts disrupted seasonal weather, bringing both hot tropical climate effects such as unseasonable hurricanes and mega-storms, but also freezing temperatures. Particularly in the immediate aftermath, prevailing winter weather in the northern hemisphere brought extreme cold to large regions even during thunderstorms and severe flooding.

Excessive Heat
As the disaster continued, more extreme fluctuations occurred. (Actually, possibly extreme heat first, then ash winter?)

Wildlife
Native Earth life was severely disrupted, driving terrestrial animals out of their normal ranges and leaving many domesticated animals in severe distress; wandering cattle that weren't preyed upon by specular biota traveled remarkably far after escaping abandoned ranches.

Disease
It goes without saying that the survivors were forced into unsanitary conditions. Additionally, sanitary sewers, waste processing plants, and landfills suffered breaches, releasing biohazardous waste into the environment.