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So I'd been without gaming for a little while and I had a solo player. No big deal, I've had solo players before, and he was still good for it, so I had him made a d20 Modern character, ex-SEAL, did tours in Iraq, pretty standard stuff for that character archetype. Anyway. He got involved with some pretty bad stuff, a few civilians killed, a court martial, he got home and discovered his wife left him. He's free on the wind and takes the bus out to Arizona.
So he wakes up in a room, a rusty, blood-stained room in a small chair. There's a lot of stuff on the walls: charcoal and chalk drawings, blood, little symbols. This guy, dear as he was, noted everything down that he could until a man in a nice suit enters the room. The guy turns and pulls his pistol, and the guy asks “Are you sorry?”
After a brief exchange, the guy only manages to get questions out of the guy, like “Are you sorry?” and “Do you cry?” and eventually shoots him and the dead man bleeds orange. He escapes, finds some stairs to the surface, and discovers he's in a small town called “Irokis,” somewhere in upstate New York. The place is busted down, a shambles, there's a few burned buildings.
He explores a bit, discovers there are snake statues that whisper things, some of them right in the front of doorways that he can't move (he eventually resorts to busting the wall next to one so he can get into the house because the statues are even blocking the windows). The statues all say the same thing: “I am here because of what was once done. Are you sorry?” All the houses blocked by statues all have the same sort of scrawling that the room did.
I'm keeping track of starvation rules. By day two the guy's trying to steal from the stores just to get food. He leaves town a couple of times, of course, but he finds out that if he goes to sleep, he wakes back up in the “chair room.” No corpse of the suited man, but there is a statue there now, that same cemetery snake statue. It says the same thing when he gets up and starts repeating it. “I am here because of what was once done. Are you sorry?” He's at the point where he just about ignores them. This one has a deep voice. After a bit of trying to engage it in conversation, he leaves.
The player is honestly starting to get a little creeped out and tells me so, but he has two friends he wants to bring in because apparently “you guys -have- to play this.” So he brings them by. Before they get their characters really done they watch a little and ex-SEAL guy makes his way into the good graces of the cut lady who runs the local bed and breakfast and is going to get a room in exchange for some handyman work. He goes through a few rather nice, calm days with nothing untoward happening. Well, you know, except for a few statues here and there, and there isn't much food. Still taking nonlethal, of course, but getting the DCs dropped here and there because he's eating sometimes (using D&D's nonlethal rules as opposed to d20 Modern's).
Things are actually going ok. Then he wakes up in his room with two other people. They get into some arguments, there are a few shots fired, but they do the Player Character thing and decide to team up to figure out what's going on. One is a cute blonde cop from New York City struggling with her sexual identity and coming up short and the other is a college student who's trying to figure out his major, since his dad wants him to go into business and he wants to get into a science career.
Science guy has all kinds of tests to run. They leave town, they hop a train, they drive to a nearby city, they always end up, now, back in the bed and breakfast and nobody remembers them leaving. They ask around about the statues and try to chip them. Nobody else can hear them, says “they've always been there” and they can certainly be pulverized. They come back the instant someone isn't looking at them.
By day 7 it starts to rain. Fatigue rolls on top of starvation rolls now. Day 9 they trade the cop's gun for food. They discover there's a woman on the north end of town who claims she can make elixirs that fend off the starvation, and they discover she has a sort of cult going , and is trading real food for drugs that just make you feel full. They decide to kill her. Science guy is killed in the ensuing fire, but wakes up the next day in the bed and breakfast room (with some more nonlethal damage). They're walking around with maybe 10% of their health left and Fatigued. At this point they're all trying to steal food.
Eventually SEALguy sends Science Guy off to get something for them to eat and maybe try to track down some animals or something. He's good at that. I run a side thing where Science Guy almost dies and even recovers some food. I mix in some dinner table conversation with the lady who runs the bed and breakfast and have her flirt with Blondiecop a little. They end up sleeping together and Science Guy comes back with more food. I manage to not have to make bed and breakfast lady react because she's with Blondiecop in her room and wants the other two to watch.
The three of them eat. I make some notes and attack the bed and breakfast with some kids wearing plastic Captain Kirk masks and get some numbers thrown around in the air involving some diseases to cover for the fact that I haven't adjusted the starvation Con check. Blondiecop is killed and wakes back up in the bed and breakfast room.
The players, down to around 5% of their health, go ballistic. They move out into town the next day and kill the convenience store clerk. They steal everything in his store and go back to the bed and breakfast. Next day, the convenience store is run down and covered with ARE YOU SORRY and snake statues. They break every snake statue they can find. They start stabbing people in the street. DO YOU CRY
ARE YOU SORRY
DO YOU CRY
It's everywhere. The only person spared from their wrath is bed and breakfast lady, who is getting more sexually aggressive the whole time. She's slept with all three and had them all watch. Never all three at once. Just one at a time, one a night.
The rain gets worse.
YOU NEVER CRY starts appearing in the signs. YOU DON'T CARE. SEALguy finds pictures of the people he killed in Iraq lying around. Blondiecop's parents come in on the bus and start hunting her down to talk to her and force her to fellate random men at gunpoint. She kills them a lot. Science Guy's dad is stalking all three of them with the ability to seemingly make people follow him just by showing them the inside of a briefcase.
They team up and kill him, mostly by luring him close to a big statue and pushing it over. They traded their guns and armor for food already. The statue breaks open and a giant snake that breathes poison gas emerges. They spend two days tracking it and killing it.
They find the dead kids from Iraq inside.
SEALguy has a breakdown. The player literally starts crying. Finds himself on an empty road, haggard, tired, and halfway between Colorado and Arizona. He hitches a ride. Nobody pays any attention to Science Guy and Blondiecop. He arrives in Arizona, and they spend a few days hanging around, paranoid about everything, and SEALguy is eventually jumped by cops and dragged off to an asylum.
He spends time in the asylum. Blondiecop and Science Guy are actually free to come and go. Nobody stops them. They never have to check in at security. They have trouble talking to him or interacting with things when he's taken his meds, you see. Eventually he figures this out and gets off his meds and plans a breakout. He does break out when Science Guy drives a car through the wall. They get about thirty miles before SEALguy is suddenly back in his room at the asylum and getting injected.
He starts taking his meds, I start focusing the game entirely on him.
Up until he's released and he meets this college kid and an ex-detective from New York and the three of them discover that the asylum is performing illegal anti-psychotic research and get SEALguy (and most of the other inmates) released by the courts and some licenses revoked.
That's not the end of the campaign. That's just where I started, mind you. The level 3-7 adventure.