This is the third and final part of the arc as written, though I should note that this can be done before running they encounter Boundless Regret - this was the way it went with my group when I ran this scenario. Valuable lessons for a GM - don't try and predict your players. They'll always do the wrong thing. [b]Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus[/b] Cycling between the Martian and Jovian gravity wells, Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus is (like most Scum swarms) an eclectic mix of tribes with generally-aligned social ideals. By the time it the players encounter it, it is passing through the Belt en route to Extropia. Most of the knowledge someone from outside of the Swarm would have is probably knowing about how they like pissing off the Jovians by not paying gravity tariffs, or someone with enough g-rep would know of the experimental narcotics flooding the market passes by Extropia or Mars. Perhaps niche media connoisseurs would be aware of the swarmcatting broadcasts or the melodramas put on by [i]Goatsong Parade[/i]. Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus - a probably-inaccurate rendering of 'thus always to dinosaurs' - came together after the Fall. A Japanese military capital warvessel, the [i]Divine Judgement[/i] suffered a mutiny when Tokyo was crushed by the collapsing Pacific space elevator. The crew abandoned Earth and fled into the Main Belt with almost all of its weaponry and hardware unused - a small subset of military historians debate about the knock-on effect of this defection on the morale of other crews, or how many more could have gotten off with it's help. Wandering in disgrace, many of the crew fell into vice or depression until they encountered a lone scum barge called [i]Gygax Spasm[/i]. Finding the possibilities of Scum life a better alternative than their shame and depression, the [i]Divine Judgement[/i] underwent a total overhaul, with a new name and a new lick of paint.. This was the seed that gradually grew into the full Swarm, which has only formalized in the last three or four years. In general, the Swarm is less about hardcore neo-cyber-sex and nano-drugs than normal - though certainly those things can be found - and more about alternative social models, lifestyles and extreme hobbyists taking things to an extent generally considered a bit socially unacceptable even by anarchists. In general, everyone on a certain ship is 'into' one thing - but they're really, REALLY into it. The Swarm is generally introspective and travels together out of convenience more than anything else, but there are some loose semblances of organizations across the Swarm. Each ship largely handles its own security but matters concerning multiple ships, or the whole Swarm, are handled by a kind of 'security council' of the ships' captains. This rank of captain is largely meaningless and simply means whoever currently has the highest rep score in that crew, or who has volunteered/been democratically elected to the position and it carries no power beyond the seat on the council. The following are a list of the notable members of Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus. [b]The Beautiful Deluge[/b] Members of the [i]Deluge[/i] were part of a rescue team that answered the Beautiful's distress call and broad the infected synth aboard. It has spent the time since then manipulating them into its cult, worshipping it as a god. This is essentially a perfect storm scenario as the Altruists are highly susceptible to the Beautiful. It plans to then use the Deluge and the Altruists to infect/convert the entire Swarm through mass-emails across the Swarm's mesh. This will cause mass chaos on the Swarm as anyone with a cyberbrain immediately becomes a ruthless psychopath and anyone without becomes really gullible and does anything they're told... Getting to the Beautiful is fairly easy because the Altruists will happily take you to him if you just ask. Getting away from it, on the other hand, is trickier... The threat isn't so much the Beautiful itself as its cult - once the mass-email is sent, all the Altruists will become insane but still worship the Beautiful and its first order (if it sees the Sentinels) is to prove their loyalty by killing the outsiders. I found it helpful to represent this encounter as more of a chase scene than an actual fight, using Freerunning and Freefall checks to run away from a single entity that represented a "swarm of altruists" wielding crude improvised weapons. However, my group was quite small and not hugely combat oriented - if your group is, run the Altruists as basic splicers or pods whose main threat is not so much their weapons as their sheer numbers over the group. A small, well-armed team should be able to gun them down fairly easily. [b]Aftermath[/b] The Swarm is severely damaged by the outbreak of the Beautiful virus. Several pods on the He-She go berserk and Mama/Papa Bear personally snaps their necks in hir massive, immaculately manicured hands. 404 has to shut down whole servers to contain the outbreak. The High Tide goes dark as an infected introduced industrial waste to the water cycling and poisons almost the entire population of the crew. It limps to Extropia and is likely to break up if the players don't offer some aid that would allow them to stay together. This would essentially take the form of a subplot of your own choosing, but some ideas could be identifying salvage for the crew of the Goatsong to bring in and sell; venturing into the murky, poison waters of the High Tide to retrieve the last cargo they made to sell on; recruiting Extropians to one of the vacant ships through social engineering. [b]The Loop[/b] The Loop is the name given to a jailbroken version of a social experiment created by a group of autonomists named the Egotronix, who were looking to promote empathic behavior. The program is to be installed in cyberbrains and works on the principle of compersion - sympathetic happiness or joy on behalf of another. The original program worked to connect multiple types of pleasure with the feeling of compersion, so as to make it more desirable to seek out the feeling - helping other people would provoke 'good' feelings across all cognitive spectra, from zen content and familial warmth to opiate-like stimulation and an endorphin-like rush. By making selfless behavior therefore more selfishly and personally profitable, the idea Egotronix had was that it would improve charitable behavior, sharing and other favors even more than the rep system could possibly do. Naturally this is the sort of good idea that lasts up until it hits the open market because the first thing that happened when they released the code open-source was that a modified version appeared with the pleasure response dialed all the way up to eleven, turning a well-meaning social experiment into essentially a hardcore drug. Renamed The Loop by whoever rewrote it, this new narcoalgorithm essentially allowed you to get super-high by helping a little old lady across the road, or just seeing two people really being in love - the good-feeling you got would trigger literally orgasmic pleasure while simultaneously feeling like a shot of barbiturates, a five-star meal and playing with the best dog in the world. And it's a social drug because if two people are running it, only one needs to help the little old lady across the road - the second guy gets high from just [i]seeing the first guy get high[/i] and the feedback loop keeps going for as long as they two of them can see each other being high. This makes it a rather unpopular algorithm among g-rep circles since it's difficult to profit from and created the unusual social groups of the Altruists in the Anathema Deluge scum barge. Essentially, they travel around in packs looking for a neotenic struggling to get something from a high shelf so one of them can get it down and the whole group can immediately creams their britches and writhes around on the floor for a while. Leaving one very creeped-out neotenic. Mechanically, there are two versions of the program. Loop v1.0 allows the user to regain stress values by doing small favors and receiving significant positive emotional feedback from doing so; they gain regain 1d10/3 stress once per session by performing some small kindness. Loop v2.0 is significantly stronger and comes with more downsides. First of all, it's more easily triggered and just hearing someone tell a joke could trigger it. Next, the effects are very much stronger. Users can regain 1d10 stress from it, but are incapacitated for a round as they are literally overwhelmed by the sensations. They also have to make addiction checks every time it is triggered, as they would for any narcotic. Failure results in addiction just like any other drug they would have been using. [b]Where Do We Go From Here?[/b] The adventure at this point forks, and so do the players. Whichever side the 'real' players go to is the course of action you represent in your games and the forks are NPCs working in the background. My group went to Mars and the Inner System, but yours might go to the Rim. Of course, then the question becomes how to give them info on what their forks find? And how do you get around the problem of integration after what would probably be quite lengthy separations? My solution to this was a program called the Dream of Roses. After nearly getting basilisk hacked, a player wanted to find some more advanced security software and fast. Being on Extropia, what he found was a little unusual but serviceable nonetheless. The program is the creation of an Extropian programmer-artist called Chetshwayo ('the slandered one') and mechanically functions as a quite good personal security suite for someone's muse, infomorph, ecto etc. However, it also includes a few more 'artsy' elements. First, it installs cosmetic and linguistic randomizers on the user's muse, causing it to seem to 'mutate' a little every time they appear - a Victorian gentleman slowly changes his dress and fashion over time to become something else, perhaps even changing gender or race gradually. The linguistic scrambler is intended to promote more artistic speech, making the muse talk in a more poetic, lyrical or ominous fashion and generally making the every day interactions more profound (or pretentious, according to your whim) It also allows the muse to 'dream', compiling the users sensory data and mesh activity into a basic simulspace that one experiences rather like a lucid dream. These simulspaces are sent to people on the user's approved contact list, allowing them to 'step inside' each others' minds and dreams. From a metagame perspective, giving this to a person and their fork allows for you to give the character a simulspace from their fork to experience and encounter as if they were there, without having to reintegrate. They would get the basics, but not every detail and no Rez - to get that, they must reintegrate take the SV risk as a result. Now, from this point my notes will be getting a bit more general and sandboxy. I planned out everything the conspiracy is doing in generalities and then wrote specifics closer to the individual sessions. So far the players are nearly done investigating what's going on Mars and their forks have managed to hit two targets, one in the Jovian Trojans and the other in Bright, orbiting around Saturn. Let me know if there's any you'd really like to here about but if not, I'll be writing up Mars Arc next.