In some ways, R639 resembles Seattle in December. Cloud cover is constant, grey, and oppressive. Coats and gloves only partly protect from a seeping damp chill that pervades everything. But R639 takes gloominess orders of magnitude further, because the recursion is a version of Seattle without power and, more immediately noticeable, one where everyone has vanished. Streets are empty. Cars are parked as if their owners expected to return. Chalky dust covers everything that’s not exposed to the weather. Nothing moves in the parks but for the sway of empty swings in the wind. Silence lays as heavy as a shroud over the Seattle of R639.
If a recursor explores further, a horrifying truth becomes clear: the residents of R639 didn’t abandon their shadow-Seattle. They fled to their basements and sublevels, attics and closets, and any other place they could hide. It didn’t save them. Something caught the natives, leaving behind thousands of sets of clothes (and pet collars) filled with desiccated dust and ash.
R639 was originally thought to have been created accidentally as the result of fictional leakage combined with propulsion experiments by Hertzfeld in the recursion lab of the Estate. More recent exploration suggests that might not be true; the recursion is a mysterious outlier.
The following are a few of the terrifying locations and situations that visitors should stay far away from if they have the misfortune of visiting R639.
It’s easy to find a parked or abandoned car in R639. Vehicles can be hot-wired, though it might be easier to find the keys in a nearby home or apartment. Whether driving or walking, visitors find Seattle’s streets empty of people or moving vehicles (but see the Karum outpost). The city streets stretch from downtown to the water and out into the suburbs. In fact, no matter how far an explorer travels, the recursion seems to stretch farther. However, long before that intuition can be disproved, one or more terrifying encounters likely ends any push for the recursion’s borders.
Those who travel any of the major thoroughfares also see, painted over faded graffiti, a series of new messages in purple spray paint: “Help! We’re hiding in the Virginia Grayson Medical Center!” Some of these messages seem to be only a week old at most.
Visitors who stick to the streets may encounter a flight of thoniks or find a vehicle infested with green pods. Characters who survive an encounter with thoniks and have any knowledge of the Strange realize that the creatures are native to the dark energy network. The thonik presence in R639 suggests that the recursion has somehow been flayed open, allowing creatures of the Strange to enter it, perhaps at will. That’s not a good thing. A second possibility also exists: What if thoniks are not native to the Strange after all but originate in R639?
The typical Seattle structure, whether it’s a place of business or an apartment building, is dusty and uninhabited but doesn’t show overt signs of violence. Dozens or hundreds of sets of clothing are hidden away in the nooks and crannies of each building. Pet remains are often found with their previous owners, little piles of dust surrounding a collar with a tag.
Visitors exploring and looting buildings may eventually encounter more green pods or a killing white light.
A killing white light is an eye-watering point of brilliance, though its emanation isn’t warm. Despite the blazing intensity, a killing white light is cold: it drains heat and life from living things caught in its radiance. The creature is normally encountered only in darkened areas, though one might chase potential victims into the street at night. A victim killed by one of these creatures is rendered into so much blowing ash, though his clothing and equipment is unharmed.
Killing white light: level 5; flies a short distance each round; blazing nimbus attack inflicts damage in immediate range; moves away from strong light sources other than itself
Visitors can find lots of everyday things just by searching buildings, but looters are best served by hitting a mall. The Southcenter area south of Seattle is (or was) a shopping mecca, and looters who go there are likely to find anything they might desire. Characters who load up on material goods and travel back to Earth via a matter gate are enriched. Of course, each looting trip requires another gauntlet run through the horrifying, dead recursion. Is it really worth it?
Amid the normal things one might expect to find while looting a building, characters can also find the following.
Searchers sometimes discover single lumps of volcanic glass the color of milk in dark corners, under beds and couches, and in basements. Quickened characters who examine a lump get the sense that the object is a cypher. However, when put to the test by a paradox or someone else able to identify a cypher’s function, the glass lumps resist immediate analysis, suggesting that the cypher is in a state of superposition, requiring a triggering event to collapse it to its final state (and cypher type). If someone translates out of R639 with a lump, it also translates and becomes a known cypher (such as an analeptic or a gravity inversion grenade). The cypher functions normally if used, but afterward, it doesn’t evaporate in a swirl of fractal light. Instead, it hatches as a killing white light.
A reality scar in R639 manifests as a bubble of perceptual static about 200 feet (61 m) in diameter. From the exterior, it’s difficult to perceive the boundary of a scar, given the misted, gloomy nature of the recursion. Once a visitor has crossed into a reality scar, everything within appears as if seen through a filter of old-timey television static, sound is pinched and weak, and the senses of taste, touch, and smell are muted. This has the cumulative effect of increasing the difficulty of an explorer’s tasks by one step and decreasing her line of sight to immediate range, though she can make out imperfect outlines of objects and people up to short range. At first, some of those people seem to be echoes of former residents. But they don’t respond to hails, they melt away when approached, and sometimes they shiver into horrifying shapes a moment before disappearing completely.
Finally, characters who become incapacitated (or suffer some other grievous shock, as determined by the GM) within a reality scar must succeed on a difficulty 1 Intellect defense roll, or they are immediately ejected to a random location in the Strange and treated as if lost.
Searchers can find actual cyphers in addition to the pseudo.cyphers described above. In addition, they might find “cursed” artifacts, such as the mirror of fading beauty.
Located in the heart of Seattle on Earth, the Virginia Grayson Medical Center is an acute care hospital with more than three hundred beds.
In R639, the beds are empty except for dust and ash, a reality scar fills the lobby and all the ground floor entrances, and a group of human survivors hides in the upper floors, scavenging for food and survival as hope dwindles. The survivors are down to just three people. All of them are dazed, confused, and desperate, with big gaps in their memory (which cluster around the transition from their former life to their new existence). None of the survivors has the spark, but all are on the edge of developing it—Dr. Radakovich more than the others, given his recent proclivities.
Justin Brown (former patient): Sixteen-year-old Justin came into the hospital for a broken arm. The next thing he knew, everyone was dead. Justin sometimes ventures out of the building to salvage food and supplies for the others. He’s the one who’s been painting the messages for help using spray paint he liberated from a home improvement store.
Justin Brown: level 3, tasks related to stealth as level 5
Since “the change,” Samantha has coped by trying to keep Justin and Dr. Radakovich (and herself) alive and in good health. She recently noticed a strange infection on one of her arms, which manifests as a slowly growing brown crust. She keeps her sleeves long to hide it. This worrying development is probably why she’s failed to wonder more about Radakovich’s increasing instability.
Samantha Chaudhary: level 3, tasks related to healing as level 5
Benjamin insists on being called “Doctor” Radakovich, even in the face of “the change,” which is just a symptom of how completely he’s lost his mind. He has been secretly murdering the other survivors when he can get them alone, and then storing gruesome trophies of flesh and skin in a medical refrigerator (which has no power, so the interior is a rotting mess). Radakovich believes that he is slowly transforming into a god, and to complete his apotheosis, he must kill everyone else first.
Benjamin Radakovich: level 5, wields level 6 reality-tearing knife artifact
Amputated animate arm: level 3, Speed defense rolls as level 5; regains 3 points of health per round even when reduced to 0 health
Explorers familiar with the Estate on Earth can find its dim replica on R639—a replica sans any people. Despite being a copy of the real-world campus, the Estate in R639 doesn’t have the cyphers, the artifacts, the working translation and inapposite gates, and other specialized equipment the real Estate possesses. That said, searching the remains yields 1d6 randomly determined cyphers.
A search of the campus reveals a few additional features, including the remains of known Estate members (at least, their distinctive clothing and a lot of loose dust). These include Katherine Manners, the Fixer, and potentially the PCs themselves. It can be particularly upsetting for a character to find a copy of himself who was crammed under a bed, in the corner of a bathroom stall, or huddled under a desk when death struck.
Visitors to the Estate campus can also find evidence that someone systematically tossed every office in almost every structure, leaving a litter of upended file cabinets, torn couch cushions, and ripped wallpaper in their wake. All but one building (the Library) has been ravaged, and it’s only a matter of time before the responsible party returns to finish the job. The perpetrators are none other than a group of Karum out of Ruk who have come to steal whatever Estate secrets they can from the dim replica of R639.
Characters who sleep in R639 may experience the same repeating dream of a run-down shed at night in a nondescript rural backyard not far from Seattle. A swaying old-timey heat lamp provides erratic lighting. Rain beats down in torrents. The dream perspective slowly advances on the scene as a feeling of horror mounts for the dreamer. Something is digging up from the sodden earth behind the shed; the mound of disrupted soil grows larger each night. But the dream always ends before the dreamer sees what is emerging from the ground. That’s probably a good thing.
A cinder block holds down an amputated, yet still writhing, human arm. The cinder block in question is at the corner of two prominent streets in downtown Seattle, behind a mailbox. Any interaction with the arm or the cinder block (even shooting at it from a distance) risks releasing the arm. If released, the arm tries to murder any living thing it can sense in the recursion via vibration through the ground and air. If the PCs probe the arm with special abilities, they might learn that it used to belong to a human recursor named Garland of the Fall, from Ardeyn. It’s not revealed where Garland is currently, whether he’s alive or in pieces, or how his arm became animate, amputated, and caught under a cinder block.
A small team of Karum agents from Ruk discovered R639 via a particularly catastrophic translation failure. At first, the team thought they’d found the real Earth, though that idea was dispelled quickly enough. Still, they decided to use the mishap as an opportunity to learn more about the world they despise, starting with one of their chief rivals, the Estate. To that end, the agents set up a base in the sub-basement of a nightclub called Trinity in downtown Seattle, commandeered trucks in which to drive about and conduct their investigations, and settled in for a short stay.
The oppressive and dangerous nature of R639 proved more than the Karum team was prepared to handle. Of the five originals, only two still survive: Ur-galrum (a female) and Dram-edin (a male). The survivors are deeply torn over whether to continue their investigation or devote all their energies to trying to escape the recursion. Ur-galrum wants to stay, and Dram-edin wants to go. So far, all of Dram-edin’s translation attempts have failed. When he and another team member figured out how to fly a plane from nearby Boeing Field to see what they could find above the clouds, hundreds of thoniks came after them and killed the pilot.
Characters who come across the Karum operatives find either enemies or short-term allies who are willing to help find a way to escape R639, depending on how the interaction goes. However, if it looks like the allied group has a chance of escaping the recursion, Ur-galrum betrays everyone—she’s come down with some kind of psychosis. (The blister glove she wears is something she found beneath a pile of green pods.)
Ur-galrum: level 5; health 25; Armor 3; wields a level 7 blister glove artifact
Dram-edin: level 5, subterfuge-related tasks as level 6, mechanical tasks as level 7
The artifacts in this section rely on R639’s Exotic law, but they will function normally for a few days under any other law.
Level: 1d6+2
Form: Fingerless glove sewn from ratty denim, covered with rusted rivets
Effect: If the wearer points with her gloved hand at a target she can see within long range, the target blisters across its extremities, feels extreme pain, and suffers ambient damage equal to the artifact level. Fleshy pustules also form on objects, the ground, and other structures near the target.
A blister glove wearer can attempt attacks using other hand signs, but the results are less certain. Flipping someone the bird with the glove might do nothing, or it could open a crack in the earth beneath the target or summon a flight of thoniks.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20
Level: 1d6
Origin: R639 (emergent)
Law: Exotic
Form: Humanoid clown mask
Effect: The wearer is happy while the mask remains on. This effect also keeps him safe from malign mental influence, including fear and intimidation.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20
Level: 1d6
Origin: R639 (fictional)
Law: Exotic
Form: Hand mirror
Effect: A user who gazes at himself in the reflective surface activates the device. He gains access to an additional stat Pool called Beauty that has a number of points equal to the artifact level. When spending points from any other Pool, he can take one, some, or all the points from the Beauty Pool first.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20 (check per day of use)
GM Intrusions: The user’s reflection mouths threats at her. The reflection attacks an ally. The reflection attacks the user.
Level: 1d6+3
Origin: R639 (emergent)
Law: Exotic
Form: A shard of dull steel, sharpened along one edge
Effect: This large knife functions as a normal weapon of its type. When its special power is activated as part of an attack, the knife emits a silent pulse of reality-twisting force that sweeps out to a short range in all directions. Creatures in the area other than the wielder are knocked prone and stunned for one round, losing their action. Unfixed objects are toppled or moved at least 5 feet (2 m). Cracks form in walls, floors, and ceilings, and a reality scar is left behind in the area.
A reality scar is a region about 200 feet (60 m) in diameter that messes with perceptions of creatures within it, increasing the difficulty of all tasks by one step. Everything within a scar is seen as if through visual static. Creatures and NPCs sometimes take on nightmarish outlines that are probably not real.
Sometimes, the largest crack left behind creates a temporary inapposite gate to the recursion R639 (or to recursions outside it, if the knife is used within R639).
Depletion: 1 in 1d10