Round type: Quarantine

[Dauntasa]

Round starts off normally. There are no traitors or changelings or what have you. After about 10-15 minutes, a Centcom update comes through. The shuttle that brought the crew to the station was also transporting a dangerous, experimental genetically-engineered virus to the next stop-off, but when it reached its destination they found that somebody broke the containers, and everyone on the station is now probably infected.

At this point, everyone is infected with stage 1 of a particularly nasty virus. At stage 1, it doesn't do much, but as it progresses through stages 2-5 it becomes gradually more and more debilitating. At stage 2, it begins randomly stunning and making you drop things. At stage 3, you start coughing up blood and vomiting, doing brute damage. At stage 4, your skin starts sloughing off, causing constant bleeding and damage. At stage 5, your limbs start to rot and fall off. When it reaches stage 6, you have only a few minutes to live before your bones dissolve and you die horribly(excellent medical care will keep you alive through stages 3-5, but at this point you essentially gib and no amount of healing chems will save you). The disease prevents you from being cloned.

It takes NT an hour from the disease being detected to synthesize a cure, which will be accompanied by the shuttle arriving(ending the round), but the disease will run through all of its stages and kill you if untreated for about 20-25 minutes, and will reach extremely debilitating and potentially fatal stages in around 15 minutes. The good news is that there's a chemical that will not cure the disease, but will push it back to a previous stage when administered. It can't be made on the station, but NT will send shipments of it into QM. The bad news is that they won't be sending enough of it to keep more than 4-5 people alive. The only goal of everyone on the station is to survive, no matter what they have to do.

To add an extra little wrinkle, a few people are sent syndicate uplinks that start with zero telecrystals. In exchange for certain, valuable and hard to come by objects(RCDs, E-guns, Captain's hat, things like that), the Syndicate will grant you 1 crystal. There's a limited catalog of traitor items available, nothing rampagey, but most important is that you can buy anti-viral injectors for 2-3 crystals. Something would have to be done about Electricians. The stuff they scan and make wouldn't be acceptable.

[epicdwarf]

Idea: Instead of having the same virus every round, let's make is randomly generated! When pathology comes back it will bring with it randomly generated pathogens. All we would have to do is have a virus spawn with nasty variants to keep the crew on their toes. Also, have an NT task force(with no way to communicate to the crew) come onto the station 10 minutes in. Their objectives would be kill infected crew members and take the vaccine if created back to NT. Make the crew decide whether to attack them and make sure they don't take any vaccines developed ,or just leave them to kill the infected but risk the crew being screwed over by their employers.

[Zadeon]

Something neat would be for the disease to be different every round. But different as in symptoms and the final effect. There should be variants such as people constantly laughing until they die or just be turned into something at the final stage. So one round people could just turn into a toolbox or something when they reach the last stage. Just more wacky ideas to put out there.

[KikiMofo]

Question: What would you do about late joiners and what if once everyone knows about the round type they all start borging themselves to escape all the shit?

[Dauntasa]

Question: What would you do about late joiners and what if once everyone knows about the round type they all start borging themselves to escape all the shit?

late-joiners: they get infected on arrival
borging: Most people aren't going to want to borg themselves to escape all this shit and even if they were it's not like they're going to be able to build and assemble the dozens of frames and conduct the proper operations anyway. It'd be hard to coordinate it in a normal round let alone one where the roboticist might have his arms fall off half-way through the surgery.

[Berrik]

Make the disease affect borgs in some way too. They still have one biological part, after all!

[icarus]

there needs to be a variety of ways to get the medicine, like paying massive amounts for shipments (leading to people swarming the hop or the slot machines) or being able to contact the syndie and get an objective in exchange for a syringe of the antibiotic

to make it feel more like a quarantine there should be drones patrolling the station that shoot down any pod trying to escape (escape is still possible, but difficult)

[Splatpope]

It's simple : whoever gets debrained dies, thus failing the objective of staying alive.

[Readster]

This sounds like a neat idea. Add more sources for the anti-virus and it could be pretty fun.

[atomic1fire]

Being a miscreant in a quarantine round could be really really funny.

Tell people you have the cure and whip up a batch of random chemicals that include some health chemicals but doesn't actually cure anything.

Sell it for money and everyone will throw money at you.

[Dauntasa]

there needs to be a variety of ways to get the medicine, like paying massive amounts for shipments (leading to people swarming the hop or the slot machines) or being able to contact the syndie and get an objective in exchange for a syringe of the antibiotic

to make it feel more like a quarantine there should be drones patrolling the station that shoot down any pod trying to escape (escape is still possible, but difficult)

I said something about being able to get stuff for the syndicate in exchange for medicine. But those being the only two ways to get it was kind of intentional. I want it to be a rare commodity that people will fight over.

[atomic1fire]

Here's a potentially stupid thought, what if the cure was craftable in chemistry, but only if they know the recipe.

Now here's the kicker, The recipe is made with ingredients that don't already mix together, but the actual recipe is random.

Could be saline + phosphorus, but only 4 units of phosphorus. Lets try adding cola and see if that works. nope.

While the station is errupting into chaos, you'd have people plaguing chemistry trying to find or get a cure that may not even be there.

A set of incomplete doctors notes would be sent to the station. These would be more or less a hint as to the actual recipe, but some enterprising jerk could just as much set them on fire and leave the station in chaos.

The recipe may not even be the full recipe. "This drug looks kind of like a cure, but seems to be missing something".

Maybe even Botany and bar get involved creating chemicals and doing science.

The Doctors notes + random Recipe would serve as a potential gameplay element for scientists and barman, but also serve as a false hope, a piece of cheese for all the little mice in the station's maze, dangling hopefully just out of reach.


A chemist could either share the recipe, sell the cure, or simply cure themselves and not tell anyone.

The best stories come from outrage and sheer rudeness.

[Dauntasa]

I don't think that an actual cure should be creatable on the station. But having the treatment be creatable could be good.

Basically, if the medicine's going to be creatable, I think the way it should work is this: The recipe is random, but always has the following characteristics:
Requires reagents from at least 2 of Chem, Medbay, Botany, and the Kitchen.
There's a notebook that gives clues as to what could be in it.
It has several different ingredients.
It has a very low yield.
Mixing it is somehow dangerous, creating fire or noxious gas.

Getting your hands on this shit should not be easy, because if it is then it's basically just extended. The point of the round essentially is to make the anti-viral drugs something that A: everyone needs and B: not everyone can get.

[Captain_Bravo]

I can see many, many of these rounds ending up with four people killing everyone else, and then just sitting in QM for forty minutes waiting for the shuttle to arrive.

[Dauntasa]

I can see many, many of these rounds ending up with four people killing everyone else, and then just sitting in QM for forty minutes waiting for the shuttle to arrive.

gradually reduce amount of incoming shipments to force them to start fighting over them