I was jonesing for a solo game a couple of weeks ago and I came across a rather evocative image of an astronaut in DriveThruRPG under the “Most Popular Under $5” section. The title was
Entity, and it advertised itself as a “Solo Storytelling Nasa Punk Game” which was immediately intriguing, in particular the Nasa Punk description. Predictably, I bought it, and after one adventure which I have turned into a little story, I have some thoughts. In summary: It’s good! I like it. I find the game loop to be a little simple but the engine serves very well as a planet exploring experience, and it was significantly better than other solo “journaling” games I have tested.
How does the game Entity play?
In Entity you play a far future synthetic astronaut, piloted by an AI, that explores an alien world. Mechanically, your character is defined by three Traits (Technology, Analytics and Adaptivity) and each Trait has three distinct Edges (for example Physics, Biology and Chemistry are Analytics Edges). The three Traits can vary in value from 3 to 5 and each Edge can have a value from 1 to 3. These values come into play when your character travels to a location or discovers encounters on a location.
To pass through a travel or location encounter, you will be prompted by the encounter to add the value of your Trait to one of its corresponding Edges and then roll two d10 and compare each die roll to see if both, one or no die rolls under the resulting target number of your Trait plus Edge value. A full success results in both dice rolling under or the equivalent of the target number. A partial success is defined as one of the two dice rolling under or the equivalent of the target number, and a failure is both dice rolling over the target number.
With a full or partial success, you may proceed to the next encounter and/or obtain the items the encounter delivers. However, with a partial success you also accrue a Strain. With a failure you suffer an Impairment. These matter because you start with 20 slots in your Spacesuit. Each slot can hold either a Strain, Impairment or an Upgrade. Essentially this means you have 20 hit points per mission, except that some of these slots can hold Upgrades that augment your Edges. Strains are different from Impairments in that once you complete a Mission, Strains are removed from your Spacesuit’s 20 slots. However, Impairments are permanent from Mission to Mission.
Speaking of Missions, Mission are completed by obtaining a certain number of Aspects (from 2 to 4) and Mission fulfillment results in the building of a Structure. Structures give you and your successor characters bonuses from Mission to Mission and do not take up any Spacesuit slots. Aspects are rarely acquired (a roll of 10 or higher on 1d10 when you are determining encounters at a location) unless you spend Data to positively modify the location encounter roll. For example, if you have 4 Data, you can spend up to all 4 Data to add +4 to your location encounter roll, ensuring that you have the possibility of recovering an Aspect if you roll a 6 or higher on a 1d10 when determining encounters at a location. Data is most reliably found by carrying out the Side Activity: Collect Data which you can only do once per exploration to a location. There are other Side Activities that can bolster your astronaut positively as well.
In addition to the core book for Entity ($5 on DriveThruRPG), I purchased Advanced Storytelling for Entity, which is a 30-page pdf with a plethora of additional tables (also $5). However, after adventuring with the core book, I find it alone produces enough information and prompts for journaling that additional detail is unnecessary. Understand, that this is not a failure of Advanced Storytelling for Entity. The tables provided there are descriptive and very useful if you wanted to go into more specifics with your Entity story, or just rip-off the tables wholesale for some other scifi rpg.
An Entity Story: Game One
Without further ado, here is the story of my first Entity game.
The rhythmic
rise and fall of the violin’s notes roused me from my reverie. By the time the drum beat played my focus was awake and analytics flooded my sensorium. Alien constellations wheeled above me in the vast expanse of void as I listened to the last strains of a forgotten song from an ancient place named Scotland. Funny that. The song was immortalized in digital film but the unknown questions as to its origin mirrored the unknowns of this planet’s alien landscape that stretched out in leagues beside me, dwarfing me.
Heh. Enough maudlin ruminations. Although this land was defined only by a meaningless string of numbers and letters, unknown shores are nothing new to the human race, or even the memories of one. Time to get to work.
The long dead newsman’s audio came in clear as I surveyed the wreckage of my creche, the technological marvel that had once streamed from star to star, carrying me and my explorer’s soul.
“…remember. We are not descended from fearful men.” Defiance surged through me. So much was damaged, broken or a wreck. Right. Start from the beginning then. I waved my hands to activate the translucent orange overlay that defined input to my electronics. Daunting. My touch feedback haptics for robot controls were fried. That’s it then. My first mission would be to fix that. I strained against the planet’s gravity and heaved a chunk of metal and technology to the side, staring at what I had uncovered. Then I looked up. I would need to find resources and other assorted things on this barren planet. Correction, I thought, musing over the gigantic pyramid that orbited in the sky. Suspected barren planet.
***
My local sensors and what was left of my creche’s scanners filled my sensorium with reams of spooling data. A particular image of a desolate craggy outcropping was zoomed in on and overlayed with pinks and greens, telltale markings of rare minerals, essential for the robotic repairs I so badly needed to function on this planet. As my telescopic sensors keyed in on the outcropping objective I began to march across the alien plain, leaving a line of footsteps in the dust. My vision resolved a more high-resolution image of the spar of the outcropping as my effort brought me ever closer. Telescopic sensors swept up and down the glimmering metallic material of the spar as the stars winked overhead.
CONFIRMED. TITANIUM DEPOSITS in bold yellow letters flashed in the lower left of my vision. Then the announcement scrambled into letters, numbers and static. What the Hell? I gasped as my sensorium glitched, stuttered and nearly cut offline. I held my helmet in a humanlike-coping manner, shaking my head as if to clear my vision.
Then I felt it. The static and the pulling. I started running. Flickers of bright blue and white-yellow sparks started emanating up from the ground as I accelerated away from the rocks and dusty trail I had started carving through the alien landscape. Visuals were immediately fixed on my local area, the titanium spar forgotten in the panic of flight. I did not stop until I had broken far away from the sudden electromagnetic storm. My hands were on my knees in relief, a remnant reaction of the human brainwave patterns my silicon mind was based on. Instincts die hard deaths it seems. Fortunately, survival is one of them.
Thankfully the sprint hadn’t cost me any oxygen. It did, however drain some of my batteries. One of the main cells was flatlining. I switched to draw more energy from my auxiliary stores and put unnecessary functions on standby, just in case. I looked forward. The spar twinkled in the starlight. I surged forward, this time a little more warily.
After traversing a sparkling white ridgeline and reaching the shadowed side, I stopped cold. Then as I stood, I slowly smiled. At the base of the titanium spar was, for lack of a better word, a construction worksite, clearly alien.
As I approached the location I felt a sense of peace in the dormant machines, curled cast-offs of titanium metal on the ground here and there, and Platonic solids of unknown manufacture simply hovering silently in the air off the ground at about at eye-level. Metal twinkled in the starlight, and everything just looked … well, abandoned. Like several someone’s had just walked off the scene and were waiting in the wings, grabbing coffee and whiling away the minutes, ready to retake up their tools at a signal from an invisible director.
A compressed sine wave appeared before my sensorium, and moments later moved to the very bottom of my vision, repeating over and over. I turned my hearing on; it was an audio waveform. Did that sound like…hissing?
I did an about-face, spinning about quickly. Then I looked down. The ground rumbled and cracked open in various places. Hissing bio-luminescent vivid green fog began to swirl around my knees and rose to my chest, pouring out of the earthen rents in the ground. Was the very surface of this planet trying to kill me? NON-TOXIC ORGANIC my sensorium responded to my unasked query as my vision filled with the green fog. I looked up and it was swirling ever higher, blotting out the dome of constellations above me.
I took an exploratory step. The ground held. I took another and nearly wedged my foot into one of those vents in the surface. Then, I held out my hands to stabilize myself and walked out of the fog, step by careful step, navigating purely by dead reckoning until the fog wall began to become thinner and thinner.
I arrived unmolested in the center of the alien workshop when another rumble occurred. The hissing stopped abruptly and I looked back. A plume of beautiful vivid green organic fog danced in the starlight. Was this some sort of pollination on this alien planet? I stared in wonder, knowing that likely I would never find out. I turned back to the dormant construction droids fallen in a nearby heap and what looked like broken tools of alien make and manufacture strewn across the workspace. I salvaged what resources I could, stowing away strips of electronics to repurpose and carefully mining the titanium from the deposits in the craggy glacier I had finally reached.
After hours of diligence, I was satisfied with my harvest and scanned my surroundings for a more lucrative site.
***
I spotted it through my telescopic sensors. I saw the mirage above it before I understood what I was gazing at. A mirror of the cosmic wheel above, the river was embedded in the ground and curving in a sinusoidal pattern beyond a plain of an ash grey spotted with a pungent orange color. That degree of reflective sheen on the surface could only mean one thing; I was looking at a river of pure quicksilver. The liquid mercury would be very useful to my repair project, so I nodded to steel myself and began the long hike to the desolate valley where the river lay.
I began to traverse the ash grey plain, careful and slow to pick my way around the bright orange spots here and there. The sound snuck up on me. There was a faint crackling behind me so I turned my head. My eyes grew wide and I fell onto my hands and knees, suddenly struggling with the ground crumbling beneath my feet and turning what was once a flat plain into a 70-degree incline in front of me. Every footprint in the grey ash plain behind me was emanating with long trails of choking grey dust. The bright orange spots began moving; crawling over the plain with little tendrils and merging into each other in their haste to converge on me.
This, this was some sort of cryptobiotic soil, it wasn’t a lifeless plain. And I had disturbed it. Swiftly I righted myself and ran up the incline in front of me and I didn’t stop pushing forwards even as my boots sunk themselves into the earth up to mid-shin. As I moved frantically forward, my sensorium was filled with image after image of cryptobacteria until a molecular model was pushed to the foreground. The cryptobacteria commonly interacted with chemical signals. If I could exude some chemical signals that mimicked the cryptobacteria signaling pathways it might, just might, consider me “friend” rather than “foe” and stop trying to engulph me in this fragile earth.
I engaged my multitool to the chemical emitter on my suit’s side and began modulating different input valves as mentally I guided the emitter through the complicated heating, cooling and chemical washes necessary to mass produce the cryptobacteria signaling molecule in question.
Then I heard a ping and the emitter began spraying yellow water, stinking of sulfur. Shit. I frantically tried to get the multitool to seal the venting emitter, which was exuding chemicals far too early in the reaction to produce a viable cryptobacterial signaling molecule.
I was slowly drowning in porous grey earthen matter. And that did not even count the bright orange clumps of bacteria saturated crusts that collectively jumped down into my deepening hole, serving to make my flailing forcing me to sink deeper still.
I had one chance; I needed to go back. I had no idea how much further this cryptobiotic soil extended, but I did know I had enough energy and suit integrity to return to my point of origin. Where I could gaze at the subtle shifting of the liquid mercury river, but not reach it.
I began my retreat.
***
It was very clear to me now, if it wasn’t apparent before, that I could take nothing for granted in this truly alien environment. Marching away from the cryptobiotic infested plain, I set my sensorium to complete a full analysis of a deep environmental scan. A couple hours later I had cogitated and correlated my next plan of action. To the south, the fissures extended into a network of subterranean cave structures, weaving and crossing their ways into the deep underground. Far-ranging chemical sensors suggested there were useful microorganisms hidden in these structures. Clearly, understanding of the local microflora and fauna was essential for survival on this planet. I checked my batteries and clicked on my suit’s headlamp. It was time to go caving.
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| Bioluminescence. Available here |
I entered the first underground aperture and squinted. Then I turned my suit’s lights off. The darkness was still illuminated. Not by the warm yellow of my headlamp and LEDs, but by a cool aquamarine luminescence that coruscated against the rock walls. The humidity external to the suit began to peak and I flicked on my lights with a thought. Pools of water, captured in pockets in the rock, lay before me, coated in floating algae of some sort, glittering with the bioluminescent aquamarine glow. I picked my way carefully among the pools, weaving over a delicate land bridge that creeped further in to the stygian depths, the bioluminescence guiding my way.
There were egg-like protrusions of rock on the ceiling of the cavern in irregular clusters, usually of about five or seven. As I continued down the now widening land bridge, the egg-like rocks became more clustered on the upper walls, adjacent to the ceiling. Wary and not willing to take a chance in this unusual environment, I set my sensors to scan one of these rock clusters in detail.
There was a response to the sensor ping. One rock egg crackled and unfurled like the petals of a flower, revealing a grey interior shot through with crimson-orange veins. I stared, mesmerized, as my suit began to register a steady stream of packets of data from the open rock egg…rock flower? Then there was another sound of crackling. One more egg unfurled. Then another and another.
Red warning symbols decorated my HUD as the packets of data became more numerous, then completely chaotic as my suit began being bombarded with the data explosions from these alien plants? Rocks? Reeling from the data impact, I made the drastic decision to cut all local communications except for a very long-range ping from my creche’s remaining scanners. Silence engulfed me. I navigated by the cheery yellow glow of my headlamps in the deepening dark cavern and that distant pulse of my creche by which I could approximate my position.
Running through my navigational memories I noticed several discrepancies between my current location and the tunnels I had been. At least I think I had been there. The tunnel crossovers were all wrong and I couldn’t draw a straight-line path from where I entered the caverns and where I was now. Were the paths shifting?
Unsettled by that thought, I relied on dead reckoning again and that very faint ping from my creche to navigate to a deeper cavern that was not covered with those data-spewing rock eggs or the bioluminescence of the algae-like life in the pools.
After hours of hiking in the barely illuminated stygian blackness, I had found my quarry. I risked rebooting my sensorium to active and fortunately, though there were a few glitches, the HUD and my electronic monitors were not the worse for wear. What appeared before me was a cloud of hazy white in the light of my headlamps. The long-range chemical sensors were dead on the money. I began taking copious samples and running every test I was equipped to run on the biological spores. The life in this area was data-sensitive? Or at least somewhat capable of interfacing with my electronics and nanotech? Strange. I collected extra milky-white samples and headed back towards my creche for more analysis and hopefully greater answers.
***
I stood around the ruins of my creche, watching patiently as the functioning (thankfully) genetic sequencer took the alien genome of the hazy white spores and rendered them into familiar and understandable data: the A, G, C, and T nucleotides of DNA. I took the white spore’s sequence and entered it into my GLADIATOR simulator, a software tool for simulating microorganisms and their interactions, and compared it to the sequence of that cryptobacteria that had colonized the soil and nearly eaten me alive. Extensive biochemical charts filled my sensorium, marked in black. Then I began to dig deeper, looking for conserved biochemical pathways between the two organisms. Looking for what common biochemistry the two alien species had for identifying food.
The swirling haze of data in my sensorium began to thin out and red marks of chemicals in common began to be displayed here and there. I consolidated these red colored chemicals, and set GLADIATOR to find the most likely chemical that received the “food” signal and develop a synthetic ligand that would bind to the “food” signal receptor and shut down the pathway. “I have you now,” I whispered under my breath. With luck, a little bit of this synthetic ligand spread about the cryptobiotic zone would prevent the cryptobacteria from seeing me as eatable and allow me to navigate the path to the quicksilver river unmolested. Think of it as crop-dusting an alien field to bend the biology to my will.
Long range telescopic sensors locked onto the serene waters of the quicksilver river. I stared at the ash grey plain with bright orange spots in my immediate focus. Hell yeah. Time to try this out. With a thought, my suit started releasing a faintly white-tinged cloud of gas. The synthetic ligand had been deployed. I took an exploratory step. The ground held solid. No boots sinking into the ash grey plain. So far, so good.
From there it was a welcome stroll down to the embankment of the liquid mercury river. A field of strange plants with elongated tear-drop shaped purple fruits hugged the shore. I scanned them, wary for a data burst that would scramble my sensors, but happily the readout just indicated a collection of heavy metals in the fruits. Useful. I collected as many of them as I could carry and gathered up multiple liters of the quicksilver in the river.
I sighed in relief and sat upon a nearby rock, just marveling in the silvery mirror sheen of the mercury waters. The orbiting pyramid was rising on the horizon, alien and enigmatic. I couldn’t help but smile as I looked up at the stars. I finally had enough base elements and materials to repair the haptic controls for my robotic interface. I’d be able to assemble the necessary mechanisms back at the crash site of my creche. But for now, I indulged in the absence of a goal, simply enjoying the vistas of this strange and uncanny planet.
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| from Entity |
Behind the Scenes: The rolls and decisions made in Entity
When I wrote up the above story, I took the salient details from the Entity game and tried to weave them in a narrative.
Part of an Entity round looks like this:
Identify Location, Roll:19
Result: Titanium Glacier - A unique glacier formation made from ultra-dense ice mixed with titanium deposits, gleaming metallically under the stars.
Travel, Roll: 2
Result: There is a Travel Challenge.
Travel Challenge, Roll:38
Result: You are caught in a sudden electromagnetic storm. It’s scrambling your suit’s systems and draining your power. Use Physics or Survival (used Survival)
Target Number 8 or less, Roll: Partial Success
Result: +1 Strain = 1 total strain
And so on.
Incidentally I rolled Location “Quicksilver River” and Encounter Challenge “You cross a patch of cryptobiotic soil that becomes hostile when disturbed” twice. So, I felt I had to make it front and center in the story plot.
The rock eggs, and looking for conserved biochemical pathways between the milky white spores and the “cryptobacteria”, and a few other things were my ideas.
