Collins Does Solo RPG ‘The Wretched’

I plan to play this solo RPG and document my journey here.

If you haven’t seen this solo RPG before and want to play it do the following.

• Go through every entry in this project blog and smash every button to show me how much you appreciate it but don’t read the content
• Go to loot the room and buy your own copy of the adventure and soundtrack
• Try to survive the adventure yourself! Don’t forget to document it in your own project
• Come back here and read my adventure!

Things I need!

1. The booklet (or pdf)
2. Deck of cards (no jokers)
3. a single D6
4. Jenga (or other similar – https://bit.ly/Jenga-Alt)
5. 10 tokens
6. A way to record it (this project, keep reading!)

The deck of cards here is a cracker. Picked it up at UKGE (anyone remember what an expo is?)

It’s a regular deck of cards… It’s a make your own dungeon. It’s also a D6, D20, D100 all in one.

You too can be as cool as me with my fancy deck of dice maps cards by visiting inked adventures and getting your own deck.

Day 1, salvage ship The Wretched. Flight Engineer Collins reporting.

The other members of the crew are dead and the engines remain non-operational, though ship integrity remains good and life support systems are still active. I successfully  jettisoned the intruder from the airlock, but it remains alive and continues to try to access the ship. With a little luck I can repair the distress beacon and somebody will pick me up.

This is Joshua Collins, the last survivor of the Wretched, signing off.

Opening Music (Empty Space – Chris Bissette)

Day 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Well that’s it… the realisation of what’s happened has hit me… what I’ve heard… what I’ve seen… and it scares me.

I barely slept last night, I refused to turn the lights in the berth off because every time I did all I could see were flashes of Powell, the electrical mechanic, being ripped under a section of the engine. The screams he made will haunt me, the wet ripping cracking and crunching likewise is persistent in my ears. I think I eventually drifted off when exhaustion finally took hold but that wasn’t an escape from the nightmare.

The creature stalks me in my dreams. I was running from the fore cargo bay to the upper decks and the safety of escape pods. Sirens were blazing, the visual alarms bathing the corridors in their pulsating red glow. On climbing the last ladder to the upper deck, just as I get to the top I feel something yank on my left leg. I lost my grip of the ladder and fall to the bottom. I land heavily on my head and right shoulder, my vison is blurry as I slowly regain a small sense of consciousness. I can see my laces are tangled on one of the rungs… who the hell makes ladders with gaps in them for stuff to get stuck in?

As the clarity floods back to me and the lancing pain across my shoulder makes itself violently known I start to work on freeing my foot. That’s when it goes dark above me, when I hear the sound of it breathing, I dare not look up but curiosity got the better of me. That’s when I saw it, I don’t know what it is just that it was black, shiny and not human. In one lightning move its down the ladder past my tangled foot and on me, screaming…

I didn’t want to sleep anyway. I woke in a bit of a cold sweat, a horrible nasty sticky feeling. I desperately need a shower before anything else. Just because I’m the only one here doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep some sense of humanity! I dragged myself off to the refreshers and that’s when I discovered the first problem for the day… The waste water system has sprung a leak and the whole block is flooded. Shouldn’t take longer than a few hours to fix… it’s unfortunate that the leak is before the primary maceration and filtration tank… just my luck, survive a horror story only to be left with the real shitty jobs.

So that’s the tasks for today, fix the craphouse and work on the beacon… Oh and keep my boot laces tied double knots…

Day 2, Entry 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

God what a stinky day. Turns out that the leak wasn’t that bad to fix. Simply needed to find the temporary shut off, open up the wall panelling, and fit a collar brace over the broken pipe. It’s not pretty or a permanent fix but if I’m honest I don’t care. I only need it to last long enough for someone to rescue me!

Rescue me, that’s right I said rescue me… today with the time I saved on the short refresher room repairs I was able to invest into something much more useful. The beacon, I actually got the beacon working!

Well I think I did, I recorded a message and I have it playing on a loop broadcasting what I think are my last coordinates. I could have completely cocked it up in so many ways. I could be playing the message to myself and not actually broadcasting it, I could have told them I was a few parsecs over, I could have conveniently forgotten to tell them about the murderous creature that caused this havoc!

Hey, don’t blame me for that last one, you would do it too…I sure as shit wouldn’t be rushing to help someone who had their whole crew killed to death by god knows what. But seriously, I am concerned about the first two, less so the first one, I’m reasonably certain I did fix it and got it working but that second one, that’ll be the real kicker. I’m no navigator, that star chart stuff was Owen’s job and he is laying dead in an air vent somewhere, I think. I am also aware that just because the engines lost power doesn’t mean the ship immediately stops moving… there’s inertia and stuff happening. That means forward motion continues and it’s not like there is any resistance in space to gradually slow the ship down either. So yeah, i’m actually super worried that the rescue party will go looking in the wrong place. Hopefully they can think of a decent way to triangulate the beacon signal but that would need multiple rescuers and given how my day has gone so far I don’t think I can stretch my luck that far sadly.

Anyway, I’m tired and hungry. It’s time for dinner, unfortunately the specials are all off in the restaurant so I’ll have to go simple and a la carte… prepackaged carbonara perhaps, delightful…

Music (Between the Stars – Chris Bassett)

Day 3, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Another restless night… I wasn’t plagued by nightmares but I couldn’t get to sleep. I could hear the creature on the hull. It’s still doing its best to get into the ship, looking for weaknesses. The only one I know of is the airlock I blasted it out a few days ago. Whatever it did on the way out damaged the outer door and I can’t get it to shut properly. The inner door is fine and now thanks to the computer failsafes permanently locked shut. That hasn’t stopped the bastard thing hammering and scratching at it trying to break the seal. It gives up after a while and goes crawling over the hull to another spot. It’s odd, the creature seems to know when I move around the inside of the ship and tries to follow me, it’s becoming super unnerving.

I need to come up with a plan for if the worst should happen… well the worst has already happened but worse than worse. There are several things I’ll need in abundance to survive long term. Food, water, air, medical stuff, security, safe disposal of waste, heat, comfort, entertainment.

Food and water are relatively easy, the mess facility has food in abundance and it can be eaten cold or hot. I can move it around the ship into little stockpiles should that area not be accessible. Water is piped throughout the ship so I don’t need to move that around, so long as the recyclers work I have an unlimited supply.

Air, so long as the integrity of the hull holds out and the atmospheric regulators play ball I have an unlimited supply of that too. If there is a breach the bulkheads seal off the affected compartments and keep the rest of the ship safe. If I happen to be in the compartment that breaches I’m just fucking dead ok, there’s nothing I do about that. Well I could wear an EVA suit all the time but they’re awkward, bulky, have limited life in the CO2 filters and just fucking no ok… I’m not doing it.

Medical supplies are all in the med bay with the exception of IFAKs and area specific first aid kits, you know, burns kit in the kitchen, general ones at random corridors, tourniquets and haemostatic gauzes in the engine room. Maybe I could move the med kits and bulk them up when I figure out where the best chances of survival are.

Security. Well normally that means keeping doors locked right? Well, can do! Quite easily too. I know the creature can’t use the door release mechanisms or it would have found a way in by now and besides when it was in the ship it mostly skulked around and used non-human paths of travel, air vents, maintenance access points, floor and ceiling voids etc. so really I’m talking about personal security of the reach out and touch you variety. I don’t know if you’re well versed on how much weaponry is carried on a mere salvage ship. It’s not a military vessel and so there aren’t any formal repositories of weapon systems like armouries or guard stations etc. I’m pretty sure Captain Coates kept a pistol in the top drawer of his desk along with a fine bottle of scotch. I’m hoping he didn’t have a chance to move it before he was killed as I never saw him with it. Mind you, if I was him I would have had it on me when that monster was picking us off so the chances are that it is beyond my reach now. Still, I had better check his drawers… He wouldn’t want the scotch going to waste.

The final items, heat, comfort, entertainment and waste disposal will all fall in line once the others are determined.

So which rooms suit these needs? Medbay, bridge, my quarters, the computer mainframe, the captain’s quarters, maybe a few other places. I think the bridge is the best bet. The captain’s ready room is right next to it and it has a bed, refresher and basic cooking facilities there. Most of the other stuff can be moved to the bridge and the bridge is where all the systems of the ship can be monitored from, be they working or otherwise. I’m pretty sure I can also seal off the bridge too in an emergency.

Cool, so that’s the plan then. Start moving stuff around the ship that’ll be useful, starting with making the bridge area the best it can be. I wonder whether I should rotate randomly around my hidey holes when they’re all up and running or whether it’s best to stay in once place. I think I’ll stay in one place for the mean time. It is easier and I can spot when things go wrong a lot faster.

I’ll start tomorrow, I can’t be arsed right now and I’m still super tired. I’ll have dinner and hit the hay. Chorizo pasta tonight, I know… pasta two nights in a row, I just can’t be bothered to make a full-blown 3 course roast dinner for one you know… I will however eat that whole bar of chocolate for dessert… because nobody can stop me.

Music (Drifting – Chris Bassett)

Day 4, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

This morning I was checking on the med kits around the ship when got distracted in the engine room with trying to figure out how to make the spinny make motion happen machine work properly. After all I’m the flight engineer, it’s my job to monitor these things and problem solve their issues. Fixing it can’t be that hard, I’m a technically minded chap. Well, the problem is I used this equipment as a user, I’m not the mechanic or a dedicated technician. I’m reminded of ancient aviation cockpit crews and how they operated back on Earth. Generally, they watched dials, used joysticks and simply held it together until they got the aeroplane back to a port whereby they would complete a detailed report for the grounded mechanics which could boil down to ‘flappy bit not flapping’ then simply wander off to the nearest bar to pick up some locals or other air crew to get battered with and bang senseless till the aeroplane was fixed. God those sound like they were the days. Now the most interesting thing a port has is different colour on the walls, same food, same boring people and usually no booze.

Anyway, I was in the engine room messing around for 4 hours before I realised I had put my hand in a damp patch that was probably some of the left overs of Powell. I vomited, started shaking as the memory flooded back to me, smelt the air and recoiled at the now pungent aroma that had smacked my nostrils for 6, then vomited again. Baffled by the problem and not wanting to stay in there any longer I left in a hurry… I forgot to pick up the list I made about the med kit in there like the idiotic child I am.

On my way up the corridor I could see signs of the creature that had stalked poor Powell in there. Scratch marks and gouges in the walls and floor. It’s seems to leave a trail like a lizard would in sand. Clearly it has feet with claws, I can see those scrape marks. But there is also a drag mark in between, I assume that’s some form of tail. Remember I did see it as it went out the airlock but it was over so quickly that I don’t have the details and when I dream about it the creature changes ever so slightly. It’s still shit your pant scary each time but it does shift. I don’t like to think about it, especially as I know it’s still close albeit on the outside of the ship. Half of me hopes that when I get the engines fired up I find out its been sleeping in the vent and it gets incinerated simply by me starting up the engines… that’ll teach the fucker a lesson.

I found the remains of my dearly departed Captain today. He had his pistol on him. I checked the magazine in it. It doesn’t appear that he was able to get many shots off as it’s mostly full. It’s a fancy one too, I noticed there is a little indicator on the rear and when I point it in different directions it changes colour from green to red. I’m not sure why yet but I don’t think its linked to the magazine or the number of shots left. When I point it at down the corridor to the other end of the ship where the mess hall is it’s green but when I point it at the hull bulkhead its red. I shall have to ponder this. I took the holster for it too and gave it a clean up before wearing it, it was a bit too, soiled for me to be happy wearing it. Still it means I’ve now got my security problem solved. That makes me feel a bit safer.

I’m going to start moving items to the bridge this afternoon, I still think the best place for me to monitor everything is there. First up, food. Whilst I’m at the mess hall I might as well eat something, after all I did empty my stomach like an anorexic schoolgirl before the summer ball.

Music (Malfunction – Chris Bassett)

Day 4, Entry 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

AH COCK! I ballsed up, I ballsed up big time… I was moving things into the bridge area and I noticed that one of the lighting panels was malfunctioning. Once the move in was half done and I decided to have a change of task I went up into the roof crawlspace to try and fix it. Lighting after all isn’t that hard. The worst thing that can happen is I kill myself by doing something stupid like licking the power lines. I can’t risk powering down the ship to solve the issue or even the circuits that the lights are one… remember I’m shit scared of the dark these days due to the creature that stalks me, god I hate him. But more importantly I’m now worried I’ll never get it back up if I do turn off the circuit, especially after by wasted efforts this morning on the engines.

Anyway, when I got up there I did some jiggery pokery with the wiring. I managed to get the lighting panel working again! Happy days! What I didn’t realise is that somehow, I know not how, I have managed to lock myself on the bridge… I mean I don’t mind it when I can control it but this is not good. The door access panel says its unlocked, but when I try to open it the door activates, struggles and then gives up. At least it recognises there is an issue and doesn’t try to force itself open or shut but I’m now stuck on the bridge with a lying piece of shit door between me and most of the supplies I had gathered…

After throwing a hissy fit and slamming my fists on the work tops I went to sit in the Captain’s comfy chair. That’s when I remembered the bottle of Scotch in the top drawer. Well at least I won’t have to worry about my throbbing hand for the rest of the night… Here’s you Captain, thanks for the drink… sorry you and the rest of the crew are dead.

Day 5, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Oh god my head hurts. I’ve also decided that I can’t stand scotch… it was like drinking fiery bog water. It did the trick though, I got a good night’s sleep and didn’t have any funky, or rather, terrifying dreams. Silver linings I suppose.

Overnight the locked bridge door miraculously reset itself. Brilliant, problem solved! Or at least it would be if you ignore the need for locks to stay locked until you don’t want them locked. But right now it means I can get out and go and get some more stuff and continue to work on the engines. First I need a decent bit of breakfast however so I’m going to hit the mess facility for some bacon and eggs, or the salvage ship’s equivalent.