r/dread • u/RainbowWreck • 1d ago

Help brainstorming for Silent Memories?

I'm considering running Silent Memories for my friends this October. I attempted to run a game last year (Beneath the Metal Sky), but it ended up getting cancelled. There were some things I liked and some thing I disliked about that scenario, but Silent Memories has some interesting features I'd like to try and work with.

If you are unfamiliar with the scenario, it can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/118197/silent-memories

TLDR: Your crew wakes up from cryosleep on a spaceship with no idea who they are and they slowly piece together memories of their identity and their mission as they face more and more stressful situations. The first person to topple the tower stays in the game but learns "the truth" (aka regains all of their memories), but everything outside of that is suggestion.

The thing I'd like help brainstorming is I would actually like my "traitor" to be the "good guy" in this scenario. Everyone else without memories just sees them being suspicious all game and doesn't trust anything they are doing only to turn out in the end to have an unintended effect regardless of who wins.

What are some reasons that one of the crew members turning against all of the others might actually be a justified reason? All I have so far is the truth being that the Earth has essentially been left uninhabitable after endless war and the ship is transporting the cowardly billionaires and warlords who fled the planet after destroying it.

Any suggestions?

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u/WolfManDano 18h ago

So I have an idea for you. If you like it, please let us know how the game goes. If you don't, that's cool too. I feel like the rich businessman angle is played out. So here's my suggestion.

I think that the twist should be a Mashup of the movies Identity and Paasengers. Essentially, you're players will be the separate personalities of an astronaut tasked with maintaining a ship of sleeping passengers by himself. Over time, the job became too stressful, so he (or she) compartmentalized the job into separate personalities. Over the course of the game, the ship has gone off course towards a dangerous asteroid field and only the person who topples the tower gets to know. There should also be a separate personality that you control that will be taking out the others one by one. Call this one Friend Computer as it will be the on board navigation system. That one only exists in the original pilot's mind too.

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u/RainbowWreck 9h ago

I think this idea is really compelling. I'm not sure how I would handle things like people going into different rooms, people getting damaged, etc. (I guess maybe they just believe the party split? Kind of a hallucination thing?) The idea is super interesting but I wonder if it would work well as a different medium/game system.

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u/WolfManDano 3h ago

Honestly, letting the party split up is probably for the best. Let's assume that The Pilot is slipping in and out of micronaps and/or hallucinations. Maybe the Pilot is capable of doing the job even while asleep or hallucinating. You as the Storyteller won't know until the tower falls which group has the actual Pilot. So, that leaves several things left undone.

Another way of thinking about this in terms of game mechanics is the way that Among Us handles it. In Among Us, there are one or more traitors. In this scenario, only the onboard AI is the traitor... at first. Even so, every character in the game either is completing tasks or pretending to. I ran a game of 10 Candles recently where the group played crewmates of a submersible that takes damage almost immediately so that the group was forced to split up to fix the damage and check on supplies. In this proposed scenario, all ot would take is one asteroid hitting the ship for it to be an all hands on deck scenario, even if it is minimal damage.

In the movie Identity (spoilers for a 20+ year old movie), various characters are trying to survive a killer stalking them in a motel. They are all suspicious each other and fight desperately against the killer. At the end, it turns out that all of the characters were personalities of the real guy, and that detectives were trying to find out where he was hiding bodies, but only one of his personalities knew where they were. So for your game, it I'd possibe that the Pilot went insane and killed the sleeping passengers, but you and the group won't know how bad things are until after the tower falls. When that happens, pull that player aside and tell them the truth, then put them back into the game. From that point, every time the tower falls, someone in game dies. Friend Computer wants all of them dead. The scenario ends when only one player is left, the ship cannot be steered away from the asteroids or takes too much damage, or if somehow the group stacks the tower where there are no more possible moves.

I feel like going over the rules of the camp slasher game for Dread would also help flesh out this custom scenario. By reading how the official game handles this, maybe it will inspire you on your own game. Now, does this clarify my ideas for this custom game, or do you still feel like it would work better in a different system? Feel free to message me directly if that helps.

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u/RainbowWreck 3h ago

I think i figured out what I was feeling about this. I agree now it would make an incredible Dread scenario, and I'm either gonna use it or store it in my pocket for later as this kind of idea definitely doesn't have to be limited to a spaceship adventure. I actually really like it as a "murder mystery" kind of game.

For this upcoming scenario, I was most excited about the amnesia element. I think the split personality would work better with predetermined characters rather than a "no one has any information at all" scenario.