Mush: A space journey

The Mush are people infected with a parasitic fungus that uses its hosts to achieve its goals which is spreading over to new hosts and, eventually, taking over entire galaxies.
You, alongside other brave heroes escape the Xyloph 17 base orbiting around Venus on the spacecraft known as The Daedalus and your mission is to save The Sol system of the Mush menace or to find Eden, an infection-free planet and start over, leaving your old home behind. However, two agents of Mush (selected randomly from the crew) managed to infiltrate the escape. One person among the crew is immune to the mush infection so they can be trusted.

The way this RP would be played out is similar to the actual browser game but with a lot more freedoms. First off, the characters won't be pre-determined. You will be able to choose your own skills (up to 4) and your own history. The Mushes also get up to 4 skills to choose from. Choose wisely as that could determine whether you win or lose.

The human winning conditions:
-eliminate all the traitors (mushes)
- research the retro-fungal serum
- return to the Sol system with the formula
- Find Eden (Bonus points for having the serum and pregnancies and for arriving on Eden disease-free)

The Mush winning conditions:
- Infect the entire ship (minus the immune one)
- Cause the ship to be destroyed, via rampage, infecting everyone and killing the last non-infected (causing the ship's AI to purge the ship via blowing it up
-Succesfully acquire the Hacker Kit and bring the ship back to the Sol system (the PILGRED reactor needs to be repaired)
- Succesfully infiltrate Eden (not everyone in your team will make it, however as at least the two or 3 alphas have to die first for the humans to believe their ship is Mush-free). This is the ultimate Mush win.

Of course, this would rely a lot on avoiding metagaming entirely. Everyone will need to work towards keeping the ship afloat. There will be hunters attacking, there will be planet expeditions for food, oxygen and fuel, there will be things to research, projects to build, morale to keep in check. Furthermore, certain rooms on the ship will have surveillance making it hard for the Mushes to infect some people. One person with the Tracker skill will have the chance to print a special document known as THE List which will reveal the name of at least one of the alphas. THE List won't work if the ship is mush-free. The immune person can't be the Tracker. There's a lot more things to talk about but I'll go more in-depth if anyone shows any interest in this.

How will the players actually participate? How workable this is will be determined by your mechanics.

Well, after each player joins, I would put everyone's names in a random generator (except for the immune person) in order to determine the two starting Mushes (or 3 starting Mushes depending on the number of players). Then the journey begins and the human crew would have to begin working on research whilst the mush team would have to try and convert people, sabotage expeditions and so on. Of course, since the RP is out there for everyone, all players will know who's human and who's not but their characters won't. Any sign of meta gaming won't be tolerated. The Mush hunters will need to gather evidence that one or another is Mush. They are also free to accuse anyone but they can't just kill anyone who's a bit suspicious.

On top of that, some tasks (such as piloting and planet scanning) will require more energy than usual thus people will be getting tired faster. There's also a limited number of beds. People sleeping in beds regain their strength twice as fast as those who don't get a good night's sleep.

The Mushes need spores in order to contaminate people. The entire team can extract a total of 4 spores per day (reduced to two once the Antispore Gas research is completed) at the cost of some of their energy (extracting becomes even more tiring after another piece of research is completed). Mush skills like "Fertile" allow for one extraction per day at no penalty to their daily levels of energy and the skill "Mycelium Spirit" allows for one more spore per day per person who has that skill. Furthermore, Mushes can only store up to 2 spores on their bodies. Any more than that would raise suspicion. Infecting others, trapping rooms, infecting food rations all cost 1 spore per chosen action and any human infected 3 times will join the cause and be taken over by the Mush. Some humans will also start the game with one spore in their system. That will also be determined via a random generator and the humans in question won't know, but the mushes will because they're capable of "sensing" other spores.

The RP will need joint posts now and again and some cooperation in order for goals to be achieved.

In order to keep things balanced, the humans will only be able to finish one research project per day. Those working on the particular research, will be tired by the end of it. Medics & Biologists have better efficiency, allowing them not to get as tired when researching. The same applies to the various projects and improvements that can be done around the ship.

The GM will be posting scanning results for astrophysicists when it comes down to planet scanning. Or I could just offer the astros the particular zones that one could find on a planet and let them do the random generating. Same goes for direction and fuel cost.

There's quite a bit to tackle but, in short, this RP would need a dedicated GM in constant contact with the players.

Hope that answers your question some >~>

Most of that sounds good, but if the players themselves know who is infected and who isn't there's going to be no way to stop people subconsciously metagaming.

gimmepie said:

Most of that sounds good, but if the players themselves know who is infected and who isn't there's going to be no way to stop people subconsciously metagaming.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm still trying to think of ways to deal with this.