Your next horror game

GURPS
When I say horror in an office building, I mean kafkaesque horror.
Session in, session out, players reenact inane office tasks and character interaction is restricted to banal "small talk" or meaningless business gobbledygook.

Let us see how long it takes until a player (character) goes postal or just kills themselves for the futility of it all.

HEXUS
The living corporation

marvunapp.com/Appendix4/hexusmb.htm

'Nuff said

...

I'd use some hilarity for contrast, but too much just kills any tension.

>Both promise individual power in a system detrimental to all at the price of personal morality.
Can confirm.

>Oh, the product isn't ready for the demo. So we just made a fake interface that gives preset responses. But we'll say it's a working version.
>Whatever the client asks, just say that it can do it. We'll just add in that functionality before release.
>The product is never going to be released, nobody listens to your opinions, but you just work on it day in and day out because that's what you're paid to do.
>Your superiors are all friends with the owners and will never get re-evaluated. So there is no one to complain to. You will just get fired if you take your issues to the higher-ups.
>Dying inside spending your life on a worthless boondoggle that will never help anyone.

This would be awesome for Shadowrun.

My group wants to have a character "Crazy Steve" in their setting who is a badass that shows up in a costume screaming random bullshit and seems to be impossible to kill BUT SEEMS TO KILL YOU JUST FINE OH GOD RUN

Characters get in a semi-intelligent elevator that takes them to Building X.

Building X is like The Abyss from D&D - an infinite stack of infinite floors. Some floors are absolutely horrifying, some floors are normal office floors. The only place you can't go is the Lobby, unless you have an Executive Keycard. And Executives are legendary.

I like this idea for a campaign. You can have just about anything happen to the players as they go through each door and a cool "nexus" for them to return to.

...sure?

?

Having all the doors just pop open seems to be a huge waste of "infinite stack of infinite floors." That that really awesome detail becomes window dressing which is fine I suppose but I've gotten fired up for games where the GM hyped up something that wound up being some lame tank-and-spank.

So something like this: the players are corporate spies or deep cover cops or something.

So the first thing they notice is that everyone is super friendly and enthusiastic about their work, but nobody actually does any work. One guy just walks in wide circles around the office all day. The janitor just cleans the same spot to infinity (yet the place is always clean in the morning). The computer workers just sit at their desk staring at notepad, hitting the same key over and over again, then emailing it to the boss at the end of the day. Now you can chalk that up at first to simple laziness, people pretending to work. But when they realize everyone is like that, it should set off alarm bells. At the end of the day, the workers go home. But they don't have homes. They just go to the subway, and ride it back and forth and back and forth until morning, then go back into work.

The executives, at the end of the day, go to the executive elevator. (Totally ripping off here). The executive elevator at first looks like a super fancy elevator, with a preprogrammed female voice that says things like "Hello, Mr. Steven, which floor would you like to go to?" or whatever. It doesn't have a keypad, so you just have to tell it where to go.

Now the normal elevators don't have floor 13. This is pretty standard in most elevators due to tradition. But if you tell the executive elevator to take you there, it takes you to the "lobby". The players can leave, and walk around, but now, the world is different. It's not just the office workers, but EVERYONE, their espionage employers, their family, friends. Everyone is super cheery and excited to hear about how they are doing at work, and telling them how important the project is.

Now whenever they go to any elevator, no matter what floor they are on, it tells them they are on floor 13. Everyone pressures them to go to work and work on the project. But when they go back into the office... a skeleton pops out!

I'm loving this idea. Sets things up for non-combat for a long time with plenty of room for an awesome shootout at the end.

I'd railroad them. No, really. I'd play the Stanley Parable with their characters.

This could work out really well because Stanley Parable actually has a SHITTON of agency inside of it.

youtube.com/watch?v=rXzCddEBZl0

Aren't those pretty much the same thing?

Every meeting goes like this:
>youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

>Its 8:30.Friday.1st of May. You have 9 hours of work before you
>You woke up at 7:00,you are tired even before you entered your work
>You have seen few people as tired as you in work.Nobody wants a small talk,deadline is coming closer
>Its 13:30. Half of an hour of break for you. Or less if you want to do your job in time and get paid
>The people you have seen are as tired as you
It's 17:25. You are almost finished. You pack yourself. You feel like you are missing something very important,crucial for your company
>But your day is almost over. You exit the office,and head to the main doors of the building
>You see the main doors thinking of what are you going to do when you get home. It's Friday evening after all
>You suddenly feel bad,like you are going to fall down. You exit the building.
>
>
>
>
>
>Its 8:30.Friday.1st of May.

Basically,a corporate roadhog day with no clear goal. Your enemy is boredom.
Few other people are also stuck in this strange time loop. This is the rest of the party
Be overly descriptive. Tell the players things so unimportant and precise they are not going to remember them.
And do this again next cycle,but with couple changes.
Once in a while do a major event. Perhaps a coworker hung himself? Was he also stuck in a time loop?
More cycles go by,more weird things are happening. People stop looking like people. Somebody starts to write on the walls in language you don't understand. People start hurting themselves.
PC will propably start investigating. Start reading e-mails of other. They may start to use force. It's not like it's going to matter. Next day they are all in here

I think I actually DID something like that once.
Damn if I can remember what the game was or the situational context was though.

Sounds like a nice old game of Don't Rest Your Head or Unknown Armies! Woooooo! Especially DRYH. Literally fucking perfect.

What the fuck do people actually DO in offices? The fact that I've only ever heard vague things about "projects" for "clients" and "report deadlines" and "data entry" makes me believe nothing actually happens in an office at all.

This is some genius right here. The only problem is the absurd amount of preparation needed.

Did you see the series Angel? Where the Senior Management are actually demons from another world? Getting terminated means, well, getting terminated... Add in elements of Resident Evil (the movie), and so many others and you have a fantastic setting. Is there a demon in the office intranet checking your email? Did you email really getting eaten?

you don't really need much preparation.
A sketch of why this works how it works
Names of coworkers and how long they have been in the cycle
Some e-mails
Some normal human drama within company
And of course a project they are working on.

You propably have to make yourself a map of the building,and visualise some of the most common rooms there.

the meat of the prep would go into figuring out all the unimportant details and how they would change across loops

once you think about them once,you can improvise later
For example you want to show the time is in fact,going forward.
First you describe some typical potted plant. It's green and really pleasant to look at.
Later you can describe the plant as looking yellowish and dry
Couple days go by,and you tell the players there is a potted plant,but it's dead
Later you can just ignore the fact,don't describe the plant at all,since it's not there

That's pretty much what Pentex from Werewolf is.

It really works when you take out the more ludicrous evil stuff and leave the slow boil creeping horror of a global corporation slowly desecrating the world from multiple angles.

>Office horror setting

No mention of the Laundry Files? Shame on you, Veeky Forums. Chaosium/CoC would be perfect system for this kind of thing.
>Players work for a banal government agency that just so happens to hunt elder horrors
>The job is extreme drudgery interspersed with rare missions into mind shattering areas and against enemies too disturbing to comprehend

If you want to keep all the action in the office, though, that works too.
>The players must retrieve a permit for some arcane purpose. Unfortunately it is buried in the Stacks, the labyrinth of paperwork under their job
>The players' new boss is an Elder Thing. Is this a mistake? Is the creature plotting to end mankind? The players must find out, delving into the hideous realm of HR.

Shit writes itself pretty much

I really like this Groundhog Day loop idea, and think that it might be perfect for an existential-sort-of-horror game. The same stressful, crappy day keeps repeating over and over and over again, slowly fraying their nerves and wearing away at their sanity and morality. After all, why care about the consequences of your actions if everything is just going to reset itself anyway?

Let the PCs have fun with it a while. Make it fun for them a while. Let them steal, assault and destroy. Show them the hidden sides of the office that they'd never get to see if the stuck to their routines, did their jobs and played by the rules.

But then, have that existential-sort-of-horror set in, and have the things they start to notice about the office grow more and more surreal and disturbing with each loop. Make hem desperate to have it all end, somehow, someway.

>The layout of the office building starts changing with each loop the PCs to through, starting out with subtle tweaks and alterations that grow more and more chaotic as the game goes on.

>Suggest that there might be more people in the office that are aware of the loop, but have them suffer some sort if mysterious accident that silences, removes or outright kills them in every loop after the PCs realize this.

>Play with when and where the loop begins and ends, perhaps shortening the duration of the loop by a little day time as the end of the game draws near to create urgency and dread.

That's really devilish. It's like running someone through a gas lighting scenario.

>that snake

nightmare fuel

...

Laundry is shit. I've never read worse Weird Fiction.

The unicorn one is, in particular, terrible.

I had this idea that I want to use someday where you're an inspector, maybe undercover, tasked to find out what's going on in this company. Their staff turnover rate is astoundingly bizarre - some people are there for only half a day before leaving, others have been with the company for decades. The CEO, though he's never been seen, has had the company under his name for 70 years and counting. Money seems to come from nowhere, and any searches through the papertrails never ends, yet no one you come across seems to have existed before you searched for them. The houses the company builds are on file as being all over the globe, including places they shouldn't have access to, mountains, places no one has heard of before but can't deny, and most bizarrely even at sea - yet none of these can be found by going to the locations.

When you enter, you're greeted by a tired young lady at the reception with a weak, sad, but friendly smile who seems vaguely familiar. All the staff members seem to stare at you like you're in blackface and no one will say why. You get to work, and the clatter of a normal office business day drones on in the background.

Soon, things start getting weird. You get off on the wrong floor one day, yet you still find your desk right by the elevator. You find rooms that shouldn't fit where they are, endless hallways, Windows on the inside walls that show a lush countryside even while you're in the city. Eventually physics starts to really fuck up. Every floor has a glass ceiling. The mirrors stop working. You Start overhearing the managers talking about you behind your back.

Anyhoo, you eventually work your way up through the building to speak to the CEO. Turns out he's the God of the underworld or Satan or the grim reaper or whatever you prefer. The whole business is very legitimate and above board - they're relocating those who died by moving them through the company - it just doesn't translate very well into the land of the living

I'm curious too, I don't know shit outside of what you see in TV shows.

I already have days like this, no reason to get too real now.

I actually didn't know cubical farms really existed. Like, what could you possibly need that many management type people packed together in one room for? Maybe a telemarketing service, but even those are provided from the employee's home nowadays.

Every day, when the PCs arrive at work, they're given a handwritten list of things to do placed on their desk. There's no signature on it, but it's always been like that since they've started, so they don't really question it, just do what's there. Additionally, they are also given tasks by their supervisor and sometimes by their supervisor's manager. Often, these directives run counter to already given ones, putting the players in a sort of tug-of-war between the three leaders.

As the game goes on, the orders become more outlandish, with the handwritten notes describing incredibly minor actions such as move one's computer monitor to the other side of the desk or switch office chairs with Pat from Accounting (All of which have wild butterfly effects that advance a unknown agenda), and the supervisor and manager start to instigate workplace violence by asking the PCs to harass other employees over trivial matters, eventually working all the way up to murder, in the hopes of eliminating rivals to their careers. At a certain point, actual company work ceases and each day instead becomes a gigantic power struggle between various factions with the veneer of a productive day (Reports get hastily done and are mostly made up bullshit, but work well enough to fool whoever needs them for a little while and let you flag the task "complete," memos and emails still go out but with very spare details and only cryptic instructions.). Somehow, none of this actually seems to cause problems with the company's actual purpose -- work is still completed even though no one actually does anything productive.

During all this, the PCs have to navigate throughout the office each day avoiding other employees attempting to sabotage or outright kill them a la The Ship. The 5:00 PM quitting time becomes the only thing each employee lives for since it frees them, however briefly, from their torment before they must return again the next morning. Employees who quit, are fired, or are otherwise unavailable to work any longer are quickly replaced with fresh faces who are quickly caught between office politics and forced to choose a side.

The only way out is to either work their way up the corporate ladder and arrive at an upper management position (Upper management are usually promoted for life and are near untouchable by anyone else and only work about an hour or so each week when they analyze the productivity of lower workers and assign tasks to them based on that information.) or question why they continue to come to work each day and take steps to quit, at which point they must survive another two weeks before receiving their papers to leave.

And then the pirates came!

youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA

>hostileTakeoverInShadowrun.matrix

bump

>My opinion is objective fact
>Capitalizing weird fiction

go home Veeky Forums you're drunk

Basically do this but deadly serious:
youtube.com/watch?v=_nTpsv9PNqo

God no. FEAR was stylized and actiony, Delta Green reserves the action for when everything is about to get fucked up for everybody

Well, about 10% of revenue is devoted to creating a valuable product or service, 60% are devoted to managing the first 10% and bringing it to market, and the last 30% goes right into the pockets of people who won the birth lottery and will never work a day in their lives or even remotely understand why "little people" would spend all day in an office instead of out having fun.

Percentages vary, but that's the rough idea.

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I take players go through blatant expy of my average workday.

>Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here:
>You are a set of delivery employees from different companies who were sent to the building to deliver things like pizza and paperclips to Room 136 in a nondescript building.
>However, not only can none of you find Room 136, but you can't find the way back out, impossibly.
>There are no windows leading out, and if you open a door or break down a wall, it just leads to more office space.
>Things get more and more arcane and unusual the further you go in, but everyone continues acting as if everything were completely normal and part of everyday buisiness, up to and including goat sacrifice.
>People don't seem to know how to tell you how to to leave ("Just go out the exit, duh"), but they can direct you to Room 136. You hope you're going the right way.

Yeah...

Horror messages are left on Employee e-mails between cubicles.

Mail room is actually still full of normal employees unaware of the dangers above, or the fact that the company no longer exists, making it a safe house to get cigarettes and cheap booze for healing.

Give him

suction cups

...

Dread

Die Hard with cultists.

I think the Laundry series gets worse as it goes on

> what the fuck do people actually DO in offices?

that's like asking what do factories make? It depends on the company. An office is just a space for companies to do their work in, which is typically providing a service, as opposed to a factory / workshop which makes products.