>Mars-Corp. wishes to congratulate you on your promotion to Station Supervisor, and welcome you to Way Station #3, your new home here on the Red Planet!
>Here at Way Station #3, it will be your and your fellow Supervisors' responsibility to work with the other five Way Stations along the Trans-Martian Highway to ensure that the exchange of data, resources and personnel between Mars-Corp. Colonies remains quick, efficient and safe!
>Although you may have already heard some of the rumors and so-called "urban legends" that unscrupulous employees tell about the Trans-Martian Highway before your arrival, we here at Mars-Corp. are certain you will not allow any pre-conceived notions or superstitions to impede your work!
>As you get to know the particulars and peculiarities of your new assignment and co-workers at Way Station #3, know that Mars-Corp. thanks you for your service!
In your next game, your PCs are Mars-Corp. employees or civilians who live and work at the "problematic" Way Station #3 along the dusty old Trans-Martian Highway.
Built in Mars-Corp,'s early days on the Red Planet, the Highway and Way Stations are rundown and antiquated but are still seen as a necessary lifeline between Colonies.
The Way Stations are relatively small outposts of about half-a-dozen levels both above and below ground, with vehicle bays, highway maintenance facilities, a food court, a clinic, a communications and weather center and lodging for employees and visitors.
The Highway and Way Stations have become the subjects of a great many Martian myths, but no one station has had as many of these urban legends attributed to it as Station #3.
Adrian Morales
bump for interest.
Carson Robinson
>Mars Shift
Sign me up
Evan Perez
>Long ago, one particularly bright bulb in the Maintenance Department rigged the Station's highway-repair bots to work completely autonomously. No one has seen them since.
>There are some that claim that there is a former Mafioso living at Way Station #3, laying low in a kind of Mars-Corp. sponsored witness protection program after becoming a snitch.
>The layout of the Station sometimes shifts in subtly ways like a corridor lengthening or a series of doors rearranging that people blame on their own poor memories and distraction.
>The residents of Way Station #3 are big believers in the "Old Martians," the Red Planet's "original" inhabitants that hold a bigfoot-like fascination by Mars' Human population.
>The Comms Center regularly picks up radio calls from travelers out on the Highway to report things like dust storms and transport accidents that vanish when investigated.
>Other travelers that stop at the Station tell stories of a phantom hitchhiker, a dark-haired woman, totally nude, walking down the side of the Highway and peering in through windows.
Christopher Watson
>>The residents of Way Station #3 are big believers in the "Old Martians," the Red Planet's "original" inhabitants that hold a bigfoot-like fascination by Mars' Human population. >>The Comms Center regularly picks up radio calls from travelers out on the Highway to report things like dust storms and transport accidents that vanish when investigated. I like these two, they fit the best.
Andrew Adams
The idea seems to be 1/3 sci-fi setting, 1/3 trucker culture, and 1/3 paranormal happenings.
Gavin Rivera
>>>The Comms Center regularly picks up radio calls from travelers out on the Highway to report things like dust storms and transport accidents that vanish when investigated.
>I like these two, they fit the best.
>Sightings of "Old Martian" and their ruins scattered al across the rusty red plains.
>Terrible dust storms that boil up and kill folks but are never seen on the weather radar.
>Crashed vehicles and wrecks that can never be found again once they drop out of sight.
>Phantom hitchhikers, like the Staring Woman, who appear and disappear without a trace.
Henry Green
Anyone have the Night Shift pdf? It seems like it would work well with this.
Lucas Allen
...
Jordan Ross
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Ayden Howard
...
Julian Mitchell
no encounters list though.
Justin Wood
>Having been operational for upwards of forty years, Way Station #3 has had a number of "very special features" installed that are most definitely NOT Mars-Corp. approved.
>While there are only a handful of children living at the Station, they tend to be the ones most in-the-know about the Trans-Martian Highway's tall tales and urban legends.
>Visible some distance away from the Station is the hulking, supposedly haunted wreck of the Pintonova, a company ship that crashed spectacularly in the early days of colonization.
>The most popular radio station along this particular stretch of the Trans-Martian Highway, "MAR-Z 8837," is not registered with Mars-Corp and has no discernible point of origin.
>They say that the Station's local smuggler can get you just about anything you need, but that he prefers to deal in the exchange of strange favors rather than payment in credits.
>It is claimed that the food court is haunted by the ghost of an especially unlucky young woman that died in some kind of hilariously tragic industrial-food-service accident.
That's exactly it.
1d4chan's Night Shift entry has all the encounters listed in Google Docs:
don't forget a sprinkled topping of corporate/bureaucratic bullshit to add spice.
the colonies must be pretty damn far apart for lodging and such to be needed. Which I guess makes sense. It's not like Mars is going to be densely populated any time soon.
Landon Long
>In order to ensure employee compliance, this outpost is fitted with an oversight AI known as Bernie. He's quite advanced, for his date of quickening." >"Say hi to the camera!" >Only Bernie can open the outpost's safes and high security storage lockers. >In order to prevent oxygen theft, spare O2 tanks are kept in a security cage on the outside of the Outpost.
>"Bernie, open the cage, we're at the two hour mark. Passcode 62658" >"The internal O2 meter says you still have four hours left." >"The internal meter hasn't been serviced since I put the request in six months ago. Open the fucking cage." >"I'll open it in two hours."
Isaiah Sanchez
This just turns it into passive-aggressive System Shock.
Carson Martinez
Room 1111 (Residential floor 1, section 1, Unit 11) is never rented out. If you ask, you get a different answer for each person you ask.
Charles Evans
>don't forget a sprinkled topping of corporate/bureaucratic bullshit to add spice.
Right. Mars-Corp. owns the Colonies, the Trans-Martian Highway, and the Way Stations. Mars-Corp. likes to think it owns you and me, too.
Chase Ortiz
Glad to see this thread still alive. It sucks when cool things get bumped off by edition wars or bear threads.
Daniel Bell
>bear threads At least that shit picked up pace so fast, they should be on bump limit already and disappear.
Xavier Phillips
Mars Corp. Execs promise a buyback program for residents and employees, allowing them to gain independence. However, nobody knows where the manual of buyback procedures and accounts is... But a vault in Waystation 3 was opened after the manual was written- and never opened since. I think it's behind a wall now.
Aiden Thompson
>From the Desk of Walter V. Pensworth, VP Employee Relations Division
>In light of the recent uptick in distribution of misinformation by the Martian Independence Movement I am being required to address certain falsities that being spread throughout the workforce.
>1. Mars-Corp. thinks it owns you. This is false. The legal responsibilities Mars-Corp. has to its employees and the responsibilities you as employees have to Mars-Corp. are clearly listed in your employment contract. Mars-Corp. is not liable for failure to read a 30-page document before signing.
>2. Mars-Corp. is secretly conducting illegal medical experiments on its employees. This is false. Mars-Corp. has used medical testing clones exclusively for over 60 years. MT clones are exponentially cheaper and offer far more reliable data than live subjects.
>3. Mars-Corp. AIs disregard human well-being in favor of maximizing profits. This is false. AIs are fundamentally inhuman and lack any concerns other than what is allotted by their programming. Please quit projecting human morality and emotions on the AIs, it's impolite.
>4. Mars-Corp. is hiding the truth about "Old Martians" and supernatural phenomenon. This is false. If ghosts were real Mars-Corp. would have monetized them.
>I hope this memo has cleared up any misconceptions you might have had about Mars-Corp. and its activities.
>Addendum: Employee Relations Division is not Human Resources. Please stop emailing us about your interpersonal problems.
Josiah Brooks
>4. Mars-Corp. is hiding the truth about "Old Martians" and supernatural phenomenon. This is false. If ghosts were real Mars-Corp. would have monetized them. Then what is your response to the "paranormal marketing" budget?
Logan Wood
Mars-Corp. is capitalizing on the rumors of the paranormal as a tourist draw.
Elijah Watson
honestly I'd rather see most seeming incompetence and/or heartlessness from Mars-Corp be less anything intentional(at least on an actual company-wide scale and not just the occasional corrupt or incompetent executive), and more just something that's inevitable when your talking about a company that's controls a population, economy, and resources larger than most Earth nations, issues are inevitable when your working at scales that large
Jacob Nguyen
I agree. The idea I think is that Mars-Corp. isn't really malicious or malevolent, but that turning a company into a government and a corporate culture into a functioning society is hard, strange work.
Jeremiah Adams
>I agree. The idea I think is that Mars-Corp. isn't really malicious or malevolent, but that turning a company into a government and a corporate culture into a functioning society is hard, strange work. exactly, and indeed 99% of the time they do a pretty good job at it(you kinda have to when you're colonizing a planet inhospitable to humans), but every now and then something screwy happens and things get weird(and it often isn't even directly their fault, Mars is just a weird planet in this universe)
Parker Price
Exactly. All-told, Mars-Corp. is pretty good at keeping the lights on and the air flowing, but you're reminded that it is a corporation first and a government second in those times when both sets of roles and goals don't quite synch up with each other.
Joseph Nguyen
They probably have some troubles with funding, if the road the Station's on is so outdated.
The major colonies themselves are probably the big cash sinks. Hard to invest more in modern infrastructure when you've got to keep a few million (or whatever the Martian population is) people alive in a dense area. Not to mention having to maintain the mining operations that make the whole thing profitable, especially with competition from the belt.
Throw in some charter colonies refusing to play ball with their theoretical superiors at Mars-Corp and the occasional scattered homesteads of earlier colonization efforts, and you've got a nightmare to administer even without the unusual goings-on interrupting the odd shipment.
Gavin Perez
Taking all this into consideration, it's not surprising that Mars-Corp might want to simply ignore the sometimes bizarre incidents that occur and the fact that one of their oldest and most important arteries for data, resource and personnel transportation is apparently haunted. They might legitimately not have the time or the money to throw into investigations and exorcisms when their employees and colonists seem to be living with the anomalies or finding the solutions on their own.
Elijah Cox
yeah way I see it, Mars-Corp's unofficial policy is that generally if a Weird Happening occurs, unless it threatens an Outpost, Homestead, Operation, or Colony's survival and/or can be provably tied with more than a couple deaths(cause at this stage in Mars colonization human lives are actually still pretty valuable) they try to get the local management to handle it without having to bring in outside personnel or resources(or at least as little as possible)
of course this doesn't mean that Mars-Corp doesn't occasionally have to send Mars-Sec on a Bug-Hunt of some sort when things get truly out of hand at the various settlements on Mars(which is often something Local Management tries to avoid as much as possible, cause if that happens and they're still alive, odds are decent that they'll be fired or demoted for letting things get to that point)
Juan Gomez
You've also got to consider how many false positives they have to deal with, plus the general disbelief and low effort among Mars-Sec, who are mostly stationed at the large, established colonies, when dealing with any Weird Happening.
Logan Gray
It makes sense then that at least some of the PCs in this scenario may be members of a Mars-Corp task-force or a small team of corporate trouble-shooters who have been sent to Way Station #3 not to cover things up per-se, but to quietly evaluate the myths and legends that get told about the place and see if any of them requires further attention and problem solving.
Kayden Hill
...
Gavin Gutierrez
of course one thing to keep in mind is there's a difference between say the standard security officers one sees in most places outside the major Colony Cities(including Way Station #3), which tend to be glorified mall cops hired from various minor companies(in spite of what some people might think, Mars-Corp isn't the only company on Mars, even they can't afford to be an absolute monopoly, although they are responsible for approximately 87% of Mars' economy in one form or another), Mars-Sec are the big leagues, ranging from highly trained and fairly well equipped cops and detectives, all the way up to Mars-Sec's proper military and special forces divisions
Nicholas Torres
...
Anthony Ramirez
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Tyler Richardson
...
Carson Gomez
...
Jace Bailey
bump
Jordan Morris
>Mars-Corp's automated PA system regularly broadcasts outdated information, bizarre factoids and hokey corporate slogans across the Station at the most inopportune times.
>The vehicle bays are cluttered with shipping containers, crates and drums containing all manner of Trans-Martian Highway freight that has been abandoned or forgotten at the Station.
>Way Station #3 was once the local support and trading hub for a number of defunct mining outfits and isolated homesteads scattered across its sector of the rusty Martian plains.
>Travelers on the Trans-Martian Highway have reported seeing rovers from various stages of Humanity's exploration of Mars still scooting around.
>They say that when Station #3 was built, Mars-Corp accidentally punched down through a labyrinth of tunnels and caverns deep below the Martian surface.
>Some long-haulers claim to have been passed on the Highway by a black 1965 Mustang Convertible being driven, top down, by a woman in a space suit.
