Sometimes people slow down in life, they get stuck in a rut and grind to a halt. This might be reaction to failure or trauma or they might be slowly ground into unhappy complaceny without even realising. It can seem impossible to start moving again. Shut-ins, addicts, people stuck in loveless marriages and dead-end jobs, the Room of Drowned Stagnation baptises them all with revulsion for their inactivity and escapism.
Agenda
The Room of Drowned Stagnation jumpstarts people who have become stuck in life to action with the cruel certainty that any activity is better than none. It provokes its inhabitants with illusionary agency over their problems and limitations while shocking and traumatising them into letting go of harmful dependencies. In their choice to let go it forces them to be free. If they don’t choose it will torture them until they do.
If someone is doing something, anything, rather than allowing their life to become mere survival the Room has no interest in them. Not everything counts, some things are just distractions. A Buddhist monk working to attain nirvana would only be seen as stagnant if their pursuit was masked apathy. If someone is truly satisfied the Room will not claim them.
As a matter of course the Room collects people who have made significant headway on their Helplessness and Isolation gauges. If successful it washes away this trauma and plants a seed of itself to guard them against returning to old habits. Whether they have the power to act anew in spite of their circumstances once released is of no interest to the Room.
Appearance
The Room appears as familiar places to the people it claims, an illusion that is as complete to them as it is tacky and transparent to observers: outsiders and agents. To a shut-in it’s the apartment that has become their prison and to an alcoholic its the dive they drink their life away in. To an observer it’s a poorly constructed TV set or a prison cell with crayon drawings on the walls or a garishly rendered VR simulation on a screen. The two groups are kept apart from each other, separated by both perception and a literal gulf of dark ocean that only the observers can recognize. Inhabitants can be influenced from afar, but they are ultimately on their own.
One constant is the damp and the hydrogen sulfide stench of fetid water, the Room does a poor job of flushing itself out between cycles. To an inhabitant this is concealed by the illusion but even this breaks down eventually. As the cycle of the Room comes to a close the smell and the puddles bleed through into their perception of the Room. And then the deluge starts.
Renunciation
There are three powers the Room of Drowned Stagnation uses to goad people into giving up their harmful comforts and mental prisons. Operating in a cycle they repeatedly test inhabitants until they give in. The Room adopts different strategies, apparently with little rhyme or reason on its own initiative. The trials are crude and unsettling without the direction of an agent who can otherwise dictate what tests of resolve an inhabitant experiences.
Agenda
The Room of Drowned Stagnation jumpstarts people who have become stuck in life to action with the cruel certainty that any activity is better than none. It provokes its inhabitants with illusionary agency over their problems and limitations while shocking and traumatising them into letting go of harmful dependencies. In their choice to let go it forces them to be free. If they don’t choose it will torture them until they do.
If someone is doing something, anything, rather than allowing their life to become mere survival the Room has no interest in them. Not everything counts, some things are just distractions. A Buddhist monk working to attain nirvana would only be seen as stagnant if their pursuit was masked apathy. If someone is truly satisfied the Room will not claim them.
As a matter of course the Room collects people who have made significant headway on their Helplessness and Isolation gauges. If successful it washes away this trauma and plants a seed of itself to guard them against returning to old habits. Whether they have the power to act anew in spite of their circumstances once released is of no interest to the Room.
Appearance
The Room appears as familiar places to the people it claims, an illusion that is as complete to them as it is tacky and transparent to observers: outsiders and agents. To a shut-in it’s the apartment that has become their prison and to an alcoholic its the dive they drink their life away in. To an observer it’s a poorly constructed TV set or a prison cell with crayon drawings on the walls or a garishly rendered VR simulation on a screen. The two groups are kept apart from each other, separated by both perception and a literal gulf of dark ocean that only the observers can recognize. Inhabitants can be influenced from afar, but they are ultimately on their own.
One constant is the damp and the hydrogen sulfide stench of fetid water, the Room does a poor job of flushing itself out between cycles. To an inhabitant this is concealed by the illusion but even this breaks down eventually. As the cycle of the Room comes to a close the smell and the puddles bleed through into their perception of the Room. And then the deluge starts.
Renunciation
There are three powers the Room of Drowned Stagnation uses to goad people into giving up their harmful comforts and mental prisons. Operating in a cycle they repeatedly test inhabitants until they give in. The Room adopts different strategies, apparently with little rhyme or reason on its own initiative. The trials are crude and unsettling without the direction of an agent who can otherwise dictate what tests of resolve an inhabitant experiences.
What agents have no control over is how long an inhabitant stays. Some are repeatedly captured and released back into the world in between enduring the Room, others reside there permanently and are tested until they succumb. Sometimes it’s a combination.
"What Door?": It is rare for an inhabitant of the Room to recognize it for what it is, usually that’s grounds for baptism (see below). Unwitting entry is achieved by the Room unfolding itself over the environment, a door or an alleyway in the claimed party’s path briefly replaced by an impostor. A successful Notice check at a -20% shift gives them enough warning to avoid it, the world on the other side of the threshold seems false like a two-dimensional image with tinny audio. Otherwise the deception goes unnoticed.
Repeat visitors gain a cumulative +10% to the shift on the Notice check each time an incomplete baptism has failed to properly erase their memories. For those who have disorders from the Room an unconscious associative stress reaction can be enough to keep them away. In some cases that trauma incidentally squashes the habits the Room targeted them for in the first place and it ends up leaving them alone.
Simulacra: Inhabitants perceive the Room as familiar territory. It behaves in all the expected ways although simulated people come off as a little plastic. For a period the Room will indulge their vices to establish what they are here for, then it will unveil a scenario.
Scenarios tend to be clumsy and unimaginative, insofar as the Room has a personality it is plodding and dull. It will provoke emotional reactions by offering revelations and opportunities to reject the things bogging them down. The intensity of the simulation will ramp up stutteringly in an uncanny valley version of the three Ghosts of Christmas. The Room calibrates itself to people with repeated attempts like a machine learning algorithm and the process is horrifying to endure. Without an agent interceding this is the only way it works. Eventually the inhabitant either repents their wasted potential or breaks down in desperation and confusion. Then the baptism starts.
If an inhabitant genuinely rejects their chains all notches, hardened and failed, on their Helplessness and Isolation gauges are erased (even the last hardened notch, abilities still act as though they have one though). Oddly it doesn’t touch the Self gauge, even though that damage is often a factor in the original problem (oh well). Any attempt to return to their old habits coerces the relevant gauge at a rank equal to their old hardened value as the fouled waters of the Room well up inside them, unless they dismiss the thought.
Baptism of the Lethe: There is only one way out of the Room, it drowns you. The plaster on the walls begins to sag with damp and the stink of rot fills the air. There is a drip, then a trickle and then a gush as the slimy, muddy water pours in, flooding the room. Within terrifying minutes there is no more space or air. Being drowned like this is a rank 7 Violence check. Don’t worry, you won’t remember.
The baptism doesn’t kill you but it erases all memories of time spent in the Room. A crit or matched success on a Knowledge roll retains partial memories of what happened, whether someone believes their recollection or not is down to personal interpretation ("doctor, I keep having these dreams..."). People released after a baptism wash up near water sources, beaches, lakes, canals, a soaked bathroom floor next to an overflowing tub.
Agents
Agents for the Room of Drowned Stagnation are those who went through its trials but had nothing to move forward on, typically this ends up recruiting people with heavy Self damage. Given a choice to stay and help others they have an opportunity to be a mollifying influence on the Room’s haphazard exposure therapy. Some find therapeutic purpose in freeing other people from similar circumstances, others use it to indulge in vicarious, apathetic wallowing as agent status frees them from the carrot/stick obligation of the psychological consequences of their simulacra. There is only one agent at a time.
Panopticon: An agent can see everything in the Room from their vantage. None of the inhabitants actions can be concealed from them, although they may misinterpret things. Their perspective of the Room takes on a form that makes this easy, some might see the inhabitant’s environment as a theatre stage or a CCTV riddled asylum. When a new agent is selected this changes gradually to fit their tastes. It’s not clear if this is a genuine transformation or yet another illusion. Otherwise it’s fully provisioned for their material needs.
"What Door?": It is rare for an inhabitant of the Room to recognize it for what it is, usually that’s grounds for baptism (see below). Unwitting entry is achieved by the Room unfolding itself over the environment, a door or an alleyway in the claimed party’s path briefly replaced by an impostor. A successful Notice check at a -20% shift gives them enough warning to avoid it, the world on the other side of the threshold seems false like a two-dimensional image with tinny audio. Otherwise the deception goes unnoticed.
Repeat visitors gain a cumulative +10% to the shift on the Notice check each time an incomplete baptism has failed to properly erase their memories. For those who have disorders from the Room an unconscious associative stress reaction can be enough to keep them away. In some cases that trauma incidentally squashes the habits the Room targeted them for in the first place and it ends up leaving them alone.
Simulacra: Inhabitants perceive the Room as familiar territory. It behaves in all the expected ways although simulated people come off as a little plastic. For a period the Room will indulge their vices to establish what they are here for, then it will unveil a scenario.
Scenarios tend to be clumsy and unimaginative, insofar as the Room has a personality it is plodding and dull. It will provoke emotional reactions by offering revelations and opportunities to reject the things bogging them down. The intensity of the simulation will ramp up stutteringly in an uncanny valley version of the three Ghosts of Christmas. The Room calibrates itself to people with repeated attempts like a machine learning algorithm and the process is horrifying to endure. Without an agent interceding this is the only way it works. Eventually the inhabitant either repents their wasted potential or breaks down in desperation and confusion. Then the baptism starts.
If an inhabitant genuinely rejects their chains all notches, hardened and failed, on their Helplessness and Isolation gauges are erased (even the last hardened notch, abilities still act as though they have one though). Oddly it doesn’t touch the Self gauge, even though that damage is often a factor in the original problem (oh well). Any attempt to return to their old habits coerces the relevant gauge at a rank equal to their old hardened value as the fouled waters of the Room well up inside them, unless they dismiss the thought.
Baptism of the Lethe: There is only one way out of the Room, it drowns you. The plaster on the walls begins to sag with damp and the stink of rot fills the air. There is a drip, then a trickle and then a gush as the slimy, muddy water pours in, flooding the room. Within terrifying minutes there is no more space or air. Being drowned like this is a rank 7 Violence check. Don’t worry, you won’t remember.
The baptism doesn’t kill you but it erases all memories of time spent in the Room. A crit or matched success on a Knowledge roll retains partial memories of what happened, whether someone believes their recollection or not is down to personal interpretation ("doctor, I keep having these dreams..."). People released after a baptism wash up near water sources, beaches, lakes, canals, a soaked bathroom floor next to an overflowing tub.
Agents
Agents for the Room of Drowned Stagnation are those who went through its trials but had nothing to move forward on, typically this ends up recruiting people with heavy Self damage. Given a choice to stay and help others they have an opportunity to be a mollifying influence on the Room’s haphazard exposure therapy. Some find therapeutic purpose in freeing other people from similar circumstances, others use it to indulge in vicarious, apathetic wallowing as agent status frees them from the carrot/stick obligation of the psychological consequences of their simulacra. There is only one agent at a time.
Panopticon: An agent can see everything in the Room from their vantage. None of the inhabitants actions can be concealed from them, although they may misinterpret things. Their perspective of the Room takes on a form that makes this easy, some might see the inhabitant’s environment as a theatre stage or a CCTV riddled asylum. When a new agent is selected this changes gradually to fit their tastes. It’s not clear if this is a genuine transformation or yet another illusion. Otherwise it’s fully provisioned for their material needs.
If someone other than an inhabitant or an agent gains access to the Room this is the part they end up in. Hopefully.
Director: Agents of the Room have full authority over simulacra that inhabitants are subjected to, although they may not release them. Following from panopticon this takes an appropriate form. An asylum director’s office with CCTV monitoring might let them boss staff around via an intercom/P.A system, for example. This direction is always carried out as intended. In appropriate setups they can communicate directly with the inhabitants, given the kind of people who become agents this is rarely used as well as it could be.
Waterborne: Most choose to live in the Room full-time but an agent who wishes to travel to and fro can do so via any sufficient source of water. A swimming pool, lake or cistern, even flushing themselves down a toilet in a pinch. A puddle might if it’s big, but pouring out a water bottle and jumping in it isn’t enough. Leaving the Room is as simple for them as stepping into the gulf around the panopticon.
Director: Agents of the Room have full authority over simulacra that inhabitants are subjected to, although they may not release them. Following from panopticon this takes an appropriate form. An asylum director’s office with CCTV monitoring might let them boss staff around via an intercom/P.A system, for example. This direction is always carried out as intended. In appropriate setups they can communicate directly with the inhabitants, given the kind of people who become agents this is rarely used as well as it could be.
Waterborne: Most choose to live in the Room full-time but an agent who wishes to travel to and fro can do so via any sufficient source of water. A swimming pool, lake or cistern, even flushing themselves down a toilet in a pinch. A puddle might if it’s big, but pouring out a water bottle and jumping in it isn’t enough. Leaving the Room is as simple for them as stepping into the gulf around the panopticon.
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