Skyline

Starting Out

If this is not your first tabletop adventure in the world of Skyline you should skip this section and go directly to Hooks.

Otherwise, welcome!

If you have not already picked or created characters, do the following:

1. As a group, look through the Starter Characters.
2. Each player should pick a character they find appealing. If more than one player wants to try the same character, that’s okay! Pick a new name, and maybe change a few background details.
3. Each person should print or copy the character sheet for their chosen character, available in the Adapter for your system.

The starter characters each have a set of starting gear, so you won’t need to worry about finding weapons, armor, or tools before you start your adventure.

The starting gear for most tabletop RPG characters will be fine — you shouldn’t need anything special for this module.

Narrators may want to glance at the Story Graph to get a feel for the flow of the module. It has spoilers!

What do the players know about the world of Skyline?

Fifty years from now for us, and a thousand years ago for the characters, humanity lost the war against machines and Artificial Intelligences they had built to wage war with each other. Humans lost control of those machines, which reverted to one of their primary directives: consume biomatter, the entire planet if necessary, to feed their self-replication. But that war took time, allowing some groups to make contingency plans for the apocalypse.

One such plan was Project Zero Dawn. Repurposing the very technology that was destroying them, Zero Dawn created the GAIA AI and a number of Subordinate Functions with a unified purpose: crack the codes to disable the machines, regrow the biosphere, and restart the human race. GAIA spent the next thousand years doing exactly that. Cavernous underground, fully automated factories churned out machines, designed by one of the Subordinate Functions, which slowly replanted the soul, purified the atmosphere, and reintroduced fauna one species at a time.

Humanity’s proclivity for self-destruction would not be abated, however. Through an act of nihilistic sabotage, the knowledge base intended to reeducate the lab-grown, reintroduced humans was destroyed by one of the last people alive on the planet. When humanity next walked on the surface after a 500-year absence, it had forgotten nearly everything it had learned since the stone age. This included even a sense of where they’d come from, replacing history with Earth-mother worship, Sun-god worship, and other folklore.

Tribes, spear-wielding and primitive by our standards, followed a similar progression as before: going from subsistence hunters, to farmers, to villages, to small cities. One thing was different this time: the machines. Humans coexisted with the machines, still working to reseed the planet, for hundreds of years. Access to these machines gave humans a supply of worked metals, plastics, chemical energy sources, and tools. This drove the pace of innovation, bringing humans screaming through the equivalent of the Bronze Age and all the way up to ironworking and combustion, in just another five centuries.

This synergy with the machines changed twenty years ago with what is referred to as “The Derangement”. A signal from an unknown source caused GAIA’s Subordinate Functions to evolve into independent AIs, with goals and directives corrupted, and to break free to act on their own. GAIA fought back against one AI in particular, HADES, which had the original goal of helping GAIA reset the planet to a blank slate, should the terraforming go awry. HADES began to reactivate the ancient war machines which had been dormant the last thousand years, so GAIA destroyed the primary facility which housed most of the computational resources in an attempt to stop it. The Subordinate Functions which created and produced the machines began to produce machines which were antagonistic to humans, adding armor, weapons, and even stealth technology.

As a last-ditch effort to regain control, GAIA directed one of the underground birthing facilities to produce a clonal “reinstantiation” of Elisabet Sobeck, the head of Project Zero Dawn. This clone was released into the care of the nearest tribe, the Nora, in what we would recognize today as Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado in the United States. The Nora, fundamentalists and fearful toward technology, gave the child to one of their exiles to raise outside of the tribe.

That child, Aloy, spent the next two decades enduring training and trials to prove herself “worthy” of learning the truth about her heritage. Attacked by a terror organization known as Eclipse, the Nora would not immediately grant Aloy the information she sought. Instead, they named her a Seeker, one who lives outside the tribe, allowing her to hunt down the Eclipse in the lands beyond Nora borders.

Along the way, Aloy would learn much of the real history of the Earth and its population, all the while learning more and more about the technologies used by the machines and AIs. In a showdown with HADES, referred to as the Battle of the Spire, Aloy was able to shut down its attempts to reactivate the war machines, and to drive the AI back, at least temporarily. Aloy, uncomfortable with the attention garnered by such a feat, chose to fade from view and instead attempt to rediscover what she saw as her roots: the heritage of Elisabet Sobeck.

The Battle of the Spire was just weeks ago at the beginning of this IASO module. It was bloody and destructive, leading to huge losses for both the Nora people and their neighbors, the Carja.

What the characters do and do not know

Older people will remember a time when humans and machines were indifferent to each other, when humans instead had more to fear from each other. Most under thirty, however, would not know a time when machines would not attack on sight.

Everyone is aware that an ancient people, referred to as the Old Ones, lived in these same lands and died off long before living memory. The artifacts of the Old Ones can be found almost everywhere, but mostly in ruins of twisted metal and strange materials. Some have even pieced together that the dormant war machines which pepper the landscape are presumably what destroyed the Old Ones, leading to the inherent fear of technology harbored by many of the tribes such as the Nora and Carja.

Some tribes, such as the Oseram and the Banuk, do not share in this fear, instead seeing technology and machines as things to be studied, learned from, and appreciated. None of the people see machines as mystical or divine — they know the machines are mostly metal, and are constructs, not grown like plants or animals. A few have even figured out that the machines are built in the giant underground “crucible” factories. It is not uncommon, especially in Oseram lands, to see scavenged machine parts repurposed for everday use, even if their users don’t actually understand how the parts work.

The concept of AI, however, is still a little beyond all but a handful of people in the known lands. The few who have interacted with AIs, such as GAIA, HADES, and CYAN, have generally interpreted them as some kind of deity.

Even fewer have any coherent understanding of history beyond living memory. In the canon of Horizon there are really only two, Aloy and Sylens, though you might argue that a few others such as Erend, probably picked up quite a bit from what Aloy related to them. As the world of Horizon is littered with data points and texts which tell bits and pieces, it is conceivable that many people know isolated stories of the Old Ones. It’s also possible that collectors of such stories, such as the Banuk historian starter character, Van, have come across enough stories to be able to piece together something pretty close to the truth.

Similarly, most people will not know every nook and cranny of the landscape. That is, while many people would be able to relate a general area and direction for a place they think might be a cauldron, very few would ever have visited one, and even fewer would be able to direct you to a second. Some people may be well-traveled enough to know where most settlements are, such as the Nora Brave starter character, Drake, but that’s rare outside of traveling merchants and hunting and defensive parties. Without horses to ride or beasts of burden to help pull carts, long distance travel is still daunting. Canonically for Horizon, only two people have figured out how to use Corruptor modules to ride machines: Aloy and Sylens. Everyone else is on foot.

When thinking about what your character knows, try to keep it realistic for a starter game. Your characters won’t have the Horizon map memorized with all its points of interest, nor will they be able to recite the history of the Old Ones on command. Most people, even warriors and hunters, will still be surprised when they see a new machine, or when they end up in a ruins of the Old Ones, or see a display of Old Ones technology.

What next?

Start your adventure by skipping ahead to the Adventure section’s first entry: 100.