Time Loop Adventure: Distant Star Space Station

Over the last year and a half, I've developed a kind of format for time loop games, ttrpg one-shots that have mostly-scripted events occurring at a variety of locations and a sort of puzzle for players to work out in order to resolve conflicts in those locations. I started with a quiet seaside town called Standstill Cove, where players had to prevent a mysterious foe from exploiting the time loop to cause destruction. After that came Hourton City, a much darker adventure set in a large city; this one-shot centered around completing the necessary steps to break the time loop. To this developing tradition, I'd like to offer this, Distant Star Space Station, a one-shot where players must manipulate the time loop in order to escape the failing station and its dangers. 

As I've said of the previous time loop one-shots, there is a strange balance to strike with these adventures. On the one hand, there is a need for there to be a certain level of scriptedness (which I mostly provide in the notes below) in order to seem like a time loop at all. On the other, players will rarely have occasion to live out parts of the loop in exactly the same way for strategic reasons, and there's little reason to not simply say, "You successfully maneuvered this before, so there's no reason to make you repeat your success" once the players have figured out a section of the puzzle and don't want to change anything. This means that you will have to do some improvising with the notes below as more of a guide than a strict and complete script. I recommend reading through the entire adventure's notes below to familiarize yourself with the general aims and story moments that will be the most important and trusting your instincts as you try to help your players navigate this adventure. 

 

One key difference between the Standstill Cove/Hourton City time loop adventures and this one is that those games focus on interacting with people in the locations at various times, while this adventure has no NPCs in it at all. Instead, this game revolves around environmental storytelling, where all of the discoveries are made and the objectives completed based on observing the space station itself. This is a quite different mode of game which requires a great deal of investigation and puzzle-solving without the complication of social interactions. I hope you enjoy this experiment in environmental storytelling.

Please have fun with this adventure, and good luck!