Exit 23

I volunteered to run a Halloween-themed one-shot for my gaming group, or at least for the host of my gaming group and maybe a slightly different crowd, depending on availability, and we're looking at actually doing it on Friday, Halloween evening.

This is a group that, as far as I know, has only played 4e and 5e. I thought it was a great opportunity to introduce them to something new, as a one-shot, because hey, the cost is low, and if it's not what they want to play ongoing, that's OK, they're not committed to it. I thought about going really radical and doing Dread, the game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice to resolve actions, but I decided that that was too much. I'll probably whip up a few pre-gens using a very slightly modified version of Old Night (which I prefer to typing Shadow of Old Night all the time) to a modern setting, and then run "Exit 23", or a slightly bulked up version of it anyway. "Exit 23" is the small adventure that was included in original Dark•Matter setting book, first published in December 1999. 

Quick history aside. Wizard of the Coast bought TSR in 1997, and continued to publish material for it, especially in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e line, although the schedule was minimized, and they went to work pretty quickly on revamping D&D, relaunching it, rebranding it even, as 3e, which happened in August and into the fall of 2000. However, TSR had also been working on a science fiction game, Alternity, which was released in 1998, delayed slightly from its 1997 schedule and quick play preview due to the acquisition of TSR by WotC. Alternity was probably more like D&D than prior TSR science fiction non-D&D games, like Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, etc. had been, and it was meant, I presume, to be the second pillar of RPGs alongside D&D, and be able to support anything that wasn't fantasy. It didn't get a ton of rules support, about half a dozen products or so, and it officially had four settings released for it (as well as kinda sorta a Sliders mimicking setting in the book Tangents. Which wasn't really a setting, but kind of was, and was focused on alternate realities/dimensions and the ability to go back and forth between them.)

It also had four official settings, each of which had some material beyond just the setting book published for it. The first was Star*Drive (the asterisk is usually how it was officially written) which was a pretty standard space opera setting not terribly unlike that of Traveller, TSR's own earlier Star Frontiers, or Star Trek, etc. It also got a Gamma World re-release for this rule-set, and a licensed StarCraft game, based on the wildly popular (during the 90s) Blizzard computer RTS game of the same name. And, of course, it got the Dark•Matter release; a setting, some adventures, even some novels. (Again, the stylized way of writing it with the • is pretty typical, even if it requires an awkward keystroke to pull off.) Dark•Matter was heavily influenced by the popularity of The X-Files throughout the 90s, which was still going strong at the time of its release. I'm not 100% sure that that's what most people considered "science fiction" not taking place in any setting more exotic than the normal real world—just with exotic stuff rolled into it, like The X-Files did. 

The X-Files was really incredibly well-known and well-regarded in the 90s and early 00s, though. It was an important cultural touchstone too, because it highlighted the distrust that people had developed of the government. Although obviously less serious, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was another big "indie" hit during the same period, that explored similar themes, except in a high school light-hearted way compared to The X-Files. Dark•Matter was hardly unique; during that period, we also got games like Conspiracy X (Unisystem; same system as the Buffy RPG), Delta Green (a kind of Cthulhu-themed X-Files for Call of Cthulhu; has since become its own game), Bureau 13 (which actually predates The X-Files by a few months, and is obviously somewhat sillier, or at least it looks like it with the Phil Foglio cover art), and even World of Darkness (also huge in the RPG scene in the 90s) got in on the action in 1995 with "Year of the Hunter" where each of their product lines had a supplement that was focused on regular guys and government agents hunting the monstrous characters that were otherwise normally the protagonist PCs of the World of Darkness. And I'm sure that's just a sampling of the ones that I was more familiar with. I doubt that GURPS wasn't in on it too, for instance (Black Ops and Illuminati, I think, both had similar themes—there were probably many more.)

I think Dark•Matter may have been the most well-known, or most highly regarded of them. At least, it's certainly the one I heard about the most, even from people who were familiar with all of them. It was a bit of a kitchen sink; Delta Green was more focused, and generally seen as therefore "better" but Dark•Matter could do everything from aliens to ghost stories to Bigfoot to dark mages, etc. Alternity didn't last very long, but d20 Modern was the spiritual successor to it, and Dark•Matter got both a mini-update to d20 Modern in the pages of Polyhedron magazine, and later its own actual source book; it was essentially re-released as a d20 Modern setting. Most of the rest of the old TSR stuff was also released for d20 Modern, but it wasn't stand-alone like Dark•Matter was, it was just kind of folded into the generic d20 Modern (d20 Future had a lot of elements that were originally from Star Frontiers or Star*Drive, for instance, but Star Frontiers and Star*Drive were not released as settings or supplements for d20 Modern.) Another clue that Dark•Matter was by far the runaway success of the line and the most popular.

All that said, and I'm of course a fan of The X-Files as a campaign model in terms of themes, tone and even structure, even for fantasy, moreso than I am for your typical D&D model, my "Exit 23" is not really meant to be an introduction to an X-Files-inspired game; I'm considering it a stand-alone supernatural horror adventure of a group of PCs stuck in a remote rest stop (I'll probably relocate it to Wyoming or Montana, because that feels even more remote to me than just a few miles from Spokane) by a sudden, unexpected snow storm, a summoned ice demon or wendigo kind of thing, and some bad guy sorcerers who are in over their head after the death of their cabal leader. 

I'm going to rewrite a few minor details, but it will still mostly resemble the scenario as written. I anticipate enjoying myself. I've run that at least three times in the past at conventions—maybe four, but I don't remember anymore—as a one-shot, and its a great scenario. Depending on how fast people do stuff vs roleplaying and conversation with each other and NPCs, it can be a little light, though, so I want to make sure that I have a little bit more meat on the bones, just in case I need it. And, of course, I'll document it here.