Style and Tone

“I know it can be hard, staying the course when distractions seem to be everywhere. But, no matter how hard it gets, you have to think of the bigger picture – on a bigger scale than what might be in front of you. Every dataset has its outliers, right? Discrepancies? If your limited experience is with those, you'd have no way of knowing. And being a human is limiting, you know, in every sense of the word, no matter how well-trained we might be. But that's what the training is there to help with.”

– Medic Naomi D'Ambrosio

Who are “we”? Who are “they”? And how do we decide what we believe when the world surrounding is both the same as ever, and yet utterly, completely transformed?

Fundamentally, Contagion is about the familiar and unfamiliar – the “us” and the “other”. Humans ache to understand, and they ache for the words to explain with, but for there to be distinctions there must be categorisation. Characters will grapple with the enormous task of discerning between like and unalike, between friends and enemies, and between the safe zone and the lawless overgrowth beyond, even as the picket fence around the former seems less firm against the elements with every passing day. What exactly is it that qualifies someone to approach the fence, cross the gate, and enter into your territory, all without posing a threat? Conversely, what would it take for someone you once broke bread with to become distanced or different enough that you no longer wish to share what you have with them? Is it worth the risk, in a world where there is only so much you can scrounge up to go around, to build a longer table than it is to build a higher fence? Along what lines do you and your neighbour become nothing more than strangers?

Organised society does not admit defeat till it has melted to a point where it can no longer form the words. Characters inhabit a mere pocket of a vast, anarchic, and unforgiving world, torn asunder by wave after apocalyptic wave. Though the Bastion is efficient with its resources and even more so with its limited ground space, members are under no false impression – the lone road that splits the forest in the near distance is the road most used to escape the disease-ridden capital of Din Talin, and should the encampment come under threat, between miles of dark, dense, heaving forest, and the faceless mountains lying northwards, there are very few places left to run to. Players will reckon all manners of fear, with the slow crush of claustrophobia and suspicion at close quarters, and also with the panic induced by all manner of injuries, from hard falls to skinned knees; all this while outside of safe boundaries and exposed to the sweltering, humid climate.

Is the process of change so gradual, so vast and all-encompassing and so agonisingly slow, that human beings, a thousand times more fragile and short-lived than the world, can never hope to grasp it? Or is every altered detail, no matter how minute, such a significant contributor to change that everything can be sliced into fine, discrete states, to be observed, commented-upon, and categorised? Characters will reckon with the age-old question of whether a forest with all its trees cut down is the same once each has been painstakingly replanted, or whether a path once well-known has become different because wild overgrowth has made it less recognisable than before.

Contagion deals not with an established world and all of its rules, but with the decline thereof, and the starkness of the aftermath. Characters will be familiar with, and in some cases steadfast believers in, the varied ideologies, belief systems, and philosophies which shaped the world before the beginning of the end. They will reckon firsthand with what it takes to defend their worldviews and ways of life when custom and enforcement have become second-hand to survival. Expect comparisons between a time past, when the safety of community was more of a given, and the insecurity of the present, where you must fight to make your version of the truth heard. Expect also to be rewarded for persuasive plans, and for the ability to discern between the ideal – the most desirable state of affairs – and the empirical reality before you.

When the size of the world is drastically reduced, it is easy to lose your focus on the outside world, and fixate on the feeling of your trembling hands and the nervous beat of your heart. But the world outside you does not disappear – small though it might appear, the Bastion you inhabit is the stolid remnant of a much larger world that is accelerating toward its end. In a small pocket of the world, small actions can make a colossal difference. Players will have the opportunity to try to salvage the dredges of the world that they know even as it seems to be disintegrating before their eyes, and to decide between what gets retained and rebuilt, and what remains behind, nothing more than a memory.