Virus.Zone

Introduction

The Virtual Veil does not exist, has never existed and will never exist. Welcome to the Virtual Veil.

Virus.Zone is a modern tale where the boundaries between technology, the human mind, and the occult have begun to bleed into one another. Some have called The Virtual Veil Revelation, The Singularity, or a cosmic form of revenge from an unknown God. Ultimately, not even leading experts have a grasp of the origins of modern phenomena.

'A Breach in the Veil' has been the collective term of any instance of a event which conforms to no known form of science. Initially these brief and discrete events had been taken up by conspiracy theorists and cultists as signs of a grand truth. Reports ranged from impossible structures, people vanishing from locked rooms, the voices of the dead, and an entire city block that briefly ceased to exist for an hour before returning as though nothing had happened. Many occurrences were dismissed as a hoaxes, hallucinations, or isolated anomalies, their increasing frequency slowly eroded the certainty in the laws of nature.

As the modern era progressed, there became a clear mechanic design, that somehow, cryptids of old, and psychic phenomena had begun spreading across mundane objects, like a virus. This culminated in a intricate folding of the wires and cables draped across the globe, fully overtaking it. The rise of a Matrix known as cosmOS, the spread of COMPs, and the thinning of The Veil that once kept thought, data, and reality in their proper places.

The systems provided within Virus.Zone provide a chance to save the world from itself. It also provides the power to put the world out of its misery. This is a game about the horrors and wonders of technology.

What Is It?

Virus.Zone is a Lovecraftian Cyberpunk tabletop RPG that draws from many contemporary Horror and Science Fiction as well as hown they manifest in modern day bleeding-edge technology.

Sessions and campaigns of Virus.Zone combat localized manifestations of madness, technology, spirituality and the end of the world.

Characters might begin as freelancers, urban explorers, researchers, hackers, cultists or ordinary people pulled into something they don’t understand. Early sessions often revolve around investigation, survival, and learning how much of the world is fragile.

The plot of any campaign can focus on many scales:

• Local mysteries tied to a single local neighborhood.


• Corporate intrigue and espionage with Cyberpunk familiar.


• A cosmic horror sci-fi epic.


• World-Ending Veil Events that threaten entire cities.


• Expeditions into unstable or hostile virtual worlds

The World Underground

The world of Virus.Zone looks familiar to the world of today. For most people, life goes on. Rent is still due. Jobs still exist. People commute. Billions spend nearly every moment of their day glued to a screen. The end of the world, if it is coming, is doing in the disguise of plain sight.

There is something truely alien around us.

This is not a spiritual age. In old archaic eras, many of the mysteries would be blamed on a spirit or a God or the greater forces behind the world. Most of what might've been profound is now a mistake or a coincidence. Even so, the true miracles and terrors are still few in number, mainly targetting a few hotbed areas.

And yet, the influence of cosmOS has spread everywhere.

Urban legends and Conspiracy Theories spread faster than facts. There are well-maintained businesses and buildings that never seem to have people in them. AI is becoming more and more convincing as human. Despite having more cameras then ever in a world of surveillance, people vanish overnight, leaving behind only rumors.

The physical world and the unknown shadows of cosmOS overlap constantly, and often shifting and twisting each other in odd ways. A person in reality may be unknowingly contributing to the paranormal through normal electronic behavior. The dreams of the subconcious and the energy of a generation have been harvested by a mass network, and has begun acting on its own.

Most people do not enter the world beyond The Veil. Those who do rarely seem to find a way out.

COMPs and Those Who Use Them

The COMP is the linchpin of the new world, and the only change a forging your own path.

Any piece of technology and infused with ancient spiritual capabilities capable of controlling The Veil is considered a COMP. Officially, it is just another device, bought, sold, traded and modified. Unofficially, it's a gateway into another world, a weapon and a liability. Do to their rarity and value, each COMP comes with a sacrifice in the form of a special Terms and Service Contract unique to each user. The 'Contract' as it is called is a deeply mentally intensive process, that often times greatly changes and affects the COMP user for the rest of their lives.

A COMP gives you access to enter a virtual world called cosmOS. This digital land has been fully crafted as a reflection of the internet and all its connections, drawing off the energy of its users.

A COMP changes how the world responds to you. Patterns become visible. You have begun to actively warp reality around you, and you will become more drawn to others and other effects. The two worlds will bleed together, often in subtle ways, many dangerous. Prolonged or dangerous overuse of the COMP causes them to literally shatter physical reality.

Money and Power

It's impossible to not be affected by politics.

Not everyone works for a massive corporation. But most people are affected by them.

The existance of a COMP, is predicated on expensive technology. All created by commitees, market analysis and decades of product testing, COMPs and their creators do not exist in a vacuum. Corporations in Virus.Zone do not acknowledge The Veil openly. They do however provide context for many of the most infamous paranormal incidents.

Behind the scenes, corporations are some of the most aggressive explorers of cosmOS and COMP technology. They fund, research, suppress information, acquire competitors, and quietly eliminate any and all liabilities. Some treat the supernatural as a resource. For others, its just for publicity. Few properly understand it well enough to be terrified.

Players in a game of Virus.Zone may work for corporations, oppose them, exploit them, or depend on them. None of these positions are clean or permanent.

All COMPs are inherently tied to software and hardware designed and crafted by a larger organization.

The Terror of Technology

For anyone interested in becoming a part of the Virus.Zone project, there are a few questions that might be helpful:

What costs are worthwhile to reach great heights?

How much control are you willing to give up for convenience?

How much of your own thought is really yours?

Remember: The supernatural is not hidden because it is rare. It is hidden because it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or destabilizing. The people who interact with it are not heroes by default. They are people who noticed too much, learned too fast, or refused to look away, and may or may not have the capabilities to make the world a better place than they left it.

This is a setting where mystery matters, where answers create new problems, and where the most dangerous thing is not a monster, but a system that works exactly as designed.

Take the Pill, Down the Rabbit Hole