No Soul Left Behind is now available for purchase in print and PDF! Now you can plan out your own villainous careers while running/ruining the future of the Brighter Futures Academy. Speaking of villainous careers, please enjoy this excerpt from the fourth adventure in the campaign which details some of the student science fair projects which have been given a little demonic ‘bump’ by their teachers (originally playtested on the RPPR Actual Play Podcast):
“Algae Overlord”
Timothy Solono is a mousy little sophomore with a big heart. A nerd at heart, science has always been his worst subject despite his passion for it. Either due to clumsiness or bad luck, none of Tim’s lab work ever seems to come out like it’s supposed to. Tired of seeing the plucky kid cursed to a C average despite his efforts, Mr. Pollock has been nudging the kid’s results towards the fantastic. Tim’s made a real turnaround, coming out of his shell and becoming quite the showman at his booth. His experiments involves the effect of an amino acid solution on the growth of algae in a petri dish.
If not stopped, Tim jokingly tells onlookers to stand back as he unknowing drops the tears of a teen suicide from a glyph inscribe eye-dropper onto the algae. While delivering his speech on cell growth, the algae cracks the dish, overtakes the table, and begins to crawl up the wall. The black blob is sentient and carnivorous. It can spend successes on strangling attacks against the nearest bystanders or on regenerating dice in its pool. For example if the algae is down to 6d and rolls 2×4, it can regenerate 2d and roll 8d in the next round. The only way to destroy the creature is to wipe it out completely with a heat source or caustic chemical (i.e. Hairspray, flamethrower, industrial bleach, flaming hell claws, etc.)
“Pig-boon, An Abomination Against God and Decency”
Dakota Boaz is very skeptical of Mr. Pollock. She’s only in his class because the science classes offered by the Brighter Futures Academy bore her to tears and she flunks them by ignoring her homework. Mr. Pollock keeps trying to accelerate her instruction to get her invested again. When Dakota got interested in gene-splicing based on the latest sci-fi novel she read, the teacher let her do an independent research on the subject. Dakota go really passionate about the project and hypothesized how nanotechnology might one day overcome the genetic barriers of inter-species chimeras. To her surprise, Mr. Pollock told her to write up her theory and he would pass it on to “some guys he know in a government lab.”
Now against all reason, Dakota has something moving inside the rubber artificial womb that returned from the “lab.” She knows deep down that her theory shouldn’t have worked, but she’s too excited to see what happens next to stop now. In reality, the womb contains a pig ovum, baboon sperm, and a coin used to purchase the deadly betrayal of a close friend (you can find anything on Craigslist these days…). When Dakota utters the classic words for a scientist good luck Mr. Pollock taught her (dolor vitae pervenerit), the terrifying pig-boon bursts forth from it’s amniotic sac with an agonized screech.
The pig-boon attacks and terrorizes everyone in sight with 4d, especially Dakota. If the PCs manage to put it down, it will hiss a garbled thank you before slipping into oblivion.