Backup Directives

A forgotten protocol activates. The system obeys.

Backup Directives is a system-agnostic storytelling tool for science fiction roleplaying. It helps you treat forgotten protocols not as glitches, but narrative forces that reshape the world. When something old reactivates, characters remember, systems respond, and the story realigns.

This book treats failsafes, sleeper agents, and buried intentions as moments of revelation. Use it to create tension, reframe control, and explore what happens when forgotten orders return with expectations. Whether you're building a campaign around automated design or threading these moments into larger arcs, the system remembers, and it's waiting to be obeyed.

This Book Contains:

Each section serves a different purpose. Together, they offer a modular approach to storytelling that treats failsafes, sleeper agents, and forgotten systems as reactivated intentions that still expect to be obeyed.

Narrative Framing: A series of tools to help you define what the protocol meant when it was written and why it's active now. It explores who wrote it, who still serves it, and what it reveals when it resurfaces. This framing gives backup directives weight, history, and agency.

Scene Tools: Practical methods for describing activations as moments of revelation and recursion. These tools help you evoke tension, focus on changes in behavior or environment, and show how something designed in the past still holds power in the present.

Character Archetypes: Ten detailed examples of characters whose lives, identities, or missions are shaped by dormant systems. These archetypes can inspire players, complicate alliances, or represent the cost of forgetting what the world tried to bury.

Story Complications: A collection of narrative consequences that unfold after activation. Each one extends the event into a slow, unresolved breach, of trust, of systems, of memory.

Worldbuilding Prompts: A set of questions to explore how your setting stores, suppresses, and survives automated intent. These prompts help define how societies remember failed safeguards, reactivate old threats, and legislate control when memory fails.

Adventure Hooks: Ten scenarios that begin when something reactivates. Each provides a reason to investigate, contain, or comply. They can spark a campaign, shift a character arc, or mark when old orders override current plans.

The failsafe waits. The system remembers. It wants back in.