Foreign Directives

A signal doesn’t issue a command. It reminds one.

Foreign Directives is a system-agnostic tool for science fiction roleplaying. It treats alien interference not as conquest or mystery, but as conviction that doesn’t recognize refusal. When a foreign directive asserts itself, something becomes certain. The world adjusts. Characters confront what they were never meant to understand. The story does not ask for agreement.

This book equips you to treat foreign directives as irreversible moments. Use it in any setting where unknown origin matters, where code rewrites intention, or where systems never expected to explain themselves. The focus is on intrusion, recursion, and refusal.

This Book Contains

Each section serves a different purpose. Together, they offer a modular approach to storytelling that treats foreign directives as immutable pressure in unfamiliar form. These aren’t puzzles to solve. They’re meanings to endure.

Narrative Framing: Tools to explore what the directive means. Not what it does, but why it persists. It asks when it arrived, who still responds, and what the world reveals when explanation fails. This framing gives foreign directives narrative force and cultural dissonance.

Scene Tools: Practical methods for presenting a directive’s return as more than contact. These tools focus on altered perception, behavioral misalignment, and how space itself refuses to comply. Use them to ensure the moment feels unshared.

Character Archetypes: Ten detailed examples of individuals shaped by their relationship to a foreign directive. Some integrate. Some fracture. Some refuse the question. Use these archetypes to build player characters, non-player characters, or legacy figures who carry meaning that doesn’t translate.

Story Complications: A collection of narrative shifts that emerge once the directive takes hold. Each one alters behavior, perception, or belief in ways the system can’t contextualize.

Worldbuilding Prompts: A set of questions exploring what kind of society emerges when alien code doesn’t ask permission. These prompts define how culture adapts to embedded contradiction, uncanny inheritance, and decisions made in absent grammar.

Adventure Hooks: Ten entry points where the directive has already made contact. Each one begins not with arrival, but with understanding deferred. Use them to begin new campaigns or collapse known structures.

The command isn’t given. It’s received.