Youniverse: A Cast Away Vacation
A downloadable adventure
What is Youniverse?
Put simply, YOUNIVERSE is you: your psyche mapped, charted, extrapolated and built into a procedurally generated cosmos of infinite potential.
Explore exotic planets, encounter strange entities, and confront the psychological issues that plague you all within the safety of this unique and proprietary therapeutic technology.
But don't worry: you won't be alone. You and up to four other psychonauts will work together to explore YOUNIVERSE, confronting and defeating your issues together in search of the ultimate Breakthrough.
Suit up, psychonaut. The last frontier lies within.
NOTE: All beta testers must sign non-disclosure and liability waiver documents before entering YOUNIVERSE. Given the highly advanced technology at play, some quirks of code are likely. User accepts all risk when entering YOUNIVERSE.
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Written and designed by Ken Lowery for Cast Away Vacation. YOUNIVERSE is an independent production by Ken Lowery of Bannerless Games and is not affiliated with Afterthought Committee.
"All in a Spin" by A. Duro/ESO licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Purchase
In order to download this adventure you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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I love this adventure! It's not easy to write something that evokes a specific vibe while staying open-ended enough that any playgroup would feel at home within its gentle restraints. The character and "entity" generators are fantastic as well. I really love all the unique combos.
The way the challenges, complications, and 'game mechanics' are hinted at in the text is genius. Being asked to interpret the difficulty as a collective is a nice touch. The subtle ways the text leads players and GM alike to become game designers is everything.
It asks you to pay attention - as a Navigator or a Survivor - to connect the tissue of your challenges through roleplay. This is an adventure about your characters and their psyches. You'll constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to develop characters in an introspective meta 'mirror' of your literal play experience irl and in the game.
This game-within-a-game works perfectly for Cast Away and provides a framework with which to utilize any setting, story, mechanic, or other element you wish to include. Use this to play a Troika adventure? Sure! How about a Mork Borg dungeon? Why not?! It also works really well to introduce a longer campaign if that's what you're looking for.
The potential for deep, interesting, and unique game experiences is outlined in a way that caters to the improv GMs, the prep-heavy GMs, and everyone in between. The added "meta" of an imagined world inside your imagined world is the cherry on top. Well done!