Albany Resonance Facility: Second Floor

1.3 Purple Mist

Note: This is the room that you can fall down into from the first floor

Faint purple light seeps from jagged cracks in the stone floor, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. The glow curls and writhes like living smoke, casting eerie shadows that seem to twitch when unobserved.

Sanity

Any character that shares a square with the mist will need to draw a sanity card.

1. Circular Room

As you step into the vast, circular chamber, the oppressive silence grows louder—deafening in its totality. The air is cold, sterile, and saturated with a tension that feels older than time. Eight human-sized chambers line the perimeter, each like a standing sarcophagus of glass and metal—containment pods, now dormant. They hum faintly, flickering with erratic pulses of violet light that sync with the glowing rune-circle embedded in the floor’s center. This was no ordinary lab. This was a sanctum of unmaking.

2. Containment Pods

Inside the pods

nothing. No bodies, no dust. Just faint impressions—handprints against the glass, a wisp of hair caught in a hinge, a smear of something that isn’t quite blood. Something was here. Or is, and now isn't.

Sanity

Any character that steps within 5 feet of one of the pods needs to draw a Sanity Effect.

4. Puddle of Mist

The swirling violet mist at the center of the chamber beckons like a half-remembered dream. It shifts and coils in unnatural patterns, humming with the same eerie rhythm that pulses through the walls. Stepping into it feels like walking through warm breath—dense, clinging, alive. As the fog wraps around you, your thoughts fracture and reform. Faces you’ve never seen flash behind your eyes. You remember standing in a desert under the stars, solving equations etched in light, holding someone’s hand as they died—memories that are not yours, yet feel impossibly familiar, like pieces of yourself returned from exile. For a moment, you don’t know where those lives end and yours begins.

The Fog’s Effect – Rules

• Sanity Check: When a character enters the fog, they must roll a Sanity Saving Throw (DC 10).
• On a success: They retain control of their mind, absorbing the strange memories without losing themselves.
• On a failure: They gain a random Indefinite Madness effect, as their sense of self fractures under the weight of foreign lives.
• Skill Empowerment: Regardless of the result, the character gains a permanent +2 bonus to one random skill. This should reflect a memory or ability once possessed by the consciousness they touched—e.g. Investigation for a lost detective, Stealth for a fugitive, Medicine for a long-dead healer.
• 1d24 There are 24 skills. I just number them top to bottom and roll for it.

Optional GM Flavor: Describe one specific, vivid memory that grants this skill bonus, and let players roleplay how it alters their sense of self. It may come with emotional echoes: grief, guilt, pride—or even longing for a life they never lived.

5. Locker Room

The small chamber reeks of rust and ozone, its walls lined with decrepit lockers—many left ajar, their doors warped and hanging like broken ribs. A cracked mirror slumps in the corner, offering a smeared reflection that seems unfamiliar, even to yourself. In the center of the floor, several tiles have been violently torn away, revealing a jagged hole beneath the locker room—within, the unmistakable swirl of that same unnatural purple mist pulses softly, whispering like breath against the edge of your mind.

Investigation

DC 5: Weathered Journal Page

DC 10: Injection - sleep

DC 14: Red Memory Shard

6. Computer

This is a dust-choked chamber where banks of decaying terminals line the cracked stone walls. Ancient monitors flicker with static or frozen fragments of corrupted data, their green glow casting eerie shadows across the room. Tangled cables snake across the floor like veins, many of them severed or fused with scorched residue. The air is dry, filled with the faint scent of burnt circuitry and ozone. Occasional bursts of distorted audio hum through rusted speakers—garbled voices or fragments of data logs long since lost to the Quiet. Some of the machines still blink faintly, as if trying to remember what they were once meant to do.

Using the Computer

If they players have found the key card from the locker room, they can use it to access the computer terminal without using a computer check. Otherwise, accessing the computer requires a Computer Use DC 15.

Once they have gained access to the computer, they can do the following:

View or Download Fragmented Logs

They can recover corrupted staff messages, mission files, and research notes that hint at what caused the rift. Some logs contradict others, deepening the paranoia and mystery (e.g., one researcher describes the rift as music, another as light).

Access Rift Data

View a decaying graphical readout of the rift's instability—a visualization of pulsing, waveform-like anomalies. PCs can make skill checks (Arcana or Engineering DC 10) to interpret the data, gaining clues about how to close the rift—or the cost of doing so.

Trigger an Emergency Broadcast

Send a signal topside. It won’t call for help, but it will alert the Church of Hope—and perhaps something else listening in the dark.

1. Siren Activation:
   A low, warbling tone echoes faintly through the facility. It’s not loud—it’s wrong. Distorted. Glitching in and out like a memory half-remembered. The Quiet resists sound, and the siren cuts in jagged fragments, creating more unease than clarity.
2. Power Surge:
   Old generators strain. Flickering lights attempt to stabilize. In some rooms, long-dead systems hum back to life for a moment, illuminating long-forgotten horrors or briefly revealing shadowy shapes in places they weren’t before.
3. Automated Message:
   A broken, looping voice plays over the static:
   “Emergency containment... rrrzzzt... Protocol 7-B... schhhk... evacuate or initiate rift stabilization... unknown entity breach... system failure... system fai—”
4. Unlocks Emergency Logs:
   Players gain access to secured system files marked "Containment Protocols" and “Incident Chronology.” These contain corrupted logs, conflicting reports, and one final, desperate message:
   "If you’re reading this, you must choose. It wants to be remembered.”
5. Activate Experimental Containment Protocol
   An old failsafe routine can be partially activated—intended to suppress metaphysical resonance. Doing so floods the labs with a low hum and disrupts the Quiet for 1d4 rounds (during which Sanity cards aren’t drawn).

EMERGENCY MEMORY VENT PROTOCOL: LOCKED

They can unlock this ONLY if they have the key card.

Doing this will delete all the memories that have been stored within the Resonance Core. This will result in all of the Echoes and Silent Stalkers dissipating. It will also cause a psionic wave to rush out of the computer. Each character within the computer room will need to roll a Sanity Saving throw DC 12 as they are struck with the memories that are released from the core. Failure results in a random Indefinite Madness effect. Success results in a permanent +2 to a random skill as the character takes on one of the memories that washes over them. 1d24

7 and 9 Stairs Down

There are two possible routes to get to the 3rd floor and they pretty much lead the party to the same location. It is possible that the party takes the stairs down to the second floor and just keeps going, by passing the entire 2nd floor. While this will get them to the end faster, it will greatly limit their options when they are facing the final challenge.

8. Encounter Area

The monsters can pretty much be used any where in the facility. They are a great way to add in something if the pacing is starting to feel slow or the party is starting to seem bored with exploring. But this area, where the living quarters are, is a particularly good place foe an encounter. There really isn't anything else going on over here and they are likely to be exploring here early in the level.

Another place to consider adding an encounter is in the computer room. While they are trying to access the computer is a great time for both an Echoes and a Silent Stalker to show up. They are much more difficult when they show up together. However, if they have already fought the one in area 8, they should already know the trick with light that makes the encounter much more managable.