# ViewScream tags: #game/rpg/viewscream ![[ViewScream (10th Anniversary Edition) (cover).jpg|600]] **ViewScream** bills itself, on the back of its own book, as "the world's first Live Action Online Game" — a claim Rafael Chandler gets to make because the whole thing was born on video chat. It's a diceless one-shot about a handful of people separated by the walls of a screen while everything goes to hell around them: a doomed starship's crew isolated by quantum anomalies and hostile xenomorphs, or any other small, paranoid, cut-off cast a scenario cares to supply. Your crewmates are the only ones who can save your life, and they can just as easily spend their one good turn patching up someone else. The game is rigged — every session, at least one of you is marked for death before anyone even unmutes. ## Setting **ViewScream** ships no fixed world; each scenario drops its own. The classic frame is pure screen-horror in space: your starship is damaged, most of the crew are dead, and the survivors are scattered through a wounded vessel that will tear itself apart in a matter of minutes. Space, once "a wondrous frontier," has shown you its true nature as "a ravenous void." You never meet the others face to face — you're walled off by bulkheads, anomalies, and monsters, and your only channel to anyone is the camera and the video screen. Get to an escape pod and you might live; fail, and someone finds your mangled corpse floating in the void. That premise stretches without a seam. **A Maculate Conception** infests the science vessel *Sycorax* with a xenomorph laying empty eggs. **Neongeles** and **Summervox Whispers** pull the cast into cyberpunk — gene-traders and data-thieves jacking out of the webwork into rain-drenched streets. **Criminal Cadre** makes the crew supervillains plotting world domination; **Crystal Ba'al** makes them sorcerers convening through crystal balls; **Born of Blood** convenes the Vampire Council mid-outbreak; **Humans and Other Toys** fields an anti-kaiju squad. The through-line is constant: a small, desperate group, physically alone, obliged to trust people they can't fully trust, racing a clock. You are exactly those survivors, and your only goal, stated plainly, is to not be the one left unsolved when the air runs out. ## Mechanics Everyone stays in character start to finish; out-of-character questions go in the chat window, which stays open. A session runs 60–90 minutes and wants **three to five players**, each in a separate room — no two players sharing a camera, ever. ### The crew and the sheet One player is **Bridge**, the game's GM-analogue *and* a character who can die. Bridge frames scenes ("Bridge to Engineering, do you copy?"), mutes and unmutes crew members into conversations, tracks who still has emergencies, and paces the game so it doesn't burn out in fifteen minutes. Every other player has a one-page character sheet carrying five things: - **Description** — a few lines establishing personality ("burned-out and paranoid"), role ("Surgical," "Helm," "Crypt"), and the **location** you're stranded in. - **Two Emergencies** — life-threatening problems only other players can solve; you can't fix your own. - **Three Solutions** — technology-based ways to help *others*. - **Suspicion** — someone you're quietly investigating. - **A Secret** — a dark truth you must eventually confess. Characters are separated by design, so every Solution is remote: you don't inject the antidote, you upload it for the synthetic generator on the other end of the ship to reproduce. ### Emergencies and Solutions — the heart of the game The central loop is barter under threat of death. You reveal your Emergencies one at a time, then ask — cajole, beg, threaten, dredge up old times — for another player's Solutions. Each Solution on your sheet is secretly marked **success** or **failure**. You, the player, can see which is doomed; your character cannot, and you must offer it anyway, right down to that final marked-failure holdout. The player on the receiving end has to guess whether your offer is sincere, weighing hunches and who's already succeeded before. If a Solution is accepted, you stall for a few minutes, then report success or failure in unmistakable terms; either way it's crossed off the sheet. Rejected offers are saved for later. The technobabble is all invented — "vascular nanite scanner," "parallel-quark fluctuations" — and that's the point; you own whatever explanation you like. ### Ending The game ends when every player has spent every Solution. Those with resolved Emergencies make it to an escape pod; anyone still holding an unresolved Emergency dies. Bridge asks a final direct question (everyone must answer), then one by one the players deliver **Last Words** — a tearful farewell or a hateful rant, reflecting whether they're escaping or trapped — and sign off, muted, Bridge last. No one touches another player's Last Words. Because the game is rigged and a failed Solution is out there, someone always goes into the night. It's a one-shot for a reason. ## Editions - **ViewScream, 1st Edition** (2013) — *Not in the library.* The original, strictly four-player, no GM role (the Bridge came later). Shipped an eclectic first run — a few sci-fi/horror scenarios plus a candidate-running-for-office piece, a writer adventure, a nuclear-war scenario, a zombie invasion, and the seeds of Criminal Cadre and Crystal Ba'al. - **ViewScream, 2nd Edition** (2016) — *Not in the library.* Introduces Bridge as a character-GM, tightens the rules, and opens play to 3, 4, or 5 players. 56-page rulebook, 15 scenarios, PNG overlays, two audio files. - **ViewScream 2020** (2020) — *Not in the library.* First expansion, 10 scenarios (several requested by 2E Kickstarter backers). - **ViewScream: Distance** (2020) — *Not in the library.* Second expansion, 10 scenarios including four 4-player reworks of earlier ones and the two audio-only adventures. - **ViewScream: Tenth Anniversary Edition** (2023) — *In the library.* The current edition, a 40-page relaunch bundling 2E plus both expansions (35 scenarios), the editable scenario template, and a reference sheet, with instructions scrubbed of the now-defunct Google Hangouts. Arrived here as the **ViewScreamX.zip** collection. ## Supplements The scenarios are the actual product — each is just three to five pages of character sheets plus a distress-signal script. The full 10th-anniversary bundle in hand carries thirty-one of them: - **A Maculate Conception** (4/5 players) — the *Sycorax* is infested with a xenomorph laying empty eggs; the survivors realize they're meant to climb inside. - **Away Team** (audio) — the science vessel *Osiris*; a dying captain, crewmates stranded on the planet below. - **Battleship Carolina** (4/5) — the last flight of a ragtag fleet after the Cyborgs attack. - **Billions of Scars** (3/4) — uploaded, disembodied minds go insane and butcher the crew. - **Black Widow, Brown Recluse** (audio) — the ship's AI Recluse turns antipathic and hunts the crew. - **Born of Blood** — the Vampire Council convenes during a zombie outbreak. - **Criminal Cadre** — supervillains plot world domination under Dr. Edge. - **Crystal Ba'al** — sorcerers convene by crystal ball; ambulatory carnivorous plants besiege a tower. - **Culler Out of Space** (3/4) — a terraforming cull wakes color-shifting globules that turn the crew on each other. - **Damage Tolerance** — the Global Aeronautic Exploration Agency, with fragile tech and battery/oxygen timers ticking. - **Destiny Rising** — a hauling crew shot up by Regulation forces, refusing to go quietly. - **Dunwich Hauler** (3/4) — something on board that sensors can't detect. - **Final Voyage of the Gaslight** — steampunk farce on the zeppelin HMS Gaslight, fueled by "patented elixirs" that smell like port. - **Gates of Flesh, Keys of Bone** (4/5) — the bio-mechanical medical ship *Hippocrates*, body horror in space. - **Golgotha Station** — Dominion Shock Troops defending an orbital citadel against guerrillas. - **Humans and Other Toys** — the anti-kaiju squad's final stand. - **Ligature Marks** — a nightmare first contact, a mass suicide, and an AI that woke the survivors. - **Lights, Camera, Arson** — sidekicks rescue superheroes from a prison break. - **Martyrs in the Rue Morgue** (audio) — ghost hunters trapped in a house with something in it. - **Mine for the Taking** (audio) — explorers walled in by a cave-in in a Barrow University mine. - **Neongeles** — cyberpunk data-thieves who cracked an eternity-sim for the wealthy dead. - **Optimal Virulence** — a horrid infection on the Imperial Hellhound; the risen hunt, and only laugh. - **Pathogen Zeta** — military interdiction against "nonliving hostiles." - **Rompecabezas** — a science vessel boarded by entities from an alien spacecraft. - **Saint Bartholomew** — the medical vessel *Asclepius*; a saboteur, and the survivors being found cut up and vivisected. - **Summervox Whispers** — hackers who find only an empty folder called Summervox. - **The Call of Kullat Nunu** — a biomechanical ship that bonds with and controls its crew. - **Under the Influencer** — the Corporation's printed-and-grown influencer Mikayla, "batshit insane." - **Vade Retro Satana** — the medical vessel *Beatrix*, transporting a prisoner. - **Visceral Drive** — the Salvation Ship *Viscera*, a bio-mechanical vessel bleeding into space. - **Yellow Sine** — the *Yellow King*'s crew, infected with a nanovirus. Also on the shelf: **ViewScream: ISNOCSTS** ("In Space No One Can See The Strings"), a 32-page scenario by Arnold Cassell set aboard the gone-dark Space Station Snowth, where four crew members are the only living things left. It runs on the core **ViewScream** engine rather than being a version of it. ## References - [ViewScream on itch.io — Rafael Chandler (Neoplastic Press)](https://rafaelchandler.itch.io/viewscream) - [ViewScream, 1st Edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/113064/viewscream-1st-edition) - [ViewScream, 2nd Edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/187177/viewscream-2nd-edition) - [ViewScream 2020 — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/308155/viewscream-2020) - [ViewScream: Distance — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/312661/viewscream-distance) - [Rafael Chandler on the 2nd edition — The Hardboiled GMshoe's Office Q&A](https://gmshoe.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/qa-rafael-chandler-viewscream-2nd-edition-and-metallic-tome/) - [ViewScream 2nd Edition Kickstarter trailer](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rafaelchandler/viewscream-2nd-edition) - [Review: ViewScream 2nd Edition - Endzeitgeist](https://endzeitgeist.com/viewscream-2nd-edition-unique-game) - [Review: ViewScream 2nd Edition - RPGnet](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/view-printable.phtml?reviewNumber=17947) - [Actual play: VIEWSCREAM - A Horror LARP (The RPGeeks, GM'd by Tom from No Rolls Barred) - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG45l7BSTx1I) - [Actual play (audio): Viewscream - The Alala - Heart Points podcast - SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/heartpoints/viewscream-1-final)