A downloadable game

The year is 1987. Dozens of American coastal towns and villages have been wiped out. Buildings and vehicles are untouched, but the population has vanished completely, leaving behind tiny piles of ███████████.

Investigations have revealed a clear pattern: In each case, a wounded Russian Soldier washed ashore, befriended a group of local children, went on heartwarming adventures with them—then radio silence.

FIST has been hired to infiltrate, investigate, and terminate.

Note: If a Russian Soldier feels like a bad fit for your group, feel free to substitute it with a cute little alien, stinky bigfoot, classic movie monster, etc.

Objective

FIST operatives! You are equipped with holographic projectors designed to help you pose as children. Once deployed to the coastal city of Westoria you must:

Locate and befriend the Russian Soldier to earn his trust.
Invite him on one or more heartwarming adventures.
Uncover the true nature of the Russian Soldier and stop him before another town is lost.

Remember: You are not actually children! You are adult members of FIST—highly capable fighting machines. Use whatever training and resources are at your disposal. But under no circumstances are you to let the Russian Soldier suspect you are anything other than average 80s kids. (Real children run from bullies; they don’t dropkick them through a brick wall.)

Featuring

An adventure generator to generate random heartwarming 80s kid adventures
A collection of weird NPCs (mostly weird locals)
A few new enemies (don't get too excited)

While this scenario was written for the badass indie RPG FIST, it's mostly system neutral and should be easy to adapt to your favorite game. (If you bought the Itch.io BLM or Ukraine bundles, you should have a copy of FIST in your library.)

Author's Note

NEST was directly inspired by Russkies (1987), an actual movie about Cold War children who befriend a wounded Russian sailor. Inexplicably made in the tradition of E.T. and The Goonies, the film stars a young Joaquin Phoenix as Danny, and that kid from A Christmas Story (1983).

I saw Russkies as a child, and the premise struck me as odd even back then. Memories of it gestated in the back of my head, until they burst forth in the graphic display you now hold in your hands.

I’m sorry.

Changelog

v1.1.0 - 10 June 2022

Added progress clocks to track suspicion and █████████.
Added the Big Kids optional rule. (Thanks, R.!)
Added info on how to deal with FIST ops fighting the Russian Soldier.
Various typos and corrections.

More information

Status	Released
Category	Physical game
Rating	Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 total ratings)
Author	Brandoff
Genre	Adventure
Tags	80s, fist, Horror, military, Modern, nsr, scenario, scifi
Average session	A few hours

Download

NEST for FIST v1.1.0.pdf 622 kB

Development log

NEST Won?!
Aug 08, 2022
Update! Progress Clocks, AKA How do I run this thing?
Jun 11, 2022
Progress Continues
Jun 09, 2022
An Unexpected Game Jamourney
Jun 06, 2022

Comments

kumada12 years ago(+2)

Nest is a FIST scenario that feels just slightly out of genre---almost a Kids On Bikes or Tales From The Loop adventure, but with a twist on that formula too.

The PDF is 4 pages, with some nice splashes of color and a clean, readable layout. There's a lot of redaction of the text, which creates a sort of anti-canon in places, but it doesn't really damage the reader's ability to understand the module.

The source material this adventure is pulling from is weird, and there's a quirky, off-beat tone throughout. Plotwise, you play as FIST agents posing as kids to gather intel on a cosmic monster posing as a quirky family-friendly-80s-kids-movie outsider, and the way this recontextualizes every scene in the game is really cool!

It also means there's sort of a bunch of adventures inside the adventure, as the cosmic monster wants to psychically harvest uplifting experiences, and so it tries to drag everyone into heartwarming 80s kids movie excursions, which the PCs need to go along with in order to learn more about it...

It's neat and tense and weird.

I think my only quibble is that the cosmic monster is tough---it's got very high stats---but it doesn't really have a weakness that I could find in the text. So there isn't really a mechanical incentive to investigate it at all, just blast it with the highest powered weaponry the players can scrounge. GMs can change this on the fly, and clever players can find ways to turn some of its features against it, but it's then on the GM to decide that this changes the monster's mechanics---otherwise the group is in for an extremely tough fight.

Overall, this is a really solid adventure concept with some great slow burn storytelling potential and a weird/tense/jokey vibe throughout. It's interesting as a FIST adventure, and I think it could also work pretty easily in any Kids On Bikes style game. Definitely run this if you get the chance.

kumada12 years ago(+2)

Actually, this just occurred to me, but one way to enforce the adventure's pacing is this:

-To prepare the FIST team for the op, they are put through a ritual that temporarily transforms them into human children. The ritual will wear off in 72 hours, but cannot be reversed until then.

Brandoff2 years ago(+2)

I love it! Especially how drastically that would change the scenario, from “Mercenaries struggling not to lose their cool and reveal themselves” to “Mercenaries who are genuinely stripped of their power and trying to cope with normal life.”

Would you mind if I included your idea as an optional rule?

Heck, maybe I could even add Traits that temporarily override and take effect during the transformation. Traits based on 80s kid movie archetypes… :D

kumada12 years ago(+1)

Sure, go for it!

Brandoff2 years ago(+1)

Thank you!