Pressure Point (POD, Black & White)

You had been assured that it wasn't any different than working in space. After all, what's the difference between working in the tight confines of a generic Continuum Corporation orbital outpost and the Cameron F5, a research station drilled into the canyon wall of a milky, lugubrious sea on the moon? The view was worse, but the pay was slightly better. It was still months of claustrophobic drudgery and too few holotapes to watch and miles of nothing outside the pointless portholes.

Last week, the scientists found something. Something besides the usual mineral deposits they had been fishing out of the sand, anyway. It sent ripples of excitement through the eggheads, but was barely a blip amongst your maintenance crew.

Then last night, the power went out, whatever they found broke quarantine and something outside moved. Something large enough to make the entire station shake.

This is PRESSURE POINT, a solo roleplaying adventure zine inspired by Alien, Event Horizon, and the Abyss and the first game using the boring system.

What is the boring system? Boring system games or, as we like to call them, BS Games are solo adventure games you play like the mighty adventure gamebooks of old - Fighting Fantasy, Greyhawk, and the like, which combine dice rolls and stat checking like an RPG and the path choices of a Choose Your Own Adventure game but BS games have a twist: They incorporate a legacy element of play where, at certain times in your adventure, you must make a choice and physically alter the zine - Usually by making a choice and actually boring a hole in the page to represent your decision! Sometimes, those holes will just be that - irrevocable proof of your choice, for better or worse but other times, that hole may come back around to affect your later gameplay, by marking something on the back of the page or eliminating certain pathways with an actual hole!

All you need to play is the game book in printed format, (Either printed by DTRPG or printed at home with the digital files) a pencil or pen vicious enough to pierce the pages of the game, and a single six-sided die.

In Pressure Point, you play a member of the maintenance crew on board a research station mounted to the wall of an underwater canyon on a distant moon. Your occupation is pure drudgery, just cleaning up the black sand that manages to find its way into every crack and crevasse of the structure, despite being completely sealed off from the milky waters of the dead sea beyond.

Then something happens in the science wing, plunging the station into darkness, chaos, and danger. Armed with nothing but your spanner, a laser drill, and your thermal coveralls, you must attempt to discover what happened to the station and reactivate the core before you freeze. Avoiding anything that could cause a puncture in the station and everyone's immediate death would be good too.

Oh, and there's something alien in the station, of course. Can't forget that! This is the Zinequest version of the game and is a quick, easy-to-play solo RPG.