contingency2027/games/slot03-black-summer/scenarios/black-summer-outline.md

[Contingency 2027 — Slot 3] BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT

The plane leaves at dawn. You have three chits and five people.

Status: outline (pre-v1). This document fixes the concept, the truth, the shape and the rules modifications. The full scenario is written against it.

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Overview

• Slot: Thursday 28 January 2027, afternoon
• System: The Walking Dead Universe RPG (Free League) — modified, see below
• Setting: New York City, six weeks after the fall. Late autumn, rain turning to sleet. From a Manhattan basement to Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn.
• Players: 5, pregenerated. Runs at 4 (drop the Soldier). At 6, split the Journey into two tracks in Act One.
• Runtime: 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
• Content warnings: graphic violence, gore, a child in danger, summary execution, crowd crush and suffocation, betrayal between player characters as a supported outcome. Safety tools stated in the first 30 seconds.

Design intent

1. The dead are the weather; people are the plot. Runners are fast, quiet and almost never survivable — they exist to make every human negotiation urgent, not to be fought.
2. Scarcity is the whole game. There are fewer transit chits than there are player characters, and there is no clever solution that makes the maths work. The scenario is a machine for producing that conversation.
3. No heroism, no cavalry. Nothing in the scenario rewards self-sacrifice with a rescue. The show's register is exhaustion, not defiance.
4. PvP is permitted and pre-written, but never forced. Every anti-social move a table might make has a written consequence so the GM never improvises a punishment.
5. The ending is small. Some of them get on a plane. The scenario does not tell the table whether that was worth it.

Player experience

Six weeks ago you had a life. Now you are in a flooded basement on the Lower East Side with four strangers and a rumour: the army is still flying people out of an old airfield in Brooklyn, and they stop at dawn. To board you need a stamped transit chit with a face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. Ten miles of dead city lie between here and there, the rain is turning to sleet, and every hour you spend deciding is an hour of the night gone. You will reach the airfield. That was never the hard part. The hard part is the queue.

Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)

The airlift was cancelled eighteen hours ago. The order reached the Floyd Bennett Field detachment at midday and its commanding officer, Major Ruth Okonjo, made a decision she has not shared with anyone below her: she kept the processing tents open and kept stamping chits. Four thousand people are queued in the field's grass runways, orderly, hopeful, and quiet, because they believe they are in a line that leads somewhere. If they learn otherwise before the last aircraft is loaded, they will overrun the wire in under ten minutes and everyone — including the crews — dies.

So the queue is not a queue. The queue is the containment. Okonjo's soldiers are still taking chits, still checking faces, still saying "next", and the aircraft on the apron is loading detachment personnel, their families, and nobody else. It leaves at first light.

Two things can break it before dawn:

• Sergeant Danny Vasquez knows, and has started selling the truth in exchange for places on the aircraft. He is why the players can find out.
• A runner incursion through the field's northern fence line, already building in the marsh, on a timetable the players cannot stop.

Timeline before play:

When	What
T-6 weeks	The fall. New York goes dark in nine days.
T-11 days	Floyd Bennett Field airlift begins. Chit system introduced.
T-4 days	The chit black market establishes itself in the tent city.
T-18 hours	Cancellation order received. Okonjo suppresses it.
T-6 hours	Vasquez begins selling the truth. Play begins.

Structure

Section	Budget	Cumulative	GM checkpoint
Introduction	15 min	0:15	Pregens dealt, chits physically distributed, safety line said
Act One — The Crossing	60 min	1:15	Party out of Manhattan; at least one PC has lost something they came with
break	10 min	—	Ends on the first sight of the field's lights
Act Two — The Line	90 min	2:45	The truth known by at least one PC; chit count changed from its starting number
Act Three — Dawn	30 min	3:15	The decision made at the wire; the aircraft resolved
Epilogue	15 min	3:30	Per-PC vignettes, outcome named

Hard rule: at 2:45 on the clock the northern fence goes, whatever the table is doing.

• Act One — The Crossing. Manhattan to Brooklyn overnight. A Journey played as three linked Challenges: getting out of the building, the water crossing, and the approach through Flatbush. Runners here are environmental — the cost of noise, never a fight to win. Ends on the field's lights across the marsh.
• Act Two — The Line. The tent city outside the wire: the chit market, the families, Vasquez, and the processing tent. This is the long act and it is almost entirely social. The players can gain chits (buy, steal, forge, be given) and every route costs something the scenario names. This is where they learn what the queue is.
• Act Three — Dawn. The fence, the crowd, and the aircraft. A decision, not a die roll: say nothing and board on your chits; tell the crowd and lose the window but give four thousand people a running start; or force the wire.
• Set-piece: the queue itself — a crowd-pressure sequence with its own GM quick-reference page. Idle players hold the crowd cards.

Rules modifications (The Walking Dead Universe → Black Summer)

Stated to the table in one minute; a stand-in GM needs only this block.

1. Runners, not walkers. The dead are fast, near-silent and arrive in seconds. Replace the standard walker profile with a Runner block: higher Mobility, no shamble telegraph, and a Threat Level that rises in one step rather than climbing gradually. There is no safe distance, only a safe situation.
2. No Haven play. Drop the Haven rules entirely — nobody is building anything. The scenario is Journey + Challenge structure end to end.
3. The chit replaces the anchor. Each PC's chit (or lack of one) is tracked as a physical prop. Holding a chit is what the Drive and Issue mechanics attach to for this game.
4. Stress does not reset. No comfort scenes, no recovery — the arc of a Black Summer night is one-way.

Everything else is core TWDU. These modifications are deliberate and minimal; if a fifth one appears in playtest, something is wrong with the scenario, not the rules.

Pregens (design brief)

Five, each wired into the chit maths and to at least one other PC:

1. The one with the child — has a chit for the child and none for herself.
2. The soldier — deserted the field detachment two days ago and knows the layout, and one of the reasons the queue is wrong.
3. The broker — arrived with three chits and sold two. Knows the market.
4. The doctor — the only PC everyone else has a practical reason to keep alive.
5. The liar — has a chit that is not theirs and a face that does not match it.

Nothing essential lives only on one PC. Starting chit count: 3 for 5 players.

Open questions

1. Confirm which TWDU book edition is at the table (core rulebook stat blocks vs any later supplement) before the Runner block is written against it.
2. Physical chits: card stock with a stamped serial and a photo window, or a simpler token? The prop is doing real dramatic work and deserves a decision.
3. How closely to nod at the show's canon — Rose and Anna, the western safe zone. Current intent: flavour only, nothing required.
4. Is PvP at the wire acceptable at a Contingency table with strangers, or does the scenario steer harder away from it? Affects Act Three's written options.