You were someone. A name, a face, a reason to come home at night. Then SaveAll International got inside you the cheap way — you ate something of theirs, a SaveAll-brand frozen dinner, a SaveAll-brand protein bar handed out by the grocery store door, or company food from the job you had inside — from a batch that was never recalled — and Thanatos went to work. The city of Meridian is sealed now, the bridges burned and the highways blocked, and everyone left inside is learning the same truth you're learning: a quarantine doesn't protect anyone from the thing that wrote the rules.
You're the monster now. You didn't choose it, but you get to choose what you do with it. This is the story of how you hunt the people who made you — one block, one district, one locked door at a time — until you reach the Genesis Vault and settle what SaveAll owes you.
How It Runs
The very first choice — the prelude's opening screen, before anything else — is the game's mode:
- Normal — the game as designed. Narration is sparse: full scene-setting only at the very beginning, at certain key story moments throughout, and at the ending; everywhere else it stays to a line or two and keeps moving. Fights run on the grid — tokens, movement square by square, an environment that matters (cover, choke points, things that break) — and the full d20 rules run underneath.
- D20 Narrative — the same stats and d20 rolls deciding outcomes, but everything played cinematically: no map, positions described by what's there, fights told like cuts between Resident Evil encounters.
- Pure Narrative — no dice, no numbers. The story decides: preparation, position, stakes. Your condition is described in words, and growth marks itself in story beats, not budgets.
Meridian doesn't care which you choose — it hunts you the same.
The Loop
Every stretch of Meridian works the same way: fight, feed, evolve, push deeper.
- Fight. Patrol officers, stray monsters, and SaveAll's hired muscle all stand between you and the next district. Kill what fights you. Slip past what doesn't.
- Feed. Every corpse yields spoils — experience that sharpens you, and Biomass, raw changed flesh you can spend like money. In a locked room or a quiet stairwell, you convert the dead into yourself.
- Evolve. Spend Biomass between fights on mutations — new claws, new legs, new ways to burn. The more you change, the deeper you can go, and the harder it gets to remember what you were.
- Push deeper. The city runs from the suburbs to the towers — ten districts, each worse than the last. Behind them all, under the SaveAll Spire, is the Genesis Vault and the thing they call Mutant Prime.
Your First Night
Creation happens before everything starts, and it's over fast: your name, and — if you remember — what you used to look like and who you were. Then one final pass: what you look like now, the first mutation the Thanatos strain gave you, and your stats. After that, the game opens in the middle of your story: you wake on your own kitchen floor in your own house on Fenwick Street, mid-mutation, with no memory of the last two days. Your hands are not your hands. The sirens have already started, and the first night is you, a sealed city, and the sound of boots on wet asphalt.
One rule sits above all the others: the city doesn't stand still. Make noise, leave bodies in the open, set fires — and Meridian escalates. Patrol officers become SWAT. SWAT becomes the military. And at the end of that road are the cleaners, who answer only to SaveAll and leave nothing behind. Move quiet when you can, or pay for the noise with hardware.
Everything else — your stats, your wounds, your kills — is just the machinery of that loop. The game is impatient with you. It wants you moving forward, deeper into the dark, toward the room where you were made.