[quote=LancerDancer]
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Well. All the ideas are good and all but eventually people in this 'skeleton crew' of yours will have to start dying off. This would of course start with npcs and any characters who would have had to leave due to personal issues and didn't know when they returned. What you have to consider is what is out there in our world right. Aliens: Isolation was recently released so quite a few people would have bought it. Some of those people might be roleplayers who are on this very site. They just finished playing Aliens and [b]Bam[/b], this pops up. Those players will be looking for something like Aliens but not quite like it. So, lets say we go the path of the rampant Alien.

How exactly would have gotten into the station? If it had come through an outer vent it would have caused a leak in the Station's oxygen supply and the station would have gone straight on lock down. This scenario is somewhat similar to what your original post is like. The alarm goes off because something happened so the people gather in the cafeteria. There they find the first victim of this alien. The characters and npcs can't quite tell it was the alien though so they are lead to believe it is a human. Now, lets mix it up a bit. In a fit of hysteria the characters and npcs start pointing fingers in a sort of he-said-she-said fiasco. Thus, we mix in the 'murder' portion of the idea. In an attempt to find out who the murder is, the character or npc who is a guard would try and collect evidence against a certain character.

But, then of course there would be npcs and characters with a certain hatred against another npc or character and the he-said-she-said turns into a mass hysteria of blaming just so some people can get rid of their 'enemy'. Then we start mixing in the wild AI idea. The AI knows the alien is inside the station at it must 'cleanse' itself of the foreign being. Only, everybody in the cafeteria would have been contaminated with foreign material and would then be considered foreign by the AI. So, the AI starts killing off people while this mass hysteria is going on. Yet, another person gets killed by the alien and the mass hysteria is ceased as they go on the look for a 'rogue agent' as they believe. But what they don't realize is that the AI is still out there killing people. Not in the sense of attacking robots, no that would be too cliché. The AI instead does it in a more subtle way. The occasional death because the water was too hot or a drowning while taking a swim because the AI had covered the pool(Characters and npcs wouldn't know this).

And thus, we take three plot ideas and make one. The idea is to work in as many plot elements as possible so that the characters, unknown to them of course, would have several possible pathways to go down. So, we took one question and made it into a plot based off of three smaller plots. Yet, the above plot isn't quite easy to do with a small amount of people. We would need at least three or five characters to do it properly and at least ten npcs if not more. So, let's say that the station was made to have a stock of 100 hundred humans and we are currently at a quarter of that. So that leave 25 people. We would need at least five so that would leave 20 npcs. Then, we reduce npc numbers are more people join.