🕷️ Making WBR: Subject 02

The second behind-the-scenes look at the making of Warped Beyond Recognition's art, with time-lapse commentary video about the second test subject, Miriam Rios.

🕷️ Making WBR: Subject 02

Miriam might be the scariest "monster" in Warped Beyond Recognition, and her story is probably the most brutal and tragic. Let's start with a video about drawing her and a bit of a deeper dive into her backstory:

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Warped Beyond Recognition module spoilers ahead!

The other test subjects are more-or-less stationary on the ship, at least until they become aware of the player characters' presence. Miriam, on the other hand, prowls the ship and will stalk them, sending dismembered limbs to hold them down and tear them apart. She's also the cause of the horrible scene of dismembered crew members that greets players shortly after boarding the RSV Fidanza. Until the players are aware of Subject 06's control of the ship systems, she will be the most immediate threat.

I pictured Miriam as a kid that had to really fight for survival, for whom self-preservation was deeply ingrained as more important than anything else, and something that only she could be trusted to provide for herself. Which makes it all the more horrible when she finally gets taken away from her dismal homeworld to become part of a "special program" for "gifted youth," she finds herself trapped on a ship in deep space, being subjected to tortuous experiments designed to draw out her latent psychic abilities. Unfortunately for her captors, though, the experiments are a bit too successful.

I tried to make all of the test subjects viable as monsters but also in some way redeemable, or save-able, with the module's Sanity system. Miriam's probably the hardest to do this with, as she's a big threat and the furthest gone mentally. But unlike some of the others, if you can help her recover some semblance of sanity, she will be very earnest and loyal. Ultimately she craves safety, and if the player characters can show her a way to have it, she will take to them.

Musically, Miriam's was a pretty straightforward theme to work out with Galen: I wanted it to be very much a horror theme, with unsettling, abrasive, scary sounds, screams of anguish, and Galen added in a kind of frenetic, fast-paced breakbeat element that I think really brought it all together.