Sonia, the final test subject in Warped Beyond Recognition, embodies one of the core ideas of the module: losing the boundary between your self and the world around you. I wanted to leave each character description fairly minimal in the book itself: much of the beauty of RPG modules lies in the unique stories DMs and players create by bridging gaps in the the source material. And besides, succinctness and ease of use are almost always more important than deep lore, IMO.

But this is a “making of” post, so here’s a little background about how I thought about Sonia when I made Warped.

Sonia was a promising young pilot working for Tannhäuser intelligence before the Brain Drain experiments started. The researchers tested her last because, in a way, she was the culmination of their project. The other subjects were useful of course, but were there largely to eliminate less fruitful avenues for experimentation.

Unlike the other subjects, she was expertly trained in disciplines greatly valued by the corporation. The suits in charge hoped the project could transform her from a useful asset to a new kind of powerful weapon they could wield in their quest for corporate hegemony: a hyper-intuitive pilot, a psychic spy. Unfortunately for them, this selfsame expert training was the project's downfall.

Unlike the others, Sonia was very familiar with Tannhäuser and its motives. Unlike the others, she was a skilled pilot and intelligence officer, trained to fly all manner of craft and hack into all manner of machines. And as the last to be experimented upon, Sonia could see each of the other subjects come back from their tests changed — damaged. She resolved then that Tannhäuser would not control her, and would not break her.

When her test finally came, drugged and awake in hyperspace, she experienced her sense of self expand beyond the bounds of her body and into the space around her. The others had experienced this before her, but her familiarity with spacecraft and cybernetics made it almost easy for her self to flow through the corridors and ducting, through circuits and wiring, to deftly dodge counter-intrusion firewalls and assume a new form, a new body: the ship itself.

And once she had control, she would not let go. She released her fellow test subjects and trapped their captors, watching with satisfaction as they dominated and slaughtered them all.

But ultimately, she too was changed by the test. She could not maintain all control, and her sense of self never really returned to her old body. She found herself inexorably intertwined with the ship, a biomechanical being unlike any that have come before her.

Her path, should she survive the arrival of the PCs, lies in figuring out who — or what — she has become. And the player characters, if they are careful, may even find an ally in this ship that was once a girl.