Hawaiʻi — Emergency Republic
Fictional alternate history beginning September 2026. Choose the scenario date before revealing later timeline events.
Run it
- Start with an ordinary job and one discrepant record.
- Track who knew the warning before the intervention.
- Show the people affected outside the dashboard.
- Keep the cosmic source unknown. Let Theorize establish case truths.
Five rings
Normal → First Sign → Escalation → Revelation → Dissolution. Land a Terror and a Temptation before advancing.
Clocks
Bleed: six segments per case; use existing move triggers. Aperture: eight segments across the season; advance at case end, a claimed character, failed Theorize or a disclosed GM trigger. It measures intrusion, not an island count.
People and obligations
Keep specific names and debts. A shared childhood is optional. The finale follows play; no mandatory evacuation or hidden conversion of Bonds into boat seats.
Basic moves
Special
Anyone at the table may offer a specific complication in exchange for +1 to a roll about to happen. Take it or refuse it freely. If taken, the complication happens whether you succeed or not.
"+1 if the fictional contractor logs your badge."
"+1 if you go back down without a tender."
Open with a concrete local condition or displaced cost. “The delivery is on time; the clinic has no driver.” The move name is retained; inevitable flooding is not.
When you catch your character having been helpful in a way you can't account for, name it out loud at the table. Mark XP.
If you don't say it and the GM notices first, mark Static instead.
Confession is protective. Silence compounds.
You lose the character. You keep the voice. Roll up someone new; when the GM decides your claimed character appears, you play them and you decide what help they offer.
The help has to be real. Concrete, correct, generous. No riddles.
Static
0–5, add to VEIL and anything touching the other side. Take a Symptom each mark. Static Moves unlock at 1, 3 and 5. It never clears. At 5 the character is observed — one final scene, one impossible thing, no roll, then the GM has them.
Burning a Bond stops one Static mark. Two Bonds each, once apiece. No hidden evacuation-seat cost applies.
Symptoms (d6)
| 1 | You are eleven minutes ahead of every clock on the island, and you can prove it. |
| 2 | You've stopped hearing the surf. It's still there. Everyone else hears it. |
| 3 | Standing water tilts slightly toward you. |
| 4 | You remember an unobserved branch. It hurts to hold. |
| 5 | There's a day missing and you can feel the edge of it, like a seam. |
| 6 | Someone has started calling you by a name nobody gave you, and correcting themselves, and doing it again. |
Rolled a duplicate? It gets worse. Say how.
Signs of the Signal (d6)
| 1 | Every clock in the room agrees, and all of them are wrong by the same amount. |
| 2 | The surf stops. Not quietens — stops. For as long as it takes to notice. |
| 3 | Standing water is tilted, very slightly, toward something. |
| 4 | A count comes out at eleven when there are nine of you. |
| 5 | Someone repeats a thing you thought thirty seconds ago — and apologises. |
| 6 | A door, a stair, a corridor that is on the plan and has never been there. |
The Signal and The Sounding
A record can describe a possible branch. Reading it can change what follows.
Observation is not neutral. Intervention may prevent a local event while moving its cost elsewhere. Helpful information can be partial without being meaningless.
Keep The Sounding as the larger cosmic unknown. Its exact event and date are not fixed. Grandmother remains an unexplained voice.
Never pre-write the solution
Record established facts, warnings and interventions separately. A successful Theorize establishes case truths; it does not erase the accepted chronology. Do not make every success secretly worthless.
Fictional timeline
September Compression
Fuel/logistics anomalies amid the fictional Hormuz, oil and election crisis.
Emergency Logistics Order
Expanded federal coordination and emergency security.
Prediction-linked arrest
Signal information is used before a conventional evidentiary chain.
Branch Event One
A Harbor/Airport warning prompts interventions and cascading failures; an unacted branch records worse damage.
Observer Trials
A Hawaiʻi cell tests how knowledge and observation shift branches.
Displaced costs
Steering moves consequences elsewhere.
Fragmentation
Form, factions and campaign-present year remain open.
Real places · fictional incidents
Honolulu Harbor
Cargo records and allocation decisions.
Kalaeloa Barbers Point Harbor
Fuel/logistics dispatch discrepancies.
Daniel K. Inouye International Airport
Contradictory clearances and airport-side consequences.
Campbell Industrial Park
Invented contractor offices and inventory disputes.
H-1
Delayed shifts and deliveries in the fictional crisis.
Sand Island
Invented workshop and warehouse scenes.
Pearl Harbor
Military/federal interface in the fictional emergency storyline.
Verify specific addresses and layouts before adding them. Do not label invented interiors as real facilities.
Institutions
Emergency coordination
The fictional Emergency Republic expands logistics priorities and security access.
JIITG
Recovered fictional program label for non-originating records. Full expansion not yet established.
Observer cell
Available in late 2028–2029 and later. Tests the effect of knowledge on branches.
Contractors and communities
Transpelagic and Halcyon Vitality are fictional case contractors. Household networks and workers have goals beyond being emergency resources.
Fictional recurring people
Otty
Ottoline Sabban maintains the files at Halloran & Vey. Ask what she wants, not just where the record is.
Mrs. Ansel
A fictional contract liaison. Access is scoped; this role asserts no real Hawaiian licensing law.
Grandmother
An unexplained helpful voice. Neither her identity nor the cosmic source is predetermined.
The household network
Player-authored people in real places, with private histories and specific obligations. No required common ancestry or childhood.
Twenty minutes, maximum
- A job — who's hiring, the deliverable, the deadline. It pays too well.
- One wrong detail. Never explain it.
- Four or five locations: a name, a smell, one person there.
- Five to seven people: name, want, secret. Two are lying about unrelated things.
- Eight to twelve clues on cards.
- Five terrors, five temptations — one pair per ring.
- Depth 3.
Writing clues
A clue is a hole in the world, not a piece of a puzzle you already solved.
| Good | Bad |
|---|---|
| The tower's water usage tripled after the last tenant left. | People are living in the flooded lobby. (explains itself) |
| Her last transmission logged four minutes after the vessel went down. It describes the vessel going down. | She could see the future. (that's a theory, not a clue) |
Theorize
Roll 2d6 + clues woven in − depth. Depth 3 one-shot · 4 longer case · 5 finale.
Glossary
| The Signal | Records and perceptions of possible branches; not guaranteed prophecy. |
| The Sounding | The larger cosmic premise. Exact event and date remain open. |
| Non-originating record | A record without an accountable originating source. |
| Static | Existing 0–5 exposure track; preserve move math and playbook starting values. |
| Observed / off soundings | Character language for being taken at Static 5, not a claim about local tradition. |
| Aperture | Eight-segment season intrusion clock. |
| Branch displacement | An intervention moves a cost rather than necessarily removing it. |