The game
What PRC is
Every other group in this genre hands you a site that already exists. This one makes you dig it out of the ground, and the map remembers.
The short version
It's an SCP-genre roleplay group, but the site isn't built yet. A government blacksite on an island. Detainees dig the site out of the mountain, Facilities build with what gets dug, Security runs the camp, and the Mobile Vanguard Force handles it when something lands. Everything that gets built stays on the map permanently, so the site you play in next month is the one people actually dug.
The longer version
PRC is Prometheus Research Corporation. It is government funded and it is not the Foundation. The Foundation contains things. PRC contains domain failures: places, processes and systems that stopped behaving.
The site is on a fall-themed island, and at launch it barely exists: a supply pier, an intake hut, a prisoner camp, a checkpoint, an open dig called the Cut, and one corridor inside the mountain with three doors that don't open yet.
There's a community progress bar. When it fills, the next part of the site unlocks, for everybody, permanently. Floor 2 doesn't exist until people dig it. In every other group the site is scenery. Here the map is the scoreboard.
What a domain failure is
The Foundation's unit of work is an object: a thing, in a box, with a number and a containment procedure. PRC's unit of work is a place that stopped obeying itself. A mine where the rock doesn't stay where it was put. A process that produces a different output than its inputs allow. A building whose floor count disagrees with its stairwell.
You don't contain a domain failure by locking a door. You contain it by occupying the ground, surveying it, building on it and holding it. That is a construction project, which is why the game is one. It is also why there are prisoners: this is survey and excavation work in a place that isn't reliably lawful, so the state supplies the labour and the Corporation is contracted to run it.
The charter, in the site's own voice
PROMETHEUS RESEARCH CORPORATION
SITE- · RISK MITIGATION · UNIT-Δ
The Corporation is funded by government contract to identify, occupy and stabilise domain failures: locations, systems and processes that have ceased to behave according to their own rules. We do not collect anomalies. We move onto them and we do not leave.
Site- is a contract site. It consists of a supply pier, a detainee camp, an open excavation designated the Cut, and an adit driven into the eastern massif. Everything else on the licence is scheduled, funded, and not yet built.
Detainee Labour digs. Facilities Maintenance builds what is dug. Logistics moves what is built. Security Division counts them out and counts them back. Mobile Vanguard Force answers for the rest of it.
Personnel are reminded that the works programme is the site. What is built here is built permanently and is not subject to reversal by individual request.
Something below the fourth floor has been here longer than any of us. We are all still figuring out what that means.
Three clocks
PRC runs on three clocks at once, and you should be able to feel all three.
30 minutes
The session
One shift: draw a tool, work a face, haul spoil, place a module, run an escort.
“I did a thing tonight.”
7 days
The week
Two scheduled ops, a promotion board, the supply boat.
“My department is going somewhere.”
Months
The campaign
The progress bar, floors, zones, seasons.
“The site is growing and I dug part of it.”