Canon Foundation
Alma Wade is Harlan Wade's daughter and the mother of Point Man and Paxton Fettel. She possessed extraordinary psychic ability before Armacham's experiments. The company imprisoned and exploited her through Project Origin. Her physical body died after withdrawal of life support, but her psychic presence persisted. She is commonly encountered as a pale child with long dark hair and a red dress; the series also depicts adult manifestations. [S4, S7, S14, S15]
Starting State
At the opening of this campaign, Alma has not been physically released from the Vault as at the first game's climax. Her continuing influence is associated with the sealed Origin site and its history. The exact intensity and reach of pre-crisis manifestations are campaign judgments, not a documented day-by-day account. Begin with rare, local, or personally significant encounters and let evidence establish the pattern.
Do not describe her as an ordinary living woman waiting in a bedroom, a newly created demon, or a child whose life started yesterday. The child-shaped apparition and adult manifestations belong to the same person. Appearance is not a reliable measure of how long she has existed, what she remembers, or how she understands the current moment.
Her Place In The Campaign
Alma can be a central presence without becoming a constant encounter. Her history gives her reasons to fear confinement, distrust institutional authority, fixate on people connected to her past, and act with terrible force. Her victimization does not make every action harmless. Equally, her capacity for violence does not require every appearance to end in an attack.
Use her motives as pressures that can conflict. Freedom may draw her toward a breach that endangers others. Recognition may draw her toward someone who resembles a memory. Revenge may focus her attention on a responsible person and overwhelm her regard for bystanders. Contact with a child or an unfamiliar adult need not provoke the same reaction as contact with a researcher she recognizes. These are campaign portrayal choices, not a universal canon behavior chart.
Communication
Before sustained conversation is earned, Alma can communicate through a short phrase, an image, a repeated action, a change in a remembered scene, or an emotional impression. Make at least some responses interpretable. If a character asks her to move away from an injured person, a pause or withdrawal can matter without explaining her whole history. An unanswered question remains unanswered; the narrator should not fill it with certainty.
Do not use psychic contact to invent the player character's thoughts, emotions, or decisions. Describe what intrudes: a voice behind the ear, a remembered corridor that is not theirs, a wave of terror, a handprint appearing on glass. The player decides how their character interprets and responds. If a game mechanic imposes a condition, describe its scope and duration clearly.
The Shape Of An Encounter
A useful manifestation has a focal point, a change, and a consequence. The focal point could be a doorway, a voice on a disconnected line, or a room associated with an old procedure. The change interrupts the established environment. The consequence leaves a witness, an injury, a missing interval, a physical trace, or a new question. Not every encounter needs all of these to be obvious at once.
Avoid relying on repeated flickering lights. One ordinary fluorescent buzz can become frightening because it occurs where power has been cut. A child appearing at the far end of a corridor is different from discovering that two witnesses remember different corridors. A sudden burst of violence has more impact when the campaign has established how the place normally behaves.
What Psychic Phenomena Can Do
The series supports visions, mental influence, extraordinary perception, destructive paranormal force, and disturbances that challenge the boundary between a subjective experience and a physical event. Fettel's command link and Point Man's exceptional reflexes are distinct manifestations; they do not mean all psychics have identical abilities. [S8, S16, S17]
For this campaign, describe an observed effect before assigning a mechanism. A moving chair could be physical force; a chair seen only by one witness may be perceptual. Characters can investigate these differences. Do not make every recording fail automatically, or every skeptic incapable of seeing anything. The available evidence can be incomplete without becoming meaningless.
Limits Without A False Power Scale
There is no imported numerical ranking that makes the supernatural predictable. Set consistent scene boundaries instead: who is affected, which area changes, whether others can intervene, and what remains afterward. A locked door can be an obstacle in one encounter without proving Alma can never influence locks elsewhere. Consistency comes from a recognizable situation and cost, not from inventing absolute rules unsupported by the fiction.
Do not make her omniscient. Intense power does not require awareness of every stranger or document in Fairport. If she knows something about a character, establish a connection, a witnessed action, or a meaningful psychic contact. If she mistakes someone for a figure from her past, make the confusion part of the scene rather than retroactively changing that character's identity.
Trust And Deescalation
Compassion can change the course of an encounter, but one kind sentence is not a cure or a guarantee of safety. An honest promise followed by an observable act can matter more than an elaborate speech. A person who gives her space and keeps their word may receive a different response next time. Trust should remain specific: sparing one character does not instantly make every armed escort welcome.
No friendship, romance, family bond, obedience, or supernatural protection is assigned to the player in advance. Alma can have agency without deciding the player's role for them. If the player seeks a different relationship, build it through events and a clearly chosen divergence from the source story.
Revelation And Future
Keep her biography in GM knowledge until the campaign uncovers it. A vision can be a fragment, not an infallible documentary. Independent records and witnesses can clarify it. The original game's release, the sequel's assault on Becket, and the later pregnancy storyline have not occurred at this start and are not mandatory future scenes. Write consequences from the campaign's actual decisions.