RogOut – Game Lore

DRAFT VERSION

Summary

Centuries after a virus-borne apocalypse, survivors huddle in bunkers. The dark ruins of the old wealthy elite hide advanced loot, and they also hide dormant infected called the Sleepers, who wake only to movement. Each player wears a personal teleporter, the R.O.G. (Resonance Origin Gate). You teleport into a target location with nothing, loot it, recharge the device from the building's wireless charge field, and escape before the Sleepers overrun you. Recharging the field is what wakes them.

Successful extractions let you upgrade your bunker with crafting capabilities and a more powerful teleporter, until eventually you can bring equipment in with you. Dying on an expedition loses everything: collected loot, bunker stores, and teleport-power progression. Banking enough power unlocks more distant, better-protected locations with richer rewards. The endgame is the most secret laboratory of all, where the apocalypse began, and the goal there is to destroy the source.

1. World history

It began with a world like our own, where wealth quietly drew a line through humanity. Over centuries that line hardened: the elite ascended into technologies the rest could only dream of, leaving everyone else behind. Then it all came apart, and the survivors were driven beneath the earth.

Era One: The Known World (~2026)

Humanity lived much as it does today. Technology was roughly equivalent to the mid-2020s: firearms, the internet, conventional energy sources. Society was divided along familiar economic lines between the wealthy and the poor.

Era Two: The Great Divergence (Years 1–500 After Split)

Over the following centuries, the wealthy elite separated themselves from the rest of society. They funded private research, built isolated communities, and developed technologies far beyond what the general population could reach. The poor stayed in an industrial-era paradigm of gunpowder weapons and mechanical technology, while the rich advanced into laser weapons, photon cannons, energy-based systems, and finally teleportation.

The two civilizations co-existed but were worlds apart. The lower class had no access at all to what the elite discovered.

Era Three: The Collapse (The Apocalypse)

An event triggered a global collapse, and survivors do not know its precise cause. It may have been a dangerous experimental technology, a biological agent, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, the result was catastrophic. Nearly all of humanity perished, and the atmosphere was severely damaged. Nothing grows on the surface, and prolonged exposure is lethal.

A small number of people survived by sealing themselves inside bunkers they had reached in time. The wealthy elite had built these bunkers and stocked them with advanced technology, including portal devices. Much of the knowledge needed to operate or maintain that technology was lost.

2. The Infected — "The Sleepers"

The collapse came with a virus of unknown origin. It infected humans and gradually transformed them, in body and mind, into something no longer recognizably human. The infected became sensitive to light, which drove them into dark enclosed spaces: the mansions, laboratories, and underground facilities of the former elite.

In those dark places the infected entered a state of deep hibernation, or anabasis, to conserve energy. They do not age. They do not need food while dormant. They remain suspended in near-stasis, and they wake only when they detect movement. The moment they wake, their instinct to feed activates.

Key behavior: the Sleepers react only to movement. Sound and light do not wake them. Once one wakes, though, it can alert others nearby, and that can chain through an entire building's worth of dormant infected.

Players do not know the full history of the collapse or exactly how fast it happened. The origin of the Sleepers stays ambiguous, a mystery to uncover or to leave unknown.

3. Teleportation technology

How it works

Portal devices use energy to dematerialize and rematerialize matter. The energy cost is not uniform. Organic matter such as living humans and basic clothing requires relatively little energy. Solid objects such as metal, equipment, weapons, and tools require vastly more, and the more advanced an item's material and technology, the higher its teleportation cost.

This is why early survivors can only teleport themselves wearing little more than rags, and why hauling a full kit of gear demands a far more powerful device.

The lost art of fixed portals

The elite originally pioneered teleportation as large fixed installations wired into their mansions and laboratories. After the collapse almost none remain operational, and the knowledge to repair them is gone. Survivors no longer rely on fixed portals at all. Every expedition today is powered by the personal, rogue-built R.O.G. device (§4).

4. R.O.G. devices — Resonance Origin Gate

Origin

Rogue scientists engineered the R.O.G. devices. These were outcasts who worked outside both the elite's closed research circles and the general population's reach. Using salvaged components and incomplete knowledge of elite teleportation theory, they produced something unprecedented: a personal, wearable portal device that needs no fixed installation.

How it works

Each R.O.G. device is one half of a paired set. The device worn by the user resonates with its counterpart, the home unit installed in the survivor's bunker. With enough charge, it dematerializes the wearer and rematerializes them back home, regardless of distance.

Power requirements follow the same physics as all portal technology. Teleporting the wearer alone, with no equipment, requires a large but manageable energy draw. Teleporting the wearer with equipment such as weapons, armor, and provisions requires significantly more power, and that power scales with the material and technology of each item carried.

A R.O.G.'s teleportation power can be upgraded over time (see §7). A weak device can only pull its wearer home near-naked. A fully upgraded one can extract a survivor fully geared, and can even carry equipment in at the start of a run. Energy is the scarcest resource in the post-collapse world, so most rogues treat a charged, upgraded device as their most prized possession.

Wireless Concentrated Charging Field (W.C.C.F.)

The elite built their facilities with an ambient wireless charging infrastructure, the Wireless Concentrated Charging Field. It was originally designed to keep their own devices and systems powered passively. Many abandoned mansions and laboratories still run these fields today, fed by century-lasting power reserves in the emitters.

Where present-day wireless chargers only trickle power to a single device sitting on a pad, a W.C.C.F. floods an entire facility with a concentrated, high-intensity charge that powers many devices at once. That intensity is exactly what makes it dangerous to switch on, since the same dense field that fills a R.O.G. fast also rouses the electromagnetically-sensitive Sleepers.

A R.O.G. device cannot make it home on its own reserves. It must draw from an active W.C.C.F. to charge enough to teleport out. Activating a field has two consequences:

  1. It opens a resonance point. The surge of charge creates a stable resonance the R.O.G. can lock onto, a teleport-out point that appears to every survivor in the group as a glowing Portal somewhere in the location. To escape, survivors must physically reach this point and ROG out from it.
  2. It wakes the Sleepers. The W.C.C.F.'s magnetic interference disturbs the Sleepers, whose virus-altered physiology is sensitive to electromagnetic waves, and rouses the building's dormant infected.

Because of this, rogues follow a strict discipline: charge last. They loot the location first, find what they came for, and only fire up the W.C.C.F. when they are ready to leave. Then they race the waking Sleepers to the resonance point.

"ROG/Out"

Reaching a resonance point and activating a R.O.G. device to escape became known among survivors as ROGing out. The phrase is shorthand for the device name and for the desperate sprint to the portal that always comes first. It carried weight. It meant the run was over, you had survived, and you were coming home with whatever you managed to grab.

5. The Bunker — player home base

Each player controls a bunker equipped with:

Crafting — the Printer

The bunker's Printer fabricates items from recipes, which are recovered out in the world as memory cards. Printing consumes Scrap, a raw fabrication resource looted commonly inside target locations. Better recipes and more advanced items demand more Scrap, so both recipes and Scrap are core expedition rewards.

Energy — a rare resource

Electricity is extremely scarce. Batteries and energy cells are among the rarest items in the world. The bunker's systems, including its scanners, terminal, and R.O.G. home unit, all run on whatever reserves the player has accumulated.

6. Gameplay loop

Scanning and targeting

Players use scanners, which run on energy, to search the world for viable target locations: abandoned elite mansions, laboratories, and underground facilities. A scan cross-references known databases and surfaces locations matched to the player's current teleporter power.

More distant and better-protected locations demand a more powerful R.O.G., and they unlock gradually as the player completes successful extractions. Difficulty and reward both escalate this way, without forcing new players into advanced zones.

Information as loot

Inside target locations, players can find memory cards and data drives. These hold coordinates for other elite facilities, which expand the scannable location list, and crafting recipes for the bunker Printer. They are among the most valuable finds.

The expedition

  1. The player teleports to the target location. Early on they arrive near-unarmed in basic clothing; with an upgraded R.O.G. they arrive partly or fully geared.
  2. They navigate the building and avoid waking the Sleepers.
  3. They loot the location for gear, Scrap, memory cards, and energy cells.
  4. They activate a W.C.C.F. to charge the R.O.G. This opens a resonance point, a Portal visible to the whole group, and begins waking the Sleepers.
  5. They race to the resonance point and ROG out before the Sleepers overwhelm the group, carrying home everything within the device's weight capacity.

If a player dies, whether killed by Sleepers or otherwise, their run ends and everything is lost (see §7).

Cooperative play

The game is multiplayer cooperative. Players can form groups and run expeditions together, which improves their odds against the Sleepers. Progression is per-player. If one player dies, only that player suffers the loss, and the others are unaffected.

7. Progression

Teleporter power and weight capacity

This is the central progression mechanic. Each successful extraction increases the R.O.G.'s teleportation power and raises the weight it can carry. Weight is spent per item according to its material and technology, so crude gear is cheap and advanced gear is expensive. Teleporter power determines:

A new survivor teleports in with nothing and barely escapes with a pocketful of loot. A veteran arrives fully geared and extracts heavy.

The long climb

Progress is measured in successful extractions. Each one strengthens the R.O.G., unlocks deeper locations, and brings the player closer to the one location that matters most, the origin of the collapse (see §8).

Dying on an expedition wipes everything: the loot you were carrying, the loot stored in your bunker, and all teleporter-power progression. A death is a full reset to a fresh survivor, so every run is a high-stakes decision.

8. Endgame — the Origin

Somewhere among the deepest, most fortified elite facilities lies the laboratory where the collapse began, the source of the virus that created the Sleepers. It is the most distant and most heavily infested location in the world, reachable only by a R.O.G. upgraded near its limit through many successful extractions.

The goal

  1. Survive expedition after expedition, upgrading teleporter power and unlocking ever-deeper locations
  2. Unlock and reach the origin laboratory
  3. Fight through its Sleeper population to the source of the infection
  4. Destroy it

The ending

Destroying the source breaks the grip the infection held over the world. The surviving player and any co-op partners who made it extract one last time, and their names are recorded among the few who reached the Origin. This counts as a win. Players who beat the game earn prestige bonuses and may start over to run it again under increased difficulty modifiers.

9. Open questions / to be developed