“My mommy always said there were no monsters—no real ones—but there are.”

Newt, Aliens (1986)

Humanity broke the world.

Obviously, it didn’t happen all at once. There wasn’t a day when everyone woke to find the seas poisoned, the skies stripped and the weather weaponised against anything stupid enough to be alive. It took a while. It arose from a thousand thoughtless acts of convenience and indifference. A billion little decisions made because somebody else would deal with the consequences. Targets missed, deadlines passed, problems pushed out beyond the slowly seething horizon.

Now we’re dealing with them. This is QkSLVa.

The Monsters Are Dying

The ecological collapse didn’t just threaten humanity. It caught other things in the net. All the warnings about the eco-sphere were taken to mean those things occupying links down the chain. Arrogant presumption meant humanity didn’t account for its position being a rung or three short of the top.

Vampires discovered that atmospheric depletion turned daylight from an inconvenience into an inferno. Lycanthropes found industrial silver-contaminants accumulating in groundwater, rain and soil until the environment itself became toxic. Ancient things dependent upon narrow ecological niches watched their habitats disappear, alongside those of near endless animal populations. Creatures that had survived centuries by hiding suddenly had nowhere left to hide.

The monsters came out and they brought their rage with them.

That is where QkSLVa starts. This is a near-future in which ecological disaster has flushed vampires, werewolves and other preternatural creatures into the open while simultaneously killing them. Humanity isn’t fighting against a plague or an invasion. It’s surviving the death throes of things that were here all along.

The Game

Characters in QkSLVa aren’t soldiers. They might dress like them, and even act like them, but the truth of the matter was that those with military training just weren’t suitable for the task at hand. Or maybe all the soldiers died in the first waves of the war. Maybe that’s something for the GM to consider and develop.

Instead, Characters are anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, medics, scientists, logisticians and analysts. People who understand environments, behaviour, systems and survival. Where conventional military responses proved inadequate, somebody probably decided specialists might have a better chance.

That said, no one had any chance against the threat without being a whole lot stronger. QkSLVa is the commercial name for an experimental cocktail derived from the DNA of the same creatures you’re hunting. It gives an ordinary human the speed, resilience, perception and rage necessary to meet something supernatural on roughly equal terms. Roughly.

The governments and corporations call the Characters Field Assets. The media have nickname the squads Silver Teams. If you care to bath in the toxic slurry of social media, you will find that the public has various other names depending on whether you saved their town or accidentally demolished half of it.

As with many Genre Setups for Sanction, you’re expendable, but reasonably well supported and moderately informed.

QkSLVa is not primarily a monster-hunting game. Most of what you’ll experience lies in wrestling with consequences and deciding how quickly you’re prepared to burn through what little humanity remains, in the world and inside yourself.

References

The original idea for QkSLVa arose from a random thought about poisons leeching into the environment. It probably had something to do with waste and rivers killing river-dwelling eco-systems. It occurred to me how might this play out if the eco-system was supernatural and the death throes were beyond mortal means to contain.

Our world seems to be filled with thresholds, deadlines, limits and good intentions that no government or country achieves, and they do it because the repercussions aren’t visceral enough to make action a necessity. Well, how would we handle it if the fallout of inactivity bite back, hard.

I had imagery in mind from Daybreakers, Dog Soldiers, Predator, Blade Runner 2049 and The Last of Us. Most of these had elements to leverage without being useful whole cloth.

From Dog Soldiers and Predator comes the physical asymmetry of fighting something that ought to be stronger than you.

From The Last of Us comes environmental collapse, strained relationships and the uncomfortable question of who the monsters actually are.

From Blade Runner 2049 and Daybreakers comes a future sufficiently close to recognise, but degraded enough that everything feels used up.

QkSLVa adds one final element. Characters can become strong enough to win, but they just shouldn’t do it too often or risk losing themselves completely. We’ll look into that with Resources and revisiting Strain from earlier in the month.

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When have you struggled with regret, in or out of character, and how did it play out? I look forward to reading about it in your RPGaDay post.

#RPGaDAY2026