You awaken, cold and in the dark. Fumbling around by low blue lights in a coffin shaped pod. You pull yourself out of the box, and in the dark see the faces of others. You are all wearing loose fitting white clothing and laceless shoes. Hospital patients? You peer into the dark, seeing little but hearing the sound of dripping, running water and distant machinery. You gather what you can, knowing that something is hunting you. It will be here soon.

Wait.

Can you remember who you are?

Welcome to The Facility by Galen Pejeau!

The Facility is a game of “amnesiac runaways, murderous robots, and an interdimensional jailbreak” – Portal, Metroid Dread, and Blame! are listed as some of Pejeau’s inspirational material. The game is built on the Breathless SRD by René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas of Fari RPGs , and I happened to notice that Pejeau and Deshaies-Gélinas worked together on Fari RPGs’ game of ‘bad-ass space dwarves’ Stoneburner, so we’re pretty closely tied to the source here. The basic mechanics of The Facility hew pretty closely to the Breathless core: every character has skills that are rated by die size ranging from d12 to d4 (in this case the skills are Bash, Dash, Sneak, Shoot, Think, and Sway). When a character needs to make a check they roll their die for the relevant skill; a 1-2 is a terrible failure, 3-4 is success with a cost, and 5 or higher is a full success that’s more effective the higher the result.

However, every time you make a check with a skill, the die rating for it downgrades whether you succeed or fail. You may start off with a d10 in Shoot, but after three checks you’ll be worn down to the d4 minimum. You can ‘Catch Your Breath’ at any time to reset all of your skills back to their maximum, and may even get to heal damage, but things then get worse as hostiles gain strength or the GM introduces a new complication – this is where the SRD gets its moniker from. The result is a constant sense of tension, balancing the ever-worsening odds on your checks against the risk of making things acutely worse by getting odds back on your side.

Not very surprising that the original Breathless involved fleeing from zombies.

Of course, The Facility is instead about “ordinary people, stripped of their memories and trapped in a hostile and insane labyrinth of machines and interdimensional weirdness.” That leads to some very interesting departures from the basic framework, but just as interesting is that they’re split between the actual mechanics of the book and the nature of the physical (or digital) book itself.

The amnesia is a key part of every character – they’re extremely barebones at the start, narratively speaking. However, a player can describe how some of their memories resurface when making a check, detailing what those memories are and how they’re helpful. First of all you ‘learn’ and record more about who your character is, but you also get to roll a d12 for that check instead of a skill. You’ll need to catch your breath before you can do it again, however.

What’s particularly dangerous about catching your breath? The Nemesis. The Nemesis is a robotic predator hunting down the player characters, maybe to retrieve them or maybe to kill them. There is always a Nemesis – while they can be damaged the same as a player character, and even destroyed, the Facility will simply send a new and nastier Nemesis after them. All of the Nemeses will gain Threat Dice, starting off as a d6 and getting upgraded, as the characters catch their breath and/or fail rolls. While each type has a few things they can do for free, when they really get nasty the GM can roll all of the Nemesis’s Threat Dice and then discard as many as they want to get various results. Finally, each Nemesis comes with a description of what happens when they’re destroyed.

Let’s take a look at the Shambler, pictured in that header image above. At no cost it can do things like move freely through a zone and even above the test subjects if the ceilings are high, or lift nearly a ton with its hydraulic driven arms. With a max Threat Die size of d10 it could discard a die with a result of 1 to leap 15 meters in any direction (including up) to escape a fight, a 4 or 5 to smash into a subject straight through a wall to deal stress and put them in reach, or a 10 to grab a target and force them into its chest-mounted grinding unit. Upon being destroyed the Shambler will attempt to grab a target, lock them into a bear hug, and plummet off the nearest precipice – if there are no targets in range or precipices handy, it’ll blessedly just collapse in a heap.

As with Breathless itself, salvaging equipment is a key part of The Facility. As standard, an item has a die rating of its own, and can be rolled instead of a skill for a relevant check. It downgrades as per usual, and when it would downgrade to a d4 it is destroyed, but it lets players keep their skills from degrading for longer and might give them a better die rating than they otherwise would have in a given situation. The Facility devices are some-assembly-required, however, and they’re amazingly quirky to boot. Once a session, every player can roll 1d20 for salvage. There are some corner cases – a 1 upgrades all Nemesis threat dice, and a 20 could be spent for a medkit, the best source of healing in the game – but most will get one of three things. Several options will gain you a Cell, which grants a die rating. Some will get you a Case, which determines the range of an item (area of effect, melee, ranged). Others will get you a Core, which describes the effect of an item. You need all three, Case, Cell, and Core, to build a device.

What kind of effects do Cores offer? Let’s look at four of them. Core 01 generates enough bright light to illuminate an area, but you might have to shake it from time to time when it turns off. Core 04 smells of ozone and emits deadly arcs of lightning. Core 35 is a rotating series of spinnerettes, constantly weaving, and fills a volume of space with patterned monfilament webs. Core 23 contains a tiny jet marble in the center, and creates a smooth-sided quantum tunnel through any surface up to 10 meters deep.

As you can see there are some pretty varied results, but what’s up with those numbers? Well, they correspond to the page numbers of the book: each page, 1 through 70, has a unique Core on it. A salvage roll might ask you to roll a d10 or a d66, and to see what your result is you literally turn to the corresponding page number. You might be doing some quick counting and realize that those two dice options only cover 46/70 results. That’s because the final Core-finding option on the salvage table is the GM’s choice, allowing them to toss in things like Core 57 (a fractal swirl of metal fingers that when activated turns a Case into a harness with mechanical arms that can add +2 to skills) or Core 30 (changes shape whenever you look at it, teleports in an alternate version of the target from a random universe) at will.

The pages of the book aren’t just unique for their Cores, though. Once all the rules have been covered the book stops explaining how you’re going to be doing things and starts to detail the Facility. Each page or spread details a zone; you begin in the Drainage of the Facility on Pg. 27, and your goal is to to reach the Exit on Pg. 64. Each zone includes a description of what’s inside of it, hazards and encounters independent of the Nemesis that the escapees will have to overcome, and how to get out of the zone and continue through the Facility (meaning it tells you what page to turn to). In several cases there will be multiple exits with different page numbers, making The Facility something like a choose your own adventure book.

For example, Filtration is a few levels/pages up from the Drainage and is filled with vast metal tanks lit by the bioluminescence of an alien coral that has spread throughout the entire zone. Young colonies of the coral might try to spread to the gear of any character who brushes against them, mosquito coral will lance out with dozens of needles to try and drain the calcium out of a target’s bones, delicate growths resonate and sing in a ventilator breeze that makes conversation impossible, and at any moment a tank could give way and flood the area with filthy water.

If you clear the coral from an emergency hatch you go to Pg. 34’s Warehouse, which is so clogged with cardboard boxes that you may need a machete to cut your way through and a deadly boxalanche is a likely threat – not to mention the dog-sized wasps with hallucination-inducing stingers or the psychic birds that will shake you down for food. However, if you try and swim through the pipes you’ll find yourself in Pg. 36’s Aquarium, which is quite a beautiful sight but could involve a run-in with creatures like the mind altering hypnoperch or the ravenous phasing squid.

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The Facility can be played as a solo game, there are oracles and advice for doing so, but they’re a little thin on the ground and Pejeau’s own comments on the game’s page admit they were a later addition. You’ll ideally want a GM and several players, although while the text on the back says ‘any number’ the little icon that says 1-4 is more accurate; like probably any Breathless game, too many players let the party spread checks out, likely making things too easy as they don’t have to catch their breath as often.

I’d have also liked a bit of GM advice when it comes to making the decision to kill a character off. When a character has taken a certain amount of Stress they’re considered vulnerable, but exactly when to off them for good – and if and how to get the player back into the game with a new character – could have probably done with a few extra words.

There’s a fair amount of replay value in The Facility. The Cores you get, which zones you pass through, which Nemesis winds up on your tail, a complete freedom when it comes to the memories you recover, all allow you to have a different experience even before we confront the variables of player choice and dice luck when it comes to whether or not you even escape.

My overall verdict: The Facility is a great twist on a solid tension-inducing system, with interesting tweaks both under the mechanical hood and on the design surface. I think there’s a lot of fun to be had from this one from playing around with the Cores, exploring the zones, building off of one another’s restored memories, and coming to horrible misfortune at the tentacles, stingers, and singularities of increasingly dangerous robots.

You can venture into The Facility yourself via itch.io for $7.00 (and you can take a peek at the Nemesis sheets first for free if you want), or you can get a physical copy plus the PDF version at IPR for $22.00 (I got mine at PAX East ’24.)

No memories, only one way out, and something is hot on your heels. Start heading for the exit, and don’t forget to catch your breath… if the killer robots let you.