1d8 Bird Memories

cw insects and worms, hallucination, urges to eat non-human-food objects, intrusive thoughts

Making this for a scifi project. Inspired by Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. A supercomputer made to monitor and manage birds in an asteroid base greenhouse is stuck in a state of malfunction that the humans on board don’t recognize, and can only communicate by broadcasting recordings of bird experiences it has recorded. Do not explain this to your players: they should have to contend with their own understandings of being shown a world of “wrong” scales and desires.

Upon being exposed to a Bird Memory (usually a location where the malfunctioning computer has interfaced with a doorway) a character has a vivid impression of one of the following:

1. Architecture of woven branches towers in front of you like a cathedral and you desire to hide within.
2. A massive grub as big as your head crawls rapidly towards you, it seems alluringly delicious.
3. You see a pattern of color like a strange tapestry and desire to live with it and love it.
4. Huge gloved hands lift you by the legs, and you grow dizzy and tired while dangled upside-down.
5. No visual hallucination, but you would feel a lot safer if you were to climb as high as possible.
6. You catch a raw fish perfectly in your mouth and swallow it whole.
7. An indistinct enemy has screamed a challenge at you. You must scream back.
8. You are suspended in liquid surrounded by something hard and you need to escape. Luckily there are cracks you can push at.

The computer does not by default mean harm to the humans on board, but being struck by these memories is necessarily troublesome when in any other danger or trying to perform a task.