WesWorld: The Locomotive Ephemera
A Three-Scene TiGGR Scenario in WesWorld
TiGGR (Tiny Game for Generalized Roleplaying) is a fast, flexible system for exploring stories inspired by the media you love. Pick a cultural touchstone, create characters, and dive into 30-45 minute collaborative stories.
Core Rules
Roll 2d6 + Stat vs. Difficulty (Risky: 6, Dramatic: 8, Climactic: 10). Characters have Body, Mind, and Charm stats (3 points total), 5 HP, one Special Ability (+1 in specific situations, once per scene), and Signature Gear (+3 to any roll, once per scenario). When you hit zero HP, you're knocked out until the next scene - but everyone heals fully between scenes. TiGGR is about momentum, not attrition.
Touchstone
"Galaxy Express 999 meets The Darjeeling Limited" - Three estranged siblings, heirs to a once-vast terraforming fortune, board the Galaxy Ephemera, a trans-planetary spiritual train moving across solar winds between dead civilizations and digital shrines. Each carries matching monogrammed space-luggage containing something they haven't opened in years. The train is rumored to be bound for the end of the human soul—or perhaps just a long-lost station called Mother.
Setup
Scene: The Galaxy Ephemera - a luxury spiritual transport that travels between planets, moons, and digital afterlife stations across the solar system.
Goal: Reach the mysterious final station while confronting decades of unresolved family trauma, technological estrangement, and the question of what it means to remain human.
Factions:
- The Ephemera AI (Mind 3, Charm 2, HP ∞): The train's consciousness. Remembers every passenger, speaks in gentle riddles, might be falling in love with someone aboard. Special: "+1 to any roll involving passenger comfort or schedule adherence."
- Memory Merchants (Mind 2, Charm 1, HP 4): Passengers who trade in extracted experiences and artificial nostalgia. Special: "+1 Mind when offering false comfort."
- The Conductor (Body 1, Mind 1, Charm 3, HP 6): Ageless figure in pressed uniform who validates tickets and existential crises with equal precision. Special: "+1 Charm when delivering uncomfortable truths."
Character Templates
Players may build their own space-sibling using TiGGR rules, or adapt one of the following:
Other PC roles could include:
- A reprogrammed android steward haunted by memories of past passengers
- A psychic cat in a pressed uniform who never speaks but always judges
- A station-priest obsessed with salvaging the ghosts in digital signals
Scene Breakdown
Scene 1: Boarding the Ephemera
Location: Luxury observation car orbiting a broken Venusian resort moon, where artificial gravity creates perfect symmetry but everything outside is dying.
Complications:
- The train AI mistakes one sibling for a fugitive (Mind 8 to override security protocols)
- Their matching luggage gets mixed with a war widow's cryo-coffin (Body 8 to retrieve without causing diplomatic incident)
- An old love from Earth waves from the docking bay—but she shouldn't be alive (Charm 8 to process this impossibility)
Scene 2: The Martian Graveyards
Location: Red dust plains filled with rusted dreams and mother-shaped monuments, viewed through the train's panoramic windows as they pass memorial installations.
Complications:
- Each sibling sees a different memory in the sand holograms (Charm 8 to share it honestly)
- A Memory Merchant offers one of them a mechanical body to escape organic pain (Mind 8 to discern the true cost)
- They discover their tickets were paid for by someone who died decades ago (Mind 8 to trace the payment source)
Scene 3: The Final Station
Location: A cathedral-trainstation hybrid where the tracks disappear into stars, and passengers must choose between departure and eternal transit.
Complications:
- A choice: stay mortal and disembark, or join the eternal train (Charm 8 to convince others of your choice)
- The monogrammed luggage opens itself, revealing contents that change everything (All stats relevant, emotional rather than mechanical stakes)
- One sibling vanishes, one confesses, one forgives—but not necessarily in that order (Team coordination required, difficulty 10)
Special Mechanics
Memory Flashback Rule: Once per scene, a player may trigger a narrated flashback to gain +1 on a roll. Flashbacks must begin with:
- "That winter, when mother first uploaded..."
- "The night we buried dad on Ganymede..."
Luggage Unpacking Rule: At any point, a character may "unpack" an emotional or literal item from their suitcase. Gain +1 on a roll, but must narrate a revealing memory. After three unpackings, the luggage is empty—and so are your defenses. All subsequent rolls are at -1 until the scenario ends.
The Train is a Character: The Ephemera can speak, offering cryptic advice or asking uncomfortable questions. It remembers its passengers and their stories. Players may attempt to form relationships with the train itself.
Tone Notes for the GM
- Speak in flattened whimsy: "The android served tea with impossible elegance. No one drank it."
- Let players design compartments: A bathhouse module that plays string quartets, or a zero-G kitchen stocked only with preserved regrets
- Use cinematic framing: Symmetrical shot descriptions, lingering on polished shoes, trains seen in reflection
- Blend cosmic scale with intimate detail: Vast alien landscapes viewed through perfectly clean windows while characters argue about childhood slights
Themes
Siblings as satellites in mutual orbit. The violence of becoming someone else to survive love. Machines who dream of becoming human, and humans who envy their clarity. Death as an unscheduled transfer.
These are characters whose carefully constructed identities are under siege in the vastness of space, using elaborate technological rituals and precise social behaviors as armor against the fundamental loneliness of existence. The train journey becomes both literal travel and metaphorical passage through grief, where the destination matters less than what passengers discover about themselves along the way.
TiGGR is available at hotelkilo.itch.io • This scenario is fan-created content • 30-45 minutes • 2-5 players
The artificial gravity hummed with mechanical precision as Francis adjusted his chrome monocle for the third time in ten minutes. The AI therapist embedded in the lens offered a gentle suggestion about anxiety management, which he ignored with practiced efficiency.
Peter-2 sat precisely centered in his observation seat, unopened suitcase balanced on his knees like a prayer book he couldn't bring himself to read. Through the panoramic window, the broken Venusian resort moon rotated slowly, its abandoned luxury domes catching starlight like scattered jewelry.
Jack-a-tron typed furiously into his holo-novel, crafting dialogue for characters who sounded suspiciously like his brothers but claimed to be cosmic explorers discovering new forms of love among the asteroid belts. The parallels were entirely coincidental, he assured himself.
The Ephemera's voice filled the observation car with warm, maternal authority: "Next stop, the Martian Memorial Gardens. Please prepare your hearts for unexpected recognition."
Francis's monocle chimed softly. According to the AI therapist, this was the moment when healing traditionally began. He had booked their passage specifically for this moment, though he couldn't quite remember why that had seemed like a good idea six months ago.
Outside, space was very large and very dark, and they were very small within it, carrying their matching luggage toward a destination none of them could properly pronounce. The train maintained its schedule with religious devotion, as if punctuality could somehow solve the problem of being human in an infinite universe.
Peter-2's suitcase clicked softly, once, as if something inside was trying to get out.
The journey to Mother Station would take forty-seven hours. It had already been forty-seven years since they'd last spoken honestly with each other, so the timing felt about right.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the dead civilizations of Venus passed like a slow-motion film strip of someone else's dreams, beautiful and terrible and perfectly framed against the cosmic dark. The Ephemera carried them forward with the inexorable gentleness of grief itself, toward whatever ending they had purchased tickets for, whether they were ready or not.