/BRIEFING

FIELD MANUAL — DO NOT DELETE

=== THE SITUATION ===

CORP runs the world contractually. It owns the housing, the food, the water, the cities, and just about everything else. The public propaganda make you feel sick. Thankfully, CORP's security hygiene is a joke.

Unfortunately, that joke stops the moment you start exposing CORP. Insidium is the game of that moment: a small hacking crew up against a megacorporation that can notice them, trace them, and neutralize them.

The objective of each adversarial campaign is exact: breach a series of CORP targets, exfiltrate serious evidence, and leak it to the public while maintaining your crew's Public Signal.You cannot win if CORP is exposed but your Public Signal is gone.

=== WHAT A SESSION LOOKS LIKE ===

Play alternates between two worlds with different kinds of risk:

DIGITAL — crawl CORP infrastructure
           rooms are servers
           server elements are obstacles
           CORP agents are monsters

PHYSICAL — move through a world owned by CORP
           safehouses and raids
           bypass locks, guardhouses,
           and sneak into to network closets

The digital dungeon is classic OSR with careful exploration, resource pressure, and lethal mistakes. The dungeons are subsidiary server architectures, generated with procedurally elements so no two campaigns crawl the exact same infrastructure. The physical game is another layer consisting of safehouses, accumulating heat, raids, and physical intrusions into CORP's actual buildings. Avoid patrols, fabricate fake identities, sniff traffic, and use social engineering.

=== WHAT DIFFERS INSIDIUM FROM STANDARD OSR ===

• No hit points, no death spiral. Operators don't take traditional damage. When things go wrong they escape, die, or are kidnapped by CORP. Every bad roll can turn into a story branch.
• An adversary that actively fights back. CORP counterattacks during campaigns: it steals money, bricks items, traces operators, and raids safehouses.
• Two global pressures instead of an XP grind. PUBLIC SIGNAL is the win condition, and CORP ALERTNESS is the global danger clock. Both move because of what your crew does so pressure escalates naturally.
• Item-forward problem solving. Your inventory is a major part of your character sheet. The marketplace rerolls periodically, so acquisition itself becomes a strategic game.
• Streamlined operator creation. There are three methods to create an operator and one of them takes less than a minute.
• Highly customizable difficulty. The type of campaign be selected alongside the overall difficulty four challenge levels. On sandbox, your crew gets unlimited operator replacements and time. On nightmare, things are very different. This structure makes Insidium easy to learn but brutal to master. CORP™ challenges you to complete a nightmare campaign.

=== WHO IT'S FOR ===

Insidium is built for oneshots and challenge campaigns. A oneshot is a small CORP target begging to be compromised. A campaign is a sequence of CORP targets, each one harder than the last, all under rising alertness. Your crew either breaks CORP open or CORP closes the file.

It rewards tables that like tense decisions, expendable-but-loved characters, items with personality, and laughing nervously at corporate propaganda and disturbing internal files. Insidium is analog horror, and CORP is required by internal policy to state that some of the content may be innapropriate for younger audiences.