The Session

The Unit of Play

A session is a single, self-contained night of survival: a Survivor night. It has a map, a condition, a population, a set of threats, a supply of resources, an infection pace, an Elpis Reserve, ways out and seats, and a strain map, all assembled fresh by ΜΝΗΜΗ.

Survivor at a Glance

Mode	Kind	Survivors	You begin with
Survivor	Survival horror among strangers, won by getting out	40 to 100, by map. Everyone wakes alone; squads of up to four are made in the night (Survivor, Squads)	Nothing

Survivor is the only mode of Resident Evil Online. Every rule in these documents, outside part 08-future-development, describes it. The other modes once designed beside it are kept as possible future development (Future Development). In the Valley of 2004, the Plaga replaces the virus, Elpis, and the strains (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out).

The Lifecycle of a Survivor Night

1. Request. A sleeper asks ΜΝΗΜΗ for a night, alone or with their party (Survivor, Parties), in the classic rotation or in the Ruins (The Worlds, Raccoon City · Ruins, 2026).
2. Assembly. ΜΝΗΜΗ selects the map, its version, and, for a story night, its threads and beats, and builds the session: condition (the hour and the weather, which in the Raccoon City of 1998 are its four days and their weather track, and the state of the city), strain map, Elpis Reserve, ways out and seats, threats, resources, companions, the Stranded, puzzles. Then she places every subject at a waking point.
3. The Waking. Each survivor wakes where ΜΝΗΜΗ put them, clean, alone, and empty-handed.
4. Observation. ΜΝΗΜΗ watches everything from the first footstep. Survivors choose: cooperate, separate, hide, hunt, betray.
5. Infection. The first survivors are bitten, scratched, or needled. Their Marks rise and their clocks start.
6. Trials. Each infected survivor's road to the cure takes shape.
7. Disturbance. Events begin to surface.
8. Elpis. Doses are earned, seen, fought over, and taken.
9. The Turn. Infected survivors who run out of time turn.
10. The Signal. ΜΝΗΜΗ judges that enough has been done, or the night runs out of time, and opens the ways out.
11. Extraction. Survivors reach a way out before it leaves, or do not.
12. Debrief. The After-Action Report is written.
13. Closing. ΜΝΗΜΗ closes the night. What each survivor lived goes to her, and its record to the Ledger. The sleeper keeps nothing, and goes back to the Waiting Dark (The Sleepers and the Remembered). The player keeps all of it.

The Waking Points

There is no cabin, no drop, no jump to choose. Before the simulation starts, while every subject is still unconscious, ΜΝΗΜΗ places each one somewhere in the world. A survivor may wake in a bed in a third-floor apartment, on a rooftop above Downtown, in a stalled subway car, under a desk in a dentist's office, in the pew of a village church. Nobody remembers being placed. Everybody knows they were.

ΜΝΗΜΗ chooses each waking point from hundreds built into every map, at random, within one rule: equal ground. No survivor begins with an advantage that came from where they were put.

• Clean and empty. Every waking point is sheltered and free of the dead at the moment of waking. Nothing within reach is better than an improvised weapon: a pipe, a bat, a kitchen knife. No firearm, ammunition, or medicine lies in the room.
• The same distance from everything that matters. No waking point is near an armory, a vault, a laboratory, a safe room, a way out, a companion, or one of the Stranded. Each lies about as far from its nearest one as every other point does from theirs.
• The same first danger. Every waking point starts in a region at Low threat, with the same density of the dead around it.
• Never shared. No two survivors wake within sight or earshot of each other. Every survivor wakes alone, and no one wakes in a squad.
• A party is placed as strangers. Members of a party wake as far apart as any two strangers would, with nothing in their placing that helps them find each other (Survivor, Parties).
• Never twice. A survivor never wakes at the same point in two consecutive sessions.

Nothing announces a night. No radio, no screen, no count, no rule read aloud. A survivor comes to knowing nothing: not where they are, not what day it is, not their own name, not how they got there (The Sleepers and the Remembered, The Waiting Dark). What they have is the room, a slow body (Coming to, below), and the sound of a city falling outside it: sirens, screams, gunfire, breaking glass, a loudspeaker repeating an evacuation order no one can follow.

The voice. Then, close by, a person's voice. It comes from a phone lying beside them, faint, a small sound only that room holds, and it is talking to them: in Raccoon City, a grey cellular phone of 1998, its screen lit green with NO SERVICE, and a cord running from it to a single earbud; in the Ruins, the bud alone (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, The Phone). Nothing in the room explains it. Until the earbud is worn, it says only one thing, in many words: put it in your ear.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Hey. Hey, can you hear me? The phone. Next to you.
Put it in your ear. Please.

The first words. Once it is worn, she speaks as a person, low and quick, and what she says first is the same for every survivor, in different words every night: get out of that room, keep low, keep quiet, find somewhere better. It is true. No waking room keeps anyone alive to the end of the night. A survivor who asks what is happening is told there is no time for that yet. A survivor who asks who she is is told her letter, and that she will help them if they listen (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, Asking Her).

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Listen to me. You can't stay there. If you stay in that room, you'll die in it.
Get up. Find something to hold. Stay low and quiet.

Asked who she is, and what is happening:

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Call me M. I can't explain it all now. Get out of there first.

What she leaves out. She never lies, and she leaves out almost everything. She never says what she is, that the survivor was placed, how many others woke, that anyone is watching, or that this is a night at all. She never says she is a person of the city, and never says she is not: asked, she refuses, as she refuses anything she will not answer. Everything a survivor has of her, a human voice, a phone, a city in the middle of dying, lets them take her for someone holed up somewhere in the city who can see more of it than they can, and she lets them.

The first explanation. Once the survivor has left the waking room, the first time they ask what is happening, or after the first minutes if they never ask, she tells them, once, what she can, and she can tell only what their player has already found (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Speaks Of). What anyone on the street can see is news, and she always gives it: the city is coming apart, the dead are in the streets, and the Army has closed the roads out. Asked where they are, she gives the place and the day, each map's own (The People of Raccoon City, 1998, The People of the Valley, 2004, The People of the Ruins, 2026); in a Late Waking, the day and the hour where the seed stopped (Story Nights and the People of the Records). The rest grows with the file.

• A file that has found nothing. Something's wrong with the people. The ones who look dead are dead, and they don't stay down. The Army's closed the roads. That's all I can give you right now. Keep your eyes open.
• A file that has seen a bite do its work. She adds: If one of them bites you, you'll change. I've watched it happen.
• A file that has seen the medicine. She adds: There's medicine. Yellow cases that come down out of the sky, under a light. Not many. Nobody gets one for nothing.
• A file that has Named the virus. She adds Umbrella's name for it, as the papers it read gave it.

The words are each world's own: in the Ruins it is the wall and the BSAA, not the Army, and in the Valley there is no medicine to speak of, only villagers who are no longer themselves (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out). A survivor whose player has never seen the medicine learns that it exists the way the first survivors of every night did: from the sky, when the first case falls within sight. A survivor who never puts the earbud in hears nothing from her but what the city's devices carry (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, How She Speaks).

Coming to. The waking is played, never a cutscene. Every survivor comes to at the same moment, in a room the dead have not reached (above). For the first seconds the body is slow: sight soft at the edges, sound muffled, a hand to the head, a stumble on standing. The survivor can look and stand at once; running, fighting, and climbing come back as the body does. How long that takes follows Hardening, about eight seconds for a Civilian and about three for a Veteran (The Survivors, Hardening). The room is sheltered, so those seconds cost only time. Everything else in the room plays from the first frame: the voice in the phone, the street outside. On 28 September in Raccoon City, the city sounds like it is falling, because it is (The Worlds, The Four Days).

Empty Hands. No survivor begins with anything: no weapon, no pack, no ration, no tool, no map, no compass, no marker. The one exception is the earpiece beside every waking point, on a phone of the map's own time, or in the Ruins alone (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, The Phone), which carries ΜΝΗΜΗ's voice and nothing else, and cannot be dropped, traded, or taken. Whatever a survivor carries from this moment on, they took from the world, and a survivor learns the world by its landmarks, or finds a map somewhere inside it.

Scale

Every Survivor night is played on an open world: a whole place rebuilt as the records hold it, at Slow Burn. It is Survivor's bound of that world, the largest any mode plays (The Worlds, One World, Every Mode). Its character is slow dread, long silences, and sudden collapse. A hundred survivors disappear into a whole city, and for long stretches each one feels alone.

No Survivor night announces its length in minutes. In the Raccoon City of 1998 the sky shows how far its four days have come, never how many minutes are left (The Worlds, The Four Days). A night ends when ΜΝΗΜΗ decides it has asked enough of its survivors and the last way out has left, and it rarely ends in less than an hour.

The Shape of a Survivor Night

Before the first survivor wakes, ΜΝΗΜΗ fixes three numbers. They decide what kind of night it will be. None of them is ever shown on a screen: only ΜΝΗΜΗ's voice says them, when she chooses to (Project Overview).

The Reserve. One dose of Elpis for every ten survivors, rounded down, and never fewer than four. A Survivor night of sixty-four holds six doses. A Survivor night of a hundred holds ten. The Reserve is paced: all but two doses open one at a time across the first hour, one opens at the signal, and the last opens when ten minutes remain (Elpis in the Night, The Reserve). There is a cure to earn until the night's last minutes.

The Seats. The ways out ΜΝΗΜΗ opens hold, together, no more than one seat for every four survivors and no fewer than one for every five, both rounded down. A Survivor night of sixty-four has between twelve and sixteen seats. A Survivor night of a hundred has between twenty and twenty-five. Every map is built so that some combination of at least two of its ways out fits that range for every population it can hold.

The Clock. No one carries the virus when they wake. A survivor's clock starts the moment they are infected, and from then on the virus is paced so that a body never wounded again and never cured reaches the Threshold in about forty minutes. Wounds, appetites, and ΜΝΗΜΗ's Surge make it sooner. Nothing a survivor does turns it back. An antiviral found in the world can hold it still for a few minutes (The Infection), a safe room holds it while a survivor shelters there (Survival, Safe Rooms), and one strain slows itself: a T-Phobos carrier who keeps calm burns at half pace.

Put together, those numbers mean one thing. Every survivor enters the night clean, and most will not stay that way. Six can be cured, and never all six early: the last of them cannot fall before the night's final ten minutes. Sixteen at most can leave, by every way out she placed tonight, improvised ones among them (The Extraction, Improvised Ways Out), and no one else but the rare survivor who walks out through the edge at one in a hundred (The Worlds, The Crossing). Every survivor who is infected and not cured has about forty minutes from the wound, and the night is longer than that. An infected survivor who reaches a seat takes it from someone who might have been clean.

If the night goes badly enough, the Turned still in play come to outnumber the living before the signal rises. When that moment comes, ΜΝΗΜΗ says it over the city's devices, to everyone. After the signal it means nothing: as the ways out carry the living away, the Turned end up outnumbering whoever is left in almost every night, and that is only a night ending.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: There are more of the dead than the living now. The ones who changed are hunting together.

Survivors call what follows the Second Night.

The Session Blueprint

ΜΝΗΜΗ assembles every session from layers. Every layer but the last is seeded before the survivors arrive and rewritten as the session unfolds. The last is written by the survivors themselves.

FORMAT + MAP + VERSION + THREADS AND BEATS + CONDITION + WAKING POINTS + STRAIN MAP + INFECTION PACE + THREATS + RESOURCES + ELPIS RESERVE + WAYS OUT AND SEATS + COMPANIONS + THE STRANDED + PUZZLES + OBJECTIVES + RESTRICTIONS + EVENTS + SURVIVOR BEHAVIOR

Into one result:

A NIGHT THAT HAS NEVER EXISTED BEFORE.

A Survivor Night

Layer	Setting
Format	Sixty-four survivors, each waking alone; two parties among them, of three and of six
Map	Raccoon City, September 1998
Threads and Beats	Three acts and the Last Morning, 28 September to 1 October. Jill Valentine's flight from the Nemesis begins in Uptown; Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield arrive in Act II; Kendo's shop can fall, and Mikhail Viktor can make his last stand
Condition	The four days. Weather track: rain from dawn on the 28th to its afternoon, then dry; overcast on the 29th, rain from its dusk through the night; overcast on the 30th, drizzle from its dusk through the night; clear for the Last Morning
Waking Points	Sixty-four, on equal ground
Strain Map	T-Virus across the heart of the city; G-Virus beneath it; C-Virus in Raccoon University; T-Phobos in the Hospital District; T-Veronica in Raccoon Park
Infection Pace	Slow Burn
Threats	Zombies everywhere, Lickers in the R.P.D., a Tyrant held in a transport truck Downtown
Resources	Lean
Elpis Reserve	Six doses: four opening at minutes 15, 30, 45 and 60, the Signal Dose, and the Last Dose
Ways Out and Seats	The Subway (10), the Clock Tower (4), the Rooftop (2): sixteen seats
Companions	Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, and Robert Kendo, each in need of rescue somewhere in the city
The Stranded	Eight, among them Ben Bertolucci in the R.P.D. cells, Marvin Branagh holding the station's main hall, Cindy Lennox behind the bar at J's Bar, and a nurse barricaded in a Hospital District pharmacy
Puzzles	The R.P.D. medallions, the subway's points, the vault behind Kendo's gun shop