Survivor

Survival horror among strangers, won by getting out · 40 to 100 survivors by map · Everyone wakes alone · Squads of up to 4, made in the night

The one mode, and the one original to Resident Evil Online: a mode of Johnny Kestler's design, new to the franchise (Project Overview, Why Survivor). A crowd of survivors wakes, clean and empty-handed, wherever ΜΝΗΜΗ placed them in a whole city rebuilt as the records hold it. The dead roam every street, and the virus is in them, in the water, and in the vials left in the laboratories. Somewhere a cure exists, and a handful of doses wait to be earned. There is no shrinking circle. The virus, the puzzles, and the few ways out do the herding, and ΜΝΗΜΗ decides when the night is over. In the worlds that hold a story, the people of the records live their last days around the survivors (Story Nights and the People of the Records). The story is never the point of a night. Getting out is.

What kind of game it is. Survivor is not a battle royale. No one has to be the last one standing, nothing closes the map around the players, and everyone aboard a way out that clears wins, as many as there are seats. It is an extraction game, played as survival horror: survivors win by getting out, among the dead and each other. It differs from the extraction shooters in one rule: no item is carried in and no item is kept. Every survivor wakes with empty hands, and everything found is left in the city when the night ends (The Economy, The Survivors).

Squads

Every survivor wakes alone. No night is chosen as Solo, Duo, Trio, or Squad, and no one arrives with a team. A squad is made inside the night, by survivors who decide to trust each other, and it is unmade the same way. Friends who want to play together come as a party and still wake alone (Parties, below).

The Offered Hand

• Offering. A survivor forms a squad by offering their hand to another survivor within arm's reach: one held input, and their survivor holds out an open hand. Nothing is offered at a distance. To make a squad, a survivor has to walk up to a stranger.
• Taking it. The other takes the hand with a held input of their own. The handshake takes about a second and a half, both standing, each with one hand empty: neither can fire a two-handed weapon while it lasts. When it ends, the two are a squad.
• Refusing. The other can step back, raise a weapon, or do nothing. After five seconds the hand drops. No sound or sign tells anyone that a hand was refused, but everyone in sight saw it.
• Growing. Any member can offer a hand to someone outside the squad. Whoever takes it joins the whole squad, and the rest of the squad sees the Squad Sign appear over them at once.
• Two squads become one when a member of one takes the hand of a member of the other, if together they fill no more than four places.
• Who can be offered a hand. Any living survivor, sleeper or Echo. Echoes offer and take hands as the sleepers they were made from did, so a squad can hold an Echo without knowing it (The Echoes). The people of the records join only by being asked along (Companions, below). The Turned, the Taken, Defectors, and the dead never join a squad.

Four Places

A squad has four places, and survivors and companions fill them alike.

• Companions count. A companion or a Stranded taken along fills a place. Four survivors have no room for one. Three survivors and a companion are full.
• One companion at most. A squad never holds more than one companion or Stranded, whatever places are free.
• A survivor with a companion is a squad. A survivor alone who takes a companion along is a squad of two, and the companion carries the Squad Sign.
• A full squad takes no one. A full squad cannot take a hand or a companion until someone leaves. Telling a companion to leave frees their place (Companions, below).

The Squad Sign

Survivor has no icons but one. Over the head of every squadmate, the rest of the squad sees a small pale sign: the Squad Sign.

• Only in sight. It is drawn only when the squadmate's body would be drawn, when the survivor's own eyes could see them (Presentation and Technology, The Camera Sees Only What the Survivor Sees). It never shows through a wall, never points the way to someone out of sight, and never shows a distance.
• It says one thing. It says that this one took your hand. It never shows a name, health, a wound, a Mark, a stage, or whether they carry a dose. A squad learns those things as everyone does (The Living, The Mark Within a Squad).
• Only for the squad. No one outside a squad sees its signs. To a stranger, a squad is a group of people walking together.
• In the Night. ΜΝΗΜΗ draws it in the eyes of those who took each other's hand, as she draws everything they see. It is the one sign she draws for a few eyes and no others, and it is true: she never shows it over anyone who has not taken a hand.

Leaving

• Walking away. Any member can leave at any moment with a held input. No one has to agree. The sign goes out over them for the rest of the squad, and over the rest for them, at once.
• Casting out. The rest of a squad can put one member out, if every other survivor in it holds the input within ten seconds of each other. Companions take no part in it.
• The Turn and the Lost. A survivor who turns or is Lost leaves their squad at that moment. A survivor who is Down is still in it.
• After the signal. From the signal on, survivors can still join and leave squads, but for Exposure each is counted with everyone who was their squadmate at any moment from the signal to their departure (The Economy, Exposure). An infected member cannot be put out at the door to save the others' awards.

Alone or Together

Nothing makes a squad the right choice. It is the same trade every night: more hands, and more to lose.

	Alone	In a squad
Knowing who	Every face is a question	The Squad Sign: in a crowd at a door, or a shape in a corridor, a survivor knows who took their hand
What needs two	Locks built for two, a wound on the back, the back of the neck, and a survivor who is Down all need a stranger (Survival, Self-Examination; Objectives, Restrictions, and Events)	A squadmate is there for each of them
The Heavy	Run first; a Heavy is a crowd's work (Survival, Run First)	Three or four can put down what one cannot
Noise	One body, one set of footsteps	Every member's steps, voices, and shots are their own: four survivors are four times as easy to hear
Resonance	Only a survivor's own Mark draws what senses the virus	One marked member draws it onto everyone beside them (The Infection, Resonance)
Trials	Any stranger counts toward a Trial that asks something of or for another survivor	No squadmate ever counts (Elpis in the Night, Strangers are strangers)
Doses	A survivor's own road	Each member walks their own road, and a dose still cures one
Seats	One seat to find	As many seats as members, and a way out with fewer splits the squad
At the door	Only marked strangers aboard cost anything	Every squadmate who gets out infected costs every other member a quarter, whatever their stage (The Economy, Exposure)
After the Turn	Anyone can be counted in a Turned's Hunt	No Hunt ever counts the squad a Turned belonged to when they turned (The Turned, Hunts)
The end	The Last Scene alone	The Last Scene together, if they leave on the same way out (The Extraction, The Last Scene)

Parties

A party is how friends come into the same night. It belongs to the Service, not the Night.

• Forming one. In the Waiting Dark a player invites friends to their party, up to ten players: a quarter of the smallest night. When the party's leader asks for a night, the whole party enters it together.
• Everyone still wakes alone. ΜΝΗΜΗ places a party as if its members had never met: each at a waking point on equal ground, never within sight or earshot of anyone, partied or not (The Session, The Waking Points). Finding each other is the first thing the night asks of them, by the world's own means: sound, smoke, landmarks, a shout.
• A party is not a squad. Nothing in a night marks a party member. Friends become a squad only by taking each other's hand, four places at most. A party of ten can make up to three squads, and to the rules every one of them is a stranger to the others.
• Two rules know the party. A Trial never counts a member of the survivor's party (Elpis in the Night). And Echoes never fill a party's place: a party always comes whole.
• No voice inside. The party has no channel inside a night. Inside it, a voice carries only as far as a voice carries (The Living, Speaking and Silence); text chat is for the Waiting Dark.
• In the Night. Sleepers whose files are joined may ask to be woken into the same night. ΜΝΗΜΗ grants it, and wakes them as strangers (The Sleepers and the Remembered).

Companions

ΜΝΗΜΗ's records hold the people who survived these places, and she can play them. Somewhere in every Survivor night, a few of them are waiting, each in trouble: Leon Kennedy locked in a room with the dead clawing at the door, Claire Redfield pinned on a rooftop, Robert Kendo barricaded in his own gun shop. A survivor who gets them out can ask them to come along.

A companion asked along joins the survivor's squad and fills one of its four places: a squad holds one companion at most, and a squad of four survivors has no room for one (Four Places, above).

• Each companion exists once. There is one Leon Kennedy in a session. Whoever gets him out first gets him.
• One at a time. A squad whose companion is gone, or was told to leave, may take another, if anyone is still waiting and a place is free. Told to leave, a companion goes their own way and is no longer anyone's.
• The rescue is the price. A companion is always somewhere dangerous, and getting them out is always loud.
• Companions are who the records say they were. They fight with the skills and weapons they are known for, help up a survivor who is down, and take part in puzzles built for two. Most are loyal. A few, like Nikolai Zinoviev, are exactly as loyal as they ever were, and what each owes the others is written in their ties (below).
• Some carry a secret weapon. A companion whose records put one of the map's secret weapons in their hands may wake carrying it, when ΜΝΗΜΗ chooses so at Assembly: Leon Kennedy with the Lightning Hawk, Claire Redfield with the GM 79, Jill Valentine with the MGL. It counts among the night's secret weapons and lies nowhere else that night (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events, Secret Weapons). It changes what a rescue is worth: a survivor who brings that companion along brings one of the surest answers to the Heavy in the city, and a pair can put down what otherwise takes a crowd (Survival, Run First). Every stranger who sees it knows it too.
• Their secret weapon is theirs alone. The companion fires it themselves, with its own finite load, and spends it on the Heavy, not on the common dead. They never hand it over, no survivor can take it from them, and it never falls for anyone to pick up. If the companion dies or turns, it lies spent and broken where they fell, and no one carries it away; a companion who defects keeps it, as a Defector keeps everything they carried. Letting a companion die is never a way to get their weapon.
• Companions follow simple calls. Follow. Wait here. Go there. Leave.
• Companions are mortal. They can be wounded, killed, and infected. An infected companion's clock runs like anyone's, unless their records gave them that infection (Story Nights and the People of the Records). They walk no road: the only dose that can cure them is one someone else earned. A companion who turns is no longer a companion. ΜΝΗΜΗ plays what they became, and if the strain left them a mind, they use it. Their secret weapon, if they carried one, does not rise with them.
• Companions need seats. An extracted companion is written into the squad's report.
• Companions belong to their time. A map's version is a time in the records, and only people the records place there, at that time, can wait in it, as they were then. Chris Redfield is not in the Raccoon City of September 1998: the records put him in Europe. No one waits in a time they had not yet reached or had already left, and no one is younger or older than the records make them there. A new companion arrives only with a version whose time holds them. The one exception is a crosstime night, when the people of one time can wait in another's map (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Crosstime Weekends).

The roster of each time is listed in that time's cast document: The People of Raccoon City, 1998, The People of the Valley, 2004, and The People of the Ruins, 2026.

The Stranded

Not everyone in a Survivor night is a survivor. Before the waking, ΜΝΗΜΗ places a few people from the records where the records put people in trouble: a man locked in an R.P.D. holding cell, a nurse barricaded in a pharmacy, a family in a stalled bus with the dead around it, a man sealed in a cargo container who will not come out. Survivors call them the Stranded. They are neither sleepers nor Echoes, and ΜΝΗΜΗ plays them as she plays companions. They are not counted among a night's survivors: not in its numbers, not in her verdict (The Extraction), and not among the living the Turned are counted against (The Session, The Shape of a Survivor Night).

• Where, and how many. In the Raccoon City of 1998, about one for every eight survivors. Each waits somewhere the dead can reach, and no waking point is near one (The Session).
• Decided before the waking. What a Stranded carries, what they know, whether they tell the truth, and whether they were bitten before the door closed are all set before the first survivor opens their eyes, never for whoever finds them.
• Named and unnamed. Most are people of the city with no story in the records beyond that night. A few are named, and those are always who the records say they were: Ben Bertolucci in the R.P.D. cells, a reporter who has been digging into the chief's bribes and never comes along; Dario Rosso, sealed in a cargo container in an Uptown warehouse, who will not come out for anyone and talks only through the door. The named Stranded of each time are listed with its people (The People of Raccoon City, 1998). ΜΝΗΜΗ changes what the named carry and know from night to night, never who they are.
• They carry the Mark like anyone. A Stranded bitten before the night began starts it at Seed or Fever, and a fresh Mark in a dark cell is easy to miss. Their clock runs like a survivor's, unless their records gave them the bite (Story Nights and the People of the Records). They walk no road: the only dose that can cure them is one someone else earned and gives them. A Stranded in a G-Virus region may have met a Brood Host before the door closed, and their clock runs fast.

Talking. The Stranded are the only people in a Survivor night who answer more than a call. When a survivor stands close and faces one, up to four replies appear at the edge of the screen, and choosing one says it aloud, as a Murmur. Apart from ΜΝΗΜΗ's own, these are the only words a Survivor night ever lays over the world. A Stranded speaks in their own voice, never in hers: like any stranger, they can be wrong, and they can lie (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director).

Reply	What follows
Get them out	The survivor opens what holds them: finds the cell key, cuts the chain, pulls down the barricade. It is never quiet.
Ask what they know	Where a key is, where a vault's code is written, which way out the Army still holds, which streets the dead have filled. Sometimes true, sometimes out of date, sometimes a lie told to be let out.
Ask for what they carry	A key, a few shells, an herb, a code. Some give it at once, some only once they are out, and some promise and never pay.
Take them along	They become the squad's companion, if the squad has none and a place is free (below).
Leave them	Nothing is opened, and nothing is owed.

What comes after. A Stranded is never only a reward.

• Left behind, a Stranded stays where they are. Someone else may free them, the dead may reach them, or a bite they already carried may finish its work in place, and whoever opens that door later meets what they became.
• Let go, a Stranded goes to ground behind the nearest door that locks and waits. When the signal rises, they make for the nearest way out and take a seat if one is left when they arrive. Every Stranded let go is one more person who may need a seat.
• A Stranded who turns is one of the dead, never one of the Turned. They turn by the same beats and into the same forms as anyone (The Turned), in the clothes they wore when they were freed, and ΜΝΗΜΗ plays what they became. A survivor who let a bitten man walk out of a cell can meet him again two districts later.
• Robbed or threatened, a Stranded shouts, and the shout is a Clamor. They never come along, and never tell that survivor the truth again.

As companions. A Stranded taken along fills the squad's one companion place, so a squad of four survivors can free them but never take them, and follows every companion rule: the simple calls, the seats, mortality, and no road. They are not Leon Kennedy. Each does one thing well, from who they were, and has the limits of an ordinary person.

Who they were	What they do well	Their limit
Police officer or soldier	A steady handgun; holds a doorway	Few rounds, and none to give away
Firefighter or laborer	An axe; forces a door faster, though still as a Clamor	No gun
Doctor or nurse	Treats wounds; reads a stranger's stage at a glance	Will not fight unless cornered
Mechanic	Gets a stalled vehicle running; opens a jammed hatch; fits an improvised way's parts in half the time	Weak in a fight
Pilot or driver	Flies or drives an improvised way out, and raises its odds (The Extraction, Improvised Ways Out)	Weak in a fight, and will not leave the machine once it runs
Anyone else	Knows the streets: a shortcut, an unlocked back door, a place to hide	Weak in a fight

A Stranded companion can break. When the dead reach arm's length of them, or the survivor they follow goes down, they may run or scream, and a scream is a Clamor. Police officers and soldiers rarely break. Anyone else often does.

The Stranded in the record. A Stranded freed is a deed in the Ledger, and one brought out through a way out is a larger one. Nothing done to a Stranded counts, only what was done for them. A Stranded can also be a RESCUE objective or a Mission on someone's road (Elpis in the Night and Objectives, Restrictions, and Events). Echoes meet the Stranded as their Way's sleepers do: they free, question, rob, and leave them in the same measure.

By time. The Stranded belong to their time, as companions do. The Raccoon City of 1998 is still full of its people, and the Stranded are many. In the Ruins of 2026 they are few, about one for every sixteen survivors: scavengers who climbed the wall for what the city left behind, a BSAA soldier cut off from the cordon. In the Valley of 2004 they are fewest: one or two outsiders the village took and kept, each already carrying a Plaga.

Ties

The records hold what these people were to one another, and ΜΝΗΜΗ keeps it. A tie is a bond the records hold between two people who can wait in the same time: loyalty, command, distrust, a use, an old enmity, a betrayal waiting for its hour. Ties are written only for the people of the records: companions, the named Stranded, and the named hosts of the Valley. ΜΝΗΜΗ never invents one, never changes one for a survivor, and never chooses when one wakes: she plays a tie as the records wrote it, and the cause of what follows is the meeting the survivors made.

• A tie wakes when they meet. Two tied people meet when they see each other, hear each other's voice, or, if the records gave them radios on a shared channel, hear each other on it. The U.B.C.S. carry such radios. A call on that channel is a Murmur from the radio itself, so any survivor near a U.B.C.S. companion hears both sides of it.
• Only people of the records. A survivor in U.B.C.S. dress is not one of Mikhail Viktor's men, and nothing of the records treats them as one. Nothing worn ever wakes a tie (The Service, Promise 2).
• A tie outranks a call. While a tie is acting, a companion follows it, not their survivor's calls.
• A companion who goes to someone they are tied to holds no squad's place. They walk beside the one they went to, ΜΝΗΜΗ plays them, and they still need a seat.

Tie	What it does
Loyalty	Each asks their survivor to go to the other. If the survivor refuses, they stay, unless the records say they would go anyway.
Command	The officer gives orders to the others of their unit, and they obey unless another tie forbids it.
Distrust	They warn their survivor aloud about the other, and everyone in earshot hears the warning.
Enmity	They attack each other on sight.
Use	They stay close while the other is useful, and leave for what they came for when it is within reach. Leaving is not betraying: they hold no squad's place, are no Defector, and still need a seat.
Betrayal	They wait for a trigger the records give them, then turn on whoever stands in the way.

Betrayal has rules. It is the only tie that kills, so it is the most bound.

• Every betrayal has a trigger, written in the records, and the trigger is something a survivor can see: a laboratory reached, a pure strain within reach, a survivor down, a Mark with lines.
• Every betrayal has a tell, before the first shot: a question asked too often, a word on a private channel in another language, a step back to let the others go first. A Distrust tie says the tell out loud.
• A companion who betrays is a Defector. They leave the squad's place empty and keep everything they carried. ΜΝΗΜΗ plays them with the skills the records gave them. They can be wounded, infected, and killed like anyone. A Defector who has what they came for makes for a way out and takes a seat.
• Betraying is never a tool of pressure. It follows from who was freed and who was brought together, never from how a survivor is doing.

The ties of each time are listed in that time's cast document: The People of Raccoon City, 1998, The People of the Valley, 2004, and The People of the Ruins, 2026.

Example: three survivors, three men of the U.B.C.S. A night in the Raccoon City of 1998, in Act I, before Mikhail Viktor's last stand.

Step	What happens	Why
1	Three strangers each free a companion: A frees Nikolai Zinoviev, B frees Mikhail Viktor, C frees Carlos Oliveira.	Each companion exists once. Each survivor, alone until now, becomes a squad of two with their companion.
2	Mikhail calls his men on the U.B.C.S. channel. Carlos and Nikolai answer. A, B, and C each hear both sides of the call.	Command; the radio is a Murmur.
3	Each companion asks their survivor to go to the call. All three agree, and three squads of two meet in the Uptown station.	Loyalty and Command. A refusal would have kept that companion with their survivor.
4	Mikhail takes command and leads all three squads toward the subway. Nikolai asks twice where the hospital's laboratory is.	Command; Nikolai's tell. The three squads cannot become one: three companions and six bodies will not fit in four places.
5	C is bitten on the way. For a few minutes it is only a wound, and Nikolai waits.	Betrayal needs a visible trigger.
6	C's Mark spreads into lines. Nikolai fires on C and calls it protocol.	Betrayal's trigger: a Mark with lines. Nikolai is now a Defector, and A has no companion.
7	Mikhail saw the lines. He believes Nikolai and orders C away at gunpoint. Mikhail and Nikolai now stand together against C.	Command, deceived.
8	Carlos refuses the order and fights both for C.	Distrust; Carlos never fires on the survivor who freed him, or because of a Mark.
9	A and B choose: side with C and Carlos, side with the two soldiers, or run while the U.B.C.S. kills itself.	The sleepers decide. The Ledger records what they did.

Small changes turn the same night elsewhere. If C had gone down while the bite was still in Seed, Nikolai would still have killed the fallen, but Mikhail would have seen a Mark with no lines and turned on him. If Tyrell Patrick had answered the call, and ΜΝΗΜΗ had chosen his first account, he would have named Nikolai at step 4. If A had been the one bitten, Nikolai would have shot the survivor who freed him. If Nikolai lives and reaches a laboratory, he takes what he came for and makes for a way out. In one account he left Raccoon City by helicopter; in the other he was left on a rooftop with the missile coming.

Eyes and Ears

Survivor has no icons but the Squad Sign, and it shows only who took a survivor's hand (The Squad Sign, above). No name tags, no radar, no pings. The world tells survivors where things are.

• Sound. A gunshot's direction, a crashing door, a voice in the dark, the scream of a Turn, rotors.
• Fire and smoke. Someone is fighting there, or running from something.
• Silhouettes. The Nemesis sprinting down a street means someone is being hunted.
• The dead. A horde moving as one has heard something.
• Light. Amber is Elpis. Red is a strain. White columns are ways out.
• Marks. A survivor with no wound in sight is clean, or bitten somewhere you cannot see, or bitten in the last few minutes. A torn sleeve or a bloody trouser leg is worth a second look. A clean survivor has the most to lose.
• Noise from puzzles. A grinding stone, a bell, a heavy door rolling open: something is now open.
• Maps on the walls. Every district holds boards that show it: a bus-stop map, a fire-escape plan, a park sign, a subway diagram. They are read where they hang and never carried. A paper map of a district is rarer, and fills a pocket.

Winning

A survivor wins by being extracted: clean, cured, or still infected. No one else wins: not the Turned, whose race ended when they turned (The Turned, No Victory for the Turned), not the Lost, and not anyone left in the city when the night ends. A squad's result is recorded survivor by survivor, but a squad shares one thing, counted with everyone who was in it from the signal on: an infected squadmate who gets out costs every other member who got out part of their award (The Economy, Exposure).

Getting out pays most. An extraction adds Ribbons on top of what the night paid and weighs the Ledger's page most, and every minute a survivor stays alive hardens them. A Turned who plays the night out still earns, less than the living, and their Hunts still count (The Economy, Earning; The Survivors, Hardening).

The Ledger does not rank a night by its result alone. It counts what a survivor did: public objectives completed, puzzles solved, survivors raised, the Stranded freed and brought out, doses given away, Plagas burned out of others, Turned, Taken, and Defectors put down, and every Heavy put down. Then it weighs that count by the result: most for a clean extraction, less for a cured one, less again for an infected one, and least for a Turned. Exposure lowers the weight of a clean or cured page exactly as it lowers the award (The Economy, Exposure). A Turned's page counts what they did after the Turn, their Hunts among it. A survivor who extracted clean and did nothing has a clean result and an empty page.