Quarantine questions

We're adding a quarantine to the game I'm MC'ing. I've never played with one before, and have a couple of questions I'm hoping y'all can answer (I searched, but didn't find the answers):

__ By default,  are any stasis facilities unlocked? It reads as if you start play with 1 unlocked, but it's not 100% clear.

__ The quarantine brings rules for psi-harm. Do these rules apply for other characters already in the game? Specifically, do characters now suffer psi-harm 'from exposure to the world's psychic maelstrom'? I realize it says in the very next line that the psi-harm might be from 'first exposure... or some subsequent unusual exposure', but it's not clear how liberal I can be here or how to apply this rule generally.

Thanks.

-- Christopher

Hey Christopher!

Yes, during character creation, you choose 1 stasis facility to unlock.

No, don't hit the other PCs with psi-harm. They had their first exposure to the world's psychic maelstrom long ago, presumably in utero. (This is why they have a weird stat!)

You can hit them with psi-harm during play, for unusual exposure, like if they get trapped in the world's psychic maelstrom or something, but save it for that.

-Vincent

Thanks, that clears those up.

Our quarantine ended up with Weird = nill. How are folks dealing with this in relation to custom moves powered by weird? For example, the book has example custom weird moves involving mud fish parasites.

My intuition is to say that the quarantine, upon resisting mud fish parasites or whatever, just rolls +0, but the playbook distinguishes between 'nill' and '0'. Is this distinction just simply to make explicit that the quarantine can not open his brain (because weird is nill, not 0) but CAN do other weird stuff? Or does the distinction imply that the quarantine can't do ANYTHING weird (including resisting mud fish parasites, because weird = nill, not 0)?

Thanks.

-- Christopher

It looks like there's textual support for rolling -1 ("getting +1weird will give you weird=0"), but I'd personally angle toward "can't do anything weird," with side orders of "automatically misses weird rolls they can't avoid" but "is also kind of immune to weird things."

-Vincent

When I played a Quarantine, we went with the "roll at -1 if unavoidable" with a side helping of "most custom weird moves are ignored entirely because outside forces (except PC's) just can't reach your brain at all."