Quote:
Originally Posted by apoc527
This is pretty good, and amusingly similar to a campaign I intend to run myself in the next 5-7 weeks: GURPS Dark*Matter! Very similar ideas, but I'm going to have to revisit the appropriateness of MH Sidekicks as starting heroes. It should be okay, but in D*M, starting agents are usually less accomplished than even your typical MH Junior Hunter.
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The PCs for this game are
extremely competent, versatile and resilient people. Otherwise, they would have essentially no chance of surviving, as the game is set in a gritty, unforgiving world where the gods, if they exist, do not take an active hand in mortal affairs.
Hovering outside of mortal consciousness, however, there are plenty of restless spirits, inhuman intelligences and hungry ghosts. Some of them can manifest in physical forms, bind themselves to mortal flesh or possess the living. As such, being a PC with a chance of having encounters with the supernatural without ending up as an unexplained statistic, essentially means 'being one of the few people with the strength of will and personality to resist such things'.
That, in turn, means that the characters have what it takes to succeed at most things in life. Will-power, self-discipline and a strong motivation of some sort are, realistically, the things that mostly seperate successful people from others. Those who make it through special operation forces selections are those who have the will and motivation to do so. Sucecssful athletes are those who have the willpower to constantly practice and apply themselves. Those who excel in other fields also do so largely because they have enough will to be diligent.
Thus, someone with a lot of willpower (small 'w', because it represents more than just GURPS Will) will tend toward high GURPS Attributes and a lot of points in skills and learnable Advantages. Even their hobbies or paths of study that could have led to an alternative profession will tend to be high.
The characters in question are one officer of military intelligence, one Delta operative and two detectives.
The officer of military intelligence is a brilliant linguist, interrogator and psychological warfare officer who had attained the position of Foreign Area Officer in China before electing to focus on the War on Terror. He holds several Masters' degrees and a PhD in Intelligence, Security and Strategic Studies. He's got an excellent chance for promotion to Brigadier General after he manages to fit in a joint tour somewhere. He's also a fitness fanatic who weighs 250 lbs., can benchpress 500 lbs. and could have gone pro as an MMA fighter. And he competes in IPSC matches.
The Delta operator is considered a high-flyer even among his elite peers. He's good at everything, never quits, never doubts and never hesitates. He's rated Expert with pretty much every hand weapon, taught parachuting at Fort Benning and probably holds several records for racing through extreme obstacle courses. His hobbies are escrima, parkour and driving sports. Added to which, he's likable, charming and can pass for a native of Al-Anbar.
One of the detectives is sought after as an instructor at the FBI National Academy and has written several books on investigative techniques. He's also a former high-risk warrant service team member and a former evidence technician, who still teaches courses on forensics at the local university. He was an amateur boxer who could have gone pro and if he was a bit taller, he would have gotten a basketball scholarship for college.
The last character doesn't look like much, being a middle-aged, overweight detective from Australia. He is, however, amazingly good at talking to people and getting them to share confidences with him. And his military service, which was mostly as a member of the Royal Australian Corps of Military Police,
may have been more interesting than average.
The characters don't use any Wildcard skills or cinematic rules, but their point value is incredibly high. It's actually cheaper to make GURPS characters into street-level supers than it is to reflect realistic-but-obscenely-competent characters that are not allowed to take Attributes above certain levels and can't take cinematic or super Advantages.
And, yeah, this adventure may as well be set in the
Dark•Matter setting. Aside, of course, from the lack of any coordinated response from the official authorities to the occult. There is no Hoffman Institute, no Bureau 13, no Majestic 12, not even any two-man FBI team investigating X-Files.
There are, however, plenty of people in and out of government who have come into contact with things that to them appear inexplicable. Seeing as they don't have any proof and even those who believe they themselves have supernatural powers can't replicate anything they may have been able to do under laboratory conditions, however, there has been a dearth of people who have actually been able to get their superiors to believe their reports. A lot of powers are developing some sort of extra-legal and informal means of reacting to supernatural threats, but most of those are technically conspiracies of those 'in the know' and don't exist anywhere on paper.
And while there are some troubling things behind the events that the PCs are being sent to investigate, the Lieutenant General that is formally ordering the investigation is trying to find a solution to an Iraqi political matter that affects the future security of Iraq when United States Forces - Iraq leave in December. He has no knowledge about any supernatural elements and wouldn't believe in them if he did. The reason the British are providing assistance, however, through lending the effort a senior MoD accountant and an Australian ADFIS investigator on detached service, are more murky. It might be that someone there suspects something and the Australian ADFIS investigator might well have been chosen for his open-mindedness in regard to strange phenomena.
That being said, the adventure in Iraq not the sort of thing
junior agents from anyone could deal with. In any plausible setting, there is little reason to assume that any sensible secret organisation is dispatching
junior investigators to investigate occurances of the wildly dangerous supernatural hiding behind ordinary events. It's not as if there aren't plenty of ordinary agencies and organisations where people can demonstrate their competence as investigators and troubleshooters before ever being recruited by ultra-competent conspiracies to fight the very forces of darkness.