Ideas Are Easy

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Mechanical warfare can be terrifying, especially in hostile environments.

The players are the damage control team for a most unlucky spaceship. The campaign starts when enemy weapons set off a chain reaction of damage in the ship, and it ends when the ship is saved. or Not.

obstacles include venting atmosphere, naked wires, raging fires, radiation hazards, secondary explosions, smoke, malfunctioning gravity generators, and whatever else your GM can dream up.

Players must stop the remaining ammunition from blowing up, patch small leaks, seal off large ones, keep the reactor from going critical, free trapped survivors of the blast, get life support on before folks run out of oxygen, connect various portions of the control computers together, get a semblance of a command chain together, and stop those fires!

Help will eventually come, but it will take a while: the rest of the fleet is still in battle. It may even be the enemy who shows up to take you all prisoner.

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I thought it would be interesting to run a war game where you never saw the enemy. In this scenario the challenges are almost entirely environmental. How would you do aboard a ship still undergoing damage? It can also be oddly similar to a dungeon crawl: what's behind this next door?

This is inspired by damage control stories in world-war era ships. If you'd rather ran it there, go right ahead.

If you're feeling particularly cruel as a GM don't tell the players that the game is almost completely damage control. Let them build their characters for a spaceships war game, and then stick them into the inferno of a damaged ship.

I like that. It gives something to do to someone besides the Captain. Also all that crawling through corridors with frightened spacers, or machinery going crazy, as well as fires and explosions can feel like a dungeon crawl.

[jason taylor]

Cliffhangers style. With any other source you like.

The PCs have been summoned to Rome. A disaster has struck! Cardinal X, the PCs Patron tells the story. The deepest corner of the Vatican Archives has been robbed. The Spear of Longius or some other Implement of Power has been stolen (and you thought they only kept crumpled manuscripts here). It is your job to find it.

The burglar is an unusually sporting one and has left a riddle. Why in the world did they do that. I haven't the slightest idea, they always do that.

Possibilities: She is a Femme Fatale Classy Cat Burglar. She was hired by who-knows-who.
Maybe when she finds that the villain really is an Evil Mastermind instead of just your day to day black arts dealer she will ally with the heros.


Maybe Cardinal X is the real mastermind.

This story can go all the way around the world in campaign after campaign.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A second one has more interest because it has potential to go into more parts of the world. It also has, as well as a clear adversary one who is perhaps deluded but well-intended, making for some complexity.

Instead of the Spear of Longinus it is the Lost Arc. It ended up in the Vatican Archive some how (maybe it was originally Titus' plunder). Some overzealous Coptic sponsors it's theft to be returned to Ethiopia. In that case the original thieves are Worthy Opponents. A third party will arrive that is the real Mastermind. Whether or not the Arc is an object of power decide.

[Michele]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The burglar is an unusually sporting one and has left a riddle. Why in the world did they do that. I haven't the slightest idea, they always do that.

The Trademark Disadvantage!

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The burglar is an unusually sporting one and has left a riddle. Why in the world did they do that. I haven't the slightest idea, they always do that.

Possibilities: She is a Femme Fatale Classy Cat Burglar. She was hired by who-knows-who.
Maybe when she finds that the villain really is an Evil Mastermind instead of just your day to day black arts dealer she will ally with the heros.


Maybe Cardinal X is the real mastermind.

Ideas:

1. The Cardinal is using the artifact for his own purposes, and is pinning its disappearance on the thief. If, at the end of it, they don't recover it, there's a new clue as to where it wound up, keeping them forever looking for something that isn't missing.
2. The thief knows the Cardinal has nefarious plans, and steals the artifact to stall him. The riddle was a deliberate attempt to get caught so that she can have a chance to talk to the Cardinal's secret fixers, hoping to turn them against the Cardinal.
3. The thief has nefarious plans, and steals the artifact to put them into motion. The riddle was a deliberate attempt to get caught so that she can have a chance to talk to the Cardinal's secret fixers, hoping to turn them against the Cardinal.

[ericthered]

Heres a one shot:

In the depths of an icy moon, isolated and artificial lit deep sea reefs raise exotic aquatic delicacies for export to the luxury market. Each reef is maintained by a small city of workers, nestled in a cosy habitat under the ocean. Each The reefs are intentionally placed hundreds of kilometers from each other and the surface, to prevent the spread of disease to their sensitive crops. This appears to have failed. The reef the player characters live on to has hit by a plague threatening to wipe out a key species, crashing the ecology, bankrupting the city, and saddling the population with crushing debt for decades.

Another Reef a few hundred kilometers away weathered this same plague just a few months ago, and they have a cure, but they refuse to sell it for anything less than a quarter of the reef's total value. Relations between the two reefs have been poor at the best of times, and the Reef affected by the plague suspects foul play, but its nearly impossible to prove, and they only have a few days to stop the disease.

The PC's have been tasked with getting their hands on the cure before its too late. Quarantine will force them to stay away from their goal, at least physically, but they have full access to networks. They will need to find someone in the cure city who is willing to steal it for them. Reef cities tend to be very tightly controlled, and loyalty to the reef is high. These actions are technically illegal, and if the other reef is willing to distribute a plague, they're probably willing to go farther. How do you find an agent in another city? how do you ensure their loyalty? How can you tell they're telling you the truth?

The PC's had better come up with answers to that, or they and everyone they know will loose their shirts.

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The idea here is to make the players accomplish a task through others, and to reverse the normal recruiting scheme.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Heres a one shot:

In the depths of an icy moon, isolated and artificial lit deep sea reefs raise exotic aquatic delicacies for export to the luxury market. Each reef is maintained by a small city of workers, nestled in a cosy habitat under the ocean. Each The reefs are intentionally placed hundreds of kilometers from each other and the surface, to prevent the spread of disease to their sensitive crops. This appears to have failed. The reef the player characters live on to has hit by a plague threatening to wipe out a key species, crashing the ecology, bankrupting the city, and saddling the population with crushing debt for decades.

Another Reef a few hundred kilometers away weathered this same plague just a few months ago, and they have a cure, but they refuse to sell it for anything less than a quarter of the reef's total value. Relations between the two reefs have been poor at the best of times, and the Reef affected by the plague suspects foul play, but its nearly impossible to prove, and they only have a few days to stop the disease.

The PC's have been tasked with getting their hands on the cure before its too late. Quarantine will force them to stay away from their goal, at least physically, but they have full access to networks. They will need to find someone in the cure city who is willing to steal it for them. Reef cities tend to be very tightly controlled, and loyalty to the reef is high. These actions are technically illegal, and if the other reef is willing to distribute a plague, they're probably willing to go farther. How do you find an agent in another city? how do you ensure their loyalty? How can you tell they're telling you the truth?

The PC's had better come up with answers to that, or they and everyone they know will loose their shirts.

************************************************** ***********************

The idea here is to make the players accomplish a task through others, and to reverse the normal recruiting scheme.

Is this colony under a corporate government (like Hudson's Bay) or a conventional one with Eminent Domain? Or are the reef-cities sovereign?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Is this colony under a corporate government (like Hudson's Bay) or a conventional one with Eminent Domain? Or are the reef-cities sovereign?

I conceived of this with mostly Sovereign reef-cities, leaning towards semi-feudal. Actually, I was building a fantasy world with underwater cities that could only communicate with each other via magic when I realized that a science fiction setting actually worked better.

I thought about including the default government type I was working with when I came up with the scenario, but I decided against it. oops.

I suspect you can make this scenario work with many forms of government, but that more dysfunctional governments work better, as do smaller units of independence. The government type will matter in this scenario, and in some ways its a nice scenario for exploring the consequences of a given type of government.

[WaterAndWindSpirit]

Terminal Battalion: They are expendable and know it because of an incurable terminal illness, so they volunteer for high risk suicide missions most people wouldn't even consider. They are even pumped full of combat drugs that are otherwise not given to anyone because they cause horrible long term damage the Terminal Battalion will not live long enough to suffer from anyways.

[RyanW]

A League of Assassins sort of organization. Recruits are paired in twos, and put through a "training from hell" regimen that requires excellent teamwork to even have a chance of success. When a pair passes the training, the more promising of the two is selected for induction, and his final training task is to kill his partner.

If such an organization exists, there is no doubt at least one pair of mercenaries roaming around on the run from just about everyone, incredibly skilled and fiercely loyal to one another.

[ericthered]

The Player Characters are personalities implanted in the subconscious of otherwise very civilian "sleeper agents". Their handlers can activate them remotely (be that through technological or supernatural means) when they need a job done and the sleepers are in the area. The personalities turn their "hosts" into high-end action heroes, but don't get to share any of the host's knowledge Their handlers try to minimize the knowledge the sleepers need to get the job done.

The Campaign starts as a series of action scenes, but the starting situations when the sleepers "wake up" get odder and odder, like waking up already in a fight, or just before they undergo surgery. And it seems that their hosts are catching on to what's happening, and taking measures to prevent the sleeper from actually doing anything. Or possibly even working for the other side. Whoever that is.

Originally Posted by RyanW

If such an organization exists, there is no doubt at least one pair of mercenaries roaming around on the run from just about everyone, incredibly skilled and fiercely loyal to one another.

Where would you insert the players? as one of the teams going through training? As the loyal pair on the run? As law enforcement dealing with the assassins? As self-appointed heroes stopping this menace?