Cross-time Adventure Seeds

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Dr. Beckenstein

By sheer coincidence, I have written a Roswell-adventure that I plan to put up on a web-page in the next months.
The difference is that the PC are agents of Infinity who have the mission to hunt the conspiracy buffs down.

Also fun and far more worthy.

[Astromancer]

Here's a minor chore that can go wrong. According to this YouTube posting from QI the Galapagos giant Turtles were the tastiest creatures ever. This led to their present crisis, they got eaten.

Homeline sends out regular crews to get the Galapagos Tortoises from other timelines to build a breeding population. So far so simple.

However, the Galapagos islands were frequented by Whalers, the guys that ate the tortoises. Whaling ships often Shanghaied any seamen they could find to make up for deaths and those that escaped/deserted or were shanghaied by other ships.

So simply have some of the PCs shanghaied and the rest of the PCs go after them to rescue them.

[Flyndaran]

Shanghaiing would make any trip to certain areas in the late 1800s dangerous for visiting PCs.
Just looking a the Wikipedia page of Joseph Kelly from my local Portland, Oregon is rather disturbing. "Kelly was never arrested for crimping because it was not illegal at the time."
Crimping was another word for Shanghaiing that I just now learned.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Shanghaiing would make any trip to certain areas in the late 1800s dangerous for visiting PCs.

To be honest most places without very strong local government present essentially the same risk. Most societies have plenty of people who view strangers with nobody around to miss or avenge them as slaves that haven't been captured quite yet. Realistically though being shanghaied isn't much of a risk if you don't get too drunk or stoned to fight back. Taking somebody at a cost of one of the guys you already have (and actually trust enough to send off the ship looking) being hurt enough not to be able to work is a loss. It's not worth the risk.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by malloyd

To be honest most places without very strong local government present essentially the same risk. Most societies have plenty of people who view strangers with nobody around to miss or avenge them as slaves that haven't been captured quite yet. Realistically though being shanghaied isn't much of a risk if you don't get too drunk or stoned to fight back. Taking somebody at a cost of one of the guys you already have (and actually trust enough to send off the ship looking) being hurt enough not to be able to work is a loss. It's not worth the risk.

Solid points. It would be easy to get some of the less cautious PCs, or someone with an addiction to booze or partying, drunk. Or simply slip them a Mickey Finn (proverbially a bad guy to drink with.

[Astromancer]

It occurs to me that the First Doctor episode The Romans (I'll post a link later) is a varient of the Shanghaied trope. It starts with a kidnapping of Barbara and Ian that perfectly fits malloyd's analysis. The additional complications involved in being swept into the court of a famous Roman (Nero in the episode) would create all sorts of burdens and limits.

You'd need to escape and/or rescue the enslaved PCs without doing anything that would make returning to the parallel off limits.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

A Myth parallel, roughly equivalent to The Magician's Nephew has been discovered. There are rings as in the book. One of the types takes you to a space between the worlds, the other type brings you home. Homeline wants one or more sets of these rings.

Centrum and the Cabal want sets too. The possibility of a whole new way of accessing the multiverse, including world well outside of the known quanta, is a massive prize.

[David Johnston2]

In a steampunk parallel where the steampunk revolution started in China, the opium being sold through the Chinese trading port of Liwupu (Liverpool) has a new competitor on the street. The Homeline trader in Liwupu reports that there's a growing trade in something that appears to be methamphetamine. This is surprising given that they haven't even discovered amphetamines so far as he can tell.

Your mission is to track down the source of the meth trade, determine whether it's coming from offworlders, shut it down, and do your best to ensure that of the local police, the Imperial magistrate dispatched from Beijing, the spy from her majesty's government in London, the opium cartel and the secret society opposed to the Chinese, none of them learn about any offworld connections to what is going on...including you.

[Astromancer]

Here's a simple category of mission. Find lost things.

Example: The Romans loved the taste of laserpicium, or lasarpicium. But scholars clash on what the plant the Romans used really was. Classical North Africa is an interesting place to go looking for wild plants you've never seen before.

Another possibility is to look for the mysterious eagle Audobon claimed to have discovered and named for George Washington. He painted a distinctive looking bird that couldn't be any other Eagle (and Audobon was an excellent and reliable observer). Hunting through the wilds of early 19th century American for a gigantic Eagle unknown to science should be fun.

Simply trying to find D.B.Cooper in Nixon Era America, could be a blast.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Here's a simple category of mission. Find lost things.

One that has always appealed to me is Hemingway's first novel, the only copy of which was left on a train by his first wife on Homeline.

There are numerous timelines where this book was not lost, but no two of them are the exact same book. So you are sent back to an echo to find it sometime after it has been lost.

But when your investigation turns up evidence that it was taken by parachronic thieves, it raises some troubling questions. The most troubling of which is, is that what happened here?