Continental Investigations Agency Inc

[hal]

Hi All,
To my two players who are part of the online campaign - this is restricted material...

To the rest, who might have some thoughts...

The story begins (sometime in September with any luck), where two men, waken from unconsciousness. Both are employed by a company called Continental Investigations Agency - a multinational corporation with offices in major cities throughout the World. They are, so to speak, cops for hire - a sort of mixture of Pinkertons in the early days, and any law enforcement agency you might care to name in today's world. In effect, they are the disillusioned former cops in the future - fed up with the corruption within major city governments who essentially prostitute themselves to any with sufficient money to buy immunity from the law.

All the justice that money can buy might be one of their mottos spoken in jest - but secretly held to be true in their hearts. Unbeknownst to those who work for the agency, their actions are heavily monitored to insure that they too (the C.I.A. agents world wide) are not corrupt. Without getting into too much detail, the Agents in Charge in every city - are looked at for select leadership qualities, and in turn, proven track records for getting results. When one agent of the C.I.A. is killed in the line of duty, the Corporate heads roll up their sleeves and everyone assigned to other cases get pulled off until they find and bring to justice - any who have wronged their fellow agent. Overall, most law enforcement agencies know that the CIA Inc are to be left alone for the most part - largely because of the mentality of the upper management.

But that's not what caused me to bring this up. For that, see the next post.

[hal]

My problem is that wading through Boardroom and Curia is a dry process. As a consequence, I intend to write an APP in vb.net so as to be able to tick things off (radio buttons, check boxes etc) write descriptions in various locations, and presto - the entire thing is written out in a format that matches that of other entries in Boardroom and Curia.

But here is the thing - in Night City (yes, CP2020 fame), these two characters were sent out on a contract to bring to justice, a lone individual whose dealings leave a trail of broken bodies, tortured lives, and a problem that only gets worse. Said individual is a lieutenant in another organization whose criminal activities are the distribution of drugs in Night City, engaging in illegal sales of military grade cybernetics, and a general overall process of corruption that includes honey pot traps, electronic surveillance, hacking, and other illegal forms of information brokering.

When the scenario starts for our two players, they won't have much memory of what went before, courtesy of the after affects of interrogation processes used on the player's characters. When the game starts, they will waken with a dead body of a man whose life bled out before he could fully free them from their restraints, and whose task it was, to find them, bring them the equipment they would need to escape, and rescue a valuable prisoner also being held captive. The place is an abandoned meat packing plant that was going out of business as the world transitioned to other sources of food (including algae processed proteins instead of raw meat).

So, two men, dehydrated from lack of water, drug use, and physical abuse. They will be down to the last of their hitpoints before going into negatives, and their fatigue levels will be significantly low courtesy of dehydration.

If they decide to make a run for it and get into a firefight, well, that's certainly one way to try and get out of a dire situation. If they try to sneak out, and they decide to leave the other prisoner behind - that's certainly a way to go. If they try to save the third prisoner, they can perhaps set themselves up for a greater success later in the campaign - but run the risk that the third prisoner will slow them down drastically.

On to the next post.

[hal]

So, what am I looking for here?

Having used the rules regarding Death and medical processes that can save characters etc - I've run across various things that actively help the player characters even if they should "Die" at the start of the campaign.

Death only comes if you fail your HT saving roll vs Death by 3 or more points in GURPS.

With Trauma Team Inc in the game, the players now have access to emergency medical dust-off missions by NPC's whose SLA (Service Level Agreements) require that they be on hand within 6 minutes. With access to drugs, medical technicians, and a rapid transport to the nearest hospital, the player's characters stand a good chance of surviving.

Drugs from GURPS BIOTECH and ULTRATECH should make their lives easier despite the increased deadliness of combat in modern times, let alone in the future such as 2052 AD.

So, the next issue becomes one of "when does CIA Inc become concerned about its agents?

At a guess, I suspect that they are discretely looking to see why two of their agents haven't checked in for a week. Problem is, they have no clue as to what has happened to their agents, and thus won't invoke the swarm effect of hunting down their agent's killers.

For now, I will likely treat the player character disappearance a worrisome thing, rather than a belief that they've lost two investigators just yet.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Eventually, once I've got that app written, I'll detail the CIA Inc with multiple offices throughout the world in this thread. Rather than try to detail the whole organization at once, I will simply detail the organization at a city level.

[Varyon]

As I mentioned in your thread about Trauma Team, my only exposure to the setting is the video game Cyberpunk 2077, so some of my advice here may be anachronistic.

First off, at least at the beginning of the adventure, PC's either shouldn't have active TT packages, or OpFor will have needed to have disabled their TT packages in some manner. Otherwise, TT likely would have shown up once the hardcore interrogation started and neutralized OpFor, leaving the PC's to awaken in a TT-associated hospital. Failing that, the PC's would have the option of simply calling in TT to escape, given their poor physical condition.

As for the actions of CIA Inc, I'd imagine that having two operatives missing might cause them to use a go-between to hire a Fixer (indeed, they may already have a Fixer in Night City who they favor using), who in turn would put together a team to investigate (probably with a fake story for motive, if that's even necessary - some Fixers may well be fine with "I want to know the recent locations of these two individuals" without any further justification... particularly with a sufficiently-large payment). This lets them avoid needing to use their own assets (aside from money) to figure out what's happening, and two levels of separation (the go-between and the Fixer) will let CIA Inc maintain some level of anonymity in the whole affair. The PC's will likely encounter this team at some point - which could serve to give them some temporary allies, have a misunderstanding erupt that results in them becoming adversaries, or any number of other scenarios.