Casting Shadows

This week’s Seed is being planted for Serenity. If nothing else, I hope it gets people to take a look at the episodes again. Was there ever a better show and cast? This is a small seed, a mere bit of pollen, perhaps, but with proper care, feeding, creativity, and active players, it has the potential to take your series far and wide, from Rim to Core and back again.

The Seed:

Increased Alliance presence on and attention to a mining settlement has made things too hot for most of the underworld players. Shady folk of every description, plus their most precious bits of unmentionable cargo need to get themselves elsewhere and fast. Every possible form of independent transportation is being hired, hijacked, booked, or coerced into a veritable interplanetary emulation of rats departing a burning building.

The Details:

Regina, a troublesome spot with needed resources and unneeded medical complications, has been a refuge for the wretched refuse of most worlds spinnin’ since the terraforming process was confirmed to have been flawed. Kept running only by regular and grudging shipments of Pescaline D, the mines in the numerous mountainous regions represent one of the few major legitimate sectors of the economy – the rest long having fallen into the hands of those for whom under the table is the only place to do business.

In the apparent power vacuum left in the wake of a certain man of solid reputation’s sudden loss of expert and hired help, many lesser thugs and pretenders to the throne of crime have been making plays for larger slices of that deep, black pie of perfidy… public plays. In addition to this enticement, new and more valuable deposits of ore have been uncovered recently. With these new discoveries come investors, experts, professionals, and all the trappings of proper industrialization. Keeping the peace, regulating business, and ferreting out the elements which would try to prey on those soft corporate city-folk now falls on a much more motivated, and mobilized core of Alliance troopers and civil authorities.

What is going on:

The players have many opportunities to get involved in this gradual, but increasing exodus of criminality.

• hired to transport persons of interest
• hired to transport items of interest
• hired to steal items of interest by persons of interest from persons of interest
• hired to prevent any of the above
• hired to steal back or otherwise interfere with other hirings and their hirers
• self-motivated to do any of the above
• coerced by the authorities to betray a person of interest in exchange for pardons or leniency in the hearing of their own crimes
• more…!

The potential options are amazing. I may have to return to this one for an Infectious Plot…

Enjoy!