Casting Shadows

This week’s Saturday Seed is being planted for SLA Industries. Since reading a notice on Buccaneer’s Guild, thoughts of the game have been intruding on my consciousness. To exorcise them… this seed is being chucked into Mort’s rain-choked gutters to sprout dark tendrils of opportunity for whomever, or whatever might be out there, still playing in the World of Progress.

The Seed:

The kernel involves a crash of a celebrity transport in CS1. While few should reasonably expect any survivors of the crash to survive the terrors of the landing zone this has not stopped the greedy and the glory-seeking from mounting rescue operations. The competition will be fierce, and savvy observers no doubt expect bloodshed to occur between the rescue teams as much, if not more often than between those teams and the denizens of the Sector.

The players’ group is welcome to jump on the bandwagon, just tune in to keep up-to-date on details of the frenzy, or ignore it altogether. Give them time to get the lay of things, before hitting them with the real thread of this idea.

When the timing is right, have someone they ‘trust’ inform them of a request from ‘someone highly placed’ to take on a bit of work that will have very lucrative remuneration. The job? Prevent the rescue teams from reaching the crash site or locating survivors, and if that objective is foiled, at the very least ensure that none of the rescue teams make it out with survivors.

The details:

Inserting this into your game will require some finesse. The players really need time to think about the challenge of entering Cannibal Sector 1 to seek out and potentially rescue survivors before the offer to work for the other side of that coin is made. Players also need to be sharp enough to recognize that if this job even exists that this is not just a simple crash, and so if they refuse the deal, someone will come gunning for them for the sake of completeness.

Having a figure to approach them that the group considers to be trustworthy or at least a source of reliable information is imperative. It goes without mention, I hope, that those for whom this seed is planted can hold their own in CS1…at least for a time. It is also important that the group have enough renown and the appropriate skill sets to be considered for such wet work.

What is going on:

As with the contact, an established mover and shaker in the shadowy halls far beyond the grasp of the PCs, should have some form of pre-established presence in the game before this offer is made. It would work best if this deal is something that ‘smacks of their tactics.’ It should come with equal trappings of risk and reward.

As is no doubt obvious now, the crash was planned, as was the site where they went down. The planners of the crash feel it is important that the deaths of all on board be seen as a terrible accident, and it is important that no one be allowed to escape. Rescue attempts for fun and profit are also a part of the plan, but none of them can be allowed to succeed – this is the point where the PCs come in.

Betrayal:

Some groups will not want to take the deal, in which case this seed can sprout into a multi-pronged thorn. Their own lives will be forfeit. If they add in entering the Cannibal Sector to find and rescue the crash victims to gain some leverage over their oppressor, they can add all the dangers of that journey to the great joy of fending off assassins.

How to work this into your existing stories, I leave to you~

Enjoy!