Casting Shadows

This week’s seed is for Blue Planet. It is another extremely small seed, and would best be run with human characters new to Poseidon, or with very unassuming appearances.

The seed
One of the characters (or a person near them physically at the time the scenario starts) is mistakenly marked by ecoterrorists as having overheard details of a plot they are orchestrating.

Planting the seed
This seed may work best for a group of just 1 or 2 players. For larger groups, you may wish to have the location provide tactical advantage to the terrorists at first. Experience for the characters or players is not that important. What is important is that the faces or names of the characters not be famous or recognizable to the villains. They are all just regular folk.

The Details
A radical group of idealistic youth with more adrenalin and self-righteousness than sense has decided that they know something no one else does, namely that Dundalk Shipbuilding’s latest joint venture in producing undersea habitats with Hydrospan involves the use of unsafe materials linked to genetic damage. The new habitats are so cost-effective and comfortable that inspectors and large-scale corporate consumers are looking the other way, and conspiring to cover it up while ‘a solution is sought quietly.’

While getting carried away with a heated discussion in a public place, key members of the group become convinced that a few bystanders (the characters and one or two other innocent people) have overheard their plans to cripple Colonial Station. They must be abducted and held until the plan has a chance to succeed.

The problem is, they are wrong about the characters. No one heard a thing.

What is going on

If you run this idea, it will be good to decide at the outset if the terrorists are correct or not. That will set a tone which will last for a long time in your campaign. Either way, the characters, will be completely in the dark about why they have been targeted. For reasons of time and complexity, the rest of this entry will be written from the point of view that the terrorists, who are still arguing about the names Ocean Home or Loving Action, succeed in their abduction of the ostensible witnesses and secure them in an out-of-the-way location under guard. If the characters in your campaign avoid abduction, and choose to follow-up on learning why the attempt was made, this entry should still allow you to fill in the blanks.

The leader of the terrorist group is Ben Hotchkiss and he has slowly grown into a full and textured paranoia without his self-involved co-conspirators being any the wiser. Their obsessions with saving the world have always been more about their roles in saving the world and much less about the actual problems that people living there have.

The group, mainly due to the charisma of its top leadership, including Ben, and the early number of pliable and attractive partners a prospective new member could meet has grown to a significant size. Disregarded by authorities as puerile youth, their actual growth and increasing steps toward action have not been noted.

The abductees, once held in a storage facility, have very little to go on, and almost no contact with their guards. If they escape to tell their tale, they will have very little to share with investigators. If they are hands-on problem solvers themselves, they may have more luck taking things into those hands a la an 80’s action hero than trying to ‘do the right thing.’

The actual plot is quite grandiose, but few among the group members realize that. In a nutshell, it involves using a mixture of force and misdirection to catastrophically end production on Colonial Station, and ruin Dundalk’s and Hydrospan’s reputations at the same time. Details are best left to you to match to the intensity of your campaign.

Will the characters escape? Will they uncover the details of the plot? Will they choose to act on it themselves?

Enjoy~