Trying to plan my first EP module

[beej]

So as the guy in my group who pushes new systems/games, I going to be shotgun herding my fellows into trying EP.  Also as gm a who knows his players, I need to make something a little shooting heavy to draw them in (one of my players is good with RP but it takes a while to draw'em out into a character)

So here's here's what I've got so far

The Gold Bug

Go-nin has bribed TerraGenesis to smuggle an unknown quantity of alien gold statuettes (about a foot tall) through the Vulcanoid Gate so the Go-Nin Board of Directors can give themselves the artwork as a yearly bonus.  Solaris catches wind that Go-Nin has smuggled the artifacts for their Board members and wishes to steal them as an F'you to their biggest competitors in banking.


A Solaris representative approaches a Firewall cell masquerading as corporate 'security consultants' with a job.  Solaris wishes the players to 'acquire' a shipment of rare statuette art pieces from a Comex aero-storage-stat on Venus and deliver them to a rep on Venus.


Firewall is aware of the statuettes, however they are not completely sold on them being just artwork.  Far too many credits have exchanged hands and pecular personal changes at TerreGensis occured right before the 'statuettes' came through the gate.  Firewall tasks the players with investigating the alien artifacts.  If the statuettes really are just art, go through with the contract.  If they are more than just art, aquire if possible, eliminate if necessary.

The players take a shuttle provided by FW, piloted by a FW friendly Uplift Crow...yep.     

They arrive on the Comex facility and discover it has been recently attacked by pirates.  They will search the facility to discover if the statuettes are still there and if possible why the platform was attacked.  They will find the bodies of dead pirates and Comex staff, it is obvious there was a serious firefight.  Players locate the statuettes, some still in their packing cases, some scattered about the facility.  While searching platform records, they find recordings of the statuttes coming to life and attack the staff and pirates.   At this point the robot statuttes outside of the packaging activiate and attack the players who must fight them off and scuttle the platform to prevent the robots from escaping.

After destroying the platform, players will fall back to Pavarti and interrogate the stacks.  They will discover the pirates who attacked the platform were hired by the Outfit to retrieve Congnite hardware stored there and decided to scoop up the 'artwork' as well.  When the statuettes activiated while they were still loading up their ship, the captain took off and abbandoned some of his men on the platform.

Players will have to hunt through the underworld of Pavarti to locate the pirate captain and interrogate him.  They will uncover that the pirate turned the robots over to the Outfit.  The players must then figure out their location and with the help of an eraser squad, storm the Outfit warehouse and retreive/destroy the robots.

So...too much?

Advice?  Thoughts?  Disparagements about my parentage?

[clockworkjoe]

Outfit?

It sounds interesting but you might par down the number of factions operating in this scenario.

[beej]

'the Outfit'  I created a crime group and made it only local to Venus.  They're supposed to be 'up and coming' until the players come along...

As for paring down factions?  Drop Comex from being mentioned?  TerraGenesis?  Make Solaris's involvement hidden? Go-nin?

[clockworkjoe]

'the Outfit'  I created a crime group and made it only local to Venus.  They're supposed to be 'up and coming' until the players come along...

As for paring down factions?  Drop Comex from being mentioned?  TerraGenesis?  Make Solaris's involvement hidden? Go-nin?

It's up to you, but narratively speaking, having the pirates attack that ship because of reasons unrelated to the goldbug plot just seems like too much of a coincidence to be believable.  Out of all possible shipments they choose the one with alien artifacts, a shipment that is in fact secret and probably heavily guarded (it has to be well guarded if the artifacts are valued by the Go-Nin board)

[beej]

I see your point.  Hmm.

edit...

Would it make better sense if the pirates were sent deliberately? 

Firewall suspects something is up about the artifacts and decides to attempt to plant survellience equipment to figure out what it is?  Nanites and such.

(I'm using the Telemetry Gate uproar from Know Evil as the reason why the goods haven't left for Mars yet.  Its just happened a few days ago and there's been disruptions to interplanetary ship.  They won't know enough about the science and politics to know I'm bs'ing the reasoning.)

The FW cell is sent under fake ids to 'pick merchendise' up from the platform and attempt survellience, plant tracking bugs etc etc.  They arrive to find a bunch of dead pirates and Go-Nin personal.  They discover the statuttes are really alien bots.

From there the players track down the pirates, follow the artifacts to Hypercorp office?  hyperelite exec's home?  hypercorp lab?  The players call in the eraser squad and hit the place with them?

[Pyrite]

First of all, how will the statues fight, exactly? Are they just little sharp metal men? Do they have access to some kind of beam weapons? What exactly triggered them?

Personally, I'd let the players go through all the effort of bugging the statues, make some rolls, take some meaningless notes, then have another group come in to steal the statues. Either while the PCs hide and the group examines the statues, or while a firefight blazes between the PCs and this group, one of the newcomers does something that triggers the statues (shoots it, touches it in a certain way, says the iktomi word written on the base, whatever) and it becomes a three way fight.

Now it turns out that some of these statues have already been distributed to the execs of whatever hypercorp, and further study confirms they could be a xenological X-threat. Firewall needs them removed.

Also, if your group is shooty, calling in an eraser squad is likely to take all the fun out of it for them, really. That should more be kept as an option if they get in over their heads, not as something they're expected to turn to.

[beej]

I imagine the statues to about a foot tall, a sort of an anthropomorphic ant with the head of a bird.  the claws/pincers fibrate and fuck up armor and beaks fire an an electricity like bolt from its beak.

[beej]

After going over all the helpful advice..and picking up Sunward.........I have a revised Gold Bug scenario


The Gold Bug

Set on and around Mercury

- A Firewall friendly in TerraGenesis tip off of large credit transfers from Go-Nin shell companies to the company.

- Other FW agents independently pass along a rumor that Go-Nin is bribing TerraGen to bring alien art pieces quietly through to give to their Board of Directors

- FW is not sold on the art story.  The sums of money seem to big for just art.  They investigate more and learn that Ultimates, paided with the funneled money, are set to return through the Vulcanoid Gate on (insert date).  FW moles inside TerraGen will attempt to find out what is happening.  FW sets up a  team (the players) on Mercury in case something other than art comes through.

- FW mole reports that Ultimate mercs came back through with an unknown number of crates and left for a PC run space station to be shipped somewhere unknown.

- Players using covers provided by FW pose as Transpiration inspectors conducting a surprise inspection of the several habitat wings (including the one with the art work) on the station.

- Players can get fairly close and plant surveillance and tracking equipment or they can try their luck and try and talk their way past the hired muscle and inspect the goods themselves.  If they do anything stupid and get their IDs looked at closely, their cover could get blown.

- If they can get past the protection detail they find 4 cases, each holding three, one foot tall statuettes.  They are anthropomorphizing ant-like beings with what appears to the head of a robin like bird.  They stand on bent legs with arms in strange posses.  They are made of an unidentifiable metallic alloy??? element??? that has a royal purple hue and are clothed in feather like leaves of silver.  There are strange runes carved into the statuettes, filled in with gold.  They are lighter than they look. (their true nature is hidden from most portable scanners).  If the players do actually figure out their robots...they'll have to figure out what action to take, which will probably involve the dozen Ultimates guarding the goods.

- Players move onto another habitat (going with their cover) when pirates assault the hab housing the alien artifacts.  The PCs rush back to the hab (cause PCs can't not run toward gunfire)

- they find a bunch of the statuettes shot up, pretty much all the Ultimates and most of the pirates are torn up like confetti.  The two or three active stattuettes (which are now damaged) peel off from the slaughter and attack the PCs.  The statuettes scurry very fast with all the limbs.  They jump onto a target and then tear it apart with spikes that come out of their limbs.  The beaks emit a sonic based weapon that degrades/disrupts synthetic materials at the molecular level.  Extended combat or hits from multiple blasts at once can render armor and weapons useless quickly. 

- As players grab the remains of the statuettes and hopefully some stacks alarms start sounding, announcing station reactor was going critical.  One of the statuettes had hacked into the station and attempted to take control of security and comm systems, station personal managed to block it so it hacked engineering and rigged the reactor to blow. 

- fleeing the station, the players head down to Mercury and turn over the robot bits to FW.  The players and FW researchers discover that the purple hued metal alloy is designed primarily to resist nano-tech.  It doesn't react well to stuff like like bullet or lots of plasma bolts.  The sonic beak weapon it is discovered is extremely effective at not only disrupting non-organic matter but it can disrupt or totally shorts out nano-tech. Reviews of pirate and ultimate stacks will reveal that the robots did not activate until after people starting firing off disassembler and guardian swarms.  Anti-exsurgent tech anyone?

- the FW mole inside TerraGen confirms that 6 cases came through the gate.  One is still on Cadwell, one was immediately dispatched to Venus and the remaining 4 were sent to the space station to be delivered to Go-Nin research facilities on Luna.  Careful review of xps will reveal that there were four cases when the players first inspected the robots and that one of the pirates grabbed a case during the fighting and escaped with it.  (Unless the PCs notice earlier that there was a case missing after the pirates attack)

- Networking/rep/favor skill challenge to locate the pirates, currently staying at a hidden sifter/prite/smuggling base in a crater near Al-Hamadhanj, planetside. 

- Skill challenge navigating the Mercurian surface on speeder bikes to the hab.  Catch a few of the pirates and learn that their captain took the robots to the guy who hired them, back at Al-Hamadhnja. 

- Players race back to the city and stop the exchange (I'm feeling John Woo slow mo gun fight in a crowded fleamarket.)  Players stop the deal and recover the statues.  The buyer is...not sure.  If they demand a full campaign after the one-shot he will be an employee of the Big Bad.  Probably PC.   Jovian?   Tharsis?

- Cadwell is too well guarded for the PCs to go after the fifth case so they'll leave that to FW.  After retrieving the case w/ all three inactive statutes, players must egocast to Venus to be there when the shuttle carrying the 6th case arrives.  They're going to have to storm the ship when it arrives in orbit.  (I'm thinking about going for broke, giving whatever armor/guns they want, plus the eraser squad and have a big ass big damn hero gun fight against Ultimates)

 

[beej]

Its been pointed out by a roomate (who knows nothing about EP) after looking over the outline that there's not really horror in it.  "They're kinda scary (the statues) but nothing that'll make people pucker in their seats."  (his words)

Reflecting on it and to quote Ross "this is true."  I thought about copying the 'Fall' AP but maybe the 'terror' of it instead of the actually event.  Maybe I can step up the hacking of the robot statues?  Allow the PCs to hack into the security system.  Let them hear station personal freaking out as more and more systems fall to the alien hack?  Have them screaming over the comms while they're having flashbacks of the Fall.  Have the players hear the guys in the control room getting into fights over whether its really an exsurgent/titan attack and if they should activate the auto-destruct.  Maybe have to fight their way through panicked employees in the docking backs to get to their shuttles?

[Decimator]

The problem I have with these things is that they seem rather mundane.  In EP, anybody with a cornucopia machine and some time to kill can make an army of autonomous potted hydrangeas.  These disguised combat drones can easily each carry a security or kaos ai to mess with systems and wield concealed weapons of various flavors.

So what makes the goldbugs special?

[beej]

They are essentially anti-exsurgent weapons.  They made with materials that is resistant to nano-tech and their beak weapon is designed to take out nano-tech.  Three or four might make a fractal look twice before it shreds them.  A dozen or two will slow up a fractal.  Three or four dozen could potentially stop a fractal.  You release a few dozen of these things into hab that has an infection outbreak and you suddenly bought yourself a bunch of time.  Its not so much that they are an uber threat, its FW and the PCs will want to get their hands on them at just about any cost because of what they represent.  Its like the of Think Before Asking.  That report won't be of any real use in the short term, like the gold bugs.  Given a few decades of R&D, they could produce some powerful advances. 

What I think I need to work on is creating a sense of urgency once they realize the things can fight ex-surgent threats.  They have to find them before the pirates give them to whoever ordered the attack and find out how the uknown person knew about them.

Also if they want a regular campaign after the module, I can bring these back in a critical tool for the PCs in some critical event.