Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

Jovian Republic Adventure - More Ideas Needed

9 posts / 0 new

Last post

Thu, 2013-06-20 14:50

Maskin

Jovian Republic Adventure - More Ideas Needed

I've been tinkering with writing an adventure which stars the characters as top agents working for the Jovian Republic. The idea is to ease the players into the setting by starting with a faction where a lot is restricted, but also to give the Jovian Republic a more nuanced and symphatetic face and therefore make it much harder to choose sides or condemn the actions of the Republic when things start heating up later in the campaign. The PC handlers are part of the catholic church for reasons I wont get into here, although working closely with SCI as well. The focus will be to locate, infiltrate and neutralise the dangerous terrorist cell JAC (Jovian Anarchist Cell). JAC has something major planned and SCI knows most of their agents have been exposed making them worthless - enter the PCs. I think a cool idea is to have SCI assign the players a black-ops terrorism act against the Jovian Republic in order for them to get on JAC's radar. It will have to be something spectacular so that JAC will not doubt their sincerity and it will also have to be a real terrorist act as SCI does not know the extend to which their security has been compromised (the JAC cell has an AGI working with them, but this is not known yet to SCI). This is cool because it means the players will have to do a real mission, but will be conscious of doing the least amount of harm (one would hope) while seeming sincere. It means they will also be hunted by CDC or SpaceForce and cannot rely on SCI to give them assistance, but instead have to hope JAC will offer them sanctuary/assistance. I know what the major plan JAC has in store is, but where I need some ideas help is for this black-ops mission. The obvious thing is to bomb something, but that is not very original or cool. Anyone have some really interesting idea for a black-ops that would almost guarantee getting noticed by JAC, and ideally will be fun to plan/execute? The only adventure seed I have for Jovians at the moment is Indigo Latitude (thanks Anders), but although a really cool installation that I do want to use at some point I don't see how it ties in with any of this. Obviously JAC is not as evil as they have been painted and if the players learn enough about their cause and what is really going on then they will have to think hard about what side they will take and what course of action. There are no wrong or right answers, but it will be interesting to see what direction they will take. There is also a lot of different agendas at play within the Jovian Republic so there is plenty of different viewpoints to explore there as well to give the players different perspectives - albeit more conservative than in the rest of the solar system.

—

Transhuman Mind

Sat, 2013-06-22 17:33

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Hmm, some form of dramatic

Hmm, some form of dramatic sabotage? The one discussed in this post might be a bit too deadly and serious, but something like it could work. Get an expensive ship or installation to malfunction at the worst possible moment. Say a current-carrying space tether involved in tapping the Io torus (superconductor quenching make amazing explosions as parts of the installation suddenly experience resistive heating). Or make a "near-failed" attack where a ship just barely misses a habitat.

—

Sat, 2013-06-22 18:23

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

data sabotage or harvesting,

data sabotage or harvesting, war begins with information

—

What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Sat, 2013-06-22 20:51

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

fafromnice wrote:data

fafromnice wrote:
data sabotage or harvesting, war begins with information

Especially if it is information the anarchists would love to have their hands on. Somebody steals a really important register of agents, police installations or fabber backdoors - now they are really useful. So maybe the PCs should pose as a hacker/amateur spy group doing outrageous stunts?

—

Sat, 2013-06-22 23:27

The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture

How about just plain old

How about just plain old assassination? The twist: the target, despite being a Jovian big-wig, has had his ego backed up (a specially sanctioned job by the top brass, and all top secret of course; maybe even he himself is unaware). He'll be resleeved once the JAC is defeated, but until such a day comes he's the sacrificial lamb that blesses the PC's admission into the terrorist underworld.

—

[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/iso_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/aliens_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]Time will perfect matter.[/i]

Sun, 2013-06-23 16:27

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

they could steal a major

they could steal a major shipment of carbon destined to the food cornucopia machine and give it to the anarchist, who will make weapon out of it for me it seems that Jovian are the one who will do that but let's play an inversion game :P get the habitat mesh down or subverte it, after Email every one with a Cornucopia plan with a low hacking grade AI, the plan is a weapon and you have a message attach to it like : free yourself ! - JAG (Jovian Anarchist Group)

—

What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Sun, 2013-06-23 18:11

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

Scrap the weapon

Scrap the weapon made it respirator system, most of the Jovian habitat have a environnemental system who is failling under the stress of too many people if i want to win a war against Jovian Gouvernement I have to win a reputation war, so i presume ease the life of the population is the weapon of choice of course if you want to play your anarchist like terroriste who believe in chaos give them weapon :P

—

What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Mon, 2013-06-24 10:55

Maskin

Ah, this is really helping to

Ah, this is really helping to get those neurons firing. @Arenamontanus, that thread is great. The idea of a planned near-miss is interesting because there is always a chance that they will mess up and cause more carnage than intended and so get in trouble with the SCI - there could even be sabotage if I want to make things really convoluted. A fake "terrorist" attack to get the attention of JAC is sabotaged to make it real by a rival in SCI who wants the mission to blow up in the face of those organising it to forward their own agenda... @fafromnice, great idea about information as it is something JAC would want, it causes no immediate harm to the Jovian Republic and most importantly as SCI is aware of the data theft they can take measures to invalidate the data once it has served its purpose (change protocols or make sure there is bogus information and traps in the data). The only downside to stealing data is that it is a very low-key crime and the Republic would typically hush such events down so suddenly making it public knowledge would be suspicious. I guess the best bet would be to have the players pose as sellers of the stolen data (they would still need to steal it first to ensure that JAC does not catch on as SCI does not know how compromised their security is). Not quite sure how they would advertise only to JAC how to contact them though – perhaps just try to get into the criminal side of society and make sure the word gets out on the street (which would risk getting the attention of CDC, see below*). The reputation war angle is a nice angle for a JAC mission once the players have been recruited. Having just infiltrated the "evil" anarchist terrorist cell, their first mission to prove themselves is to release a nano-plague in a run-down habitat with a failing environmental system to clean up the air and make it a nicer place. Bonus points for saving the park flora and dwindling bird population. All crowned of course by hacking the news network and broadcasting to the population the gifts they have just received by the Autonomist Alliance. This could also server as a diversion for a secondary mission to smuggle a maker into a habitat and help organise a system (reputation based?) for the desperately poor to use it to improve the community without getting caught and executed for treason. *I'm also thinking CDC (Spears of Longinus) might get involved in confronting the players as they have sympathisers in the SCI/CDC who are frustrated at the lacklustre response to the latest data theft by the players and so tip of the CDC, or maybe they get tipped of by the players' attempt to get the word out to JAC.

—

Transhuman Mind

Tue, 2013-07-02 16:14

The Doctor The Doctor's picture

Arenamontanus wrote

Arenamontanus wrote:
Especially if it is information the anarchists would love to have their hands on. Somebody steals a really important register of agents, police installations or fabber backdoors - now they are really useful. So maybe the PCs should pose as a hacker/amateur spy group doing outrageous stunts?

It could also be something like an exploit. Say that one of the cells' members was performing reconaissance and found a devestating zero day that would let a net.warfare cadre' bypass the infosec strategy of the network of a Jovian habitat. It was weaponised and used to compromise some terminals inside the habitat's network, giving them a considerably amount of direct control over what happens inside and around that particular network. Instant potential disaster. Or the exploit is actually a jailbreak for the few fabbers on board the habitat, which a creative anarchist uses to start manufacturing cornucopia machine components... tools to build tools.

—

[img]http://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/info_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [url=https://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/blankbadge.png][img]http://drwho.vir...