I have trouble creating stories and adventures myself, so I'll be watching this thread. However, I do have some advice. What exactly does Ozma and the Ultimates think are the weakest links? For the Ultimates, the strongest are obviously themselves. The next strongest might the big players that have formed 10 years after the fall such as the Jovians, the Titan commonwealth, and the Planet Consortium. Other players such as strong bio-conservatives and stagnant hyper-elites have a way of holding everyone around them back. They may have many questions as to how the Anarchists have managed to survive, even with the help of other parties. The poor, indentured, and the sick are to be pitied. The criminals are to be despised as they are a blight on whatever system they exist in. Ozma is a secret organization that supports the Planet Consortium. Its unlikely they would take action against the founding members of the Planet Consortium, or their goals. However, everyone else would be free game, including other hypercorps. The Planet Consortium has serious difficulty trusting decentralized organizations such the Anarchists or Firewall, so its likely that they would be considered as targets. But those are obvious targets. The Jovians control a strategic point in the solar system backed up with a significant military, but their fear of advanced technology may be their weak point. They for instance inhabit one the most radiation intense zones in the solar system, but they are unwilling to make use of recent advances in medicine to treat cancer because it uses "dangerous nano-technology". The Titan Commonwealth is not weak itself (or at least it doesn't appear to be), but it has wasted resources in protecting many outer system factions that should have been easy prey to the Planet Consortium. The Morningstar Constellation (Venus) is a faction that rebelled and separated itself from the Planet Consortium and has not finished establishing itself as an independent power. It for instance is still dependent on foreign sources of water, and it has difficulty in setting up mining operations on the surface forcing it to still rely on foreign sources of materials. Of course, some factions may appear to be strong, but really aren't. Perhaps the best way to figure out effective strength is to arrange for a series of random attacks against the various factions. The attack on the space elevator might be one way to determine if the local hypercorps are effective at dealing with a threat. Against the threat that the ETI presents itself, it might be an acceptable risk to unleash TITAN weapons against their targets. Ozma can ensure the weapons are delivered, and the Ultimates can clean up the mess afterwards. Its unlikely that either will consider themselves as the weak links, or a potential weakness that the ETI can exploit. Also the act of trying to purge the weak links may actually weaken transhumanity, not strengthen it. It might be interesting to try to play things from those angles.

Ozma are great as a conspiracy type enemy, but their secretiveness makes them somewhat unsatisfying as the Big Bad - you will never meet the minds behind them, just their underlings. Ultimates are much nicer in this regard: they like a good battle and do not shy away (although they pride themselves in playing efficiently dirty to show that they are the best and brightest). This suggests that as villains go, if you use the TV tropes terminology the Ultimates are the Dragon to the Big Bad of Ozma. A big bad that always seen to be shrouded in shadows and impossible to touch. That suggests that an important plot will be to find something or someone that can hurt Ozma. What is there that the organisation is *afraid* of?

Something that I've recently considered is that the gates should be considered very important strategic points. Their defenses *must* be tested. Failure to have good gate defenses can leave a big opening for any extra-solar entity to invade our solar system. There is some evidence that these tests may have already been done. The Vulcanoid gate is controlled by TerraGenesis. Their gate security used be lax until a team of Reapers nearly broke their way to the gate itself with a nuke. Since then, gate security has been tightened considerably. The discord gate used to be controlled by some anarchist, but they quickly lost it to exhumans. The exhumans eventually lost it to the Ultimates. Currently the discord gate is controlled by the hypercorp Gonin with the help of the Ultimate mercenaries. The Ultimates there belong to the Overhumanist faction (whose beliefs make them a potential x-threat) who feel that they are biding their time before they take control of the gate for themselves. While Pathfinder may be the Planet Consortium's flag project, they might be deeply worried to find out that Pathfinder have been dumping garbage on a exoworld. Dangerous garbage like old experiments, radioactive materials, and TITAN tech. Its a Venus like world, and they try to dispose of the garbage in the lava. Strangely enough, evidence has been found that the world may have possibly intelligent life. See Vohaul (gatecrashing, p. 136) for more information.

pd336819 wrote:

"What is it that Ozma is *afraid* of?" Well, I think that Ozma is afraid of the same things that Firewall is. They are afraid of the extinction of humanity. In their minds they are willing to go to any length that is necessary and I think that they see Firewall as not willing to go far enough.

So that might be a way of forcing their hand: set up an xrisk *as a trap* to force the Big Bad to come out in the open. Sounds suitably epic as an end to the campaign.

Nothing too substantial beyond what's written in Sunward and the main book. They are officially a secret agency of the Planetary Consortium government, tasked mainly with neutralizing x-threats. They are more centralized than Firewall and operate more like CIA or other government espionage and black ops agencies. It is suggested that they are more interested in the Consortium's survival, treating autonomists, argonauts, Firewall and other unaligned organizations as threats. In [i]"Sunward"[/i] it is suggested, however, that Ozma's authority is so great that the Consortium doesn't even control it anymore. They certainly don't answer to the Hypercorps Council and frequently used the Consortium's other intelligence agency, the Oversight, to clean up after them. It is unclear if they do even care about PC, or they merely view it as a useful tool to further their true goals.