The characters are Coalition trouble-shooters, called in by a bootstrap team working on a frontier world to aid in the investigation of some mysterious assassinations of leading government figures, which are threatening the stability of the Coalition supported faction on the world. Timing is not important, and in fact, the adventure could fairly easily be converted to a Regency contact team setting. The setting has been left deliberately vague to allow transplantation into a variety of campaigns, but the world should be balkanised and of low technology (TL4-5)
The initial mission briefing takes place on the tiny makeshift space station of 150 displacement tons which has been left orbiting the world. Although fairly new, the construction of many of the station's fittings appears cheap, from the exposed piping on the exterior, to the flimsy blue plastic of the tables in the galley and the slightly unpleasant chill of a poorly calibrated air conditioner. The station has a permanent crew of twenty, although it has sufficient capacity for double this number. A single missile turret provides token defence for the station, but a greater insurance of safety is in the lack of plunderable resources to attract pirates to the world.
The mission briefing takes place in the small command room of the station. On arrival the characters are escorted there quickly from the docking ring. On monitors around the room are several images of the world, spinning slowly but visibly beneath the station. Other smaller monitors around the edges of the larger screens show weather patterns being tracked and the status of the handful of satellites that make up a rudimentary communications system for the operatives on the ground.
The station commander is fairly young, and the dress uniform he wears for the briefing suggests some anxiety about reports the players may make to his superiors.
"I'll try to be brief. The situation on the ground is fragile and your presence is needed urgently. Most of the information you need can be acquired planetside, so I'll just give you an overview while my flight crew prepare the interface shuttle, okay?" He gestures to one of the wall displays which updates to show a spinning image of the mainworld. As you watch, the major continent is highlighted in red. "Our mission here is as a liaison to the largest faction on the planet, The Federation of Tomorrow, a comparatively progressive democracy which commands popular support. There are many other smaller factions also on the planet (the map highlights a patchwork of different coloured areas around the edges of the central red area) and following our contact with the Federation, many of them formed a loose alliance due to fears of offworld domination. The Federation is governed by ten representatives, one elected from each of the provinces, who form a council in the nation's capital. Three weeks ago, the head of the council was assassinated, and since then two more members of the council have been killed. We believe that the assassinations have been carried out by one of the rival powers on the planet, but the local security forces insist that the killings were carried out by a ghost, some kind of local superstition. We don't have the resources here to investigate this matter, so we have been waiting for the Coalition to send specialists to assist us. It is imperative that you get to the bottom of this as our helplessness has encouraged dissenting factions that would like to see us leave the planet completely." As he finishes a woman in a slightly crumpled flight suit enters the room. She salutes with a sharpness that seems strangely out of place with her appearance.
"Yes Lieutenant?"the captain inquires.
"The pre-flight checks on the lander are complete, sir. There's still that problem on the number two thruster, but the contra grav has just been refitted, so I don't think there's much danger of leaving the capital with another crater nearby." She then addresses the characters, "If you'd like to follow me, then." She salutes again, then turns ands leaves at a brisk walk. (Any characters with Ship's Engineering can inspect the interface shuttle before entrusting their lives to it, should they wish. Most likely they will agree with the pilot's assessment that the risk is minimal, although on a fumble they may remain convinced that there is significant danger. In this case, if the character persuades the others to wait for repair the station captain will try to persuade them to go regardless. However, if they still remain on the station there will be another assassination a few hours before they realise that the shuttle is in better condition than it looks. This should have no effect on the progress of the plot, but should leave a mark on the player's consciences)
Despite a strange grating noise as the thrusters fire to slow the lander before touchdown, the landing from the station is uneventful. The pilot brings the ship to rest in a large sandy-bottomed crater, possibly 500 meters in diameter. In the distance the green countryside is broken by a darker area, the capital city still being too distant to resolve any detail with the naked eye. As the characters leave the interface shuttle they will notice that in the centre of the crater the sand has been fused together into a glassy surface, presumably by the heat of repeated landings. It is Easy:Acrobatics or Agility to avoid falling over; on failure the character falls and cuts their hand on a shard of glass broken from the surface by the pressure of the landing gear (1D6/2 damage to an arm).
The pilot leads the players up the side of the crater, talking between breaths "They don't like us to come in to land too close to the city, nothing personal, they just had a few bad experiences with stuff falling out of the sky a while back. The crater makes quite a good landing site, keeps us out of the wind on the final part of the descent, and the surface is quite solid now that we've blasted it a few times with the HEPlaR to keep the sand down. We think that this crater was the result of a small nuke from the Final War, perhaps it missed the city, perhaps it just got left in an unstable orbit after a fleet engagement up there," (she looks up at the sky, turning a golden yellow as the sun sinks towards the horizon), "and this where it came down. Maybe they were shooting at something on the ground, who knows? The radiation has mostly decayed now, but I'm not saying I'd want to build a house here." As the characters climb over the lip of the crater they are confronted by the sight of a small building next to some railway tracks. Little more than a shed, the structure still has a neatly painted sign on it which reads 'Starport'. "They built it for us. Well, the tracks ran nearby anyway, and they wanted to do something to show us they appreciate us being here. Don't worry about those cracks in the structure, we had a small earthquake a few months ago, but most of the damage was superficial. A train should be along soon that will take you into the city, just wait here and get on, you won't need a ticket. Me, I've got to get back to the station and work on the shuttle, we'll need all the engines working if we need to evacuate suddenly. Look, I hope you get to the bottom of this, it's strange, but I've kind of got used to this place and I wouldn't want to get reassigned." With this last word she begins back down the slope into the crater. A few minutes later the shuttle lifts off, the thrusters giving off a heat which is only just bearable, like standing slightly too close to a fire.
After a wait of ten minutes on a bench in the unmanned station building a steam train arrives at the platform and slowly screeches to a halt. The driver invites the characters to ride with him in the engine, or alternatively seats in the carriages can be taken. The journey to the city takes twenty minutes and is uneventful.
The characters are met at the station by state security officers, who wear deep blue uniforms and carry revolvers as sidearms. They look relieved to see the characters, and explain that they would be grateful if the party would inspect the security arrangements around the home of the acting head of state (his two predecessors having been assassinated too recently for the government to affirm his succession). The security officers drive the players to a large house on the edge of town.
The house has three stories and is surrounded on all sides by ten metres of lawn. A few patches of bare earth show where bushes and other cover have been recently uprooted. A ten foot high brick wall topped with razor wire surrounds the building. The party is greeted at the gate by a senior security officer who greets them warmly before addressing them with respect to the situation: "As you can see, we've tightened up security around the house since this started happening, but of course you'll want to see that for yourself. We have done everything possible, it would be enough to stop any man but I still reckon it won't be enough to deal with what we're facing here, a ghost, a curse, call it what you will, it's something more than we can understand."
He than leads the party off to inspect the premises. The following details can be related as requested:
The players should be able to suggest some security improvements eg. better lighting, more guards, patrol route alterations, even some kind of decoy in the main bedroom. Despite all this however, the events of the night are largely unavoidable...
The party are likely to be tired and will be offered accommodation in the house for the night. Some players may alternatively wish to help with the night watch. This poses few problems unless the characters involved have very high observation assets and advanced sensor equipment or cyberware. Even if they do choose to stay up, fatigue, and the assassin's unusual ability to detect cyberware and avoid those who carry it should ensure that the players will have little chance of having any effect on the night's events, as they are extremely unlikely to have any idea of what they are facing.
A few hours after sunrise, after a quiet night without any disturbances, the characters will be woken by a scream coming from a bedroom on the top floor of the house. Characters rushing to find out what has happened will find a shocked maid standing over a dropped tray of breakfast inside the door of the President's room. The President lies in bed, but a large red stain spreading across the sheets indicates that despite all the precautions taken, the assassin has struck again. Yet the guards stationed at the only two entrances to the room saw nothing all night.
The five wounds to the President are of an unusual nature. On first inspection (Average:Medical or Average:Education for characters with military experience) the wounds are consistent with large calibre gunshot wounds. However, despite showing none of the burning typical of laser or high energy weapons, the wounds have no physical bullets inside (Average:Medical for a character to determine this, or if there is no medic in the party then a doctor will arrive within a hour). The wound depth is also unusually shallow considering the probable size of the round, although the wounds are certainly deep enough to be fatal. Closer inspection of the wounds (Difficult:Medical) will reveal an unusual degree of bacterial infection of the wounds (this would be missed by a visiting doctor). The staff of the house need no convincing that the murder is supernatural, the silence, the apparent invisibility of the assassin and the missing bullets all convincing them beyond doubt, as well as creating some doubts in the minds of the party as to whether they are facing an enemy agent or a ghost. The household are all in shock and seem far less welcoming to the characters than they had the day before, they are all talking to each other about the 'hundred year curse' in whispers.
There are several important pieces of evidence around the house. For each clue, relevant skills are listed, along with task difficulties which are dependent on the declared area of search. In addition to this, successful Investigation rolls could help uncover clues which have been missed.
In the corner of the window of the bedroom there is a small hole in the glass. A circle about three centimetres across has been cut cleanly from the glass. Partially covered by a curtain, the hole is hard to see. Formidable:Observation - Glass dust on the inside of the window shows that it was cut from outside.
The direction of the gunshot wounds on the victim indicates that they were shot from the general direction of the closed window. Careful measurement and calculation (Difficult:Investigation) could link the wounds to the hole in the window.
The razor wire across the top of the wall has been very slightly flattened in one section. There is no sign of any blood or cloth on the wire.
Leading across one patch of bare earth are a set of particularly distinct footprints. The footprints indicate a normal size foot, but the depth of the footprints is about five centimetres compared to the footprints left by the characters which are at most two or three centimetres deep. The trail disappears once the firmer turf at the edge of the flower bed is reached.
Players may wish to investigate the possibility of an enemy agent being behind the killings. Talking to people in bars does reveal a degree of xenophobia with respect to foreigners, but this does not help the players track anybody down, since in the eyes of the locals, anyone with an accent is suspicious.
Looking through the history archives will reveal one particularly significant event in relation to the events of the recent weeks. There is a record of a similar spate of killings of senior government officials almost one hundred years ago, shortly after fighting in the Final War reached the area. The nature of the injuries recorded in the press clippings matches very closely with what has been observed here. The killer was never apprehended and since then has acquired a semi-mythical status, in the same way as the Terran serial killer 'Jack the Ripper'. During the Final war, the planet was not involved in the fighting in any significant way, lacking any starport, although considerable fleet traffic passed through the system, using it as a refuelling stop. The investigation into the murders was curtailed by a small nuclear explosion near to the city, which caused considerable damage and confusion.
So what exactly is going on? The cause of these events can be traced back to 1116. During the Final War a small robotics company developed a variety of assassin robots, for sale to any faction willing to put up the credits. As part of the testing and evaluation of the robots a small military vessel was used to deliver prototype units to worlds which were for whatever reason insulated from the interstellar community. On these worlds the company could carry out 'testing' without danger of repercussions from any faction. On this world however, after the test had been completed, as the courier made ready to depart it was detected by a cruiser passing through the system. Refusing to acknowledge the cruiser's communications and operating without a transponder, the courier was assumed to be an enemy vessel and the cruiser fired on it from orbit. The missile used was not intended for atmospheric operations and in the terminal phase of its flight towards the courier, high winds caused the flight computer to lock up as it tried to correct for every gust. The missile impacted a few hundred meters from the courier, causing it little damage, but flipping it onto its side, and burying it under several meters of the material that was thrown up from the explosion. The efforts of the crew to free themselves were futile, the airlock was buried, and the det-laser missiles carried by the courier offered no way to cut themselves free. The crew put themselves into the emergency low berths to wait for the rescue party from the company. Meanwhile the company headquarters, containing all records of the mission, had been destroyed in fighting, and so the rescue party never came. More recently, an earthquake uncovered the airlock, which now lies at the bottom of a three-meter deep crack in the ground in the middle of a small forest. The A(P)-11 robot had remained on standby for years, powered by a trickle of electricity from the fusion plant. When the earthquake hit the tremor shook a loose power connection to the robot, temporarily disconnecting the electricity which the robot was using to preserve its internal settings. This resulted in the robot resetting itself. It now believes that the original 'testing' never took place, and a month before the players arrived, it resumed its original programming.
Programmed with exceptional stealth abilities, and with sensors and electronics subsystems which aid in avoiding detection, the robot is almost invisible when involved in a planned execution. It is only when it is forced to improvise that there is any possibility of detection. Unfortunately, the patrols which were organised to protect the president were nothing unconventional, so the robot had little trouble in using its grapple to climb undetected up to the roof, matching the texture of the wall, and then lowering itself down to the president's window where it used a silenced weapon for the assassination.
During the players' investigations they will be approached by a flustered looking doctor, accompanied by two security guards. The doctor talks rapidly, turning slightly red as he does so: "I'm very sorry to interrupt you, I'm sure you have other things to attend to, but I wonder if I could possibly request your assistance, just for a few hours, I wouldn't ask, only, well, there has been something of an incident at a local school. I've never seen anything like it, but perhaps you may know this situation better. This really is a matter of urgency, please come with us to the hospital." He pauses to catch breath, before launching into another monologue "But of course, you don't know what has happened. Well, it seems that one of the older boys at a local school has somehow got hold of one of your weapons, or something like it, and has shot one of the younger pupils. He really is in a very bad way and I fear we can do little more for him, worse yet, this other boy has run off, and nobody knows who he is. This boy is the only witness and we need your help to save him."
[What has happened here is not the fault of the players or any of the station staff. The weapon, an old laser carbine, was found by the older boy, Hoyt Adaki inside the old courier, which he discovered while hiding in the woods to skip school. Sadly Hoyt is a sadistic and violent individual, and when a younger child at school annoyed him, he shot him]
The players may choose not to involve themselves in this, especially if they feel that their lack of medical experience would make them more of a nuisance than an advisor. This doesn't matter as there will be opportunity to follow this lead later.
As the party enters the room containing Hoyt's victim, Ulex Grey, they can smell a charred odour. The boy is apparently only eleven or twelve, and all present will immediately notice that he has a red line burnt across his cheek, which Average:Education or Medical can identify as a laser wound. When the players arrive he is unconscious, and the nurses present will tell the players he has been that way since he arrived in hospital. An Average:Medical (Diagnosis) roll will indicate that the laser wounds to his torso have damaged his heart, and although cauterisation from the heat has prevented much of the bleeding, his pulse is becoming rapidly more erratic, and he will likely suffer heart failure within a few hours. Failure on the diagnosis will provide the information above, but will make all medical tasks one level harder. Catastrophic failure in diagnosis will suggest that the damage is less severe than it actually is. This makes all further tasks two levels harder, and the players may wrongly decide to leave the child alone. There are two major options for treatment
If the players are successful in obtaining the name of his attacker, then they can cross-reference it with school records to find the boy's home address. If they do this quickly (only possible if they operated in the hospital), then they could intercept Hoyt before his amateur bank robbery. In this case it may be easier to apprehend him and with less danger to civilians than at the scene of the robbery. If the players choose this option, then I leave it up to you to determine the course of events, bearing in mind that ideally the players should subdue Hoyt without injury.
While the party is passing through one of the commercial districts of the city, they will be blocked on one street by a security cordon across the road. A dozen national security men are crouched behind trees and bushes opposite a bank. On the steps leading up to the bank doors a security officer lies holding his chest, obviously in considerable pain. Inside Hoyt is holding six terrified bank workers hostage. Although hopelessly amateur in his execution of the robbery, Hoyt's paranoia has made it too risky for security to try anything: one man who tried to enter the building was shot down as he tried to climb the stairs.
Hoyt, Experienced NPC, Assets:Melee (Unarmed), Laser pistol 6, Observation 6. Armed with a TL-13 CLC laser carbine (4 rounds remaining)
In this situation the players have several objectives:
The hostages are being held in the foyer of the bank, and can be seen through the windows. Hoyt is staying away from the windows, and reflections make it hard to see where he is, although NAS or similar high tech sensors could detect him. He is standing in a position where he can see the front steps, but little beyond that.
The party does have several things which will help them apprehend him.
Unless the players use obviously excessive force (fusion rifles, HE grenades etc) Hoyt will be captured and it will be possible to interrogate him, and find out the location of the buried starship.
The party can take the train back to the Starport station. On arrival, they can see the forest described by Hoyt begins about a hundred meters from the edge of the crater.
It takes about a hours of searching through the undergrowth, which seems to consist entirely of a thorny scarlet creepers, to find the entrance to the ship. The ground has cracked open leaving a gap which is a meter wide and about five meters long. It slopes downwards at about a forty five degree angle, and about four meters down, a smooth metallic surface can be seen. The airlock is at one end of the fissure, half obstructed by the earth. The airlock is jammed open, some rocks having fallen into the track which the airlock door slides on. It is a tight fit to get through the airlock, but once inside, it is clear that little dirt has fallen into the vessel.
The airlock opens onto the main living area of the ship. The interior feels extremely claustrophobic. The lighting is provided by small low power emergency lights in the ceiling, about half of the lights are broken, burnt out after years of use. Although sufficient to see by, the lighting takes a while to adjust to after the bright daylight outside, and the irregular arrangement casts strange shadows across the walls.
A table fills most of the room and a couple of plastic cups lie on the floor, as do the dried remains of a tall plant, its pot knocked onto its side, spilling soil across the tight woven carpet. A narrow corridor leads towards the front of the ship and the bridge, and a similar corridor leads backwards to the hold and engineering sections.
Engine room The engineering components of the ship are contained within a single room, but blast screens divide up the compartment, and there are emergency bulkheads which can close off damaged sections. There is a low humming noise from the main reactor, which is operating on a trickle of fuel from the jump tankage, the much smaller reactor fuel tanks having been drained decades ago.
Hold The small hold contains a pair of emergency low berths. Each contains four people. The display on the side of the freezers indicates that the crew members inside are still alive, although the power plant will need to be brought back up to a higher output to power the revival process. Also in the hold is a tall cabinet with the impression of a heavily built humanoid. A socket in the impression corresponds to the small of the back. Easy:Robotics test to determine that this is a storage unit for a humanoid robot. Further reinforced piping leads from the cabinet to an unmarked tank a few meters away. The tank contains hydrocarbon distillates, the top can be opened to discover this, however the mixture of fuel vapour and air at the top of the tank could pose an explosive danger if there are any sources of ignition nearby. The people in the low berths will probably pose a moral dilemma for the players. By the time the characters will have been able to bring the power plant and main computers on-line to revive them, they will almost certainly have recovered log entries from the crew's personal quarters which will describe the nature of the mission they were involved in. Should the players revive them? They are murderers with a corporate morality which belongs in the past, but at the same time their knowledge and skills could be put to great use.
Quarters The corridor leading from the main living area forwards to the bridge has doors to crew cabins on the left and the right. In most rooms a personal hand computer can be located easily, which will describe the mission of the courier and the events which lead to it being buried. In addition, the engineer's hand computer contains performance and technical specifications of the A(P)-11. The quarters are fairly tidy, a common feature of all being a lack of any great number of personal effects, only one or two souvenirs, an unusual shell in one, an ornately crafted pen in another, a painting of a sunset over a city of lights in the captain's room.
Bridge The bridge is the area of the ship which shows the greatest damage. The superdense shutters which slide over the front window during reentry and combat have been left open, leaving the windows unprotected. The left panel has cracked open, and a considerable quantity of earth and debris has fallen into the bridge compartment. The control panel is half covered by soil and rock, clearing it will take several hours. The small bridge would probably feel claustrophobic even when cleared out, but at the moment there is barely room for more than two people to fit.
While the players are exploring the ship, the A(P)-11 will observe them, unsure at first as to whether they are crew members or enemies. It will take about twenty minutes to decide that they are enemies, but this time depends greatly on the method in which the players explore. If they are clearly taking precautions, moving with guns drawn, etc. then the time will be reduced, if they are less timid in their investigation then it will take longer to realise what is happening. Once it decides to eliminate the characters it will not act immediately. Instead it will wait until characters are alone before attacking. The robot is extremely dangerous, so perhaps it would be advisable to allow the party to bring an NPC security guard or similar with them, so that the first person found dead is not a player character. An encounter with the robot should be terrifying, shadows moving amongst the clutter of the ship are likely to be the only warning before the character is shot by a large figure which will appear as if from nowhere. Use player paranoia to create the atmosphere, mention half seen movements among the reactor machinery, strange sounds, 'footsteps' which turn out to be a sound from a fuel pump.
There are three major possibilities for dealing with the robot:
Once the mystery has been solved, and the assassin robot dealt with, the party will be treated as honoured guests by the government. The salvage of an uninfected and only superficially damaged starship will get underway (assuming the players didn't blow it to pieces while hunting down the robot), and preparations will be made back in the Coalition/Regency for the trial of a group of remnant war criminals (assuming the players didn't pull the plug on their low berths). The players will receive a finder's share in the courier once it has been recovered, in addition to any standard wages.
This robot was designed for deep security penetration and assassination missions. Externally the robot appears human, although fairly heavily built, and the robot can appear convincingly human in simple dialogue, although while it is fluent in all major languages, it is not an amazing conversationalist. Power consumption was a problem for the designers and one of the robot's major weaknesses is its extremely limited endurance. For long insertion missions the robot often carries additional fuel supplies, but for most purposes the robot's endurance is sufficient.
The robot is designed for stealth and its synthetic skin incorporates a chameleon surface which can render it practically invisible when it remains still for 1D20 combat rounds. EMM masking underneath the skin can hide the robot from IR sensors, or be used to produce an IR signature which matches a human.
| Armour Values | All 14 |
| Endurance | 5.4hrs high power usage, endurance is doubled when not moving |
| Combat Move | 10/10 |
| Initiative | 6 |
| Intelligence | 6 |
| Command func | High Autonomous |
| Assets | Observation 16, Slug Weapon (Pistol) 16/32*, Voice Recognition 16, Language 11, Stealth 16, Intrusion 16. |
| * The robot's armament is smartlinked so 32 is the effective asset when using the internal weapon. | |
| Armament | Subsonic Gauss Weapon built into right arm. |
| Electronics | 500m NAS, DataJack, Inertial Navigation, Visual Eye, WSV eye, Image Enhancement, Target Link, Display interface, Rangefinder, Telescopic Optics, Light Amplification, Artificial ear, amplified hearing, low frequency hearing, high frequency hearing, sonar, multiband radio receiver, grapple hand, voder. 'Looking glass' chameleon skin, subdermal EMM masking. |
| Mass | 249kg |
| TL | 16 |
| Fuel Type | High grade hydrocarbon distillates (18.9dm^3) |
| Maint | 1 |
| Damage | 2+2 |
| Travel Move | 45/45 |
| Price | Cr3,106,000 |
| Arm | STR | AGL | Lift | Hit | UMD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Left | 3 | 5 | 125 | 11 | 2 |
| Right | 3 | 5 | 120 | 11 | 2 |
The robot's internal armament consists of a large bore gauss weapon which fires rounds at 300m/s, inaudible beyond a few feet and producing no muzzle flash. For a graduated response the robot carries internally two switchable magazines, one carrying conventional rounds, and another carrying HEAP rounds for situations where stealth can be compromised in exchange for increased striking power.
| ROF | Dam | Pen | Ammo | Rng | |||
| Subsonic Gauss Weapon | 5 | 3 | 1-Nil | 30 | 23 | Soluble Rounds | |
| 5 | 12 | 2-2-2 | 30 | 17 | HEAP |
The soluble rounds consist of a discarding sabot which is retained within the weapon, and a biodegradeable polymer bullet which contains bacteria which are released on impact, digesting the bullet within an hour. These rounds were designed to intimidate lower technology targets by playing on superstitious fears, and also provides the political advantages of causing confusion over the wounds, and leaving no rounds which could be identified.
Disclaimer: The above is obviously a poorly justified plot device. However I like it, so I included it, don't flame me for technical details, think up an alternative that improves the plot and post it. Also, please excuse any glitches in the plot or setting, it taken a long time to type this.......
I hope people find this useful, even if you don't use the adventure, the A(P)-11 is quite a useful design, although Vampire Fleets forces some strange compromises, particularly on endurance.