by Peter
Vialls
Panic in the Sky
A passenger airship run by Cornercut Airways is crossing the
continent, over the mountains, when a faulty fuel valve fails
due to shoddy maintenance; highly inflammable octane fuel
carried to fuel the propjets that propel the airship spills
over the skin. The captain stops engines, to avoid a
catastrophic explosion, and then radios for help.
The airship is left drifting with the wind over the mountains.
It cannot gain height without the engines; in five hours, it
will crash into the side of Mount Superhigh.
The problem is that the airship is carrying 80 passengers and
4 crew, none of whom can debark. Normally, the airship docks at
a tower in the destination city: but of course it can't get
there. If it attempts to land in the mountains it is likely to
get torn apart and crash; nor can the passengers be airlifted
out of the mountains due to the dangerous aircurrents at low
level.
Nor is the airship equipped for a helijet to lift the
passengers off it. The passenger gondola is in the lower part
of the airship, and the main body of the airship hangs over it.
Thus it is impossible merely to winch passengers up.
Nor can a line easily be attached to the airship for towing;
there is no hook or fixing point to which to attach a cable
except at the front of the gondola, on the underside of the
envelope.
All the party have to do is get the airship or at least the
passengers and crew to the city beyond the mountains.
Important characters for the party to cope with are the crew
of the airship and any influential passengers who may manage to
commandeer the radio at critical moments. It may well be that
the passengers get so nervous that they decide to take over
control of the airship "to help the rescue team".
On the ground, there is the Director of Cornercut Airways, who
may well want to destroy the evidence of his cheapo
maintenance, there are the air traffic controllers who may well
object to the presence of rescue craft in normal airlanes,
there are the gaggle of reporters who want to interview the
party members, and there are the relatives of the passengers
clamouring for attention.
Think of the airship as a space-age zeppelin, with passengers
and crew in a gondola below the main body, and propjets mounted
on pylons above and below the body. Remember that jets may well
blow the airship around if they get too close, as well as
panicking the passengers. Also remember that the skin of the
airship may well not support a person's weight: too much damage
to the skin could cause the airship to begin to fall, further
reducing the time available to get the passengers off.
Hell Hole
A party of visiting engineers from Dsanir IV are travelling
into the disused Silverthorpe mine, considering attempting to
reopen the mine, when the old and poorly-maintained cable car
machinery fails catastrophically. The cable car falls eight
hundred feet down the shaft into the depths of the mine, before
the emergency back-up systems brings it shuddering to a halt,
clinging precariously to the side of the shaft. The ruined
machinery tumbles down the shaft after the cable car, jamming
the shaft for a hundred feet with tangled steel girders and
live power cables.
Accidents in mines never come singly. One end of a broken
power cable, sliced cleanly by the falling cable car, shorts
against a line that extends to the bottom of the shaft, nearly
a kilometre below the trapped cable car, and ignites a massive
build-up of coal gas at the bottom. Around the sealed cable
car, an inferno is raging.
The mine crew on the surface have reported the accident: all
the party have to do is get the trapped engineers out before
they fry - in about seventy minutes.
This is a classic multiple problem scenario. The party must
somehow clear the debris out of the shaft (without sending it
tumbling down onto the cable car, which may be only
precariously poised in the shaft), and then travel down eight
hundred feet to attach a new cable to the car without
dislodging it, or alternatively cut into the cable car and get
the engineers out individually. The fire is there to hamper the
operation. If the referee think the party are having too easy a
time, he could add that the Dsanir engineers do not breathe
oxygen, and thus must be brought out either in the car or in
suits.
The major characters the party have to deal with are the
engineers themselves (who are in touch with the surface via the
still-intact telephone cable) who may be able to suggest
helpful or not-so-helpful ideas (depending how well the party
are doing). At the top of the shaft are the mine crew, who can
give useful background information and who can describe the
situation. As always, there will be reporters and cameramen,
and probably sightseers.
Stress to the party the heat at the bottom of the shaft, and
the depth of the car. The shaft is narrow, giving little space
for movement, and of course there is little to hold onto. Above
the car, there is a mass of debris which will need to be cut
through: one slip could send debris showering onto the cable
car, hurtling it into the depths. A slip could also send the
person doing the cutting to follow the debris. Ropes will not
be long enough to reach down to the debris, let alone the cable
car; cables can be used to haul up the car, but the rescuers
will not have sufficient flexibility from cables to support
themselves.
Tank Trap
The army is testing its new computer-assisted battle tank,
codenamed Ogre, when the tank goes out of control. The four-man
crew aboard pass out when the life-support system pumps
knock-out gas into the cab, and the tank heads for the city.
One of the computer programmers has written a bug into the
program, and is demanding 10,000,000 credits to stop the
tank.
General Moore has asked the player-characters to stop the tank
to avoid paying the ransom to the programmer. However, the tank
is equipped with anti-personnel systems and will prevent any
attempt to close it down. It is also presently heading for the
40-storey Subether Radio Tower, and will get there in seven
hours.
This scenario is basically very straightforward. All the party
have to do is stop the tank, preferably without damaging it
(according to General Moore), and rescue the crew. The trouble
is that the computer has other ideas.
The major characters in this operation are General Moore and
his military sidekicks, politicians (both those in favour of
bigger and better killing machines, who want this minor
incident to be hushed up, and the opposition who unreasonably
seem to dislike spending billions of credits on tanks when it
could be spent on hospitals and schools), the computer
programmer who is causing this problem (who is undoubtedly
bright enough to issue his demands without easily being located
or attacked) and perhaps a handful of reporters and/or spies
(depending who the party talk to).
Subcrash
A submarine liner, carrying a small number of company
executives, is caught in the middle of an underwater earthquake
as it travels towards Marineville. The sub is seriously
damaged, and ends up on the seabed, completely immobilised. A
fine hairline crack in the hull is leaking water slowly into
the sub, and the leak is slowly getting worse. The sub crew
radio to base, to ask for help.
This seems like a straightforward rescue mission; the party
take a second sub out to the wrecked sub on the seabed.
However, on getting to the scene of the wreck, they find that
(unknown to the trapped sub's crew or passengers) the sub is
partially buried by rubble and debris that settled on the sub
in the aftermath of the quake: this rubble totally covers the
escape hatch. The sub is too deep for the characters to venture
out of their sub in scuba gear. Alternatively, the escape hatch
might have been buckled or jammed.
The major characters will be the sub's crew and passengers
(who range from honest and helpful to sneaky and unpleasant
business types), any additional crew on the PCs' sub, plus,
once again, reporters (a pushy reporter going out in a third
sub could prove useful, or could complicate matters
further).
Finally, if the PCs are finding this too easy, it is quite
possible that there might be a second undersea quake whilst the
rescue is in operation.
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