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POW CAMP MAP HERE ; DISCUSS THREAD HERE ; MAP THREAD HERE ; SECTOR MAP HERE
TAU PRISON CAMP on Kashasevo, a toxic desert planet.
Tau Overseers, Kroot Guards, Gue-seva Managers & Supervisors.; prisoners have Neck implant devices: penal
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References: Gurps Reign of steel campaign is a Terminator-world. AI's control the world slowly exterminating humanity.
recently captured humans who will be assigned to the same work group in a slave camp.
Imagine a concentration camp where you are worked daily to fix Tau mining equipment.
I plan to of course make escape possible which will occupy the initial parts of the campaign.
For NPC's. I am thinking collaborators both obvious and hidden. Maybe a member or two of a resistance group looking for allies.
A few hothead types to give the PC's a little bit of a buffer if they come up with any really stupid escape plans.....
But what I am wondering about is how to keep the prison atmosphere interesting for the players. The kinds of encounters you can have. Fighting for the limited supply of good food. That sort of thing, but I am also trying to keep it from being a fight fest.
Prisoners work for credit chits from 1, 8, 16, 32, & 64 denominations. All prisoners get rations.
Work must be done for anything beyond bread and water level.
Cut down on gear. The only weapons are plastic pipes and shards of glass, and when one of those gets involved in a fight,
things finish quickly. Metal weapons will be scanned by the Drones. Most players should want to keep conflicts to fists
(though they may not realize this if they're trying to apply normal thinking to the game) because you can still get up
and walk away afterwards. In other words, make sure that when a weapon gets involved people just don't casually
get up and walk away afterwards.
Be open to the players solving problems in their own ways. In the prison break, for example, have the thing that makes the break possible planned out, but let there be a variety of ways for the break itself to actually be accomplished. This allows you to have strong narrative control without leaving the players feeling railroaded.
Well I am starting out the encounter with them all captured along with several dozen others in a pitch black rail car.
Basically the compound is a razor wire enclosed area with guard towers at the corners, several buildings for shelter,
a workshop and medical/storage facilities. Oh yes, and a mine field surrounding the facility which will be displayed for the prisoners through the use of a prisoner who is too weak to work any longer (Reign of Steel is a pretty ugly world)
The group is going to be pushed together as one of the newly formed work gangs. I plan for some conflicts with other prisoners, smaller party members are going to have to fight for their safety if they want to keep them. Prisoner groups will form off into cliques. Guardsmen, Pirate Crew, Human hostages, Refugees, Ratlings, Non-Imperials, etc.
Anyone heavy, such as Ogryn, Beastmen, Half-Orks, etc is working the mines, in a separate camp.
Reasonable possibilities for escape. One is a mass "smash the wires, drag down the machines" approach which will work
IF they can get enough prisoners to co-operate. This would entail massive casualties and probably get a low
number of Experience points. Another is the old tunnel and dig, which is of course horrifically slow.
And easy for a machine to monitor.
Supervised parties are used to salvage from a local wrecked town. Looking for food supplies for the remainder of the camp. It may be possible to smuggle a weapon back into the camp. Or maybe some wire cutters which would be a start on the wall.
If it gets really bad, and they are having a extremely tough time getting out, perhaps a party member
on scavenging run could encounter a resistance member, and help could be attained.
The locals are little four armed xenos with brown scales. KASHEVIANS
Can anyone think of any other escape scenarios?
Or interesting conflicts within the camp?
Reign of Steel is an interesting setting, I myself would like to run a game with the one AI into genetic experimentations being the source for some effective elements of rebellion.
A natural disaster might create an escape opportunity with lots of action potential. A flash flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake might damage the camp's security systems one way or another. The players would have to deal with the elements, scramblin other prisoners, and what survives of the security system.
I have to wonder, what's the in-game explanation for Tau using human laborers for anything? Why do they bother?
They use humans in areas where the climate or environment inflicts relatively higher maintenance costs on machines. I'd say this would be relatively humid places near salt water. More trouble with corrosion there. The Tau might also be in a bigger hurry to salvage stuff in that climate, because whatever it is they want might also be more likely to corrode, decay, be submerged, etc. Hence their resorting to using humans too. That could put your camp in the way of a hurricane or flood. Having water to hide in might also make escape a little more feasible. Infrared sensors and chemical sensors would be easier to evade. The entire planet is Tellurium heavy, therefore moderately poisonous. Adeptus Mechanicus Lore
Earthquake/flood idea's great. Start with your basic map, then make changes to it every so often (say, tearing it in half for example, then putting the pieces close to one another and assuming that water's pouring out of the crack), this adds an element of the unplanned and spontaneous and gives the PCs the opportunity to devise the kinds of unique solutions I mentioned above.
Natural disaster is another possibility for escape opportunity. I think four different escape possibilities is enough for pre planned. These players are quite intelligent and they can probably come up with at least one of them (or something Else.
Encounters within the prison that concern me. Keep the game interesting in the prison for awhile.
The collaborator work boss in the prison who has control-freak tendencies and abuses her power.
Sub quest killing this woman and making it look like an accident would be a good one....
A captured resistance fighter who is keeping quiet and if the players go through the effort of getting her trust she
will try and break out with them (and give them a contact in the resistance once they get out) I am going to have
her work on a different work gang, so they will infrequently encounter her during food and possibly sleep breaks.
An attractive female character who will latch on to the toughest looking PC she can find, and
see if she can manipulate him into acquiring her more food and protect her from the work boss.
A few captured nomads who want to escape, and both of them have a hard time keeping their mouths shut, if they are
brought in on any escape plans the party is going to have to make an effort to make sure they don't do anything
stupid or premature.
A junkrat who is an excellent scavenger, and if they get his help on scrounging runs he may be able to help
them secure better food or some sort of weapon.
Tau keep humans around for various reasons, some don't bother.
So you guys have suggestions for any other kinds of NPCS and what kind of encounter set ups?
What I do in these situations, I get me to Blockbuster and rent a few good P.O.W. camp movies:
Notes while you watch, and soon you'll have all the NPC and subplot ideas you can handle.
Iso-Cubes: prisoner is in a VR box. he seems to be on a hill looking down at a village. in there, in real time, plays out the lives of the gue-vesa villagers. they eat, work, rest, play, and go to the town square. All he can do is observe. The events seem to be quite real, unscripted, and never repeat. He can watch for years. Learn the language, habits, holidays of the Gue-vesa villagers. Especially close by are the school, town hall, and marketplace so that the oberver can see first hand how good citizens look and act. No torture, or deprivation, but the indoctrination via example never stops. It even plays while sleeping so it gets in your head.
But, to get you started, three obvious NPC types are the tough leader, the black marketeer, and the camp doctor. A few collaborating humans who help the bots run the camp would make great villains.
Give them lots of opportunities to either resist or collaborate in small ways, to build up their existence in the camp to something more bearable. That way, the choice of whether to resist and risk everything they have becomes a little more difficult. Also, you don't want to make the setting too bleak.
"We can escape through this Steam pipe!"
*pull cover off Steam pipe*
*steam blasts them in the face*
"ITS NO GOOD! IT'S FULL OF STEAM!"
Doing the cyborg experimentation thing, you might have a sympathetic NPC that you introduce early on be snatched up and "altered" then reintroduced into the prison. Should the PCs trust them? Should they stop the other inmates from killing them?
Making the NPC still sympathetic but "altered" after their operation can raise all sorts of moral, ethical, emotional conflicts for the PCs to argue amongst themselves about.
If the human captives have been together for a while, there may well be gangs or factions. These might break down on familiar cultural/ethnic lines, or they might be different: collaborators vs. resisters, cannibals vs. non-cannibals, groups of religious fanatics (pacificist/martyrs, stubborn resisters, collaborators who think the machines are scourging hands of God), captured soldiers from opposing pre-collapse armies, even extended family groups. If there is a cyborg research/production facility nearby, the rejects from their work might end up in the camp. They could be interesting: shambling morons, idiot savants, crazies of various kinds. They could all still be deeply ingrained with loyalty to the AI, or not.
Here are some notes I've done on how to tell a story and how to run games. Although I'm talking about fantasy games, these techniques work for any genre. http://www.fantasyimperium.com/story
-Give each player a dossier with the facts of their individual court cases. LEt them expand on it if they want to.
-Introduce an NPC cellmate with a MacGuffin (aka location of a stash of stolen loot, etc). Give him a gimpy leg or other infirmity( maybe he was shot in his arrest) so now he's too weak to get his hands on the loot.
-Shortly before the explosions that rock the prison, the NPC (Mr. MacGuffin) is taken away to be interogated and possibly tortured by the guards.
prison life has being very regimented and rather strictly controlled their meal times and times in the yard and such. But there were enough interesting NPC figures in the prison so that they always had something interesting to do. When their doors open, they were running to cut a deal with some evil bastard.
have an escape that makes the players feel their characters are cool.
1. If you have a technical whiz in the group, make it a complicated technical solution that only she could possibly figure out involving multiple panel-removals, security bypasses and energy conduits.
2. If you have a Smooth Criminal in the group, one of the rather dim guards thinks he's cute and will listen to the sob story or seduction attempt. Bring this NPC back for more comedy during the escape attempt.
3. If you have a really acrobatic character, make the cell tall and dimly lit up above, and the solution is leaping and shimmying up "impossible" pipes and through vents and so on.
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