Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Bug-Hunting Mishaps (Rogue Space)


Bug-Hunting Mishaps
A Table of Creepy-Crawly Scenario Seeds for Rogue Space

  1. Those giant pseudo-insects that have been terrorizing the locals? Yeah, uh, the people who hired your team to deal with these things failed to tell you that these creatures are incredibly radioactive, much larger than you were expecting and their chitin is reinforced by some bizarre form of hyper-polymerized diamond lattice that makes them extremely difficult to injure. If you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, here it is: there's another team out there trying to capture and return a specimen of one of these bugs. These bright lads have managed to locate what appears to be a Queen Bug that they intend to ship back to their employers ASAP.
  2. Swarms of tiny insects resembling an incredibly ugly mash-up of scorpions, ticks and spiders have infested the ventilation ducts of a major arcology. You've been hired to clear the things out, but quietly. No one can know about the infestation or else things will go very badly for your team, or at least that was the standard, implied threat.
  3. Normally vacuum kills most bugs. Just not the mega-cockroaches that were recently released from deep within a hollow moon by a group of adventurous xeno-spelunkers. If you can escape the swarms boiling out of the crater-entrance, you might try to get word out to the Authorities. Or maybe you've got a plan for burning your way past these things to go see what else is down there? Maybe there are a few credits to be made turning over a specimen or three of these weird things to some BioScience Corp? If you can recover an intact enough specimen, of course.
  4. Three months ago this planet was an airless rock that had a string of numbers and a code-prefix for a name just like any other potential hazard to navigation in this system's primary debris belt. Now there are hundreds of foamy, resinous bubbles enclosing some weird yellow-tinged sulfur-based ecology crawling with millions of insect species no one has ever encountered previously. There is something of a race between teams being sent in to collect specimens. There could be a lot more at stake here than just a new and exotic source of alien bioweapons, especially as there appears to be something, some kind of guiding intelligence behind all this...and that sort of thing tends to make certain people nervous. Like the secret cabal of high-level military advisors who have diverted a camouflaged system defense boat armed with Hellburners to sterilize what they see as a potential threat. Unfortunately, whatever is guiding these bugs considers dropping nuclear weapons on it a threat as well.
  5. The crew of a tramp freighter that has been listed as missing for thirty-seven years have broken-out from quarantine. One of them was killed in the process. Thousands of tiny alien insects, no doubt some sort of hive-mind or colony consciousness, vomited forth from their body on the live newsfeed. Panic has gripped the starport. Civil order is breaking down rapidly. Riots have broken out in several different sections and mobs have taken to lynching anyone they feel are 'acting strangely.' The starport is being shut down. Only a few government officials and ultra-rich elites have been able to launch; all of them have hired-on bodyguards and private security in order to get through the chaos. In fact, anyone with a gun and little to no scruples is either fighting past the crowds surrounding the starport or the access ramps leading out of the city, or they're shooting anything that moves for fear it might be some invader-bugs out to take-over every living soul in the place. It's like the Zombie Apocalypse all over again, only with bugs, or at least that seems to be the general reaction of all those people shooting at everyone else.
  6. The vibrantly-striped caterpillars only found in a single isolated valley have been determined to produce a complex organic substance in their tissues that can extend the human lifespan by multiple thousands of years. Of course the BioMed Group that discovered this game-changing property of the caterpillars has been relocated to an ultra-secure facility in some undisclosed location. Your job is to go collect as many of the things as you can and return to the pick-up point. Easy money, right? Yeah, it would have been except that some local AgrIndustrial Corp has been constructing a hydroelectric dam that will completely inundate the valley within the next three days. 



4 comments:

  1. Man those are GREAT! Absolutely love #5, so many possibilities!

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    1. Number 5 is interesting in that it could be played as a straight-up Zombie Horror scenario, or it could just be a case of mass hysteria...or those bugs might really be up to something sinister, as in some grotesque amalgamation of Creepshow, Heinelin's Puppet Masters, and those nasty masks from Halloween 3...the possibilities for insect-based horrificness abound...

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  2. Great adventure seeds, love the ink work.

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    1. Thanks! I'm working on a few new pieces along similar lines.

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