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[Ideation] Cyborg weapons systems research facility

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
I'm developing a scifi post-apocalyptic campaign setting in which a major villain is a 'mad' scientist obsessed with research & development of cybernetics with a military bent.
The first adventure will see the players potentially discovering some of the research material (information and artifacts) and while I have a few ideas of my own, I'd like to crowd-source the content to get a really diverse set of possible discoveries.
If you'd like a few lines of background to help seed your suggestions, click the 'spoiler' below.

I'm taking an alt-history angle on the Star Wars universe to give me a well-formed deep background and point of departure.
The scientist and facility are aligned with Cestus Cybernetics, which I've taken creative license to create a covert connection to Tenloss Syndicate.
The scientist belongs to the X'ting species.
They are developing a cyborg 'supertrooper' to rival the Imperial clone troopers

If you have any thoughts on what might be uncovered, please feel free to post here.

Thank you in anticipation

sergey-zabelin-lab-3.jpg
Image credit Sergey Zabelin
 

TealdragonUK

Member
Silver WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Not so much info, but for the scene after gathering some information they set off (or someone notices and sets off) the release/awaking protocols on one or more of the containment units, they can try and get more info but more units will come online, Eventually they are forced to flee, chased after obviously very dangerous foes, they learn more info on the job as they try and escape through corridors and rooms, hacking through locked doors and dodging explosive things to get back to their ship.
 

BenS

Member
Wizard of Story
  • Some sort of extraction of human consciousness/brains (think dalek or cybermen from Dr. Who)
  • Extreme extension of human capabilities (e.g. massive strength or speed, think space marines from wh40k)
  • A rogue AI controlling the compound, trying to "update" the players
  • 1:1 Clones of the players with similar or better abilities
 

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
Now THATs a juicy set of suggestions!! I particularly like the ones pertaining directly to the PCs - a great hook that has great potential to 'make the players care'
 

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
Following @JohnnFour suggestion I summon @JochenL and @ELF to chime in on this thread. Just whatever comes to mind really...

I should add that the original idea of 'all PCs start as prisoners' has mutated slightly, now that my players have come on board and provided character sketches: two are actual prisoners, the other two are indentured servants in the facility (one is a maintenance droid, the other is his 'superior' - a Chadra-fan technician with a penchant for hacking...)
 

TealdragonUK

Member
Silver WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
If two of the characters are experiments the implants/themselves could be worth a lot of credits, maybe the mistreated servants might want to escape with the pay day of the prisoners they have got to know well as their ticket out of there.
 

JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
A JochenL appears dragged from the lightless caves of code :)

I just put some of the stuff I made up/used for a similar situation in one of my campaigns:
  • Angel Spark: An implanted chip that prevents a person from doing evil, used on various remote space stations to forcibly create utopian societies.
  • Puppet Implant: A chip that allows remote control of a person, used by society-coordinating central AIs to ad-hoc recruit citizens for emergency tasks whether they want or not.
  • Breeding Tentacles: Vat-grown tentacles grafted to a patient's head that semi-independently attack opponents with hardened tips. Those break off on contact and burrow into the flesh causing severe pain. Finally encapsulating themselves and breeding a new lifeform as desired by the designer.
  • Ego Transmitter: Transplant that records emotions and thoughts of an individual, and transmits them to a receiver for replay. An ego receiver enables its user to re-experience recordings like being the original person. Some systems use transceivers to monitor citizens and selectively manipulate their perception and thought processes.
  • Nano Goo: Viscous fluid of nanobots or retroviruses that infect organisms and grow Angel Sparks, Puppet Implants, and/or Ego Transceivers without the person noticing. Can be injected under the guise of medical treatment or left as a puddle of goo for someone to touch.
EDIT: I should add that my players like to play around with stuff, push every button, test every liquid, etc. :)
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
I love the idea of building AI-controlled Storm Troopers. Really cold and alien. Fighting robots means you can design all kinds of foes without fleshly limitations.

Perhaps there's a special silicate than can be turned into a room temperature quantum fusion chip that runs the troopers.

The villain's 3 Step Plan is:
  • Find a legendary planet said to be the only known place where this silicate exists
  • Set up harvesting and manufacturing there
  • Unleash his cyborg army of near-omniscient instant communication fearless relentless soldiers
I'm reading Dune for the third time right now, so the spice, er silicate, must flow.

Star Wars meets Dune meets Terminator
 

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
Praise be, oh dark Lords of adventure! I can feel the force flowing through these rich seeds...
The world on which this post-apocalyptic tapestry is unravelling is a veritable sea-chest of rare mineral wealth, so the 3-step plan is already into phase two! Which is fine, as this particular villain isn't the main villain (she is more of a slow-burner with even larger-scale plans) and the beginnings of the campaign will benefit from being thrust head-long into such a well-developed vile plan.
Jochen's list will make for a series of jaw-dropping discoveries when/if the PCs manage to hack into the deeper levels of the facility's computer system.
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
cyborg 'supertrooper'
When you say that a - spoiler - cyborg supertrooper is to be created via cybernetics, do I correctly understand that you intend to have that mad scientist create cyberware to implant into biological bodies for their enhancement and that those cybernetic enhancements are intended to be used for combat?
If so, you have an abundance of those in the Shadowrun setting (specifically abundant in the third edition volumes on cyberware and bioware, while newer developments like nanoware and geneware are best described in the fifths edition). You should watch though, that you maintain your Star Wars tone for this.

Some examples:
  • Cyberlimbs, cybereyes, metallic layers within their skin, underwater breathing based on oxygen tanks, lasers within their tongues, monofilament whips instead of their tongues, metal claws that can be extended from the hand, tactical computer chips implanted within their skulls, ... but these are mostly individualistic and not so much fun to include, I believe, if you want to create an army.
  • Genetic combinations with some animals to give them some strong animal features like in Netflix' "Titan" or even better like in "Terra Formars".
  • Implantation of a chip that can overwrite the personality and lets them all act simultaneously. In addition, you can upload skills and languages and the like for them to reach a higher level. A bit like in Netflix' "The Unlisted" or in "Matrix".
  • Also, you don't necessarily reduce to humanoids, you could take huge fire breathing dogs with 8 cybereyes, poisonous claws and heavy armor.
Or one that I used recently:
  • The PCs break into a sea-based R&D facility and find a diagnostic room, where a huge Merrow male, a Merrow female and even a small Merro child lie dead on examination tables. They are many holes in their bodies. And the female doctor there explains when threatened that they had already been almost dead and that they had tried to rescue them, but failed. The holes are the markings of their illness, not from some experiment on them.
    When the PCs reach the research room, they find several tanks, some empty, some filled with dead or half-dead Merrow, some with other objects. Again some with water, some without and some with some dark liquid. But what all of those had in common were some kind of black spikes protuding from the Merrows' skin. Huge and bizarr in those tanks filled only with air, tiny in those tanks filled with that poisonous goo. And in one instance they also saw how a rock of this black crystalline stuff moved towards a living being. Exposed to the light it grew very fast, it seems. But what was this?
    Finally, the PCs reached the central, most secure observation room. There were three tubes, but only the middle one was not empty. Within, a conscious female Merrow touched the glass wall when it saw the PCs. She was also covered with those spikes, but seemed to have survived. Although the threatened doctor objected fiercly on the PCs "rescueing" this Merrow, they did it nevertheless. He warned them that these Merrows were infected by an intelligent parasite they call Amphrit-3, that was uncontrollable and killed its host and spread like a disease. It mustn't be escaping this facility for it would threaten humanity as we know it. This is, when one of the PCs remembered to have found (and touched!) these black spikes in a warehouse lately during his research on the facility. He got worried, but the PCs were the heroes that they are and hauled the Merrow to freedom. And they all got infected....

    So yeah, you could just make it a kind of parasite that enhances its host but also takes over control. And the mad scientist tried to overcome the controlling force of the parasite by experiments.

But really, you would want to put your PCs in the center of the experience and not choose something that is cool, but with which the PCs cannot interact.
 

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
When you say that a - spoiler - cyborg supertrooper is to be created via cybernetics, do I correctly understand that you intend to have that mad scientist create cyberware to implant into biological bodies for their enhancement and that those cybernetic enhancements are intended to be used for combat?
Firstly thanks @Stephan Hornick for your detailed reply. A cornucopia of great ideas in there!

To respond to your question, yes you're correct in your understanding. Since making the post I've also been working genetics into the mixture, thanks to suggestions made by others above and further ideated to generate a list of information they can discover if they hack the facility computer network.
Specifically, I've been going down the path of gene-splicing with aquatic creatures. The facility is located on a lake and has a history of various kinds of corporate-funded research in this environment.
I really love the idea that some of these experiments might be entirely non-humanoid.
My plan is - again, thanks to suggestions above - when the PCs reach the lab level, they discover evidence of this in the growth chambers, as well as disturbing evidence of experimentation on partially-grown 'substrates' that resemble one or two of the PCs.
I'll see if I can get hold of a copy of Shadowrun and have a look at the implant options you've noted.

I don't want to get too involved in the detail at this stage though, as the current adventure is actually a 'prison break' scenario and all they probably want to do is escape. The discovery of this information & evidence is to build a hook for a subsequent 'return mission' at some point in the future when they realise they really need to either stop this villain or get to the bottom of what's going on.
 

Gerald.Lock

Active member
Wizard of Story
Quick question @JohnnFour @JochenL @ELF @Stephan Hornick or anyone else interested: the PCs are trying to break out of a cybernetics research facility they’ve been imprisoned in (as test subjects). The facility is afloat on a large inland sea, which provides the major means of containment (or at least disincentive to escape) as you may already be aware.
There’s a possibility they can try to escape via a submersible but one character has a deep fear of water so it’s unlikely they’ll try that. Currently they’re aware of a small shuttle that is coming in a couple of hours to pick up some kind of cargo.
After some initial combat with sentry droids, facility security has been alerted to the break and is trying to contain them. Half the guards have been taken out already and the PCs are trying to keep hidden until the shuttle arrives.
Unknown to the characters, the shuttle is picking up a cargo of smuggled weapons and is crewed by armed gangsters.

Do the facility flight control staff warn the shuttle off (thereby blocking the planned escape) or ask for their help, risking damage to the facility landing bay and beyond in the likely event of a firefight, as well as risking the inmates’ escape if they win the fight?
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Do the facility flight control staff warn the shuttle off (thereby blocking the planned escape) or ask for their help, risking damage to the facility landing bay and beyond in the likely event of a firefight, as well as risking the inmates’ escape if they win the fight?

To me their most sensible option would be to hold off the shuttle until they themselves capture the escapees. But that would change if they had already suffered too many losses, or if there was a time limit for the delivery.

If the staff decide to request help from the gangster, that could result in an interesting situation where the staff would be indebted to the smugglers, who would naturally want something in return. And that would produce a new option for player characters to get involved deeper in the intrigue of that illegal side job. Perhaps they are able to offer something more valuable than the provenly incompetent facility staff?
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Hmm... hard question but a great opportunity to take out the WoA approach.

From a settings perspective:
What would the NPCs do?
  • What would the leadership (=director?) do? I guess the answer to your initial question depends on the leadership of the facility. I can imagine both scenarios. But based on what you have told (and drawn) us about the facility secrecy seems to be way more important than the lives of the prisoners. Thus, I would imagine that the leadership will try to prevent the shuttle from docking. Likewise, he may order someone to man the submersible and to hide it from the prisoners, just in case. The leadership might also want to use knock-out gas throughout the whole facility and let it sweep for the prisoners by drones.

  • The gangsters (=rebels?) on the shuttle on the other hand will become suspicious when hearing that they are not allowed to dock and may try to dock anyway, or they might have a way to contact their mole within the facility to get news on what is going on (which may spread rumors among the prisoners).

  • The mole himself might have planned an escape (with the weapons) and might either try to convince the smugglers to dock anyway, or he might try to talk to the PCs (after searching for them) to cooperate (regardless of whether the shuttle docks or not), or he might rat them out to the leadership, just for the leadership to be occupied while he and his buddies try to escape instead (regardless of whether they will try to free the PCs in the process or not).

From a story perspective:
What makes the story more compelling?
  1. You could go for the joined prison break option as described above to add NPCs and give the PCs a foot hold after the prison break. This is going to be much roleplay and some combat. It will increase the tension.

  2. Or you could try to flush them out with gas. This would make the PCs desperate and the players will loose options and may sink into a no-options perspective (I would suggest to avoid this). On the other hand, you might be able to nudge them the submersive this way.

  3. You could go for the ratting out by the mole. This would burn the relationship with the other prisoners, but would be a shocking moment (which is good). When the gangster later rescue the PCs nonetheless (after the situation has calmed and the shuttle was able to dock), the relationship could be restored and would be more dramatic than just explaining what they want to do and asking the PCs for help. With this option, you could also have the option of the PCs being brought to the leadership for questioning etc. This would be a great boon to your players as they will henceforth know whom they are dealing with (a villain who will later become important again in the story).

  4. Or you could go with the option that the shuttle does not dock and that the PCs have no other choice than to use the submarine. They could find the technician boarding the submarine to be in no great mood that he has to do it or is very lax in doing so. Either they overcome him or take him prisoner (he may beg for his life and may tell them a whole lot of other things, like that the shuttle will not arrive, but is delayed by the leadership. If they flee by submersive, the PCs will be able to experience the beautiful ocean outside and find themselves in a very different environment to explore. If they instead try to use this information, it might give the whole situation a new hue of emotional color.
    What if the technician IS the mole?
I guess I would choose Option 3 for its emotional rollercoaster ride, or I might use the submarine Option to present the technician (including a roleplay session where there is still none) and to give enough information to lead to Option 3, but this your choice, or at least it is your choice which elements and options to include for the players to make their own choice. Give them enough information and conflicting choices to make an informed decision with stakes.

From a system perspective:
What makes the game itself more fun?
  • You will want to include a variety of roleplay, combat, and skill encounters. The sudden shift from one to another is what makes the game diversive and fun. Also, it gives different PCs the chance to shine and rock.

  • Try to include bits and pieces of information in each of those encounters, and not only in the roleplay encounters.

  • Each player will have different reasons and motivations for playing. Try to make it fun for everybody by including for example exploration elements (surprising and meaningful discoveries they work for), investigation/mystery/puzzle-solving (to determine how something works), let them roll dice, etc.

  • Try to make time an element. The passing of time (especially when they are in hiding) can be counted by regular things like cleaning personnel, a bell or announcement for specific activities like bed time (lights out), lunch time, exercise time, and so on, or announcements to the personnel. Maybe this announcement is coded but still telling that something is going on, like e.g. that all security personnel are to assemble in hall C for briefing, or an announcement that protocol 57b is going to be executed in the west wing (and consequently all the cleaning ladies will stop immediately and run towards the exits leaving everything behind). The latter may be for the gas. Whatever the case, the waiting should be a mixture between waiting and counting people passing them on the floor, a short adrenaline kick when some droids sweep the corridor in search for them, but after a successful skill check pass them, and a dramatic adrenaline kick, when an announcement that they do not understand completely makes them reckless.

  • But whatever you do, keep an eye on the pacing. Roleplay encounters are great to reduce the pacing (even if it is a short talk between cleaning ladies outside their hiding spot). But when you have the feeling that this was enough down time, quickly increase the pacing again. E.g. don't let the cleaning ladies just go away (unless you need time for the PCs to shortly talk about this), but rather let a guard hurriedly approach and change the tone again.
    • Additional setting remark: He may tell them to stop talking and to move their buts away, maybe even hitting one of them (if your setting makes them inferior or maybe even prisoners also). Or (in case they are on the same side) he will give them the information that this area will be flooded with gas soon. That is what the announcement was all about. They should hurry away. Also, he will ask them if they had seen anybody else here who needs to be evacuated. In the way you role with this, you present what his motivation is (doesn't think the PCs are here or doesn't care or friendly to one of the cleaning ladies or rude). The way you present him will drastically change the decision the players will take. If you present him rude, the PCs will likely have no problem knocking him out or maybe even killing him. If you present him disciplined but with a mellow heart towards one of the nice cleaning ladies (he may be fond of her), you present him much softer and thus, the PCs may be reluctant to kill him.
  • Also, you may be wanting to present the players with an opportunity to cope with the fear of water, or you want to present rules of diving, or other. Then you may want to include such scenes in your design.

  • From a game designer's point of view, you want to use the session to present a goal situation, rules of engagement, and hindering circumstances. You want the players to "solve" the problem themselves based on that situation, so you mustn't make it too easy for them, but also need to present the goal state and the rules and hindrances as clear as possible.
I hope this helps.
 
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