- | ## Disaster Scenarios

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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