- | ## Day of Disaster

### by Peter Vialls

#### An article about running science fiction rescue scenarios, influenced heavily by Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds

From what I've seen of SFRPGs, most scenarios seem to fall in one of two categories: exploring strange new worlds, and criminal capers involving stealing spacecraft and/or money. These ignore the wide range of possibilities inherent in SFRPGs. This article will attempt to cover one small area, that of rescue operations.
A rescue scenario requires a setting where a disaster has taken place, leaving individuals trapped where they are difficult to rescue. This basic structure is then embroidered with a range of complications to make matters more interesting for the rescuers, who are of course the player characters.

#### Trapped in the Sky.

When writing a rescue scenario, try to find an interesting setting. This gives the scenario initial interest for the players, and can provide many of the problems inherent within the rescue.
Aspects to consider in choosing a setting are the resources close at hand (a rescue set next door to an robotics factory could give your PCs a ready-made solution fresh off the conveyor belt), the technical problems automatically part of the setting (such as the lack of pressure in deep space), the people in the vicinity (headhunters in the jungle could be embarrassing for rescuers), the problems of getting to the setting, and how much players and GM may know about such things.
In most worlds finding a good setting should not be difficult. Depending on the world, a few ideas are high mountain roads, monorails or railways, deep mines, complex chemical plants, high towers, deep sea installations, oil rigs, ocean liners, high-speed aircraft, dirigibles, cable cars, space stations, advanced vehicles, underground tunnels or tubetrains, or perhaps a high bridge or a spacecraft. The list is endless: the above is just what I came up with in ten minutes.
Unusual settings are not obligatory, of course. A good rescue can equally well be set in a city towerblock (see "The Towering Inferno" for details) or in an airport.

#### Brink of Disaster

The second part of an interesting setting is the nature of the accident. Particularly in technologically advanced cultures, small accidents can have catastrophic results. The problem is that catastrophic accidents tend to leave no survivors. When setting up a suitable accident, people may be killed, but make sure that some of the victims can survive to need rescuing. Think about the setting, think what could go wrong, and work from there to figure out where victims could survive, trapped. Don't be afraid to put in freak chances - most accidents happen through a chance incident that had not occurred to the engineers or designers responsible. Remember also that one accident can give rise to three or four seperate rescues, for instance when a bridge collapses in a storm, dumping one pressurised auto into the river estuary below, leaving another teetering on the edge of the drop, whilst the bridge crew are trapped in their control room at the top of the main support girder.
Accidents come in various shapes and forms. The simplest is a crash (whether by a plane, a car, or a starship), trapping people in or beneath the wreckage. Alternatively, the crash has caused secondary damage, for example to a tower, and the people at the top are trapped.
Another major form of incident, of course, is a systems failure aboard a starship or major construction machine, which is therefore heading for a collision with a city or a dam or a nuclear power station (as I say, the range of permutations and combinations are endless). Then we have the hole in the ground, perhaps from an earthquake, into which a person or vehicle falls. (A good varient on this is Clarke's Fall of Moondust, in which a moon tourist craft sinks into a dust-filled crater). For added problems, there may be a raging fire at the bottom of the hole. Then there is the monorail or lorry that gets stranded when a bridge collapses. Another option is the storm that causes an already weakened tower or vehicle to suffer some form of failure and get into trouble.
Then there are explosions. Surviving an explosion itself can be difficult: however, explosions are a good cause of secondary problems, such as unstable towers or blocked mineshafts. These are also a good source of fire, always a useful problem. Either a fire must be stopped before it does more damage (such as exploding a massive storage tank full of volatile gas), or people are trapped within a chamber within the fire, and must be rescued before they fry.
Another major source of rescue missions is sabotage. Good examples are bombs in aircraft undercarriage, explosives in monorail tunnels, sabotaged jet fighters, or even the trusty standby of bombs in nuclear reactors. Remember that sometimes the operation can be to prevent an accident or disaster occuring, rather than mopping up afterwards.
However, inventing an accident is easy: the problem is making the accident one that normal rescue services cannot cope with, causing the player characters to get involved. The easiest way of achieving this is to set the accident somewhere where there are no rescue services; newly colonised worlds are a good choice here. However, they tend to lack any major structures to get into trouble. Another solution is to arrange for the party to have immobilised the official rescue services through a previous misdemeanour ("Well, you accidentally shot down our main transport ship, so we can't get to the danger zone. If you want to stay out of jail, you'd better rescue them."). For that matter, if you want to run a number of rescue scenarios, the party could be hired to form the local rescue service. Alternatively, the PCs might be the only people presently on planet with the range of skills needed to handle a particular problem - perhaps a starship has crashed, and only the party known enough about starship systems to be able to cut through the wreckage to rescue the trapped crew. Finally, it might be that the PCs have a vested interest in rescuing the victims, perhaps because a victim is a friend or knows something the PCs are after.

#### Move and you're Dead

The next problem is to make the rescue difficult. A man stuck at the bottom of a hole is easy to lift out with a few ropes; however, if the shaft is on fire and the trapped man within a steel cage that is slowly heating up, the party may have more of a problem. Good obstacles are fire, poisonous air, water, and vacuum.
Alternatively, make it difficult for rescuers to get close enough to carry out the rescue without killing the victims. For example, if the trapped people are on a high bridge in a partly derailed monorail, the downdraft from a jet or helicopter coming overhead might well cause the bridge to collapse completely. For that matter, the victims might be trapped inside a vehicle or craft; breaching the craft might let poisonous fumes in. Or perhaps the accident was within the ubiquitous nuclear plant; cutting in through the walls might not be a good idea if the walls in question are those of the containment vessel. It may be that digging out victims could cause a further collapse, killing them. Or there may be a piece of wreckage balanced above the trapped victims, which could fall at the slightest movement.
Use these with care: only put in additional obstacles if the basic problem is REALLY straightforward. Often, something that looks easy during design can provide players with real headaches. Only when the reverse happens is it worth introducing a complicating factor, if necessary during the rescue.

#### The man from MI5

Another useful complication is bureaucracy and government (and corporate) departments. If your victims are trapped within a military complex, it may be difficult to get authorisation to enter restricted areas. Do the party ignore the military and go in to get them out? Or perhaps a local secret service was responsible for the disaster, and do not want PCs getting involved. Megacorporations often object to nosey PCs wandering into their plants to rescue people - they may fear industrial espionage more than burning down their research centres.
Sometimes, a rescue might be straightforward, if it were not for the local bureaucracy. Do the party want to risk carrying out a rescue whilst holding a blaster at the head of the local ruler to keep her army off their backs?

#### The Duchess Assignment

This leads nicely to the people in the scenario. Ignoring the victims (of whom more below), any danger zone is likely to contain a nice range of characters for the party to have to deal with. It is always worthwhile detailing the personalities of a range of NPCs at the danger zone, as a source of complications, entertainment, light relief, and if need be assistance. Most players enjoy chatting to NPCs, and this is a good opportunity for them.
The obvious NPCs are the normal rescue service (who may not be too happy about the party muscling in on their job - perhaps the local union will turn up and picket the party for threatening the jobs of the rescue service) and the local police force (who can range from the redneck type who object to anything out of the ordinary to the extremely helpful who want to get involved). There will almost certainly also be reporters, who at the very least may get in the way and might well become part of the problem, needing rescuing themselves. Reporters are always a good source of troublemaking; the addition of a nosey or pushy journalist can turn a fairly thin scenario into a classic.
There may also be relatives of the victims (a good opportunity to stress the fact that the victims are people, not just plot devices) who will come asking what is happening at awkward moments or who might give useful information about the trapped people ("Didn't you know Sylvia is a skilled electronic engineer?").
Less helpfully, if the accident arose out of sabotage or enemy action, there may be troublemakers present. There may be a military presence as already discussed; there might also be the local area director or land-owner, who may object to the presence of the rescue craft messing up their lawns. ("Young woman, if you do not remove that monstrosity you call a helijet from the cricket square at once I shall have you arrested!") There may also be sightseers or even autograph hunters. Play all these people for all they are worth: nothing turns a crisis into a drama faster than troublesome extras.
NPCs are not always only to be found at the danger zone: sometimes, a reasonably straightforward rescue may be possible if (for example) the party can obtain plans of an out-of-control machine. Trouble is, the only plans are in the lab of a very awkward scientist hidden in the wastes to the north, or in the jungles. Getting to the scientist (or whatever) may be an adventure in itself: getting him or her to hand them over may be another one. Always think what the player-characters might find useful in a rescue, and give them an interesting (not necessarily a difficult) time obtaining it.

#### The Perils of Penelope

The other important characters are the trapped people. Rescuing a faceless, nameless person you've never seen or spoken to carries far less importance than striving to free a man you've been talking to or whom you can see over a TV link. Always try to arrange some form of link between rescuee and rescuer, even if not the other way. (In some rescues, being able to communicate with the victim may make the operation far easier, so don't automatically give your PCs this advantage. Don't be afraid to tell players that for example the victim's radio receiver is broken, but the transmitter still works). Always ensure that players know the names of the trapped people; it makes them far more alive. Good means of communication are CB radios in vehicles, or monorail cab circuits, or starship communicators, or even closed- circuit TV (for example, if a bank official is trapped in a vault, he or she may well be in view on the security cameras). This is also a useful means to inspire your players with increased urgency, as they watch the victims choking or stifling or drowning, or hear their moans and screams over the radio. It makes the victims into people rather than plot pawns, and gives the rescue some purpose. If the PCs do fail, it is more likely to matter to them.
Occasionally, it may be possible to devise a plot where the rescue victim is actually someone already known to the player-characters. In particular, if a player misses a session, his or her character makes a good victim. Of course, if the character is actually killed, you and the other players may have to face a very annoyed player!
A careful choice of victim can also be useful for plot purposes. If the trapped people are aliens, they may not be able to breathe our air; this may well hamper rescuers greatly, as well as providing a timelimit. Or suppose Zimmerman, the only person who knows how to defuse a bomb at a nuclear plant, is trapped aboard a crashed spaceliner, slowly sinking deeper into the ocean, to a depth where the fuselage will collapse.... The only problem here is maintaining any credibility - coincidence can only go so far. On the other hand, it isn't difficult to provide rationales to link two rescues. To take the example above, you could claim that the people who set the bomb deliberately sabotaged the spaceliner to get rid of Zimmerman.

#### Thirty Minutes after Noon

This brings us nicely to time limits. All the best rescue scenarios have some form of timelimit. Timelimits are normally easy to set; often, as in Zimmerman's spaceliner above, they arise naturally out of the situation. Anywhere where a vehicle is moving has an easy timelimit (when it will hit something). The same applies where there is a fire ("It'll take the fire three hours to burn through to the trapped men"; or "Our cooling system can only last forty minutes at the present level"). Pits filling with water also provide a nice straightforward timelimit (but be aware of the possibility of getting air tubes or spacesuits to the victims, turning a tense race against time into a walk in the park).
If your plot doesn't have any of these useful elements, bombs are a useful standby for limiting time; so are injured victims, whose conditions slowly deteriorate.

#### The Mighty Atom

Any rescue is easy to carry out, if the rescuers have the correct equipment. It is very easy for players to learn the facts and then roll out the latest Amclair ZX C-5,000-QL nuclear-powered drilling mole with atom blaster for breaching vault walls, with integral emergency breathing systems (or whatever, as appropriate). This does not make a good scenario.
What equipment the party will have available depends on their circumstances, and will vary from game to game. However, the basics that most rescue missions will require will be some form of transport craft, some form of helijet or lifting body from which people can be lowered into the danger zone, and a collection of smaller equipment such as breathing apparatus, ropes, cutting tools, communicators, lights, heat- resistant suits, scuba gear, etc etc. Be careful with equipment: players will always want one extra and useful item, and will always try to stretch what they can do with it. If their idea is reasonable, let them get away with it; clever planning is one of the major means of achieving a rescue. But don't let them persuade you to allow something impossible or very unlikely. Think about it in real terms, and tell them their chances and likely consequences of failure - then let the players decide if they want to take the risk.
More usually, the equipment the PCs can get hold of will be whatever happens to be at the danger zone. Think about what would realistically be there: if the PCs are at a monorail station, there will be repair kits and similar hardware available.
If no PCs have the skills to operate equipment they need, introduce an NPC with a suitable skill. This again provides someone for PCs to talk to, and brings the scenario to life a little more. It can also introduce its own problems. For instance, if the only person who can program a Tandetti F:GME 12/864 model H computer happens to be a keen potholer, and is currently deep underground, some of the PCs will have to go and find her. Alternatively, the NPC may just be an awkward cuss who specialises in being obstructive.

#### The Uninvited

However, if a party's carefully devised rescue plan worked every time, the game would soon become very tedious. There must always be an element of uncertainty in any rescue mission. For a start, the party may not succeed with a part of the plan: it is all very well intending to climb down the shaft and attach a cable to the fallen lift cage, but if the climber slips the rescuers may end up with an extra person to rescue. Always make PCs exercise their skills in carrying out a rescue; just because a PC has piloting skill, don't let her hold the helijet over the chasm whilst her colleague is lowered down to the monorail - make her roll to keep it steady. Make it clear to player-characters that they CAN fail; if they slip up badly, the victims will die. (On the other hand, do not automatically kill victims if the PCs fail just one roll; always give them a second chance, though you may require a trickier roll in some cases).
Secondly, use the NPCs to keep the scenario alive and moving. NPCs are not automatically going to do what they are told to - though make sure you can justify why an NPC acts in a particular way. If a party have had a chance to talk to someone in whom they intend to trust, and didn't, they should not be surprised if that person turns out to have a good reason for not co-operating. ("Why won't you help?" "Because that bitch down there seduced my husband! I hope she fries!")
Thirdly, there may be factors about which the party are not aware. The first of these is sabotage; where an accident arose out of sabotage, the saboteur may wish to hamper rescue operations. Be careful with this: in a difficult rescue, a clever saboteur may be able to kill the rescuers as well. Always think what effect a saboteur could have before using one.
The other matter that rescuers may not be aware of is problems on site. A straightforward rescue may turn into a nightmare if the rescuers discover that the truck balanced on the brink of a cliff is actually loaded with volatile nutomic charges. Or how about finding out that the logging machine out of control is heading for a dam? Or perhaps the site of the rescue contains some hidden hazard. ("I can't use a laser to cut them out of there: if I do, I'll ignite the flammable Luminite packing on the walls. Didn't you know about the Luminite? The construction team used it because it was cheap.")
Also, the rescue may run into problems while it is underway. Perhaps a fire will start as a result of the rescue, or a water main will burst, or an electrical fault will plunge the danger zone into darkness. This is a useful backup to have in reserve if a scenario lacks tension.

#### Security Hazard

Finally, of course, the rescue operation may well lead into another scenario, particularly if sabotage or enemy action was involved. Some routes into other scenarios are obvious; but others may occur. For example, if the party find out during the course of a rescue that a particular monorail or machine was unsafe due to shortcuts by the construction crew, they may have to deal with murder attempts to silence their testimony.
For that matter, during a rescue, the party might cut through into a previously unknown tunnel complex requiring exploration; or perhaps a transporter, flying to the danger zone, may pass over a mysterious pyramid that needs investigation. Or perhaps the security service may decide that the rescue service might provide a useful cover for a spying operation, with all the ramifications this could lead to.
It might also be that some other group may impersonate the rescue team in order to commit a crime, thus forcing the real rescue team to find them to clear their name.
Or perhaps a rescue mission may mess up some illegal scheme, angering the criminals involved, who might well try to get even. The possibilities here are endless.

#### Give or take a Million

This article is not designed to provide suggested rule mechanics for rescue scenarios. Basically, the simplest method for determining rules is to settle the skills needed, and think of a probability. Don't be afraid to fudge this, or change the decision after the players roll. Obviously, systems like Star Wars that have difficulty levels are better for this than systems like Traveller that are showing their age. The important thing, though, is to make the players think they are having a tough time and to keep things moving, rather than to get bogged down in pages of tables and the minutiae of rules.

#### End of the Road

Hmmm, not bad, 3,600 words without saying "Thunderbirds" once! For anyone who hadn't worked it out, the major source for this article is a certain well-known puppet series by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, which is heartily recommended as a source of ideas and scenarios. The basic structure is normally the same; it is only the plot details and the trappings that change. The Andersons managed to keep the formula going for 32 episodes and two feature films without any serious problems; just writing this article I have come up with half a dozen other plots that should work just as well, and I suspect most readers can do far better than that. As astute fans may have noticed, many of the examples above are based on episodes from the series (sorry, no prizes for identifying them), while all the section headings are episode titles.

#### Acknowledegements

Thunderbirds:
  the classic rescue service puppet series. Now available as a T-shirt.
SIG magazine:
  this is the official Gerry Anderson fan club magazine, and is available from NGale publications, 13 Primrose Avenue, Squires Gate, South Shore, Blackpool FY4 2LJ.

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