I'm writing this in the hope that the members of this forum might be able to help me flesh out this idea in preparation for my next game session. The plot-line itself has a beginning, middle, and end, but I would like to throw it out there and see if anyone has ideas to add in terms of little details or side-treks.


Setting: Los Angeles Sprawl
The runners' usual fixer hooks them up with a girl (legal adult, but still living at home) he met at a wild party last night. She's a little eccentric, but the money is good. The girl meets the runners at the LA Zoo, in front of a cage containing four nagas. She claims they're "talking" to her, demanding she help them get out of the enclosure and back home to India. She needs the runners to arrange two incidents: a distraction and an extraction.

The distraction gets the park security away from the enclosure can take two forms (though I'm expecting my players to work up a third, crazy option): Bombing the museum across from the zoo (as all the security personnel are in charge of maintaining the peace park-wide; for the museum, the zoo, botanical gardens, and several other sites). There's a guest speaker at the museum who's received death threats so it wouldn't be immediately traced to the runners. The other option is to release a more dangerous animal within the confines of the zoo and get the security guards' attention. As for the Nagas, they need to be loaded for overland transport.

Complications for the run are as follows:
--The girl is the daughter of a city councilman and A-class corporate board member. She ran off to join a cult and she's been writing checks to them regularly for some time. The councilman has his personal security team and a Knight Errant mage-investigator out looking for her.
--The "New Temple of the Awakened World", a religious cult founded by a guru run-out of three countries for fraud, took the girl in when they convinced her to run away. Behind the walls of the cult's mansion compound, the law can't touch her, but now that she's run away from them she could end the guru's scam if she's caught and deprogrammed. So consiquently, senior cult members are on the hunt for the girl as well.
--Finally, upon entering the enclosure to commune with the nagas, the girl is ripped in half as two struggle to devour her. The nagas then explain via mindlink that they are behind the prison break and the girl merely served as a voice for them. Now the runners must take the nagas to a quiet port in the nearby California Free State where they will meet a boat and receive the rest of their payment.

So what can I do to improve upon this scenario? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Ehm... and you are sure, the Runners wouldn't shoot the "beasts" up for that after about... 0.5 seconds? Also even IF they can mentally talk after eating... wouldn't they still shoot 'em up?

Well the overall idea is ok i think. I never did great plans for such runs. All you need are the characters and their motivations and ressources and things will come together.

(The dude who had the bomb threats... maybe he has high security detail now. Or a frined of his loaned his trusty combatmage to him?)

(Who made the bombthreat... maybe they will follow through at roughly the same time, the runners try something. (Maybe the runner find an allready primed bomb, which is a deathmachine for hundreds, not their lowly distraction-bomb?)

(The Naga's, why killing? What is wrong with them? Or just misunderstood?)

(Cultis: So where are they, have they good leads on the girl. Maybe police/Daddies Guys are trying to get the girl too. Any conflicts that could happen?)

I would say. run with it, let the people all have a timeline when they do and know what. and see how the runners influence all this.

Good luck

Instead of all the nagas going bad, how about just one of them. It can bite the girl and pump some venom into her giving the runners a complication in trying to keep their mealticket alive. After that, they may need to stop the nasty naga either now or in a later adventure (a naga serial killer that the goup has set loose can be an option)

A dead client pays no bills. If the Naga's threatened her we'd stop them, probably with a stunball if we can, else gunfire.. If she's dead we'd hose them as we shoot frag and HE grenades into the cage, then exit stage left.

Of course I always like to shoot the soliloquing bad guy in the head too.
"You have no id" BangBang. Thud.
"And we never will".

Summerstorm & HappyDaze:

Thanks so much for getting back to me. This is really cool of both of you as I want to run this mission at a session tomorrow afternoon. I'm going add some comments here based on your feedback. Also

--I honestly see the girl dying in ironic opposition to her behavior toward the nagas. I picture her having a very "fluffy" and "new age" attitude toward nature, and thus learning too late that not everything in nature is kind, sweet, and cuddly. However, the venom idea is a great compromise and it doesn't put pressure on me to sell the nagas as sentient creatures. I get to smack the "new ager" with the irony-hammer, and the pay-mistress stays alive--unless the runners screw up. For some reason, probably the size of them, I was thinking they were constrictors rather than vipers.

--As far as the "New Temple of the Awakened World", I'd never planned on it being anything more than a fraudulent group with designs on drugging up rich young fools, abusing them in a variety of colorful ways, and then draining their bank account. The whole thing that starts the girl on her mad quest to free the nagas is a conversation that goes wrong with the guru: he's attempting some innuendo, and she decides to be proactive--daddy was a doner to the zoo and little Chloe (I might as well start using her name), has had nagas in her dreams since childhood. In another life, she might have made a solid mage, but living a Paris Hilton lifestyle has lefter her with only enough brains to be a drugged-out flower child. The guru is a wanted scam artist who's had to relocate several times, and wants Chloe back if only to keep from relocating his con-job again. Daddy probably doesn't know about Chloe's association with the cult, and his men are still just trying to get a location on her. They might be harassing local magical groups and talismongers to drum of h

--I hadn't thought much about the *real* death threats against the guest speaker, but since the museum across from the zoo is named after Gene Autry I figure the threatening group will be terrorists associated with the portrayal of Native Americans in the history of the Old West. Maybe they're Aztlander refugees complaining about a visiting professor's latest history of their homeland.

Thanks again for the help!

I second the idea of having a clear timeline for what happens if the PCs do nothing. This sounds like a really fun run. I like the irony with the nagas going after the naive girl, and the way the nagas can symbolize and or foreshadow the way the cult treats the girl if the PCs are sharp.

Also, just because of the chance of PC's doing something crazy, it would be good to know what orders the park guards and the daddy's henchmen have been given. That makes it easier to figure out how they will react to various unexpected effects of PC actions.

Something else good to know would be how the information about the girl and whatever disasters happen to her is going to get to the different factions, and how long that will take if the PC's don't prevent word from getting out. Does either faction have an agent

Lastly - if I were the team, I might well have a means prepared to instantly sedate the nagas already prepared. I might even use it before the girl even thought about getting near the nagas, or when it looked like she was getting dangerously close. To me as a PC, it goes like this: 'I hear I need to extract a naga. Sounds different, do research. Nagas - dangerous. Needless complication. Uncontrolled complications, bad thing. Eliminate complication. Do research to know best way to instantly neutralize complication.' You might want to make their research (truly or falsely) indicate that the easier ways of neutralizing the nagas are a bad idea, perhaps because of things about the way they are caged that would mess with whatever the PC's would normally do to knock the things out.

Have the Mage-Investigator turn up after they free the Naga and take them away to the boat/transport of choice and offer them more than what the girl is paying FOR the girl, assuming she's alive. Just because the Magos is in KE doesn't mean that he has to be hardline about offering deals for the scumbags. They take a hit to their reputation in exchange for a bit more cash. Or they can off the investigator, assuming he doesn't sic his spirit buddies on the runners after taking the girl, as he well might if he is prepared to pay shadowscum. This, of course, assumes that you're a bastard of the highest order.

strictly speaking, if the investigator only wants the girl, he need not interfere with the transportation of the nagas. i mean, what does the KE investigator care if a bunch of expensive "zoo animals" get stolen from a lone star patrolled area. (or any other security company, really).

so the runners transport the nagas, thus fulfilling their contract, and get paid a little more.

KE doesn't employ many idiots. If he was to make an offer like that it would be via some means that prevents them from attacking him. Like a phone call. After reporting in to KE/Daddy what was going on and getting permission to spend a pile of money.

But the amount of power (police/media/etc) someone with her father's connections can whistle up makes this ugly. A trained investigator (or a KE evidence team) will be able to determine who they are unless they are really good at covering their tracks and providing electronic security.

So it's essentially an offer they can't refuse, and unless they have done something to make it obvious to anyone looking for the girl what is going on I wouldn't do that to the players.

Now where's the fun in that if your GM isn't making you scrabble for every breath of air while you get mired deeper and deeper into an underworld hole?

You're assuming that the Nagas aren't multi-millionaires themselves.


Anyway, the way that the players can screw your scenario over the worst, and the way I'd play it in this situation, is to negotiate the naive rich girl into giving us an expense account up front, along with half payment. At that point, I'd use the expense account not on gear, but on a good lawyer, and have get a court order for the Nagas' release. To aid in this endeavor, I might also falsify citizenship documents if necessary, though I would ask if they had citizenship in any country or extraterritorial corporation first, and ask what their stock portfolios look like. In any event, the result would be substantially more peaceful than a bombing and more predictable than releasing paracritters, and wouldn't require any interaction with the girl beyond the original encounter, because I'd also negotiate the naive kid into putting the second half of the payment into escrow.

While I'm unsure of LA's attitudes towards non-metahuman sapient, their treaty obligations are clear. There is no way in hell they'd be able to hold Nagas that have SINs, and fake ones are good enough to get a court order for their release.


The question of why the Nagas were in the zoo in the first place comes to mind immediately. Obviously, they weren't captured recently. They weren't arrested for any major crime and havn't killed any metahuman that the authorities are aware of, as they would have simply been put down instead.
They are from India, but apparently don't have Indian SINs, which is odd. Though, it is possible that they were tourists who had their documentation lost or stolen.

It's unlikely, that they were captured for the express purpose of being sold to the Zoo. If captured before Nagas were recognized as sapient, then they would have been sold to megacorps as security paracritters, there is more money in it. And there isn't much of an above ground market now.

I also have to wonder exactly why they choose to use mindlink for communication rather than just speaking English. Mindlink isn't a translator, so they must know the language.


How about this - the Nagas were minor SK stockholders who pissed Lofwyr off at a cocktail party or something. When they went on a business trip to LA, the big gold guy had his Matrix people erase their SINs, their accounts, and every trace of their identities. This was a problem when they got to the airport and tried to board their plane back to India, with the lady at the counter having no record of their tickets, and this escalated to an altercation with airport security, and the authorities just didn't know what to do with them, hence the zoo.
As a result, rescuing them is going to have invisible repercussions on their dealings with Saeder-Krupp

I'm also going to recomend having two of the the Nagas played by Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, to give it an interesting flavor. For added fun, flavor the KE detective with John Mahoney and name the naive girl Marris.

If he shows up before the girl pays, then the players have a choice. The girl won't pay if the investigator takes her (or at least, not pay as much, hint hint), but the investigator won't pay if you tell him no.

And if the girl gets taken and doesn't pay, the players have four (possibly conscious) naga to deal with. Who won't be paying anything.

Although...I hear naga venom is quite valuable. Hint hint.