Afternoon all,

Hoping for some advice. I’m setting up a mission for my team (Gun-Bunny, Face, Hacker). As I have a tendency to make investigation/noir style runs, I want to give them a change of pace, let them break out the hardware they’ve been collecting.

My plan is a convoy, protecting a truck running into Denver (where the team is based) carrying a mysterious delivery. The rig will have a walkway around the cargo section so they can attack any pursuers. They might also bring their own vehicles and play outrider. They WILL be facing an assault by multiple vehicles but I want to add a few more incidents to keep things going and to be able to add if things are getting stale.

Anyone any ideas ? I was thinking a run in with the Ghost Riders, have to pay a toll, driver doesn’t want them to shoot because he runs these roads. Give the face some face-time.

We play a no-magic game though. All the races are in, just no magic or dragons.

*This post has been removed by Grid Overwatch Division*

An AI that fell in love with the Trailer/it's pilot program?

Flat tire or overheated engine requires the convoy to stop for a little while, unless the PC's can fix it quickly.

Work on the NPCs of the Convoy. Make them interesting, maybe colorful characters, NPCs they've already worked for/with/against.
This will make "down" time more interesting and will avoid turning the session into a succession of battles or challenges. It might also invest the PCs and players a bit more into the adventure.

Some event ideas:
1. Routine police check. Might even be something like air pollution check.
2. Having to wait for a special convoy (big convoy, the car of a visiting foreign president) to cross the street.
3. A riot/unplanned demonstration forces to change the route.
4. Real or imagined traitor inside the convoy.
5. Matrix tracking of the convoy/interception of their communications and so on.
6. The package runs aways from the truck
7. "Oh my god! They're having a special sale at the local [...]! We've got to stop! Right! Now
8. The convoy got delayed and now it's Rush hour and the fastest (and safest) way to get to destination is through the park.

Stop them at a railroad crossing and have them wait for one of those mile-long freight trains to pass? A lot of stuff can happen during that wait...


Or...perhaps have the driver be a pregnant woman and have her go into labor? "Nah, this is my third - I'll make it in time...gotta get this paycheck for the hospital bill anyway..."

People have already suggested an unexpected break down which is what I thought of at first. What about a gas station/fueling post being gone? And now you've got to go out of your way fro fresh fuel-"We'll be back in a few hours."
Bad traffic, your convoy gets stuck behind some old age pensioner driving his winnebago slowly along the mountain roads.
Your sat nav gets hijacked to take you to particular rest stops. "Yes Martha, this was the best idea to get truckers in here."
You get caught up at a'gang' war between rival rest areas :"Mine is the best chicken and gravy!" "The frak it is!"
You come apon one of those old road side rest areas, like giant ball of yarn, or crazy guy's home made flying saucer, Civil War in Colorado museum or a ghost town of abandoned Las Vegas displays. Heck an old west ghost town- all now long abandoned by the original owner but who knows what is in there now? Maybe nothing but do they just drive by it?

Make it a race for whatever Reason.
Make it Cross the Death Race 2000.

Outrider vehicle stopped at police checkpoint. Transport passes along (no time to wait), some bad guys pass the checkpoint a few minutes later, while the groups rigger still has to explain some vehicle mods in detail. After the check is finished, a race ensues.

How about if the cargo in the truck that is being delivered is either a falsehood or something of little value, and the mysterious delivery IS the truck itself (the vehicle is harboring a valuable, but incapacitated, free spirit or AI that needs to be delivered into the waiting hands of corp scientists). In that way the person hiring the PCs is keeping them off guard by not letting them know what the true nature of what it is they are escorting/protecting.

The hacker PC of the group might nominally have some control over the vehicle during the initial stages of the convoy, but then an NPC go-gang equipped with armored cars and motorbikes gets involved and the fur starts to fly. During the fracas the possessed/inhabited truck becomes aware and goes off by itself, leading the PCs (and the enemy) to give chase before either the valuable prize destroys itself or loses them completely.

Train Crossings work for this too.

Thanks for all the ideas, guys !

Given the convoy is a fast night-time run and the nature of the cargo is important, some of the suggestions I can't work in but I'm DEFINETLY taking the one about the outrider being pulled over and seeing the bad guys following later. Might even have the check-point being fake, give my gun-bunny a few people to kill before racing to catch up.

I'll probably work in the "missiong" fuel stop too. Seems like a good way to make them stop where I want.

Also the hacker of the group has some issues with Grid Overwatch so maybe some messing with the truck's nav or pilot programme....

Cheers for the imput !

Where are you going from? Utah, Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana are EMPTY now. I've been on an interstate north of Colorado, at the top of a big hill and not seen a vehicle in view for miles in either direction. (and my Saturn topped out at 110 mph going downhill.) I70 through Utah has no services for something like 80-100 miles today. All you have are exits for ranches, but you can't see any buildings or any evidence of human habitation other then the roads.

Without the interstates it's going to take a lot of time on the crappy excuses for roads.

Hitchhikers. Sure, the runners won't be inclined to pick up a scruffy hippy with an outstretched thumb. But let's say a woman runs onto the road (requiring a crash test to avoid making roadkill of her), clothing ripped, spattered with blood, with the harsh sounds of quad bikes and attack dogs cutting through the trees. Where has she escaped from? A ranch full of cultists? A corporate lab? A top secret internment facility for emergent threats? Maybe she's a shifter who took human form to enlist help escaping the hunt. Maybe she's a runner, and the whole thing is staged so that she can take out the team and sell the cargo to a different buyer. Hell, she could actually deserve the hunters, she could be an escaped psychopath running from a crime scene. Who knows? Think fast.

Wildlife trouble. Particularly heading to Denver, particularly at night.

Having to dodge idiotic opossums is already bad enough in the real world, imagine dealing with acid-spitting Novopossums and other Awakened critters. I suggest a couple of Bandits showing up to root through their stuff at any stopping point, or maybe a group of Leshies crossing a highway and possibly getting a little territorial. Tons of other good critters to be found in Running Wild.

~Umi

A wild snorlax . . . err, Juggernaut, appears!
And it's sleeping on the road.
It's an 14m long armored armadillo that eats anything.

*floors it and just plows through them, the vehicle stages down most of the ramming damage, the hitchhikers unfortunately do not and are mulched*

~Typical Runner

The one thing that immediately comes to mind is that this is a decoy convoy and it's filled with sand....

I stopped doing escort/travel scenarios. They are too scripted for my players taste and often resolve down to a serie of encounter without really way not to railroad the thing.

Hope you and your players do better.

Most convoy/trucker work IS boring, I guess you must have been doing it right.
How about taking a cue from horror movies and detective books, instead of a hitch hiker have someone bloody, near naked, stagger out of the woods screaming for help. Did she escape from something terrible that is coming after her? Is she a threat herself? If they do not stop will they wonder who she was? Can relatives trace them and blame them when her body is found ? "Your licence plate was the last picture in her camera."

I´m lucky to have a crowd that doesn´t mind a laid down track for an adventure. They know that they can take the train off track at any time.

"Don´t want to play an errant boy mission? Let´s make the cargo something interesting. What are you afraid of most?"

Love it! That's a great way to get the players involved regardless of what they do, and teach them that all of their actions have consequences...

Clowns?

and why?
because you'd have to be batshit crazy not to <.<

"Hey, this clown calls himself a Joker and want to show you a trick with a pencil."

That and it would be pretty awesome if the convoy was actually a circus and one of the clowns, who were all riding in a clown car down the road, had a hit on him by the yakuza because he sprayed seltzer water in the face of a boss.