But while flipping through Rigger 3's ship rules, with the intention of statting out a Mecha robot, I noticed the magic and ships section. Specifically, the bits about certain ships of notoriety, like the USS Constitution and HMS Victory (two of the finest and last sailing ships in their respective classes of cutter and ship of the line,) and the RMS Titanic being particularly noted for having resident free spirits and background counts. (I shudder to imagine what the BGC for Titanic would be.)

So many mysteries of shipwrecks go unsolved. But imagine, if you will, a mage-diver who can dive the wrecks and use magic to help in the investigation, posisbly by summoning a spirit to interrogate it.

It could be neat. It could also be dangerous, not to mention being absoloutely perfect horror movie material. (Ghost Ship, anyone?)

The best part about shipwrecks is that there's about no end to them. From spanish galleons sunk with holds full of gold, to an Ares Macrotechnology shipping trawler that went down last week, the potential for this and a team of underwater runners is pretty good.

Not to mention, of course, when the group dives a death ship, and arouses vengeful spirits and tormented dead. Titanic, anyone? Or any other major maritime disaster with a lot of lives lost. I imagine, of course, that it would be much different, even if both are just as deadly, to dive the RMS Titanic, as it would be to, say, dive HMS Hood or the Bismark.

Don't forget all the non-spirit related hazards of the deep. Lots of things with big teeth or other ways to snack on a mage.

I guess the wrecks of the "famous" ships like the Titanic are already explored in 206x. What could be interesting and lucrative are the victims of the increased piracy liek the mentioned Ares trawler.

Yuo need a very specialized team to do wreck hunting though. Everyone should be able to dive and know how to operate small boats/ motorships. A mini-sub can be useful and some skilled underwater-fighters will too. But it can be fun, i'm sure.

Check Cyberpirates and Target: Wastelands for more details.

Grinder, maybe... But still, I'm sure you could come up with a few interesting runs in some famous ships. If you have gear that can dive that deep and keep you alive, like pressurized minisub/suits.

Maybe the wealthy son of old money is Awakened, and he's tracing his family's history to find an artifact that was lost... Oh teh noes, looks like the artifact went down with his great-great-great-great Grandfather with RMS Titanic. Just give up on it? Hell no, you hire the wreck divers to recover it. Since it's a magical artifact from the 4th age or some other happy horse-shit like that, it's survived the century and a half under water, in a decaying wreck.... But GETTING it is gonna be the true bitch.

Vengeful spirits animating skeletons, monsters of the deep, both mundane and Para, and of course, the incredibly considerable dangers simply inherant in diving a wreck, to say nothing of a wreck 150 or so years old.

Of course, if the team pulls it off, they could get QUITE a haul. Not just the money from the Run, but if they find any other interesting tidbits...

Sounds like a nice plot-hook. And finding the safe of the Titanic: hell yeah!

And lets not forget sunken aircraft wrecks starting from about WWII through 206x. You could have your team dive on everything from WWII bombers to wrecked suborbitals and downed satellites....

Do you ever watch "Deep Sea Detectives" on the history channel? I bet you could get a ton of good plot hooks from that show... LINK

Talk about background counts....

Don't forget awakened sea creatures! Or, to put it another way: "UNLEASH THE KRAKEN!!!"

Attack Of The Killer Penguins? (when you're in cold waters)

Great hook ! You could include jobs investigating lost underwater habitat (several mentioned in Target: Wastelands) or sunken ruins, and occupy a team of runners with underwater "forensic" missions for a good long time...

The theme was heavily mined by Hollywood in the late 80s, with movies like "The Abyss", "Leviathan" and "Deepstar Six" - and that was just 1989.

Underwater ruins are a really nice idea, of which i never thought. Too bad i recently started a new campaign in Metropole, having no character with only a slight interest in underwater action. But who knows how the campaign my change?

Actually I ran a short campaign years ago that was set in an underwater archology (to my knowledge this was years before they made an appearance in canon).

The premise was that this arch was situated near a deep sea rift where it was doing some research. Through the course of thier work...

[Edit]Details removed 5/14/2008 in prep for a new PbP game. If anyone actually reads this and wants the old text send me a PM[/edit]


It was pretty dark and creepy and my players all agreed that is was one of the funnest settings we had ever played in.

Method: do you have any of your notes from the adventure? By sheer coincidence, I'm planning something very similar for my PCs.

Actually I do. I saved a lot of that stuff, but most is PnP. I'm getting ready to jet out of town for a concert in Denver, but when I get back I'd be willing to type some of it up and send it to you if you want...

Maybe you can post it here?

That would be totally sweet, thanks.

If some one were to run this as a PbP in the Welcome to the Shadows BB, I would be all over it.

I would be willing but I've never run a PbP game before....

And if I post it here it would ruin everything for the players, but I can do that in a few days if you guys want. I just pulled the stuff out and have a surprisingly detailed outline with everything from NPCs to sketches of epuipment and minisubs (none of that stuff had rules back then).

It sounds a lot like the underwater mission in Knights of the Old Republic, which kicked ass.

Well I gotta run now, but I'll check this thread in the next couple days and see whats up...

Ok, sounds good

And enjoy whatever you're doing in the next days

If you really want to double down on the magic angle then you could try setting it in the eastern Mediterranean with the Erebus storms.

Actually, Deep Sea Detectives was part of my inspiration for this.

Yeah, diving some old airplanes would be neat, too... Not as much chance for a background count or an interesting spirit, though.

If you're really interested in throwing together a bunch of A-grade underwater salvage experts ("Hey, at last my adept can use his swimming skill!") I'd recommend that you use your Google-Fu and check out some of the rather strange laws/legislative requirements concerned with salvage and wrecks.

People who make a living on the big water tend to have really strange cultural mores and unspoken laws - check out some of the site you'll find... Then have your hotshot diving experts inadvertently get up the nose of some of the local "salvage teams", with rivalry, backstabbing and the occasional torpedo/missile headed your way.

That being said, there are an unknown number of site out there. Just look back to your history, pick out some of the more interesting ideas then play with them.

- WW2 left a large part of the Pacific seabed littered with wrecks, planes and god knows what else. Possibly hired to find/recover a family heirloom that went down with good great-great Uncle Yamato-san? Not to mention the sheer PAIN it is to find stuff, but what about the locals, the supply network you need, the salvage and of course, the unexpected.

- Ok, Spanish conqust and pillage of the New World. Etc, Etc. Now, add that whole shebang to the possibility of certain treasure now acting as a uber-foci, or as things that draw the attention of "things-that-must-not-be". Oh, and the friendly smiles of Aztechnology as they cut across your bow in a Azzie Cruiser. (This sort of campaign would be getting towards the higher levels, but it'd be fun to have an Azzie bloodmage after your asses, then have the big chunk of emerald-encrusted gold you found glow weirdly and the summoned blood-spirit eat the mage and cower at your feet...)

- Australia. Sure, it's big, it's bad and everything is going to try and kill you, but at least the seawater won't eat away your skin like the Med. Not to mention a lot of possibly aspected shipwreck sites, the lost "Mahogany Ship" springing to mind here...

- Hell, why not the African Gold/White coasts? More registered ships have come to grief there than the total number of aircraft were lost in both World Wars. And I'm not just talking about lofty tall ships - the sands and currents on both coasts regularly claimed ships until reliable GPS units made things less horrible.

- The Atlantic Grand Banks. Sure, It's got the Titanic, but what about the hundreds of WW2-era wrecks? Admittedly, it's going to be a hellulva lot harder to recover stuff from down there, but off the coast of Canada and Quebec you'd be hard-pressed to not find a semi-shelted cove without a tale of some poor vessel coming to grief.

Just remember that people will have to get wet (ie: don't make them swim in the North Sea, that's simply wrong and cruel.) warmer climates and shallow waters make things easier and it's time to break out every pirate chiche you have.

Ahur!

-Tir.

Having been inspired by this thread to make some characters that would fit in the plots suggested, it occurs to me that shapechange is my friend.
You don't need to know how to scuba or fight if you're a 800 kilo shark

Astral Projection would be very useful for scouting out shipwrecks. Why bother sending an expensive minisub when your mage can just pop out of his body and fly down there for a quick look. As an added bonus, a magician can go insane upon encountering the inhuman spirits that dwell within the Abyss.

You can find some very wierd lifeforms if you go down deep enough. Logic suggests that mana will be aspected strangely in the depths and that the spirits who dwell there will be effected by this. Some of the more extreme deeply submerged power sites could produce some odd SURGE effects. There is nothing like the look on a male PC's face when he finds out that he is pregnant. That he has been chosen by the Seahorse totem would be of little consolation in the face of that particular SURGE effect.

I imagine you could 'make up' some famous wrecks also. Anything from next year to 206x, you could have all kinds of cruise ships or military vessels go down.

I really liked the 'Everybody's Crazy in the Undersea Habitat!' concept. That would get real claustrophobic, real fast.

I don't think that much dramatic is going to happen at sea anymore. Short of diving the wreck of Euro Air 329.

I mean, it's just not really as exciting if you're not tieing it into something either EXTREMELY 'big' and important as the undersea habitat Run, if it's something the DM made up, as it would be if the players go "Titanic? We're diving RMS Titanic?!"

(Note: This only works if your players (NOT their characters) have some Interest: Great Maritime Disasters, or possibly some cross-references in Interest: WWII. )

This is true.

I suppose we'll just have to go MAKE some wrecks...

Making (in)famous shipwrecks ICly, eh?


That sounds like fun.

To really get the characters involved, they could be hired by someone to blow up a large ship, then get hired by someone else to retrieve something on the wreck they created, haunted spirits of the people they killed and all!

How about the wrecks of merchant vessels and warships (on ALL sides) sunk during the wartime periods of so-called "unrestricted submarine warfare" (i.e., without warning) by hostile submarines?

A good example would be the American destroyer U.S.S. Reuben James (DD-245), a Clemson-class "four-stacker" built in 1919, and sunk with the loss of 113 out of 156 officers and men (none of the officers survived) on October 31, 1941--prior to the United States's entry into World War II. (Nazi Germany claimed that it was a case of mistaken identity, i.e., that the attacking sub's crew did not realize that their target was flying an American flag and was, technically at least, neutral.)

Other examples would be H.M.S. Hood and R.M.S. Lusitania.

Another example, this one sunk by that "to-whom-it-may-concern" antishipping weapon, the sea mine, would be the Royal Navy hospital ship H.M.H.S. Britannic.

EDIT: Sorry, ShadowDragon8685. Guess I read your post too quickly.

--Foreigner

Heheh. I was thinking of the H.M.S. Hood, actually. And the Bismark. I did specify those two, after all.


Hehehe. And we need some more "To-whom-it-may-concern" antishipping devices.

So, is anyone going to run one of these underwater campaigns on Welcome to the Shadows, or what?

Well I guess its ShadowDragon8685's perogative. He brought up the idea.

Like I said, I might be willing, but I've never GM'ed a PbP game, so it might be a little rough to begin with.

Also, I'm still hoping to post some of those notes... just never... enough... time...

Wow this is one of those GOLDMINE of a threads that just gets us GM's salvalating at the possibilities.

If know one else is going to take advantage of it I am, so I will give Method and Shadowdragon a few days to say. After that I will probably run a game based on the ideas presented.

If anyone wants to take the idea and fly, err, swim with it, I'd love to hear how it turns out. I'm too weak to DM it.

Shadow: I think given my lack of PbP experience I too will conceed. You've spent a lot more time on Welcome to the Shadows, so I think you'd do a much better job.

I'd love to play in this campaign, though, so I can learn more and maybe GM a PbP game in the future. What kind of time frame are you thinking of for getting this off the ground?

You will find recruiting for Into the Abyss in the Welcome to the Shadows section now.

Bookmarked it - not that i have the time to participate as a player, but reading will surely give me some ideas for a new campaign irl.

for a slight change on the concept, we're in a game right now escorting the Queen Mary, the Titanic's sister ship to a new port. It is currently one of America's most haunted 'places', so imagine after the awakening. Fun stuff.

Without ruining the premise of the run, just wondering why the corp would send runners into the arc, and not their own security forces? Not asking to knock it, asking becuase I think it's a great idea for a setting for a run, and I'm brainstorming too!

Hmm how to answer this.

In the game on the boards it isn't going to be a full blown arc. A corp team has been sent, but the manager, not the corp, need deniable assets to retrieve some data.

Or something like that.

ahhh.... cool, that makes sense acutally. Neat idea, I like! 2 karma for you

Don't know if that was directed at Shadow or me but in the run I designed there were complicated inter-corp espionage at work.

[Edit]Details removed 5/14/2008 in prep for a new PbP game. If anyone actually reads this and wants the old text send me a PM[/edit]

Right on, multiple layers of paranoia. Good stuff, defintely good stuff.