Getting Posses into new Advnetures Was [HoE] Boise Horror

[Ralph Dula <rdula@ezonline.com>]

Dusarat@aol.com proposed the following ideas for getting posses into new
adventures (Spoiler space for those who haven't been cleared for the Last
Crusader's No Man's Land or play GURPS):












>1) the party finds itself trapped in a very hostile environment and has to 
>figure out things or else it will get quashed (Anyone seen any sci fi movie 
>with the plotline "Marooned on an unexplored planet....")
>

One of the best ways to get a posse into this kind of situation is to use
one of the powers of Saint Stern, from the Last Crusaders.  A Templar
blessed by Stern who is forced to leave one group for certain doom while
saving another may spend a Legend Chip so that the group he abandoned will
survive.  Have an NPC Templar spend a Legend Chip, and your posse be subtly
guided by Martyr Stern to save the people the NPC Templar is too busy to
protect.


>3)  With the biological weapons, decaying corpses, and rampant poor personal 
>hygiene (which can be lethal.. anyone read "The Postman"?) the whole party, 
>or just maybe one of them, contracts a debilitating and soon to be lethal 
>ailment and the party has to run to find a cure.  
>

Can't agree with this one, I'm afraid.  I've been gaming for about 16 years
now, and every time I've run an adventure with this sort of plotline either:

A.  My players curse me out for automatically infecting their characters
with something horrible without giving them a chance to avoide getting
sick, just so we have an adventure to play.

B.  My players curse me out, because they come to play heroes who slay the
evil and wicked, not diseased losers on a quest to find a vat of tetracycline.

C.  My players send their characters out for the cure, slaying any and all
in their path, with no regard for any innocents in their way or how much
more the disease spreads.  This was the path my players chose when I ran
them through Infections recently.

> a) big twist, the party goes on, and at the very end, they find out 
>THEY'RE the duplicates and they've been hunting their originals all the
time. 
> pays off big when it works, but you need a very mature and fun party,

This is a cool idea, a variation of which was available to GM's to use when
running GURPS:Flight 13.  What I've found to be a problem is that in the
course of such an adventure PCs use up all sorts of equipment, and when
they find out they are merely duplicates of the original character the
players complain that they should get all the equipment they expended back,
since it wasn't their character they were playing, but their twin.  So you
either have to:

1.  Copy down all the equipment they were carrying before the adventure
begins (a problem if you have players who always hold onto their character
sheets, like mine do)

2.  Say the duplicates were using the original characters' equipment (a
real headache if you have players whose characters constantly take
precautions against equipment theft)

And don't forget that you might have to explain that the creator of the
duplicates just happened to be able to create exact replicas of the
one-of-a-kind weapons your PCs carry.

-Ralph