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ID: 6084
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Comments: 5
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Rating: 3.5
Condition: Normal
Submitted:
July 13, 2010, 7:29 am
Updated:
July 13, 2010, 7:29 am


HoH not available due to level or sub is not 10 days old
Legend of a Mind
By: RGTraynor

He’ll take you up, he’ll bring you down, he’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground.

Hook:     The planet Sinsemilla’s got the best, I mean the best hemp anywhere, and a lot of folks out in the ‘Verse like them a good smoke.  So there you are trading, but the village you’re dealing with has a bandit problem ...

Problem: The village elders pitch this not so much the party eradicating the bandits as training the villagers up to do it themselves, and if you help them out there’s an extra couple bales in it for you.  Now as it happens the village is quite well-off through the hemp trade, and they’ve got a startling amount of military-grade weaponry and gear: armed skiffs, grenade launchers, assault rifles and the like, and a small mountain of ammo.

Complications: Think 1960s commune; the villagers just can’t wrap their heads around violence.  They’re none of them good shots, they think military discipline’s a bit silly, and they’ve all got stab fright.  Intellectually they know what needs doing, but in their guts they shrink from it, and it’ll become pretty apparent pretty quickly that the party’s going to have to hunt down the bandits themselves.  That being said, most of that fancy military-grade gear is still in the packing crates - and how did they get what’s plainly restricted arms? - and needs setting up and going over.  Pity the concept of “zeroing” an assault rifle’s lost on these folk.

There are just a half-dozen bandits, but they’re bushwhackers and are not just going to sit fat and happy for the party to ambush.  They’ve no qualms about retreating to prepared strong points, and their ultimate base is the Mountain of the Prince, a promontory the villagers regard as holy.  Play them exactly as cannily as if they were the party and the villagers were the bad guys ... for instance, all that nifty milgrade gear’s in a single storehouse with nothing more than a padlock to keep the kids away.  Moreover, two of their number are ex-locals with a bit more sand than the villagers, and the mayor’s granddaughter is their inside mole (she thinks the bandit leader is dashing and cute).  The bandits’ goal is to cow the town into submission so they can take over.

Resolutions: Whack out the bandits; it’d be more impressive if the villagers do so.  Pray the Alliance doesn’t find out there’s loot hijacked from a troop transport ten years ago, with 17th Regiment flashes still on the crates!

Fun Stuff: It is the villagers’ inalienable right to be stoned at any time of the night or day, and some of them don’t just stop at the hemp, they hit up refined uber-THC tinctures.  Give them long enough and they won’t be able to press the starting buttons on a skiff because the colors clash with their hallucinations.  Sitting around in a circle, clasping hands, and chanting mantras while their platoon leader turns a prayer wheel five minutes before a battle is by no means out of character.

Beyond that, they're all pseudo-Rastafarians, with their own peculiar practices.  Play the NPCs with outrageous pseudo-Jamaican accents, and you can use the following vocabulary common to contemporary Rastas:

Rasta = Way, Path            
“Ital” food = vegetarian (coconut, mango, no booze, no fermentation).  The Rastas' version of kosher. 
Kebra Negast = holy book        
Bredren/Sistren        
Babylon = evil! generically
Nyahbinghi = consecrated warrior    
Livication = dedication    
Irie = acceptance, good feelings
Downpression = oppression        
Red = stoned            
Zion = heaven, generically

“Everyone his own kingman!”

Bynghi = holy day, clockwise passing of ganga after short prayers, much dancing, feasting, several days long



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Comments ( 5 )
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RGTraynor
2010-07-13 07:29 AM
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This follows Steve Darlington’s excellent format for designing adventures: take an evocative song you like and use it as your inspiration. For the ones I’m posting here, I use Moody Blues’ songs; this one is Legend of a Mind (Timothy Leary’s Dead). The adventure was written for my Firefly campaign, but it works in any SF campaign, and truth be told, would work for any milieu where the characters are involved in merchant trading.
Voted valadaar
2010-07-15 06:58 PM
0xp
Heh, this is excellent sir.

I'm going to find that codex scras mentioned...
RGTraynor
2010-07-17 09:01 AM
0xp
Thankew!
Voted Drackler
2010-07-25 09:53 PM
Only voted
Voted Dossta
2011-09-21 04:34 PM
0xp

I like it, and can easily adapt it to a fantasy setting if necessary.  The only nitpick I have is that the title and/or blurb give no indication of the contents of this sub.

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The religion believes in reincarnation, but that you will be reborn in the past. People of today are those re-born of tomorrow, with some discarded as trash. The most pure will be eventually reborn in the mythical paradise-like past, where people lived for hundreds, or maybe even thousands of years. This goes nicely with beliefs into foresight (you know a little about the future because you have been there), but also to many complaints of how things are going always from bad to worse.
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