# Adventure idea - 3-5 players are contracted to work together by the scout services - there is a corporate owned system, Bocalduck, which has 4 inhabited places. The scout service contract is to remove the local head of the system/local head corporate rep. - The system has 4 inhabited place: - an agri world which has a few hundred farmers and a small town of maybe 15 thousand people, has a few shops, local services, and a small star port where a container ship can pick up the farmers harvest - Anyone can land here. There are always a handufl of coprorate shuttles parked here. - A gas giant with a series of air-ship cities within it, acting as harvestors. There are about 1,000 people per air-ship, and each of them is working to collect super-toxic gas from deeper into the planets core, used in part of the process of preparing dilithium. - these 'cloud cities' are only accessible by corporoate shuttle, they only have three landing pads and all are designed to take the shuttles and no other kind of ship. - There is an asteroid-base, with a few hundred people on it. The largest group is a sect of miners who are working in the systems asteroid-field for resources which can be used to maintain the farmers and the gas-gathering operations. This asteroid base, tuckced away and hidden, is also the corporate HQ for the system, and as such there is a small but highly skilled security forces on the base, and access to it is tightly restricted. - thsi is where most of the orporate shusttles are docked, and to access the base one not only needs to come in a corproate shuttle, but have have the access codes, which change every 24 hours, and which are only distributed to the pilots of that day, and the senior most officer at each of the corporate locations so they may give the pilots that days codes. - Finally at the edge of the system there is a free-station, owned by a local mom-and-pop trader family who used to work as piltos for teh comapny in system, but eventually settled down and opened a station. Recently the couple have installed a hyper-computer, allowing the system to be connected to hyper-space networks. While ti has only been a few weeks, there has alreayd been a steady increase in ships enter the system, either bringing stuff to sell to the agri planet, or to buy gas from the cloud-city. Either way, they all stop at the small station. - teh station itself has only a few places to go. A small engineering section, a tiny command centre, no weapons, a large cargo bay, and its main area is a small shopping district with 5 'businesses'. All wrapped in an outer docking ring - the shops are: a bar/place with neural-vlt's and neural-poker, a bank, a shipwright/refueling post, the federation office for the system, and a 'general store' which mostly sells snacks, knick knacks, and all sorts of immediate things like teeth-cleaning strips, chewing-weed, various drinks ranging from hydro-carbonated sunshine to 0-Kelvin Cold-Brew coffee. - There is always one or two corporate owned shuttles docked here, as some employees prefer to go to teh station for r and r as gambling is forbidden in the corporate areas. ## Groups in the system - The company Management - mostly are the people in power in cloud city and agri place. ALso makes up the majority of the population on the asteroid base. They quite love the company, and enjoy living on the resources they are able ot call upon, including regularly sending a shuttle to the station to pick up luxuries for the management class. - However, they are unhappy with the current local-corproate-ruler. Since he took over about 30 years ago, things have slowly been getting worse. Promotions have become more rare, and internal dissent among management has continued ot rise as the system-ruler attempts to play off the leaders of the agri-world and the cloud-city against one another, whiel also using the asteroids guards as the leaders personal military force, scaring and attacking everyone inot following his orders. - The corporate shippers - once a month a massive corporate tanker comes and picks up all the gas which has been collected in the cloud cities by dropping massive hoses basically down inot the atmosphere of the cloud cities. The tankers then draw in the gas, and move ot the next area, before leaving the system to take the fuel to teh corporatinos mega-refinery elsewhere. - Otherwise they basically don't care about hte system. - The Farmers - these are hte peopel on the agri world who grow the food for the compamy. They are employees of the company and own neither their land nor their homes. If they strike, or take any action against the compny, the loose their land and homes. SO they are bound ot be good folk, and many of them don't like this fact. - recently, the big boss whom the players have been hired to remove issued a declaration reaffirming that the company has full rights to evict any farmer from tier land who does not meet quota. This has been on top of steady year over year increases in what the quota is, while the price per bushel sold to quota has decreased! What used to provide the profits for innovation adn reaching past quota, the excess agri-goods the farmers produced, are now being eaten up by quota leaving less funds available to innovate ot try and meet next years quota. - teh Cloud WOrkers - These are the people who ahve families in the city on the agri world, but who work in the corporate controlled cloud city. Many of them have poor pay, deal with shitty conditions, have limited amoutns of personal stuff they can bring with them or keep in the city, have ot pay for their living in the city, and their travel to and from it, and generally are treated like crap, but if they act out in any way, the company keeps threatening ot just deflate the air-ship balloons which keep the city afloat. - The workers as such would like to complain but can't, they are trapped. They remeber under the old management there was more negotitation, there was more dsicussion and acceptance of families and prostitutes on the cloud-cities but now those were both banned. They blame the new leader for imposing the constant threat of deflating the balloons, while also demanding more and more gas of hgiher and higher quality which pushes the workers to go to and engage in increasingly risky work without the facilties having been developed for it. - Indeed this has already happened once, recently. Two months ago there was a cloud city that went too deep into the core and were pulled inot the higher density layers destorying the city. Managemnet says that this was a result of engineering failure and a failure to properly follow maintience scheudles stemming from lazy employees and poor government regulated education, so a thruster malfunctioned and the city moved beyond the safe zone, and once outside the safe zone something unsafe happened. According to the workers, they were ordered by management to defer maintence to save money, to employee the cheapest possible fixes, and to take the city to the very edge of what is actually safe, not the legally manted definition of safe zone. - as a result, there is currenty an insurance claims investigator in the system determining whether the company is at fault or not for the destruction of the station. - The Mine Workers - The mine workers are perhaps the best paid and treated of any group in the compamy outisde of management. The reaosn the moon base has so many shuttles is that teams of mine workers deploy in the shuttles, and from them operate drone networks to mine the asteroid-belt for resources. They are allowed to keep their families with them on the asteroid-base, so long as the family does not interfere with the work. This has led to many of the smaller local roles on the base, such as cooks, teachers, and even lesser internal posts like engineers and assistants, are filled by these family members. - - The city employees - the city employees are predomiantely the family members of the farmers who moved to the city - i.e. their children, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, etc. - or the family members of the people working in the cloud city, and is where those people retunr to when they finish theri 'on' shift at cloud city. Most peopel in the city either work in small family owned store which sell goods to the farmers dn other city folk, or for one of the small corporate owned serivce comapny which provides goods, services, analysis, marketing, importing, accounting, etc for the differnet corporate areas within the system. Thus there are school teachers, accountants, but also food service workers, etc. - The city folk are generally tired of being so heavily under the copmanys thumb. They want self government and protection of the federation. But the company is engaged in a massive propaganda campaign instilling in large swaths of the city-folk the idea that the Federation government is evil, and wanting to hurt then and destroy htier livelihood, and it is only becaue the kind and loving corporate government exists that the people have the good lives they do. - The mom and pop - mawmaw and peepaw are the lovely old couple who previoulsy, and ruthlessly, managed the company in this system. After they had spent several hundred years making massive profits for themsleves, they felt it was right to retire. BUt they coulnd't pull themslves away from teh system they put so much time, blood, and energy into. SO they bought a station, had it transportred to the system, and now they operate it. Rumour has it that the couple are looking to grow the non-corporate population of hte system, so that they migth request a charter from the sectors Baron incorporating the system as an Baronette-system in its own right, rather than its current status as a corporate system. - The new traders - The new traders are the people who want the company to have less power, fewer rights, or at least less control over its non-core business parts in the system. In effect, the new traders are trying to push out the compamnys monopoly and liberalize the market so that they can more completely exploit it. arguing that if the system is liberalized for their explotiation of it. they'll sell the farmers theri fields and homes, and then buy the agri goods hte famrers make, and they'll employee ship owning free peooel to move the food to worker-owned cloud cities which extra the gas and sell it to worker-owned refiners in the asteroid belt, shipped by privately owned tanker ships. The new tradesr are convinced if the corporate monopoly could be taken down, adn the system incoporated as a Baronette rather than a Corporate system, they could get loans from the Bank on mawmaw and peepaws station to fund all their dreams. - The handful of free people/famileis of employees - these people are on teh agri-world. - They mostly want the company to pay better, treat their family members who are in the cloud city better, etc. ## Game - the game starts with the players on the shipt eh scout services has set up for them, a few minutes before it drops out of hyper-spcae at the station. The group has been in transit for three days, and never saw one another before the start of this mission. At the outset, they appear to have no connection to this place. - The first place the players will go is the station, they're beckoned to it both by the fact that their ship is out of jump juice and must refuel before they go to hyper-space again, but also because they at least need to contact it to download a map of the system, and stopping there to talk to people is a good thing. - At the station, there are a few groups the players encoutner: - the new traders to the system - a handful of new employees coming to join the corp - a few old employees leaving the system finally - the families of a few employees leaving - the shop merhcants on the station - the mom and pop who run the station --- ### Side objects, each is secrete and personal to each character 1. Destroy the mawmaw and peepaw station make it look like an accident. 1. this is because its bringing to much attention and change to the system, the new liberal traders are far too demanding and threatening to corporate power. 2. Convince the insurnace claim investigator that hte citys destruction was the result of an engineering failure and not the companys fault. 1. this is being done so the company can get insurance money back, and use this as a justication to shareholders to remove hte old mining stations for their bad enginneering and high maintence costs, and replace them with something new and better 3. Stir up a revolution among the farmers 1. This is being done so that the company is justified in taking the land away from the worst and most troublesome farmers, and then can offer it to the the best farmers in return for their loyalty 4. Stir up trouble among the cloud workers so that there is just cause to decomission the stations, 1. this is being done so the company can fire most of the staff, and bring in new deep collector statiosn with more automation and fewer staff, who can all be better treated 5. In the city, root out and report groups which are threatening the Company;s power, or appear to support the idea of the federation having any say in governign the city rather than the comapny.