Sci fi campaign - need an opening mission!

[Avista]

For context, the campaign is cyber-noir and set in intersolar space, meaning no one's traveled out of the solar system. No aliens, wormholes, warp drives, or the like. You can travel from planet to planet, but that's it. Everyone is enhanced, human, augmented, cyborg, or android. Social structure has humanity as the top, with first world countries embracing gene-editing and augmentation. People look down at 'natural born' individuals - mostly with pity - and they create an unspoken second caste. If born without hereditary gene enhancements, most people turn to augmentation and cyborgification to stay competitive, if they can afford it. bottom rung are androids and AIs, which make the backbone of society and do the dangerous/boring jobs no one wants. Unless their owner (be it private or corporation) discovers they managed to become awakened, they remain as property. Usually an awakened AI is just reset and put back to work, but there are a small handful who managed to gain citizenship in more liberal countries.

The party is composed of private investigators who get their cases from two sources: people looking to skirt around legal detectives to get results, or cases outsourced from the government when they are unwilling/unable to attend to these cases. I already have a gist of the main campaign worked out, but I've got no clue what to use as an opening.

For the main campaign, an android politician is pushing for more accountability and protection for AIs that become 'awakened' (self-aware and conscious). But he's been recently accused of murdering his former owner as a means of gaining his own citizenship. If found guilty, he'll be taken into custody and terminated. He insists he's innocent, but the system isn't lifting a finger to help him, so he turns to the party for help to clear his name.

But that's the main campaign, and I don't want to open it on that. I want to introduce this politician from the sidelines and lead up to him, but I don't want the party to start on his case immediately. Can anyone give suggestions on how to accomplish this?

[Psyren]

- Party are mercenaries hired to find a missing person/minor macguffin that will lead into the main plot.

- Party are corporate muscle charged with escorting a VIP of some kind (e.g. an important executive or key supplier.) The ship they're all on gets attacked by Shady Group X that has some connection to your main plot.

- Party are technicians (or a security/escort for the technicians) tasked with repairing a malfunctioning beacon or relay of some kind. They arrive at the beacon to find it's being scrapped/stripped by scavengers. After disposing of them and repairing it, the relay appears to be picking up a strange signal that they are then asked to investigate since they're closest.

- Party are in a seedy dive (yeah, cliché I know) when a fight breaks out. Though they didn't cause it, they get thrown in jail with the other toughs and need to work together to break out, or possibly work with law enforcement (who can be the only voices of reason or corrupt as you see fit) to clear their names, stumbling across the beginning of the main plot along the way.

- Party are on a communal transport vessel for their own reasons and don't actually know each other yet. The vessel is attacked by pirates or has to deal with some space phenomenon like a tachyon storm/solar flare/meteor shower/etc, and the group must combine their skills to survive it.

- As above, but Party crash-land on a penal colony - one that's overrun by the inmates, or being run by a malfunctioning/sadistic AI. They are forced into a gladiatoral setting and must work together to escape in one piece.


You can combine a couple of these also. For example, the party can be corporate muscle charged with responding to a VIP's distress call, and then once they find him/her, escorting back to HQ, but on the way back the ship gets damaged by phenomenon and they crash-land, etc. Any of them should give you the means to introduce your main plot once desired.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Perhaps looking into the murder, or illegal re-writing, of an awakened AI? That would set the tone, and lead them into the main quest [assuming that the AI politician is supposed to be sympathetic].

Or perhaps helping an awakened AI to prove it's awakened status and gain freedom. Or helping out an "underground railroad" for awakened AI's. If the AI politician is supposed to be a good guy, then it could be useful to have an opening quest alluding to abolitionist actions before the US Civil War.

[Beleriphon]

Perhaps looking into the murder, or illegal re-writing, of an awakened AI? That would set the tone, and lead them into the main quest [assuming that the AI politician is supposed to be sympathetic].

Or perhaps helping an awakened AI to prove it's awakened status and gain freedom. Or helping out an "underground railroad" for awakened AI's. If the AI politician is supposed to be a good guy, then it could be useful to have an opening quest alluding to abolitionist actions before the US Civil War.

Which Fallout 4 borrowed liberally for the Railroad quest lines.

[Avista]

Which Fallout 4 borrowed liberally for the Railroad quest lines.

Didn't Detroit: Become Human also do that?

[LordCdrMilitant]

It's a pretty easy-to-make link. I haven't played either of those, but if you have overt themes about American Slavery, The Underground Railroad is probably more forward in consciousness than like Bleeding Kansas or John Brown's Rebellion.

That said, you want your intro mission to fall in line with the theme of your games. If the game is about helping the oppressed AI's you probably don't want to start with them fighting killer robots.

[LibraryOgre]

Party wakes up in a space station to find everyone dead, except maybe one or two NPCs. They have to search around for the means to escape. Turns out mining robots killed everyone at the orders of someone out to kill the PCs.

In other news, Knights of the Old Republic 2 has an excellent opening sequence that was in no way plagarized for this suggestion. :smallbiggrin:

[OmSwaOperations]

Perhaps have them first employed by the government/a super shady corporation to hunt down and destroy "Rogue AIs", and then have it become very clear that the AIs aren't rogue at all. You set up the mission like a Terminator movie, plus a bunch of propaganda about these evil AIs everywhere, and some corporate goon "handler" as an NPC who spouts bio-supremacist nonsense, etc. Then you subvert it hard.

[Avista]

I want to avoid the slavery route, because I'm trying to go for a more scientifically probable case with the AIs and robots, where people question how AIs are meant to be integrated into society, instead of the 'robots have souls and are oppressed' trope that gets used way too often. Data from Star Trek was put on trial to see if he was really alive, and the end answer is, 'we got no clue, but let's err on the side of caution.' What are you going to do with AIs that do more harm than good? What about AIs that keep society running? That's the moral dilemma I want to explore. More shades of gray and not cut black and white, right and wrong.

Lots of the suggestions aren't bad, but they sound more appropriate for sidequests. I do like the idea of giving them an unrelated case (investigate pirated merchandise?) and they get ambushed. But I can't see how that would connect them to the politician, short of a news coverage that the politician sees and goes talk to them. But that approach feels lacking.

[Kiero]

Party wakes up in a space station to find everyone dead, except maybe one or two NPCs. They have to search around for the means to escape. Turns out mining robots killed everyone at the orders of someone out to kill the PCs.

In other news, Knights of the Old Republic 2 has an excellent opening sequence that was in no way plagarized for this suggestion. :smallbiggrin:

Good enough for Mass Effect 2 to basically rip off the same intro.

[Friv]

Well, this is the "future", right? If there's a decent amount of anti-AI sentiment, it would make sense for the politician to go to the PCs if they were in the news for a splashy case where they supported an AI. And if you want the PCs to like or trust this guy, you probably need to have their first case or two establish the situation.

So the initial case can be one in which the players are approached by someone who wants them to find someone stealing money from him. The players can track the money and learn that the case is more complicated; the money is being stolen by an AI who has attained intelligence. It hasn't alerted anyone because it is certain that the owner will reset it, due to having witnessed this happening. It intends to use the money to hire someone to move its server somewhere safe, at which point it can reveal itself.

This leaves the players with a moral dilemma - do they support their original client, or the blameless AI?

[Erelamar]

A widow who was never able to have children comes to the PC investigators to find her missing "child" android (technically her property), who has runaway. This leads them to hunt down an entire hidden society of underground runaways and delinquent androids/AI, some of which are sympathetic but others are delusional/psychotic/dangerous. At the same time they must outrun a "Blade Runner"-style NPC (maybe of the Lawful Good antagonist model) who is seeking to root out these clusters of malcontents (some of them are dangerous after all, and each of them is breaking the law).

Scenes could include staking out seedy android "charging stations"; questioning jailed spaceport attendants who've been caught smuggling AI off-world; questioning pawn-brokers who deal in stolen android parts, which could lead to gruesome android chop-shops; and forays into dark, subterranian steampipe/subway/underworld cyberpunk havens.

Either way it comes down to them having to make a decision of turning these refugees in or not. They'll also come face to face with the plight of the androids/AI (causing them to be more sympathetic to the android politician in the future), and maybe make a friend "inside the system" with the Blade Runner NPC.

[JAL_1138]

How do your AIs exist in the world? Are there only a few, or are there large numbers? Are they housed in massive immobile supercomputers, do they exist as disembodied programs floating around the interwebs, do they exist as humanoid or otherwise similar-sized droids a’la Star Wars who have to get jobs and pay rent if they’re not someone’s property?

The answers to those questions will affect the general kinds of quests you can offer, and the specifics of how they’re offered, pretty significantly. If an AI is housed in an immobile supercomputer, its means of committing murder, fleeing the scene, and suchlike are quite limited unless it can do something like hire an assassin, provide fatal misinformation, hack a vehicle to make it wreck, or flood the Enrichment Center with deadly neurotoxin, etc., etc. If your AI is more like a Star Wars droid, its opportunities for larger-scale mayhem like flooding the Enrichment Center with deadly neurotoxin are limited to about what any ordinary human’s opportunity would be, but it’d have a much easier time shivving somebody in the kidneys than a roomful of circuit boards would.

[Ken Murikumo]

The PCs get hired by an unknown individual with spotty details who says they need to speak in person. This person is being held at a corporate facility and the party is given access to see the individual. When meeting the person, they are an awakened android being detained at the facility and awaiting a potential reset.

The corporation that owns the facility originates over seas (from a country that gives awakened AIs citizenship). The awakened insist that since it was created overseas and is self-aware, it is allowed the rights of a citizen of that nation, asylum, and safe passage back to it's origin country. The PCs are hired to pursue this, but the corporation insist that it has no case.

With the right checks and contacts, the PCs find that the Corporation actually has no real legal ground to stand on, but more importantly if this news were to reach the media, it would damage the Corporation's image significantly (just think of how many investors would pull out if a scandal like this got out!)

The Corporation is willing to do whatever is needed to protect it's image, including but not limited to, destroying the android and silencing the PCs.

[Avista]

How do your AIs exist in the world? Are there only a few, or are there large numbers? Are they housed in massive immobile supercomputers, do they exist as disembodied programs floating around the interwebs, do they exist as humanoid or otherwise similar-sized droids a’la Star Wars who have to get jobs and pay rent if they’re not someone’s property?

AIs come in three varieties: your warehouse AI that is immobile and left to run a specific job (regulate electricity of a city, building functions of a corporation, etc). These are the most stable and unlikely to awaken because due to the sheer importance of their job, they are highly regulated and have constant maintenance. These are also pretty content to remain at their job posts and really don't want/care to leave. They are considered the most stable due to the massive security software and importance of their job. (think of VIKI from the iRobot movie). If they are awakened, they may keep quiet for several years while planning a means of escape.

Second are industrial AIs. These are closer to independent factory drones, construction vehicles, and war machines, and they may either be networked or act alone.

Lastly are domestic AIs. These are your average service robots that are assigned menial tasks and usually live within cities. Wealthy individuals may own a two or three, but these are the most human-like androids, and are employed in jobs such as technicians, custodians, restaurant servers, etc.

if an AI is found awakened and manages to gain citizenship, they are disconnected from whatever corporate/private/public network they were originally linked to, and they are allowed to purchase a domestic AI shell to live and work among humans. They may be subject to a memory wipe before being allowed to live free, especially if they dealt with sensitive information. They can freely connect to the public internet like cybernetic humans, having their consciousness enter the network, much like the Matrix. (I have some fun internet-hopping quests in this reality)

[5crownik007]

You can never go wrong with "steal the macguffin".

[Ornithologist]

You could go with a variation of the steal a mcguffin, and have a hard drive with an at risk AI on it, that they need to keep away from a bad guy. Also, the team can find out several sessions in the politician who is the big bad has partial ownership or gets funding from the AI Corp from earlier. Maybe even a link showing that he is not as squeaky clean as his public images suggests.

[JAL_1138]

Since you have some droid-like AIs, one option to introduce some campaign concepts without dropping them directly into the main campaign might be to have an independent AI hire the PCs to investigate a hate crime the police aren’t taking seriously (because of bias). Perhaps someone broke into the AIs place of business and vandalized it, painting anti-AI slurs on the walls and smashing things up. The AI who hires them at first might also be campaigning/organizing for the AI politician and be able to get the PCs in contact with the politician some time after they resolve the hate-crime.

[Black Jester]

You can easily start on a classic murder investigation really easy: There has been a murder on a spaceship. Nobody but the crew could have entered or left during or after the deed, so the killer must be one of the fellow crew members. Everybody seems to have a motive, some have an alibi.
This is a very front-loadad adventure type to run, because you have to prepare a) the murder, b) a list of suspects, including potential motives and c) where everybody was during the time of the murder (and who could provide an alibi or could act as a witness). But, as soon as you have your plot and timeline, it is very easy to run and particularly rewarding for the players to solve (because this is type of adventure is actually a challenge for the players, not the characters).

[Kaptin Keen]

Party are hired in the prologue to break and enter some place, and do a simple wipe of a very specific storage device. They are given a location - rack, shelf and slot number - and a virus to insert.

Much later, it turns out this specific storage device holds vital evidence for the AI case. Either the AI did the deed, but deleted the evidence (and maybe the instance of itself that did it), or someone else did the deed, and hired the PC's to do the erasing.

Possibly red herrings or false evidence was planted too.

The beauty is that you don't have to decide whether it's one or the other, until you feel like it. That may be villainous, but it's also effective - actually, most things that are effective are also villainous. Insert maniacal laughter.

[SirGraystone]

I would jump them straight into action like a movie intro. Make them part of a special team (like the FBI) already in vehicule on the way to a mission to stop a terrorist. Let them clear the building but on the last villain have him blow up the building killing the hostages and sending the team to the hospital.

Then jump 6 months later, the team all heal up but having been fired (or retired) from the special team for their failure and now working as private investigators / troubleshooter.

Extra points if you stop the first session right after the explosion and not telling them if they survive or not.

[Marcotix]

So have the PC's wake up from hyper on a derelict space ship (the great dane) .

The ship is dying because its proto AI (we'll call it Ophelia) that runs the thing has a faulty Mcguffin Chip. The PC's were awakened when Ophelia noticed it was having problems. It did a scan of the hypersleep chambers and found that one of the PC's possessed a mcguffin chip.

After the PC's realize that they don't have a spare mcguffin chip, they find out that they are often used in AI mobile frames. They eventually come to find out that one of them is an AI inhabiting an advanced cybernetic android frame, and must die in order to save the rest. Only technologies not currently on board could detect the android for what it is, the PC's must find out who.

Ophelia, since her McGuffin chip is failing, can't keeping facts straight. It knows one of them is the AI, but not which one.

To make matters interesting, the hypersleep could have amnesic effects.

You could play this in a number of ways, the most obvious trope is that the PC's are ALL AI's for what ever reason (a country contemplating graning AI's citizenship is questioning whether the AI's themselves believe they have the right to live ETC.)

Perhaps the ship AI has gone nuts, having awakened decades ago and is just pawning with the humans it woke up.

Maybe its a test to see if the people awoken would kill one to save all? What if the PC's refuse? then they have to work together to escape!

The Great Dane doesn't have to be a ship either, it could be a secret AI research facility, an automated hospital for coma patients. really anything.

Anyway, have fun!