Wild Talents One Shots

/tg One Shot Ideas
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The following are concepts for one shots and adventure modules that can be run in Wild Talents. Unless specified these should be considered Works In Progress, but may nonetheless be a useful resource.
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001- 2:11 In Progress
002- Danger Zone

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001- 2:11 In Progress
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For the mini-versions (the equivalent of a scene or random encounter or something) I was thinking something like this:

2:11 in Progress
Location: Quikcash Payday Loans, cnr Rickmond & Warner
Background: Darryl Weir has convinced his former cell mate Michael Kirby to take part in an armed robbery with him, utilizing the newly developed powers of Michael's younger cousin Jerry.

[insert picture of business layout]

Darryl Weir (40s, coveralls, black beard, baseball cap)
Stats: As Hardened Criminal, armed with Sawn-Off Shotgun (6D, W+1SK, inc Spray 3)
Actions: Holding the door, extremely aggressive. Will attack authorities on sight.

Michael Kirby (late 20s, brown buzz-cut, checkered shirt & jeans)
Stats: As Hardened Criminal, armed with .38 special revolver (3D, WSK)
Actions: Emptying the melted register and safe, bolts out the back at the first sign of serious trouble (wounded accomplices, opposition power use, etc.).

Jerry Kirby (teenager, brown bowl cut, t-shirt & jeans)
Stats: As Blue-Collar Worker.
Power: Red Blasty Beam (Harm) 8D attack (WSK) w/ PEN 2, loud and bright, interrupted by damage to right arm, 128yd range (Penetration +2, Locational (Right Arm) -1, Obvious -1, Reduced Capacity -1. Capacity: Range).
Actions: Holds the cashier, is terrified & follows his cousin's lead. Uses his power if cornered or confronted.

2 hostages. Cashier, Harold Freeman (held by Jerry) & Melinda White (on floor, inside door).

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002- Danger Zone
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I'm thinking of making this into a one-shot. It's based a series of sessions that I ran which my group widely regards as the best

I've ever done. It's called DANGER ZONE. This is the basic overview.

>Background
It's definitely set in the modern day, and it's agnostic enough to run in any Wild Talents setting, including the default. The only stipulations are that a.) the players should be localized to a city and b.) it should be fairly high-tech. The main puzzle piece that needs to be established is:

a.) CIPHER, a shadowy US government Agency responsible for monitoring and policing parahuman activity, and
b.) Paradigm, the world's largest tech company, which just so happens to have a major presence in the city

These factions could have their names changed, so you could rename them to the NSA and Apple, or adjust them to slot into an Agency and a Corporation that you've already built into your setting.

>ACT I
The story begins with investigating a series of disappearances in your city, mostly of vagrants and other citizens of low social profile. If you want to raise the stakes, have a higher profile target that points to a larger kidnapping ring being held. The kidnappers, it turns out, are groups of men in suits that have an oil-slick color to them and wear masks. When the players track them down and confront them, they exhibit superhuman strength and abilities like being able to walk up walls. On being defeated their suits burst into flame, burning their bodies to ash and leaving behind only the mask.

An examination of the Mask reveals that their insides are lined with retractable needles long enough to enter a person's brain, and a serial number that links it to Paradigm, and specific to the very Paradigm manufacturing plant in the city.

The Players infiltrate the plant and discover a particle accelerator underneath it, as well as more masked men being lead by a figure named Dr. Janus. He's got kidnapped citizens tranquilized and are leading them up into the reaction chamber of the particle accellerator, which activates to create a wormhole, through which oily tentacles emerge and envelop the victims, turning into the suits worn by the men the players fought earlier. The victims are freaking out but lose control of their bodies, but calm instantly when Janus slaps the needle masks on their faces.

The players at this stage can choose to attack the facility or not, but either way their goal is clear: they need to get to the bottom of what's on the other side of the wormhole.

>ACT II
I'll have to figure out how to make this make sense in the proper One Shot; in my game, the players had already worked with and against CIPHER on multiple occasions. CIPHER, incidentally, stands for "Council for Investigating Parahuman Events and Response. In ACT I, CIPHER has also been investigating the abductions, so during that pat of the one-shot the players may run across their agents while tracking down the kidnappers. In ACT II, the players need to accomplish two things. First they need to acquire the endpoint coordinates for the wormhole that was generated at the Paradigm particle accelerator; this can be acquired at the facility itself, or from other sources that I'll work out.

Second, they must travel to a CIPHER facility in the middle of the Texas desert called Red Basin. Red Basin is the site of an experimental piece of government hardware-- an Einstein-Rosen Bridge Generator, which the players can commandeer and use to create a wormhole set to Paradigm's coordinates. Alternately, if they have a good relationship with CIPHER they can approach this on the level and volunteer to use the bridge as the forward scouts for CIPHER. In my game the players were very much anti-CIPHER and did this by force. What's discovered when the wormhole is created is that the coordinates on the other side are locked into something stationed in orbit past the dark side of the moon: a massive asteroid.

Danger Zone ACT III
The asteroid is actually a vast hollow space comprised of three areas. When the players enter they're in a sort of forest park, which they must navigate to reach the next area. In the forest they encounter a number of weird alien phenemena including an oily black lake where some people are sunbathing while others are held in cages, screaming or under sedation. They witness a masked person approach the edge of a pier, remove his mask, and then start screaming as the oily suit he's wearing slides from his body and enters the pond. He tries to flee but is captured and sedated by other guys in suits.

The forest leads to a small town mostly occupied by masked people as well as a paramilitary security force wearing Paradigm gear. They're protecting the third part, which is a giant pyramid, where Paradigm has set itself up to research the technology found in the asteroid. Here the players can get a full understanding of what's happening: the asteroid was discovered beyond Jupiter on an impact course towards Earth a decade ago, and the US government sent a secret team to blow it into a stable orbit, which suceeded. When they discovered that it contained seemingly abandoned alien tech, they financed Paradigm, then an ambitious start-up company, to research it. But soon after all contact was lost and the asteroid disppeared from orbit under unknown circumstances. The reason, of course, is that Paradigm discovered that the alien tech_wasn't_ abandoned, and that the vast oily pond was infact a dormant alien intelligence. Paradigm struck a deal that propelled them to technological heights they are now, but the alien intelligence has started to cash in and demand that Paradigm supply it with human hosts that it can control.

From here, the act can unfold a variety of ways. The players can try to take on Paradigm and Dr. Janus, the lead researcher and go-between for the aliens, themselves; or they can call in CIPHER for back-up, or CIPHER will attack on their own after re-establishing the wormhole link to the asteroid. In the latter cases, the interior space turns into a warzone, and eventually the players will have to make their escape through another wormhole or through the escape pods as the asteroid is destroyed by CIPHER nukes or its own reactor going critical.

This is one of the Archetypes for use in Danger Zone: the Bonded.

Archetype: Bonded (0)
>Source: Extraterrestrial (0)
>Permission: Power Theme [Alien Ooze] (5)
>Intrinsics: Vulnerable (-8), Mandatory Power [Neural Node Casing]
DESCRIPTION: A Bonded human's body has been taken over by one of the extraterrestrial lifeforms discovered by Paradigm within JL2007-115WC. Most Hosts are unwilling, but there's little they can do when enveloped by the ichorous, semi-liquid bodies of the "operators" as they're called. A operator has full control over its hosts muscles and nerves, but not its mind; for that, neural probes must be installed into the brain to induce a sedate condition over which the operator has complete authority. In the case of willing hosts, the neural probe procedure is unneeded. Although the operator's physical form appears to be a uniform, oily black mass capable of forming rudimentary shapes, they are infact complex lifeforms. The core of their being is a centralized neural node located somewhere in its volume, damage to which can disrupt the operator's control over its host's body. These four Wound Boxes are positioned at Location 9, and are almost always protected by a casing of hardened alien ichor, though an operator caught unaware may have its core damaged before it can raise its internal defenses. When controlling a human, an operator will usually attempt to hide this node, requiring a Scrutiny check at a difficulty of 5 to isolate it for direct attack (without this check, any hits to the 9 location count as 8s).

NEURAL NODE CASING (5 pts)
>Defense Extras and Flaws [Armored Defense-2, Endless+3, Interference+3, if/then-1 (only Location 9)] Capacity: Self
EFFECT: The soft, nougaty center of an operator's physiology is a tight cluster of neural activity, its nucleus as you will. Damage to this location can weaken and even kill an operator without causing any negative effects to its host. As a result, operators have an instinctual ability to protect this location from damage with a dense layer of alien ichor giving them the equivalent of Hard Armor to their 9 Location. Most individuals Bonded to an operator have 2hd in this ability, equating to HAR2, as the operator must divert more of its focus into maintaining control of the subject. A Bonded human who willingly accepts symbiosis may have 3hd in their Neural Node Casing, giving them HAR3.