(Another quick toss-together adventure, prepared while eating dinner after work on game night…)
A random pair of characters are on patrol when they see a bright light flash across the sky; a meteor strikes out toward the marshy areas near the canal. If characters get together quickly to investigate, they’ll get close enough to see a crashed spacecraft of some sort with some broken, empty cages on the ground around it. CHESS (a secretive government organization in the broader MP universe) will arrive & cordon off the area before they can get a closer look. In a few hours evidence & CHESS are gone.
A week later, Starks calls and says he may need their help at a possible murder scene in Blackbird State Forest. Characters arrive to be shown what’s left of a hunter (hunting illegally out-of-season) missing for 2 days – completely stripped of flesh, with tiny scratch marks all over the bones that remain. A trail where leaves and loose soil have been brushed aside is visible near the body. Tracks lead to a hole in the ground; a cave can be seen underneath. Starks has rope in squad car that can be lowered down for access & a flashlight they can borrow. His bad knee won’t allow him to climb down himself.
Characters must defeat alien insects & queen. Insects come from lighter grav world so they can’t fly here & are a little slow, but hard to kill. Mandibles are dangerous & characters might want to try to keep their distance. When fighting starts, all the bugs in the cave except for the queen and her entourage will start making their way toward the commotion, so some strategy is needed here to keep team from being overwhelmed.
Notes
I internally referred to the bugs as “neekers”, after the “neeker-beeker” biting insects that Frodo and Sam had to contend with early in their journey in The Lord of the Rings. I ended up grabbing a few images of their larger Lord of the Rings Online counterparts as their tokens.
How it played out
I started with a few bugs and kept adding a few more until the ten tokens I’d created were all in use… and then whenever 3 or 4 of those were taken off the board, coincidentally three or four more came around the corner to join the fight. It started to go badly as the bug numbers increased, but the players managed to get through it with a combination of grapnel gear and “shaped” walls to slow the bugs’ approaches and corral them into a smaller area to keep them from surrounding the team. With the cave full of lesser bugs taken care of and a few minutes’ rest to recover a little power, the D-Listers were able to make their way to the farthest reaches of the cave and defeat the queen with very little drama.
I’d thought to use this scenario as a way to play with MP’s perception system (which I’m still not sure I completely understand) via combat in relative darkness, but except for the final fight the characters stayed in the lighted area near the entrance as the bugs came to them.