[d20 Modern] National Crisis

[Sixchan]

What exactly do you tihnk will happen to you if you look up information about national nuclear arsenal sizes on the Internet?

He will be made to "Disappear" by those evil Jews that are holding the strings of power in the US. Oh, and did I mention that the said Jews are 7ft tall lizards?

Most websites seem to guess at around 200.

Compare this to 9,000 in the US,
Between 10,000 and 20,000 in Russia
400 in China
350 to 500 in France
and 200 to 400 in the UK

Putting the following order:
Russia
US
China
France
UK
Israel

And most likely NOT 3rd.

 

[Ravellion]

I know of at least one person who was busted for having a shadowrun conversation over the phone (in the 80s, parents were members of the communist party, and he was released afterwards). With the US total awareness program, I am not posting anything in a high risk language such as English. I'd be acquitted, but only after a lot of hassle.

But no, I am not sure. But as the previous post said, if you take an optimistic estimate, it could very well be the 3rd nuclear power in the world.

Rav

 

[Cerubus Dark]

You would need to create a compelling reason for terrorists with the means and motive to use a nuclear weapon which would have no effect other than the destruction that it would cause.

Wait, they need a reason? The total loyalty to thier leaders/gods isn't enough? You have Terriorsts strapping bombs to themselves for the glory of thier god, because they think it will grant them a place in heaven. Their leaders are quite pleased with the mass destruction of their enemies is good enough.

 

[DM_Matt]

Wait, they need a reason? The total loyalty to thier leaders/gods isn't enough? You have Terriorsts strapping bombs to themselves for the glory of thier god, because they think it will grant them a place in heaven. Their leaders are quite pleased with the mass destruction of their enemies is good enough.

"Glory" for their religion and loyalty to their leaders (who themselves need reasons) are indeed motivations, but if it is not known even generally who did it, there is no glory, no intimidation, no gain at all. Anonymous attacks on that scale generally do not happen.

 

[Utrecht]

Incidently, if a nuke was detonated on US soil (harbor) we would got to DefCon 1 - not 2. At that point, we would consider ourselves in a state of war.... but it is a minor point.

Second, the US is currently undertaking a concerted effort to reduce their arsenal to 2000 weopons (along with Russia). The fact is that maintaining all of those weopons is expensive and beyond a certain threshold of limited deterance.

Now, the conspiracy theorists might suggest that the US is not actually dicommisioning them......

Another think that you have to ask youself is how close to "reality" do you want your game to be - on eof the enjoyable factors of role-playing is the escapism - in many ways all you are doing is extending into the future....... Just something to think about.

 

[Fellwind]

One item to note. A large bomb set off in Manhattan could kill off much more than 1 million. As of 2000 the population of Manhattan was 1,537,195.


I like the general idea, but the timeline may be a little off. You may want to push out the implementation of the space defense out to like 2010 and your game out to 2025 about. The numbers make more sense.

 

[Unseelie]

I run a Champions game (well, mostly used to... it's on hiatus) where a group of highly motivated, and very lucky Terrorists managed to smuggle a small neutron weapon (stolen) into the nation's capital, York, PA (it's a long story).

Anyhow, to make a long story short, what was really going on was that the uber-villain was trying to cause a temporal disruption. The bomb, you see, is SUPPOSED to have gone off.

The terrorists, were not the ones that originally were to have smuggled the bomb in. These guys were not as competant, and therefore are much more likely to have been caught.

One of the PCs (also from the future, and yes, she knew this was bad), took the bomb and extra dimentional teleported, saving lots of people and erasing her own timeline.

One day the PCs will find out where that bomb actually went... *evil cackle*

Why does any of this matter? Well, what I'm trying to get at is that it all depends on how strange your game is going to be.

Maybe no one claimed responsibility because they're not from the same time or dimension. Heck, maybe all of this was done to produce the environment you have now. You have to ask 'why?'

Like I said, it all depends on how strange your game is going to be.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I take it you don't like my suggestion of having the US government as the ultimate bad guys?

I think it would make a much more credible foe for your game!

Cheers

 

[Dark Helmet]

Obviously, you can look to many movies for inspiration:

As previously posted, A Sum of All Fears is good, having Neo-Nazis trying to pin it on the Russians.

Or The Peacemaker, have a Serbian radical trying to get revenge over Kosovo.

Or True Lies, various Islamic extremists.

But personally I think the most likely plot is from Canadian Bacon, I blame Canada!



----------------------------------------

"Blame Canada! Blame Canada!"

"They're Not Even A Real Country Anyway!"

 

[DM_Matt]

Obviously, you can look to many movies for inspiration:
As previously posted, A Sum of All Fears is good, having Neo-Nazis trying to pin it on the Russians.

The villains in Sum of All Fears were pretty weakly done and cartoony. They were a bunch of one-dimensional neo-Nazis who somehow decided taht blowing up the world could allow them to come to power.

The reason for this is that the movie was not too much like the book. They changed the books Palestinian villains to white neo-Nazis out of political correctness.