4) I like both the Molemen and the Triffids/Alien idea! The former could dovetail nicely with a Journey to the Center of the Earth!
And the Triffids could be smuggled to Earth by a wealthy industrialist for his greenhouse...kind of like what happened in Dr Who Seeds of Doom (with the Krynoids).
Thank you, kindly...I've always been fond of mutant plants.
The trick is that I want to design plotlines that make sense for students, staff & faculty as opposed to paid super-agents.
<> 250% more kidnappings of well respected professors and field researchers!! <>
This works especially well if the Cavor Academy has any "Sister Institutions" like many real world colleges and universities do, in efforts to facilitate cross-cultural teaching and student exchange.
..1) This facilitates getting the characters out of their normal stomping grounds occasionally, visiting other Grand Institutes of Learning, while keeping the plot arcs tied to their station and nature.
....A) Sent to retrieve a sensitive report or packet of information from a important professor. The professor is missing shortly after first meeting, or upon the PCs arrival.
....B) To find an allied professor or exchange student who hasn't reported in in sometime.
....C) To discover a field researcher's last secret expedition, which he refused to share details, but promised that it if correct, it would cause a fundamental shift in current world power structures/beliefs.
......i) Exchange visits are often paid for by the schools in question, to some degree, and provide the characters with reason to go to otherwise restricted locales.
......ii) While there, 1 or 2 additional adventures should occur:
........<> Strange murders;
........<> Missing people;
........<> Shy and shunned students who look like they might make a good Cavor Academy hopeful revealed to be a corrupt necromancer or enchanter or geneticist controlling those who derided them/murdering and animating the bodies as "friends";
........<> Meteor showers causing the dead to rise;
........<> Assassins sent after PCs after they have investigated one to many missing Professors.
......iii) Missing field researchers are the best way to get the students to "backwater" worlds like Venus. Some kind of transmission, letter, disturbing evidence from a school investigation suggests that the person who has gone to Venus to study [dinosaurs/triffids/a hidden culture] knows why some other plot is happening.
......iv) And they can all be tied together:
........<> While several scholars are missing; eventually they find a few murdered, but their head (or just brain) is missing. Plot lines can weave together that one of your power groups, or a new one, is trying to solve some problem, and is gathering some of the greatest minds (but NOT to make a giant mechanical steam powered spider).
..........Those who accept their bondage are treated well. Those who don't, are made into living JarBrains, forced by neural torture to add their prodigious intellects to the villain's cause. Even if they don't cooperate in the jar, they can be mind probed - but this is slow and inefficient as the responses come out via tickertape machine, so cowed but full bodied scientists and professors are preferred.
..2) MAKE SURE one or more of the PCs takes some kind of Forensics/Investigation type skill or supportive Power, and is good at it.
..This way, whenever they are in town between missions, Scotland Yard or some other "local" or "national" law enforcement group who doesn't want to bring a curious case to the attention of higher powers or international/planetary groups can call on the Cavor Academy to send a group of "consultants" to confer on the case.
..Sometimes these cases will just be side adventures without any relation to plot arcs, and sometimes may offer a lead to a larger hanging plot arc which the PCs haven't been able to follow to completion yet.
Ok.
I've now made myself want to either run or play this damn campaign.
You, sir, are infectious.
