I've been running a campaign for a while now, and I've run into a severe, game-changing problem. After several adventures leading up to it, I ran the climax adventure, a save-the-world adventure where the stakes were pretty high.. I expected the player characters to be able to pull it off, though there might have been some death and destruction.
Instead, they muffed it. Completely.
Okay, bad dice happens, so I gave them another chance. Far-sighted as they are, the powers-that-be had a backup team. The players got to make a new team, similar amount of karma, and go in and try it again.
This time was worse. This time, one of my players went so far as to join the other side, in addition to stupidity and bad decisions. (The player's decision to defect was based on roleplaying and his character background. He was playing correctly, but I could not have imagined what his loss did to the team in terms of morale and decision-making ability.)
Well, I've run the campaign into a corner. This was a save-the-world run, and they flubbed it, twice. The good guys had the main team and a backup, and quite frankly I can't see pulling a Deus Ex Machina and having a third team pull the world's fat out of the fryer, and showing the players that their actions were worthless. Nope, I want to show them that there's a price for failure, beyond just the loss of their characters. The world has to change.
Trouble is, I'm having a hard time envisioning the change. So let me paint the picture, and we can extrapolate What This Means For The World.
An ecoterrorist group led by a toxic shaman (one of those 'burn the world in order to save it' types) got its hands on an ancient ritual designed to raise Leviathan from its slumber deep in the Marianas Trench. Leviathan is a proto-Horror, something even the Great Dragons can't control without the ritual. Well, this group, thanks to the mistakes of the player characters, managed to raise Leviathan and are now in control of the thing. Their message to the world is this: Clean up the oceans or there will be no more transoceanic shipping. With Leviathan firmly under their control, they have the means to do exactly that.
The corporations are helpless. They tried a combined military strike and Leviathan destroyed them with impunity. Ares got permission from the UN to use a nuclear strike. It failed. For a Thor Shot to work, Leviathan would have to remain stationary. I don't want there to be a possibility of taking out the leadership of the ecoterrorists until MUCH later in the campaign. Right now these people are too powerful. They have Godzilla in their possession -- a Godzilla that can't be tracked, can't be found unless the toxic shaman wants to be found, and can destroy any attempt to use the oceans for any sort of commercial venture.
So the world is all sorts of FUBAR right now. Every time there's any attempt at commercial ocean shipping or harvesting (fishing, etc.), Leviathan suddenly appears and wipes out the assets in question. Attempts at using this as bait have all failed. Leviathan is just too tough.
I don't want the world solving this problem. That would, again, obviate the players' actions. I want this to affect the world and make the players realize that their indecision, their stupidity, and their actions, have seriously cost the world.
First thing I can imagine: The corporations have actually had to deal with this ecoterrorist group's agenda, and that means money that would have gone towards shadow operations, now has to go towards developing strategies and technologies to clean up the world's oceans. That means that shadow jobs are MUCH harder to come by. But the problem is, well, what happens when there's a lack of money in the campaign? Players start making mages and adepts and technomancers rather than playing cash-hungry mundanes.
Of course, gear is harder to obtain -- some of it's just not available any more, since you just can't get stuff from overseas, unless it got shipped by air. And Leviathan's been known to strike cargo jets out of the upper atmosphere, so only stratospheric means of shipping are available. That means either suborbitals -- expensive! -- or stratospheric zeppelins -- slow! -- are the only methods of getting it across the Atlantic or the Pacific.
("But Deacon, if the corporations are dealing with the ecoterrorists, wouldn't the ecos allow shipping?" Well, that
was the original idea, but the ecoterrorists are nutters. It's become fairly apparent that they intend to wreck the global economy, because they have the power to do so. The corporations are starting to clean up the oceans, because the ecos have said that's what they want, in hopes that if the corps give the ecos what they want, they'll go away, but apparently the ecos will only allow shipping when the oceans are cleaned, not while they're being cleaned. Doesn't make sense, I know, but did I mention the fact that they're nutters?)
("But Deacon, Leviathan is one tiny little Godzilla in a huge world, it can't possibly be everywhere at once!" Leviathan travels at hypersonic speeds
underwater, and can sense big giant metal ships travelling on top of or
in the water from thousands of kilometers away. Thor Shots don't work, because by the time Ares fires, Leviathan has moved. No, Leviathan can't be everywhere at once... but odds are that by the time your big metal container ship launches from one port and makes it to the destination, Leviathan will have found it and blown it up.)
("But Deacon, what about coastal shipping?" You mean just traversing the Ring of Fire, or the Atlantic Coasts, in skips and jumps, and getting stuff to markets that way? Might work. But if Leviathan catches you doing this, well, you know what Godzilla does to Tokyo in all those movies? Yeah, I don't think a port city is going to want to risk that.)
("But Deacon, what about small-time shipping, in boats not large enough to attract Leviathan's attention?" You mean, like a smuggler campaign, where the PCs have to smuggle goods in small watercraft, buying and selling like merchants and occasionally doing or dealing with the odd bit of piracy? Hey, what a great idea for a campaign! Hope my players can spot that too.
)
Anyway, I've set it up. I'm just wondering if I've missed any other implications on How The World Will Change. Can I get some discussion going on this idea?
