Lonestar Adventure - Coding

Books Useful for this article.

• SR2 Core
• Lone Star

This post uses my Lonestar Campaign Setting found here.

Adventure Title: Coding

Adventure Type: Cyber Crime

Setting: Seattle, 2075

Plot Overview:

The group of officers arrive on scene of a catastrophic traffic accident (Go Gang related attack with civilians caught in the crossfire). The EMTs arrive after the officers give what aid they can. One of the victims has an incredibly rare blood type and is an organ donor (this rare type is resistant to organ growth, so vat grown organs are off the table) and needs to be rushed to the nearest hospital (with police escort). Another group of officers is called to give a police escort to a family who’s in desperate need of that heart.

While the first officer group watches the pain of the family who has lost a loved one, the other group is seeing the hope and joy of the family whose child will actually now have a chance at life. These two stories begin to merge as the officers are watching the proceedings when a man wheels in a sickly woman holding a small computer (a Tablet). After a few tabs of a key, the lights flicker and then finally go off.

The man announces he is holding the hospital hostage until his wife receives the new heart promised to the young girl. Finally, once the man and his Deamon is dealt with, his ‘friends’ try their own hand at extorting the hospital for hard nuyen.

NPCs:

• Jenny Erickson - Daughter with a bad heart that even magic wont fix
• John Erickson - Protective Father with a sick daughter
• David Defore - Desperate husband willing to risk everything for his sick wife
• Melissa Defore - Sick woman who has forgotten what its like to bed well
• Hacker Hive
  • James Hitchcock - Hacker
  • Zelda Peterson - Hacker
• Michelle Cruthers - Head of the Hospital
• Sam Burke - Surgeon in charge of the Heart Replacement
• Sarah Elrin - Victim of the gang violence

Locations:

• Accident Site
• Hospital

Challenges:

• Keep the accident victim calm and stay with them until the end.
• Hacker group has total control over the hospital.
• The ability to shut off health care to anyone
• Lock doors and turn off lights
• Stall elevators, force them to specific floors,etc
• Watch over the cameras and disable peoples use of the cameras
• David has a code he has to enter every 15 minutes, else the Daemon will randomly attack a patient.
• After the initial attack has begun, all patients show as “coding”

Scenes:

Scene 1 - Squad 1: The Accident

Squad car one is called on scene to a vicious accident, they will be first on the scene. Several cars stacked under an overpass. One spun out and pinned between a car and a structured concrete post. Several pieces of rebar have broken free and have fully pierced the victim (Sarah Elrin). She has around 2 minutes to live and does not have a Doc Wagon contract. She is however an organ donor and her license does confirm this.

Make this scene hurt; she is worried about getting a ticket (She’s in shock and believes she’s at fault when in fact her car has been riddled with bullets) and that her cake will be ruined (She is picking up a cake for husband’s birthday). She will pretty quickly lose consciousness. She just needs to be comforted until she passes out. This will prompt your players to perform emergency rescue. They however cannot reach her chest in order to put on a trauma patch. They will have to break out the back window and crawl through the wreckage and perform the operation.

This requires an athletics roll TN 5 to squeeze into the space (failures results in a light wound but does allow them to reach her, rule of ones causes a moderate wound and bleeding)

Again, this scene is to offset the joy of the other scene. After she passes out (and nothing can stop this) the EMTs arrive on scene and set up to use the jaws of life to pry the car apart in order to get access to her. This process takes around 10 minutes.

They will need a police escort into the hospital to make sure the hospital gets the body as soon as possible. Once they arrive the doctors have set up a hallway to move the body through. Each of the doctors bow the head (or bodies if they come from an Asian culture) to show respect to the patient.

After the officers are asked to stay for questions about the patient’s condition as they moved into dissection in order to preserve her heart.

Scene 2: Squad 2 - The Police Escort

These lucky officers are sent to the home of Eriksons. There, Jenny requires a police escort to be brought into the hospital for emergency surgery. She is too weak to walk and will need to be wheeled into their van. Her father is also in poor health (though his issues are due to his constant stress over his daughter who has inherited this heart defect from her mother, which has already taken her). John is as happy as he has ever been, thanking the officers profusely for their help in getting his daughter to the hospital. Play up the joy and the life changing miracle this heart truly is.

After a short drive the officers are told to stay with the family until they are needed elsewhere for another call.

Once they arrive, have them meet and talk about the differences in their day, hopefully squad 1 has some strong feelings about what’s going on with their day. Once they have had a chance to catch up, move to scene 3.

Scene 3: Hospital - Both Squads: Trouble Brews

As soon as everyone is settled in and awaiting their next call, a man quietly wheels in a very sick looking woman. He parks her wheelchair next to his chair and begins tapping away at a small computer. After a few moments the charge nurse calls out a patient’s room number and several nurses and doctors grab a crash cart and begin moving it towards the hallway before she calls out again, “A4… wait, A6 too… A9? Oh my God, its half the floor! What is going on?!”. The crash team splits up and begins checking on as many patients as they can while the chaos begins to unfold.

The man (David Defore) with the small tablet holds up his tablet and approaches the charge nurse, “I’ve taken over everything in his hospital, unless my demands are met… People are going to start dying. You will give my wife Sarah Elrin’s heart.” He then reveals his biomonitor implanted on his chest, “If you try and stop me or try to hurt me, this will trigger an automatic response from my daemon and it’s going to start getting bad around here.” Since David is getting worked up already from having to deliver this news, the first stage is going to hit. This stress will trigger his biomonitor which gives off an audible beep from his chest followed by all of the exits locking and the interior lights dimming as the overhead lights go out and the emergency lights turn on.

Assuming at least one of the officers tries to tackle David to wrestle the tablet away or use some other means to remove him from his computer, check the table referenced further in on this document to see the various ramifications of David’s heart rate being elevated or stopped. The doors and lights are just the beginning of his plan. Once peace has been made and someone is taking him seriously, it’s time for the officers to regroup and come up with a plan to deal with this problem.

If your players are completely stumped, offer a Police Procedures roll at TN 6 (a very unusual situation). A success tells them they need to take David some place quiet and away from everyone else while they figure out exactly what the demands are while the other officers call back to home base to get cyber crimes involved. Whomever has the best social skills and personality for keeping this man calm should stay with him to try to keep his heart rate even. Etiquette or Negotiations tests will keep him calm but he is deadly set on his mission, he would rather die than live without his wife. Any time the GM believes his heart rate elevates, a TN 5 Etiquette can calm down. It can only be done once per instance however, so if they have a heated argument about the same topic twice, there won’t be a second roll allowed.

Decision Tree -

Give into the demands

Assuming the players don’t influence Michelle Cruthers one way or the other, she will eventually give into the demands once people start dying. She will prep the surgery team and give them the green light. This will of course enrage John Erickson, who’s daughter is the rightful owner of that heart. He will lie in wait until he sees the final walk of two stealing his daughters heart and he will attack them. He is an unskilled fighter, but getting them by surprise with a fire extinguisher will very much cause some serious damage. At the very least it will cause David’s heart to spike.

Refuse the demands

If the players rebel hard against the demands, they can convince Michelle Cruthers to give the heart to the child even though it will cause heavy damage to the hospital and several innocent people. If David doesn’t keep his device or if he doesn’t enter his predefined codes. This will cause his events to come much faster.

Cruthers will hold out until step 4, then her hands are tied. She can’t hold back the shareholders of the hospital. They will force her hand or remove her for someone who follows their instructions. Once this happens they will open the flood gates and try to get the feds involved.

Scene 4: Remote Scene - Hacker’s In House

Sooner or later, it will come time to narrow down where these attacks are coming from. With bouncing hosts and attempting to hide themselves as best they can the hackers cannot hold the hospital forever AND remain hidden. After the police deckers are made aware it will only be a matter of time before they are found. As the GM of this adventure it’s up to you when they finally find the deckers that are helping David (or at least using him as a mule to get a rogue device on the wifi). These two deckers believe ultimately that they will not get caught and want their payday before leaving.

They have rented a house in the nastier side of town and then dug a channel through the yard to bury cables and hide their safe house which is a neighboring home. They have done the best they can to hide these cables. Their hope is to have the police break in and find an empty and cleaned out house. If the basement is searched there is some strange wiring of course that leads to holes in the floor and wall that seems to lead outside but to no source.

Perception tests for your players to investigate the scene, though it would be much better to have the players explain HOW they investigate it. Have them go ahead and yell between each other to try to track where these wires could go. See if they notice the subtle dip in the yard.

The deckers have set up a small maser grid connection to the matrix in their hidden dwelling. Once caught they won’t put up a fight. However, they have rigged their front and backdoor with alarms which will allow them to have a heads up that something is going on and be able to ditch out a secret tunnel from their second home This tunnel can be found if the players do a thorough investigation of the crash house before rushing in once they find the secret line into the home.

If you want more excitement you can give the deckers bodyguards or make them combat deckers with shotguns ready for the police to break in at any moment. Once they are arrested, the police deckers will be able to rip through their code and combat the daemon/malware loaded onto the hospitals computers to return things back to normal.

• Adventure