New Campaign. Need some friendly CG Poster inputs!

[TheTSKoala]

Okay you crazy Spycraft-ians.  We're taking a break from the sci-fi and stepping back to "real world"-esque.  The next campaign is going to be base around ideas like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Op Center & Net Force.  I've got the basics of all written out, but I ran into writer's block.. ..and I've got 48 hours. LOL.

Starting out @ Level 2.  Based out of Washington, D.C.

Their first mission is a hostage situation @ a Children's Themed Restaurant.  (Chuck E. Cheese)

I need small scale, tactical or intrigue based ideas for missions until they get to around level 5.  Any ideas, I'd love you guys. 

(P.S.  The moderate-main bad guy is the Toy Genius Nazi guy.)

[foproy]

whatch the robin williams movie toys, or almost any robin williams movie for that matter, outised of good morning vietnam.

[Darth Sephiroth]

One option would be that they followed the wrong kid to use as a hostage, and thus while they have a lot of hostages, the kid they wanted isn't there. The party could use the roof as an access point (Some may even have skylights, imagine the tube things rising up above the building and have an agent having to sneak through the brightly colored, plastic tubes until he can get a good shot.

The badguy could escape with a hostage or three, causing the party to go into pursuit, end up entangling some high up politicos in the process.

If you want something out of left field, have the showdown in a sight of an assassination, thus the party has to deal with that after getting the kids to safety.

One game you may find interesting is Prime Target.

[Gentry]

For small-scale action, rather than think about full-length adventures with small objectives, you could consider using single-scene missions instead.  From that angle, the agents chase a single objective (or a tight group of objectives) that's part of a larger "ongoing operation".  So you could have them *just* do the stakeout that gathers crucial information.  Or *just* have them hit the hideout and shoot everyone, but not both.

Keeping the length of the action shorter allows lower level agents (with commensurately less staying power) to freely expend their resources and have a good time, rather than closely husbanding their ammo/action dice/favors/request checks for the final scene and the big finale shootout. 

Putting together a single-scene mission is also a fair bit easier than a full-blown scenario.  You still create a mission outline as though you were going to do the whole thing, but you only stat up a single specific scene within your outline. 

[TheTSKoala]

Yes!  Excellent!  *gets his creative juices renewed, revitalized and refreshed*   *gets to work*

[spinningdice]

That's an interesting option Gentry, I'd considered going in the oposite direction and having missions lasting 3-4 months (or rather 12+ sessions) but not stripping a mission down to one scene.

[Gentry]

Don't get me wrong.  If you've got the time, energy, willing group, and creative juice to create something epic like that, then by all means do it, says I.

Unfortunately, not everyone's got all those things at once.  We've all got an adventure idea for something that'd be *awesome*, and most of us may have even outlined it on paper.  But for most of us, that's where it stops--it never gets the final treatment that's going to make it playable.  And that's not anybody's fault, really, nor does it mean that if you've ever lost steam on an adventure idea that you're a "bad" GC. 

By only statting up and fleshing out the coolest scene from within your outline, you do two things--you preserve the cool idea that led you to start outlining the adventure in the first place, and you conserve your energy so it can be done again.  And especially in the espionage genre, it's super easy to skip all the intro, read some box text, and drop your players right into a scene.  It'd be a campaign of James Bond opening teasers.

And as an aside, if you've got a flaky player (or a couple) who may or may not show up, keeping the action within one scene keeps the group from having tagalong "NPC status" do-nothings in the back. 

[TheTSKoala]

I actually flip between Gentry and Spinningdice's methods.  If I linger on epic missions, my players become almost impossible to surprise as they expect a twist around every corner at that point.  If I linger on simple Police Intervention missions too long, they lose feeling of being "Heroes".  So.. my standard campaign goes Short / Short (which has a tie in to the Epic, but the players don't know it.) / Short (start in on side plots) / Epic / Epic / Short (perhaps exploring side plots.) / Epic.

[Equinox]

Take a look at the 1st and 2nd seasons of Alias for good ideas as to how to run an epic campaign while still maintaining a 1 mission feel.

For that matter, those seasons are excellent seeds for mission ideas.

[srl51676]

1)Ok this is not a mission just an idea for the Chucke cheeze idea. I have this mental image of individual balls in the ball crawl containing explosives. Big macho demolitions guy wading through a sea of plastic balls looking for the 5 or 10 that will blow up. hehehe.

2) I like the wrong child idea. how about a child that looks just like the kid they want.  (CEO or Congressman's son) they demand ransom or consessions that the kids parents have no power to grant. team needs to figure out who they realy want and why.

3) the real target is the CEO or Corp that owns the chain. the villan then procedes to target a string of other seemingly unrelated buisnesses.  I checked but the real CEC Entertainment, Inc. does not apear to be part of a larger congolmerate but it could be in your world

[Nepenthe]

Take a look at the 1st and 2nd seasons of Alias for good ideas as to how to run an epic campaign while still maintaining a 1 mission feel.

For that matter, those seasons are excellent seeds for mission ideas.

I wouldn't completely ignore the other three seasons for some idea mining, either. In fact, wasn't there some fairly big thread with lots of Alias->Spycraft "conversions" going on? Wonder if anybody managed to save that stuff up before it went bye-bye...