TO: Dariya FROM: Sarah Connor DATE: August 16, 2098 SUBJECT: Don't Follow Me
D-- Got caught in 2098. Underground bunker. Miscalculated Judg Day. Not sure, but I hear rumors that weird aliens are responsible. Don't know-- surface too hot to investigate. Stuck here till my autochron works again-- radiation interfering. The machines aren't smart enough here. Something went wrong. Fix it before 2075 when the bombs go off. --S.C.
It’s another day at Timewatch, and another attempt by Sarah Connor to stop Judgement Day. And, naturally, it went south somehow, so an extraction team has been sent to pick her up from the 22nd century.
Meanwhile, Dariya receives a strange email message from the distant past, from Sarah Connor, asking her to investigate something not-quite-right about Judgement Day. Namely: the machines didn’t rise, and there might be aliens. John Connor asks Dariya to check into it, rather “off the books” this time, and directs her to a bar, where Mace Hunter is drinking, on a 2-week suspension for doing something against Timewatch rules (“All I can say is, there was a prince, there was a princess, some kind of castle, and I’m not allowed in a certain small European country anymore….”)
In the course of this two-part adventure, Dariya and Mace Hunter travel through time to the 1990’s to discover that President Dan Quayle has fast-tracked the construction of several nuclear plants… which degrade and leak resulting in a toxic radioactive buildup within 150 years.
While there, they discover that Little Boy, the bomb that was originally supposed to be dropped on Hiroshima, was discovered recently and is being transferred to the Smithsonian. Interesting information, and they do some research into it. This leads them to conclude that Little Boy was stolen in the 1940’s before being dropped. They hop back in time to stop the bomb from being hijacked on its way to the Enola Gay.
That showdown results in them facing off against a bunch of ezeru who are trying to hijack the bomb. This leads them to the secret ezeru base in the South Pole, which Dariya and Hunter infiltrate to kill monsters and steal back Little Boy’s nuclear core.
The video sequence is somewhat long, due to spanning two sessions, but full of hilarity and hijinks. This is a really good example of tailoring a time cop adventure to two players, leading to a kind of “buddy cop” story. We don’t have a lot of science in this group. We don’t have hacking. They have an AI, but when they’re separated from each other, the AI is split and doesn’t have the full set of its knowledge. That works great, because it leads them to some humorous moments, and some great examples of how playing to your weaknesses really helps the story.
As a GM, one of the things I did with this adventure was specifically look for two very important scenes I wanted to put into it. First, I wanted Dariya to have an Amazing Heist scene, where she just slips in and does a great little stealthy theft thing. Second, I wanted Mace Hunter to have a Fabulous Hunt scene where he gets to hunt down monsters in the manner of a big game hunter.
Both of these came to pass in the same point in time, where the agents split up so Dariya could retrieve the core and Hunter could cause an enormous, bloody distraction.
It was beautiful and the players did a great job of coordinating their teamwork, while sticking to their strengths.
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