25: CALAMITY
Emergencies, disasters, and heroic actions to save the day.
The established Allegiance I wrote up in The Trinity Continuum is the Neptune Foundation, an offshoot of the Aeon Society and a future part of the eponymous Trinity. While the Triton Foundation focuses on research into Talents and mysterious Flux phenomena, Neptune is concerned with crisis response. They’re the people who go in to fix that dam that’s about to crack after an earthquake and flood a town. They go into hot zones to treat pandemics. I was thinking of Rescue Fiction, the term Warren Ellis used to explain Thunderbirds and Global Frequency, as well as the real heroes who do this kind of thing.
It can feature in other genres as well, notably superheroes, where the disasters might be caused by villains but the people still need saving in between fighting those responsible, and sometimes they have to deal with emergencies with nobody to punch out.
Disaster movies are more of a one-shot thing, unless you count Die Hard where the same poor guy gets stuck in the middle of villain-created disaster-movie scenarios and works to defuse the threat and defeat the villains responsible, saving other people involved on the way.
There’s also the stopping-the-apocalypse genre like Armageddon and The Core, which focuses on saving everybody rather than going into the danger zone itself and saving the people there. The story game Our Last Best Hope models this, with characters dying at the dramatically appropriate moment being a key mechanic.
So how do you make an emergency exciting to play, besides adding a villain to take out at the end? It should have stages, complications and setbacks, and chances for heroism, good planning and improvisation. It would be good to track the size of the threat and ways it can go up or down - cooperative board games like Pandemic and Flash Point: Fire Rescue are built around this. While I rarely use maps in-game, if everybody’s trapped in a sinking ship then it will probably help to have deck plans.
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