Adventure Hook: Set A Thief

Since I have all this space, this is a good place to repost my adventure hooks from the DWAITAS forum. All roughly modern and basically Aliens In London or possible Secret Invasion types, originally designed for a UNIT game.

Set A Thief


1892. Agents of the Torchwood Institute investigate reports of lights in the sky over Hong Kong, break in to a house and are shocked by what they see.

A hundred and eighteen years later...

One of the Institute's now-abandoned duties was to oversee alien artefacts of particular value. The largest facilities were seized by UNIT, but some slipped through the cracks or were taken over, or already held, by other groups. One in particular, the first to be started, was judged to be well guarded by its current keepers and unlikely to pose an ongoing threat.

Until news that a group intends to steal one of its key components, a sapphire computer capable of creating crystal matrices when properly powered, constructing machines out of stone and dust. In the wrong hands, they're capable of threatening the world. And if someone has suddenly taken an interest, they're almost certainly the wrong hands.

And since the Tower of London is protected by a sovereign nation, and possibly leftover Torchwood agents and anti-teleport technology, the group can't simply remove the items with psychic paper or UNIT badges.

So to save the world, they have to... steal the Crown Jewels.

Things To Do: Plan the break-in, stop a rival group, steal the sapphire and run!

Antagonists: Tower guards, rival thieves (possibly lead by Lady Christina De Souza), the police - and the sapphire.

Action Scenes: Breaking in, dodging guards and disabling alarms, outrunning pursuit, facing down the aliens and getting the gem back safely.

Problems: With the guards, the police, rival thieves and unknown buyers, there's a huge potential for double- and triple-crosses. And that's before you add the sapphire computer waking up, converting nearby silicon into soldiers, turning the museum corridors into a web of crystal structures and trapping people inside in order to read their minds and better defend itself, possibly by converting the planet into a spacecraft.

Things To Prepare For: The characters will need, and the players may well want, maps of the Tower of London and Jewel House, the museum housing the Crown Jewels, along with some ideas about the security system.

Continuing the Adventure: Who sent the thieves to retrieve the sapphire and what do they want it for? Was anything else taken in the raid? Is that old story about a werewolf and the Koh-I-Noor true? (Ahem.) Does the sapphire computer have anything to do with the crystal-based alien AI known as "Mister Smith" located in Sarah Jane Smith's attic?