Smuggling

[ReHerakhte]

This was something of an intellectual exercise more than a fully developed thought but I was re-reading some articles about Columbian drug cartels using semi-submersible boats and also purpose built submarines for smuggling drugs into North America.

This lead me to wonder about the potential for such smuggling in the Dark Conspiracy world. Naturally smuggling of any commodity is going to be profitable enough for people to try it as evidenced by the smuggling of people, cigarettes, fuel and so on in Europe today but... what would the corporations of the Dark Conspiracy world do about such things?

Smugglers could/would be eating into a corporations profit margin and we know how nasty they can get when someone messes with their potential for profit!
Plus there's not a lot of adventures involving the sea or sea travel (or even rivers for that matter) so this could be a way to introduce such things into a campaign.


Anyway, here are the articles I was reading, they may give some inspiration for other aspects of DC, such as Igors smuggling DarkTek, Dark Minions or even Dark Minion young or perhaps an anti-Minion cell smuggling their own people or equipment into an area controlled by Minion forces (or a hostile corporation).

http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stor ... bmersible/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/0 ... w-harpoon/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco_submarine

http://article.wn.com/view/2011/02/15/S ... _Colombia/

[Linden]

what would the corporations of the Dark Conspiracy world do about such things?

It's an interesting question. I think I'd perhaps ask another question "what do they do now?", and extrapolate from there. If in the present day they rely on state controlled law enforcement then I can see them taking on more of that role themselves. Possibly you could even have corporate controlled airports and sea ports where customs is run by the company security force, nominally in the name of the national government. Something like the UK border agency strikes me as ripe for outsourcing - a raft of negative stories, maybe the private sector should be allowed to have a go?

I always thought the Cobra Men would be the Mr Bigs behind People Trafficking, having eliminated or absorbed the competition. I vaguely thought of writing a scenario based around them but found the whole baby eating thing just too gruesome.

[Morthrai]

It occurs to me that it might even be possible for some megacorp or other to form a new version of the East India Company and start poking around in some of the proto-dimensions. After all what could possibly go wrong?

Obviously this would depend on factors such as how technologically advanced they might be, or if there is ET or other Darkling assistance, or how long the corp has been at it. Still, might be worth looking at.

[Linden]

It occurs to me that it might even be possible for some megacorp or other to form a new version of the East India Company and start poking around in some of the proto-dimensions. After all what could possibly go wrong?

In Dark Races weren't the Ravagers discovered by a Grey controlled company doing exactly that? Borrowing from Alien I can see Ravagers being of interest to the bio-weapons division of your favourite evil company. They've got potential as stealth assassins, fifth columnists, infiltrators, whatever you want to call it. Need to dose them up with some mega appetite suppressants though...

Imagine a disguised Ravager trying to blag its way through customs with a suitcase full of dodgy diet pills.

[Zvezda]

Thanks for mentioning the "East India Company" they are always related to my interests.
I guess smuggeling depends on what the corporations do and what they want, besides profites that is. It it has a dark agenda, like building a bio-computer from brains, it is very likely to be engaged in human traficing it self. We modified the DC campaigh we are running in that way, that it is more "mystical" and has less alien involvement. We use for example old school werewolves and vampires. Therefore there is a lot of trafficing in "magic items" in our stetting which is perhaps similar to totays antiques smuggling. In the setting there are several corporations which exclusivly deal in magic items, the use smuggling, theft and such on a regular basis.
The minion hunters themselfs are also very similar to modern day terrorists (or contract killers) in our campaign since the minions and the corporations make the laws. Therfore the PC spend a lot of time gunnrunning and other such things to aquire weapons and ammunition. At one point they set up a private security firm in the Hutt River Province (An independent/ outlaw State in our setting)to optain EUCs(the Sipri-article is very good on how to forge or reuse EUCs.)
The case of the columbians is a very special one. They move so much money with one operation that they occasionally use disposable airplanes for smuggeling. They simply unloaded them and left them were they had landed. So they already have a lot of money at their disposal with makes bribery an easy option. Hell I remember even the head of the USA's DEA in columbia was involved in smuggeling cocain to the USA.
On a smaller scale it is very problematic to smuggle stuff today. Ocean going ships and boats are required to have AIS which identifies them wereever they are. Additionally everybody on bord is required to have some kind of "boarding pass" complete with a documentation of the ports he visited and were he got off an on the ship. A lot of computer, forgery and electroings rolls.

[ReHerakhte]

As a side note, I've been to the Hutt River Province a few times many years ago. It was always treated as something of a joke by the residents of towns nearby but the Province isn't really all that different to other entities that have declared themselves separate from whatever nation (for example, Sealand off the coast of Britain).

[Zvezda]

I hope that in real live it is not much different than let's say Disney Land. More of a tourist attraction than a bandit stronghold. I like the idea of brake away states for DC. They make a lot of sense to me with all those outlaw territories. Survivalists, David Icke and some of those micro nations might be the big winners of the greater depression.
Returning the the smuggling issue: Dimension Walk! I think that's the future.

[Morthrai]

Returning to the smuggling issue: Dimension Walk! I think that's the future.

The corporation in the Among The Dead adventure were using a portal to move goods across the Atlantic, so yeah

[Zvezda]

I think that criminal and terrorist enterprises which are big enough will find Portals very useful. Without knowing that every use is likely to alert the dark. Are there any estimates about the percentage of the population with empathic abilities? If the chance is 1d6-1 for everybody about 80% of the people in DC must be able to use empathy. But there was a different way to determine the empathy for NPCs if I remember correctly.

[Morthrai]

I think that criminal and terrorist enterprises which are big enough will find Portals very useful. Without knowing that every use is likely to alert the dark. Are there any estimates about the percentage of the population with empathic abilities? If the chance is 1d6-1 for everybody about 80% of the people in DC must be able to use empathy. But there was a different way to determine the empathy for NPCs if I remember correctly.

I think that the percentage of player characters/Minion Hunters with empathy is supposed to be a lot higher than the general population simply to reflect the idea of PCs being 'special' in some way Also, the opening of the long-sealed portals kickstarted the rise in human empaths and reawakened ancient abilities that modern Man thought were fairy tales

[Linden]

They were talking about this on the radio earlier today. I wasn't sure whether it belonged in the smuggling or zip gun threads...