Editing Engine Heart (section)

===Bots on a Boat===

The setting here is on a medium-to-large vessel like a cargo ship or luxury liner. Such ships are large and complex enough to have an entire module dedicated to them as well as be part of a larger campaign: for example the Programmer can have the PR's start on the ship and have to first escape from the vessel (leaving being considered dereliction of duty by the autopilot!) before being able to go anywhere else. Alternatively the PR's can encounter the ship at its dock or run aground.

Suggestions:

---"I Sea Trouble": A strange robot arrives at a docked ship's pier, so badly beat up that it cannot use its radio or speaker or screen but desperately attempting to communicate a terrible danger. If repaired it will warn of a voracious swarm of hostile robots that are consuming or conquering everything in their path. (this can easily integrate with the vanilla EH's military 'locust swarm' or the salvage robots run by the rogue AI). The vessel will be a prime target and nowhere on land appears to be safe from the menace...an escape by sea appears to be the only way out! However the boat requires engine repairs, fuel, hacking the autopilot or all of the above (determined by dice roll or Programmer's discretion with at least one required) before it can sail and at least two PR's working together or a PR at least size 5 (and thus tall enough to see out of the bridge window itself). Then finally the newly-commissioned Captain and crew must pass a series of checks operating the vessel's controls to get out of port.

---"Sink or Swim": A vessel, drifting untended for years, has run aground or struck something and is about to join the Titanic. The PR's must overpower or outwit the vessel's AI that insists all is well and head for the lifeboats before they become part of a new artificial reef. If the Programmer chooses they may have a short window of opportunity to stop or slow the vessel's immediate demise by shutting watertight doors remotely or themselves by hand, but the AI and the robots under its command will attempt to reopen them. The PR's may in turn prevent this by cutting remote-access wires, welding the doors shut if they have an appropriate Feature and/or beating up the AI's minions.

---"Letters Of Last Resort": A submersible is awakened by a coded "deadman" signal and sent on a mission to launch missiles against long-dead foes and irrelevant targets. The PR's come online and will quickly find out that due to the degraded state of the ship and its weapons, launching the missiles will almost certainly result in a swift voyage to Davy Jones' locker! They must overcome their directives and onboard security measures to abort the launch outright and leave them in control of the vessel or set it to dive beyond its limits and escape in a pod before it passes crush depth. If worse comes to worst, the Programmer rolls the results of missile launches to determine if a missile fails to launch and sinks the ship, launches but fails mid-flight, lands but is a dud or successfully detonates. This continues until a failed launch or the ship has expended all its missiles, at which point the autopilot will set course for port.

A possible extra touch in case the PR's fail to prevent the launch is to destroy a building or location further along in the adventure, with the obvious caution against nuking half your planned campaign.