Gaming - Industrial Application of the Elements, and When Things Go Wrong

 Previously, I discussed both an alternate "modern world" and its background, and how I would interpret portions of this in Savage Worlds.  Today, having dealt with an extreme case in "magic Chernobyl," I will discuss an intermediate state, roughly equivalent to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and another industrial disaster.

Picatinny Arsenal has been involved in armaments production in one form or another since the Revolutionary War; tradition has it that there was a cannon forge on the site in the 1770s and the Arsenal proper was established in the 1880s as a powder storehouse and later manufacturer.  Today it is perhaps best known as the place where mounting rails for firearms were standardized in the 1990s, but at one time it was the primary repository for ammunition on the east coast of the United States, a major center of manufacture and research in artillery propellant, payload, and fuzes, a role it continues to this day.  In the 1920s, a large portion of modern Picatinny was used by the Navy as the primary repository for naval powder stored on the east coast, at the Lake Denmark Powder Depot, located adjacent to the current ammunition storage area.  At the time, ammunition and powder storage was handled with a much higher risk tolerance than is done today, partly because of incidents like what happened on July 10, 1926.

Lightning struck a munitions storage structure and ignited a fire.  Over the following three days, several million pounds of explosives across the Naval depot and across the neighboring Arsenal detonated.  Of about 200 buildings standing on Picatinny, about a dozen survived destruction, of which the surviving few today are all labeled as historic structures.  The Arsenal still occasionally has to send out EOD teams to the surrounding countryside to retrieve WW1-era artillery shells that were hurled off-post by the explosion.

While this seems like at most an interesting historical-trivia event, in the context of a world built on advances in elemental binding, it is an excellent case study.  Let us discuss why.  Broadly, a modern artillery round consists of an explosive payload, a fuze, a hardened case, and a propellant charge.  From the pull of the lanyard, three explosions happen - first the propellant, then the fuze, when its conditions are met, then the payload.  Depending on the round type, either then it sets fire to things (incendiary), flings hot, sharp bits of metal everywhere (HE), disperses a vapor (smoke, chemical), or simply burns up while hanging in the atmosphere (flare).  There are therefore three different places where the idea of an elemental bond suddenly disrupted by a change in conditions applies.

My vision is that a combination of innovations through the 18th and 19th Centuries culminated, by the early 20th Century, in the use of a fire-air couple for propellant and a mission-based elemental load for the payload.  Suddenly changing the balancing conditions of a couple would upset it, and attempting to compress it past its containment limits would discharge it - a controlled compression being the ideal, and the uncontrolled compression being what happened on July 10, 1926, with the sudden addition of a massive source of either air or fire (depending on how you want to interpret lightning in the classic four elements; I tend to lean toward air) to a stockpile of these couples.  Each detonation runs the risk of imbalancing the ones next to it.

Unlike Chernobyl, or a nuclear incident in general, the problem here is strictly limited to immediate energy release and one does not have to worry over-much about being poisoned by the environment or transformed into a tree-person because of the unforeseen consequences.  Instead, for game purposes, this can be modeled pretty much like any other explosion - every ten minutes of game time, roll a die; if it comes up a one, an explosion happens and you take an arbitrary amount of damage to an arbitrary radius.  When I say "arbitrary" here, this is because there's precious little point in creating characters if every explosion is going to roll 12d6 to try to beat a target of 7, every ten minutes.  That's just a meat grinder and doesn't give the players any reason to interact, nor is it very interesting if it is portrayed in strictly numerical terms.  Like a lot of Savage Worlds (or really any RPG), this depends very heavily on flavor, skins, and trappings, rather than pure numbers.  Hell, you could do this exact same thing by saying that the royal dragon nests had been hit by lightning before the latest clutch of eggs were ready to hatch, and the eggs had detonated and the hatchlings had been driven mad by it.  It's all a matter of trappings and scenario development.

Instead, the challenge with an encounter like Picatinny or Chernobyl is that the environment itself is what's trying to kill the players, and they need to find ways of mitigating that risk.  They're not going to find the off switch, there really isn't one.  But they can be smart about it - at Picatinny, using the terrain to approach the problem, rather than charging headlong in, or at Chernobyl doing what Soviet servicemembers did and trying to improvise protective gear.  The goal here isn't to defeat the creature, but to conduct a vaguely defined rescue mission against a time limit; remember, Picatinny or Denmark Lake were garrisons, with family housing, and evacuating the Exclusion Zone was a huge portion of the Chernobyl response.  I don't know that it's the basis for a full campaign, but as an adventure, taking characters out of the mode of "we will win by defeating the bad guy" is a good way of reminding them that they are in fact mortal, and one of the ways that mortals occasionally win is by redefining the victory conditions.