Quadrotor Swarm: Evil? or am I just being paranoid

Don't you just hate it when someone invents something with the best of intentions and all you can think about are it's potential evil uses.

Grimtooth's Most Useless Machine Trap

I stumbled upon this video of the Angriest Most Useless Machine. 



For those of you not initiated in the ways of Most Useless Machines, it's a device whose only function is to turn itself off.  Each time you turn it on a finger pops out and immediately turns itself off.

Which got me thinking, perhaps Grimtooth might have invented something similar for one of his trap catalogues?  Something like this perhaps:

The trap consists of a 100ft long, 10ft x 10ft corridor, at it's far end is a featurelss door with no handle.  Protruding from the wall beside the door is a lever with a sign above it which reads "OPEN" and one below it which reads "CLOSE".  Behind the wall sits an ogre, troll or other dim but dangerous creature who has been told to guard this door and stop anyone trying opening it by flipping the lever to CLOSE.

How to play it

The first time a player flips the lever roll 5d6, the resulting number is the PATIENCE of the guarding Ogre, make a note of this number.  Each time a player flips the lever to the OPEN position the Ogre flips it back to CLOSE and reduce the Ogre's PATIENCE by 1.  When the Ogre's PATIENCE is reduced to 0 it opens the door from his side snaps off the lever and bashes the PC with it before returning through the door and closing it.

Player's Solution

Go back the way you came.

Other RPG Uses

Unmodified, the machine would make a perfect Alpha Complex experimental robot...

"Listen up troubleshooters... The Computer, in its infamous wisdom, has granted you temporary security clearance to escort the experimental bot U-SLUS-MASH1N to R&D sector, please make sure that it gets there in one piece... "

Purity Test

The PCs are sent to a location by their corporation on the pretext of a mission when they intercept an SOS message from an unknown source.  Locating the source of the SOS the PCs discover that it has been sent by a group of ex-corporate troubleshooters who famously bought out their respective corporations contracts. These NPCs are the rolemodels the PCs look up to in their respective fields. The NPCs tell them that their former corporations want them dead... or worse.

The quandry for the PC's is do they join forces with these dissidents and face the wrath of the corporation or do they turn them in?

The scenario is in fact a corporate purity test and the PC's will be "retrained" if they support the refugees rather than alerting the corporation to their whereabouts.

Suitable Game Systems

Anything with a heavy corporate setting: CYBERPUNK / JUSTIFIERS RPG / PARANOIA

Valley Forge

60 years ago an eccentric Billionaire tired of the dog eat dog existence of Mega City 1 started a "simple living" commune known only as The Valley. The residents of The Valley think that they are on a colony spacecraft to a distant planet. They have been living in isolation from other citizens of Mega City 1 for their entire lives. All is well until one of their number finds out the truth and commits suicide by throwing himself out of an airlock.
Phillipe Stark Towers is a 2000m tall luxy block the top 900m or so which are the property of the walker foundation. Entering at any of the pedways or blockparks below 1150m, the PCs will find that the elevators do not have buttons for the remaining penthouse levels. They will need to hotwire an elevator, Barney will be too busy to override an elevator (The control panel is voice activated and will not allow any unauthorised access to or from the upper levels.

The upper levels house The Valley Forge commune, the brainchild of eccentric multi-trillionaire Findus Walker. A commune in which the inhabitants have no knowledge of the existence of Mega City 1, it is an elaborate 60 year psychological experiment to test the theory that the psychological stress of inhabiting a Mega City is the cause of the anti-social behaviour demonstrated by it's residents.

The experiment has been the life work of Findus Smith-Walker who has undergone many bodyswap's in order to witness the result of the experiment at first hand he is currently residing in the body of a 12 year old girl. The residents of the commune live under the pretense that their accommodation is in fact a space colony seed ship destined for a remote corner of the galaxy on a one hundred year long voyage. Many of the original inhabitants who were specially selected for the voyage have since died and their descendants currently inhabit the "space craft".

Oh and just in case you thought the judges were getting off lightly Smith-Walker uses a private army of War-droids (dressed in Judge uniforms) which the residents know only as "space pirates" to keep them under control and at a stable population density.

Suitable Game Systems

Originally written for JUDGE DREDD RPG, but would work in any city based sci-fi setting with heavy corporate overtones such as CYBERPUNK / JUSTIFIERS / PARANOIA / SLA INDUSTRIES with some minor tweaks.