The Federanium Lady or the Treasure of the Tetrarchs

jedion357's picture
jedion357
September 27, 2016 - 4:01pm
Re: the 1952 movie The Steal Lady
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steel_Lady

In WW2 a treasure of jewels were stollen and loaded on a German tank. a Taureg (bedouin) scout was leading the German unit and witnessed the tank opening up with its machine gun on the rest of the Germans and driving off into the desert in North Africa. This scout and his tribe have been searching for the tank for 10 years.

An oil company sends a survey team by plane to scout for oil in North Africa. Plane crash lands in storm and no hope of it taking off again nor is radio operational. The team finds and antenna exposed by winds from storm that forced them down, digging into sand they find German tank and mummified crew. With limited water and low hope of rescue they use petrol from plane and manage to restart the tank. Using significant ammounts of their water from the radiator. They begin their trek toward safety but are eventually detected by the Taureg tribe that will negotiate with them till they know for sure the treasure is still on board. Team barely escapes their treachery and ends up in running battle. the injured guy gets an idea on how he might be able to fix the German radio and they manage to call for a plane and rescue.

Movie is bad, there is plenty of conflict within the group as the alcoholic is the one to discover the bag of jewels and tries to hide them for himself.

Frontier conversion:

in final days of Laco's War a "treasure" is loaded onto an armored vehicle by mercs from one side but that vehicle kills off the rest of the mercs escorting it and disappears into a sand storm. One merc survives and has spent 10 years searching for the missing armored vehicle. To that end he's joined up with a smuggler/priate crew who are using the outback on Laco as a hiding hole.

PCs are part of a team that were doing geological surveys on Laco....
I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers!
Comments:

rattraveller's picture
rattraveller
September 28, 2016 - 7:41am
I understand it was a bad movie but how was aviation fuel supposed to work in a tank engine?
Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go?

jedion357's picture
jedion357
September 29, 2016 - 11:48am
Avgas was formulated in the '70s thus since we're talking a tank from the '40s and a plane from the 50s it's probably not and issue. And for a SF version we'd be talking parabattery swap out so the basic plot works well enough for an adventure seed. You could even turn it on its head and have the PCs hired to go find the "lost" armored vehicle. 
I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers!