[Wild_Bill]

Yeah, but think if the GM's had a particular story line they wished to pursue. They could just announce it, or the could organize a DSS hunt (as happened several times in the past I believe) and have one of the DSS's "reveal" whatever link they wanted/needed for the story line. This would be for a special 'right now' type story line and would require moderate GM involvement and advertisement ahead of time (to give everyone who wanted to a chance to be involved). This would be fairly rare. Maybe a couple of times a year or more.

Alternately, hidden in among the regular Scout missions (or Espionage) would be one (and only one) mission to go to such and such sector, rotacol points x,y,z, and check out to 40k from that point for wreckage believed to be there. This would trigger a canned (totally preplanned and prepared) mini-story line that would run for a set number of steps/missions and/or time, and perhaps tie in with other preplanned missions that would be triggered by the first mission. This could be repeatable with slight variations so as to get the most mileage from the scripting efforts/GM involvement.

My alternate would require minimal precise planning, just write up a couple of mission scenarios with some interchanageable variables to allow re-use without becoming meaningless "everybody does these". These would be something that happened maybe every 100 missions or whatever and was totally random. It would work something like arty-spawns once the first mission was taken and the "whatever" was found, it would trigger a second mission, etc until the whole set had run out. It would be automatic and random and once written up, shouldnt' require GM intervention. Anyway, just an idea.

[netburnr]

I love the idea Bill and hope ND can find the time to write the code for your proposed Story Line/ Mission system.