To the Rescue! Tips for Running Rescue Missions

Whether it’s Aragorn showing up with his army of the dead in Lord of the Rings, the shot of the rescue team breaking through to the trapped people in the disaster movie, or a hero saving an innocent victim from a mugging or kidnapping, there are few things that capture the spirit of heroism as much as saving someone from peril. But “rescue” is a surprisingly broad basis for a scenario and can encompass all sorts of things, so when planning a rescue operation for your game, it pays to think ahead.

This is the first thing to think about when working on a rescue scenario, because depending on the answer, everything that follows will go very differently, and there are a number of underlying considerations as well.

• Is the target of the rescue an individual or a group? In either case, what is their relationship to the party? An operation to rescue friends or innocents is a heroic classic, but what if an enemy needs rescuing? This is also the time to think about why the PCs would want to rescue the target in the first place.
• How helpless or capable is the target of the rescue? Rescuing people who are wounded or otherwise out of commission (trapped, pinned under rubble, or sick, for example) will be different from bailing out capable people who are temporarily in over their head(s).
• How cooperative is the party to be rescued going to be? Put another way, do they want to be rescued? Sometimes stubborn types may need to be convinced to leave. If the PCs show up to take them away, will they gratefully come along or insist on staying unless the PCs do something for them?
• How much information do the PCs have? What is the scope of the operation? There’s a world of difference between “you need to infiltrate this prison and extract this person from this cell” and “save as many people as possible from this flooded town.”
• In some cases, the thing that needs rescuing is not a person at all. Cute kittens, endangered rhinos, critical data and priceless artifacts sometimes need saving.

To spice this up a little, it can be fun to mix and match; maybe you need Dr. Sanders and her kaiju data, because she’s the only one who can interpret it. Furthermore, she’s relatively helpless now because she’s trapped in a civilian science lab that’s sinking into the ocean, but if you give her a weapon, she can use her military training to help you.

The environment of a rescue operation will influence what a rescue looks like. If you’re searching for the survivors in a collapsed building, you’ll probably have access to things like roads and possibly cellular networks and electricity (depending on the technology of the setting and the extent of the infrastructure damage) whereas if you’re looking for a plane that went down in northern Canada or a carriage that broke an axle in the Barovian countryside, even paved roads can’t be assumed.

Virtually any place can function as the backdrop for a rescue; a person kidnapped by an evil corporation might be held in a skyscraper. Dwarves could be trapped in a collapsed mine. Explorers could have their ship wrecked in the antarctic.

• This also covers the amount of travel the party will need to reach the target of their rescue. Northern Canada is vast and may require days of travel, vehicles like aircraft or snowmobiles, and may require the rescuers to camp out as they travel. A specific neighborhood in cyberpunk Neo-Mumbai can probably be reached by hopping on public transit. The people screaming for help in the burning building are just steps away.
• Prisons and other fortified environments merit special mention: if your rescue is a prison break or an infiltration into (or assault on!) another secure facility of some type like an evil R&D lab, you will want to think about the security measures and how many of them the PCs can discover ahead of time. Generally, if you’re looking for a heist-like scenario that uses pre-planning or flashback mechanics like a GUMSHOE system preparedness test, it’s better to make lots of information available to your PCs. If it’s a more action-oriented game, lots of info might be counter to the feel you want and it’d be better to narrate the security they encounter on the fly.
• The rescue site needn’t be stationary! Trains, planes, spaceships, convoys, motorcades, submarines, and sailing ships can all hold a rescue target on the move.
• Locations that require special means of travel to reach can also add spice to a scenario. Examples include pocket dimensions and caves that require swimming through water-filled tunnels.

Here, also combining multiple elements can be fun; perhaps you need to rescue your target from a military convoy moving through dense jungle; you’ll almost certainly have the element of surprise, but you’ll also have to deal with the jungle itself including the heat, wildlife, disease, and the fact that cover and concealment work both ways.

The second major set of considerations concerns the reason why rescue is needed in the first place. While the actual possibilities are almost limitless here, I think they actually boil down to two broad categories:

• Targeted threats are something that is after or affecting the rescue target specifically. Examples here can be things like assassins, kidnapping, imprisonment, or enslavement, pursuing forces, monsters or predators, or even aggravating paparazzi. Anything that will deliberately thwart the rescue if unchecked. Rescue from these threats usually requires combat, stealth, or escape of some kind, whether that’s an invisibility spell, a getaway car, or a medevac helicopter. If you want to add a chase or combat to the rescue, one of these threats is a good way to do it.
• Generalized threats don’t know or don’t care about the party that needs to be rescued. This is the purview of things like invading hostile forces (from Mongols to Martians), natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, meteor strikes, and flooding, kaiju, rampaging swarms of nanotech like the Iron Wind in Numenera, and large-scale accidents like the great molasses flood or a gas line explosion. This can include hostile environments in general, too, like the Australian outback or The Mournland. A space station or disabled space ship that’s beginning to disintegrate and deorbit is a classic sci-fi trope. Consider also whether a generalized threat is stationary (like the aftermath of an earthquake or terrorist attack) or is moving (like a hurricane, invading army, or wildfire) and if it is moving, how predictably, how fast, and in which direction(s).

In the case of these generalized threats, usually either the party or thing to be rescued is already in the threat’s area of effect, or the hope is that you can get who or whatever it is out of the path of the onrushing threat before it arrives.

Remember, you’re not limited to a single threat or a single type of threat. Trying to save people being stalked by werewolves as a forest fire sweeps toward you all would be tense and dramatic!

Most rescue operations have some sort of complication. Otherwise, you have an errand, not a rescue.

• The most classic and universal complicating factor is time pressure. This can be measured in minutes or weeks and still be tense; a race through an occupied city to rescue a downed helicopter crew has a tighter timetable than looking for survivors of a shipwreck before they starve, but both are urgent.
• Hostile forces are another; if someone or something else is trying to reach your target before you, that adds additional pressure. A low-stakes version of this is another team competing to rescue the endangered party first rather than seeking to harm them. The opposition can also ignore the target of the rescue completely and come straight at the PCs; enemy security forces in a controlled area and territorial wildlife are examples.
• Don’t neglect environmental factors! Something as simple as obscuring weather like fog, rain, or a sandstorm can add a whole new dimension to the problem, or with planning and preparation could be an asset to rescuers that need to rely on stealth. Exotic environments might have magical forests with shifting pathways or toxic/corrosive atmospheres. And there’s also the old standbys of extreme heat or cold.
• Other parties may try to “attach” themself to a rescue; this is especially common in prison break scenarios where inmates the PCs may not want running around will try to force the PCs to free them along with the PCs’ intended target.
• Changing conditions are a good complication, especially with enough warning to let the PCs adapt, but not start over from scratch. For example, they get a call from base that the wind has picked up and the wildfire is moving towards them faster than expected. Now they need to either get to shelter or find a safer extraction point.
• Scant resources can sometimes be fun, but it can also be satisfying for some deep-pocketed authority to say “this is important. Tell us what you need.”
• Remember that for a lot of rescues, getting to the target and helping them is the easy part. Getting out is where it gets dicey; needing to sneak or fight past security, carry wounded people to safety, cross a hostile border, or evade pursuers can make the back end of a rescue just as tense as the beginning, if not more so. Getting wounded crash survivors out of a swamp full of gators and piranhas is way harder than getting in!

As with previous sections, don’t be shy about using more than one of these or different types, as long as it doesn’t add up to frustration for your players.

Because the concept of a rescue is so broad and because it tends to run on a specific set of emotional resonances (time pressure and a desire to help chief among them), there are a few specific pitfalls to watch out for when running a rescue.

• Pacing is important for a rescue. If things start to bog down at the table, do what you can to clear logjams proactively and dispel confusion as quickly as possible. Nothing kills the tension of a race against time like a lengthy rules discussion.
• On the flipside, you should give your players sufficient time to brainstorm and plan. Large or difficult rescue operations can require heist-like levels of preparation, and more spontaneous ones may require some impromptu planning as complications manifest.
• Rescue operations are a great place for a “fail forward” approach to mechanics. Failed a check to climb? You’re up there, but the ladder fell behind you as you stepped off. Failed a check to find your target? You found them after all, but the situation has worsened due to the delay.
• While mixing and matching elements from the different sections of this article is a good idea, you shouldn’t have so many moving parts that the scenario becomes hard for players to hold in their head. You also want to avoid presenting such a dire situation that your players are overwhelmed.

Rescue scenarios are among the most versatile and dynamic missions you can run. They typically have a good mix of tension, drama, variety, and challenge, and there are fewer things that feel more heroic than swooping in to save someone. You can also combine rescues with other mission types very easily and spontaneously – drop a friendly prisoner in a cell during a dungeon crawl or infiltration mission, have an NPC ally get dragged off by a monster during an exploration, have a team member get caught during a heist – all of these can add stakes and tension to an existing scenario. Have you ever run a rescue operation in one of your games? Do you have any tips for them not covered here? Tell us below!