5punk

Y'know, the brief for this part of the BPN says something like "make a point about the Cannibal Sectors by throwing encounters at the squad until they're sick of them then chuck another one in to drive the point home." I think I can consider that accomplished. It also highlights my biggest bugbear about the game. The Cannibal Sectors are meant to be some of the most dangerous places on Mort, but the system and canon just doesn't back that up. Cannibal Sector 4 is meant to be like the scene in Escape From New York where snake has to hide from the mob of crazies, but even a rookie squad of Ops could grind through a mob of cannibals without any real problem. If there were hordes of them that wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but the sourcebooks say they live in families of about 30, and that they are survivors. Not likely to recklessly throw their lives away against high-risk targets for minimal reward then. The devs encourage creative use of their environment, but even that's difficult to turn into a real threat, as you've seen. So it just turns into a slog. Even that wouldn't be a major problem if the normal bad guys were more of a background risk or cannon fodder, but the canon also makes it clear that things like ebb beasts, rogue Necs, and other such dangerous types are extremely rare.

One solution is to move player characters away from being normal Ops, towards more of a task horse against a certain type of nasty. The problem with that though is that SLA thrives on being disempowering, and that would detract from it. Personally I'd rather it was just more dangerous.

EDIT: Split from Cannibal Heart

I don't suppose that the cannibals not being very threatening is something you could fix by just GM stats fudging to just make the garden variety cannibal more beefy and deadly?

Not without some serious inconsistency. Cannibals are just savage (albeit cunning) humans, whereas Ops are well trained humans in power armour with big guns. Better in the long run to fudge the rules to make Ops more vulnerable. Upping melee damage works at lower levels, but once people are out of Blocker it's difficult.

One random thought that comes to mind: Make all the armour that is much more than blocker require power to function properly, then give the battery packs not particularly long life. Out for a few hours in Mort? Slap on your hugest of battle armour, no problems. Going out for many hours/days in the cannibal sectors? You need the less protective but unpowered armours.

Course, that falls down a bit with Ebb users, but Ebb users are waaaay overpowered in many ways.

The ebb thing has had a house rule for ages which limits the maximum skill level by the character's Formula. It works nicely because the more you know about the Ebb the more power you have, but thee closer to turning you get. It's currently 10+Formula, but it was originally 2xFormula. Either way, it puts it under the direct control of the GM but allows the players to influence it by asking for Jade BPNs.