Cut Content: LAM Airport & Cicada Whisper

When I first pitched Cicada Whisper to Catalyst Game Labs, the adventure offered three ways for a runner team to slip into Los Alamos. They could drive up through Totavi Checkpoint, ride in with the Koshari smugglers and their horses through the back country, or buy a ticket on a PCC AirTransit flight into Los Alamos Municipal Airport.

For longtime Shadowrun fans might remember AirTransit. It is the Pueblo Corporate Council's regional air service mentioned in Native American Nations Volume One back in the early 1990s. The service is designed to knit together communities scattered across the wide, often hazardous distances of the American Southwest. By 2084, I imagine that flights are largely autonomous with designated landing and takeoff locations.

The airport approach felt great on paper. Players go through a single-terminal airfield on top of the mesa, walk through security screening, and then grab a Kennel car to Fuller Lodge. On the way out, the same happens in reverse, except now with the target in tow.

Then I started writing the actual scenes, and two problems surfaced almost immediately.

Problem one: it was just Totavi again.

The entry and exit beats mirrored the Totavi Checkpoint scenes so closely that I was essentially writing the same encounter twice with different set dressing. Show your SIN, talk your way past the guards, hope nobody looks too hard at your gear. I worried players would not like that two of the three entry/exit options play out the same way mechanically. Sneaking out on horseback is very different driving through Totavi Checkpoint.

Problem two: the airport is a trap.

This is the one that really sank it. If things go sideways at Totavi, the players are at the bottom of the hill with options. If things go sideways at the airport, players are on top of the mesa, in a single-terminal building, with the entire Los Alamos Police Department converging on them and nowhere to run.

I tried to design a way out. The obvious move was to have the team hack an AirTransit flight and take off. The craft are autonomous. So, a sufficiently talented decker or rigger could in theory commandeer one. But that solution assumes the team has a decker or a rigger. Plenty of legitimate runner teams don't. I didn't want my adventure to end simply because the Decker player couldn't attend game night.

Fighting down the hill wasn't viable either, for the same reason fighting through Totavi isn't viable. It's five miles of cliff-hugging road from the checkpoint to the town proper, exposed to aerial drone fire from Bushman Outpost the entire way, with Totavi itself locked down and waiting at the end. A running gunfight down that road is not a scene; it's a cinematic execution.

And even if I gave the team a clean hack and a stolen flight off the mesa, I kept hitting the same question: why doesn't Los Alamos just shoot the flyer down? Especially if the run went bad and the target got snatched. Air defense over a city built on top of a former weapons lab is not going to be casual. Once that question is in the room, you can't un-ask it. Any answer I came up with felt like author intervention rather than a setting that breathes on its own.

The deeper issue was that every version of the scene I drafted had too many ways to go catastrophically wrong, too fast, with no recoverable middle state. That's not the same as a hard scene. A hard scene has a knife edge — players feel the danger, make a choice, and live or die by it. The airport scene didn't have an edge. It had a cliff, and the cliff was on every side.

When the ebook started bumping against its word count, cutting the airport route became one of the easiest calls I made on the whole project. And the adventure got better for it. With the airport gone, the Koshari exit had room to breathe — to become its own thing rather than a third option competing for narrative oxygen with two others. That route now does work the other two can't, and I'm much happier with how it lands.

There's a lesson in here about Los Alamos as a setting, too. The town is built on a defensible mesa for a reason. Every entry I sketched eventually ran into the same wall: Los Alamos is hard to get into and harder to get out of, and any scene that pretends otherwise is lying to the players about the place they're visiting. The two routes that survived — Totavi and the Koshari — both respect that geography. The airport route, the more I worked on it, kept trying to wish the geography away.

So if you're running Cicada Whisper later this year and one of your players asks why they can't just buy an AirTransit ticket: they can. The flights run. The airport is real. They can land there, walk through the terminal, and catch a Kennel car into town. They just shouldn't plan on flying out the same way if the run goes loud.