Adventure Seed: Hearthfire Agricultural Genetic Solutions.

Hearthfire Agricultural Genetic Solutions

Background: Hearthfire Agricultural Genetic Solutions is a biotech corporation operating primarily in the United States and Canada, with offices in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Chile.  It specializes in practical, low-level applications of past biological discoveries after the patents run out (or become available). To give one example: Hearthfire would not have been involved in the creation of something like Golden Rice, but the company would be actively trying to make a variant of the finished product that would be available to as many people as possible, and as widely as possible.  

This is not due to humanitarianism; Hearthfire simply wants to dominate the generic biotech market.  The company is likewise neither particularly good or particularly evil. Hearthfire operates within the law, and is reasonably careful to avoid controversy, but the company has nothing inherent in its corporate culture that would actively prevent it from idly drifting into quasi-criminal or morally ethical behavior.  It certainly has no connection with anything esoteric, supernatural, and/or metaphysical, either.

Alas and unfortunately for Hearthfire’s board of directors, the corporation manages to act in the same way as a corporation that hides its connection to the esoteric, supernatural, and/or metaphysical.  It’s remarkable, really; they’ve hit pretty much every bullet point on the So You Think This Company’s Eldritch? checklist, and everybody in the Shadow World knows the checklist.  This is a problem for Hearthfire because a team of, well, ‘demons’ on a recon mission to this plane of existence managed to botch their exfiltration; now they’re holed up in Hearthfire’s main HQ, and trying rather badly to find the Secret Master who really runs it.  They haven’t started in on torturing the staff for the (nonexistent) secret, yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

So, the mission?  Ah, kill the demons?  And try to figure out how to explain away all the freaky stuff to Hearthfire’s personnel.  While keeping an eye on them, mind you — because it is downright weird that the company is so in line with that checklist.  Unnaturally and suspiciously weird. It can happen, obviously, but take a discreet look around anyway while you’re there. You never know.