Piracy may hit Egypt's Suez Canal revenues

Summary

November 21, 2008: Somalia-based piracy has become so frequent that it is starting to affect shipping through the Red Sea significantly - and with it, the revenues Egypt collects from the Suez canal. Some shipping companies have announced that they plan to reroute their ships along the Cape of Good Hope of South Africa.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• Crime and lawlessness in one region can have large repercussions in other parts of the world, and GMs can use that when plotting their campaigns. If one region deteriorates, which countries and companies suffer - and which benefit? Answering this question will make it easy to come up with political and intrigue-based adventure ideas.
• This is made of adventure hook - significant trade route imperrilled by piracy by land or sea. In most RPGs settings, states (or not state actors) who are not as prissy about violence as modern first world powers then hire specialists in applied force (the PCs) to find and liquidate the offending parties. In a modern setting, the PCs may be PMCs retained by more pro-active elements in a first world nation (or a lesser power without force projection capabilities) to do the same job with greater deniability … being thrown under the bus by your employers, even after a sucessful mission (let alone a failure), may be an occupational hazard. GMs may then wish to continue the campaign with a brief but satisfying session in which the PCs catch up with whichever meddling fifth-columnist decided to expose the operation they were part of.