Forty-fifth Session – The A Team and a fire team of Recon Marines take the Lighthouse back from MINA and a bunch of aliens. Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Enter a world of shit in this episode of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!
The Lighthouse’s bridge is taken by a bunch of aliens and MINA, the station AI, is compromised (more than usual, of course). A bunch of old plot threads come together pleasingly in the solution.
First of all, we have the hacker Brent Terchyev, the son of the Jamaican Syndicate leader on Lucullus, who we saved from kidnappers and have had on board the station since our last visit. Now we’re back to free the system from the aliens, and this apparently kicks him out of his normal diet of videogames and Grid porn into action.
Secondly, we have our means of access – the concealed airlock in the back of a massage parlor that our criminal characters have used from time to time. Lambert Fulson was reluctant to narc it out to the station personnel, but with the fate of the station on the line he gave it up.
Third, we have the Concord Marines. We’ve been making good use of these guys, and this time we promote them from faceless NPCs to real personalities. Besides Concord Marine Captain David Chase, who is a named NPC in the Lighthouse supplement, we had along an elite Recon/Marauder unit consisting of:
- Sgt “Animal Mother”, violent and jaded even for the Marines, largely derived from the character of the same name in Full Metal Jacket
- Cpl “Klinger”, whose armor is skillfully painted to be wearing a negligee and garter belt, somewhat based on Klinger from M.A.S.H. and Fruity Rudy from Generation: Kill
- LCpl Wierzbowski (no cute nickname yet), the unit’s grenadier, named after a quickly deceased character from Aliens
- Pfc “Ludafisk”, a Nordic whiteboy that talks like a gangster rapper, inspired by Evan “Q-Tip” Stafford from Generation: Kill
- Pfc “Motorhead”, with mottos like “Eat the Rich” and “Born to Lose” spraypainted across his combat armor, just inspired by a love for Lemmy
They are stock second level NPCs, altered only from the default Concord Marines listed in the Lighthouse supplement in that they have recon powerered armor and a couple more skill points due to our more generous chargen rules – just about everyone who played Alternity used “Optional Rule Set 2” published as part of the Alternity errata that upped skill points by a small but noteworthy margin.
As you may be able to tell, we’ve been watching a lot of stuff like Full Metal Jacket, Generation: Kill, etc. lately.
Back in the day, I had done some work with an ex-Marine on a Concord Marine supplement detailing some Marine TOEs, training, and the like – I’m going to dust that off and publish it here for your enjoyment! And we’ll be using it ourselves, Paul generously told us we can level this squad to third and customize them up a bit for future supporting cast roles!
Anyway, it took us a while to insert, make our way down the two kilometer elevator shaft, disable our crazed station AI, and then assault the bridge. The Marines burst in and put down the thaal high priest like he was Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. It was beautiful – the bridge was full of External bigwigs – the thaal high priest, a bunch of other thaal psychics, superior sifarv bird-men, a gardhyi (or “space vampire” as Takashi calls them), bareem ape-thugs, karaden roach scientists… And our squad of Marines ripped them a new asshole in extremely short order. (Well, it took hours of game time, but short order in game). The KZ 130 13mm charge machinegun is quite a weapon in the hands of some motivated men. We put the video out on the Grid to demonstrate the lack of invincibility of our heretofore-untouchable enemies.
As Takashi, I alternated between using my Command skill to give our friendies bonuses and the Infantry Tactics skill to mess with our enemies. And I also shot down two bad guys with my little laser pistol – Takashi has way more luck then he has any right to with that thing. For whatever reason, he is really not good at combat by the numbers, but when he finally whips out the pistol and shoots it’s always followed by some alien boss falling with a hole seared in his forehead.
Next time, the fleet goes to Bluefall to defend against the approaching External fleet!
Geek Related 