Category Archives: session summaries

Forty-sixth Session – The Externals assault the Aegis system in force, and we have our entire fleet there to prevent them. We tear them a new one. Now we have to figure out what to do with all these weirdo prisoners!

This was an interesting session.  First we spent a good bit of time planning our strategy – we knew the aliens were coming.  Since we’ve teamed up with the Medurr and have access to their drivespace denial weapon, we came up with a plan to trigger it in microbursts designed to spread incoming ships out in a big ol’ line trailing out of the system.  We’d then put our forces in one big ball and roll them on up!

Before they come, we go and get the other forces in the system on our team – some Thuldans and some VoidCorpers. The Thuldans say yes, the VoidCorpers say no.

We were interrupted by a systemwide hack. I thought we had thwarted that back in the day but apparently not.  This took a LOT of rolls to resolve.  Taveer went out into cyberspace to thwart it. The enemy AI pretty much chased Taveer off and back to the station and started attacking us!  Once we got VERA and Captain Takashi into the fight, we finally managed to cut it off.

Then we found out it was a VoidCorp AI behind it all. They had some flimsy excuse but the Admiral pretty much told them they were going to join our fleet or we were going to seize their assets in the system.They gave in.

In an attempt to turn this whole thing around, we took the AI, VORL, and put it on a barge with some External wireless codes to mess with the incoming fleet.

But before the battle – a promotion!  I had actually written that “Letter to the Admiralty” and sent it to our GM Paul  a while back so that when we were in Bluefall and could get some admirals together that we could have a board of review to promote the faithful Martin St. John to Captain.  He was surprised! And in fact, once he was promoted, we talked about a command for him – it hadn’t originally been my plan, but Takashi as an Admiral has been kinda kicked upstairs to do full fleet command tactics a lot of the time, so he offered command of the Lighthouse to St. John, who accepted. Woot!  We put as much pomp and circumstance into it as the GM had patience for (not all that much). Hell, I’d be happy to do a whole session around just the promotion, but then I’m a roleplaying freak.

Then we fought the Externals and pretty much owned them.  Only two problems – one, the second fortress ship got away despite all our efforts to catch up to them (we’re not really sure how that worked, it was GM fiat) and also the rules tended to punish us for being big.  We were using a simple abstract system that uses Space Tactics rolls; that’s where Takashi is a Viking. Well, first round he rolls Amazing and the first bit of the enemy fleet rolls like Ordinary, they lose 15% of their force and we lose 5% of ours – but we are so much bigger we lose about as many ships as they do!  We were like “WTF!” Usually “stacking” all your forces is an advantage but in this ruleset it’s not, so next time we’ll go with small task forces that should get the same effect with fewer losses.

Suddenly we went from most of the Externals being rare “never seen by humans” stuff to “We have a prison hulk full of thaal, what the heck do we do with them?” We spent a lot of time trying to turn the various client races with mixed results. Not everyone is on board with the crazy Scientology religious heart of this war, but many of them are stupes who like their congenital slavery so it’s a hard nut to crack.

The bareem were like this.  We got some sifarv turncoats to command them all to help us, but Chris had the most inspired idea; we’re putting them through Concord Marine training not only to battle harden them but also to try to inculcate them with our values. Once they accept leadership other than the sifarv, and kill sifarv on orders, then they’ll become more liberated dudes, at least that’s the idea.

The A team is going to take half the fleet to Tendril to lift its siege and the B team is going to go RIF the Algemron system, which is probably controlled by teln mind-worms.

Interestingly, I think we kinda all unanimously and implicitly backed off going from one big serious space battle thing to another – after another half hour of roleplaying suddenly the next steps became smaller and closer to home!

We were looking for the N’sss (stealth space jellyfish) we are sure are in the system, and detected the VoidCorpers beaming clandestine messages into the gas giant (where N’sss like to hang out). Admiral Takashi lost his shit. Forget about interstellar diplomacy and weak excuses, this is an act of war and/or treason and he immediately ordered a Marine strike force to load up and assault VoidCorp’s Cloud City. After the AI thing, and finding out that they are trying to stop Old Space from coming to the Verge’s rescue, it was the last straw. They are clearly traitors against humanity and he’s not going to tolerate it another second. Long term consequences can worry about themselves.

Plus, there was a throwaway rumor about problems on the set of actor Jack Everstar’s new movie and suddenly, for no real reason, all the B team (while playing naked beach volleyball on Bluefall, our usual vacation time diversion) decided we all want to meet Everstar and have cooked up a Burn Notice/Leverage style plot to all get onto his movie crew.  Woot!

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!

Forty-fourth Session – Back on Lucullus, the Lighthouse comes to the relief of the kroath-beset locals.  That’ll teach them to be such criminal douches next time we need their help. We engage in some large scale land combat and send in the A Team and some Recon Marines to nip the alien leadership in the bud. It all goes well, except those darn psychic aliens teleport up and take over the Lighthouse’s bridge while we’re giving them their whupping! Experience the twists and turns of the latest installment in our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

We spent a ridiculously long time getting the various Lucullan factions on board with the Verge Alliance last time we visited, only for them to totally roll over like bitches for the Externals. All the alien fleet left but has ovipositor-ramming facilities in full swing turning Lucullans into kroath soldiers. Sigh. We put together a joint Verge Alliance and Medurr fleet, using the Medurr riftship to gate in draco-centaur needle ships. Concord Marines, Lucullan Picts that have been on board the Lighthouse, and Medurr all take part in the assault.

I as Admiral Takashi put together the tactical plan. We had our forces feint at the alien domes to lure out their armor as we sent in an infil team (including our command staff, of course) to take out their orbital-capable guns and decapitate their leadership. Then once those guns are silenced, our aerospace superiority would enable us to pound their armor and carry through the assault. I made some great tactics rolls and the larger army action went very, very well for us.

On the micro level, we rolled hard on the aliens and had a lot of success, including killing some of the birdlike sifarv whom we hadn’t encountered in person yet, until one of them downs Haggernak and negotiates for his release.  Admiral Takashi is a naval man of his word type, so he accepts the sifarv’s parole and chats cordially with him, only to discover the other alien leaders had teleported off to take over our space station!  Grr. We’ve tried to set up psychic teleportation detectors with little success and prevention with zero success. Fricking aliens.

I am always a bit worried about going into a lot of battles with Takashi since he is by no means a combat monster. He has inordinately good luck with shots from his laser pistol when it counts, but he is not well armored or really all that skilled. He excels in using his Command skills to inspire other combatants and give them bonuses, however.

This episode also features the continual combat effectiveness of the Concord Marines. We have been continually impressed with these guys; in fact, I’ll do some posts on them in particular as we’ve been inspired to detail them more as they continue to come through for us. Our PCs are not butch enough to go in on assaults without backup, and so we bring them along a lot. For second level NPCs they have performed remarkably!

Forty-third Session – We infiltrate an External fortress ship to prevent them from getting away with their superweapon. We use our own superweapons to defeat them – the Red Queen, alien aphrodisiac crystals, a nuke, and a Thuldan Warlion! They never stood a chance. All this and more in this session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

Last time, we’d basically gone down to Mantebron and found out that the aliens had stolen an Ancient superweapon and generally were all over things there. We were leaving with our tails between our legs after some light recon, but Markus the warlion convinced the rest of the group that with a clever plan, we could (albeit at the risk of our own lives) sabotage their effort.

Mainly, this involved clandestinely inserting into their fortress ship the Phlegethon, nuking the thaal cathedral where all their psychics are, and setting off the alien weapon so it shoots the other fortress ship, the Styx. The main goal being destruction of the weapon, but also sowing whatever chaos and destruction we can.

Many of the group had misgivings about the survivability of this plan. But Markus figures it’s war – gotta go big or go home.

And the plan worked!  This is one of those sessions where we spend as much time carefully laboring over every little detail as much as in execution – which ends up paying benefits in survivability. The main nail-biter was the precognition ability of the enemy psychics, which end up alerting them to potential attacks. We bypassed that by installing a nuke in their cathedral, given that they probably couldn’t escape the radius in time even with teleportation. Luckily this worked, and then when we fired off the superweapon we put a big albeit nonfatal hole in both fortress ships.

Markus got to march around the ship in power armor firing drum after drum of grenades from his Zeke-5 grenade launcher, which always gives him a warm feeling. Wily opponents try to move into melee range to escape the hail of grenades, whence they discover what real pain is like.

Enjoy the writeup!  More to come… We’re moving into the final stages of the war, looks like.

Forty-second Session – Tendril falls to the Externals. We send the Red Queen to Mantebron to figure out what the Externals want with the Glassmaker artifacts there – apparently they’ve extracted an alien superweapon. We risk our lives to go down to the ruins ourselves, and find out nothing that wasn’t already obvious. Then we weigh the odds – two alien fortress ships against one party of PCs.  The B Team decides “We can take ’em!” All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

I missed the first part of the session, resulting in the rest of the party getting chewed up by alien dogs. When a glass spider asks which one of them it should implant with horrid alien devices, Peppin and Taveer both fall all over themselves volunteering. On the basis that Peppin “sounds like you already have at least two people in there already,” Taveer is chosen and as usual plays it up to the hilt. Finally I arrive and the grenades start flying, and we finish out crawling the Glassmaker ruin, for all the good it did us.  We got a lengthy description of how unstoppable the obviously unstoppable weapon the Externals got is, which we knew already, and that they are gathering Ancient artifacts for some fell purpose, which we knew already, and that they want to make the Deepfallen on Bluefall disintegrate everyone on the planet, which we knew already.

Finally we head out, and Markus talked everyone else into taking a run at the fortress ship.  If it gets out of here with that weapon then there’s no way we can ever take it in a space combat. The ship is still partially splayed open to install it so I figure if we can get on there and sabotage it, fire it off before it’s well seated and have it rip the ship apart, or set off a nuke by it, or shoot it into the other fortress ship, or something, then we can remove the threat. And the B Team is the group of people to do it!

Forty-first Session – The Lighthouse is going to Cambria to meet the Medurr, but is knocked out of drivespace early and has to head off an alien setup. Then we throw our Picts into battle against the kroath! Under 50% losses is a victory in our book. The Medurr sign on to the Verge Alliance, and we plot strategy. All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

Bruce (Taveer, Lambert Fulson) has taken to attending the game via Skype, because he’s too much of a wuss to drive from Dallas to Austin every weekend. Since we upgraded to a HD camera it works pretty well, and when he starts gibbering we can mute him, which makes the game go smoother than previously even.

We discover the Medurr have a drivespace denial weapon, which we thought was impossible, in addition to the riftships we had thought were impossible. The N’sss conduct a transparent “We’re attacking the Medurr and we must be treacherous humans” ploy, which we foil by blowing up one of their ghost ships.  Then they dump a bunch of kroath on the Medurr, and the big tough Klingon centaurs start whining like bitches. So we finally pop the tab on all those insane Pict warriors we brought on board in Lucullus and start the kill.

We finished that up pretty quickly, and then burned two hours debating where to send our various battle groups to in order to defend the Verge from the “alien fleets so massive you can’t beat a single one of them,” to hear the GM tell it.  Sigh.

Fortieth Session -The B Team takes the Red Queen to Ptolemy and has to whip the crazy cyber-lovin’ women manning her into shape. Once we get there, the pirates are shacked up with the aliens, so we set an inescapable trap for them. And we buy Taveer a lap dance. All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

The Red Queen is as crazy as ever – the ship from the Last Warhulk, but run by a crazy “Alice” AI who thinks everything is in fantasyland.  Her new “handmaidens” are a bunch of Nariac cultists with so much cyber that they go nuts from cykosis at the drop of a hat. They are pacifists, but conveniently have all sorts of hideous weapons implanted for when they go bugfuck crazy. Which they do.

Then we infiltrate the pirate flagship. My favorite part was when we burst onto the bridge, where the pirate captain and his External handlers were chilling.

Markus shouts out, “Alien collaborator says what?” and flings a pulse grenade into the midst of them.

Exciting!

We laid a good trap for the pirates. We figured that if we just jumped a battle group in, the pirates would jump right out.  But then their stardrives need to recharge. So we figured out their rally point, staged a diversionary attack so they’d flee, and had our battle group waiting for them at their rally point. Whap!