In these two sessions, we go through the Alternity hosejob called “The Last Warhulk.” I think we’re starting to regret not going with more combat-monster characters, or at least as monstery as we could be at such low levels.
Sixth Session – A holographic yet stabby and underage prospective lover appears in Ten-Zil Kem’s room. When she’s rejected, a huge warship appears and pulps the Lighthouse and her destroyer contingent. The command staff shuttles over to beg for our lives, and we are tentacle-raped by warbots as the ship departs into drivespace.
I don’t mind losing, but the space combat took such a long time to resolve – and all there was to resolve was us being pounded for two rounds. Apparently it wasn’t supposed to be a totally one sided shellacking; in games where levels etc. count less it can be hard to estimate a good challenge level.
Seventh Session – We determine the crazy AI in charge of this ship has to go. Happily, we have popguns and level 2-3 characters to pit against the well armed, armored, and sensored robot legions. But then we find some plastic explosives and it’s BOOM time! Oddly, the female alien on the ship’s crew does not find herself irresistibly drawn to Captain Takashi, to everyone’s disappointment.
We manage to pull this off, but the only way to hurt the warbots is by using whole clusters of 6 energy grenades at a time (seriously) liberated from dead robots. Did I mention I have all of one rank in Pistol and carry a little laser pistol?
This session was more fun than the last one since we had a lot more people to spread around and the crazy AI and the aliens were entertaining to interact with.
This scenario showcases some of the worst spots of Alternity, sadly. All the technical skills needed to open doors etc. took minutes to use. So when a robot firefight broke out, you couldn’t have people dramatically closing blast doors or hacking computers to help. That sucks. And then the difficulty scaling was an issue. We all started at level 1 recently and a level 1 Alternity character can’t hit crap. Which is fine, but everything we fight (pretty much in all the sessions) has Good armor and really heavy arms. Paul’s used a couple of the printed Alternity adventures so far and they’re all like this, assuming you have heavily armed, armored, and skilled PCs at all times. So of course we have to resort to bandoliers full of grenades and plastic explosives. And then it’ll be hard to have a normal fight with normal opponents if we get acclimated to generating huge explosions with impunity.
I’m still enjoying the campaign, but session 6 was very un-fun and the continued trend of needing uber combat is sad – I’ll just have to bring my Warlion on every adventure instead of the Captain.
Geek Related 