Tag Archives: lighthouse

Twenty-ninth Session – After we lay Rokk to rest, we go mess with the remaining Lucullan factions.  Most are kittycats, except for the insane and violent Picts.  But they’re not as insane and violent as we are!

Chris had a new character since Rokk got Thunderholed last time – Drest Talorgin, a Pict subchief.  So in good faith, we tried to set things up so that he’d confront the Pict chief, King Steel, a psycho cyborg weren.  We planned to hijack Steel’s cyber gear and then Dreth would take him out in combat.

Well, Taveer and Lenny managed to put a virus in Steel’s cyber maintenance gear, and it gave him a 2 step penalty to everything…  But he was so insanely ripped out that didn’t matter.  When as planned the fight broke out in the Pict assembly during the negotiations, King Steel totally tore Drest to bits, and then our own weren, Haggernak, jumped in, and Steel tore him to bits too.

As a player, I really didn’t want to steal their thunder.  So Markus tried to just ask for Haggernak and Drest’s lives (he was willing to settle for Haggernak) but Steel attacked him as well.  Well, Markus doesn’t tolerate primitive screwheads putting their mitts on him, so he executed the huge Pict with his chainsword.  The whole assembly fell silent; you could have heard a pin drop.  So Markus used one of my favorite Conan quotes – “Enough talk!” and issued a call to arms.  I have to admit, it was entertaining to be a Conan-style barbarian chieftain for a week.  And we got a Pict horde out of the deal; we gave them a camp in a cargo ship Lambert Fulson owns that’s docked with the Lighthouse.

We finished up in Lucullus.  The subplots in drivespace were fun.  Rokk Tressor’s ghost returned to haunt Peppin.  Degenerate gambler Marlok Taneer showed up and wanted Markus to get him “variable density bio-gel,” which I immediately realized he was going to use to load dice with.  Which was fine with me, as long as it wasn’t in my casino, and as long as I was getting a cut.

Then a human woman took a liking to our big weren Haggernak.  Easter egg: Paul was casting about for a name for the woman and I insisted she be named “Satine”, after Satine Phoenix, one of the stars of I Hit It With My Axe.  If you’re familiar with her work, you’ll know why.

And then we took Peppin’s miscreant cousin and forced him to be a steward on the ship we’re keeping our Pict hordes in.  WELCOME TO OZ, BITCH!!!

Twenty-eighth Session – The Jamaicans must fall under our sway!  And for some reason this means we have to go white water rafting.  In the end, brave CIB agent Rokk Tressor gets Thunderholed.

I missed this session, but to hear the other players talk, that’s probably not a bad thing.  They got roped into white water rafting, and the rules being used meant that pretty much everyone was guaranteed to die – since “boating” isn’t high on the list of skills for spacemen and the Alternity system is unforgiving to the untrained (roll d20!  On a 1-3, you don’t die!)

And then another super hard target fight.  We feel somewhat torn about how the combats are going.  Every fight is against extremely high grade opponents – awesome skills, armor, etc. – and often require heavy weapons to best.  The GM pretty much lets us take heavy weapons anywhere, the resistance is more from our sense of realism.  “Really?  Should I really be carrying a duffel full of rocket launchers everywhere I go?  And a quantum minigun?”  That’s not very Star Trek/Babylon 5 so the sense of genre appropriateness inclines us not to do it, but when we don’t, people get killed.  And that’s what happened to Rokk.  He spent all his Last Resort points to survive the whitewater, so then when an uber-NPC got in a lucky shot on him, he was straight up dead.

Since I wasn’t there, you’ll have to get more details from the session summary.  Go click it now!

Twenty-seventh Session – We go to a system called Lucullus that is run by various criminal gangs.  As that is a clear challenge to our roguishness, we pull off a complicated casino heist on the Mafia!  Eat that Lucullans!

I enjoyed this session – Lenny, Ten-zel, Markus, and Peppin work well together and we got to freeform plan our heist.  I like it when there’s a sandboxey setup – the event was being prepared according to a schedule, so we could be proactive, reactive, etc. based purely on our own merits and inclination.

Probably my favorite part, though, was after the “hot librarian” female Mafia security expert came and set up the casino’s security (we surveilled her the whole time), Ten-zel called up some hookers and got one that looked like her and was dressed exactly like her.  I said, “Brilliant!  What’s the plan?”  I figured he had some elaborate sting in mind and that we’d use the doppleganger to somehow compromise the casino’s security.  His response?  “Well, uh, I just kinda wanted to bang a chick that looked like that lady.”  I think “consternation” is the best word to describe my reaction to that.  And of course he just had them come to the front door – of the abandoned building next door our listening post was in.  As the Mafia security goons headed towards us, I said “I’m going upstairs to hide our equipment; you’d better bluff them out of here or I’m going to shoot them and you.”  He got them out of there, though.

The rest was too many meetings with too many functionaries to wreak diplomacy upon them.  It kinda bothers me that despite the huge Imminent Alien Holocaust, every single faction of NPCs everywhere is sitting around jerking off and have to be convinced via doing crap for them to get on board.  I mean, some of that is fine, but shouldn’t there also be people wildly in favor of it?  That can provide complications too (“We should attack NOW!!!”  “No, wait…”) but so far we’re starting to lose respect for pretty much the entire population of the Verge.  I find myself thinking, “So if these yokels get their asses enslaved by aliens, it’s probably what they deserve.”  I don’t want to feel that way, but when every single person you meet is a helpless, passive, venal snarfhocker…  Sure, NPCs shouldn’t outclass the PCs and we should be the drivers of the adventure and all that, but when other characters are too milquetoast  it threatens your attachment to the in-game world.

Twenty-sixth Session – Our handler wants us to forge a brave new world with a new interstellar government.  Instead, we spend the time screwing around with various personal subplots.

Of those subplots, the mainly interesting one was that the Swede’s crazy mutant terrorist ex-wife shows up with a gang and causes problems  – problems we solve with MURDER!  And then there’s a wedding.

Not much more to say about it.  Some of these sessions where we just do all the subplots while we’re in drivespace are a little trying.  There’s a interstellar alien war on, so when people whine to us about some personal problem it’s a bit hard to take it seriously.

Twenty-fifth Session – The klick keep on coming with bigger and bigger ships; also kroath in the refugee ships board and smack around power armored marines pretty easily.  The session summary is short because blow by blow descriptions of combat aren’t all that entertaining, and because I wasn’t there to spice up the conversation.

Whew!  Our Lighthouse campaign is up to 25 sessions.  And these are long sessions; 6 hours on average.  On the main campaign page I have all the back session summaries if you’re not caught up; also up to date character sheets from whichever players bother to send them to me.

We’ve gotten the hang of space battles.  So has Paul our GM; he wrote a program to do it all to avoid the “roll 100 times” syndrome of Alternity “Warships” style ship combat.  Anyway, here’s the secret.  Fire all your missiles immediately.  All of them, as many as you can get into the air.  That’s it.  Beam weapons and other stuff are for feebs (well, ours are, the enemies’ are all more powerful).  More wimpier missiles are better than fewer bigger missiles – we had this big deal with getting “zero point” hellacious missiles but they’re worthless, you just wing as many little plasma missiles as you can and get lucky with crits and take out systems.  It’s effective, if not really very entertaining.  I don’t like the Warships rules; we basically end up never using any of our ship skills!  “Oh, you can only use Space Tactics to roll initiative.”  “Can I use Defenses or Sensors to do something useful?”  “Not really.”  I want to like space combat, but Alternity makes it hard to.

Twenty-fourth Session – Hammer’s Star is eradicated by a massive alien attack!  The Lighthouse heads into action, and jumps to go assist refugees headed to Argos.  We need help ourselves as a klick task force appears, but we wipe them out and then board them to get their monkey!  All this and more in this fortnight’s installment of The Lighthouse.

Please beware the spoilers for the External War – that is, those few of you that still play Alternity out there, and for some reason haven’t read all the material 20 times by now.

Well, this time the crap hit the fan.  A massive klick/etc. fleet came and totally trashed Hammer’s Star and with it most of the Concord fleet in the Verge.  Some civilians got away but that’s about it.  We went to help them get to Argos and had quite a fight of it with a pretty small klick detachment, all things considered.

Administrator Wakefield has started getting lippy with me and taking charge.  But now that it’s wartime Captain Takashi isn’t going to put up with a whole lot of that.

We did a lot of whiteboarding this session of the plots and alien races involved.  We keep doing it, but it doesn’t really lead to any new insights.  “An arbitrarily large number of big and more-advanced-than-us alien races are here to kick our ass in a variety of ways,” basically.

After the space combat, the “B team” on Peppin’s spy ship decided to board the klick ship and look for humans to free (found some!) and intel and prisoners (found some!).  We captured a big ape.  We all shot frantically at him till we realized we had misheard, and the GM had said he was a GRAPE ape. As it was, he tried to grape us in the mouth, but Markus can beat down the biggest and grapiest of foes.

Next time we’re going to try to get the refugees to Argos, though the enemy have better/faster jump capability than us so there’s every reason to believe that place is gonna get wiped off the map in a couple days too.  Wish us luck!

P.S.  Many of our character sheets are posted – feel free and use these ruffians as NPCs in your own games!

Twenty-third Session – The Symposium on the State of the Verge concludes!  Captain Takashi makes a stirring speech about the External threat that is trilevised across the Verge.  Peppin astral-travels and talks to a Deepfallen and asks them to please not disintegrate everyone on the planet.  And we finally go look up Angela Quinn!

I made it to this session, and thus got the thrill of sitting through many stellar nations’ conference presentations.  Peppin is trying to get someone from every single weirdo alien race we come across to take up residence on the Lighthouse.  I had a good moment as Captain Takashi – I planned out a presentation to make on the External threat, and I rolled a natural 1 (critical success) in addition to my Celebrity perk taking the net result down to sub-zero.  I informed all present about the exact nature and depth of the External threat, and the tri-d crew broadcast it unedited to every corner of the Verge.  Woot!

Then we had some recreation shooting fish from a yacht.  Captain Casoval and I (as Markus) had an innunedo-laced bet going – I lost, but still won, if you get my drift.  Lambert Fulson, entertainingly, was trying to participate but pretty much just fired at random over the rail.

Finally, we looked up Angela Quinn.  She’s a recurring NPC – she was memorable in our very first session of this campaign and has been back since.  Ten-Zel Kim was kinda sweet on her.  I was somewhat enraged to find out that despite being on her planet, no one had looked her up yet.  I hinted a couple times, then had to just flat out say “Are you going to tell me you’re not going to look up Angela while we’re here on Bluefall?”  We were almost discouraged from it – Kim kept calling her up and getting “I’m busy, blow” messages back.  Clearly she was undercover doing something.  Finally we decided “Screw it.  We’re PCs, and poor impulse control is part of the package.”  We went and interrupted her undercover operation and sped it up to the “kill the principal” finale.  I mean, really we should have left her to it, but the GM wasn’t really giving us much to work with – she wasn’t totally convincing in her “leave me alone” so that we’d think “the GM *doesn’t* want us to do this now,” but there was no compelling reason to go in either.  But it was the end of a long session of mostly PowerPoint presentations, so we decided murder was called for.

Twenty-second Session – The Symposium on the State of the Verge begins on Bluefall!  The PCs go to convention speech after convention speech.  Then, they conduct a complicated sting where they escort space Nazi Alex Racin to infect the native Deepfallen with teln mindworms at the behest of a space vampire.

Sadly, I missed this session.  But it was mostly attending stirring presentations by various stellar nations at a big conference.  The sting was a long complex thing where the space vampire/gardhyi  Krl’Xenoth Nurhan wanted his main human worshipper, ex-Thuldan general Alex Racin, to go down and infect the Bluefall natives, the deepfallen, with the teln mindworms.  Rokk Tressor of the CIB has been cozying up to them, so they asked him to make it happen.  They all went down, but once they were safely 20,000 leagues under the sea and Racin made his play on the deepfallen, Rokk and crew stunned him into insensibility and killed the worms.  More next time!

Whoo!  Our Alternity Star*Drive campaign set on the itinerant space station The Lighthouse has hit its twentieth jumbo-length session.  The latest big ol’ PDF session summaries are:

Nineteenth Session – Lambert Fulson is hospitalized; the Nariacs are up to no good but Markus kills three autoflechette-armed cyborg guards with a knife.  Ten-Zil Kem gets implanted with mind control worms.

Twentieth Session – Lambert Fulson is hospitalized again; the rest of us fight cyborg apes and sponsor a Christmas concert by the station orphans for the people of High Mojave, Mantebron.  And we weed out the mind-worm-bearing people on the station (except for the ones CIB agent Rokk Tressor hides for his own nefarious ends).

Twenty-first Session – Lambert Fulson is hospitalized again (yes again); the weren security chief is tortured by a mafia hit-boy who turns out to be the long lost son of our pet irate auditor, and the hit-boy’s hit-butler just about punches Ten-Zil Kem’s ticket to permanent hypersleep.  Captain Takashi talks everyone into love and fellowship.

I haven’t had much time to post much on the blog lately – basically, besides life being busy, my gaming time is all used up playing in this campaign and running my Pathfinder Pirates campaign!  To which I say “Mmmwah hah, hah hah haaa.”

Now off to update my characters…

[Edit: Apparently I missed posting one between 18 and 19, so instead of two session summaries you’re getting three!  Enjoy.  The first one wasn’t very well fleshed out or formatted though.]

Eighteenth Session – The kroath get pulped into green goo by the Thuldan forces.  Then, the PCs intrigue while in drivespace; Lambert Fulson’s new job as a drug mule goes really badly.

Sadly I wasn’t there, but the session summary’s good; Bruce has been driving on from Dallas alternate weekends to play!

They ran the Thuldan v. Kroath land battle as a minigame.  The PCs weren’t actually involved.

• The various other current subplots intertwine.
• Someone messes with Lambert Fulson and hires him to be a mule but the cargo is poison and he’s set up for murder.
• Lenny needs special rare ink for his coming-of-age tattoos.
• Peppin is a more-psychic clone of his old self after getting blown up by the Flying Spacghetti Monster last time.
• Haggernak investigates it all, including Irate Auditor Otterschmidt from last session.
• Martin St. John…  Plays with dhros, or orphans, or something.

I like the subplot thing but I could deal with a slightly more rich mix of plot to subplot.  Or, well…  It’s not that I don’t like a pure char-interaction game, maybe it’s just that none of the NPCs really stick around long or have much personality (besides “crazy”).  That’s sort of the problem with our itinerant setup, I guess, but maybe more station NPCs?  Frankly we like the dhros the most of all the stuff just because they’re always around instead of there 2 sessions then gone forever.

Another session tomorrow!

We’ve completed a couple more sessions of our Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse!  Sorry, I’m falling behind since I’m running one campaign, doing session summaries for this one, and doing other RPG work on the side.  But this should catch us up.

Sixteenth Session – As we’re heading to a system overrun by kroath, the “Take An Orphan To Work Day” program backfires terribly as it turns out the guy who runs the orphanage is a spy.  He is lucky to only lose one of his four limbs in the bargain.

The kroath are kinda like a mix between Predators (who they resemble) and Aliens (in that they can transform people into more kroath).  We were looking forward to mixing it up with them, but turns out that’ll be unlikely.  The planet where the kroath has a gravity of like 4 g’s and only mutants and cyborgs can exist outside the cities.  And, we didn’t get much done on that because we spent most of the time chasing the head of the local orphanage.

A lot of the campaign’s plot has been driven by these plotline writeups Paul has us do.  He has some index cards with stuff like “Old Enemy” or “Star-Crossed Lovers” written on them that we pick and then write up a related subplot for our characters (or another’s!).  He is pretty much constructing entire sessions from those.  A previous subplot had Martin St. John masterminding “Take an Orphan to Work Day” as part of his community service efforts with the Lighthouse’s orphanage.  Turns out the kids have been stealing intel from secured areas and the guy running the orphanage takes off.  At first we think maybe he’s a garden variety pedophile; then we think maybe the kids are infested with alien mind control worms;  but in the end it turns out the guy’s a VoidCorp secret agent. We quickly come up with a very elaborate and amusing plan to catch him.

Seventeenth Session – We’re in the kroath infested system, but most of the session is spent dealing with an irate auditor and an alien threat that can best be described as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Again, we actually get to the kroath planet but most of the initial action is from Klaus Otterschmidt, some Concord auditor that has been making a nuisance of himself; he jails Martin St. John and tries to depose Captain Takashi.  The Captain gets sick of him and has Haggernak throw him in the brig; the guy reveals that he is getting payback for his family dying in a botched mission Captain Takashi led like ten years ago (a subplot helpfully written up by Chris for me, apparently).

Then, the dhros (space bunny-cats) that live in the station air ducts (the fodder from many a subplot writeup) figure in again; three of them get psychic powers somehow and try to force-choke their frequent tormentor, Martin St. John.

And finally some huge 10 km across tentacle-and-maw-intensive Lovecraftian space monster shows up.  We promptly dub it the Flying Spaghetti Monster, much to Paul’s consternation.  There’s a long confusing sequence mostly happening in Pepin’s mind where he makes contact with other aliens and gets superpowers and talks to the FSM and sacrifices himself to save the station…  He lives, and some sci-fi author somewhere is very proud.

Kroath?  Maybe next time!

Have you not been following our science fiction campaign?  Well, it’s a good time to start.  Here’s a fun summary of the StarDrive campaign setting to help.

Fifteenth Session – The Concord command staff has to deal with a lot of shenanigans on Yellowsky.  Every group of religious wackos the setting offers has converged on the Lighthouse and is trying to cause trouble.  And some goon shows up promoting a new “space vampires are our friends” platform.

The space war is really heating up in this session.  We need some kind of anti-psionic tech because we’re being beset by guys with super-psi regularly now.

First, a bunch of bald psychic Jedi-esque weirdos show up and hassle Captain Takashi in the middle of the night.  I was really proud of my acrobatic escape from one balcony to the other till they all came hovering after me.  Then I got away from the first four only to run into another two!   They ego whipped me insensible.  But I got vengeance when the Lighthouse’s escort ships blasted their shuttle to scrap.

I dubbed them “donut worshippers” because of the concentric circle tattoos on their palms they were using to zap me with.  The other players are amused by my colorful names I tag our various unknown opponents with – “space vampires” for the alien bad guys (they’re tall, thin, intelligent, grey-skinned, evil looking, black clothes with frickin’ skulls on their shoulders like they’re out of Warhammer 40k) and now these guys.  Maybe the Captain’s memoirs will be entitled Space Vampires and Donut Priests – Or, How Everything In The Verge Tried To Kill Me.

Up next was the ever-popular on-stage assassination attempt.  I flung myself over the principal to protect her, but they got her anyway.  Alas.

Then the bad guys show up with their “turn Rokk Tressor against us” program.  Their story is “the aliens are friendly!  No, really!”  Apparently when the space vampires teleported aboard a klick ship and led an attack on the Concord Marines there, they were “trying to negotiate.”  Chris did a good job as Rokk, pretending to get on board with the loony tune program while still poking at the most incoherent bits of their story.