Tag Archives: RPGs

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.