Tag Archives: scifi

Thirty-fourth Session – We bring our new klick buddy back to the Lighthouse, and get the third degree from our other set of characters. Then we are off to recon the alien-conquered Hammer’s Star system! All this and more, in the latest installment of our Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse.

One of the weirder things about this campaign, where we are playing “A Team” station command staff characters and “B Team” ambassadors, criminals, and other unaligned folks, is that we often have arguments with ourselves.  This time, the B Team sneaks an alien on board the station, which gets them all detained and TSAed out the yinyang by the A Team. But it’s all in good fun.

The whole part where Peppin’s cousin somehow got in good with the Picts and then ran the Corner casino out of cash and arm wrestled his cousin using his won FSM powers for the ambassadorship was a lot longer and more in depth.  But really many of the details ended up not being important enough to bother typing in, so it seems pretty short. We tried a whole bunch of jockeying with the Picts and Tanya Taneer but none of that went anywhere.

Then we finally played the A Team a little while!  They’re like 2 levels lower than the B Team by now.  We went on a boomer-style mission to Hammer’s Star; we did a lot of plotting strategy.

Next summary is mostly done and going up ASAP too!

Thirty-second Session – Wait, wasn’t my last posting #31?  Session summary #32 is currently MIA because Tim is a huge slacker.  I’ll link it if it ever shows up.

The short form is that we steal some klick eggs from the alien base near the sick guy’s vault and scram.  Then we track down Scrooge McDuck’s pirate-stolen treasure on some Spanish colony and are attacked by rabid Ewoks.  Some pirates attack us, and regret it for the couple seconds of life remaining as Markus pounds grenade launcher rounds into them.  And then when we go into the caves to find where they stashed the treasure, we meet some rock crystal aliens that are like Hortas with illusion powers.  The emanations from the homing beacon the pirates placed there make them horny (no seriously) so in exchange for us turning it on and leaving it there (on a different frequency, natch) they let us have the moolah.

Thirty-third Session – Here’s where it gets freaky.  We get the rock-crystal aliens to help us by channelizing the pirates into our ambush, and murder or press gang them all.  But then as we’re loading the loot onto out ship, klicks attack.  But we end up cutting a deal with them!  Hooray klicks, our  new… allies?

As Markus, I found it entertaining that when I gave a frag grenade out to each of my companions, I gave them a very clear safety briefing.  Sadly no one remembered the safety briefing once the action started.  Lenny tries to activate his grenade by licking it and Ten-zil throws his grenade well within the 10′ effective range of his own party.  He’s not handing out grenades next time.  And then Markus’ own grenade launcher jammed!  That forces him to resort to melee because his Dex-based gun skills stink.  All this made a fight that should not have been challenging at all somewhat more challenging, but my new secret weapon is four ranks in Armor Operation which allows me to shrug off two points of rollover stun damage per shot, an immense improvement in combat durability.  Used to be, with enough mooks, even an armored warlion would suck up enough rollover to go down in a round or two.

I was totally ready to unload on the klicks but I saw the story hints and we negotiated.  I was wondering how the hell we were going to do anything against the huge unstoppable External army, and this appears to be the leverage point; if we can turn the klicks then it’s no longer “way more guys with way bigger ships and better tech who completely understand all your tech” time.

So all we have to do is assault the alien-occupied klick homeworld!  Easy peasy!

Thirty-First Session – The Lighthouse goes to Aegis, but the B Team goes to Oberon to help out Scrooge McDuck.  But it goes from The Italian Job to Aliens in one fell swoop.

In a welcome break from negotiating with endless waves of bureaucrats, our secondary characters head out to another system to recover what is supposed to be a huge wad of loot.  We conduct breakins, home invasions, abuse the homeless – we’re like an alien crime wave hitting the Oberon system.  But then when we go to the vault, it’s empty of loot but full – of KLICKS!

We had a lot of fun this session.  We’re at our best when we’re on the loose and scheming and innovating ways to get the answers we need.  We’re baaaaaaaaad men!  The best parts were when Peppin dressed as the “Miner ’49er” and psychically phased through the wall of the government building, to find himself in a rhodium mining exhibit, and then coming across the revolutionary vandal there.  The man threw his back out crapping himself in fear, apparently.  “A G-g-g-g-g-ghost!!!”  And when the man later, at the Tim Horton’s, said that he hadn’t eaten solid food in a while.  I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I was incapacitated with laughter for a long time.  I was like “What, do you live on Thunderbird and semen?”  Finally, the sweep and clear in the vault was bracing.

Taking a week off helped us get back into the swing of things, I think. Fun was had by all!

Thirtieth Session – In the latest installment of our Alternity campaign The Lighthouse, it’s off to Corrivale to get all the factions there on board with the Verge Alliance. Then it’s hot Pict on Sesheyan action as we perform some extreme rendition.

Not only that, but Captain Takashi has started to channel his LOLcat making skills into war propaganda!  Witness his cautionary tale of the N’sss, the jellyfish aliens T’sa believe to be demons:

Also, Peppin tries really, really hard to get the sesheyan shamans into the anti-alien battle.  Eventually they have to fess up that their magic isn’t, you know, real in that sense.

Thrills!  Chills!  Pills!  And more!  It’s session number thirty, and we’re feeling fine.

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.