Tag Archives: SF

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!

Thirty-ninth Session – It’s large scale war planning as Lucullus falls, we win at Ignatius, and a new alien spills a load of historical beans. We’re sick of always playing defense, so the Lighthouse heads out to Medurr space to get them on board one way or the other, and the B Team takes the Red Queen to go pacify some alien-collaboratin’ pirates.

We didn’t actually do all that much this session – the B Team took some autistic kid off Lucullus, and then that system promptly betrayed the Alliance.  Then we interrogated a new alien called an Evrem, and used our alien communication artifact to talk to everyone we know. More out of luck than anything we send a battle group to Ignatius and they take out an External fleet there – the aliens split their forces, bad idea for them. It was a long series of planning and events we weren’t there for.  But we’ve set the stage for violent anti-pirate combat at Ptolemy and violent diplomacy with the Medurr next time.

If we get the Medurr to chip in, and our captive kararan scientists can reverse the klick egg-bioengineering so that the klicks will turn on the i’krl, we just might have a fighting chance!

Thirty-eighth Session – The B team hunts dinosaurs and fights a pretty large number of draconic centaur Klingon type aliens.  We hit them until they like us. Diplomacy is just like dating!

We had a lot of fun this session. The dinosaur hunt was entertaining.  Peppin missed the whole attack by the Medurr assassins, but he was having fun trying to ride around on a riding dino. Markus always shines in the more savage locales – intrigue on the space station is challenging for him, but as a genetically engineered shock trooper, if a situation calls for beating the living crap out of something, he is the man to do it.  Lenny got to be referred to as ‘our female’ all the time – the Medurr are matriarchal and we figured that we’d get more cred if we claimed Lenny was our female (he’s a lizardlike alien called a T’sa, and we figure there’s no way they can tell one way or the other).  Lenny wasn’t consulted on this plan, which was hatched by a throwaway line last session, so he protested every time it happened, but no one paid that any mind. Lambert, Ten-zil, and Peppin all got to shoot up the landscape a lot. Ten-zil especially had some great additions to our tactical plans.

Markus got a lot of screen time since, as the most violent, the Medurr considered him the person to talk to. I felt bad that our ambassador didn’t have much to do, but Tim spent a lot of the time cutting up with Georgina anyway, so that worked out fine. I especially liked the scene after we fought off the assassins that had lured us in with a trapped dinosaur – Markus stalked over, terminated the dinosaur with a sabot pistol round point blank to its head, and whipped out his knife and carved a huge “IX” in its side to mark the spot. I was happy that Chris got the reference (Markus was in the Thuldan Empire’s IX Legion and has a big IX tattoo, I try to mention it from time to time).  Bruce was all “what the hell” when it happened but Chris explained it to him.  I like when everyone’s into it enough that they remember stuff like that about each others’ characters. Then later when Stykor asked Markus his “clan” I was momentarily at a loss, and Chris suggested “Clan Nine,” and that was a marvelous idea.

There were a lot of little jokes that didn’t make it into the summary but we were all in rare form. Having the entire group there was nice.  Next time, Bruce is going to try to Skype in rather than driving from Dallas, we’ll see how well that works out, it’s an interesting idea if the tech is up to the execution.

Thirty-seventh Session (9 page pdf) – The B team goes to make contact with some new aliens, potential allies who really like and respect violence. If they like violence, they’re going to love us!

Bruce and Patrick were out, so there were just three of us to handle the diplomatic mission to the Medurr, a new alien race of matriarchal warlike draco-centaurs. Tim ran Ambassador Peppin, the Borealin dissipation-friendly academic, and Chris ran Ten-zil Kem, the dissipation-friendly VoidCorp exec. I ran Markus, the only sober member of the party.

It was an interesting session.  There was the expected fight with the Medurr to prove we weren’t wusses – and Markus was firing on all cylinders.  I beat the entire squad of Medurr down in two rounds (with some help from Peppin and Ten-zil).

Then we do a little clandestine research on them mainly with some of their many slave races – some cute little groundhog guys with exploding collars, mainly good for smacking around and getting you drinks, and the octopus people, who seem to have all the marketable skills but a fatalistic outlook that keeps them from rebelling.  The Medurr seem like they can be a great ally against the Klicks and i’krl but there’s a high chance that like, say, every single Central American and Middle Eastern country, that if we arm them and train them too much we’ll just be fighting them in ten years. So we’re trying to strike a deal while planting seeds for future destabilization.

Funny note, with the D&D 4e lameness that is the Dragonborn in mind, we asked whether the female Medurr have breasts – they don’t.  We were relieved.  But then there was a picture of the octopus people and they are quite busty.  We laughed sadly.

Next time, we go on a dinosaur hunt!  Markus always welcomes an opportunity to generate some maximum overkill.

Thirty-sixth Session (8 page pdf) – We sweep and clear the alien lab ship and take loads of freakydeak alien prisoners, and recover the Admiral, or at least his brain in a jar. Concord Marines FTW!

The External War is in full swing as our Alternity StarDrive campaign The Lighthouse enters its second year.

Sadly, I missed this session due to Christmas break. It’s funny that I had already posited that the Admiral would be just a brain in a jar by the time we rescued him.  Turns out that’s exactly the case.  I have Detect Plot Point as a supernatural ability.

I don’t have much else to say, except that our squads of Concord Marines come in real handy in these kinds of situations – we have a couple combat-monster characters but the rest really aren’t up to much alien shooting.

Thirty-fifth Session – It’s silent running in Hammer’s Star until we get wind that Admiral Rastad might still be alive aboard a lab ship. Then we reconnaissance in force that mother!

The entire session was us infiltrating the External ship and laying waste to the aliens in it. We successfully mixed stealth with ultraviolence and so have avoided bringing down the wrath of the entire ship on us, but haven’t found the Admiral yet.

Not much else to say that isn’t in the summary; we were on task and things were going by the numbers. Read on!