Tag Archives: SF

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.

Fourteenth Session – We struggle through the usual subplots until we get to a pretty cool new planet named Yellowsky.  There are Stoneburner ruins on it and the more scurrilous characters decide they need a good looting!

But first, the command staff deals with trying to figure out what is up with the ten different dangerous, questionably related, mostly mysterious alien races we’re dealing with.  There’s klicks and kroath and i’krl and teln and some dwarfy ones and some big ones…  Kind of a lot of different ones for them to *all* be mysterious and unknown.  As in real life, we find most of what there is to know from the Internet.

The ruins crawl was good interstellar explorer fun.  We must have rolled 100 Perception checks to search the place.

Sadly, next time we’ll be down four characters (two players).  Bruce (Lambert Fulson/Taveer) got a job in Dallas and had to move away, and Peco (Adun Zelnaga/Ivan Stukoff) is on the spin cycle towards his impending marriage and won’t have spare time for a couple months.  It means we have basically zero in the techie department – Taveer and Adun were our key people there.  We need a Velma!

Welcome back to our tales of the Lighthouse, the wandering space station operated by the Galactic Concord to keep peace in the delicate frontier of the Verge in the Alternity Star*Drive universe!

Thirteenth Session – It’s Starship Troopers type fun as we board the klick ship we disabled in last session’s space combat and wreak havok!  We are very, very happy we brought fifteen Concord Marines along, since Markus and Haggernak are really the only two PCs who can pack a meaningful punch on these critters.

The klick ship was fun, with gooey biotech all over.  I had to complain once – the GM has a bad habit of saying “a door opens and a bunch of enemies come in” – he then places them in the room with us and says “roll initiative.”  I successfully argued that we’re moving along Rainbow Six style; any kind of coming in the room needs to happen as a combat action because we intend to bottle people like that up in the doorway as much as possible.

We brought a bunch of Concord Marines with us…  We split them into one NPC platoon (that of course got wiped out off camera) and one platoon that went with us.  Three five man squads – one in power armor, and two of riflemen with one machine gunner, with us as the command section.  They were invaluable.  We only used the power armor squad in the initial fights, leaving the other squads to secure other approaches.  When the jumbo klick captain and “space vampires” and horde of klicks hit us we brought them all into play, and concentrated autofire of a squad’s charge rifles is, as it turns out, just about an automatic win. Plus, I remembered the suppression rules- having the riflemen lay down suppressive fire gave us some much needed defensive bonus (no matter how far away, under cover, behind 5 marines in power armor, etc. we were, the GM never gave us more than one step of defense bonus).

Both Markus and Haggernak took an awesome amount of mortal damage.  Luckily, that’s where we’re Vikings – we drugged ourselves up and kept going.  I was happy with this chance for Markus to shine – his big background thing is that he was a mutant shock trooper for the Thuldan Empire who did exactly this for a living, so excelling at it was gratifying.  Soften ’em up with a frag or two and beat them down with the gravmace.  No hesitation, retreat, or surrender.  We didn’t even lose any marines!  (Well, none in our platoon…)  I felt bad that the other PCs didn’t get too much chance to do stuff, but while Markus and Haggernak are mildly better combatants in a “wandering the station” situation, once we’re geared up with military hardware the gap is pretty wide.

Once it was all over, Markus hooked up with that Thuldan engineer chick he had noticed before.  Bruce made it sound like he just hunted her down and seduced her in the session summary; actually to celebrate their victory, Markus shut down the Corner and had a private party – the PCs, the Marines, and friends (basically anyone whose name we have bothered to learn).  The GM said the Thuldan geek girl showed up.  Markus is usually much too gruff to bother with the ladies (and, when it comes down to it, shy – the Thuldan mutant shock troop curriculum didn’t have much on social skills and no opportunities for fraternization), but the aftermath of a space assault had his blood up.  She stayed around as the party was breaking up, and the deal was sealed.

Welcome back to our tales of the Lighthouse, the wandering space station operated by the Galactic Concord to keep peace in the delicate frontier of the Verge in the Alternity Star*Drive universe!

Eleventh Session – Subplots are visited upon us en masse as we starfall towards Hammer’s Star.  Crazed cyborgs rampage and the station populace begins rutting like crazed weasels.  And we have the first real combat for like three sessions.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

On the one hand, I like that our custom subplots help drive the campaign.  On the other hand, this game session was just chaos.  People weren’t listening, interrupting, yelling off topic stories about whatever damn TV show they watched last night…  I don’t mean “not behaving optimally for people to roleplay” or “enjoying socializing with friends,” I mean “acting in a distressingly impolite way.”  At one point I seriously considered punching another player in the head if he interrupted me again.    Then I considered just packing up and leaving.  Then I decided to just quietly ride it out.  Sigh.

Twelfth Session – The Lighthouse starfalls to the Hammer’s Star system.  The normal shenanigans and subplots ensue until an entire klick fleet appears and Captain Takashi gets to yell “FIRE ZE MISSILES!!!” again and again until they stop moving.

I think we’ve discovered the best way to use the Alternity space combat mechanics…   Ranges vary widely on normal weapons, from 1 to 12 hexes.  The Lighthouse itself can’t really move in combat and has short range beam weapons, so if anyone gets through our screen of defending ships we’re in trouble.  But missiles move like 6 hexes a round, and thus can get .  So really you  just want to fire all missile tubes at once before the other ship(s) are even anywhere on the tactical map; the chance of any significant weapon hit taking out major systems is very high.  We lost one of our two destroyers because we “played nice” and didn’t insist on engagement at very long range.