Our heroes are:
- Lady Talia Sabine, the NPC space knight commander of Harlequin Squadron
- Baron Mallus Grimshaw, aristocratic adventurer and fighter ace, known for his paranoia and overweening arrogance.
- Viscontess Shay Sabine, aristocratic space knight and fighter pilot and the wingman of Talia Sabine.
- Sir Tyro Pavonis, Aristocratic (and blind!) fighter ace (though not from as prestigious a family as the other two), and wing commander in Harlequin Squadron. He has exceptional psychic vision, but keeps his sensory awareness quiet, preferring to play the role of blindman.
- Sir Axton Kain, cybernetic space knight and presumptive heir of House Kain, currently in command of a platoon of Alliance Regulars.
- Walker Lee, native of the Orochi Belt, rebel hero, and scavenger. He watches over Jethro, a farmboy from St. Borlaug's Star near the Belt.
- Xerxes, an Asrathi pirate captain of the Calico and a practicing Witch Cat. He has a full pirate crew, including the fanatical and blood thirsty Asrathi Sylvar Ro, the heavily armed Born Riksen, the Shinjurai engineer with a bad attitude, Winner Chau, and the innocent Asrathi college student who somehow managed to stumble into being a pirate, Persia Purasinga.
The session begins with Baron Mallus Grimshaw regarding the rest of the fighters jetting about on patrol in the space around Port Mongo, securing it from any remnant defenders. One brings a hand-carried message from the Hierophant, which is unable to directly communicate with them thanks to interference from the botanical asteroids. The message carrier brings it to Lady Talia Sabine who stands with Sir Axton Kain and his regulars as they keep watch over their prisoners, the smuggler Wyatt van Carlo and his pirate companion, Scipio Vash. Nearby, the farmer boy from St. Borlaug's Star sits with the candy-haired clone-girl, who now wears a donated coat and breaths from a rebreather. She has introduced herself as Nixi but has few memories (and was likely only recently decanted from the cloning biofabricator).
The messenger drops off the communicator and an image of the Grand Dame, Contessa Styliana Sabine, herself appears. "My eyes are opened, the prophecies are true," she intones formally, and then continues:
- The Hierophant is unable to communicate with them directly due to interference from the botanical asteroids and the "morass" between them. They are coming to them, however, but going is slow thanks to all the asteroids.
- No other ships arrived; they have the last hyperspatial signatures of them, so a good idea of where they've been scattered across the system.
- They must control the base. It is clearly the "mountain fortress" of the prophecy, but they must avoid death where possible.
- They have detected some movements at the edges of the belt, some corvette-sized signatures that might be additional pirates. They've sent some fighters to investigate.
- Talia is in charge.
While the message plays, the Shieldmaiden-pattern robot, Elara, approaches Xerxes and his pirate crew. They discuss the possible haul from the place, with Born Riksen, heavy set and jovial in his heavy armor, bragging about his knowledge of the sort of operation going on.
"Whatever you do, we have to get to the processing center. I bet they have a scrimshaw blade and some marentine gems. They'd be worth a fortune!"
They're interrupted by the arrival of Elara, who invites Xerxes to join Axton, as they have heard he had a vision pertinent to their circumstances. The pirates argue about their deployment; Sylvar Ro bristles at being left behind, his tail lashing as he moves with his reavers to guard the entrance, and Born exaltes at he and his maurauders joining their captain, which only irritates Sylvar further. And so, Xerxes joins the rest of the group.
They arrive to find Callister Lee and his robot, Nubbins, explaining that they've managed to isolate the hangar bay from the rest of the comm systems and surveillance, so they can talk privately here without Mongo overhearing them. He then suggests that he and Nubbins watch over Nixi while they repair Axton's Lancer. Walker, Jethro's guardian, looking askance at his ward's mooning over the clone-girl, readily agrees.
The group describes their best strategy.
- Xerxes expresses concern that the dark Asrathi god, Kilrah, has been trying to contact him and may be trying to disrupt the mission. He believes the base to be under a dark influence, and informs them that Kilrah wants him to kill.
- The group believes it best to keep the pirate and the smuggler alive, but to arrest them and keep them in the brig on Axton's ship.
- Thanks to one of the Regular's scouting (Lance Highguard), they know there are several different paths they can choose: the industrial section, the habitats, the command bridge high above, or the bowels of the base, likely where engineering is.
- They choose to go into the bowels first, to see if they can smoke out Mongo and, perhaps, restart the fusion reactors.
- Talia decides to stay behind with the majority of the Regulars, to keep the hangar secure and to distract Mongo by "negotiating" with him.
And so begins the "Dungeon Crawl" section of the Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt. In addition to the space combat, I wanted to see how well the fighter aces handled on the ground. This is a BAD 1 scenario, so it should be relatively easy and, as we'll see, it will be (especially given that everyone is 300 point characters). I also wanted to put some extra work into bringing everyone together, which is easier in a ground-combat scenario. I also want to note that I had all of this planned out before I knew what the PCs were like, so some of it might seem tailored for Xerxes, but it actually wasn't, he just made certain aspects a lot easier!
We did a couple of character things before this started. First, I talked to Shay's player about her ST, and I agreed to allow her to reduce it to 9, mostly to better reflect her physical stature; this would prove an interesting choice, as it gave her the option to pursue more psychic powers, but the additional frailty of that lost HP would turn out to matter a lot. We also explored our disadvantages more clearly, and I required a few people to invoke the Ham Clause on some of their more obscure disadvantages. This included:
- Shay's Dreaming Nymph addition
- Mallus's secret agenda
- Walker's Superstitions and his secret and obsession (merged into a single -2)
- Xerxes' Disciplines of Faith (Though I forgot to consider his Asrathi disadvantages).
This helped bring their disadvantages more to the fore, and made them think a bit more about their characters and their disadvantages.
Into the Bowels of Port Mongo
Not that it mattered, because everyone had nightvision, mostly via their vacc suits. I might change that, because the idea of people turning on flashlights in dark parts of a ship fits the feel of Psi-Wars well, as well as certain races, such as the Asrathi and the Gaunt, having an advantage in the dark. I've generally found this to be an issue: a lot of the typical problems of games like DF, Action or After the End, such as darkness, toxins in the air, or temperature extremes, are totally mitigated by ultra-tech vacc suits. I think we can make the argument that Psi-Wars vacc suits "aren't that great," because, after all, people get rid of them as soon as possible, so they shouldn't be something one lives in, unless you're a belter. Something for me to think about.Finally, the reached the deepest level, where the natural flows of psionic energy grew twisted. Tyro found his vision distorted and began to see double. Xerxes performed a minor rite of protection and the Dark God Kilrah saw fit to bestow further distortion of vision upon him, as he faded more deeply into the shadows, like a ghost. At the deepest part, a candy-haired corpse lay in a hallway of doors, blasted in the chest, a look of stunned surprise on her otherwise vacant face. Beyond, they sensed even greater darkness, so naturally, they went to explore that too.
Except gaining a disadvantageous destiny to see that it opened and whatever lay within came out.The group correctly identified the room at an entrance into the Labyrinth. Walker revealed that the Veridian belt once made up a planet, Veridian, that was destroyed long before humanity ever arrived. Veridian was speculated to be a Labyrinthine planet, and there had even been an old Akashic shrine on some of the asteroids to investigate it, but it had been abandoned centuries ago. The intensity of the twisted psionic energy made the psychics uncomfortable, so they returned to the corpse.
Xerxes performed a rite above her and found himself looking eye-to-eye at her confused ghost, who claimed "I can't believe he shot me!" After haggling with her confused spirit, he learned that she had been Mongo's personal assistant, but when the Orochi came to attack, he had shot her, rather than share his safe room with her. Nonetheless, as she died, she had seen the code he had used to get in.
Xerxes gave the code to the rest, and the door opened easily. On the other side, a crowd of armed smugglers, including an engineer armed with a bandolier of EMP grenades, circled around the massive, heavily armed hover-chair of Mongo Corpulain where he sat at a comm system near the massive, quiet fusion reactor. Mongo finished his call to "Legionnaire 451" telling him that the Alliance was negotiating in bad faith, and he had his permission to launch an assault on the hangar. At that moment, both sides recognized one another and shifted to attack, but our heroes had the drop on them.
Axton immediately charged in and bodychecked the engineer, knocking her off her feet and bouncing her against the wall. Shay stepped in and swung her resonance sword in an elegant arc, its EMP-powered blade passing perfectly through the force screen around the chair and dealing sufficient fatigue damage to Corpulain to immediately knock him out. To prevent further catastrophe, Mallus leveled his hand at the group and used his Mass Surge to create sparks flying off everyone's equipment, including the chair, which shorted out and died completely. The rest came in, opening fire on the stunned, suddenly disarmed smugglers, defeating them swiftly. In the midst of the commotion, Xerxes fired his plasma pistol at the still body of Mongo, but Shay, sensing it, deflected it with her blade. When she was further distracted by the firefight, Xerxes crept in under the cover of his broken communion miracle (and her increasingly distracted nature due to her dreaming nymph withdrawals) and killed Mongo with a ceremonial slash of his force blade. The fighting abated after just a few seconds, with most of the smugglers badly wounded, and only two dead: Mongo, at the hands of Xerxes, and the engineer, after a slash from Axton's force sword.
I expected this fight to be a lot harder; Mongo was loaded for bear with mini-missiles, a gatling blaster and a force screen and was, thus, a mini-tank. I'm not sure I should have allowed the ESP blade, which ignores DR, to pass through the force screen or not, but it hardly matters, because Surge is a malediction and thus easily passes through force screens. We also handled Surge wrong, as it's resisted twice: first, you roll a contest vs HT, and then if it passes, you inflict surge "damage" and then check again to see if it's disabled. Psi-Wars has houserules that make surge more effective, and it certainly showed here. We missed the first HT contest, but in retrospect, I think it was fine. The way Action handles things like this is to just do a standard roll at a BAD penalty. And in Psi-Wars, Psi typically has a less bad BAD to deal with, so it's probable that the BAD-PSI would be -0, which means his straight roll to see if it worked (plus an impulse buy point when it technically failed) was enough to make it all work.
Walker was a little forgotten in the melee, mostly because he was too slow, and holding up the rear, but I think he got some use out of his plasma flamer. Tyro was also on the edges, his pistol not especially effective in these circumstances. Mallus, Xerxes, Shay and Axton all shined. It should be noted that Axton and Shay are Space Knights, though Shay has some points in being a pilot. Xerxes uses a unique Pirate template that's mostly space combat focused but with plenty of ground combat elements, making him a hybrid character, and Mallus is pure fighter ace, so its seems plausible that a fighter ace can hold their own in ground combat, which was the point of scenes like this.Once they had secured the reactor, Walker stayed behind to reactivate the reactor. The rest high-tailed it for the hangar bay, to find it already under attack by a swarm of smugglers and a giant, heavily-armored super-soldier and a plasma-wielding Maruader.
The Battle for the Hangar
Axton didn't slow down at all. He took the entirety of the Legionnaire's gatling blaster on his force shield, the shots splattering off of it as he charged and slammed directly into Legionnaire, knock him off balance, just as Shay erupted from behind the cover he had provided and slashed at him her resonance blade, the ESP-attuned psi-blade carving a ghostly pattern through the armor. The giant toppled, his consciousness snuffed out and slumbered upon the ground. The Maurauder fired shot after shot from his plasma fire, which the rest of the group dodged and Shay battered aside the fire with her resonance sword. One of the stray plasma shots, deflected by Shay, struck a coolant line, and mist sprayed into the hallway, obscuring everyone and creating an ice slick on the floor.Tyro steadied his focus through the mist, able to see without sight, and fired his blaster pistol, which did nothing against the tough armor of the soldiers. Mallus waded through the mist and when he say the marauder, exerted his mind upon the man's gun, which caused him to drop it as sparks few from the surging weapon.
Xerxes, meanwhile, still benefited from his ghostly miracle, and slipped through the mist and made it into the hangar. He found Talia wounded in the shoulder, but still deflecting fire with her force sword. He found Sylvar Ro and nodded to him, agreeing to create a distraction while his reavers got into place. Once they had, while the Regulars and the smugglers continued their intense firefight, Xerxes suddenly dropped his Miracle and unveiled his force sword on their flank, howling with predatory malevolence. Distracted, the smugglers dropped their guard just as the reavers fell from the rafters and slaughtered the smuggler mooks with their vibro-blades.
Outside the hangar, the space knights mopped up the smugglers. One, armed with a plasma pistol, landed a direct hit on Axton Kain, who glanced down at his smoking, but otherwise unarmed, armor, and then laughed through his loudspeakers:
"Nice shot! Now surrender." He leveled his force sword at the man, who dropped his weapon immediately.
Shay took out the marauder with her resonance blade.
As the the mist dissipated, everyone surveyed their surroundings, checked over their shoulders, and then slowly eased and came out of cover. After taking stock, they determined they now had control over the base . The lights suddenly flickered back to life as Walker commed everyone that he had managed to restart the fusion reactor. Talia shrugged off concern about her wounded shoulder. The group gathered and discussed, and then determined to explore the rest of the base.
"Fatigue damage is OP" Shay's player claimed. While true, it's really the combination of Shay's fatigue damage and Mallus' surge that's so effective: what she can't defeat (machines), he can. Or rather, he can stun for a few turns, which allows people to take it out. Also, while the fight wasn't nearly as challenging as they seemed to expect, again, we're talking a BAD 1 fight. I had hoped the Legionnaire would present more of a challenge than he did but, ahhh, learning curve. This will prove useful when I need to hammer them with bounty hunters and Imperials later. Plus I don't mind it so much when players steamroll a deliberately cautious encounter, as long as they get the sense of menace and threat, and I certainly think they did.
The Rest of the Base
The Habitat Section
Axton led some regulars into the habitat, which seemed deserted (most of the inhabitants having been, uh, defeated by the player characters). They had a startling encounter with a "Mouser" which scurried off and hid trembling in another room, and then found an imperial medic locked in a medical room. The room had been sealed off to maintain the atsmophere within, and through a window, they could see him working with surgical tools on a wounded little girl. Beside him sat a grown man, carrying a long rifle and wearing a vacuum suit. The medical officer looked up and noticed them and then lifted his hands to gesture, indicating the number 5.
Axton snorted "He's holding that little girl hostage." Then, agreeing to not break the seal, he posted a guard. Hearing some interesting comm traffic, he set off for the industrial section.
The Bridge
Mallus, Shay and Tyro clambered up into the swaying remnants of the bridge that overlooked the rest of the base. They arrived to find the computers locked down. As they set about trying to unlock it, a heavily armored and mining-laser armed Dredgecat slowly powered up and so, you guessed it, Mallus surged it, and then while it was jerking and spasming, cut it down with his force sword. Then they went back to fixing the computers. Some interesting comm traffic came over the comms, so Shay and Tyro left Mallus to his devices. Once they left, he glanced over his shoulder and then inserted some backdoor code so he could get logs of what people did with the computer systems for the base.
The Industrial Section
"Boss, we need to go, we need to get to that Industrial Section first." Born insisted to Xerxes while the rest of the aristocratic types debated how best to rule their new doman. "Before that Walker guy gets the good stuff."
Indeed, after a quick look around, they noticed Walker absent. So they quickly made their way to the Industrial section, where their Orochi kills were flensed, stripped down and processed. The Orochi attack had wrought much devastation here. The entire section was smashed, with flickering lights, half-open doors, and scattered bodies. They found one survivor, who blubbered his innocence and warned them from the main processing warehouse as it was still there.
They quickly saw what he meant. They stepped into the vast room, large enough to process several Orochi at once. The industrial machinery necessary for the processing of Orochi lay scattered and broken across the vast space, as well as great crates, barrels and chests filled with the processed results of the Orochi. One wall had been torn open to reveal the vista of space and the botanical asteroids beyond. And in that great rent, dominating the room with its wrath, lay a wounded Orochi, pinned to the ground by a great girder that had managed to spear it.
The Orochi was vast, longer the Axton's frigate. Great, needle-sharp, metallic teeth gnashed at the thin air of the room. Two eyes rolled and searched the room. Electricity gathered along its mane of roiling tendrils that surrounded its head. It's tail, with a spread fin that rippled with magnetic force, lashed at the warehouse.
"$#!+." Born muttered.
The group radioed for help and then began to creep around the edges while the Orochi roared and trembled. Its electric arcs began to spark and surge as it gathered its full power and then launched a ball of plasma which exploded across the room. The group took cover.
Suddenly, Axton and Shay arrived. The moment Shay arrived and beheld the beast, her Second Sight struck her with a vision of Viper, their co-pilot, riding a white Orochi at the head of a swarm heading directly for the base. Axton, heedless of the danger, charged directly towards the creature. The Orochi fired again and they dove for cover. Axton rolled next to the girder and began to slash at it with his force sword. Another blast and he gritted his teeth, hiding behind the cover of his force shield, which flickered under the fraction of the titanic force that it absorbed. Then, with a few more slashes, he carved through the rest of the girder and freed it. It turned, roaring, and flicked its tail to launch itself away from the warehouse. The flick left an electromagnetic wake that seized through Axton's cybernetics, leaving him gasping for breath and prone on the ground.
Tyro and a Regular medic rushed to their side. Once the surging subsided, Axton easily got back to his feet, a little battered, but otherwise fine. Shay, however, had been pretty seriously tossed around by his blasts, and was in need of urgent first aid. However, a quick application of TL 11^ first aid later, and she was right as rain.
I used the Cinematic Explosions rules to govern the damage that the Orochi dealt, so rather than dealing with the 6d×50 (2) burn ex damage from the Orochi's blast, which meant even on a success, they took 1d damage, which bypassed their armor, because don't quibble with me on how much damage you take when I'm sparing you 6d×50 (2) burn ex damage! But when you have 9 HP, taking two dice of damage is actually quite scary. When you have thirty (Axton!), it's not such a big deal.While everyone was distracted, Walker managed to snag a set of some marentine gems and three marentine rings (organic gems formed within the Orochi that grant it its sympathetic telepathy with the other Orochi; they can be used as psychotronic components) and three Kusani Spines (a length of metallic "bone" that channel the force of the energy necessary for their plasma blasts; used to create Scrimshaw blades). Xerxes managed to grab the Scrimshaw blade (a finely crafted "bone" sword made from a Kusani Spine, that can absorb energy given to it to create a plasma sheath around the blade, like a primitive force sword).
Alarms!
As the Orochi flew away, Mallus had enough command of the bridge systems to get a sensor report and he, too, detected the "corvette-sized activity" that the Hierophant (out of communication for the moment, but approaching them as quickly as it could) had detected. A lot of "corvette-sized activity." One could call it a swarm. Having heard of the Orochi and made a guess as to what attacked the base, he correctly identified them as an Orochi swarm making its way to them. They had less than an hour to prep for the assault.(And Xerxes' player spent an Impulse Buy point to drive the Orochi back to the swarm before they got there, to perhaps spread its message of the charity of the group).
And there ended the session.
Retrospective
I wanted to focus on bringing the entire group together and I thought I did that rather well. Walker and Tyro were a little on the edge, though I suspect that was because the quicker and more combat-oriented characters were faster on the draw. Walker was actually very useful, but in a more subtle way. I suspect to really bring Tyro's talents to the fore, we need a more dangerous scenario, as his strengths are leadership and tactics, and when you can just win a fight with "Chaaarge!" you need neither, but there will be nastier fights coming up.
Axton's player really enjoyed itself. You could hear it in his voice. But GURPS, in my experience, is a joy to play with tank characters. Sure, everyone prefers the high DX characters, like Shay, as they can flow through their enemies quickly, but GURPS is so lethal that you know that you must not get hit. But if you invest in enough GURPS traits to shrug off attacks, it's a lot of fun to just wade through it all. Shay also really shone, because of her blade and her skill, which suggests that "hybrid" characters like her are fine.
Mallus, also, did very well, though mostly on the strength of Surge. I updated Surge to act more as a Side Effect Stun that only affects electrical critters. At its base, the original Surge is Burn Attack (Malediction +100%; No Wounding -50%; Psi -10%; Surge +20%) with a few extra minor modifiers, but this is the core of it. That comes to 8 points per level. You could also write it as (Malediction +100%; No Wounding -50%; Psi -10%; Symptom, Stun, 1/3 HP, (only against electrical targets -20%; Resistible, HT -30%) +15%) which comes to [7.75] or close enough to 8. This new version is effectively (Malediction +100%; No Wounding -50%; Psi -10%; Side Effect, Stunning, +50%; only against Electrical Targets -20%) for [8.5]. So.. yes, this new version improves the value of the Surge effect by a marginal amount (it adds up the more you add in), but the problem with the previous surge is that it effectively did nothing, because 75% of the time (HT 12 is default for most devices) everything would just ignore it. Hence the change. One might expect beefing up the effect from "basically worthless" to effective would make it effective. Is it fair? It seems close enough to fair, yes. And the player dumped 25-50 points into that one power, so one would expect it to be better especially against such weak foes and in such a target rich environment. He's already moaning that his pocket ace power is useless against the Orochi, and that's going to be rather common: he has a power that's pretty specific, and it won't always be useful. So, "Player who invested in something benefited from the investment especially with good teamwork" doesn't strike me as a problem. As we ramp up to bigger fights, if it continues to be an "I win" button, we'll revisit it. And this is a playtest, so it's good to see how these things play out.
All in all, I though the session went well. Every character had a moment and they all had a chance to interact with one another. I think it did a lot to cement what the group dynamics will be like, and it introduced them to what their new home will be like for the next few sessions. I'm curious what directions they'll choose to go into after this.
For the Next Session
- A quick scramble to deal with the Orochi menace before the unaware Heirophant arrives
- The Imperial Medic! For what dark purpose has he joined the smugglers? Are there more Imperials here?
- Judgement for the prisoners and for their clone-cargo.
- The fate of the rest of the fleet: Revealed!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.