#RustbucketTales

#RustbucketTales

Ran my first UW game last night using the “Planetary Salvage” Jump Point from the PDF. It worked pretty well at producing cool, space opera action.

The crew – Anvil (Wrecker), Kestrel (Smuggler), and Orcha-37 (Bounty Hunter) – had been hired by the Epoch Trust to recover the package from the crashed freighter. Naturally, they were attacked by the Shards of Xa (pirates seem to be the go-to opponents in this setup), who strafed the crashed ship’s bridge, forcing Orcha to flee. Anvil’s recovery of the package was quick, but noisy, attracting pirate attention, and Orcha’s attempt to ambush a group of them to buy Anvil some time was unsuccessful, resulting in a laser blast to the arm and another retreat. Then things started going well: Anvil created an emergency exit with a hullbuster, Kestrel brought up the crew’s stealth shuttle, and they got the cargo on board before hauling it out of there. Orcha kept a Xa shuttle on the ground with his sniper rifle, before making a crazy jetpack escape and rendezvous under fire. “Its almost like we’re a bunch of professionals who’ve done this before…”

On the way to their orbital rendezvous with their ship, the “Rustbucket”, Orcha scans the package with a handheld X-ray scanner. At this stage, he decides that its a sentient AI core – and that someone in the Epoch Trust has given him specific instructions to hit it with a blast of X-rays at just this angle to scramble its short-term memory stores (so, competing agendas within the employer; that’s going to be fun). They don’t want to be caught with that – AI cores are highly regulated, and transporting one disengaged like this is considered trafficking.

In orbit, they discover the Xa mothership is searching the area for them, but Kestrel manages to pre-align the docking manoeuvre perfectly so they don’t give themselves away. The AI core is quickly hidden in one of the “Rustbucket”‘s hidden compartments, while Kestrel and Anvil worry about the Xa ship. But Anvil blows the flux capacitor while optimising the ship’s stealth signature and BSOD’s the entire ship. It works, but fixing it consumes the last of their spares (which may come back to bite them later). When the Xa mothership disappears behind the limb of the planet, Kestrel fires up the drive and burns for the jump point in a carefully-timed burn, then shuts everything down and goes dark again before it re-emerges. And thus the Rustbucket and its stolen cargo makes its escape…

Pretty good all-up. Everyone got their moment of feeling like a badarse, and they left several interesting questions hanging for next week. It will be interesting to see what answers emerge.