Perseus Expansion – Episode 5
Yes, morning arrived for them and they were treated to breakfast, warm breads and a discussion about their plans. The evening before had been an exploration of the treatises of Harmonious Future, an organisation committed to the eradication of social injustice and a levelling of opportunities, education, health and wealth. Links were discussed between the Outer Territories Alliance (the failed rebellion of 15 years ago) and Harmonious Future.
A tourist interlude took them to nearby ruins with Tamara, a student on sabbatical who enjoyed reading at the ruins. The players discover a set of structures that could be aged to greater than 40 thousand years old, constructed for a humanoid species and involving some subtle but powerful molecular manipulation of the granite based building materials.
The players decide to visit the huge structure and understand what it is. They are reluctant to tell the Harmonious Future of it and mention an ‘anomaly’ instead, deep in system. Unphased, Saran Gumai offers two of her people to accompany the heroes: Joe-ann a space scientist and Derrat a spacer handyman.
Arriving at the structure they find it is enormous but inactive. Whilst approaching there was a power spike in the cargo hold. Shielding the two new crew members from the truth they went to investigate. It seems the sphere they picked up on Near Dark was in contact with the gate structure. Something was going on. Some heroic assessment and EVA later the sphere was inserted into the structure which seemed to be powering it up!
The gate came online, exhibiting the same behaviour as the two other known forerunner gates. A probe was sent in to assess safety and determine where the other end of the gate might be. It returned to confirm that it had travelled to another sector of space thousands of light years away, though its power systems were run down. As they debated taking the gate power spikes indicated that something was coming through! Five huge warships of unknown configuration emerged through the shimmering veil of the Star Gate. Run away!
In the upper atmosphere of the nearby gas giant they duelled with a huge bulk freighter that had been lurking there. I say ‘duelled’, the jo Lynn freighter they are flying has some point defence blasters, this converted Class 3 was armed with energy cannons. Heroic Shields Up prevented any meaningful damage but the point defence guns just ‘impacted on the surface’ of the targeted engines. Tyrrell was using his ace pilot skill to great effect, using the ‘escape from pursuer’ option they headed back to the gate to find an enormous war fleet was now on this side with one Class 4 vessel lurking above the gate.
As they approached the gate the defending vessel spewed forth a dozen fighters to intercept our intrepid heroes. Hurtling through the gate in the wrong direction, all they could see were the bright blue lights of the arriving war fleet with the enemy star fighters closing on their tail and into combat range. There was nowhere else to go. Undertaking a neat 180 degrees power turn, our heroes flew straight through the gate.
Good place to close the session… 😉
Sounds like a blast, and a great cliffhanger! Thanks for sharing.
Your game sounds great 😀 but what’s ace pilot -skill? I don’t see it anywhere, although I was kind of hoping to get such in the book 🙂
I’m playing to find out what happens and generally just print out some stuff and think of a few cool things that we could hang some scenes off. The rest of the tale is up to the players.
Ace Pilot is a skill that we are working on in play. We may not have got it right yet, but you can drop in a cool and appropriate new skill and ‘play to find out what it does’. So far ‘evading a pursuer’ is a good one and just being damn hot and flashy is a lot of fun.