Faraday’s Folly – Episode 3
(previously, our heroes retrieved an invulnerable tank from a mining world, but were displaced to an abandoned research station on a Wild Jump. They returned to civilized space, bringing some station survivors with them)
The Folly landed on New Neptune, a once thriving industrial world, covered from pole to pole in automated manufactories, that was now sparsely populated. Returning to civilized space, the Folly received a bunch of backlogged messages from the Flotilla, since they were about six weeks behind schedule. The final message came from a new contact, Saihong Oo, not the person who’d hired them. Doc Kovacs sent his apologies and asked for delivery coordinates.
Cpl. Cho looked for a place to stow the “Chosen” evacuees from Sirrus. An old buddy, Asaf Biton, said that he needed some unskilled labor to reactivate an abandoned manufactory – but a shipful of Carnac’s Corsairs were squatting there. Cho volunteered to clear the place out. Elsewhere, Doc Kovacs traded in the server carts from Sirrus for some high-quality maintenance drones.
Kovacs brewed a low-density neurotoxin that they could pump into the manufactory’s air vents to knock the Corsairs out. They went to the manufactory and climbed up forty flights of stairs to where the Corsairs had docked their ship. Kovacs triggered a fire alarm to distract a hovering security drone, then loaded the toxin to take out the Corsairs one story up.
Kovacs and Cho loaded the unconscious Corsairs into an abandoned office, pausing only to round up a last few Corsairs who hadn’t been around at the time. They balked at the idea of murdering the Corsairs en masse, so they made a call to the Ariel Mutual Prosperity Sphere. Ariel was more than willing to send a local factotum – Charvin Kised, economic enforcement officer – to pick up the wanted pirates. Cho flew the Corsairs’ ship off for salvage while Kovacs handled Kised.
Acting on behalf of Ariel, Kised grilled Kovacs on their wild jump from Carthage. Kovacs admitted to firing on the Dusters but denied any involvement with the tank theft. This satisfied Kised, especially when Kovacs agreed to take on a job for Ariel: transporting a prisoner, Mason Brooks, to Persephone. Mason Brooks was the Flotilla resident whose whereabouts were being tracked heavily by the last occupant of the tank Kovacs had just stolen, but Kovacs didn’t mention having heard the name before.
Having taken two irreconcilable jobs – deliver a tank to the Flotilla, keep Mason Brooks away from the Flotilla – the party split up. Cho and Brooks chartered a flight to Argus Station, an asteroid mining station. They stayed over for a couple of days, with Cho begrudgingly paying off some AFFM thugs in an extortion racket.
Meanwhile, Kovacs rendesvouzed with the Flotilla itself in the Hieronymus system. He met his new contact, Saihong Oo, aboard the Arc of Descent. While they inspected the tank, Oo offered him another job – retrieving a ship that had been separated from the Flotilla on a prior jump, the Instant Gratification. Kovacs accepted. His attempt to sell the maintenance droids from New Neptune fell through, though – there was a tempting new cargo to trade, but it was on the other side of the Flotilla, and Kovacs didn’t have the two days to wait.
Kovacs picked Cho and Brooks up at Argus and continued on to Persephone, a water-covered planet known for manufacturing pharmaceuticals. The starport was jammed with people trying to evacuate: news had broken that Carnac’s Corsairs were one jump out of system. Brooks spotted some Flotilla heavies tailing them from the airport. The crew reached their destination, but got pinned down on a skybridge by automatic weapons fire. Both Kovacs and Cho took severe wounds, but got Brooks to safety and dispersed the goons chasing them.
https://fsr2n.wordpress.com/2016/10/08/uncharted-worlds-faradays-folly-episode-3/
https://fsr2n.wordpress.com/2016/10/08/uncharted-worlds-faradays-folly-episode-3/
GM notes:
* The one thing our group has never grown used to, in a PBTA game, is spending XP on advances in the middle of a session. No one ever knows quite what they want to “buy” and no one wants to grind the action to a halt. So we always “level up” at session end, as our ancestors intended.
* There are plenty of rules for selling cargo, but no rules for scrapping a ship and selling it for parts! I treated it as an Acquisition and said that the Corsairs’ scrapped ship netted enough barter and salvage to give the Folly another workspace feature from one of the crew’s Playbooks.
* We landed on “like Iain Banks’ The Culture, but not trying as hard” for the Flotilla motif; hence the ship names.
* The firefight at the end was plenty tense! I made frequent use of Face Adversity as a prelude to even being able to shoot someone. I also realized that you can dial up or dial down the intensity of a firefight by determining the number of consequences on a 7-9, even if one of the crew has Tactics and gets to pick the consequences themselves.
I like that last note very much: it’s a great way to extend combats.
I’ve been using “cargo” in Acquisition a little loose in the same-for-same sense. If you want to buy an asset, you can trade cargo, but can also trade in other gear for pluses.
Rob Barrett : Face Adversity as a prelude was essential, for me, for fights where the crew was just plain outgunned. The baddies have body armor and submachineguns; the crew has sidearms, superior skill, and gumption. It just stressed that it was a Bad Situation all around.
Awesome stuff! And yeah, the build-up of Moves in the “maneuvering phase” leading up to an Open Fire/Launch Assault can really layer on the danger and tension (not to mention provide non-combat characters an opportunity to show their ingenuity)
Also: after knocking two dozen pirates out, disarming them, and dragging them into a barricaded room, Cho and Kovacs spent a decent chunk of time debating whether they had to murder them all. Neither of them really wanted to, but they knew the pirates wouldn’t leave willingly once the neurotoxin wore off.
I was gearing up to call for a Face Adversity roll – not for the physical difficulty, but the emotional difficulty of gunning down twenty-plus unarmed humans. Thankfully, they realized they could turn these guys in for a bounty, thus avoiding the dilemma.
John Perich I’m working on emotional Adversity and Debility(Trauma) at the moment for FBH. That’s exactly the kind of situation I want to optionally cover (if the table is ok with it).
Calling for a Face Adversity using Mettle would have been the right call, in my opinion. If I wanted to get artsy, I might have even waited an in-game day or two, and made the character make a Cramped Quarters against themselves.