#ToProsperIsToFall #Part1
So, generally, I divide my PbP games into sessions on a weekly basis: Monday through Friday is game time, with weekends belonging to the players to do whatever things need their attention as adults. In real life, game length can vary widely between 2 hours all the way out to wild weekend long game-a-thons; online, the equivalent is more about user activity. Regardless: it works. That said, this is just a general idea… it falls apart if things get too busy in people’s lives, as they did for me and my play group. So, even though we started playing what feels like long ago, today marks the end of Session 1 of my game To Prosper is To Fall, haha. So, what follows is a big info dump and then a brief summary of the session. Enjoy!
Our Cast of Protagonists are:
• Dr. Merit Pantaleimon is an Academy Missionary (Productive/Academic/Explorer) with Loyalty to The Academy on Alexandria and indebted to them for her life, education, and status among them
• Zeph Athena Parthenon is an Ambassador (Galactic/Starfarer/Personality) with Loyalty to Hermes Corporation and indebted to them for his Class-2 starship “The New Horizon”
• Jiro “Marat” Kankkunen is a Turncoat Spy (Rigid/Clandestine/Outlaw) indebted to Acheron Securities for their gear/training/knowledge he stole when he went AWOL; Hermes Corp for smuggling him out of Acheron space; and the Void Confederation for pushing through his paperwork to get a new identity and colonist status somewhere on the frontier
Our game is a Colony game, and we came up with all this delightful information during game creation:
• The planet (unnamed except for a bureaucratic designation within the Void Confederation) is a world of intense and unreal mountain ranges so grand as to be visible from space. Water only makes up 30% of the surface, but underwater sources exist and are very difficult to find.
• The planet is dusty and craggy, described as one player as being like the Wild West, complete with miserable native scrub brush and regular dust storms. The atmosphere is breathable, it’s just perpetually full of particles that will scratch up your throat.
• The planet has been settled for something like three generations, 60 years or thereabouts. The original settlers were a cultural mix, but the predominant people were Pasoan Cardysts.
• Pasos is a planet whose natives are pretty friendly; they ritualistically tattoo their forearms to commemorate important life events
• Cardysm is a religious movement with elements of Taoism, Animism, and Amish or Puritan values. Cardysts pursue oneness between the individual and the universe, and follow a number of religious mores in the process. This includes constructing their geodesic domes a certain distance away from the main colony, facing magnetic north — the ritualized indulgence of specialized mind-altering hallucinogenics — and virtue-naming, where children are given titles meant to breed harmony with the universe.
• The Colony has long-held superstitions about creatures in the cliffs outside the community and the curses they can bring down on the colony and it’s people.
• ~60 years later, Cardysm now represents a minority within the Colony, although their values and some of their rites are practiced secularly by many of the non-devoted colonists.
• The Colony’s establishment was sponsored by the Void Confederation for two purposes: one, as a reminder to the the other corporate-backed worlds in this star system that they’re not too big for the Confederation; two, as a mining outpost for the metals in minting Void tinder and for prisellium ore, the raw form of Jump Drive fuel.
• Most Colonies are built on a natural landmark of some kind and this one is no different: original settlers cracked open the planet to discover an underground cistern, which has been tapped for a well, running water, and irrigation. On top of that, the colonists have settled on one of the planet’s few flat planes that stretch out uninterrupted by the world’s ubiquitous serpentine mountain ranges.
• The Colony’s main exports are minerals, jump drive fuel, metals (all of which go through the Confederation first for their cut); beyond this, the Colony also trades in quality computronic technology constructed out of the naturally conductive bone structures of local fauna.
•The Colony’s main imports are machine parts, supplementary food stuffs, luxuries like entertainment, and religious hallucinogenics; there also exists a thriving trade in bootlegged alcohol, bypassing Confederation tariffs that skyrocket the price.
• The biggest benefit of the Colony’s placement are the cliffs in the east that act as a windbreak; in the cover of the ridge, the colonists maintain a field of crops that they are trying to biologically adapt to the planet’s alien soil and atmosphere.
• The biggest threat to the Colony are the semi-regular dust storms that blanket the whole area. On the good days, it’s dirty and everything mechanical gets gummed up and needs a really backbreaking maintenance cycle; on the bad days, the winds get so vicious that the particles will cut open flesh inside and out, choking those without masks on their own throat lining and blood. On top of that, the metallic particles abundant in the soil and atmosphere act as an electromagnet when carried aloft by the alien storms, creating immense and deadly lightning discharges between air currents.
• In true Cardyst fashion, the Colony’s name is Prosper.
Since this is a Colony game, they assigned their ‘work spaces’ as locations in the Colony.
• Merit’s workspace was an Academy clinic that she and other Academics had constructed for the colony to use.
• Zeph’s workspace was NavCon, a tower to the west that hooks up to a set of satellites in orbit to monitor the terrible dust storms of the planet and guide space/air traffic for the colony.
• Jiro’s workspace was a set of secret tunnels, crawlspaces, and cubbies in the crater to the south where some living quarters and his workplace existed; they’re meant to be used if Acheron ever comes looking for him.
For our Jump Point, I kept in mind this was a Colony game — our scope is larger than a ship, and the threats can be broader. I established three separate scenes, placing the characters accordingly:
Zeph was aboard the New Horizon with his daughter and a hired pilot returning from an Acquisition with (what I later found out were) machine parts for the mine; they were in the process of re-entering the atmosphere.
Merit was in the fields with her research assistants, collecting soil and crop samples to analyze, trying to unlock why yet another season of crops had been rejected by the planet.
Jiro was at his day job bartending, splitting his attention listening to his underworld-dabbling boss fail to cut a deal with some off-world smugglers, and to his unwitting informant rattle off details about the Prosper’s administration’s inner-workings.
The Jump Point kicked off immediately when I introduced a dust storm to end all dust storms, this colossal blow-out of a tempest complete with flesh-scouring dirt and sky-igniting lightning.
Merit and her Crew — and their vital research — were out and exposed to the elements; Zeph and co. were caught by the storm part way down, without enough fuel to ascend, forced to fight their way to a landing; Jiro’s patrons and his boss were trapped in this tin can of a bar that the storm was infiltrating (while realizing that there’s no way the Colony’s satellite tower could have missed a storm this monstrous without interference…)
Short and to the point breakdown of the action this session:
• Merit tried to organize her researchers and the fieldworkers with a Command, getting them to all move to the cliffs for safety; she flubbed that royally, as some ran for cover, but others panicked, and others turned and ran into the heart of the storm to find and protect their families.
• Merit tried to quickly get to cover with her prize student, Prosperity-Cometh-Not-Before-Harmony, but he had failed to secure his research kit and lost a ton of tools… Including a sample of one of the only plants that had taken root and grown strong! Merit braved the storm and went back for it.
• Merit saved one of the fieldworkers who was lost in the storm; we earlier established that this worker was convinced missionaries from The Academy were magic, and he was kneeling in the storm praying for Merit to find him.
• Finally in cover with her students and a bunch of fieldworkers, Merit was trying to save the life of one of them who had been exposed to the storm for too long. It was gross and bloody and pretty heinous, and it was hard. First, Merit didn’t have a medkit, so she had to cobble one together out of what things in a research kit could pull double duty. Second — and worse!! — she had to sacrifice the only living plant sample they had from the field, grinding it up to create a medicine needed to save her patient!
• Zeph ordered his NPC pilot Liv to try and land the New Horizon despite the storm; I warned that would mean flying right in… It could be tried, but it would earn the ship a Malfunction from Clogged Intakes. Zeph said do it!
• Zeph handled the shields while Liv handled trying to pilot the New Horizon down through the storm. Sadly, a failed roll saw the shields completely go offline and the cargo hold suffered a Severe Breakage! Additionally, the coolant pipes throughout the ship suffered a leak as pressure built up! The Engine room was being flooded with the poisonous gas!
• Zeph crawled his way into the belly of the engine room to get his tools on the main coolant tank, holding his breath through the gas long enough to clamp down the pressure and stop the leakage throughout the ship. Sadly, the ship was still filled with this toxic fog.
• So, Zeph blew the maintenance hatches of the engine room wide open as the ship came to a sudden (and kind of chaotic) landing in the middle of the storm. Zeph figured letting the storm in a little was better than bottling up the noxious fumes, so he opened the hatches to the outside world and let the air rush out into the storm.
• With the New Horizon now safe (albeit with a Severe Breakage, a Filter Clog, and Disabled Shields…) Zeph checked on his daughter (who was okay) and reunited with pilot Liv in the cargo bay to discover that Prosper’s new drill parts had been ruined in the unshielded lightning strike… well, shit
• Liv and Zeph almost had words… she hates him in general, and it doesn’t help that his decision to set down in the storm rather than find some better place to set down destroyed their cargo…
• At the bar, Jiro was trying to seal up the joint, get the windows closed to keep the storm out and keep the patrons safe; they were already starting to wheeze and gasp and cough up blood
• In the process, Jiro spotted two shapes moving around outside, trying to get in and he recognized one of them was Reason, the Void Confederation spy who undermined Acheron and helped him relocate here
• Getting them inside was a hazardous maneuver, as it involved opening the place back up to the storm — in the process Jiro got his face raked by the storm and was injured not-too-badly for it, but he got his friend and a strange woman inside.
• It turned out that the woman was a suspicious person of import… Reason had caught them fussing around with the Navigation Tower’s power relays; they were using an insidious control terminal that can manipulate computer systems — likely, it is responsible for why the colony was hit by this storm with no forewarning!
• Upon examination, Jiro discovered a marking beneath the woman’s ear: it was a sign that she worked for Acheron in their Field Projects division!
—–
And that’s where we are, going into Part II. A lot of problems got kicked up around Prosper just by playing out a storm and seeing where they went.
We know that there’s some big project to construct a new mining drill — so what’s up with that? Probably part of whatever agreement has the Confederation sponsoring this colony, so how are they going to react when they find out the parts were ruined?
And a field worker who already thinks Academics are magic was just saved by one, so how is that going to go over with the religious Cardyst minority? And what about how Merit destroyed the only living plant that the colony had cultivated? And that colonist who Merit saved, but who is now horribly scarred?
And Liv is pissed with Zeph, so how is that gonna go? She’s the best pilot in Prosper, but if they won’t work together anymore, then what? And oh god the ship, Severe Breakage, clogged intakes, and busted shields, how’s that gonna shake out?
And now apparently Acheron is messing with Prosper? Does that mean they know Jiro is there, or is this coincidence? What will Mr. Vandikar and The Gerant — Jiro’s illicit employers — want to do about Acheron threatening the security of their dirty business? And what about Reason and by extension his spymasters at the Confederation? Hell, what will Jiro himself do to stay under the radar?
Meanwhile, there’s also some stuff floating around about how the colony needs additional generators built and the Confederation is SUPPOSED to foot the bill for those (but probably won’t after this drill disaster), and how Vandikar is trying to line up new importers of Cardyst drugs, and booze…
Extremely fun game so far, with so much going on already.
I’ve included a link to the slide deck we’re using for our game, with character sheets and so forth. You should be able to scroll through below, or open it in a new window by clicking the Google Slides icon.