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#RustbucketTales #Part2

Ran the second session, dealing with cleanup form “Planetary Salvage”. This one went rather differently. The lack of a strong opening scene led to a lack of focus, while I never really pushed hard enough to make their problems that big. OTOH, what we did get was character; Anvil doesn’t like people, Kestrel solves problems by talking her way out of them, Orcha by murdering people. And its created some baggage which can come back to haunt them in future sessions.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…A Shards of Xa shuttle strafes the bridge of a wrecked starship; Orcha-37 flings himself away from the blast.

…Anvil finishes cutting an armoured vault door open, then looks down at a significant (and bulky) looking cargo crate.

…Orcha-37 flubs an ambush on a group of Xa pirates, catches a laser blast on the shoulder, and flees into the wreck.

…Anvil and Kestrel haul the crate across a hole blasted in the hull and into the hovering “Shadow”

…the “Shadow” dodges between laser blasts as Orcha-37 tumbles through the rear cargo door with his jetpack.

…Orcha-37 scans the package with a handheld X-ray scanner, turning it to full power at the precise alignment specified by his HUD to scramble the AI core’s short-term memory.

…Kestrel and Orcha-37 wait nervously in the dark on the bridge of the “Rustbucket” as a pirate cruiser passes nearby.

…the “Rustbucket” coasts through space, then engages its jump drive and disappears.

Several weeks later. While the Rustbucket escaped SR-388 without being identified by the Xa (they think), the ship has taken a back-route through the jump network in an effort to keep a low profile. Now it has arrived at its rendevous point: New Perth City on Eanope – an airless world famous for its cadmium red colour, toxic soil, and water rationing. The planetary economy revolves around extracting and exporting cadmium, and the operation is run (through a subsidiary) by Nakamoto Horizons.

Kestrel has past history here. A few years back he beat a local mine supervisor, Alvin Hassani, at cards, at least according to “the wider rules of gambling” (one of which is apparently “its not cheating if they’re too drunk to notice”). He won a consignment of ore that was supposed to go somewhere else, causing Hassani some difficulty. Orcha-37 meanwhile has to make contact with Ito Hiroshi, their Epoch Trust employer, and deliver the salvaged (and covertly lobotomised) AI core. But he works undercover as a science commission leader in the mining company, and can’t afford to have his cover blown. So the crew have reasons to tread carefully.

And they do – mostly. They split up, do their housekeeping (Anvil arranging spare parts and making more permanent repairs to the Shadow, Kestrel arranging a cargo), and let Orcha get on with it. Unfortunately he draws himself to the attention of local police by applying for a weapons permit to bypass restrictive local weapons laws, which puts him on a watchlist and gets him a tail. He makes it to the appointed meeting place, a high end bar in an upper-class entertainment district, and sends the “I’m here” signal: a simple matter of ordering the right cocktail. Then having set things in motion, he ditches his tail in a shopping mall, buys some stims to keep him running, and settles in to watch the meeting place for the next 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Kestrel has been working the starport bars to find passangers. He finds four – a pair of miners at the end of their contracts, a young girl who is obviously in trouble, and a tourist / intersteller backpacker named Wray. He’s just taken payment from the latter when he’s flanked by a pair of large miners and Alvin Hassani sits down in his booth. Hassani wants his ore back, or the money to pay for it; Kestrel claims he won it fair and square. They go back and forth a bit and Kestrel starts spinning him a line about having a hot shipment of luxury foodstuffs – high-fluid vegetables, real coffee – coming in in ten days. He’ll cut Hassani in for 50 percent to smooth things over. Hassani buys it, but makes it clear: “if you cross me this time, it will hurt you”. And he sticks one of his goons, Rusty, on Kestrel to keep an eye on him. The moment Hassani has gone, Kestrel starts work on Rusty. And before you know it, they’re best of friends, and Kestrel has brought him off with a free passage to start a new, higher-paying career on Ghazan. The moment he’s got his cadmium and Orcha has finished his business, they’re out of there, and screw Alvin.

Orcha spots his contact, but also realises that Hiroshi has a tail: a professional, far better than the cops he lost yesterday. He slips inside the bar, establishes the delivery point (a warehouse near the starport, where the AI will be interrogated), and informs Hiroshi of the tail. They plan an ambush: Orcha will leave first, then Hiroshi will follow about 20 minutes later, taking a specific route which should allow his tail to be neutralised. But as Orcha leaves the bar, he gets spotted by the cops again; rather than draw attention to himself, he tries to talk his way out of trouble. The quick study of local law he did when arriving on-planet pays off, the detective calls his supervisor, and the potential arrest is turned into a formal “character interview” at the station in the morning. But in the process he’s missed his chance at ambushing Hiroshi’s tail, so instead he heads back to the ship to sort out the delivery.

Back at the ship, Wray the backpacker has turned up early. He’s curious, friendly, and just a little bit too observant about the Shadow being a stealth shuttle – which immediately gets on Anvil’s nerves. When Orcha turns up, Wray bugs him about his business. So naturally they recruit him as a temporary cargo handler to deliver their small, high-value package to its destination. That goes well enough, but when Orcha checks out Wray on the SectorNet, he learns that Wray writes about his travels, including the illicit adventures he gets up to (apparently helping someone sell forged artworks several worlds back). So, details of his mysterious secret op may get splashed around in six months. Oh dear.

In the morning, the cadmium cargo finally arrives – delayed due to having to wait behind higher priority bulk haulers, and only half the amount they wanted, but its something. Kestrel oversees loading while Orcha tries to convince the local cops that he’s just an honest bounty-hunter looking for work, and not up to no good. Once he’s done there, he decides he has some unfinished business, a security leak in the mission to clean up. So he tracks down Hiroshi’s address (a nice apartment in a high-class neighbourhood), breaks in unobserved, disables the surveillance the Nakamoto spies have put on it, and when Hiroshi returns, slits his throat. A very professional job, except that he gets seen by a bystander walking away from the apartment and pegged as a stranger. Which means that when the body gets found, and the locals get interviewed, he’ll get noticed, and possibly marked as a suspect. But by then Rustbucket will have lifted and he’ll be halfway to the jump point…

#ToProsperIsToFall #Part2

Welcome to Part 2 of my play report for my on-going Colony game of Uncharted Worlds! This time, gameplay went more smoothly and we wrapped up a proper amount of play in a week… unlike last time, which took a full month, oh goodness.

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 than time invested. But: one week, one session, that’s how I roll.

Now let’s get to it first with a character recap. If you want better details about what happened last time, or want to know more details about our Factions or more in-depth character details, use the To Prosper Is To Fall Hashtag above to find Part 1 or browse the community for the rest of my To Prosper Is To Fall posts.

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

—

And now:

“Last time… on To Prosper is to Fall…”

• Imagine a horrible sandstorm filled with red lightning sweeps over the colony

• Imagine crops get destroyed while we hear Harmony and Merit talk about how vital they are

• Imagine a starship get blasted by lightning — intercut with scenes of destruction inside — while hearing Liv and Zeph shout back and forth about landing the damn thing

• Imagine Jiro watching Vandikar’s “business associates” leave, outraged with his offer on their narcotics supply

• Imagine seeing Nenn dragged to safety by Merit, in complete and utter slack-jawed awe of her

• Imagine the cargo hold of the New Horizon basically torn to pieces, and we see Liv throwing some debris to the side while audio tells us the new machining parts are ruined

• Imagine Jiro ushering a pair of people into the bar while sand and lightning whip around the screen threateningly, and we hear Reason say he thinks he knows where the damn storm came from

• Imagine Merit looking at a plant — and dialogue tells us its the only plant left from the field — and we see her start smashing it to paste; intercut with the surgery that saves a fieldworker’s life

• Imagine Jiro observing the mark underneath Reason’s prisoner’s ear, complete with dramatic music telling you “yeah, that’s a big deal.”

—

Breakdown of the action this session:

• Vandikar and Reason quarrel about what should be done with the Acheron infiltrator; Vandikar thinks it’s a “colony issue” to be dealt with internally (and likely he has an invested interest in the weird tech she brought with her) – meanwhile Reason thinks this is a significant enough threat that the Void Confederation should be involved.

• Reason tries to appeal to Jiro to weigh in and give him a hand, but Jiro plays it cool and is noncommittal, insisting that instead they get answers first and worry about jurisdiction later. Jiro picks Crux, a lax (and maybe alcoholic) doctor out of the crowd in the bar.

• Crux and Jiro turn Vandikar’s private booth into a makeshift first aid station, laying out the unconscious infiltrator on the table. She’s in bad shape: bloody face and her throat is torn up, both raked by the sandstorm; swollen black eye from fighting with Reason.

• While Jiro is getting some salt water for Crux to clean the patient’s throat, he gets the idea to palm the infiltrator’s weird device that Vandikar is coveting and has now taken from Reason… but plans on doing it later. Then, there is a violent crash.

• Jiro finds the infiltrator has awoken, broken Crux’s nose (and the table) and has her boot planted on his chest, pinning him to the ground. Oh god, she recognizes Jiro (remember he is AWOL from Acheron)!

•What does Jiro do? He closes the distance and forces an entire shaker of salt into her open mouth and throat to choke her (look, you use the tools at hand), shutting her up before she can say his real name out loud.

• Jiro gets an unwelcome surprise when he discovers she is a Gecko™ brand Acheron Infiltrator – even whilst choking on a whole canister of salt she still is fast enough to both put Jiro into a headlock inches from snapping his neck and twist his arm around so far she could snap it and/or dislocate it with one small flex.

• But see, Jiro is also an Acheron asset — or at least he was one. So, while anyone else would need to get loose before they could do anything, he goes with it, striking the infiltrator square in the diaphragm and getting into a pure Jason Bourne-esque fight before finally getting loose and having her at his mercy.

• Jiro wants to know who she is and what she’s doing here, but she resists answering… until Jiro starts snapping her fingers one by one. Turns out, Jiro has a past with Acheron, and they taught him everything he knows. The infiltrator finally relents: her name is Ilyana and her assignment was to block transmissions between the surface colony and their satellite overhead.

• Why? So Acheron Operatives could have undisturbed access to its sensors and cameras for 24 hours while surveying the planet below! Since the rights to colonizing the planet belong to Prosper, via the Confederation, Acheron has gone behind everyone’s back, seeking new territory.

• Meanwhile elsewhere, Zeph tries to categorize the losses from the New Horizon’s dismal landing; meanwhile, his daughter Miane laments having to live planetside. She is – like her father – an Ender, born and raised in space, and she feels stifled by gravity, the atmosphere, the complete upheaval of her lifestyle at her father’s hands.

• Miane’s complaints border on the xenophobic, calling those around her born on a planet Turfers, and her words raise the ire of pilot Liv, leading to a shouting match where Liv criticizes Zeph for being the kind of Ender who passes on his own arrogance to his daughter. Liv tells Zeph she wouldn’t be surprised if one day he just picked up and left, abandoning the colony – he has a daughter to worry about and he’s not from around here, how can Prosper ever trust him?

• Zeph is in a tough spot: Liv is criticizing his position in the community, questioning his reliability, and even suggests he can’t properly run his own ship… if she walks out of here, spreads that to the other pilots, his work is shot. He’s screwed. Plus, if he handles this poorly, well, what message will that send his daughter?

• Luckily, he handles himself with grace and poise, explaining – sternly – his decision to remain with the colony and his decisions… Liv is temporarily placated, acquiescing to his command once more and even apologizing in her own way for her behavior.

• Then he turns his attention to Miane and chastises her behavior, telling her she needs to adjust and accept the new life they have. There’s no going back. This is where they are. Miane – with some reluctance – says she understands… and that she has even taken steps to try and become part of the community

• Miane reveals a contract she has signed with Fountains, a captain of Class-1 cargo tug The Wayward Sun; she intends to join his ship as a junior engineer and make the six-month intrasystem delivery circuit. The way Miane sees it, she gets to touch space again and live the life she wants, but she is still doing it for the community and will be based out of Prosper. Its perfect, right? Zeph is unsure, and wants Merit to take a look at the contract and make sure Fountains isn’t pulling anything.

• When the storm breaks, Merit and her research crew move their wounded to the Clinic so they can tended to.

• There, Merit learns that the field hand (whose life saving treatment required the destruction of the last living plant) should recover nicely, although there will be some permanent scarring; their name is Leslie, we determined.

• Merit also learns from her cohort, Squire – an Academy-trained nurse – that Nenn (the fieldworker who thinks Academics are magic, and whom Merit found praying in the middle of the storm for her to save him) has been telling his family and friends about what she did, and others are being swayed by his words.

• At about this point, Nenn’s grandfather comes into the clinic, finds Merit and gives her a leather necklace with a painted piece of paper: it’s a Cardyst charm painted with the symbol (remember Cardyst’s tattoo their arms to commemorate life events) for “Mystic” or “Cleric” – basically, the symbol a Cardyst religious leader marks their body with when they take religious vows to serve a community.

• Merit thanks him, and then behind his back tells Squire this behavior should be discouraged; Squire doesn’t see the harm in it if it means the conservative Cardysts will stop fighting against every scientific advancement The Academy introduces to Prosper.

• Around then Zeph appears, looking for Merit to discuss Miane’s decision and the contract. Cue some quality role-playing between the players: The Academy wants knowledge to be free, and Hermes Corporation thinks their proprietary space knowledge is their right and everyone else can get fucked. The players handle these ideological hurdles really well and they play out a scene where Merit questions Zeph’s parenting decision to let Miane run off with Fountain’s crew, Zeph laments the difficulties in giving your child room to grow while disciplining them without stifling their hearts, and finally Merit says she will make time to examine the paperwork later.

• Finally, with nothing else to keep her busy, Merit works up the nerve to go tell Cosmos – the colony’s botanist – that the crops are a complete loss; shredded by the storm, buried in the sand, even the lively specimens that looked like good candidates are gone, and that she had to destroy a sample to save Leslie’s life.

• Merit finds Cosmos in the hydroponics bay of the main colony facility, as you would expect, and when she breaks the news about the loss of the crops Cosmos flies into a manic state. She smashes an algae pool, she collapses against a wall, she has a fit and is a sad sight to behold.

• Turns out that Cosmos blames herself for the fieldworkers who were injured by the storm, and she is exhausted by season upon season year upon year of failed crops and it is getting to her. Cosmos is a Cardyst, and she has struggled for years to marry her scientific pursuits with her religious ideology and the balancing act has begun to wear on her and she is finally asking herself if the two can be reconciled, or if she is a failure to the entire colony.

• Merit speaks some encouraging words, and Cosmos mentions off hand that if she could just get her hands on some SmartSeeds – a high-tech, highly expensive, impossible to acquire colonization tool that the Confederation purchases on behalf of “approved” colonial efforts – she could turn some things around. Well…

• Merit remembers hearing about the last colony that the Confederation bought those for: a world called Fatima, this perfect idyllic wonderland with twin suns and beautiful auroras that was to be developed by a tourism megacorporation. However, the colony vessel went missing! Hmmm!

• Merit shares this info with Cosmos, and she lights up with excitement! If Merit knows where the SmartSeeds could be then they have to seek them out! In Cosmos’ worldview, Prosper will never truly be civilization until the people have tamed the land and become one with it… and the SmartSeed technology will finally make it possible, make up for the years of work she considers a failure.

• Cosmos’ arguments appeal to Merit, even as her Academy education tells her that her job is to educate the galaxy, not to gallivant across it in search of adventure. Merit’s passion for discovery wins out, however, and she is persuaded; they just need a pilot, and a ship.

• Merit remembers that Zeph wants her to concoct a lesson plan for Miane, and she tells Cosmos that the good Ambassador “owes me a favor”

• Meanwhile, Zeph hits up Herasdi – the Confederation’s Adjunct Overseer responsible for maintaining tariffs in the Colony and ensuring efficiency in the mining operation. Zeph breaks the news that the drill parts the Confederation ordered and paid for were lost when the ship was racked by lightning in the dust storm.

• It turns out — according to Zeph’s player — that the way things work around the colony is this: as long as the Colony keeps giving a hefty percentage of all gold silver tin and prisellium that they mine to the Confederation, they will foot the bill for most large scale construction projects in Prosper, provided the people demonstrate they have or can manage the infrastructure to support it. The drill parts that Zeph was transporting were purchased by the Confederation – with transport through Zeph arranged by the Confederation – to expand Prosper’s mining operation in return for an expanded deal between the two entities. So the loss of the parts is more than a little political fiasco.

• Zeph says he needs time to repair the New Horizon (which is totally true, its roughed up). Herasdi says that’s fine, but hey, delivery promise was by the end of the month and if the parts don’t arrive then there will be no pay for Zeph and they’ll happily pursue damages against him.

• Zeph gets the hell out of there and sets to work on New Horizon, leading the repair crews in an all day operation in the blistering desert sun amidst dust and a whole fleet of grounded ships, negotiating not enough repair crews, tools, machines, or parts to go around. What with one thing and another – and a dozen hours – the hull and the hold are finally repaired, as is the Clogged Intake malfunction. However…

• The New Horizon‘s shields are still down; the lightning strike, combined with the duststorm getting into every system has apparently inverted the charge running through the shield emitters, and there’s no way to bring them back online until that charge has been flushed, and Zeph doesn’t have onhand or in Prosper the tools needed for that extensive of an operation. He’s going to need to pay a visit to the star system’s local shipyard, and hope he can cover the costs.

—–

And that’s where we are, going into Part III. Lots of new and exciting ideas and characters got introduced this game!

We now know that it was Leslie who Merit saved (don’t ask if Leslie is a first or last name). We met Crux, a maybe terrible Doctor? We’ll see. We met Squire, a fellow Academic sent to this planet as a Missionary just like Merit, except that he’s not a huge fan of the place. We met Cosmos, Prosper’s botanist and we got to hear about her personal trouble reconciling the Cardyst’s Taoist/Animist/Amish principles with her pursuit of science. We met Herasdi, the Confederation’s person-on-the-ground in Prosper. We were introduced to Fountains, a cargo ship captain, but we haven’t met him yet… and man, I wonder if Zeph is going to have words for him anytime soon.

We got introduced to the idea that Acheron biologically modifies some of their agents! Specifically, we were introduced to the idea that Acheron has an entire marketing division labeling its soldiers for mass consumption. What the hell is a Gecko™ Brand infiltrator? What other brands are there?!

We got to see words like Ender and Turfer, terms that delineate between classes of people in our setting: those spaceborn and raised, and those bound by gravity.

We’re seeing a few of the Cardysts starting to fit the “magic” of the Academics into their religious worldview.

We got introduced to new terms like “SmartSeeds” and the complex technology behind them and the Agri-Box that governs them! And we discovered a new world, Fatima, where this technology may even now be lost! And oh man it looks like that space field trip might be happening! Who knows what kind of trouble they’ll run across hunting down the lost colony ship carrying this prize.

Oof, meanwhile, Zeph needs to get in the sky and hunt down new machine parts wherever he can if he is going to have any chance at all of profiting from this trip and avoiding the legal wrath of the Confederation… but the trip alone will take something like a month if he plays it safe, and by then Miane will have begun her job with Fountains… and thats not even accounting for his Shields still being dead! He needs to find answers, do his job, avoid trouble – its so hard being a space dad! Plus, ugh, there’s gonna be some political problems, I imagine, in light of those parts getting wrecked!

And of course let’s not forget this whole ‘Acheron hijacked our satellite to survey our planet for expansion, illicitly bypassing any kind of claims laws Prosper may have on the whole rock.’ How’s that gonna shake out? Are they gonna do anything about it? Is it time for a little spaceship jaunt up to the satellite to see what’s what?

Below, 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.