Captain's GLoG - Session 11
My micro-campaign group just concluded our game in Desert Moon of Karth by Joel Hines. We played a homebrewed scifi GLoGhack. You can find our previous session here. As ever, steer clear if you want to stay perfectly spoiler free on the source material.
On the Run
We rejoin the crew as they reconvene aboard the Condor:
- Captain Belee Vanda - ex-politician, now smuggler and bounty hunter.
- Hora Tilly - vagabond and explorer.
- Lambro Das - hired gun and escaped convict.
- Associate June - rebellious and expert bureaucrat.
(As a side note, the haul from last session was enough for the characters to hit level four:
- Belee became Smuggler A / Bounty Hunter C.
- Hora became Explorer B / Psion B.
- Lambro became Hired Gun D.
- June became Expert C / Technician A.)
Lambro woke up from a nap at the controls to find Hora leading the Bleached One aboard. Dr. Fayed was ecstatic and rapidly began taking notes and documenting the encounter. Shortly after, June and Belee arrived having run from the governor's manor.
Belee took a closer look at the ship ignition key the had stolen from the governor's vault. It had blue and white stripes indicative of its MEF origins, but otherwise no identifying markers.
The crew decided it was best to leave while they could, setting course for Krieg Ranch.
Back at the Ranch
The Condor took about three hours to make it to the Ranch. The ship was embroiled in a sandstorm for most of the journey. Along the way the crew passed some kind of wrecked vehicle, but decided not to stop and check it out.
When they arrived at the ranch, they were greeted by the shotgun toting Lisa Krieg. The old woman deactivated her turret defense network and took their payment - 10kcr for the repairs. She said the work would take more or less the whole day.
They taxied the Condor into the barn-like hangar that adjoined Krieg's house. As the crew disembarked, the old lady was startled by the appearance of the Bleached One. Belee threw her another 5k for her discretion and she waved them off, muttering about spacers and their weird pets.
The crew spent the day in rest.
Belee used the radio to call the Catherizer. When she finally got ahold of "Red," they had bad news. Bilberto, the android had finally staged their mutiny and become captain. Kelly had been cast out to wander the desert on foot. Belee took this in stride and successfully negotiated that instead of paying the bounty for the killing of Reverend Oboku, the pirate crew would pay off Howard, the MEF technician they had leased the power armor from.
Lambro spent the day on guard duty. Lisa Krieg had to disable the defense turrets since she had no way of signaling the Bleached One wasn't a threat. He didn't see anything.
June helped out with the ship repairs in the morning. Lisa had little patience to teach, but he gleaned a bit from watching her work. In the afternoon, he reviewed the intel they had recovered from the governor's bunker. From it, he deduced that the residents of the Silver Spire were descendants of the ancient humans who had built the orbital defense grid. He gleaned three names: Asmod, Oledore, and Rena.
Hora spent the day communing with the Bleached One. From it she learned of Karth's ancient history. The world had once been terraformed by the wigoy into a garden planets. When humans arrived they had at first welcomed them, only to have those same humans kidnap their Seedmind, the seat of their collective consciousness, and use it to extort the wigoy to harvest their rejuvenating biomaterial. That had ended on one fateful day where the orbital defense grid had fired in unison, wiping all life from the surface of the planet. The Bleached One remembered those days, but knew little of Karth since then.
The explorer-turned-psion had a few additional questions.
- What was the spire filled with eggs? It was a hatchery, but also a starship. In its lowest level were six wigoy in stasis tasked with tending to the ship.
- Where did the wigoy come from? The Bleached One did not know, but the seedspire would have answers.
- What did the Bleached One need to live? Very little. Occasional food and water, but the rejuvenation it had received from Dr. Fayed was enough to last several centuries. They didn't really have taste preferences - that kind of personalization and desire was beyond them.
Orbit At Last
Lisa Krieg completed the repairs without incident. It was evening when she called them back to the ship, coated in soot and grease. She had affixed the outsized engine the crew had purchased from the Valley Rangers to the Condor, then modified it to sync its thrust with the ship's original one. She mentioned that she had also added an emergency switch that would fire the new engine at full blast, turning the ship in a sharp corkscrew, but said not to try it in atmosphere.
The crew boarded the ship and, after some discussion, decided it was time to leave. The barn-hangar opened onto a long runway buried under a thin coat of sand. Lisa Krieg watched from her porch as they began their launch sequence.
The engines flared and the Condor raced forwards. The golden skis they had crudely attached to the hull snapped, but the ship started gaining altitude: 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters. Soon they crossed the threshold where the orbital defense system would have shot them down. They breathed a sign of relief as they escaped clean, passing between the thousands of floating laser platforms and into outer space.
In orbit, they rejoined with the frame that made their small dropship capable of long distance flight. It was right where they had left it.
One Last Bargain
The crew turned on their transponder and immediately were hailed by a huge shipping freighter that was orbiting Karth, the Ham Hock. The ship said they were expecting the Condor and invited them to dock to purchase the air-to-land torpedoes they had salvaged from the ship graveyard.
The crew had stored the torpedoes inside their cargo hold for safekeeping, so they were invited to enter a docking bay on Ham Hock's belly. They agreed and Belee steered the ship into the small compartment, which sealed behind them. Magnets clamped them to the hull as the room repressurized and filled with oxygen.
A small group of five figures kitted out in gray battle dress and snub submachineguns filed into the bay. Lambro recognized them as mercs affiliated with the Golyonova II Bratva, an interstellar syndicate he had worked with previously. The crew hastily threw a tarp over the Bleached One, then Lambro stepped out to meet them.
The squad were led by a young woman with tight blond curls. She greed Lambro and offer him the price they had negotiated through the Desperado barkeep: 50kcr per torpedo for 150kcr total. She also offered an additional deal: 250kcr for the orbital access badge. "What, you want to go back?" she joked.
Hora did, in fact, want to go back. At Belee's suggestion, he tried to negotiate a higher price, but the Novos rep refused. The crew discussed over comms, but Lambro made the call. He came back inside and retrieved the fake orbital badge they had stolen from the governor's office.
The rep was pleased. "I had orders to hold you here if you didn't give up the badge," she shared. Lambro laid the badge down and one of the foot soldiers opened a briefcase, revealing stacks of matte credit sticks. Satisfied, they made the swap.
Shortly, a tech came out piloting a loader, a service mech designed for heavy lifting. As they boarded the Condor to unload the torpedoes, the tech noticed the tarp in the back of the ship. "What's that he asked?" Lambro said it was bio-goo they had harvested on Karth, hoping it would be valuable. The tech shrugged and accepted this explanation before unloading the remaining missiles.
Three torpedoes lighter and 400kcr richer, the Condor was released from the underside of the Ham Hock. They sped off before anything went wrong.
Aftermath
They slipped to the far side of Karth before dipping back into the atmosphere. The Condor dropped off Hora and the Bleached One at Fort Vee Cee with many tearful hugs goodbye. The explorer planned to make contact with the rest of the remaining Wigoy and maybe teach them how to want things the human way.
The Condor left Karth and sped off to points unknown. With credits to burn, Captain Vanda hoped to get revenge on those who had pushed her out of her political career. Lambro would serve as her guard and enforcer. Associate June, the spark of rebellion burning in his chest, would join in as intelligencer, planning to gather a crew of hackers and informants.
Back on Karth, Hora learned that the Valley Rangers' attack had been a pyrrhic victory. They successfully killed one of the Dawnguard's leaders - Oledore - but had lost Suparint Kirzen in the process. She was succeeded by the warlike and xenophobic Abrahms, formerly Ranger of the watch tower. Her intent ambiguous, Hora introduced Abrahms to the Bleached One. Contact with their divinities would no doubt send shockwaves through Valley Ranger society.
In Larstown, Marshall Moses Clark used Tanaka's assassination as the pretense to declare martial law. He assumed total control of the company town and quickly established positive trade relations with the Silver Spire for the first time in MEF history. Rumors swirled that he had always been on the Dawnguard payroll, but none dared speak them openly within the walls of Karth's primary settlement.
Fortunately for the crew, while they had crossed the Golyonova II Bratva, retribution would be a long time coming. Internal conflict ranged as the Teamster Local 32819L went on strike, bringing interstellar shipping to a halt and limiting the syndicate's reach away from their home station of Prospero's Dream. At least for now.
It's unknown what happened to Jaspar Fury, the Condor's psion. Maybe they're still on Karth or maybe they went up the space elevator to book passage on another passing vessel?
GM Notes
Well, this was a delightful micro-campaign. I'll probably write up more summary thoughts in a separate post, but I learned a lot and the players reported that this was one of the best games so far.
This session had a few branch points that could have lead to conflict or more exploration. The players either a) opted not to investigate or b) talked their way out of trouble in every case. Mostly it was just a chance for one last check-in with the characters before we did a Fallout-style outro montage visiting the various characters and factions.
One note specific to this session: I need to think about the specific difficulty of handling a random encounter when the crew is in a fast moving vehicle (arguably the fastest on planet) and can just ignore most encounters. I followed my procedures for encounters which included a way to determine hostility and distance from the players, but in practice, they could pretty much always just bail. Might be worth having a specific ship encounter table or something similar if there is narrative justification.
I don't think we will immediately return to Mothership or Captain's GLoG, but there is still plenty of meat in this setting. I wish I had a slightly more fleshed out star chart, but that kind of thing was well outside the scope of prep that would have been relevant to this game.