Mediums and Messages

Captain's GLoG - Session 2

My micro-campaign group is back at it, this time with a scifi GLoGhack and Joel Hines Desert Moon of Karth. You can find our previous session here.

Not alone

We catch up with our crew, where we left them: in the dark, in the cargo hold of a wrecked security gunboat. They were:

Having sealed the fore hatch to avoid whatever was skittering around beyond, the crew decided to backtrack and investigate aft. When they made it back to the cross-shaped hallway they had entered through, they heard a groan coming from the opposite hall.

Hora led the way with her flashlight and machete, finding an incapacitated man in gold plastic armor at the base of a ladder. He had movie star good looks and was bleeding from a wound in his side. Hora and Jaspar applied first aid while Belee went through the man's pockets. She found a weird pistol with a barrel segmented like a GPU cable, a credit stick worth 400cr, a weird leather poncho, and some braille dogtags. Hora, familiar with all the sectors' languages, was able to read off the name Valoi, the word "dawn guard" and a three-digit identifier.

The crew discussed robbing the guy, but decided he might be some kind of cop and decided to wake him up instead. Jaspar pulled a smelling salt vial from their first aid kit and roused the man to ask him some questions. In between bouts of vomit, he explained he was here with three other dawn guards on a mission before they were pounced on by "circus beetles" - a sort of giant bug that often colonizes old wrecks and emerges during sandstorms to glean nutrients from the kicked up silt.

Valoi declared that he had to finish his mission, but would be happy to escort the crew out once he was done. His arm was broken, so he asked for help climbing the ladder. Jaspar and Hora followed him up while Belee went back to scout the remainder of the first floor of the ship.

Upstairs, Jaspar and Hora found the various gory remains of the other Dawnguard. Valoi gathered their pistols and dogtags and pressed on. Hora stopped to salvage some heavy duty cabling from the craft's defunct reactor. Jaspar found some gross soccer-ball-sized eggs. Belee, on the first floor, found another airlock - this one containing four sets of short skis and a pack of desert survival gear.

A trolley problem

While Jaspar kept watch with an SMG, Valoi retreated into a room at the extreme fore of the vessel. He called for help, saying that with his broken arm he couldn't pull a big two-handed lever. At this point, Jaspar and Hora said they were unwilling to help unless he provided more information. With a sigh, Valoi shared that his team was tasked with firing the gunships rocket pods at a nearby settlement of "desert rangers" called Fort Vee Cee.

The crew discussed and decided they didn't want to help potentially commit a war crime. Valoi shrugged, seemingly content with having made a good faith effort. He packed up a fancy slicing rig with a graphical display from the far room and started heading for the exit. The crew discussed what to do next over their communicators.

On the first floor, Belee ambushed him. Killing him with a shot to the back of the head from her slug pistol. Everyone agreed, that was probably the best call. She grabbed the dawn guards gear while the others hefted the bulky power cables and the two hard suits from the far airlock. Around then, the sandstorm died down.

Opening the airlock by the skis, the crew found the sand outside strewn with twenty or so small sandy mounds. Each had a pair of waving white tentacles emerging from the top. Beyond they could make out another ship nearby, this one covered in tarps to protect against the sand. Thinking that these were probably the circus beetles, the crew decided to throw Valoi's body out as bait. As soon as they did, the huge beetles came rolling out of the sand, somersaulting and tumbling like weird little acrobats. Not really beetles in the proper sense, they had four tentacular limbs that emerged from a glistening black shell.

The party used the distraction to make a break for it, stealing the dawn guards' skis to dash towards the next ship over. They just barely managed to escape with Jaspar trailing at the rear.

A pirate's life

Approaching the other ship, a figure popped out from a crow's nest on top of a raised bridge. She gestured for them to present their weapons. The party took this ambiguous signal as a sign to leave their guns. As they approached the woman called down, mocking them for just waltzing in unarmed and told them to run and fetch their stuff.

The crew did and made their way to the front entrance of the ship. It had a boat-like hull, as if it were designed to land in water. The front hinged open to reveal a gangway where a man with a glowing cybernetic eye was rotisserie grilling a big slab of meat. He waved them into the interior of the ship.

Inside the crew met Captain Jonah Kelly, a cordial if blustery privateer who offered them some gummy-like pills and a seat on a couch. Folks recognized them as an upper (a sort of Ritalin-II) and Jaspar and Hora happily tried it. Kelly asked how they had ended up on this hell planet and when the crew relayed their situation, he immediately recognized it as his own. He offered them 20kcr to kill Reverend Oboku, the mysterious person who had sold them the bum entry corridor.

With business out of the way, the crew asked him about the local area. He explained there were basically three big players in the area (four if you counted his crew of 30-odd privateers):

Belee asked about selling their salvage, but Kelly declined, saying that he had more scrap than he knew what to do with. He pointed them to Larstown to find a buyer, saying that you could find a decent price with some connections. He also said one of his crew was there, Taiko the Hammer, investigating Reverend Oboku's whereabouts.

Before heading out the crew said they would head to Larstown and asked if Kelly needed anything. He said he could use Oboku's head, an oldtech security badge to get through the defense grid, and some frozen waffles, if they saw any. Jaspar noted that they could get in touch with Kelly and his crew via the radio on The Condor.

Back to The Condor

The crew trekked back to their ship, arriving just around Dawn. Having seen a lot of action in the last few hours they decided to rest until noon, then hang out inside The Condor until the heat of the day had passed. During this time, Hora and Jaspar came down from the gummies and crashed hard.

During the afternoon, Hora used their salvaged power cables to repair the electrical systems on the ship, giving them HUD info, light, and other tools. Belee cleaned the worst of the sand out of the crew compartment, though they'd still be finding grit forever it would seem. Jaspar spent the afternoon practicing their telepathic art by causing Belee to experience the feeling of being thrown up on by Valoi over and over.

As night fell and the temperature started to drop, the crew began a major modification to The Condor. Using the tow winch to prop the ship up, the party mounted the four sets of personal skis on the bottom of the vessel as improvised pontoons. With a bit of tuning, the crew figured out how to steer into the thrust of their ship's single engine, letting them glide slowly and noisily along the sand.

With the repairs at least partially complete, the crew set sail for Larstown.

GM Notes

For a short session of only a couple hours, a lot happened this week. The party cleverly used tools and a little bit of luck to dodge combat and met up with Kelly, someone whose interests genuinely aligns with theirs. I didn't intend for that encounter to be such a lore dump, but Karth is a small moon, and he was equipped to just share the vague political landscape with the party.

Kelly has a lot of quest hooks going in the source material, of varying weights. Rather than dumping those all at once, I'll play them out a little at a time as / if the characters keep interacting with him.

The GLoGhack we are using uses a d20 resolution mechanic with tests where the player has to roll greater than a target number (10 for most tests). Rather than assigning difficulty scores, I've just been modulating this with advantage and disadvantage. So far that's worked pretty seamlessly, but I have noticed a couple class abilities that might need some tweaks to actually function with this mechanism.

That said, I do note that we haven't used many class abilities yet at all. Part of that comes down to the lack of combat, but part of that has been folks leaning into their equipment and basic knowledge they would have as a spacer.

I could see this sprawling well beyond the confines of the micro-campaign. The players have a clear goal for now in repairing their ship and maybe getting revenge, but there's a lot here in this setting.

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