Captain's GLoG - Session 3
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. I'm writing this a couple days after the fact and this was a fact-dense session, so I've elided a lot of detail here. Hopefully it's still a fun read.
Bump in the Night
We rejoin the crew of the Condor as they skim rapidly along the desert sand. They were:
- Captain Belee Vanda, an ex-politician turned to smuggling
- Jaspar Fury, a psion and former peasant on a medieval world
- Hora Tilly, an explorer and vagabond with a knack for locks
In the early evening, they had modified the Condor to coast along the sand on a set of jury-rigged skis. Now they were cruising through the night, making good time towards Larstown.
As the party crested a dune north of the Silver Spire, they slid out into a field of quicksand. The ship began to dip beneath the grit as it slid forward. As if that weren't enough, Jaspar poked his head out of a hatch to see a lady in white drifting in the corona of their single engine. If she had been there a minute ago, she would have been hit.
Belee wrestled with the controls and after an initial lurch, managed to angle the Condor up out of the sand. As the ship sped away, the figure grew smaller but no less visible. Reviewing their bodycam footage, the crew found she just looked like a gout of arc welder plasma.
The crew decided to press on to Larstown.
A Larstown Hello
Arriving around dawn, the crew pulled up outside of the perimeter gate of Larstown. The settlement sat at the base of the space elevator, all prefab walls and adobe buildings. Belee pulled the keys and the crew mustered the valuables they had scavenged to sell in town.
Entering through the main gate, the crew found a crowd gathered at the base of a bronze statue of an exultant man pointing to the heavens as he planted his foot on a shovel. 8 marines in navy power armor guarded a cigar smoking man, who was busy sentencing a terrified prisoner. The fellow was cuffed to a chair which in turn was strapped with rockets. The party chose not to intervene, not wanting to make trouble.
The cigar smoker activated a pad on the back of the chair and the rockets fired, launching the prisoner skyward where he was instantly annihilated by blue beams lancing from the orbital defense system. The crew observed he was only 300 or so feet up.
As the crowd dispersed, Hora spotted someone matching the description of Taiko the Hammer, Captain Jonah Kelly's agent in Larstown. They interviewed the colossal pirate on a variety of topics:
- Reverend Oboku was Governor Stieg Tanaka's private chaplain and rarely left her compound.
- Tanaka has at least one access badge to bypass the defense system. Taiko suspected that Dr. Fayed, a local physician, might have another.
- The best places to sell goods are either the General Store Emporium or Desperado, a karaoke bar by the space elevator.
- Another member of Kelly's crew - a skeletal android named Bilberto - was in town too and plotting a mutiny. Taiko suggested steering clear. The crew spotted Taiko some drinking money and headed over to those last two to see about selling their loot.
Around Town
Picture the following as a montage from Cowboy Bebop. The crew spent most of the morning and early afternoon bumming around town - meeting locals, scouting out locations, and buying provisions.
- General Store Emporium proved to be a bodega-like outfitter with terrible prices and an overpriced membership plan. Also the only option for survival gear and tools.
- Desperado was a karaoke bar run by an old man named Frances, mostly empty just after dawn but blessedly cool. Obviously connected to the black market, he bought the crews' salvaged hard suits and threw in a free breakfast (with actual eggs!)
- The First Bank of Larstown sat just off the main square and was heavily guarded. The crew considered taking out a loan, but figured they would just get sharked.
- The Governor's Manor was a refurbished oldtech structure surrounded by a chain-link fence. They saw folks - servants and secretaries - coming and going, but no obvious patrols.
Frances shared some local lore as well:
- Lars Tanaka, the founder of Larstown had died somewhere near a huge statue in the desert due east. He had an access badge.
- Sandsquids are colossal predators and maybe the only native lifeform on Karth. You can tell they are coming by a smell like half-digested cabbage.
- The local occupiers are the MEF, the Manian Expeditionary Force. They basically are content to just tax commerce going up the space elevator and mostly leave the wigoy prospectors and locals to themselves.
The crew notably did not find any port or ship hangar. They asked Frances if he could help with repairs or sourcing a new engine. He said probably, but it'd be pricy.
The Doctor
Around noon, Belee Vanda went back to check on the ship (aka her player had to duck out). Jaspar and Hora went to meet Dr. Fayed.
The doctor turned out to be an uncannily polite android. When asked about a badge, they said they might be able to give the crew access to one (or at least the opportunity to steal one), but they would need a favor in return.
Fayed revealed that wigoy is not just a mineral; it's the fossilized remains of a maybe sentient species. Fayed had the coordinates for a picked over wigoy den and suspected that while prospectors might have stripped all the fossils they might have ignored something like an egg. They asked the crew to head there with some specialized scanning equipment and scan for any hidden biological samples.
Jaspar and Hora enthusiastically agreed.
The Marine
To equip themselves for this job and for the eventual task of mounting a new engine, the crew decided to secure a suit of power armor. Finding it prohibitively expensive, Jaspar came up with a scheme to con one of the MEF marines into lending them one.
Jaspar and Hora walked into the marines barracks, an adobe longhouse near the center of town. There they scanned for anyone suffering from symptoms of withdrawal, particularly from Ritalin-II. Luckily, they found someone - a young marine named Howard who was doing paperwork on a navy blue clipboard and looking rough.
Jaspar used his psychic powers to give the marine the feeling of another dose. This and a little prodding were enough to convince the guy that a) he could learn these "ghost powers" and b) if he did, he'd never need to buy drugs again. He agreed to meet them for drinks that night at Desperado.
Around nightfall, the crew found Howard alone at a both and brokered a deal. He would arrange for a suit of power armor to get lost on its way to repair. In return, Jaspar would teach him to be a psion and the crew would pay him 9000 credits. If they didn't pay up and return the suit within three days, he'd report it stolen.
Jaspar and Hora said they needed to confer with their captain before making such a big decision...
GM Notes
We started the session with one hell of a ruling. Encounters in Desert Moon of Karth usually occurs on doubles on a d100, but if the party is using a loud vehicle, the rules instruct you to roll 10d10 instead. 1) this is a comical number of dice to roll and 2) what happens if you roll multiple doubles? I put it to the table and everyone agreed I should roll an encounter for each unique set of doubles.
In retrospect that doesn't feel like the rules as intended, but it certainly made for a dramatic travel encounter. It seems like a reasonable trade for 6x movement speed.
I feel like my actual handling of the quicksand encounter was a little clumsy. Belee failed a test, so I threatened to sink the ship. Then she passed the same test, and succeeded so I let them speed off. I think I should have stressed taking a different approach more or thrown to another party member (specifically Hora probably, since Jaspar was off seeing the ghost).
I loved the flavor of Larstown, but it was kind of a mess to run. The lack of bookmarks in the PDF really got me a few times and I found myself frantically scrolling between the map on one page and the keys on another, trying to get a sense for the space. The descriptions of places and people are functional but sparse, so I found myself having to invent (and thus keep track of) a lot. It doesn't help that I've transplanted some of Kelly's crew here.
The players for their part expressed feeling like they've gotten a ton done each session. I don't know whether that's the slightly lower player count, the no-fuss rules system, the setting, or some mix of all of the above, but I'm glad to hear it.
For next session, I officially need to make stat blocks for all the local fauna (and potential encounterable humans). It shouldn't be too much work - just a half dozen or so entries. I don't want to juggle improvising that on top of consulting the text.