Captain's GLoG - Session 4
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. This one maybe dwells a little long on the action, but I think it's worth it!
Special Delivery
We rejoin the crew as they reconvene at their ship, the Condor. They've all learned a thing or two in their time on Karth:
- Captain Belee Vanda has diversified out of smuggling into the broader field of hunting down people and things.
- Jaspar Fury's psionic powers have grown more chaotic as they have grown deeper.
- Hora Tilly, always an explorer, has now become an expert navigator as long as the stars are visible.
Hora and Jaspar fill Belee in on their wheeling and dealing. Belee wholeheartedly approves. The crew discusses next steps. They decided to use the power armor to salvage the unexploded air-to-land torpedoes from the gunship they had explored the other day. They arranged to pick up the power armor in the morning and settle in to get some shuteye.
They wake to the hot Karth sun filtering in through the fused holes in their ship's hull. Belee decides to sleep in, perhaps not feeling well. (Her player had to step away for the remainder of the session.)
Outside, they have two visitors:
- Howard, the corrupt marine, drops off the power armor and shows them how to get into it. He reminds them they owe him 9000 credits and psychic powers in three days or else he will report the suit stolen.
- Dr. Fayed, the android physician, looms awkwardly nearby. They provide the crew with a modified motion detector designed to detect psionic energy. Wigoy, they share, seemed to be capable of telepathy. The doctor thinks this detector might find any living specimens that might still be out there.
A few facts about the new armor:
- It's 8' tall, navy blue, and has a stylized hagfish embossed on the breast. It would require several people to move if not worn.
- Wearing it is more about suggesting a direction of motion and letting the servo-skeleton do the work.
- The armor can and will attempt movements that are impossible for human joints, so watch out.
- It has a cowl with a loud speaker in it, but not a fully enclosed helmet or rebreather.
Not wanting to waste time, the crew set out, turning the Condor back towards the ship graveyard on the far side of the moon.
A Mirage?
The crew roughly retraced the route they had taken to get to Larstown, hugging a ridge of mountains to avoid the patch of quicksand they had been mired in before. To do so, they dipped into an old arroyo, skiing along the banks like a halfpipe.
Ahead, they spotted a glimmer of light - a small pool of silvery water sheltered by a single palm tree. They had seen a similar oasis by the Catherizer, so figured they'd stop to refresh their water. Hora suggested taking some samples to test. They pulled the Condor to a stop some 30' away from the bank and Jaspar went ahead to scoop some water up with his hands. They passed right through, grabbing nothing but air.
"Freeze, motherfuckers!" Four figures in flat brimmed hats and hooded ponchos emerged from the center of the pool wielding bows and knives. The crew identified them as desert rangers. They demanded that Jaspar and Hora dropped their weapons and surrender their ship.
The crew tried to bargain, offering them a cut of the salvage they were headed to collect. The folks holding them hostage agreed, demanding to know where they were headed. Hora drew a map to explain. As she did, two of their captors disabled a holographic projector, causing the oasis to flicker away.
Once Hora was done, their captors reneged on their deal, demanding their weapons and their ship. This is where all hell broke loose.
Jaspar handed his gun to one of the rangers, then conjured a mind blade with his psionic powers and swung it at the other. Not a wounding blow, but the ranger was immediately struck by an errant arrow fired by his friend.
Hora took the opportunity to run back into the ship and don the power armor. She emerged, picked up the bowman, and flung him at his peers, then charged forward. She scooped up her machete out of the sand as she passed. Jaspar followed.
In the ensuing melee, Hora cut down one ranger while Jaspar wrestled back his carbine and used it to fire a quick burst, picking off another as they tried to flee. The final ranger surrendered.
The crew collected their adversaries' weapons, leaving the surrendered ranger with only a knife and some supplies. She introduced herself as Flower-of-the-Valley and (somewhat churlishly) asked for a ride as far as the ship graveyard with one of her peers who was only severely injured. Hora and Jaspar grudgingly complied.
As they left, they rummaged through the rangers packs, finding a throwable UAV drone. They looted it and the holographic oasis projector.
Wrecking Crew Redux
The Condor sailed the remainder of the distance without incident. Hora's legs felt like jelly after her brief stint in the armor. They dumped Flower and Abrahms (the other survivor) on the edge of the wreckage zone.
The crew debated going directly to the crashed gunboat and using the power armor to fight the circus beetles inside, but figured it was too risky. Instead, they raised the Catherizer on the radio. Jaspar had the idea of using the larger ships vertical thrusters to kick up an artificial sandstorm, luring the bugs out so they could slip in. The Catherizer's first mate, Moira, agreed but said it would take six hours to "pack up the barbeque" and get the grounded ship flying again.
Hora and Jaspar decided to spend the intervening six hours exploring other wrecks to get the most out of their time with the power armor. After some searching they found a relatively intact vessel - a copper-colored barge that looks like it had been bent around a telephone poll down the middle.
With no obvious entrances at ground level, Jaspar donned the power armor this time and used its immense strength to peel back hull plating to make one. Hora figured they could use the discarded plates to patch the Condor.
Their flashlights revealed the remains of some sort of zoo - skeletons of alien animals piled in cages flanking a central walkway. Hora salvaged the skull of a ten-eyed rhino which she knew some cultures valued as a powerful aphrodisiac. In another cage they found a mummified lemur, but if all the lemur's limbs converged like a pretzel. They picked that up too.
Jaspar decided to check Dr. Fayed's psionic detector. In one of the nearby cages, he found a thin, ambient reading. Inside were the remains of a giraffe-sized creature, seemingly a shambling brain supported by noodle-y limbs covered in fine cilia. The thing had desiccated into a blue, hollow coral. Hora theorized this might be a whole wigoy (and thus immensely valuable if ground up as a drug).
Intrigued, the crew decided to leave it and see if they could find a manifest or log. Checking to the fore, Jaspar forced a door open into a small storage compartment so that Hora could crawl in. Inside, she found a human skeleton wearing some kind of heavy metal collar-like device. She put it in her pack.
Next, the party headed aft, opening the door into a large chamber that looked like it had been open by a giant can-opener. Sunlight shone in from the noonday sun, revealing a wild room. The ceiling was mirrored. Underneath it, in the center of the room, a pink circular bed. To the left, a jacuzzi and to the right, a hookah-like contraption. The center of the bed seemed to be filled with a pile of strange leather sheets printed with tiger stripes. They shifted slightly.
Jaspar was leading the way in the power armor. He recognized the pattern from the weird poncho the dawn guard they had killed owned. He called out, figuring a person was sleeping under there.
It wasn't a person. Four horrible leathery things - like bats but a rippling, millimeter thin sheet of muscle unfurled and squealed. They flung themselves at the crew. Jaspar tried to slam the door shut, but was too slow. One latched onto his head; another, his arm; and another, his leg. The fourth slammed into the door frame.
Jaspar pulled the one off his face with both hands, assisted by the armor's servo motors. Hora ran forward with her machete and sliced the one on his leg, causing it to tear in half under its own tension. Jaspar rushed forward to slice the one he was holding on the jagged edge of the ship's hull, but that made space for the one clinging to the doorframe to dive for Hora.
Unprotected by armor, she found herself deafened, blinded, and rapidly asphyxiating. She raked the machete across her own head, grievously injuring herself but sundering the leathery horror.
In the meantime, Jaspar felt the arm braces buckling as the one attached there constricted. With a few heavy blows he smashed that one and raked the other against a spur of exposed metal.
As the dust settled, the party noticed the bed was full of brown, briquette-shaped eggs. Hora destroyed them in utter revulsion.
GM Notes
I amended the XP system we had been using between sessions. The old system was straight-up XP-for-credits, but I realize almost any sizable score would either be negligible progress or immediately blow out the entire system. How do you scale something like that when a gun is worth a couple thousand, but a ship might be worth millions?
The new system just checks the order of magnitude of their haul: 1000s for level 2, tens of thousands for level 3, hundreds of thousands for level 4, millions beyond that. It's probably abusable by tactically saving up or only partially cashing in treasures, but if the players horde goodies, I'm sure word will start to get around...
This session was an absolute banger. We've had a lot of suspense and relatively little action so far, so it felt satisfying to let loose a bit. The power armor became a key narrative tool for this. Lots of session time was spent exploring the sensory experience of wearing the armor. How does it feel to walk? To talk? To collide with something?
The combat system (being awfully close to a D&D) does have some risk of bogging down. That said, having guns be super lethal and having melee weapons deal guaranteed damage to lightly armored targets helps ratchet up the tension. The crew went along with the rangers to start because they genuinely feared they might die to 4 enemies who had the drop on them (as level 2s), and I think they were right to do so. On the other hand, the power armor itself basically obviates small weapon attacks and dramatically improves the wearer's defense (AC equivalent) compared to most targets. I don't think the system would hold up to being the center piece of play, but it feels consistent enough to keep combat consistent.
We've rounded the corner towards what would usually be the latter half of a typical micro-campaign. It feels like there is so much more to explore here though. I'll check in with the players, but I could see doing another two sessions to answer a few key dramatic questions, rescheduling to see if we can loop more of my group in, then picking up again with this game.