Mediums and Messages

Captain's GLoG - Session 6

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.

On the Road Again

We rejoined the crew at the end of a quick cat nap aboard the Condor. As the sun rose, they readied themselves to head back out into the dunes:

Their destination was the site Dr. Fayed had marked for them - some sort of ancient Wigoy structure that the Doctor believed might still contain some traces of living alien tissue. The crew weighed their options and decided it would be fastest and safest to circumnavigate Karth, heading southwest to circle around some mountainous ridges, then coasting due northeast up to the site.

Only a few hours into their trip, Jaspar noticed a structure on the horizon - a small farmstead with a hangar-like building built out to one side. They decided to stop and say hello, meeting the camel rancher Lisa Krieg. The old woman offered the crew breakfast (which they didn't take) and when asked, said she could probably help the crew mount a new engine. She maintained a small aircraft herself and figured it couldn't be that different. They parted on amicable terms with her disarming her extensive system of auto-turrets to let the crew leave.

Later in the day, as the Condor cruised along a well trodden path through the desert, Belee noticed an odd ridge of sand stretched between two pillars of stone. She swerved at the last minute as a party of Valley Rangers pulled up a trip wire laced with explosives.

The party disembarked in a spray of sand and engaged the rangers in close combat. Hora donned the advanced battle dress and used it to hold the attention of three rangers with small arms while Jaspar climbed the pillar and took out a sniper with a conjured mind blade. Belee showed off her trickshooting and managed to nonlethally shoot down a ranger running at her. Despite a few close calls, none of the crew were significantly injured.

When the dust settled the crew claimed some weapons (a spear, a rifle, and the anti-materiel rifle the sniper had up in their roost). They also stole the explosive cable, essentially a series of pipe bombs wired in tandem to a chain. Hora diffused it before they brought it aboard.

Madame Suparint

Late in the afternoon, the party saw another structure on the horizon, this time a dome seemingly ribbed with Jetsons-like rings. The crew decided to visit again, just to see who lived there. Upon closer inspection the place was ringed with barbed wire, skulls on crystalline pikes, and hardened barricades. A sentry in the attire of the desert rangers waved for them to stop.

The party considered just booking it, but decided they always could later. The sentry called their leader, Suparint Kirzen, who arrived shortly thereafter with a retinue of attendants. Kirzen projected calm dignity as she went on alone to meet with the crew, who sent former-politician Belee out to parley.

Kirzen proved surprisingly cordial. She understood that their previous skirmishes had been mostly due to her people attempting to rob the Condor and offered an end to hostilities. She warned that Ranger Aybram of the watch tower would likely not respect that offer, taking the assaults more personally.

Kirzen asked what the crew were doing in this area. Captain Belee shared that they were headed to an old Wigoy site to search for a living creature. Kirzen expressed that a living Wigoy would have deep religious significance to the Rangers who saw the aliens as revered teachers. She asked them to return and share any news of what they found.

Belee in turn asked if the rangers had any starship engines. Kirzen replied that they might - that was the kind of salvage they tended to hoard. She said she would search their inventory and would be willing to trade when next they meet.

Surprised at how well that had gone, the party set out for their destination once more.

The Spire

The Condor arrived at nightfall. Even with the sun setting, the structure in front of them was weirdly pearlescent. The location Dr. Fayed had marked was home to a spire of drippy coral-looking stone, some ten stories tall. It was covered in nodes and apertures at irregular intervals and the exterior swirled in such a way that you could comfortably walk up its exterior up to all but the highest point.

Belee made some repairs to the UAV drone they had stolen from the Valley Ranges the day before. She mounted a bodycam and the psionic detector Dr. Fayed had given them on the drone and rigged it with basic flight controls. Jaspar ducked out and threw it, so that it could glide quietly and scan the exterior of the building.

Finding little of note, the crew recovered the drone and headed into the interior at ground level. They left the power armor behind, taking only small arms and tools.

Belee led the way through a roughly human scale aperture at ground level. It narrowed as they slid inside, but fortunately opened up into a large interior space before becoming impassible.

The inside was too large to illuminate with the groups single flashlight. The ground was covered in strange, foot-wide eggshell-like stones. Occasionally a drippy stalagmite reached up into the darkness above.

Jaspar unpacked the drone again and threw it to take an interior sweep. He found the space irregularly filled with stalagmites and stalagmites, sometimes connected with a resinous mucus. In the exact middle of the cavernous interior they found a large surface of that resin in the floor. They detected psionic signatures at those exact coordinates.

The crew retrieved the drone and decided to trek out into the middle of the space. It was hard going over the stone egg shells, but they eventually made it. Hora tapped it with her gun, finding it hard as stone but hollow. The crew tried tilting the psionic sensor to detect on the Y axis. When they did, they found that their were two sources here - one directly above them and a mess of sources down below. The crew decided to head up first.

Higher Power

The crew trekked back out, then climbed the exterior of the spire, walking up and up in a spiral. The apertures near the top were smaller, requiring a human to crawl through to access the interior. By the time they reached the highest aperture, it was fully dark out.

By the light of Hora's flashlight, the crew army crawled back inside. They found themselves on a narrow horizontal beam of calcified coral-like material that webbed out to a central stalactite. That stalactite dripped below the level they were on to hang like a uvula.

Hanging from that uvula by six limbs were the bleached remains of a wigoy.

Acting on some previous speculation and a cryptic comment from Dr. Fayed, Hora wanted to drip water from her canteen down onto the remains to see if it rehydrated. The crew tied themselves together with paracord, then Belee sidled out first, followed by Hora. Jaspar stayed behind at their entry.

Hora poured water down the stalactite so it flowed onto the body below. She was horrified when the thing began to move.

It's exterior layer of fossilized flesh seemed to chip and crack away as it move, turning its colossal head to look curiously up at the crew. It unfurled its arms, revealing its front two limbs to be tipped with cruel harpoon-like spikes. It raised itself up to Hora's level. It's head unfurled like a flower, revealing its exposed esophagus and the thing let out a psionic shriek audible only to her that sounded like dozens of screaming human voices.

The thing swung one of its arms to destroy the platform next to Hora, cutting the line between Belee and Hora and separating the two by a four foot gap of open air. Captain Belee shot the thing with her revolver, hoping to sever a salvageable sample while Jaspar began conjuring telekinetic hands to try to catch his crewmates if they fell.

Hora swung at the creature but failed to connect. In return, it collapsed it mouth around her, hoisting her into the air to pulverize her with its eye nodes.

Just when it looked like Hora might be dead, Jaspar unloaded with his lascarbine (rolling a critical and max damage!). The laser fire peppered the creature mercilessly, causing it to disgorge Hora and lose its grip on the stalactite as it fell back mortally wounded.

Hora fell through the open air for a moment before the line connected to Jaspar snapped taught. He managed to wedge himself into the aperture they came in through well enough to not go tumbling. He also sent the telekinetic hands racing down, just barely catching the corpse before it splattered on the ground nine stories below. It still hit the ground hard, but not so bad as it might have.

Shaken the crew crawled out of the tower and down to inspect their kill. Belee checked to make sure the thing was dead, and it certainly seemed to be - one mass of blueish bruises. The crew decided to use the power armor to widen the aperture enough to pull the corpse free and load it onto their ship to bring back to Dr. Fayed. The whole process took til around midnight.

As the Condor sped away, the crew reflected on whether it was okay to kill maybe the last of a dying species, whether this was in fact the same creature as the one they had found dead or that the Valley Rangers revered as "Teacher," and whether ought to give the body to the unnerving Dr. Fayed.

We left with a shot of the green resin floor in the Wigoy spire - the point the creature had hit the ground. At that point we saw a star-shaped crack forming in the ground, gradually widening.

GM Notes

We decided in advance that a) we would continue playing Captain's GLoG and Desert Moon of Karth for another micro-campaign and b) this would be a "season ender." We wanted some big action and some resolution to problems set up earlier in the micro-campaign.

These kinds of narrative goals are really at odds with an old school style of play full of travel encounters and interesting locations in a pointcrawl. In practice, I'm glad we have the ship: encounters would be less frequent otherwise, but we would spend so much more time on desert travel.

The crew met some key characters from around Karth this session: Lisa Krieg (note that the text calls her Kreig, but I messed up the pronunciation, so Krieg it is for us) and Suparint Kirzen. In both cases I used a reaction roll, modified slightly by the players previous actions. In both cases it came up cautiously positive, so what could have been quite negative encounters ended up being new bonds formed. I'm glad that their interactions with the Valley Rangers turned out positive. They've run afoul of them twice, but that faction has some depth and feels like a helpful antidote to the unrelenting MEF or Dawn Guard.

Mothership material being Mothership material, our encounter with a big spooky creature worked well. It was a good horrific moment that the players were lucky enough to survive enough to survive an encounter with. One more turn and Hora would have been devoured whole. Students of Desert Moon of Karth will note that I have transplanted that creature from somewhere else and made some layout changes to the Wigoy spire. I've had these adjustments in my notes since before the campaign, but I always figured this would be a site for a climactic encounter.

Players remarked on how fun it is to have so many questions open that are engaging to the players, but not necessarily materially relevant enough to the characters that they want to risk their lives to find out more. The crew is leaving a lot of questions left unanswered here and that builds a sort of campaign-long suspense and intrigue that I love to see come together.

Captain's GLoG has mostly worked! Pretty good for a very rough draft of a system. I'll make some edit between "seasons," particularly to the stats. It feels like Prowess (our all purpose action stat), contributes to too much.

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