Captain's GLoG - Session 7
After a brief hiatus, my micro-campaign group is returning to Desert Moon of Karth by Joel Hines for another six or so sessions. We're using 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.
Old Friends
We picked up with the crew of the Condor returning to Larstown. They had bested a psionic alien creature they believed to be a wigoy and were now towing it back for a rendezvous with their contact, Dr. Fayed.
As the crew arrived at Larstown, they saw something in the sky - a small craft being shot down by the orbital defense system. That craft in turn ejected an escape pod that landed not too far away. From it emerged, surprisingly enough, an old friend. That means that the crew consisted of:
- Captain Belee Vanda, ex-politician turned smuggler and bounty hunter.
- Hora Tilly, vagabond and explorer extraordinaire.
- Lambro Das, hired gun and fugitive on the run.
Lambro explained that he had been in the custody of a Manian prison ship and had managed to escape only to crash land. The crew welcomed him aboard.
Jaspar Fury, the ship's psion, decided to hop off in Larstown and attend to some personal business (their player unfortunately unable to join).
Long Night
The crew was dismayed to find that despite it being about 6am, it was still black as midnight out. Karth orbited a blue gas giant named Tabernas, and once every two weeks that larger planet eclipsed the sun for a full week. The long night had begun.
Lambro tried eating a chunk of the dead wigoy before being stopped by Belee. It tasted like ammonia and pulled away easily from the body.
Belee decided to stay with the ship while Hora and Lambro went to contact Dr. Fayed. They figured it was easier for him to come to the ship than for them to stealthily transport the giraffe-sized carcass.
In the town square, Hora and Lambro encountered a young woman in violet with her ear pressed to the ground. Hora recognized her as the attendant at the General Store and called out to her. She just held a finger up and shushed them.
Hora decided to get down and listen. After tuning out the ambient noises of Larstown, she heard it - a distant whirring with a rhythm "kachunk." The young woman nodded knowingly and said that was a sandsquid, or so her mother had told her. Hora figured it had come from due east.
Doctor's Visit
The duo arrived at Dr. Fayed's clinic without incident, finding the android doctor standing silently in the middle of an empty room. Hora invited the doctor to join them, downplaying the scale of their find, and they excitedly packed their bag.
Aboard the ship, Dr. Fayed was elated. They had expected a tissue sample, not a whole creature. They conducted some initial examinations, dictating into a pocket recorder:
- The barbed spears on the creature's forelimbs were unlike anything found on previous fossils.
- The creatures flesh seemed to be continuing to calcify even after death while still being fleshy on the inside.
- These differences could be sexual dimorphism, but perhaps were more likely to be some kind of extreme lifecycle state akin to a zombie salmon.
Dr. Fayed revealed that they had encountered one other tissue sample, one provided by a colleague at the Silver Spire, and that was nothing like this.
Overjoyed, the doctor made good on their end of their bargain. They knew the location of what they believed to be an orbital badge that would allow the bearer to traverse the orbital defense grid safely. Dr. Fayed had seen what they believed to be one hanging over the governor's desk inside their manor, mounted under a taxidermized fish. They visited the manor for a monthly physical and would be dropping by in two days time.
The crew asked if the doctor could describe the interior. Thanks to their superhuman memory, they provided a detailed drawing of the badge itself as well as a floorplan of the rooms they had visited.
Finally, they gave the crew a bonus of 4kcr for their extraordinary find - not a huge portion, but all the physician could afford to spare. With that, they set off to find a card to transport the remains back to their lab.
Staking Out the Manor
The crew spent the remainder of the day buying supplies, hanging out at Desperado (the karaoke bar), and scoping out the manor. They gleaned the following:
- The manor was a three story structure surrounded by chain-link fences topped by barbed wire. It had two larger levels and a small veranda top.
- It was an oldtech building that had been retrofitted with corrugated paneling and adobe walls.
- The guard changed every 6 hours and their appeared to be 4 guards on shift at any point.
- The governor's secretarial staff ended their workday at 6pm, but occasionally left for business elsewhere in Larstown during the day.
- The manor compound abutted the curtain wall that surrounded Larstown. The tower nearby never had a guard, only an old, seemingly under-tuned autoturret.
- Close inspection with night vision and infravision goggles revealed that one unknown chamber on the second floor had extensive cabling and piping webbed through it.
During the stake out, Belee radioed Lisa Krieg at the nearby camel ranch to inquire about getting a new engine mounted on the Condor. She quoted them 10kcr for the work or she'd be willing to comp them if they did a small job for her. The job turned out to be "killing" a ghost, the woman in white the crew had seen in the sands due north of Silver Spire. Apparently the apparition had started visiting Lisa's ranch and spooking her camels.
The crew weighed their options. They decided on the following rough plan:
- Break into the manor to steal the orbital badge and kill Reverend Oboku, the shadowy figure responsible for the Condor being stranded in the first place.
- Escape Larstown and meet with Captain Jonah Kelly, cashing in on a 20kcr bounty for Oboku's head.
- Meet with the Valley Rangers at Fort Vee Cee and barter for a salvaged engine (potentially leveraging the knowledge that their may still be living wigoy).
- Use the money from Kelly to pay Lisa Krieg to repair their ship.
- Leave this godforsaken moon behind.
GM Notes
As we're jumping back into Karth, I'm gratified that the players are excited enough to stick with these characters and see what happens next. We've got a few new players rotating in and I plan to coordinate with Jaspar's player to do a sort of faction turn behind the scenes.
I'm pretty happy with Dr. Fayed as a character. I often end up stumbling over performing them, but I'm not much good at character voices in the first place. Their mix of genuine excitement at the find and ensuing willingness to support the player's schemes feels earned though after everything the crew has been through.
I was a little underprepped for this session. I had the manor drawn in my notebook, but not in a player facing form. It was reasonable to anticipate that they would get access to the floorplan (or at least scout the perimeter) so I really should have had that ready to go. I drew a quick sketch with my mouse, but it was less than ideal.
In general, I feel like we increasingly are straying from Desert Moon of Karth as written. I'm needing to draw more of my own maps and read more between the lines for character motivations. Lisa Krieg in particular kinda stumps me, but for reasons I won't go into until after this micro-campaign has concluded.
The central premise of trying to get off Karth continues to be generative it would seem. The players spent a lot of time scheming and scouting this session, but it feels like good rising tension in preparation for the heist we will no doubt lead off with next session.