Out There - Session 2
A session report of a planet-hopping, pbta-adjacent sci-fi game I am writing and playing with my in-person group.
We rejoined the crew of My Ex Husband as the pirate cutter Owes You Nothing loomed closer and closer overhead. "My Ex Husband, you've been tampering with our find. Heave to and prepare to be boarded," declared a dry voice over the intercom. The crew was:
- Polly, the ship's captain, former atmo rigger, and divorcée
- Evit, currently at the helm, a smoker and void runner
- Iago, wreck picker and face of the crew
- Bettie, a droid just human-like enough to pass as organic, but only just
The Getaway
Evit grabbed the stick, shouted a heads up to the rest of the crew and quickly sent My Ex Husband careening, turning up and over the pirate ship just as their boarding clamps extended. Polly, Iago, and their passenger, rookie SLB agent Priyava Farrow, managed to grab hold of some cargo webbing. Bettie went tumbling through space, reflexively flailing a set of retractable arm blades. They caught themselves eventually though and were more embarrassed than hurt.
Iago rushed to the cockpit and tried to ring Weather the Storm, the Solar Transit Authority patrol ship that had just left the area. He managed to make contact but an incredulous comms officer on the other end didn't believe they were under attack. They began a lazy turn back towards My Ex Husband.
In the meantime, the pirate ship had lined up a shot. Two ventral turrets lobbed fat balls of plasma. Evit executed a last minute corkscrew, losing relative speed but evading the shots. A floating piece of debris exploded as it caught one of the strays.
Polly had an idea. She signaled Bettie to hop onto the controls for the salvage arms extending from the bottom of the ship. The droid snagged a passing hunk of scrap and tossed it back at their pursuer. The projectile damaged their pursuer's turret, but one of the two arms was dislocated and trailed uselessly behind the ship.
Soon Weather the Storm came into range. The STA ship radioed their apologies as they trained their beam weapons on the approaching pirate vessel. Evit radioed back to Owes You Nothing, jeering them into continuing their pursuit. However, whoever was on the line on the pirate ship recognized his voice. "Evit? Is that you?" he asked, incredulous, but broke off as the STA batteries fired, cutting a white hot gouge in the cutter's hull.
My Ex Husband whizzed away relatively unscathed.
In Transit
The crew set a course for their rendezvous with their employer, Lord Cassian Thorne-Vey, just off the pin beacon line between Egret and Dunlin. They'd need to cruise for a few hours at impulse speed, then a few days via pin drive. They set about some in-flight repairs and continuing their conversation with Agent Farrow.
Polly, Bettie, and Iago worked together to re-engineer the damaged robot arm. It was a bit touch-and-go — Bettie had to catch the wreckage with her foot as it began to tear free and the replacement parts pulled from their salvage weren't a perfect match — but good enough.
At Iago's suggestion, Polly used the hotspot (a sort of local internet connection accessible to ships when in orbit around significantly populated planets) to investigate Farrow's credentials. She found the contact info for her boss, Agent Francisco Ninety-Six, and gave him a ring. Disgruntled about an early call, he confirmed Farrow's story, though her job was to follow the salvaged coupling to its first transaction, not all the way to its end buyer.
Evit tried to use the opportunity to extract a little extra pay for the job, but was quickly shushed by the rest of the crew. Polly confirmed that they would be paid the salvage value of the coupling (10kcr) and Farrow embellished the details of the flight from Owes You Nothing to explain the sensor array she had promised the crew as a bonus.
After the call, the crew turned to Evit and told him he couldn't just keep demanding more money at every turn. At some point it would get them in trouble. Evit said he would stop when it stopped working. The crew left it at that for now.
Preparations made, My Ex Husband lined up with a pin beacon — a huge almond-shaped ring that facilitated faster than light travel between planets. The ship seemed to stretch and elongate as it sped off towards Dunlin.
The pin drive voyage was uneventful. We talked about how the crew decorated their private berths, coffin-like beds with a little bit of overhead storage. Polly's was coated in orange shag carpeting and crowded with beauty supplies in webbed containers; Evit's with rattling whiskey bottles. Iago had retooled their own in faux 40s leather while Bettie's was mostly filled with plants in hydroponic baths. Priyava gratefully claimed a free berth after a fortnight spent sheltering in the faux-wrecked skiff.
The Rendezvous
My Ex Husband arrived at their meeting point on schedule. They found another freighter waiting for them with its transponder off — a silver luxury passenger ship shaped like the head of a shovel.
In preparation for the meeting, Polly had designed a custom tracker beacon designed to blend in with the tangled wreckage still attached to the coupling. The plan was to try to persuade Thorne-Vey to let them carry the salvage to its final destination, but if that didn't work, they could hide out and follow the tracker.
The young aristocrat greeted them enthusiastically over video and the two ships quickly docked, each extending a telescopic gantry to meet in the middle. Thorne-Vey hopped across in his rider's coat and brandishing a baton. His assistant, Dogberry, carried a briefcase with the crew's pay.
While the rest of the crew made the exchange, Iago got permission to go on a tour of the other ship. He got to sample some fruit salad being prepared in a luxury cantina and saw two private cabins. This ship, _Late Again Darling, was captained by a cannonball of a man who went by Plover. It didn't seem equipped for the same kind of salvage work My Ex Husband was.
Polly and Evit laid it on their employer pretty thick. They said the coupling was still tangled in the wreckage they had found it in and that dislodging it might disrupt whatever was keeping it energized. They said it might be too fragile to be towed outside of a hold, but that they'd be happy to carry it the rest of the way for free.
The word "free" raised alarm bells for Thorne-Vey. No one works for free. "No deal" he said, and began to hurry back to his ship. Polly cut him off, asking if his employer would be okay with that. Thorne-Vey turned white. He hemmed and hawed, then eventually demanded they dump the coupling here as they had initially agreed. The crew relented. Evit popped the briefcase, revealing a single credit chip loaded with 8kcr.
Iago rejoined the crew and they pulled away, venting their hold to release the coupling and its tangle of cables and rebar. Evit guided the ship over to the pin beacon, but rather than jumping to faster than light just ducked out of sight behind its frame. With their transponder off, My Ex Husband was all but invisible.
They watched nervously as Late Again Darling perched atop the salvaged coupling, its crew emerging in hardsuits to secure it to the ship's hull. Their quarry turned, flew up to the far side of the beacon they were hiding behind, and disappeared back in the direction of Egret. My Ex Husband followed surreptitiously behind.
GM Notes
This was a difficult session to run. I came away feeling that it was something like a B+: good, but not my absolute best work. I feel like we had a nice variety of action this session and that the limelight was divvied relatively evenly, but I have a few notes for my GMing practice that I hope to improve upon as we play.
First, adjudicating partial successes is tricky. I've always scoffed a little bit at folks complaining about this on Reddit, but it can be tough to come up with "yes, that happens but..." several times in a row while keeping things interesting. We mostly ended up with decent results (the robot arm repair was a little hamfisted in practice), but we ended up with them pretty slowly. I often needed to pause for a long beat. The fix here I think is to mechanize this as a sort of checklist of possible partial successes. I can be rules-bound to them as GM in the same way the players are rules-bound to other parts of the system. It'll still require some creative interpretation, but it should help with the specific problem of repeat adjudication.
Second, I think my prep was a little bit under-defined for this session. I usually go pretty light — one printed sheet with details of likely locations and key ideas I think might be relevant — but I think a little bit more detail on characters, ship interiors, and that sort of thing would really make the session sing. This feels particularly relevant to scenes where multiple new NPCs appear all at once. I struggled to roleplay, let alone differentiate, Thorne-Vey, Dogberry, and Plover at the same time.
Third, the travel rules worked pretty well here, but might need a supporting GM resource. The way it works is that someone rolls 2d6. On a 10+, they arrive without incident. On a 7–9, something happens as they are arriving. On a 6-, something happens mid flight. Then I stage a scene, usually something like the icebreaker of "tell me about what your berth is like." We didn't roll an encounter this time, but if we did I had a short list of 3 prepared, but only one that would make any sense mid transit. This was enough for this session, but having at least 2 of each would be useful. I also totally forgot to discuss fuel usage and capacity, which was in my notes for this session.
Overall though, despite some potential refinements, I think this was a good session and folks had fun. We'll continue fine tuning as the game continues.