Halfway Station 3.0

Rattenbury Ghost: A Whale of a Time

“Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

With the Rattenbury Ghost undergoing annual maintenance on Balina, and both Dr Zed and Germaine off gallivanting somewhere, Ed Dyson and Big Ted find themselves in the starport bar. (The two ladies have not left any contact details, because Big Ted might use them for unsavoury purposes.)

Questionable decisions are made; decisions involving a friendly airship captain, a conversation on the value of mechanical sky-whale ambergris, and more Inlander Rum than might be medically advisable.

This leads to an agreement with the friendly airship captain about using his vessel to board a giant mechanical sky-whale – a relic of the Old Empire – and relieve it of its ambergris. Unfortunately, on approach, the sky-whale discharges a bolt of lightning at the airship from a rod on its back, and Big Ted takes this as a personal affront. One thing leads to another, and after a short firefight involving Big Ted’s plasma rifle, the pair find themselves in the rapidly-closing maw of the sky-whale as it plummets to the distant ocean below, broken and on fire.

Speaking of broken, the airship has seen better days, days when its gasbag was free of holes and properly attached to it, and it wasn’t on fire itself. As it disappears down the sky-whale’s gullet, Dyson and Big Ted disembark in an informal manner; the captain stays with his ship. Dyson is carrying his tools and the ship’s cat, and immediately decides that the sky-whale is in need of his services as an engineer (poor thing); Big Ted is carrying a wide selection of firearms, and wearing his usual outfit; bishop’s robes (taken from one of his earlier victims), a scalp with a Mohican haircut (ditto) which owing to insanitary personal habits has become fused with his own scalp fur, and a bishop’s mitre perched at a jaunty angle on top of the scalp. His motivation is more mercenary, and involves looting ambergris.

The maw itself is full of screeching, bioluminescent sky-krill and conversation is impossible, so skirting the conveyor belt taking the krill aft, the pair find a walkway and head aft, as forward out of the maw is undesirable and sideways is not viable. This brings them to a krill processing area, currently blocked by a damaged (and familiar-looking) airship which is being dismantled by busy maintenance robots. Following signs leads them to the control room, clearly automated and minding its own business since the Old Empire fell centuries ago, where over-eager fire suppression robots douse them in flame-retardant foam. Big Ted roars threats at the robots and orders them into the krill processor to fight the fires there; he will later claim to have intimidated them, but Dyson privately suspects they are simply doing their job. Big Ted discovers the lever which opens and closes the maw, but decides not to use it for the moment. He is assisted in this decision by a swarm of repairbots which takes him for some sort of intruder, and advance, intent on disassembling him. He dissuades them with long, uncontrolled bursts from his assault rifle, disabling many.

As the falling sky-whale starts to encounter turbulence, Big Ted follows signs leading to the Emergency Ballast Cannon – it’s a cannon, he’s bound to be able to do something interesting with it – while Dyson makes for the power collector. As Big Ted arrives, the pneumatic cannon starts firing pulses of water in an attempt to lighten ship; he quickly realises that he could climb inside the cannon and be fired outside the whale, plummeting to his death separately. He reserves this option for later and makes his way back to the krill processor, intent on helping put out the fire, pausing only to gun down another robot repair crew.

Meanwhile, Dyson has discovered that the power collector is working backwards, shooting bolts of electricity out of the whale instead of collecting it from lightning strikes. He decides that it is overloading because the burning airship has raised the boiler temperature too high – like all human-built power plants, this one is essentially a steam engine; krill are burned to heat water, generating steam which turns turbines to produce electricity. He is delayed by Griselda, a crazy cat lady who has made her home aboard the sky-whale for reasons that will never become clear.

Dyson moves on to the engine room. Unnecessary amounts of dangerous moving parts? Check. Thermal sterilisation vents? Check. Krill-tenderising auto hammers? Check. Sky-whale nosing over so that the floor is now the wall? Check. Auto hammers starting to bend under the change of direction? Check. Dyson clambers as quickly and cautiously as he can manage to the engine itself, but can’t see what’s wrong with it.

Dyson knows from a diagram he found in the control room that there is an emergency brake, which he hopes is an enormous parachute, and he also knows where it is, so he makes his way there, using his commlink to send Big Ted back to the control room to open the maw. (His thinking is that when he deploys the parachute, the jerk will free the remains of the airship and eject it, lightening the ship while also reducing the temperature and therefore the electrical overcharge.) Big Ted reaches the control room with some difficulty, as the sky-whale is now tumbling slowly end over end, and pulls the maw-opening lever, before heading back to the krill processor and thence to the maw. Meanwhile, Dyson has found good news and bad news; the good news is that the emergency brake is indeed a cluster of huge parachutes, the bad news is that this area is on fire, full of smoke, flames, and the remains of parachutes. He gambles that there must be a backup chute somewhere, and at length finds it. Calling a warning to Big Ted, he pulls the manual override and hangs on for dear life as the backup chute deploys with a bone-jarring 3G deceleration.

Several things now happen more or less at once. First, Dyson manages to hang on to something, and even manages to secure White Star, the ship’s cat. Second, a scream and a terrified miaow, followed by a soggy thump, suggest that Griselda and her cat didn’t hang on; they will later be found smeared over the forward bulkhead of the power collector. Third, the ambergris storage area yields several tons of unprocessed ambergris, which smells like raw sewage and is the consistency of thick mud; this falls into the engine room with a disgusting noise. Fourth, the airship does indeed come unstuck, and tumbles into the maw, where it sticks again, tangled up in its own gasbag and the sky-whale’s krill scoop. Fifth, the airship captain waves and calls for help from the wreckage. Sixth, Big Ted uses his plasma rifle to blast the airship free, incinerating the captain, and artfully uses the recoil to knock himself backward along the gullet into the krill processing area so that he doesn’t fall out. (He will later deny any knowledge of what happened to the captain.)

Dyson rushes to the control room, where he manages despite his lack of skill to gain control of the sky-whale and make a forced landing on the ocean, while Big Ted rolls around in the ambergris so that it sticks in his fur, having failed to think of any other way of collecting it.

As the splashing subsides, Dyson manages – again despite his lack of skill – to steer the sky-whale as an impromptu boat, heading for the nearest port. There, they will sell the ambergris for a tidy sum; Dyson uses his share to fund repairs for the sky-whale, while Big Ted purchases and consumes a truly mind-blowing quantity and diversity of hallucinogenic drugs, as well as the services of professional companions of several species with low standards.

GM Notes

Much to my surprise and delight, a chance arose to run something for the Rattenbury Ghost players, a group I have long thought dispersed. Such opportunities are getting very few and far between, so existing PCs and one-shot scenarios are the order of the day. Thus it was that I hastily converted the old PCs to SWADE and dug out a suitable one-shot; the delightful one page dungeon from Loke Battlemats, A Whale of a Time.

Now, while the Pirates of Drinax crew love a richly detailed setting with a story arc and connected adventures, this lot just want to jump in, solve the puzzle, shoot the bad guys and take their stuff; anything more complex just gets in the way for them. Which setting are they in? I don’t have to say – the PCs are far enough out in the boonies that it doesn’t matter. There was an Old Empire which collapsed centuries ago, and tramp freighters now ply the spaces between dozens of independent planets with idiosyncratic cultures along the former frontier. That’s pretty much all we know.

Honestly, I think we have more fun with less prep time this way. Like any other form of presentation, success is all about knowing your audience.

Purple Twilight 03: Rescue on Ruie, Part 1

Regina, 1105 Week 01

Mr Johnson introduces the party to Marc hault-Oberlindes as discreet and reliable individuals who are taking freight to Ruie. Oberlindes asks if they would mind rescuing his son from a maximum security prison while they’re there, and they agree to do so for a handsome fee.

They gather information on Ruie, Sergei and Rustum Prison on Regina before departing for Ruie. They consider getting a secret compartment surgically implanted in Kyase to conceal a weapon, replacing one of his kidneys, but Kyase decides that concealing a weapon in this way would be dishonourable.

Jumpspace, 1105 Week 02

They spend an uneventful week in jumpspace, en route to Ruie with cargo and passengers.

They brainstorm a variety of approaches to the problem during the flight, and discarding such plans as fixing Nebelthorn’s economic woes, subcontracting the work to a team of commandos, and crash-landing the Purple Twilight on top of the guard barracks, decide that they will disguise the human members of the party as National Police officers, and go to the prison with Kyase as their ‘prisoner’. Once inside, free the prisoners and start a riot, escaping under cover of the confusion.

Ruie, 1105 Week 03

They consider approaching the Imperial Consul in Jingarlu, but decide against it. Talin does some networking around the starport, supported by the Agent and Kyase, and makes contact with the underworld, who steer him towards someone who can help with the plan. Turgut Veli (for that is his name) is a thin man, with birdlike features and eyes that miss nothing. For a price, he is able to provide them with forged entry and exit visas for four (the Agent, Talin, Kyase and Sergei), and forged National Police ID for the Agent and Talin.

Meanwhile, the Agent has been researching the target, and finds a very useful autobiography by someone who served time in Rustum prison, which gives the general routine and protocols. Local TV stations regularly feature thrillers involving Nebelthorn’s National Police as the bad guys, so they acquire theatrical costumes which should allow them to pass as NP officers.

Turgut Veli is also able to provide suitable sidearms for the NP officers – pistols and SMGs – and offers a discount in exchange for taking a package back to Regina for him on the quiet.

The band cross the border posing as stormchasers, interested in the frequent and severe storms which wrack the countryside around Rustum Prison. The border guards note their cameras, binoculars and other storm-chasing equipment, and point out that taking pictures of government or military facilities will win them an all-expenses-paid vacation in one of Nebelthorn’s many jails. They decide to weave this into their story; they will claim to have found Kyase taking pictures of Rustum Prison.

As it’s about 350 km to the prison, they decide to stop overnight in a small-town hotel and look for a military truck to steal (for use in the final approach) in the morning. The Agent checks to see if they’re being followed or are otherwise under surveillance. It looks like no-one is following them, so although there is still some tension from being ‘behind enemy lines’, they feel quietly confident so far…

To be continued…

GM Notes

Sadly, one player has had to bow out, so Tibiant Saltz stayed behind on Regina, where he will be safe and warm until needed again. This means the crew is an engineer short, and Talin is pulling double shifts. The easiest way to represent that is to say he gets a Multi-Action Penalty (-2) on Piloting and Repair rolls. The easiest fix is to hire an NPC.

We still need to agree how to handle finances and inventory. One player wants to track them, but loosely; one is happy to leave it as ‘whatever we think is reasonable at the time’; no votes yet from the other two. I don’t mind as long as I don’t have to keep any accounts.

The Agent got a critical failure on the roll to Notice surveillance, so the players know something went horribly wrong; but as yet there are no signs of what it was.

Purple Twilight, Session 2: The Scrap Heap, Part 2

“You all know how beastly tigers are
(Out in, out in, out in India)
They bite; they scratch; they make an awful fuss
It’s no use stroking them and saying puss puss puss”
– The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Hunting Tigers Out in India

Our Heroes are surreptitiously exploring a hulk in the scrapyard when they hear a growling noise behind them…

Regina Downport Scrapyard, 1105 Week 01

Dramatis personae: The Agent, steward; Talin Boone, captain and pilot; Kyase Eiyetea, aslan cargo handler and security; Tibiant Saltz, engineer; the Doctor, medic.

Kyase immediately stalks towards the noise, while Talin looks in the lockers on the off-chance a useful weapon has been left behind – and withdraws a rusty cutlass, which he tosses to Kyase. Talin grabs a piece of expendable cloth from someone, wraps it around his crowbar, and drenches it in alcohol from a hip flask, creating a flaming brand in case the creature is afraid of fire, as most animals are. He advances to back up Kyase. The Agent rummages in her clothing for purposes as yet unknown, winking at Talin as she does so, and the Doctor spies some interesting-looking gas cylinders off to one side.

The Agent draws a concealed pistol and holds it ready. Looking around for a way to help, Tibiant Saltz notices a loose section of floor and calls out to Kyase, suggesting he lures the creature onto it, where it might fall through. And if it doesn’t, he thinks, maybe the big canisters to Kyase’s left can be toppled on it.

The Doctor, trusting his colleagues to handle whatever is making the noise, investigates the gas cylinders and discovers that they contain traces of oxygen and acetylene. He spies an air compressor stored in the same rack, and connects it to one of the cylinders, intending to fill it.

The source of the noise turns out to be a large carnivore, which leaps on Kyase, biting and slashing with abandon. Caught off-guard by the speed and power of its attack, Kyase is pushed back, stunned, lacerated and bleeding heavily.

Talin leaps forward to help Kyase, waving his flaming brand, and manages to poke the carnivore on its nose. It rears up over the fallen Kyase, roaring in pain and rage. The Agent has been waiting for this moment, and fires her pistol at it, scoring a direct hit. The bullet is small, but the surprise is great, and the beast is stunned, trying to swat away what it imagines to be troublesome insects.

Shaking his head to clear it, Kyase decides on his trademark all-or-nothing attack and lunges forward, flailing about him with the cutlass. The fight lasts only seconds, ending with the creature dead and Kyase badly wounded.

While the Doctor applies some very effective first aid to Kyase, the Agent extracts the bullet from the beast and mangles the entry wound with a crowbar to conceal the evidence that it was shot. She and Talin both light cigars to conceal the smell of gunpowder. The Doctor explains to Kyase that he will need to spend about a week healing up, but that he can do that aboard ship during the next hyperspace jump. The Agent returns her pistol whence it came, and Talin conceals the cutlass in their pile of salvage.

The Agent, the Doctor, and Tibiant then make good their escape and seek out Mr Johnson, providing him with the information the group has acquired and collecting payment. Meanwhile, two police arrive in an air/raft, attracted by reports of gunfire. Talin persuades them that the noise was just Kyase laying about himself with a crowbar when he was attacked, and they agree that no laws were broken. While they are sympathetic to Kyase’s plight, regulations stipulate that he needs to be interviewed several times while the scene of the incident undergoes a thorough investigation, so Talin and Kyase spend the next couple of days in police custody being interviewed and giving statements, before being released with no charges.

The Purple Twilight‘s current cargo needs to be delivered to Ruie, and while the team is there, Mr Johnson says, there is a little job they might be able to do for someone…

GM Notes

The purpose of the first session was to familiarise the group with Trait rolls and Bennies, and this session was intended to show them how tactical combat works; I’ve run entire campaigns with no more rules than that, although a fight lasting one combat round took over an hour as I had to explain quite a bit, parts of it several times. The creature the PCs faced off against was a reskinned Lion, so no effort at all to set up, although using a token of the beastie from the Alien franchise produced the appropriate level of terror among the players. There was good use of Support rolls, and Bennies to gain narrative control, as well as the team’s usual creativity.

We closed by checking whether they want to continue with this campaign (they do) or do something else, and discussing how we’ll handle money and inventory. Of the six of us, five basically do spreadsheets for a living, so my guess is we will settle on the Wealth optional rules or something like them.

Thus ends The Scrap Heap, the first scenario from Adventure 1: The Kinunir. And yes, their next outing will be Rescue on Ruie, one of my favourite adventures from back in the day. The agreement is that whenever the D&D GM hasn’t had enough time to prepare during the week, he’ll give me a few hours warning and I will step in to run some picaresque Savage Traveller; and if he is prepared, we’ll play D&D 5E. I have the Classic Traveller canon on CD-ROM, I can keep that up for years; only two of us were alive when those adventures came out, and some of them are still good.

Purple Twilight, Session 1: The Scrap Heap, Part 1

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Locksley Hall

Regina, 1105 Week 01

The crew of the Purple Twilight are returning from annual leave – their ship has just been overhauled – when a middle-aged gentleman approaches them with a job offer; he is in search of trade secrets used in the construction of Kinunir class cruisers, specifically the location of the generator mountings and the actual, physical fuel tank capacity.

He offers Cr 75,000 up front, and the same again on completion, and leaves what is clearly a one-time encrypted network address where he can be contacted later. They accept the deal, take Cr 10,000 each for their own use, and set aside Cr 25,000 as funds for the mission.

Day 1

After some discussion, the party rule out breaking into the General Shipyards office to gain access to their computer net, as none of them know anything about hacking.

Instead, they begin by visiting the starport scrap heap, ostensibly in search of spare parts for their aging tramp freighter – they quickly established that one example of the ship class was scrapped here. Security is lax, and they are allowed to poke around more or less as they see fit; they find a few things that might be useful, including an autobar recovered from a wrecked yacht, and surreptitiously make their way to the wreck of the Adda Dubsar, the hulk they’ve been looking for. It’s easy to recognise as the Captain is ex-Navy and served on a similar vessel.

The hull is basically an empty shell, lying cocked at a slight angle and dull orange with rust. The party decide to make the measurements in stages over several days so that their interest is less obvious, and leave on the first day with their autobar and a number of hopefully useful bits and pieces, for which the scrapyard office charges them Cr 3,000.

Day 2

Discounting the idea of visiting General Shipyards and demanding a tour by claiming to be either auditors from head office or HR investigating reports of speciesism, the crew decide to focus on members of the design team. Some research by the Scientist reveals the publicly-available service details of all the ships of this class, plus the names and addresses of the members of the design team who still live nearby.

The Agent and the Ihatei select the address in the worst part of town, and go to pay a visit. Rummaging through the occupant’s rubbish shows they are living very cheaply, and the Scientist determines there are some outstanding fines on the household – a few hundred Credits in all, not much by ship crew standards but a lot to someone on the breadline.

The Agent knocks on the door, claiming to be conducting a paid survey and ‘just need a few moments of the occupant’s time’. The word ‘paid’ gains them entry, with the Agent explaining that the ihatei is her security detail as this is a rough part of town.

The following conversation gains them 90% of what they need to know, but not the complete set of information – the informant fortunately has total recall, as the work he did was nearly 30 years ago now.

The interview is cut short when the ihatei takes offence at some comment, and smashes the coffee table.

Day 3

Returning to the scrapyard, the crew make their way surreptitiously to E Deck of the hulk to complete their measurements. While doing this, they suddenly hear a loud growling noise from behind them…

To be continued…

GM Notes

No Arioniad this week as I have kicked off a new Savage Traveller campaign!

The D&D 5E GM is too short of time to do anything at the moment, so I offered to step in. Out of the numerous one-shots offered, the players chose to do something science-fictional; since we had one guy who had never played RPGs before and one who has only ever played D&D, I handed out some pregens and blew the dust off Adventure 1: The Kinunir. (Things need to flow smoothly in someone’s first session, so I tend to use pregens and a setting and adventure I am thoroughly familiar with.)

The aslan player is running with my standard ihatei pregen, and as I only had a couple of hours to prepare, I put most of that time into tweaking some pregens from Atomic Ninja’s Adventure Archetypes; good enough to get us going, we can always rework them later if people feel the need.

Some creative use of Bennies this session, and I remembered to keep them flowing in line with Hindrances and good ideas, which I often forget to do. As usual, no-one is that interested in interstellar trade, but this particular crew want to track their personal finances and equipment; so the party has a Free Trader with the understanding that the income from cargo and passengers exactly balances the operating costs of the ship, and if they want any money themselves, they need to go on adventures.

Highlight of the session: The ihatei (Thin-Skinned and Vengeful) rolling a critical failure to Support the Agent’s Persuasion roll – clearly insulted by what he thought the informant was saying, he started breaking the furniture.

It remains to be seen whether this keeps rolling, we switch into doing a series of disconnected one-shots, or we drop it entirely, but the players seemed to be enjoying themselves so I am hopeful it will keep going.