Starlog (Recaps)

 

GAME 01 (12/1419)

Dr. Bishop (Joe) – Ship’s Doctor/God’s gift to medicine

Victory (Alan) – Bounty Hunter/Ship’s Muscle

Telemachus (Paul) – Ship’s Science officer/Chief explodinator

Bester (Jim) – Corporate Muckety-muck/Missions Officer

Maver (Mark) – Mime/Ship’s Engineer

Vance (Darren) – Retired Admiral/Ship’s pilot

 

As I understand it, Bester is contacted for a job that needs done.  Knowing the crew requirements he digs into his (eidetic) memory and comes up with people to fill the positions needed, and we are contacted.  So we begin where all RPGs begin, at an inn/tavern/carl’s.  This one is Al’s Biscuits (or something like that).  While there, a fight nearly breaks out between some navy men and some people who are annoyed by drunk navy men, but former Admiral Vance defuses it by just being recognized and paying for the annoyed people’s breakfast.  Bester tells us about the deal.  Most, if not all of us, have an amount of debt to work off, at the rate of 1% per month, which far exceeds the amount we make in pension.  We are on a wait list for a craft.  Our ship-shares have been pushed together in order to have enough controlling interest in a ship, but we have to go get it.  This involves traveling far away (expense paid) and going to a planet where the previous team ditched the ship and retrieving it.  Also, we’re to do some geological surveying, which doesn’t seem all that hard.

 

I’m not going to include it in the recap elsewhere, but Telemachus appears to be also running some sort of substance that may or may not be weed.  It’s a sideline for him.

 

There’s some question about what to do once we have the ship.  Some seem concerned that the Admiral may be too straight-laced should it come to doing something that crosses the line.  He says it’s all on a case-by-case basis.  “I won’t be slaving.”  That seems to be good enough.

 

Later that afternoon, Maver & Victory are informed by a contractor that there’s a bounty in the same general direction.  This guy is a corporate type, not a streetwise genius so he should be easy enough to trace, and he’s worth more money than the geo-survey job.  But we think we can do it all.  There’s also a couple side encounters, with Victory helping out a drunk member of another crew to get back to his ship, and with Vance encountering a beautiful fashionably dressed woman (and filing away her contact info for later, just in case).

 

We end up being booked in passage on a ship, making our way from Flammarion starport to the planet that has our ship on it.  There’s a stopover for hydrogen refueling, though nothing happens there of importance.  When we get there, we do some ground travel and then enlist the locals in finding out the location of the ship.  It seems that according to the local government, the crew of the HighNDry were hired to do work for them and they’ll tell us where if we complete the job for them.  Turns out It’s a geological survey using explosive charges to map out a distant volcano which has some smoke coming from it.  They were dicks to everything and everyone, took the job, didn’t complete it, ditched the ship in the caldera, and  fled the planet.

 

We gather our gear, scale the mountain (with much falling) and get to the top and then down into the crater.  The only encounters are an oversized scorpion that is sniped by one of our two guards-people, and a dog that it seems was abandoned by the crew of the ship.

 

The ship itself is on a small patch of dirt in the middle of a water-filled section of the caldera.  We take our floaty equipment and swim across.  The dog is influenced by Bester, who is semi-secretly a psi, and it hangs out with us.  The crew ripped apart the ship and left anything of use outside, including the rations which the dog has slowly been nibbling his way through.  We gain entrance, begin work, and Maver determines the ship was abandoned because of failure due to neglect of upkeep.  They let the place go to hell and eventually it failed.  It’s a 100 year old ship and that takes a lot of care to keep running, so Maver sets to fixing it.  Eventually we test it out and get it to lift off.  We anticipate that it’s likely the charges we are to set will cause a problem so we want everything up and running correctly before we do that part.  A wise precaution because when we set the charges off it does indeed cause the volcano to come to life.  Victory relays to town the information we are gathering and warns them that the volcano is live and will be erupting shortly.

 

We fly back to the town and pack in as many people as we can.  We manage to get about 125 people but with a minute left we close the doors because we just can’t save everyone.  Ship is holding together but it becomes obvious to Vance that he has three options:  Fly straight up, possibly have to deal with the toxic cloud and any shockwaves; Fly straight away and have to deal with the same; fly straight into it using the heaviest shielded part of the craft to control the collision.  #3 is the most cinematic (and the one I leaned toward) but Vance ultimately selected #1 because encouraging a collision in a craft loaded with 131 people and a dog is a bad idea no matter how cool The Hunt for Red October is (The scene where Sean Connery steers into the torpedoes because they won’t have time to arm).

 

The ship survives, but only due to a concerted effort as engineering, sensor, piloting and other rolls are made in order to get the ship safely to a safe destination.  We are hailed as heroes.  We collect our 3k for making the volcano erupt and bail for the next adventure.  We have 90 days to get the ship back to Flammarion before the software disables it.  That’s at the most.  Could be as early as 60 days.  If we want to go after the bounty we need to move on and see how far this guy got.

 

Oh, but then there’s a problem with the jump drive.  Seems that a sensor keeps triggering and Maver discovers in the conduit where that drive is, resides a box with a bio-lock on it.  Bester gets it open and inside they find a document all about how to use an unusual element (Dilithium) to power weapons, and a deconstructed mock-up of a “Phaser” weapon.  Seems that someone was using the ship to smuggle or hide this device.  If it’s correct, this thing could be worth a fortune, and also it could be worth killing us over.  There’s a protracted discussion over what to do with this.  For now we store it in the same place but again it triggers the sensors later.

 

While we’re figuring out what to do with it, sensors find a nearby ship that is an Imperium cruiser, but disabled, floating powerless.  Psi scan shows no life on board.  We move closer, wary of this being some kind of trap, but it isn’t. Someone torpedoed them then raided the ship.  We steal the air raft (a big floating platform for moving equipment)  so Maver can fix it and make it ours, and then we report the wreck to authorities so they can retrieve it (and we can theoretically get some kind of finder’s fee).

 

We finally end up at the place where the fugitive was last seen.  Turns out he’s headed on to another region that also happens to be the same region that may have “authored” or has something to do with our newly found super-gun.

 

Now we’re at a tipping point.  If we continue on after the guy we may not have time to return with the ship still operational.  But the fugitive (named “Thoom”) is worth quite a bit and we need money!  So how about we send the ship back but don’t go with it?  We either hire a crew to take it back, or we hire a transit company to haul it back.  After some negotiation with the transit company, we decide to go with them because it removes an x-factor (the hired crew) from the equation.  We will send the ship back and go on after the fugitive.

 

Also, a geologist is enlisted to help us with some information.  The characters are as cagey as they can be about not letting this guy know what he’s doing or why, but the information we are digging for is this:  The worlds that produce this element used in the phaser… what do they have in common geologically, and presumably, what other planets might meet those parameters. Also, what kind of material could properly restrict the radiation of this element, concealing it from scans.  There’s lots of hedging on why we need this information and subterfuge in how we ask for it, so as to keep this geologist from either becoming a target of whoever might be looking for this gun, and also to keep him from realizing we’re on to something big.

 

NEXT GAME:  So far everyone is available for two weeks from Saturday, 12/28.  Joe was gone by the time we discussed this so he’s the only unknown.


 

GAME 02 (12/28/19)

Telemachus (Paul), Victory (Alan), Maver (Mark), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

Let's start backwards with the results...

EXP: From the start of the game until now we've trained 16 weeks, so unless you have fast learner that's two blocks of learning. Everyone got $200,000 (or whatever our money is in this game) each from this game. You've earned your pension 2 more times. And you've paid for debt down twice.

NEXT GAME: Jeff's escrow closes in two weeks so he's got to push it to 3 weeks, Saturday 1/18, unless that causes a mass defection.

We started off the game with TRAVELER: THE ACCOUNTING. This was a game of deciding the most efficient/inexpensive way to 1) Get the scout ship home for refit before deadline, 2) Go after the lab ship that has been located for Tele & Dr. Bishop, 3) Go after the bounty that Victory & Maver are tracking.

After a long discussion we ended up splitting the party! Vance & Maver uneventfully drove the ship back to base while Tele, Bester, and Vic went after the bounty. All did training during their travels. By the time the two parties reunite, the bounty group have tracked down the target, bribed the hotel clerk into giving up his room number, and confronted him. He tries to buy his way out but ultimately winds up settling for being turned over with a B.S. story that instead of stealing 8.5M, he stole less and spent most of it. Our finders fee for corroborating this is 2M that we split among the group and used to recoup costs.

We went after the lab ship. At this point we're down to 4 since Maver left early. Vic and Tele boarded while Vance manned the scout ship and Bester watched the sensors. They are attacked first by a seemingly crazy former crew member who tries to claw and gnaw his way through Vic's improved armor and fails before being taken down. But their real test involves a seven foot tall woman partially covered in armor because she's just bigger than it now, and she's got her own form of berserker rage. The good guys get banged up a little but Vic's armor-piercing axe helps save the day. A page over the com system to the crew yields one other crew member who surrenders and says he's the one who disabled the ship because Butler Chemicals enlisted him to slow down their on-board scientific exploration into combat drugs so he set off a bomb in the lab. After that the people who got killed by the enraged combat drug subjects were stored in the fridge unit or eaten. There's another guy found in pod bay 2, unarmed and weak; another possible candidate in the "down" part of the rage/feed/lethargy cycle.

There's a huge hold in the fuel tank that Maver has to fix (and did while he was gone). In that tank were human remains that had to be cleaned out. This is where one or more of the psychos went to eat.

With everyone secured we go to the planet surface. The crew down there got word of the unrest but essentially are cut off from the universe at large, so they're just doing their geology/survival thing. they failed to notify any of the local colonies of the problems in orbit.

The ship is repaired, refueled, and moved to the next star port where the geology crew are dropped off.

We are at a crossroads as to what to do next. Do we keep the ships? Sell them for better ships? What are our goals. Seems the people with the most direct goals are:

Bester is at war with his family over their corporation. He wants to build a rival corp and somehow seize his family business. His sister is in charge of that one and would likely kill him on sight.

Telemachus has a little A.I. problem. He helped create some self-aware self-replicating robots on a planet where we (most of the crew) had to go and perform our ill-fated pre-game mission. Someone has stolen his technology and run off with it. He would like to stop him and retrieve/destroy the info.

As for our immediate future, it seems to be tied up with the phaser technology. We consult the geologist and look into mining rights for planets (which can take years to procure and for far more money than we have), and how to track down asteroids that might contain the same dilithium element that we can mine.

And that's what I remember.


 

GAME 03 (01/18/20)

Lucky, Rhade, Victory, Bester and Vance

How did we start out again? Already I'm having trouble recalling all of this one. I believe we were on our way to a planet of dilithium but we had two fares to drop off in our role as intergalactic Uber. We had a Cossack and a Wizard. Both had their ups and downs.

So the Cossack dies in transit. Seems it was natural causes. We make sure the authorities haul away the body. They can't find his true identity anywhere in their system. They have no next of kin to notify. We end up with his stuff, which includes a small box. This box is familiar to Vicky and Vance, with the Admiral going so far as to recall it has a fairly simple method for opening one of these. The'd both seen one in the course of their work.

The Wizard (David?) wanders in at one point and sees the box and identifies it as a carrying case for Wafers, aka the data disks that some people can plug into their bodies, usually to temporarily learn a new skill.

Vicky has such a port and tries to use it, only she ends up with some kind of interference. It just doesn't connect appropriately with her system and she has to eject it. The only other person with know with a port like that is David, the wiz from the weird anachronistic group, and he wants to try it, so we let him.

Immediately another personality takes over. After some interrogation, drugging him unconscious a few times, and Lucky threatening to shoot him, we find out that the new dominant personality is a spy, an agent capable of much chaos, usually activated to solve large problems. The chip is fused into the port for the time being.

There's a bunch of discussion about what to do next, some negotiation with this guy, who now suddenly is a PSI and has gleaned certain information from our heads (Primarily that we are carrying the phaser weapons on board), we end up agreeing to get him to his destination. He seeks his ship, and once he gets that he'll give us the coordinates of another ship that we can have outright; a Corsair class ship which is 800 Tons and much bigger than the scout ship we have now.

Oh yeh...fun with phasers: We still needed to test it out so Rhade sets up his testing gear and Vicky and Lucky take turns firing the phaser outside the ship but inside the warp bubble. It fortunately doesn't blow us up or anything. It works on some settings but not on others.

We drop off some other passengers we picked up at the last stop, set up a Low Bay (a device for putting people to sleep for long trips) and put the Spy in it, since none of us really trust him.

It's not long after this that psychic Bester picks up a call for help in his head on the psychic friends network. We vote to investigate. Someone on a planet not far off is pleading for assistance. When we get in range we get hailed by a ship that is downed on the surface. There's some confusion over the radio... Either the many speaking (the captain) has a ship that needs repairs because of sabotage by one of his crew or one of the crew sees him as the problem. When we land we discover that the ship's jump drive has been scavenged for parts and the captain claims crewman Anderson (the woman on the radio) has fled with the parts. The ship was transporting some kind of wildlife experiments for Rexall Corporation. Also, there's a commando named Rennick who is part of the crew who is out in the jungle and is likely in possession of one of the captive experiments that they would like back.

We have no idea what the real story. Bester still picks up the psychic signal and since that takes concentration to do and the two people were talking on the radio at the same time as that was happening then it's likely that neither Captain Cole or Crewman Anderson were the psychic... It's more likely it's their once-captive experiment that's sending the call.

Oh yeh... some of the other captives were Purple Hippo Lizards that tried to take out Rhade, Vicky and Lucky in the jungle. As confirmed last game, AP rounds are great.

Ship sensors track down Anderson and the away team rendezvous with her. She wants to leave but won't go without helping the poor experiment, which it turns out, is a psychic plant. The plant is very young and can't communicate much more than its basic needs or wants. It is with Renick and it seems he's going to protect it at all costs.

When the girl and away try to reach Renick they avoid one tripwire but since everyone on that team rolls badly, the next trap sends Rhade dangling by his ankles in the air while Renick tries to grenade and/or snipe the team. He lands a pretty good grenade early on that takes out Anderson. Finally it's decided on the ship (overhead) that to unleash the kraken... The ship fires a turret laser that nails Renick but keeps him barely alive, and misses the psi-plant, named for his species ("Bofa").

We gather everyone up and get ready to depart. But now we've got a whole other set of issues. The guys from the ship that's here (missing it's jump drive) are essentially slavers and that's Anderson's objection. She' not wrong. But she doesn't know where the psychic plant is from or any more idea of what to do with it than we do.

We're going to take off and discuss this elsewhere, probably sending back the authorities to deal with the Rexall crew, but when we try to leave they try to follow. They don't have jump capability, but then we aren't in a place where we can jump yet; we' have to get up and away and plot a course, which is something we don't have enough time for.

So starts a brief game of cat-and-mouse as we try to get further away, they threaten to blow us out of the sky (with decidedly superior armor and weaponry on their ship), and Bester decides to teleview into their cockpit and try to telekinetically steer them away, which he does once to get us one range increment further away. But this is going to end badly, and wisely Lucky makes the call to engage the jump drive and blind jump as soon as we reached the edge of the atmosphere. Problem is, his roll is bad and Vicky's astrogation roll doesn't quite make up for it.
(In retrospect, I should have made the astrogation roll even if it was at a penalty for doing multiple things, because I still had two unused Luck re-rolls, but no big deal.)

We go the full calculated jump time... Plus 48 hours! We got two days further than we planned to go and in the wrong direction. We immediately discover we're near an interdicted (forbidden) planet.

There's a discussion about what to do with the smart plant. We don't know where he comes from. He doesn't know where he comes from. Lucky wants to keep him on the ship. He was the one who took control of Renick and had him attacking us to defend him. This means if we take him anyplace with people he can become an invasive species that takes control of locals. We seem to narrow it down to either throwing him out the airlock or taking him to the nearest planet and dropping him off. It just so happens that the interdicted planet below has water. It's got lots of other problems too, but it gives him a chance to survive.

We maroon the poor plant alone on an isolated planet and take off to return our still-unconscious spy to his ship, get Renick somewhere that he can be healed, and let Anderson off.

 


 

GAME 04 (02/08/20)

Lucky (Mark), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

So what now? We decide that after dropping off our couple of passengers, including the spy, that we head for the ship he promised us. We board it check the whole place out, and then do some systems testing. Turns out that while he's given us all the codes and things he's failed to mention there's a system timer that keeps anyone from using it for 3 months. After deciding against hacking it with an impossibly high probability of screwing things up we just move on to other duties for 3 months.

In this case Bester and Victory have a contact who knows of a ship that their corporation (Deep Night) lost. Seems there's no contact but they know approximately where it is. They want us to find the ship and then notify them. Finder's fee is $10M. We say yes, of course.

Problem is that it's in some deep space where there are no nearby systems and the available fuel is provided by fueling stations you have to dock with that dot the path across that sector. We fuel as best we can but ultimately when we jump in have to start looking for fuel immediately. There are two transponder signals. What we find is not what we want.

Drifting free is one of the large fuel containment ships that is normally attached to the underside of the ship we are looking for. It has a hole in it and it's empty. We move on to the other transponder signal and find the ship we are seeking, drifting free, and a field of wreckage nearby that was once the refueling station. So we are in deep space and have no fuel.

The ship has ruptures in the hull but has lots of scattered life signs. Psionic Bester peeks inside the bridge and finds a group of people sitting around looking at devices and not doing much else.

We dock and send the away team in. Bester and Vance stay on the ship. Rhade, Lucky, and Victory go in. Their first encounter when they are accosted (not exactly attacked, more like mildly pawed at) by someone who does not look healthy. This guy grabs Rhade who freaks out and after Lucky slashes the guy with a monofilament blade (and the guy doesn't even seem to notice), he slashes him again and puts him down. He's covered in some sort of biological life form, like a spore or other plant, which clings to Rhade's armor.

Continuing on they go through a progression of meeting small clusters of humans holed up in groups and discover that the ship has, instead of banding together to fix their problems, decided to split up into groups and war with one another for resources. The four main factions seem to be ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, THE BRIDGE, and a fourth group whose demarcation I can't recall. Apparently an organism got loose and infected people and then their ship's gunner, named appropriately enough "Gunz", decided to blow up the fuelstation rather than risk having this organism get back to civilization.

It is discovered during all this that the Science division have a cure, but they can't get enough of the original "core" being to synthesize enough for the rest of the crew. So the away team go and gather some by going to the room where the creature is concentrated and fight it, its tentacles, and an assembly of plant-zombies that converge while it tries its best to grab and consume the players. After they take the creature down, they cut off a big slab, take it to the science folks who science the shit out of it and produce the cure, and then that is distributed. The deal that is negotiated is that each faction supplies something like 6 people to squeeze into our ship, selected by each faction's leader, and those are jammed into our ship, we fly them back to society (using the one jump worth of fuel that is on board the ship that is adrift) and then we send someone back from the corp with resources like food and fuel to save the lives of those still there.

Now I've greatly marginalized a few things with this recap. First, how pissed off Victory is by having to deal with ANY of these people. But I have to say, being up front about her disdain made dealing with them pretty transparent and expedited things quickly. Second, there were a few plant-zombie v. human dustups (spore-ups?) that the away team handled well through tactical positioning and baiting them. Third, that Bester didn't do much, though arguably peeping into various rooms psionically was helpful recon. Fourth, that Vance did nothing at all. I believe I made two rolls during the entire game. One was a marginal success so I burned a luck; the other was a simple piloting roll; that's it. With that said, it didn't make any logical sense to stick Bester and Vance on the ship and abandon our scout ship.



GAME 05 (08/27/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

New Engineers for old.  We start with a meeting with Rick, an engineer that Vance has history with.  An interview ensues in which both the existing team and Rick feel each other out about him replacing the hospitalized Lucky (as Mark is not playing).  Fortunately for us, a job comes in via an associate of Victory, a corporate type who needs us to retrieve a lost vessel for him.  Seems they had a ship with a sub-par captain that lost some crew who quit at one of the starports after the existing captain retired, and now the ship has lost contact and is out of reach of any transponders.  So we've got to fly across the galaxy following the path it had gone and is predicted to go.

During the travels, Vance hears on a Navy channel some chatter about a reward of $300k being offered for execution/return of a young woman who bolted from the military with some stolen Psi drugs.  $200k for her, $100k for the drugs.  Vance writes it off because he's not interested in executions.  However, when the team is in the port to which she is reported to be heading, and our ship is ready to depart, she materializes out of nowhere and begins a psychic assault on the crew!  She tries Bester but his own innate psychic defenses stop that; She does however manage to injur Viktory psychically, and drops the three guests we have on board (Erek--the corproate who hired us, Maryanne--some kind of assistant, and a bodyguard type who is a slob and is driving neat-freak Rhade crazy).  Running down the hall from the bridge, Rick manages to put a bullet in her to minor effect, but Viktory buries a special extra-scary axe into her that nearly cuts her in two.  She hits the ground and everyone is fine.  Except her.

After Vance lets everyone in on who this is (which Viktory discovered anyway by running her information through various systems), we call the authorities and collect the cash.  It gets divided 8 ways ($25k each) with one share to the ship.

There's a lot more character interaction in this, but this is the gist of the action.



GAME 06 (09/11/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

We land on Bantral, where we find out a little about the ship we are looking for, that they were troublemakers that caused problems at two local bars.  Load of drunks caused a fight with the "regulars".  We also have dinner with the local dignitary who was glad to see vistors at the station.

From Bantral to Vior.  Vior needed help with their orbiting station which had a decaying orbit and broken thrusters, so we pitch in and by the time we leave their orbit has stabilized and we are heroes.

We move on to another planet where the station is attended by a member of Erik's company, a guy who seems to have a title that no one is even aware is a "thing" in the Empire.  Nobody trusts him, but he does nothing to stop us.  They're having some issues with being unable to obtain tech so they try to trade with us but we don't have anything to trade (or that we want to trade).  Word is that a vehicle was scavenged off of a planet with a 6-digit name which is not far (relatively).  It sounds like it could be related to the folks we're looking for but it has since been scavenged and the parts redistributed.  We find out from some logs that it seems the Amwar (the ship we seek) left for Ganulph, a planet that is forbidden due to its hazards.  We go that way with an intent of looking around the planet despite the quarrantine, but it's a bad choice because it's got some serious defense satellites that will shoot down anything that gets too close.  However, we do find a craft orbitting the planet, not quite in the range of the satellites, and it is disabled and broadcasting a distress signal.  We end up investigating and find that the crew were involved in checking out the planet but using a device to shut down briefly the satellie nearest to allow them through.  However while it worked once the satellite may have learned from the first try and sent a missile right into their craft, resulting in it floating around in space until their vac suits ran out of air.

So we loot the ship and move on.  We leave off on the road 398-xxx, or whatever it was called.

 


GAME 07 (09/25/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

(I'll be honest--I was having trouble concentrating during the game and now I've waited too long to recap, so this won't be good)

As we enter the system we seek, we pick up a few things.  One is a distress signal.  Another is a ship investigating said distress signal.  After radio contact we determine that they are claiming salvage rights to the craft they are at, which luckily is not our craft.  Through sensor sweeps we find the craft we seek down on the surface.  We make a line for it while doing our best not to encourage the others scavengers to follow us.  Once there we suit up and go over.  Away team is Rick, Victory, Rhade and Vance.  Bester and the NPCs will remain on our craft and monitor sensors to alert us if there's a problem.

Well, our real problems aren't in space.  During the away mission we discover the corpse of one of these scorpion-like creatures the size of a St bernard.  Obviously this means there are more.  What we don't realize is how many more!  During our search of the ship, which includes discovery of areas where combat broke out inside the ship, we come to the conclusion that they crash landed, then as they were starving eventually some of them turned on the others in a likley mutiny.  A few who remained turned weird and cannibalistic--not sure if it was a mutation or what that caused this, but they were not normal cannibals (if there is such a thing).  After dispatching some cannibals, we end up in the Kobayashi Maru.

On the deck that has the cargo hold we find a hole in a wall that leads to what turns out to be a nest of an enormous amount of these scorpion creatures, who proceed to do a pretty good job on some of us.  Viktory has great armor and so is able to stave off many, the rest of use having to run like scalded dogs, splitting the party, at one point into three groups on the surface (and the fourth back on our ship).  But as all this chaos and trying to close doors on the creatures is happening, Bester catches a ship coming in hot.  When they arrive they seem to employ some sort of teleportation (somethign everyone seems to be able to do except us) to send one of their troops in who proceeds to mow down the creatures like nothing.

 


GAME 08 (10/09/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

Our visitor hangs around and assists us.  Rhade uses the first aid to fix Rick, mostly.  We open an iris portal and fire through at the bugs nearby on E Deck (below us).  Rick tries to jury-rig the power plant to help us line-up the tubes openings so we have a clear unfettered-by-bugs passage through the levels.

Bester gets a psychic message from someone in a stasis pod in orbit that is being salvaged by others.  We send Hex, our friendly rescuer, off to help with that while we deal with the ship's bug problem.  Thing is, by the time Viktory gets to the bottom deck she comes across a bipedal one.  With Rhade and Vance nearby, the creature, who it seems has some kind of mental powers, proceeds to compel us all to do different crazy things.  Vance thinks at first that Rhade is going to kill the team and tries (badly) to tackle him.  Viktory is sure that she needs to destroy first all the computer systems and then the life support, which she's good at doing.  Rhade resists all of it and does some damage to the bad guys before Hex returns to assist, which is vital because we were making no headway against the now TWO psychic bug people.  I believe Bester managed to psychically interfere briefly to get us free, at least untl the bug makes another attempt.  During that brief moment we kill one of the bugs.  Rhade is so badly injured that he opts to hide.  Affected a second time, Vance proceeds to think that the ship is going to explode and tries to convince everyone to get offboard.  He ends up running out on his own.  Viktory, free of insanity, and Hex have chased the second bug out and killed it in the swamp, freeing everyone from delusion.

The crew closes the bay doors manually, which takes a long time.  The surgery is employed on Rhade's injued ass.  We proceed to sweep the ship to kill bugs and get out.

Logan Hex wants to enlist us on behalf of the Imperium.  Seems they know we have the phaser and they want it back, but they want us to also create a corporation and mine Ganulf, the planet that is loaded with dilithium.

We discuss the proposition.  The most enthused about it is Bester, who wants to grow the company and make a mint.  Telemachus is in favor.  Viktory and Vance are less enthusiastic. Rick is in after a discussion.  We ultimately are in favor.  Viktory wants anagathics (anti-aging drugs) in return for it.  (We have a prolonged discussion about how anagathics work). 


GAME 09 (11/13/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Bester (Jim), Vance (Darren)

We plot our jumps back to Pax Ruli (I beieve thtat's the name) and during one of the hops we pick up a distress signal.  As is our custom we check it out.  During out approach we find some discrepancies... Namely that Bester's sensors have picked up 35 people, which is what they are claiming is on board, but his psychic detection only shows 16 people.  So are there 19 people who are psi-shielded?  Are there 19 people who are actually psychics?  Or is the 35 people a lie?  And if it's a lie, why would they do that?  Turns out it's a lie in order to try encourage rescue.  These are piratesa, and they start by firing a missile in the general area (not AT us) that causes a disruptive field that makes jumping away a real problem.  We take up battlestations.

They have more armor.  We have Bester peeking into their cockpit to tell us what's going on over there.  Victory gets her battlesuit on becuase who knows if they'll try to board, and that turned out to be a smart move because when the other guys start losing they start firing missiles with a nuclear payload!  So if you aren't RAD protected then you're taking damage and suffering minuses.  Our passengers assist with giving us some radiation shots to help mitigate some of that.  Vance takes the piloting aspect to full defense, essentially making it harder for them to hit. Rick fires the missilles, sometimes as individual missiles, other times as the whole battery (for a higher chance of criting).  We take life support damage, do some sensor damage to them, Rhade has to repair the life support after it's second hit in order to keep us going.  In all they fire 3 nuke sat us during the course of the fight and plan on doing an emergency warp out of there at the end but their ship doesn't last long enough.  They all plug into their evac suits and hope we'll rescue them.  We consider it but then end up calling the nearby planetary station to get help sent out for them rather than risk some kind of further insurrection once they were on board our ship.

We make some money off of their heads.  We get a little bit of salvage.  But the net is ultimately a loss becuase of the ship damage and the expense of replacing missiles.

We have our work done, taking about 5 days and prepare to continue taking out passengers back to Pax Ruli.


GAME 10 (11/27/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Bester (Jim), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

We return the executives to their home plant so they can run free in their executive parks.  We meet with the folks to resolve the whole deal, collect our cash, get reimbursed for the damage we took, and then we meet with the Imperium, who agree to set us up in a corporation to do business with them as a hidden subsidiary.  We are now miners!

This means we have to go back to the planet and mine.  So after upgrading a bunch of our personal crap, we go to the planet and as they set up the equipment on the surface, Bester scans the nearby space with Vance at the wheel.  Finally we need to check out the mining facility that is abandoned on the surface.  Inside we send Rick, Victory and Rhade, while Bester scans and Vance pilots the ship.  They act as fire support whle the three-person away team go in and encounter... a badass security bot!  A grade IV security bot greets them and they exchange fire eventually taking it out when it tries to pull back.  They check out the rest of the facility.

Facility seems pretty extensive, if abandoned and in some places damaged.  After they dispatch the second robot (which explodes and tries to take them with it) they assess the damage.  It would cost too much to bring this place back up to code.  We will just use it for storage probably, unless we get incredibly rich really quickly or something.

There's a nearby anomaly; a spot where there's an incredible density in the soil as pinpointed by sensors of the geologists before us, who dug a tunnel slanted down to it.  We investigate it and discover that not much investigation took place here previously.  Seems they tried to drill through the tunnel wall to it but were likely interrupted by the same calamity that made this place a biohazard that drove everyone off site.  We drill a bit further and discover that there is basically a 5m diameter sphere of something so black that shining a light on it does nothing.  Can't seem to get it to make a noise by knocking on it.

A Zodani destroyer shows up in the system.  It scoops up fuel from the gas giant but stays at long enough range to avoid the interdiction satellites.  We do not engage it, but make note of it in case we need to worry about it on the way out later.  28xp total under the new XP system.


GAME 11 (12/11/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

We do the rounds, turn in what we mined, and work on our strategy for what the heck to do with the weird artifact thing we found on the planet's surface last game.

We set up a dummy corporation to hire some people to research the artifact.  We end up with two scientists:  Rikoth Phlunge (Former HS teacher) and Vlen Baddock (Former comapny guy, each with physics 4.  This all takes about 90 minutes of game time some how.  But then there was talk about how to get equipment for research, how to be sneaky about the whole science-investigating.  Somehow strapons are involved.  <--I won't even remember this reference when I re-read this but it made total sense when I was typing it based on the conversation between Evan and the GM.

During the installation of our temporary housing facilities and labs down in the shaft, sensors pick up a signal...coming from the big artifact ball thingie.  It's an RF signal.  It does stop eventually, which prompts Rick to try and set up a farraday cage to block the signal from exiting.

Our scientists tell us the next major tests involve higher power sources, like attaching it to a ship's power source or to the mining facility's power.  During one test that involved giving it power resulted in a lighting change and a panel with some sort of unlabelled controls appear.  The panel is visible but it's still inside the faraday cage so it can't be manipulated.  Telemachus has an inspiration (?) that you need to press the 1st, 3rd, and 5th row buttons at the same time.  When they finally get around to pressing the buttons a weird field of blue energy is cast.  It is surmised that if this thing were hooked to a ship when it went to warp and those buttons were pushed it would somehow alter the jump process.  We don't know how.

Another series of button presses results in a surface opening on the top and view down in showing there's either a creepy robot or a being in a full metallic suit of armor lying down inside the sphere.  (Seen here) 

Next experiment results in the sphere lifting up off the ground 1 foot.  Apparently it has a thing built in so you can eaily push it wherever you like.

Eventually they do an experiment where they open the (now enlarged) faraday cage, activate it, open it, lift the robot (or armor man) out and then play with the buttons or broadcast audio that was sent earlier back ot him, or something--that causes him to finally get up.  He doesn't take any actions other than stand there and look at us (if it has eyes).  Attempts to articulate it, like move a finger, result in it going back into the old shape.  Unable to figure out how to communicate with it, we eventually try to put it away.


GAME 12 (12/30/21)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Bester (Jim), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

We pick up a new scientist to handle translating languages in hope of trying to figure out the robot/egg conundrum (An underrated punk rock group from the early 80's).  Matilda is hired and brought back but doesn't come up with much.

So then we explore a bit and discover in the orbit of a nearby gas giant there is a weird tube-like craft.  Eventually we go and explore it (when everyone is on the ship), we end up sending in Rick, Vicktory & Rhade to check it out.  They find that the we can open it from the outside but not from the inside.  And when inside no one can pick up a signalt from our ship or send to it.  Eventaully we drag it back to the planet and because examination of it points to the idea that the "egg" fits in one end, we marry the two up.  The robot finally reactivates briefly, but we quickly seperate the egg and the tube and eventually the robot deactivates.

We spend a long time discussing what to do with the various parts.  We're supposing that putting the robot, the egg, and the tube together means it will take off, probably at a speed we can't keep up with.  So do we sell the parts and how?  What other experiments are there to perform?

At this point we plan to hook the whole thing up to the ship to test the warp capability that we think it has.  Our plan is to try it first without any of the other objects: Just the Egg.  It lit up and the robot woke up and tried to move to it, at which point we took off.  Once we go high enough, he stopped moving and the egg powered down.

So we load up the robot for the next try but about then we end up with something happening.  A Zodani destroyer shows up, not unlike the one we saw previously.  We scramble to load everything into our ship to bug out, when another Destroyer shows up.  This happens two more times until they have enough destroyers there to keep the interdiction satellite busy (and probably destroy it).  We have a quick discussion of whether they are there for dilithium mine or for the objects we found.  Ultimately we don't care; we try and load all of our stuff into the ship, which takes extra time, making our escape difficult.

We're given options, including taking the missile strikes that have been launched at us, trying to shoot down the missiles, or trying to jump right now which may send us to the wrong place--as happens in a misjump.  We decide to try to shoot down the missiles.  This proves to be the wrong choice, because one of the two missiles that gets through is one of those gravitic missiles that intereferes with jumping.  Now a misjump is certain.  That leaves us with Surrender, try to outrun a bigger, better equipped battleship under impulse power, try and jump to end up someplace unknown, or we hook the egg back up and see if its warp capability is worthwhile.

Naturally we go with the last, most despearte option.  Once the device is hooked up, the robot awakens, rips out of his restraints and does something with the egg.  A rip in space appears in front of us not unilke all the ones in all the sci-fis.  Despite his aversion to flying through gaps in interdimensional space, Vance fires the ship through the hole and we find ourselves... 18 Hexes from where we were.  Yes, our Jump 3 ship did a Jump 18.  We find ourselves in the Sinal sector, near a planet called Marduk.  But far from the Zodani and their destroyers.

 


GAME 13 (01/08/22)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Bester (Jim), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

Welcome to Marduk.  As we approach we are hailed by the station there with all kinds instructions.  We opt to pull back, find a place to hide the tube-shaped alien craft somewhere (Vance finds the best spot ever somewhere), and then we conceal the robot and egg in the cargo bay and go in for repairs.

We do a lot of typical stuff, from blowing off steam in a bar and resting someplace that isn't our ship, to lining up repairs and finding out about some things on the surface.  Our hired guns (Physicists and Miners) are doing some work when the physics guys want to test something, and do so with approval.  They come back with the knowledge that Dilithium is in a huge deposit down on the planet's surface!  So... wonder how we go about mining it.  Bester does his bureaucratic research (while Vance fails his history research) and comes back with information that there were wars down there, they are still raided by Oghma raiders, and that anyone who goes down to the surface can do so but they're not authorized to come back.  If we went down there for a while, we'd have to probably go elsewhere for a while and if we wanted to return we'd have to undergo examantion to prove that we didn't return with whatever sickness/parasite/whatever these people are afraid people might come back with.

We at least want to go the "Lower Port" (the part of the station that is set on the surface).  When we do, we are attacked by Oghma raiders who managed to cause our ship to crash.  We live, the crew does not.  So it's 5 PC's, 3 NPCs, and a girl who is full of useful information.  We gather things that might be useful and get out because, as the kid points out, the Oghma want the wreckage so they will be back for it.  We think maybe we'll set up an ambush for them and take their ship--which is a foolish move because none of use even consider that they have sensors that will detect our life signs nearby hiding.  We end up having to run from them, but they don't pursue because they just want the ship and anything they can steal from it.

We camp in the forest and during the night Vance spots an excaptionally large wolf-like creature stalking the camp.  After getting everyone up he ends up taking it out with a rifle that had been taken from the ship.  We gather it up, decide the extra food might be useful, and try to rest.  We end up finding a slightly more defensible spot, but we know there are more of those things based on their howling.  We move to that spot and trigger the beacon hoping anyone looking for us will see it.  It lasts 24 hours.  During that time we do a small amount of recon and find the locals in the distance (the ones we're not supposed to make contact with) are in Ruins not far off.  We stay away for now, waiting until the become dies.  But before that happens, we are beset by the entire pack of those things.

Problem is: We were forbidden to wear armor to the station and we don't have our full compliment of stuff, but we take what we have and fight (while NPCs and a couple PCs climb the trees).  We take a couple out relatively quickly, and they would have mauled us but something in our assult drove them off as they nibbling (we are retroactively saved because this was definitely headed for a loss).  We suspect some form of attack we used (either the shotgun or the autofire weapon) drove them off.

We are fine the rest of the night and then next day some of the locals come up over the ridge.  Bester uses his big brain to manipulate them into being friendly toward us.  They come greet us, welcome us to follow them to their ruins.  Luckily Rhade has a device that is listening to their language and trying to work out a translation.  We communicate well enough to make friends and exchange names and tell them where we come from.  Nearby is something VERY intersting... a large semicircle of metal, an artifact long dormant, that protrudes from the ground like a stargate from the tv-tubes.  It is over some water and it seems that it was dormant until yesterday, around the time we entered the system, then it lit up!

Our hosts guide us out there in boats so we can have a look.  As we get close we realize the current is flowing into it and an exceptional rate.  One of the boats (with Rick and Bester) manages to get to shore while the one with Rhade, Victory, and Vance gets pulled into ring and vanishes with no indicator of where they went and when they don't come back, Bester and Rick gather their share of the supplies (plus ours), leave the rest with the NPCs at this camp, and in they go.


GAME 14 (01/22/22)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Bester (Jim), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

Through the looking glass we find ourselves on grass.  The water that poured through the gate with us went somewhere else?  Anyway, we get up and look around.  It takes a while to determine that we might be on the same planet but clear on the other side of it.  Time passage is roughly the same as on Earth (24 hour days, sunrise, sunset).  We are setting up camp when huge hordes of hyena/bear hybride Bearynas start to encroach.  We start picking them off from range.  We do enough damage to scare them off before they arrive.  And we get food out of the deal.  Bear-hyena tastes just like bear-chicken.

Vance could hear the sound of waves so the next day we head toward the water after smoking some food to preserve it.  It is indeed the ocean.  We wind up heading south-west along the shore until we reach a river that pours into the sea, and we head up that a little bit to get away from the swampiness so we can collect water.  Our shelter finding/erecting skills seem fair.  For a few days we look around the area.  We've fired off one of our beacons which will run for 100 hours (we have 4 of them).  Eventually we head up the river and wind up seeing a distant glow one night as we camp.  It fades by dawn and when we go to investigate we see some ruins off to one side.

It's worth mentioning that Bester is having migraines.  Being our psychic we are fairly paranoid about this.  It's made worse when we encounter some sort of ghostly creature in the ruins who tries to mentally attack Bester and Rhade.  It eventually leaves.  Something they did made it flee?  I can't remember

We encounter farmers who help us translate their language to ours using the universal translator.  He feeds us, we share some bearyna meat, and it seems we are in the midst of a medieval culture.  The glow, it seems, was a nearby village with lots of night lighting.  We thank him and move on to the town.  We end up making friends with a local inkeeper who is intrigued by our strange attire and story that we come from "across the sea".  We ask about the arch, hoping there might be another one somewhere around but they've never heard of such an arch.  Bester sells some of his space-age knives and we pocket the local currency.

Rhade tries to repay the locals' kindness (they were giving us lots of complimentary stuff) by tending the local sick.  Seems there are quite a few with an unknown sickness.  He does a good job of bolstering their health.

I can't remember specifically what we were doing when we ended the game.  I think we were deciding where a bigger town might be.  Incidentally we were warned against the local ruins (there are several).  At least one is haunted. 


GAME 15 (02/05/22)

Rick (Evan), Victory (Alan), Bester (Jim), Rhade (Paul), Vance (Darren)

So there had been another group of "adventurers" in this area who didn't leave a good impression.  That is to say, they broke into a manor and were up to no good, etc.  And we know that to the north, from which they came, there is the likely source of the radiation sickness the locals are getting.  So we pakc up and head that way.

We find a manor house, abandone and in disrepair, and investigate.  The upstairs is typical building-in-ruins.  The cellar however has three figures that Victory can see on her IR so we're not surprised.  Well, we are surprised by WHAT they are, as some horribly disfigured humanoid lumps of flesh rush us.  We put a lot of rounds into them before they fall, but they also do a pretty good amount of damage to Victory, who survives.  Beyond the collapsed wall they had come through we find that essentially at some point in time a spacecraft had crashed here and subsequently was buried.  Some time after that either be design or by happenstance, the manor house was built oer top of it.

We (mostly Rhade) get to work fixing the leaking reactor, bringing down the radiation levels.  The ship is too compromised to use as a ship.  However, it does have another sphere like the one we had, although not exactly the same.  While we work on things and expiriment with the sphere, Bester goes back to town.  The "medicine woman" in town basically had low-level psionics, and he goes to her to learn some discipline in his craft.  Not only do they share practicing their psionics, but she offers to teach the rest of us non-psis to use or brains for something other than holding a hat.  Some of us jump on it, Victory is reluctant, but we all do it, finishing with some minor psi powers randomly determined.

Once the sphere is figured out (It is a time/distance travel device which lets us pin down travel back to our ship a few weeks prior, right after the events of the raid), we use it to get out of there.  Our hunter guide chooses to stay in the city (which is way nicer than the village he'd been living in).  When we get back to the station and ship in our time, we notify the authorities where to find the other people we'd left down there on the surface.  There's a plan to go and possibly take the dilithium from the arch down on the surface, but when we consider this by going there we discover that the society in that area is now flourishing, and they are not happy to see non-locals.  Rather than steal their dilithium we leave.

We go back to the asteroid belt, retrieve the alien craft that used to be a mate to the orb, and now that the orb is not in the cargo bay (because it has vanished on its own!) we can fit it inside the ship.

During travel back to our mining planet, we stop off at the Imperium.  We want them to replace the interdiction satellites, and we want to sell them the (orb-less) alien ship.  We show them all sorts of data we collected and tell them about our time travels, etc.  Bester negotiates a deal for all the information, including the craft, the dilithium arch, and the existence of the spheres, etc.  They are mulling over whether they will pay that.

 


GAME 16 (CLOSING NARRATIVE)

The following is from a document provided by Jeff after he was forced to cancel the final session of the game....

Epilogue – Player Activities After Marduk

It is Day 309 of the Year 1112, almost two years since our campaign first began. Looking back briefly, your group came together on Glisten, a planet in the Spinward Marches of the Imperium, each of you knowing one or more of the others from your past military and civilian careers. You each brought a unique set of skills, personalities, and backgrounds to the mix. Some of you had relatively clean backgrounds, others had rivals and enemies stemming from your past activities. But each of you different yet in compliment.

From that starting point your adventures spanned many star systems, many events and encounters and adventures along the way. And now, almost two years later, you are poised to cash in on your efforts and take stock of your accomplishments as well as plot a path for your futures.

Artifact Payoff
Picking up where we left off at the last game session, your group was in the midst of negotiations with Imperial representatives for the sale of the alien artifact vessel plus information on the Dilithium on Marduk. After another round if discussions, the Imperium agreed to pay your group MCR125 for both the vessel as well as the Dilithium (and information you provided along with it, ala Marduk). While the Imperium would not grant you any rights or percentages to technology developed from the alien artifact vessel, they did inform you that should anything meaningful be processed and developed, and should whatever comes of that research be something that could be made available to the public (with certain restrictions), the Imperium would consider coming to you as a possible distributor of that technology. You of course know this doesn’t mean much, the likelihood of that happening being very low. But gaining a hundred twenty five million credits is definitely a huge payday and not something to push back.

Journey back to Ganulf
As you had been informed, your group was to travel back to Ganulf as part of an Imperial Battle Group. The small fleet of nine vessels had as its primary purpose the task of “retaking” Ganulf from any enemy presence (including Zhodani). While the Zhodani attack on Ganulf was not an act of war per se (and there are many instances of military “encounters” outside of borders that never go down as acts of war), the fact that there was a duly registered Imperial Company (Yours) operating on the surface, plus the fact that three Imperial interdiction satellites were destroyed, was enough to warrant military attention. That plus the fact you were mining an important substance for the Imperium. So your ship is loaded into the cargo hold of a 10,000 ton destroyer escort, you board the vessel, make the rounds of meetings of the senior fleet officers, and are on your way. The journey there is the usual long and uneventful trip that you had gotten used to many times previously.

Encounter at Ganulf
The jump-3 capable Imperial fleet arrived at Ganulf on Day 330 (also your next payday) to find, as was suspected, a small Zhodani presence there. Initial scans indicated that they had set up a makeshift station on the surface and were in the early stages of mining. There were five military vessels present. After a brief round of communications, a battle was engaged and lasted for about 2 hours. There was a great deal of maneuvering and damaging hits in the early portion of the engagement. At one point the bridge of your fleet command vessel was destroyed, along with the fleet commander. Admiral Ellery briefly took command of the fleet until it reorganized for a second wave of combat. Fortunately throughout the process the mining facility (such as it is) on the surface of Ganulf was not damaged, and one of the Imperial Vessels was a troop carrier which did the work of landing and securing the facility with Imperial Marines.

At the conclusion of battle none of the Zhodani ships were able to jump away. Two were captured and members of its crew interrogated. Bester was asked to assist with some of the questioning which he did, to great effect. The Zhodani were there for the same reason your group was there – to locate and mine Dilithium. You did not determine how they learned there was Dilithium there, and those officers among their crew who may know are also psionics and their minds could not be probed. The remaining survivors (about 50 in all) were eventually sent back to the Imperium for processing. All but one of their vessels were destroyed (either during the battle or afterwards once their crew and computer information was fully processed). One damaged 3000 ton vessel was set on the surface of Ganulf for future determination as to whether to repair or scuttle.

The Imperium lost three vessels (one large one, two smaller craft), and the rest were damaged. After assessing the damage and circumstances, one Imperial vessel was ordered to return to Pax Rulin to bring back additional support craft, including repair. Your impression of the future plans for Ganulf was one of larger proportions than you may have initially surmised: The Imperium is now planning on setting up a permanent presence in the system, and estimated it would take up to a year to bring in all of the necessary ships and equipment to place a large orbital station with limited ship services – essentially a small orbital Type C starport with small Naval base is in the works. The Imperium determined that the system had strategic importance as well. And in time more frequent contact with the Belgardian Sojournate would be initiated – including trade and sharing of technology (mostly form Imperium), in part to help make that government an ally and strategic partner (and base) for the Imperium in the future.

Continue The Mining
As for your group and your company (or companies), you were able to get back to mining and production, beginning on Day 338. Over the months ahead, more frequent X-Boats (in addition to incoming/outgoing Imperial military and support craft) came and went, with regular supply runs and regular income for your group. During this time the manufacturing facility on the surface was brought up to full capacity, and mining and processing for substances other than Dilithium was fully underway – all under the auspices of your group’s company. After six months, by Day 183 of Year 1113, your group earned an additional MCR50.

Eventually the Dilithium supply within the surface rock of Ganulf ran out, and despite efforts to locate additional deposits, none were found. So after about 6 months your group was faced with the option of continuing to mine other substances for decreased income, or to turn over the mining to others (perhaps a subsidiary of your company) and leave for greater adventures. After all, you have a great deal of money (175 million credits plus what you already had prior to all this) and at some point you may want to spend it on…..things. Ships? Equipment? Augments? Investments?

What Next
This is where your group decides what to do and where to go. Some of you may have certain background goals. For example, Bester wants to retake his company (or rather, take charge of the company that wrongfully removed him thanks to his evil sister). Remember, most sisters are evil. At least they are in Traveller. That would be a fun adventure session in and of itself, involving logistics, stealth, and creative use of power. There may be other goals that your group has. Do you want to set up business ventures elsewhere? Do you want to buy a kicking ship and crew and travel the stars just to explore strange new (or old) worlds? You have all been together about two years – do you want to continue to stick together and venture jointly or would some of you want to separate (even if temporarily) to pursue your own unique goals? These are questions – questions the GM cannot answer for you.