The Black Campbell

The game group tried out the Alien game by Free League over the holidays, and like their other offerings, we found it easy to create characters and get to playing quickly. After running through the “cinematic play” Chariot of the Gods scenario that came with the preorder game, we turned our attention to trying out a campaign game.

I wanted to tie it into how our Chariot game ended, with the last PCs put into cryosleep by the turncoat android Lucas, who then had to battle (post credits) the damaged bu trevived android from the adventure’s setting, the research ship Cronus.

Our first session involved the characters getting hired by a fixer in Tokyo, Ari Jacobson, who had a bit of corporate espionage on the menu. The players were Wade and Max Jones — a team of brothers. The first is a former marine and screw-up (the player wanted to play against his favored type and go “dumb); the latter is a corporate spy type hoping to get his brother back on track. The other two were a hacker, Jensen, and a former marine pilot, Pugh. The team was rounded out by an android, Clay, whose job in the mission was to capture a high-ranking officer of the LaSalle Bionational company, use a “dream reader” to get information they needed to allow Clay to impersonate the official and gain access to information on a mission to salvage a long-missing ship, USCSS Cronus.

There was the usual bit of getting the kit the needed, shadowing the mark, and then attempting to take him in his hotel room. The fight led to gunfire, and the characters had to think quickly to extract their target and leave as little evidence as they could. Once they got him to the “dream factory” they were able to use interrogation techniques and a dream reader helmet to question the mark, who was drugged unconscious.

In the second session, the characters convinced Ari — who was concerned by the police and corporate security investigating the disappearance of the mark and his security team — that they could still pull off the mission. Jensen hacked the security company’s database and replaced the information on the mark’s original security with their own. Then they waltzed into LaSalle Bionational’s small Tokyo offices and managed to fast talk their way inside. Clay was able to impersonate the mark perfectly, accessed the data with Jensen’s help, and find what they needed — Cronus was an old Weyland Corporation ship that had been damaged too badly over the years to get to a Bionational facility and their agent, Lucas, had it put down on the nearest colony…which was unfortunately a Weyland-Yutani colony.

With this information in hand they returned to Ari, who was in the process of paying them when they were raided by a corporate hit team using armed drones and a pair of unmarked police APCs. They were able to escape, but Clay was damaged, captured, and his memory hacked. While the characters looked for a way out of Japan and away from their pursuers, they were able to use their military contacts in town to get aid from a former Colonial Marine Corps officer. Within minutes they were whisked to the airport, flew in a private hypersonic to Los Angeles, and were offered money and new IDs to investigate Cronus before Weyland-Yutani did. They, they realized, were working for the United Americas, who were pissed with W-Y over the loss  of their ship Sulaco. 

The next session involved meeting their new partners (including a new PC to replace Clay; the player inadvertently picked the synthetic, again). The crew of the independent scout Honest Mistake are led by Captain Dunn, and include Akoye, the engineer, and Wei, the pilot. They have a jailbroken Weyland series 12 android, Stella, who has been repurposed to aid in scientific and medical tasks. They also have a pair of scientists, a Canadian biochemist (Mignault), and a Kenyan doctor, Kumbe. They were dropped into hypersleep and two weeks later the ship was in the GJ1256 system, closing on Luther Coloney, a fairly new “shake and bake” colony.

On their approach they were attacked by a Class D Skiff — a small interstellar vessel armed with missiles. This was our chance to roll out the space combat rules, and the fight was over quickly. Detection was accomplished, the skiff got an advantageous position, but missed Honest Mistake, but Pugh was able to put the skiff in front of their ship and Wade hit it with the ships light railguns. It was a solid hit and the skiff rolled nothing for their armor. The railguns ripped the little ship stem to stern and killed it instantly.

Suspecting they were on the clock, they took the ship down to the landing site of Cronus, finding a Cobb-styled jumpjet there.

A pair of W-Y terraforming engineers had been dispatched to check out the hulk and had arrived only a few hours earlier. The team left the HM crew to mind the ship, and with the scientists and Stella, entered Cronus. They found a dead neomorph on the vehicle bay deck, the metal around it corroded and melted by acid. They bagged the critter in some plastic tarp for return to Honest Mistake and began a quick recon of the ship, arriving at the bridge. Along the way, they see dead bodies of the Montero crew from the Chariot of the Gods adventure, as well as loads of damage on the bridge. They also find the badly damaged, but reparable, Ava 6 — the ship’s synthetic.  Stella and Jensen were able to fire her back up, but not before Wade heard movement and voices aft near the science labs. The rest of the team went to investigate, missing Ava’s warning when she woke “You are all in terrible danger!”