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25 August, 2012

Hollow Earth Expedition Character: Valkyrie

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For the new player, I’ve been trying to come up with a good character to throw in with the testosterone-heavy Hannibal Drake (Steve McQueen, ferchris’sake) and Jack MacMahon team. We’ve already had a version of Jezebel Jade from Johnny Quest as an NPC (heavily tweaked), and I wanted a good anti-hero to play off of the similarly mercenary Drake, and the dog-loyal and white-hat MacMahon.

One of the choices that went over well just off of the visual was a version of Valkyrie from the old (and the not-as-old ’80s revival of Airboy.) Here’s the thumbnail of our campaign’s version of the classic HIllman character:

Born in summer of 1910, Liselotte von Schellendorf is a relative to the famed German general of the 19th Century, Paul Bonsart von Shellendorf and also composer Fritz Bronsard von Schellendorf. Her father was a nephew to the general and was a colonel during the Great War, where he lost his arm on the Western Front. Both of her older brothers are dead, one in combat in 1918 on the Eastern Front, and the other from influenza in 1920. Her father turned to his daughter as a surrogate for his boys, teaching her to ride, shoot, and fence, and raising her to be not just a fine example of German femininity, but a modern woman.

She was educated at excellent bording schools in Switzerland and Bavaria, and in 1927, had her first airplane ride at a fair. She was hooked. After a year of needling her father, she took flying lessons and in 1928 received her pilot’s license. She was active as a young lady in the German flying community and is friends with aviation war heroes. It was here she came to the attention of Herman Goering. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Goering had the notion of creating a public relations splash with a military unit made up of Nazi women — die Luftjugenfrauen, or “the Air Maidens.” Heading up the group as a captain (hauptmann) was Liselotte, codenamed Valkyrie.

The Air Maidens have been a travelling sideshow, but along the way have developed a reputation with the Luftwaffe for being exception aviatrices. In an exhibition show, the Maidens flew circles around some of the best German men in the service. From 1935-36, they were given less attention and support, as Hitler found the notion of women treading in the masculine forum of combat unseemly. Nevertheless, Valkyrie was able to get Junkers and Arado to allow them to test pilot the latest German warplanes, using Pancho Barnes’ example as a means to impress buyers with their ease of use. When the Spanish Civil War (where she will be introduced) broke out, Valkyrie lobbied for her Maidens to join the Condor Legion’s Versuchsjagdgruppe 88 air assets, and managed to get Goering to agree.

VALKYRIE (aka Liselotte von Schellendorf)

German female, age 26. 5’5″, 130 lbs. Black hair, blue eyes   Archetype: Adventuress/Soldier   Motivation: Fame

ATTRIBUTES: Body 2   Dexterity 3   Strength 2   Charisma 4   Intelligence 2   Willpower 4

SECONDARY ATTRIBUTES: Size 0   Move 5   Perception 6   Initiative 5   Defense 7*   Stun 2   Health 6   Style 5

RESOURCES & TRAITS: Attractive, Iron Will; Finesse Attack (Melee)**, Focused Defense*, Evasive Action (+2 DEF to vehicle); Artifact 2***, Followers 2 (Air Maidens), Rank 1, Status 1 (+2 social tests in Germany & aviation circles; +1 elsewhere)

WEAKNESSES: Danger Magnet, Condescending, Intolerant (You can guess the groups), Overconfident

SKILLS: Acrobatics 1/4, Animal Handling 1/5, Athletics 2/4, Brawl 1/3, Bureaucracy 2/4, Con 1/5, Diplomacy 1/5, Drive 2/5, Firearms 1/4, Gunnery 1/3, Intimidation 1/5, Linguistics 2/5, Melee 2/5**, Pilot (Air) 3/6, Ride 2/5, Stealth 1/4, Streetwise 1/5, Survival 1/3, Warfare 1/3

LANGUAGES: German (native); English, French, Spanish

WEAPON: Luger P07 9mm or Star B 9mm; Rapier or Sabre, Riding Crop

VEHICLE*** (All the Air Maidens are flying these):

Heinkel HE112 fighter V6

Size 2   Def 6   Str 6   Spd 300   Han +2   Crew 1

2 × 7.92 mm MG17: Dam 3L   Rng 250′   Cap: 500   Rate A   Spd A

 

24 August, 2012

A Glimpse Into One’s Mind

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I was looking for a new notebook to do some character and adventure spitballing — I still tend to do my initial ideas on paper, because I can draw relation diagrams, etc. easier with pen and paper than using a computer. This one had been purchased while i was still working as an intelligence analyst, and had some of the historical incidents that I was working on as examples of how we could model rubrics to look for success/failure points in a plan. I could also see the notes for personal stuff — how I was paying down debt, getting the household budget in order. There was a folder with all my final paperwork and lay off letter of recommendation from my boss (tepid, at best.)

Then there were the gaming notes — the various iterations of characters that would not be used for games that would not come off. These would surface again and again, steadily maturing into the characters now being used in the various campaigns. It was an fascinating look into how my mind was working at the time. Each page was cluttered with ideas for various game campaigns, sometimes on the same page. Characters written and rewritten, sometimes for different games than originally intended. Notes on games that were running at the time. House rules cobbled together on the fly (one set of which should hit the blog soon…)

And all through these notes, the long lists of job searches, check-marked for those applied to, Xs for those i was not qualified for for whatever reason, underlined if they called for an interview (almost none of these.) More household finance stuff — what I could get for selling things, numbers to call for the TA position paperwork that went “missing”, notes for my comprehensive exams. How much my wife at the time could expect from life insurance pay outs and notes on locations to stage a spectacular motorcycle crash.

There was increasing desperation in the notes, but the game creation was occasionally inspired! This was the period of the superb Gorilla Ace! setting. The excellent Battlestar Galactica campaign I didn’t want to end, but which would after my divorce. Ideas for mashing Jovian Chronicles with Transhuman Space, resurrecting my old Space: 1889 campaign with the Ubiquity rules (Hollow Earth Expedition) — similar to the Leagues of Adventure game recently out. A new Star Trek campaign set in the old show period, but a new universe (before the release of the Abrams film.)

It was obvious, looking back, that I was desperate to find a job, save my family finances, and my mind was so addled by the pressures of these things, comprehensive exams, freelance writing jobs, and general unhappiness, that my mind could not alight anywhere with certainty. But this was where the core ideas for the current Hannibal Drake Hollow Earth Expedition,  Galactica, and the now on-the-backburner Supernatural campaigns got their start.

Then came the break in 2010. After a trip home to Scotland, I decided to fix my life. The notes become more orderly. Characters and plot ideas are mostly grouped together. There’s none of the frenetic quality of the early section of the notebook. Characters still get written and rewritten; they drifted from one player they were initially designed for to other players, sometimes new. Sometimes these changes made the characters better, as they turn out to be a better fit for the player; sometimes not. (Often the players let me design for them to create more cohesive characters for the campaigns [with their input, of course.]) Campaign notes get more pointed, more coherent, and I could see where the bones of the current, very good, BSG game were coming together. There were notes for new player contacts, a few that didn’t pan out, one that was excellent but is sadly looking to be headed for the past, and another that we are determined to find a way to keep, even though he’s GTT.

Cracking open the notebook gave me a look into my own thought processes — however glancingly — over the period of  2008-2011. It gave me some insight into my thought processes regarding campaign design: the intent of the games from a storytelling standpoint, the metaphors I wanted to use, the character types I wanted to see the players engage, and other ideas used and otherwise. Crack open those old notes every once and a while…you might rediscover something useful.

 

24 August, 2012

After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica RPG

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Monday we finished a short filler episode we started since the player of the ship commander was out at GenCon last week. The mission focused on a new PC, a Tauron marine staff sergeant who had been working as Colonial Fleet Special Investigations Division, Artemesia Largo.

She’s in the middle of getting introduced to her intelligence crew (she’s the intelligence NCOIC), and the other characters are going about their business. The ship’s command master chief, Ajax Giadis, comes across the chief engineer getting together a work gang to find a missing member of their team. Deckhand Reslou was posted to check and replace damaged life support sensors, requiring her to work behind the bulkheads in the tight, dark workspaces. It’s a lot of girders and the occasional catwalk, but it’s a hazardous place. A lot of the young kids don’t use their safety harnesses because it takes too long to clip on and off; people falling several levels is not unheard of.

The chief spots the FNG, Largo, and “hey-you”s her into aiding in the search. They find her body after half an hour of climbing around in the guts of the ship. (Of course, they find her; they’re in the credits!) She has been beaten sharply on the back of the head with a c-spanner, and fell several levels. She had then been dragged and deposited in an overhead air vent over a general storage locker. She is taken for forensics to the infirmary while the deck gang — the only people in the area — are held for questioning. The commander, in temporary NPC mode, assigns the CAG (a PC) to oversee the investigation, as he has uncanny instincts and they are in orbit around Picon with other ships and they aren’t running CAP.

The rest of the adventure is classic murder investigation. They don’t immediately interrogate  the 11 other members of the work gang. MAJ Muir, the CAG, is also ship’s chaplain and he chooses an unorthodox approach of doing “grief counseling” to get an initial read on the people. Only six have the right foot size for the boot marks in the oil and crud at the murder scene, only one transferred with the girl (she was only aboard for a week) from Scorpia’s Argenutm Bay Military Reservation. None are covered in blood (head wounds bleed copiously) and the perpetrator had obviously carried the murdered girl to her resting place. Two are Tauron and their tattoos suggest top her Ha’la’tha involvement, one is a massive “East German female weightlifter” type welder from Caprica, and the other is a bitchy Virgonian. Largo gets locked onto Deckhand Heraklea — a name taken by a lot of the Heraclitus regime after they were deposed following the Cylon War. Muir uses his Intuition to ask “is it Armov?” (the other Tauron.) The answer is yes…now they need proof.

The master chief heads up the search for the missing work jumpsuit that the murderer must have ditched in a relatively small distance from crime scene to their billets. They also turn over the victim and suspects’ lockers and foot lockers. In the victim’s footlocker, they find evidence that someone had taped a large amount of canaba inside for transit up to the ship. Drug smuggling — but was she a willing mule or no? They find the blood-soaked workvest in an access hatch behind one of the toilets in a general head not far from the scene, along with the c-spanner. The work clothes are Armov’s

With the evidence in hand, they go to arrest Armov — portrayed as a creepy, coiled spring sort of bad guy (think classic Russian mobster) — but he twigs they’re onto him, takes one of the other work gang hostage and tries to get to the launch bays, demanding a raptor. The characters give chase, bullets fly, and they manage to surround him. Largo puts a bullet through him, clearing the hostage, and Muir puts him down with a tight double tap.

Eventually, they find out from his Tauron buddy Heraklea that she was used unwittingly as a mule, but she discovered and flushed the canaba. Armov killed her for it.

 

 

9 August, 2012

The New Guy: Tips For Bringing In a New Player

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When a gaming group gets a new player you have a few challenges to confront: do you just throw them in the deep end and bring them into the play in media res? Do you can an ongoing adventure to start a new one with the person involved? Do you craft an entirely new game, perhaps, to introduce them to the group, then bring them in on other ongoing campaigns?

We had a new player join us for out Battlestar Galactica game — the game they were most interested in playing — so I decided to go with a combination of the first two choices: There was already an ongoing adventure, but we were a a spot where I could do a “teaser” just for that character, to introduce the player to the world and the character to the other players. There’s a lot going on in the game, as anyone who has read the after-action reports can see. The character was brought in as a Colonial Fleet SID (sort of their NCIS) investigator that is aiding in the hunt for Cylon infiltration, but also to keep an eye on the commander (a player character) as the admiralty is suspicious of the constant coincidental links between him and the Cylons.

It was a pretty clean intro, but sometimes you just aren’t quite set up for an intro like that. Say you are in the standard dungeon crawl — how did the character get to be there? Did you “promote” an NPC (give the player an existing NPC?) Or are they mysteriously in the depths of a dungeon without having encountered all the monsters, etc. your party did? If so, how did they get there? IF they are traveling to a location, it’s a bit easier. There’s the traditional tavern meet and greet, but I prefer some kind of short side adventure — the players encounter some kind of evil or shenanigans the new player is involved with. They get convinced to go on this side mission with the new character. Easy peasy.

If you are very near the end of an ongoing mission — say right at the denouement — you could always shelve that last play session for a week or so, play something different to get the players comfortable with each other (I did this with the BSG adventure, as we were to the final fight in a Marvel mission), then come back to it if the new player is absent or there is another play time available without them. Another way to handle it to jump the characters to just after their last mission and assume success or failure. “Whew — that was a tough fight, but we slew the dragon and got the treasure…” or “I was sure we had that bootlegging gangster dead to rights, but somehow he got away…fortunately, we’ll get a lead through [new character]…”

When we’ve had a large number of players change hands I find I favor the create a new campaign strategy.

What’s your strategy for handling new folks?

 

3 August, 2012

New Villain for Marvel Heroic PRG: The Pied Piper

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This character is unique to our campaign, which is an “original” setting (or as much a one as supers campaigns get.)

I’ve been told our Liberty City campaign is a bit dark. The recent adventure, which featured the suicide of a security guard with the unfortunate power to release a power noxious gas from his nethers, aided in stopping a robery on a casino in the LC. Since the gas also affects dies, it ruined the carpets, paint, and fouled the air of the place badly enough the lobby will need to be refurbished…for that they fired him. It was a poignant scene and continued a theme I’ve been pushing — powers don’t make you smart, talented, or competent. The villains are still mostly idiots who can’t do much other than crime (and that rarely well), and the heroes don’t necessarily embace their gifts, or have them make their lives marvelous.

Here’s an upcoming villain that keeps that darkness going. The campaign is essentially a police procedural show with superpowers. In an upcoming episode, they’ll have a series of child abduction/murders that link into an FBI serial killer manhunt. They know very little, other than the suspect uses some kind of hypnotic weapon to draw in the kids. Only once has someone identified the perpetrator, and that agnet was killed with some kind of sonic weapon — possibly the same thing used to lure the kids. The FBI has dubbed him the Pied Piper:

THE PIED PIPER (real identity unknown)

Affiliations: Solo d10, Buddy d8, Team d6

Distinctions: Pedophile, Takes a Lot of Planning, Centuries of Experience

POWERS SETS:

Psychic Vampire

Lifeforce Drain: d10     Superhuman Durability: d10   Superhuman Stamina: d10

SFX, Psychic Vampire: On a successful life force drain test, shift the effect dice from the Pied Piper’s stress to the target. With an opportunity, can shift trauma from the Pied Piper to the target.

SFX, Memories!: With a successful life force drain, can trade 1PP for  the highest die from the opponent’s next action pool for his action or reaction.

SFX, Unleashed: Step up or double a Psychic Vampire power for a turn. If the action fails, the effect die goes to the doom pool.

Limit, Love of Innocence: When lifeforce drain is used on an adult, takes the targets reaction die in mental stress.

The Flute

Sonic Blast d8     Mind Control: d10

SFX, Come Hither: +d6 for each extra target and keep an extra die for effect.

Limit, Made for Children: 1PP and step the Mind Control effect down to d6 on adults.

Limit, Gear: 1PP and shutdown Flute. Needs to make a test vs. the doom poo or use an opportunity  to recover.

Specialities: Covert Master d10, Crime Master d10, Menace Master d10, Psych Expert d10

 

28 July, 2012

My Must Have 10 RPG Books

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There’s the usual “You’re on a desert island, what 10 RPG books do you bring with you?” meme running through the interwebz. I decided to play along. Unless my desert island has power outlets and wifi connections for my iPad so I don’t have to choose, here would be the ones I “need”:

1. Victory Games’ James Bond: 007 RPG. Or at the very least, the GM screen, which is almost all you need to run the thing.

2. Margaret Weis’ Cortex corebook. You can pretty much run anything with it.

3. Margaret Weis’ Marvel Heroic RPG. My new go-to supers system.

4. R Talsoran’s Castle Falkenstein. With our house rules for combat, it’s a pretty solid game engine.

5. GDW’s Space: 1889. Combine it with the above and you’ve got a good setting and decent rules.

6 & 7: Exile Games’ Hollow Earth Expedition and Secrets of the Surface World (the period sourcebook with lots of nice rules addendums and gear updates.

8 & 9: Decipher’s Star Trek Narrator and Players Guides.

10: Margaret Weis’ Serenity. Used in tandem with the core Cortex book, you add some good, but very abstract, rules for spacecraft.

Notice the glaring omission of fantasy stuff..?

What’s yours..?

 

26 July, 2012

Play Report: Marvel Heroic RPG

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So this week marked the return of Marvel Heroic RPG to the gaming table. It’s been a couple of months since we did the test play, and we found that the game ran smoothly despite a few “what was that rule again” moments on my part.

The campaign is still a homebrew universe, set primarily in Liberty City, Delaware — a fictional city founded by the grandfather of the current, and who was the original, Paragon after he bested a human nuclear bomb the Nazis had sent to destroy Washington in 1945. There’s a big helping of The Incredibles and The Venture Brothers, meets Wild Cards and various comic books I liked back when I collected comics.

The game opened with an origin story flashback sequence for one of the new characters, El Gato — a former barrio hood from Los Angeles that was turned into a cat by strange chemicals at a “jump” factory run by rival white gangs. Jump is a main feature of the adventure — it is a drug, originally a military experiment to create supers (or metahumans, as they are officially called) during WWII, to counter a similar Nazi program. Jump gives normals powers at between a d6 and d8 level (what we call Class C powers) for between 30 minutes to 12 hours, depending on the person’s biochemistry. Their genetic code, biochemistry, and it is thought, their psychological makeup lead to what kind of powers they get, how powerful they are (Class B: d8-d10, Class A d12), and it can occasionally lead to permanent powers (For “jumpers”, I roll randomly unless I need something for the story.) The drug also has a nasty effect on the nervous system of the user and burns your brain pretty quickly. It’s highly addictive psychologically; having super powers is cool.

The game started with El Gato landing in Liberty City for an SMA (Superhuman Martial Arts League) fight. He usually does tandem fights, as he is small (3’6″) and not overly strong…but he’s hard to hit and has a mouth that will piss anyone off. He’s the distraction for his teammate. He gets to the venue, the Indian Run Casino on the river and moments later the place is attacked by three jumpers — one a sonic blaster, two with super-strength and durability, of which one can set off earthquakes by punching or stomping on the ground. The other characters just happen to be in the area: Paragon is flying home from trying to score a licensing deal, and the head of a “capes and masks” unit of the police is nearby getting himself a YooHoo and a Bust-a-Nut bar.

The fight went well and the players were able to use each other’s strengths to quickly put down one of the villains. The cops were badly outmatched by the bad guys, but Paragon and El Gato evened the scales. For the mostly normal cops, they have to use their wits (since they didn’t have their power armor handy) and instead of trying to inflict stress, they used their shotguns with “goop” rounds and soporific gas grenades to hit the bad guys with complications to slow them down.

One of the bad guys is run out of the casino by a security guard who has a power…one that earned him the metahuman registry alias of Stinkbug. You can guess his power. They eventually capture the bad guys, take them to the SCU (Special Crimes Unit — the official title of the “capes and masks” squad) for interrogation, where they learn the jump is coming from a small group of hoods out of Atlantic City currently testing their product so they can put together a jumped-up army to go against Grendel (the Matt Wagner Hunter Rose version) who is kicking their crime family’s ass right now.

The cops get sidetracked a few hours later for a capes and masks call that includes a HAZMAT team order. Stinkbug, having blasted the lobby of the casino with putrification that changed the color of the carpets, paint, (as well as Paragon’s uniform), and left a smell they are hard pressed to get out, was fired from his job. Having been called Stinkbug in the press, despite giving his real name and having attempted to change his alias in the registry, has committed suicide. The note mentions his inability to keep a job, get a girl, or lose the horrible nickname his dad gave him. This will be a running theme: superpowers don’t always improve your life. They also don’t make you competent, as would seem in normal comic books — criminals are still usually stupid or lazy; heroes are not always good guys. Or competent.

El Gato manages to track down the dealer for the jump, questions him, and finds out he’s working for their prime jump manufacturer, Bernie Corso. They get the dealer back to SCU and find out from him where the factory is.

Next time: big fight at the factory.

 

18 July, 2012

Marvel Heroic RPG Character Datafile: Spiral

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I decided to take a shot at building one of my favorite characters from the Marvelverse…I don’t know why this character appeals so much — maybe it’s the visual, maybe it was Longshot was just so out there it caught my imagination…here she is:

SPIRAL (Ricochet Rita)

Affiliations: Solo d10, Buddy d6, Team d8

Distinctions: Lovelorn, On Her Own Side, Slave Hunter

POWER SETS:

Genetically-Altered Cybernetic Alien

Superhuman Reflexes d10   Superhuman Psychic Resistance d10   Superhuman Durability d10   Enhanced Strength d8   Enhanced Stamina d8   Enhanced Speed/Jump d8

SFX, Multiple Arms: Add d6 and keep an extra effect die per extra opponent; SFX, Psychic Domination: On successful reaction to psychic stress, inflicts effect die on attacker with same complication, etc.; +1PP to for +1 step to effect; LIMIT, Exhausted: 1PP when GACA power is shutdown; recover with opportunity or in transition scene.

Extradimensional Sorceress

Sorcery Mistress d10   Energy Resistance d10   Energy Blast d10   Teleport d10   Invisibility d10   Weapon (Swords) d6

 SFX, Afflict: Can add or subtract power level to a target equal to the number of shifts over the reaction to the spell; SFX, Counterattack: Reaction to energy attacks allows her to inflict stress equal to her reaction effect die; SFX, Life-force Drain: 1PP and Sorcery attack to target causes Physical stress to target and heals all stress and trauma; LIMIT, Astral Silhouette: Invisibility shutdown against astral or mystic-based senses; LIMIT: Energy blast shutdown against living creatures; only effect on inanimate objects or mystic/energy “objects”; LIMIT, Gotta Dance!: If Spiral cannot dance her spells, 1PP and shutdown any Sorceress power created assets or complications. If she fails a resistance reaction to distraction or suffers stress, 1PP and the power and its assets and complications.

Specialties: Acrobatics Mistress d10, Combat Mistress d10, Cosmic Expert d8, Mystic Mistress d10, Tech Mistress d10

Assets: Can call on slave hunters from the Mojoverse (Gang of 3d8) with a PP, has access to The Body Shop — 3d8 genetic and cybernetic body modification medics, or call on members of Freedom Force, depending on the period she is being played.

History:

Rita was a successful stuntwoman nicknamed Ricochet Rita when she encountered the being known as Longshot, a genetically engineered slave of another dimension ruled by the monstrous Mojo and leader of a rebellion there. Rita helped Longshot, falling in love with him in the process. At some point, Rita was abducted by Mojo’s agents and abducted to his universe. There, she became, Spiral a slave-hunter for the Spineless Ones and the the property of Mojo. To ensure Spiral’s hatred of other humanoids, Mojo had Spiral designed with six arms rather than only two and gifted her with the ability to wield magic.

Mojo sent Spiral and various rebel hunters to recapture Longshot, who at the time was rendered amnesiac from a previous capture. They followed Longshot through an interdimensional portal to Earth, although they were ultimately unsuccessful.

It is unknown if Spiral was trapped on Earth or elected to stay. Spiral enlisted in Freedom Force, the United States government’s team of superhuman agents, as a means of learning more about Earth, and served with them on most of their adventures.

Later, Mojo joined Spiral on Earth, intending to prevent Longshot from returning to their native world and stirring up the slaves. Mojo then decided to take over Earth himself, but was defeated by Longshot. Spiral led Mojo back to their home-world. At some point, Spiral returned to Earth and to Freedom Force.

While on Earth, Spiral also created a guise as “pro-priestess” of The Body Shoppe, a place where genetics and technology are used to alter people in the same way that Spiral herself was altered, she is responsible for the transformation of the Japanese warrior Lady Deathstrike into a cyborg, as well as, presumably, many of the cyborg Reavers. Later, Spiral lured the mutant Rachel Summers, the X-Man once known as Phoenix, to capture and slavery in Mojo’s universe. Later still, Spiral and Mojo temporarily captured many of the X-Men’s proteges, the New Mutants, the hero Captain Britain, and his sister Betsy Braddock, later known as Psylocke. Spiral was involved in Braddock’s cybernetic implants in place of her eyes.

Spiral eventually left Freedom Force after a clash with the X-Men in Dallas, Texas, where the X-Men seemingly died in battle with the trickster-god, the Adversary. She presumably returned to the Mojo’s universe, where later, the X-Men Longshot and Dazzler led a rebellion against Mojo. For reasons of her own, she teleported the X-Men to the universe to aid the rebellion. After Mojo was seemingly killed by Longshot, Spiral teleported away.

Later, Mojo returned with Spiral at his side to capture the hero Shatterstar. Shatterstar was mortally wounded by Mojo by being transformed into a digitized state. Spiral saved his life, however, by transporting him and his ally Longshot to the bedside of a comatose youth named Benjamin Russell, who was then physically linked Shatterstar. In that act of heroism, Spiral revealed to have some very deep feelings for Shatterstar and Benjamin Russell, but nevertheless teleported away, apparently back to the Mojo’s universe.

Spiral later appeared during the hero team Excalibur’s encounter with the mystic Dragons Of The Crimson Dawn. Spiral was somehow mystically linked to the Dragons, wearing the same Crimson Dawn-tattoo that Psylocke possessed. After the Dragon’s defeat, Spiral escaped to an unknown location.

 

18 July, 2012

After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica RPG

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Tonight’s episode was more of an interstitial episode, rather than a push episode (one that moves the main plot arc along.) In it, the character were conducting a shakedown operation to test the repairs to their vessel in a lead up to a few small combat exercises. Of course, they wind up getting dragged on mission to conduct a rescue of a salvage vessel being aggressed by an unknown pirate.

The salvage vessel has been hit hard, has its life support failing and fires aboard, requiring the ship to send a DC party. They do the necessary repairs, but not before the master chief leading the mission finds himself in the middle of a fire (something that terrifies him) that leads to a hull breech. After crapping himself, getting rescued by a raptor, he’s back into the repair fight.

The CAP, meanwhile, had raced to the hostile vessel — an older flatop like seen in the show — which jams DRADIS and other targeting with jiggers and sparrow; very unusual! Normally, they just run or jump away. Worse, they’re armed with light railguns and a point defense system. The fighters knock it around a bit, but the commander character finally has enough of the nonsense and pops a shot of anti-ship missiles. The flatop gets hammered for heavy damage, and surrender.

Turns out they stayed in the fight because the salvage vessel had very valuable cargo: 50 MTn MIRVs salvaged off of a derelict basestar from the first war.

One element (and a bit of freshadowing) I threw at them: the first rollout of the Command Naigation Program, which the XO describes as a beta, not real finished product. The CNP works alright, except it can’t talk to their Owleye sensor pallets (they have the rollbar version of Valkyrie)… they wind up finding a way to bypass the problem. Savvy players now know we’re getting close to the time of the miniseries.

 

11 July, 2012

After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica RPG

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Not a lot happened in our Battlestar Galactica game this week…or so it seemed. The “episode” was entitled “Mission Shift” and dealt primarily with the changing of several officers in the command staff and preparing for their next mission — planning and executing Operation Undertow, an attempt to collect intelligence on the Cylons in the wake of discovering they have cybernetically-augmented human agents (or possibly some new biomechanical Cylon?)

What they’ve learned: these agents are similar to humans in appearance and biology. Their DNA reads as normal. However, the blood contains molecular-sized machines, the purpose for which they haven’t ascertained. A fiber optic-like network was suffused in the brain and nervous system of the one agent, tying together into what they think was a central processing unit near the brainstem. There was some kind of heavily shielded superconductive liquid housed near the pineal gland — purpose unknown. The intelligence corps cannot decide if these are some kind of biomechanical Cylon, or humans augmented to be more pliant.

They have begged a scanning electron microscope to do the work needed to locate the nanobots, although a biopsy of the nervous tissue run through a spectroscope can also give a good indication of whether or not a person has been altered (or is a Cylon…) This information is still highly classified and the likelihood of a Colonies-wide test for Cylon agents is so politically toxic the fleet hasn’t even thought to suggest it.

Undertow’s current mission is to investigate systems with likely sources of tylium, radioactives, and other materials necessary for building Cylon and basestars. One of their vessels is the battlestar Valkyrie under William Adama (this is a version of the mission where Bulldog goes missing.)

I’m thinking about opening another front on the campaign, having the group play a second set of civilian or civilan and military counterintelligence characters investigating possible Cylon incursions on the Colonies.

 

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