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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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Previous Installments
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 12 & 13
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 10 & 11
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 8 & 9
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 6 & 7
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 5
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Session 4
Elestrial Concordat Campaign - Sessions 1-3
Emergent Story Session 14
They review the new specs. Capable of compensating 4G's, and pulling 6. Should be Jump 2. Still mounts both 2 year fission plant and a fusion plant with a month of fuel, plus 1J2 jump fuel. Also adds fuel purification plants, and adds 5 tons more cargo space.
Virgil is brought aboard, as a civilian passenger and ward of the Captain.
The Mystic Flux, a week before clearance, is ready for inspection. Dr Jones, Col Beauregard, and Amb. Danau, as well as several other Council Members, come to inspect before signing the work payout.
Amongst the councilors is the new non-voting member, Scryx. Scrix is the same polar triphibian that they "entertained" months before. He's soon to be announced as a voting member; his people have in fact joined the Concordat.
Much in-party with NPC discussion of the impending mainlander-islander war which has been escalating since the blackouts. The mainlanders blame the islanders, and the Islanders blame aliens, and nobody really knows for sure. Except Col. Beauregard, and the officers and men of the CSS Elestrial, which fired the fatal shot. And they are NOT telling.
Also, Stryx is going to come along, too give the council time to come to grips with genuine aliens on the council... and to "show" that they are trusted to know the secret projects, too.
As the party is leaving, the Mainlander Voting Councilmember, Amb. Thompson, makes some nasty snarly comments, and Danau, in a fit of pique, checks to see if he's really human. He is not, in fact, human... another Bot. She calls it on it, it takes her hostage, They trap him and Amb. Danau in the airlock, and call Cpl Castle and "bessie" (Castle's BFG) to deal with it.
The doors open, Castle shoots, it dies, and the other councilors deem it a good shoot... but how to tell? They suggest Scryx... his race is in fact too small for the robot bodies' braincases, they are psionic, and can
As they start the process of power-up and inspection, the crew begin to report for inspection details, per ECN and ECSP protocols. When Top Tuit shows, the computer doesn't recognize him. A quick review of why ensues: He identifies himself as Shelton Jaye Tuit. They check their roster, and find his name is Shelton Myer Tuit... in a fit of paranoia, they scan with maximum scan, and find that, indeed, he's NOT human, but if they hadn't done a thorough scan, he'd have passed.
A fight ensues, and eventually, they trap the un-Tuit in the hold, with the Col's sailboat. They send Castle to deal with the Un-Tuit. He does... termination with extreme prejudice.
Minimal damage to the ship, a weeks worth to fix, where Castle's BFG punched a hole in the cargo bay door.
A quick truce is negotiated, and the mainlanders and islanders both agree to let the polars be the litmus test for all government agents.
Yes, a witch-hunt, with alien executioners.
A week later, they take off. They decide to make a J2 up the trace. What they don't know is that the drive, while functional, isn't right. As they enter jumpspace, they know something is terribly wrong... as they discover there is no light in wavelengths of 50 to 500nm. Any light in that spectrum generated is compressed to 500nm... so all blue and purple stuff reports as green; worse, the RGB monitors just doubled up the G by B conversion....
When they come out, they are NOT where they expected... they are 9400 AU from a G5 V and it's M9D companion. They do a search, and find some strong signals from inbound... and are able to isolate that there are a bunch of worlds, and the three they've been able to listen to are using Simian. And not quite their simian. As Dr. Jones notes the stellar configuration, Col B. immediately realizes where they are... the Home System of the God Empire... "Dirt, or Earth or Terra... something like that! Go to silent running NOW! No actives at all. Shut down all emissions we can, go dark, and look for a way out of here."
They start looking for stuff. They find, an AU away, a "dirty snowball" cometary body, 2AU away a nickle-iron chunk, 5 AU a blip that's probably a cometary. They do a passive scan of the 1 AU, and find a marker beacon. The signal is very weak... just above background at 1 AU... "This body is claimed by the Herlockian Pirate Alliance. Unauthorized landings will be met with extreme violence." The message is on continuous loop.
Danau decides to tight beam it in hopes of friendlies. All is going poorly until she switches from simian to Old Galanglic, the Lingua Franca of the God-Empire. At which point, they declare hostilities. The 5 Herlockian ships are 100Td, 4G, Reaction thrust designs. For an hour, they burn towards the Mystic Flux, and for an hour plus, the MF burns 1G without reaction mass... And the pirates notice, and realize they won't be able to catch her. They call off the fight, and all but one of the ships return to base. Dr Jones sees the jump grid warmup and records it, then tries to reverse engineer it, getting lucky and doing so... 3 parsecs rim-spin.
They decide to skip the refuel and leave Home. They do a J1 to the neighboring system... meanwhile, Dr. Jones revises his theory. It takes him just a week to realize that deep space jumps are possible.
They arrive, and find no radio traffic. They aim for the main world, taking almost a week to get there from jump-in. Further, once inbound, they spot visual traffic. They lack a laser comm, but realize the flashes are not that fast. Danau realizes that it's Morse Code by signal mirror... and a huge one, at that. They read the message as a mayday, and detune a laser to reply. They come in to help... seeing a glass and brass structure built on to a metallic asteroid core of a beanstalk's gesynch station.
They are signalled to enter a bay, and find out the problems. They meet Fred LeGrande, the local Vice President of External Affairs. Fred explains their problem... the beanstalk broke a year ago or so... and they have no seed crops because of it. Fred is 2.1m, 40kg, and has hands instead of feet... but is otherise fairly human. his leather space suit has a brass & glass helmet, and his pistol is a brass pepperbox percussion revolver... 10mm.
Fred also explains, in a heavily accented but
Rules Notes
Lots of sensor rolls, lots of initiative rolls.
Yes, I do roll for NPC's vs NPC's, when it's relevant to the story.
Danau made several rolls to convince the other ambassadors to accept Stryx's offer to scan.
Since it was a theory 3.0 drive, it's not going to work right. 2d mishap to begin with... just for doing a J2. But at least they can. Further, the roll needed by the navigator was a 2, and fail by 4... so the mishap was 4d, and I rolled a 16 mishap.
Peter opted to go ahead and revise theory 3.0 based upon the misjump... giving him both 3.1 and 4.0. Until he can build a 4.0 drive, he can't expand that, but the 3.1 is good enough to realize that they are not as gravity dependent as the Concordat thinks.
Session 15 note Short session due to Mother's Day.
Emergent Story - Session 15
They start making preparations to go investigate why the beanstalk no longer is running. Dr. Jones decides to take the Col, Scout Dagger, and Bluž Naždur. The Col brings Cpl. Harker. Dr. Jones invites Kalter Wonkite, since this should be historic. Amb. Danau comes along to talk to more locals. They have learned that the station houses some 2000 people, all of this subspecies.
It's a 20 minute hike to the station's power plant.
As they start to get to work on the engines, they notice 7 reentry trails through the panoramic window... the Col asks for a scope, and is handed a fine TL4 75mm x 1000mm refractor... and rolls just well enough to make out the stripes on the patrol-standard vacc suits, and the personal reentry kits, and some backpacks.
All but Dagger, who volunteered for the away not out of excitement, but out of needing a break from the ship, stays put, while the rest run back to the ship... to find Lts McCree & Novaya, Top Tuit, and the privates Tuit, as well as Dr. Choi, are missing. Lt. Quincy, the XO, is tied up on the bridge, and gagged. Dr. Burns is similarly mistreated in engineering, and Castle is stunnered out in the cargo deck. Virgil is missing. Castle comes to, and tells the computer to activate anti-hijack.
As they get people up, they discover the Maneuver drive has had the inertial compensation system rigged... so as to mis-compensate.
It takes another 10 min to fix that, and an hour to check for other booby traps... then the computer informs them they need to come to the bridge. They reluctantly do so, to find a perosnality simulation interview with Tuit's avatar. They ask many questions, finding out that, indeed, Tuit and company left voluntarily, to form a new and extra-concordat colony of Tuits... BTW, thanks for the ride, now leave us alone, or we nuke you with your nukes that we stole.
The message also writes over the computer's kernal... recording the data of the message into it... and rather than ask what to do, the Col decides to allow it. Not once, but several times.
Dagger makes the needed repairs to the damaged power system, bringing it online.
As it comes up, they meet a pair of downside humans, a downside chimp, and and upsider. The Chimp takes over the discussion, and he and the Col don't quite hit it off...
When the Amb and Dr Jones reveal they are from the Concordat, the downsiders are shocked... and excited. They explain that they are the crew of the Concordat Scoutship CSS Trē Cici Ricker... lost hundreds of years ago.
And they give DNA samples, and hair samples from the crew of the Ricker. They also comment that there is almost no genetic diversity; they ruthlessly culled genetic disorders, and still do, and so are a very homogenous 1.5m 40kg red hair green eyes population of near-twins
They decide not to pursue the deserters. They do decide also to see if they can get Novus Terram declared part of the concordat... by virtue of their human dirtsiders being Concordat refugees...
Mechanics & Rolls
I'd set the difficulty of the repair as fixing a 2nd drive hit. the thing needs parts, but they don't have them and can't get them; it's a TL 16 station. With a TL 4 add on... See, TL 4 can build space craft... they just can't really get them into orbit. But an ancient beanstalk will get them up to orbit.
I randomized to see if the guys aboard the shuttlecar of the beanstalk would be alive or dead, and got a 12... alive it was. They are malnourished, unkempt, and in poor physical shape, but alive. And they didn't break the shuttle's LS system.
The Ricker is an homage to a good friend's sister. He and I jointly cooked up the mutiny of the Tuits months ago.
New Ship Specs
Specifications ©2010 William Hostman. Permission for non-commercial use granted.
Model TPX-B Patrol
DA: New Monday (1st) May 1000
FF: New Thursday (4th) Sep 1000
FJ: Waxing Monday (7th) Sep 1000
Td MCr PU System
400 16 0 Hull
0 1.6 0 Streamlining
50 8 Armor 10
10 2 0 Bridge
0 0.16 0 Model 2
2 1 0 Sens: +0 BMil
25 40 {12.} JD11D
23 48 {24.} MD11M 6G
40 104 [26.] FuPP11N
12 18 [4.] FiPP11B
4 0.2 0 FPP 80T/d
3 3.3 0 Triple Turret x3
0 1.5 3 3x PL-9
0 3 6 3x BL-9
0 12 9 3x PA-10
0 0.6 0 Triple fixed
0 2.25 0 3x MSL
48 6 0 12x SR
C, P, N, 4E, 4G
M
80 0 0 Fuel, Jump 1j2
78 0 0 Fuel, FuPP 6wk
4 0 0 Fuel, FiPP 1yr
5 0 0 Mail Bin (Cargo)
16 0 0 Cargo
400 267.61
-26.761 Std Discount
400 240.859 List Price for new construction
System Data
Systems ©2010 William Hostman. Permission for non-commercial use granted. UWP's open content under the T20 STL, D20 STL, and Wizards OGL1.0a.
Home
System Listing Or *-SAHPGL-TL Bases P M T Z Trade Codes
Daystar P G5V
Warm Belt 0 A-P00???-? 7 – R I As Va 29.8 M km
Fairy Belt 1 A-P00???-? 4 – H I As Va 59.9 ±0.2 M km
Dirt 2 A-867???-? NSHC 7 2 T H Ga 104.5 M km
Dust 2.3 X-R00???-? – – T H 0.024 M km
Simia 2.60 X-467???-? 8 – T H Ag 0.480 M km
Rock Belt 4 A-P00???-? 4 – C O As Va
Jove 6 SGG – 0 C O
Nearstar 14 M9D 189.9 G km
Wolfen 0 A-777???-? 6 1 T O Ga 30 M km
Cub 0.30 X-400???-? 0 – C O 0.210 M km
Outpost 1 D-000???-? – 5 – F O Ic Va 60 M km
Novus Terram
System Listing Or *-SAHPGL-TL Bases P M T Z Trade Codes
Vitus Novus P K0 III
0 X-300000-0 - 0 0 R I Ba
A. Primus 3 X-P00000-0 - 0 0 H I Ba
A. Secundus 4 X-P00000-0 - 0 0 H I Ba
Novus Terram 5 C-553430-4 - 1 * H I
Gigantus 6 SGG 0 0 H I
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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Oh, and a key for the UWP impaired:
System Listing : Name of body
Or: Orbit number. 0-24... orbits above 12 are Oort cloud ranges...
*: Starport
S: Size, in hexidecimal, in thousands of miles diameter
A: Atmosphere bigger tends to be denser. A+ is unbreathable and B+ is dangerous.
H: Hydrographics, 10's of percents of surface covered in water (if Atm 1-9) or other fluid (Atm A+)
P: Population exponent... number of spaces to right of Pop multiple in total pop
G: Government Code... table lookups.
L: Law Level
TL: Tech Level
Bases: N=Naval S=Scout L=Law P=Pirate H=TASHostel C=Consulate R=Research
P: Population Multiple
M: Moons of this body
T: Temperature Code: P-F-C-T-H-R
Z: Zone of system V-I-I*-H-O*-O
Trade Codes
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Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
