"In vino veritas." - Pliny the Elder
Hollis Highport, 1105 Week 45
It's been a pleasant couple of weeks for Arion, and has involved more than one dinner with Officer Muhammed. He has grown used to the pre-dinner ritual where they are both offered a small glass of water, thank the waiter for the gift of life, then drink it slowly. It has the strange total lack of taste that speaks of obsessive recycling.
His standards of attractiveness adjusted by familiarity and several glasses of imported wine, Arion is starting to think being strip-searched by Officer Muhammed might be a pleasant way to round out the evening when Ganzfeld, now dressed in a Scout Service uniform with a rank which comfortably exceeds his own, drops into a seat at the table, eyeing Muhammed with some distaste, an emotion which the latter returns in spades.
"You're not answering your commlink," she accuses Arion.
"Well, no. I'm on leave, and as you can see, I'm in the middle of dinner with our Port Authority liaison officer."
"No, you're not, not any more. Follow me, and take two of these; I need you sober enough to fly." Arion apologises to Officer Muhammed with his eyes, and adds a promise of catching up later, then taps his commlink on the table's payment terminal.
Outside, Ganzfeld fidgets with the left cuff of the uniform and the rank badges blur and shift into a rank lower than Arion's.
"That feature is supposed to be locked," says Arion, who has eyes like a hawk.
"If you haven't worked out that Karagoz and I are spooks by now, you're dumber than you look. Which would not be easy. Now, first step; we're going on a bar crawl..."
Ganzfeld explains that by pure chance, a Navy system defence patrol intercepted an encrypted tight-beam transmission from the surface of Hollis. Karagoz wants them to go down there, find the source, and investigate. They have a rough idea of the general area the message came from, and before the actual descent, it seems prudent to ask around a little first; Cori notes acidly that Arion is well known in the local bars by now, and will draw less attention, so he should lead. He asks for some extra money to buy a few rounds and is rebuffed, but decides to buy them anyway.
He begins his enquiry by asking who lives on the surface.
"Nobody," answers a grizzled scout with a capacity for alcohol which strains Arion's credit rating. "Not permanently, anyway. The plant life is lethal. The sandworms, too."
"So nobody down there at all?"
"Well, nobody permanent. There's usually one or two scientific expeditions down there; they use drones for most of the field work, live in crawlers. And I think there's some sort of cult living in the lava tubes up near the north pole. But I mostly fly scientists there and back, drop off drones, pick up samples they collect. You know the kind of work."
"I hear all sorts of stories about what's down there. You ever see anything unusual?"
"I did come across an abandoned container base a few weeks back, you know the ones - portable quarters for a small team. It was smashed flat, sandworm maybe. I did poke around it a little in case there was anything worth taking, but I didn't find anything." Another couple of beers gets a location out of him, and it's in the area of interest.
"Karagoz and Sheng will stay up here," Ganzfeld tells Arion. "Get Mr Osheen for backup. The three of us are going down there."
Hollis Badlands, 1105 Week 45
"Definitely looks smashed flat," Arion says. Like all of them, he is wearing a face mask with a commlink and a small oxygen cylinder, every square centimetre of flesh is covered against the glare and the spores, and beneath the outer layer is a thermal control garment the ship's fabber printed for them overnight, covered in tubes with coolant water flowing through them. It had started off uncomfortably cold, but after only a few minutes it is already warm despite the best efforts of the refrigerating backpack. Arion understands now on a visceral level why nobody lives down here, lava tubes or not.
He hands the binoculars to Ganzfeld; already there is grit in the moving parts, and adjusting them results in stiff movements. "Just how big are these sandworms?"
"Fifteen, twenty metres long."
"What do they eat?"
"No idea. Library data at the scout base says they haven't managed to keep a biology team down here long enough to find out. There were casualties. They decided it wasn't worth the losses."
"So probably not much more than a couple of metres wide. That hut was squashed by something bigger. Something that managed to avoid the solar panels and the transmitter array. Ship maybe?"
"Why would you squash it with a ship?"
"To make it look abandoned when it isn't."
"You have a nasty, suspicious mind. You'll fit in just fine. Okay, let's go check it out." The three lever themselves upright with some effort, unbalanced by the gently humming backpacks.
"Wait a minute... what's that noise?" Sand shifting in front of them.
Sand that suddenly explodes into a muscular tube, with a hole at the front ringed by fangs.
To be continued...
GM Notes
I usually struggle with fleshing out worlds, but Hollis has come together nicely; I think setting it up in multiple game systems really helped me there.
And here are the dice rolls for the long-promised introduction of Richard Woolcock's Interstellar Rebels as a scenario generator.
- The 'Fighting for a Cause' section seems unnecessary and inappropriate, as I already have PC motivations. So I skip this section.
- Rolling 3d6 on the Mission Generator I get three 5s - the dice are being a bit weird at the moment. Reading from the table: "The rebels decide to steal plans or intel, which leads them to a lawless colony, but they must also deal with a change of plans." They're already on a lawless colony, so let's keep the action on Hollis rather than creating a new world, and say they need to go down to the surface.
- Next, I roll two subplots on the twist table using a d66; 32 (the icon looks like a robot's head) and 22 (a battery plugged into a charger).
- Then, I'm supposed to pick a type of challenge, but let's roll for that, too; that tells me the first scene of the adventure will be Networking, which seems reasonable; that can only happen once per mission, though.
Networking is a Persuasion or Intimidation roll; Arion and Cori are both better at the former, and she'll Support him - one of my tenets is that if at all possible, the PCs should be the active characters in everything. Cori rolls first, Persuasion d6 and, thanks to an Ace, gets a 7, which is a +1 to Arion's roll. Arion next makes a Wealth roll as he is spreading a little cash around (d6 plus a Wild Die, or "d6w" in my usual jargon); a 5, success, so it works but his Wealth die drops to d4. He now rolls his Persuasion (d6w); 5, +1 for Cori's support, +2 for buying rounds; total 8, success with a raise. My usual rule is that each success and raise gets the PC a useful piece of information, so Arion learns two things, and gains a Victory Point for success in the scene.
At the end of the first (networking) scene, I describe what I expect to happen ("the team descend to the surface and explore the wrecked hut") then roll on the curveball table to see if events deviate from that. The curveball roll is 2d6, with what Mythic would call an Altered or Interrupted scene occurring if you roll doubles. I roll 5, 6 - that's not a double, so things go as expected.
Now, I select a challenge type for the next scene, and work it into the narrative. We haven't had a fight for a while, so I choose Combat. Who or what are they fighting? Well, there was talk of sandworms... but before we do that, I have statblocks for Arion, Mr Osheen and the worm, but I really should stat up the other NPCs if they're going to get into fights, so that's up next.
No comments:
Post a Comment