Previously, on the Aslan Route: The crew of the Macavity are investigating the fate of a small exploration team sent out by the Prince's landhold to check nearby fishing grounds. They are all dead, in suspicious circumstances, and a couple of male aslan captured walking back to the starport may know what happened...
Sink, 1106 Week 29
Sink D665220-5 Lo Ga Lt GG
Having captured both of the unknown male aslan, the party has multiple lines of inquiry to follow; interrogating the captives, finding their ship, talking to the Port Authority, conducting an autopsy on the expedition members, and (related but different) staking a claim on the whole planet on the Prince's behalf by some sort of sign in orbit.
The crew decides to do these things in parallel; Dr Matauranga's investigations reveal the probable course of events, namely that the captives started a gunfight which was interrupted by the sea monster, and once this had been driven off, the intruders dragged all the bodies out to the fishing boat and sank it so that the local wildlife would eat the evidence. Lifting into orbit to deploy marker buoys tagging the whole planet as belonging to the Prince, the crew notice a corsair lurking underwater some way out from the fishing expedition's base; they decide it will be best for everyone if they affect not to have seen it. Interrogating the captives reveals their captain, one Hroal Irontooth, told them to mess up the expedition and then make their way to the starport for pickup.
It turns out that Rex - a former pirate - knows Irontooth personally and is familiar with his ship and crew, so can explain in great detail who they are, how they operate, and what their ship (the Meatgrinder) is like. Rex knows that Irontooth was formerly part of the Htyowao clan - the chief rivals of the Iuwoi clan which the Prince is next in line to rule - and that he has connections with the aslan organised crime ring on Tyokh; Rex opines that Irontooth has probably put a prize crew aboard a captured freighter and is using that to fence his loot and pick up supplies.
Dr Matauranga deduces, correctly, that there must be more than one team messing things up, and that the others are bound for the starport, the landhold, and the monastery.
Descending from orbit, the crew warn the Prince and hand over the prisoners to him, pointing out that they have not behaved honourably. They then move on to the starport, which they find under new management. Rex uses his former acquaintance with one of the pirates to get up close and personal, then the Macavity's crew cuts them down in a hail of lead and laser bolts.
"It's nothing personal," Rex explains to the smoking bodies.
"They'd do it for you," Mazun reassures him.
Their friend Ahoakhi (the full staff of the Port Authority) is quickly released unharmed, and they decide to don the monk disguises they had made up to infiltrate the facility on Pourne and head for the monastery in the ship's air/raft while Ahoakhi keeps a lookout for the corsair from the Macavity's sensor station.
Meanwhile, Dr Matauranga feels the Third Most Valuable Thing as a presence in his skull. It appears to be changing shape, from its original spiky form to some kind of headset, and thanks to his insatiable curiosity he fails to resist the siren call to put it on. This gives him a glowing red lens over his left eye and an earpiece on his right ear, which he tries to conceal under the hood of his robes; only Vila notices these, and since he suspects the good Doctor is a robot anyway, feels no need to call attention to it. Through the lens, Dr Matauranga can see ghostly forms moving, merging and separating, in the swamp, and when they are ushered in to brief the abbot, he notices the abbot is connected to the swamp by an ethereal cord only he can see. He is not surprised, as the crew already knows the swamp is a hive mind and the abbot is its manifestation in the world of the living.
The abbot thanks them for their warning, but assures them the monastery is easily able to protect itself, although at Vila's suggestion an acolyte closes the doors. The abbot says they would like any bodies the crew is able to donate to the swamp. The crew notes that the monks have an elastic view of death, since they all know they will die eventually, somehow, and then be fed to the swamp to live forever as part of the hive mind.
Counting up the corsair's likely complement, and deducting how many they have already killed, the crew decide that a forewarned landhold can deal with the remaining landing party unless the corsair rocks up and blasts it into oblivion. Their problem, therefore, is to deal with the pirate ship...
To be continued...
GM Notes
I'm currently in a state of considerable demotivation regarding my various campaigns, so I decided I had nothing to lose by going all in on Mythic GM Emulator; if I can get that to work in real time at the table, it potentially eliminates the need for published campaigns going forward. I decided while dozing on the beach over the summer that the two aslan are working for the notorious aslan pirate Hroal Irontooth; he's in The Pirates of Drinax but I remember nothing about him beyond his name, profession, and the name of his ship - Meatgrinder - and can't be bothered to reread the necessary books, so he's a clean slate (and a pirate gang in a corsair is the perfect size for an opposing faction). Rex's backstory established early on that he is an ex-pirate trying to go straight - admittedly, he's not trying very hard - so I allowed him a Common Knowledge roll to know something useful about Hroal. And he rolled 31 on a d6. The others decided Irontooth is a personal hero and Rex has written a biography of him.
I set the chaos factor to 5 and rolled through the session using Mythic to answer questions as they came up, and it worked surprisingly well; by the end of the session Dr Matauranga's player had come up with a complex plot which I immediately merged into what I'd come up with in parallel as we played. The players will do a lot of this work for you, if you let them, and it makes everyone feel good when they turn out to be right.
Chaos factor: Is now 4, as the party did quite well this session.
Plot threads: Irontooth's plot; the Third Most Valuable Thing's desires; Okheai wants the Prince to sheep-dip her thugs back into polite society. (The other threads have either been closed down, delegated to NPCs, or look uninteresting.)
Characters: Clan Iuwoi - Prince Hteleitoril, his wife Elehasei, Ahoakhi the Port Authority; Clan Htyowao, rivals of Iuwoi; Okheai the Alley Cat, mafia boss; Hroal Irontooth and sundry pirates; the abbot; Captain Vipera of the Red Adder. (There are others, but these are the ones we remember unprompted, which means they matter most to the story.)
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