Saturday, April 19, 2014

Yet another Classic Traveller session report

An excellent Traveller session last night. Our heroes were trying to organise a sale of one of their robots. They were looking to generate a bidding frenzy between the large houses on Affran. The first bid was 1MC, and they laughed at the bidder. So, that's two of the great Affran houses who now want their blood.

Their warehouse was attacked over night, in an attempted raid to steal the robots, but they took care of that with a few well placed lasers. the attackers were part of a mercenary company.

Then the Navy turned up needing their consultancy skills. The Navy considers them experts on the alien Aslan. This then, had them shooting out to one of the system's outer moons where a Navy listening post had gone quiet after a garbled message that mentioned the Aslan.

In then end, they found the listening post destroyed and the operators dead. Checking the security system and analyzing the digital records revealed that a small ship had launched from the moon shortly after the attack.

They backtracked the trajectory and this led them to another of the planets moons. There, they found a secret buried installation. When they examined the door, they found it was made for Aslan hands/paws. They blasted their way inside, losing a couple of their Marines (Vasquez and Drake) to an explosive booby trap. A pair of Aslan controlled robots appeared and took out Private Frost before they were taken down.

When they entered the installation there was a terrific explosion as an Aslan ship blasted of from a hidden silo. The P.C.s raced back to their own ship and set off in pursuit but only had an opportunity to take one shot, which they missed...

This is third Aslan incursion the team have happened across. First the illegal colony on New Horizon, the x-boat type ship that appeared in Imperium space and now a hidden base on this moon.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Video review - Maquis

This is my review of a free print and play WWII worker placement game

Saturday, April 05, 2014

Another Classic Traveller session report

Role players never cease to amaze me with their ingenuity. I had a scenario all set up , and had thought through the possible outcomes, but in the end the players of-course do something unexpected...

It's a space game, classic Traveller. The PCs have a fantastic alien (Aslan) space craft, huge, well armed, armoured, and even a good jump drive. The last thing I ever expected, was that they would abandon it.

I'll admit that things might have looked a little tough...  The ship was being dragged slowly towards a massive mysterious alien ship by a huge inexplicable gravitational force. Asteroids and other space detritus was smashing into their ship as it too was dragged towards the alien. One of the impacts included some horrid space-bugs that tore their way into ship and started tearing apart the already injured Marine contingent in the Med-bay. The Hydro recycling system failed when the room was damaged by the strange gravitational forces. The Quantum Core interface had failed too. The Navigation systems were on the fritz and the jump-drive was smoking and sparking.

While all that was happening they detected the jump signature of a ship turning  up, but they couldn't see who or what it was.

Yeah. Things weren't looking great for them.

Then the alien ship that had started all the problems just disappeared and the gravitational waves along with it. They got the ship under control, but it was still infested with some very tough bugs. They opted to get the survivors into the shuttles and bug out (except for one N.P.C. who was locked up – poor mad Crow Gedes).

The other ship that had jumped into the system turned out to be an alien (Aslan). They used the Aslan shuttle they already had to false-flag their way into docking with the alien. It turned out to be an x-boat like ship, very little room but lots of jump-drive. They used their robots to rip out the air lock and "space" the Aslan pilot. Then fun and games commenced as they welded the human shuttle (they had one human and one Aslan shuttle) to the x-boat and rode it back to civilisation.

And so...next session starts with them on the star port having no ship, no money, and in orbit over a planet where the most powerful "Family" are likely to kill them on sight.  It's not looking good for the ex-crew of the S.S. Hairball.