Spacer Tales

The crew of the Deepnight Revelation have pretty much finished up their investigation at Keppa. Next up is the system of Shoh, where they will meet up with the scout ship that they sent on to Phema.

Since I’m feeling generous, and the players have been asking about it, I gave everyone 4 xp to spend on skill improvement. I generally give out xp awards at new stages in the adventure, but haven’t done so for a while. We could track training time and all that, but decided against it as too much hassle.

I also gave some points to some of the NPCs, including Lt Jana Irekia, Freddy Klavorn and Sir Alize Vanaadi. All are part of the ‘Red Team’ that are running tactical sims to prepare the crew for emergencies. It’s discussed that they probably need to run a ship wide drill at some point.

After the success of their sneaky sneaky bot, the Erline give a presentation to the crew on how they built it, and what its capabilities are.

Imelda, the ship’s HR representative, makes friends with one of the ship stewards, who it turns out has been collecting paper work from the worlds they have been visiting. Transit forms, customs paperwork, landing permits and the like. Having something of a love for bureaucracy, Imelda is fascinated. She also realises that many of the low ranking crew have been stuck in the same low ranking position for the last ten years.

She puts forward a plan to try and match up people’s skills to new job roles. The ship’s XO, Kirk, points out that he’s already been doing that. Yes, she argues, but we could be doing all sorts of things to… Kirk points out that this is being done, and points to the statistics for job changes, promotions and educational improvements the crew have been doing for the last few years. Imelda goes back to looking at her forms.

The Deepnight arrives at Shoh, where there is a C class star port – possibly one of the last they’ll encounter for a long while. There was a sighting here of an alien ship apparently, so Kirk, Dr Nekuna, Amelia and Siona board the Opportunities Multiply (Kirk’s personal runabout) and head down to the starport whilst the Deepnight refuels at the gas giant.

The world is a large colony, in the midst of trying to terraform the world. The star town is wet, muddy and shoddy looking. But there are plenty of people here, including a grizzled old pilot named Marroth Liiva who witnessed the alien ship.

They buy him beers, and he is more than willing to tell his story. He was delivering supplies and replacement crew to the research station at Ipuc system two parsecs away. Whilst docked at the station, he picked up an incoming ship, plus target locks and various other warnings. Not waiting to undock, he ripped off his ship’s outer airlock door in his attempt to get away.

The station was destroyed, and though he managed to use his ship’s ECM to disable the missiles heading in his direction, he took some damage. Fleeing deeper in the star’s jump mask, he was able to get away. The few glimpses he got of the alien vessel on his sensors suggested something in the 100 to 200 thousand tonne range. It seemed to vary in size, almost as if it had wings that it was spreading out. These also made it hard to get a good reading on the ship.

Whilst deep in the jump mask, he realised his hull was being torn apart by something growing in the damaged areas. He had to get out onto the hull to burn whatever it was away. It seemed to be aiming to reach his jump drive.

He got back here, and is now trying to get his ship, the Red Robin, repaired. He shows the crew around the ship, and they discover that not all of the material growing through his hull was dead. There were some plant seeds in the engine room, plus a sprouting seed under the ship on the landing pad.

The material was similar to that of the Biologicals.

After some days, the scout Far Reacher turns up, with a report from the world of Phema. They had found (and fought) some Biologicals there. It looks like several icy objects from the outer system had been sent into the inner system, one of which had hit the planet. Possibly it brought the Biologicals with it. These Biologicals were slightly different to the Twiglets that had been encountered earlier. It looked like they had used human corpses as a framework on which to build their own bodies. Other than that, they seemed to act in a similar (unintelligent) way.