Off the Rails

Sometimes an adventure session doesn’t quite go as planned. This doesn’t mean that it’s a problem, just that things go off in a different direction and some planning gets thrown away, and other plans get brought forward. This is pretty much what happened for this session of our Deepnight Revelation campaign.

During the previous session at the system of Onapo, the Deepnight had encountered the wreck of a human battlecruiser which had been attacked by a Biological starship. They’d successfully got inside the wreck, and obtained the computer records. We ended there, which gave me a week to come up with some nice handout to detail exactly what were in the computer records.

I did some prep for the session, but completely forgot about this until about five minutes after the session began and realised I’d meant to come up with some details. It wasn’t hard to come up with some details on the spot, but when it comes to digging through computer records I prefer to be a bit more precise about what is found.

Putting together what information they had, it seems the sequence of events had been as follows:

• The Grand Republic Battlecruiser had detected an odd object in orbit around the gas giant. So they’d moved in closer to investigate.
• The object was roughly elipsoid for the bulk of it, but was surrounded by trailing fronds of some unknown material and of unknown purpose. It was over 100,000dt in size.
• As the Battlecruiser approached, they sent in some smaller ships to investigate.
• The object then attacked – hurling large spikes at the Battlecruiser. These spikes accelerated quickly, and pierced the hull where they hit.
• Electronic warfare was not useful against the incoming projectiles. There were some large ones, and lots of smaller ones. The Battlecruiser’s point defences were quickly overwhelmed.
• The captain didn’t want to leave without the crew they’d sent on ahead, to stayed to fight it out.
• Some of the attacking missiles were corrosive, burning through the hull. Others deployed boarding parties.
• Then the alien vessel accelerated towards the battlecruiser, ramming it and putting all the computer systems offline.

What happened next seems to be that the Battlecruiser had been torn open, and the Bioship had ripped out the jump drive.

Looking at the remnants of the projectiles still stuck into the wreckage, they seemed to use some form of single use M-Drive, though it was biological rather than technological in nature.

The Battlecruiser seemed to have come an awful long way, though it just seemed to be a case of it having been on a long range patrol along the borders of the independent worlds. The Bioship seemed to have a taste for jump drives, so the players come up with a plan to build a lure. Using the scout vessel Out of Options, which was now being used for spare parts, one of the 10Mt nukes was fitted into it, and the engineers tried to rig what was left of the jump drive to try and generate a jump signature without actually jumping.

After coming up with a way too long list of possible names, they decide on Project Lumberjack for this plan.

Then, they jump onwards to the next system. There, the gas giant is described (via the system generation system I’ve been using) to have strong magnetic fields and dangerous levels of radiation. I narrate the crew coming up with a plan to mitigate this, and refuelling continues. The ship makes a DEI check (Department Efficiency Index) and gets a poor result, so I decide that the ship takes some minor damage to the sensors.

The players didn’t like this, and felt that they weren’t given a chance to decide whether to take the risk or not. I don’t feel that I did anything differently here to what’s happened before – it’s just this time the crew check went badly. Since I’ve been not making the rolls for regular ship deterioration (I started a long time ago, but quickly gave up because it was too much effort), I simply rolled this into an event describing how the ship is getting old after more than 10 years away from home.

I’ve allowed the ship to be in a pretty good state, compared to how it should be if I’d followed the campaign rules where you roll the dice, and something falls apart regardless of what the players have been doing. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair to the rules, but it is a lot more random, and requires a lot more paper work resolving fixing stuff up and keeping track of spare parts. I now only bring things to the player’s attentions when something goes wrong that can’t be fixed immediately, and just assume everything else is being done in the background.

So the result is that the players want a lot more micro management over decisions. The alternatives in this case would have been refuelling instead from a world with a water ocean, but a very dense atmosphere and surface temperature of 170°C, or an eight day trip out to the ice belt to find a comet. So I think the risk the crew took was reasonable.

At the next system, the standard gas giant has a turbulent atmosphere, so I give the players the choice of refuelling here and risk a bumpy ride, or spend a few more days heading to the other gas giant in this system. They go for the latter option.

Before the next jump, their sensors indicate that the following world has a single gas giant, which is deep inside the star’s jump mask. Which means it will be a couple of days into and out of the system. The alternative is an extra jump to take the longer way around.

After some discussion, they decide that there is a risk that if they run into a BioShip at this system then it might be hard to run away, so they opt for the longer route.

This results in them completely skipping over the main scenario that I’d had planned for this session. I could move it elsewhere, but it made perfect sense for it to be here for the very reason the players wanted to avoid the system.

So they were off the campaign rails, but they were still heading to the next system (via a slightly longer route), where the next adventure would be. A nice garden world with a good opportunity to resupply with food and meet some people.

But now they were going in a slightly different direction, which was taking them towards another place of interest which would now be visible on their sensors. A TL 9 high population world with what appeared to be at least a class C starport. The signals coming from it were weak, and difficult to interpret, so I gave them a roll to see how well the crew did in deciphering them. They got a near perfect result.

So yes, the signals couldn’t be read, but they showed header information that was consistent with a Droyne civilisation. And not the sort of Droyne that they had encountered up in the Federation, where Droyne culture and technology had been mixed in with Terran tech. But real Droyne. It also seemed weaker than it should be, suggesting that this civilisation was trying to hide itself.

Their curiosity piqued, the players decided to take a longer detour to go and investigate this world. Which meant that not only had the players skipped one planned scenario, they were now heading into the second via the back door. Oh well. But that’s a problem for next session.