Skills For Hire – Lab Crawl

So last week I wrote up the location of the GODCo bio-lab. This week we’re going to look at what my players found when they got there. First I’ll provide my game notes with the details of what had changed, and then so a short write-up of the players’ actions. “Lab Crawl” is the title I gave this scenario in my notes.

Background

GODCo has been operating the lab on Pale for about 20 years now. The lab is a location the GODCo scientists are studying the Pale flora and fauna and looking for ways to adapt various yazirian plant species to the environment as well as improving flora and fauna used by Frontiersmen to be more adaptable to the Pale climates.

A few days ago the quarterly supply delivery to the “secret” base left but the drivers and vehicles (two ground trucks) never returned. Yesterday an aircar flew out to the site and was shot at by the site’s defenses (heavy laser). The PCs are being sent in (on the ground) to investigate. Their objectives are:

Figure out what happened
Rescue any personnel trapped and still alive in the lab
Secure the site if possible.

What Happened

In my game, there are still sathar on Pale from the First Sathar War (referred to as the Great Sathar War on Pale as the second one is just now brewing). While a few of the sathar on the planet are holdovers from the war, many more have actually slipped to the surface over the intervening years. They have been working to subvert the society and develop new bio-weapons (e.g. lesser quickdeath, sathar poison squirrel). It is to do some work on the poison squirrel that they have capture the lab.

A few weeks ago, a team of sathar attacked and captured the base. They needed access to the equipment and facilities to complete some work that they had been doing in more makeshift labs elsewhere on the planet. The staff that survived the attack are being held as prisoners and used as test subjects (and food) for the creatures they brought with them.

Changes From Last Post

In my previous post, I described the lab during “normal” operations. Here is what changed when the PCs arrived

Staff

There are only 1d5+5 of the original 44 staff members still alive, all scientists. They are locked individually in the living quarters and isolated from one another. They are all malnourished and weak. They will not be able to assist the PCs in any fighting.

I put them in the rooms farthest from the elevator/stairs but you could put them anywhere. The sathar have changed the computer security system so that none of the staff ID cards work to open the living quarters doors.

Vehicles

There is a ground transport in the garage (area 3, ground level). It is only partially unloaded.

Robots

All of the security robots were destroyed in the original attack. The sathar have reprogrammed all the maintenance and service robots to have attack/destroy programs and will attack any non-sathar beings on sight. These robots are all level 3 and have only their mechanical hands as weapons. The security locks have all been removed by the sathar as they modified them. They have the following stats:

STA: 100 ATT: 60 IM: 6 DMG: 2d10 Move: 30 m/turn

The remaining robots are located in the following areas:

2 service robots – Ground Level in hallway (area 5)
4 maintenance robots – Level 1 area 30. There is a random 10% change per minute that one will emerge and go about some maintenance task. If attacked, it can summon the others.
4 maintenance robots – Level 2 area 11 (at the far end of the lab area). There is a random 10% change per minute that one will emerge and go about some maintenance task. If attacked, it can summon the others. They can also be called by the sathar on this level.

Sathar

There are 10 sathar at the facility.

Two are security officers and will be in the security office on that level (area 8). If the robots start fighting they will emerge and attack the intruders. These sathar have laser pistols with 3 power clips and a level 3 skill. Their stats are:

STA: 45 ATT: 50 IM: 5 DMG: 2d10 PS: 3 Move: 30 m/turn

The other eight are in the lab areas on level 2. Divide as desired among 3 labs. These are all scientists and will only have improvised melee weapons when attacked but do have a level 1 melee skill. Stats for these sathar are:

STA: 40 ATT: 30 IM: 4 DMG: 1d10 PS: 2 Move: 30 m/turn

In addition to the sathar on level 2, there are a number of sathar attack monsters with them in some of the labs. There are 2 cybernuks in one of the bio-labs, although only one has the cyber implant, and a caged juvenile quick death in another (use the Lesser Quickdeath stats). A third lab has a cage containing 10 tailless squirrels. If freed, any of these creatures will attack the PCs. If they can, the sathar scientists will release the creatures into the lab hall (area 14) to attack the PCs as part of their defense.

Place the sathar and creatures in the labs as desired. In my game, I had them all in labs on the right side of the map. The first lab had 3 sathar, the second had 2 sathar and the nuks, the third had 3 sathar and the squirrels, and the fourth lab had the quick-death.

Other Notes

The computer is level 4 with a level 3 computer security program. Lab doors have level 5 locks, bedrooms have level 1 locks.

Something got out and the power generator level is overgrown with a blue fungus/moss that is mildly toxic to the touch (S1/T20) toxin. This is currently growing on all the walls on level 3, part of the stairwell between level 2 and 3, and in the elevator shaft near level 3. It has not yet traveled to Level 1 or 2. Due to the fungus, the power occasionally will short out and brownouts occur occasionally around the lab. There is a 5% chance any minute that the power will temporarily go out or lights will dim in any given room.

Loose Ends

Some things I left open ended and which didn’t really come up when playing that you can flesh out as desired for your game:

Where’s the other ground truck? There were two in the convoy but only one is here. I honestly forgot about there being two when I was running it but it never came up directly. This is an opportunity to expand the scope of this encounter if you want your PCs to possibly pursue the sathar across the planet.
The fungus/moss on the generator level – Was this something the sathar brought with them? Was it something GODCo was working on?

Running the Adventure

This adventure played out over two game sessions.

The PCs had no idea there were sathar involved when they were hired. The job was simply to go to the lab, investigate what happened, rescuing any survivors, and secure the facility. GODCo offered a generous bonus of 500 cr. per staff member recovered alive.

After about six hours of travel, mostly in an explorer, the PCs arrived at the facility to find the gate closed. As they got close to the site, however, they noticed that no radio communications were working. The site appeared deserted. The humma decided to jump the fence and got shot at by the heavy laser for his trouble. Luckily, it missed him. He was able to open the main gate and the explorer entered the compound.

They gained access to the garage and discovered the partially emptied ground transport. Exiting into the hall, they were attacked by the robot stationed there. They took some damage but were able to quickly deactivate the robot. (Since the sathar removed the security lock, I only required a DEX roll – the robot was attacking them after all – to switch it off. Their roboticist has a high DEX but still missed a few of the rolls throughout the adventure.)

As they rounded the barracks (not knowing what they were) they encountered the other robot and after starting to engage that, the two sathar emerged and started firing at them. A well tossed tangler grenade captured both sathar (although one was killed by laser fire the same round). Realizing it was caught and the robot deactivated, the captured sathar committed suicide.

Clearing the rest of the level, they opted to take the stairs down and not alert anyone else by using the elevator. As they emerged into the hall on level 1 they experienced their first brownout of the power. They entered the security office and found a number of CCTV cameras looking at different parts of the lab including the hallways on level 1 and one into each lab on level 2. They saw the 8 sathar and the attack creature but didn’t know where in the complex those images were coming from.

Examing the hallways, they ran into two maintenance robots coming out of area 30 on the fall left hall way. A fight ensued with those robots and the other two that were called out of room 30 after the fight was engaged. They managed to deactivate two of the robots while the other two were destroyed.

The fighting was occurring at the end of the hall by area 30 and the prisoners in the rooms there heard them and tried to get their attention. They proceeded to open (via tech or brute force, depending on the player) each of the doors and discovered that 9 of the scientists were still alive, although is fairly poor shape.

From the scientists they got the information about the attack and current situation as they understood it. They also learned that the brownouts only started occurring after the sathar arrived. Speculation began on what the sathar were doing that needed that much power.

With the scientists found, they shepherded them up to the surface, planning on driving them out in the ground transport. At this point a discussion ensued on what was next. Fighting sathar is a job for Star Law and really above their pay grade and several PCs were all for bugging out with the scientists, reporting what they found, collecting their rewards and walking away. However, one of the PCs is a member of the Anti-Satharian League (ASL) and floated the idea that they might be able to get some reward from that group for the sathar if they took them out themselves.

In the end, they decided that the Anti-Satharian League PC would drive the scientists out and call in for medical pickup once he got out of the radio jamming. He would report the sathar presence and request instructions from Galactic Task Force (GTF). He’d also contact the ASL and see what he could negotiate. That discussion ended the first session.

Session 2 started with finalizing the plan. While the ASL PC headed out with the scientists, the other PCs set about exploring the rest of level 1. They realized part of the way through that they should have asked the scientists for a tour. Meanwhile, the PC with the scientists, after about 40 minutes of driving, got out of the jamming range. Calling in GTF immediately dispatched some flying transports to pick up the scientists and told him to stand by on the sathar situation. While he waited, he called ASL and got the same response. After a few minutes, GTF told him that if the team chose to go in after the sathar, they would be deputized by Star Law for the operation (Star Law couldn’t get anyone there for many hours and didn’t want the sathar to get away) and offered a bonus of 1500 cr. each. Just after that conversation, he was called by his ASL contact and offered a 250 cr. reward for each sathar killed plus and additional 500 cr for any sathar data collected from the computer systems.

With the offers in hand, he headed back to the compound once the medical team arrived to escort the scientists. Having been gone a couple of hours, the rest of the team was getting a bit antsy and debated exploring the generator level but decided to be patient and wait. They also reprogrammed the two maintenance robots to obey them and attack sathar while they were waiting. When the offers were presented, they decided to take on the sathar and collect the reward from both sources.

Not wanting to walk down 50 m of stairs, and figuring they had the drop on the sathar, they opted to take the elevator. They quickly examined the areas outside the decontamination airlocks on that level. Hoping to reduce the odds, they hacked into the life support and ventilation systems for the labs (all 10 individually) and dropped a doze grenade into each system to try to knock out the sathar. They had to do all 10 because they didn’t know which system went to which lab or even which labs the sathar were in. Luckily they had 11 doze grenades between the 5 PCs.

Doze grenades dropped and hoping they worked, they went through the cleaning rooms into the lab area. Upon entering and seeing into the labs, they found that the sathar in the lab with the cybernuks had been knocked out but the other were still up and about.

They rushed the robots over to the first lab and had them block the door preventing the sathar from exiting while the PCs headed down the the third lab where the three sathar were working with the tailless squirrels. As they were approaching, the sathar let the squirrels out and there were suddenly several critters attacking most of the PCs.

On the second round of the fight, the four robots emerged from the robot storage area and started to advance on the PCs as well. An on the next round they realized the flaw with having the robots block the sathar in the first lab as one of the sathar deactivated one of the two robots.

With enemy both in front of them and behind, they started to fall back and regroup trying to deactivate robots, kill sathar, and fight the squirrel critters. A well placed frag grenade managed to kill most of the squirrels as they fell back but not before a couple of the PCs were bitten and poisoned.

Just as they were starting to get the situation under control, one of the sathar in the nuk lab woke up (I had rolled for the time each were going to be out and rolled low for that one). After spending a round trying to rouse its comrade (with no success), it then headed to the doors to let the nuks out into the fight.

The sathar and squirrels turned out to be the easy targets with the nuks and robots providing the most challenge. They managed to take out the sathar that had freed the nuks before it could let the quickdeath out or things might have been really bad for the team. As it was, two of the team members, wounded and cornered, retreated into the lab that the squirrels had come out of pursued by one of the robots. They trapped one of the nuks in the entrance to another lab, and then finished off or deactivated the remaining robots and creatures.

When the fighting was over, they had deactivated two more robots, killed seven sathar, 10 squirrels and one nuk. The last sathar never woke up and they hit it with a StayDose to keep it sedated. They left the trapped quickdeath and nuk for StarLaw and GODCo to deal with. They decided to report that there were only 7 sathar (they had miscounted) and secret the live sathar away to turn over to the Anti-Satharian League for a 2000 cr. reward.

It was touch and go there in the middle of the battle with a couple of PCs getting down to single digit STA, but they pulled through in the end. Each PC ended up with 6 XP and 3600 cr. They also ended up with 7 damaged service and maintenance robots that they took with them as well.

Final Thoughts

It was a good adventure. It just took longer to finish than I had hoped due to scheduling conflicts (on my part) and not being able to get it all done in a single session (or I would have posted this sooner).

I actually completely forgot about the quickdeath in the heat of the battle which is why the sathar didn’t immediately make a bee-line for that lab to try to get it out. But that was probably just as well. Had the quickdeath came into the fray it might have been too much. As it is, the fight went well. They PCs were a little worried there for a bit, but managed to pull it out in the end. I actually thought the squirrel were going to do a bit more damage but the frag grenade really did a number on them, only three of the 10 survived the initial blast.

The activating and deactivating of the robots was a bit of humor (at least for me) during the big fight. There was a bit of a go around of the sathar turning their robots off, them trying to turn the sathar robots off and also trying to turn their back on, and fighting the robots that weren’t deactivated. And the moment when I said that the sathar turned their first robot off definitely seemed to catch them off guard and ratchet up the tension.

This will be the the last Skills for Hire post for a while. As I talked about in my “What I need is … more focus” post back in August, I have a lot of things going on and that was the main cause of the scheduling conflicts. As such, I’ve decided to put the game on hiatus for now. My players are going to take up the GM mantle and run games for each other in the meantime but I won’t be doing anything for a while.

Did you like the adventure? What might you have done differently? What changes or additions would you make? How could you use this in your game? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Skills for Hire – Rescue

I always forget how long it takes me to get back into my regular routine after a big family vacation. Which is why this post is going up a little later in the day than normal.

Two weeks ago the players in my Skills for Hire game finished this adventure so it’s time to post up the adventure notes. This time around, I’m going to post them as is, exactly as I have them written down, so you can see what I was working off of. I’ll also provide a quick summary of the way it actually played out. Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll get the audio of the session on-line as well.

Adventure Outline

What follows are my notes for the adventure, as I had them written down for me to use. As you’ll see, there isn’t a lot there, just some basic notes and names and general events that I wanted to happen. These are literally my crib notes.

The setup

The daughter (Brandi) of a prominent politician (Carter Albach, wife: Melody) has been kidnapped by organized crime bosses that the politician won’t bow to. The police, probably in the crime lord’s pay, are taking too long and not making progress. The mercenaries are being hired to get the young woman (22 years old) back.

Major segments

Finding the location
Surveillance
Springing her free
Getting safely home

Details

She’s being held in a manor house in Myra’s Beach. The manor is owned by a yazirian, Gornar Welnat, who owns several of the larger hotels/resorts in the city. He is also the head of a local organized crime operation, the Tristars.

Tristars are a known organization in the city but no one knows exactly the extent of their operations. Some members are known for generally bullying but there are other members that are more into more sophisticated endeavors including controlling some of the local police and businesses in town.

Brandi and her friend (Jula Keray) were visiting Myra’s Beach for the weekend and met up with a group of others their age. Heading back to their hotel from the beach with two young men (Karl, tall blond, & Christian, shorter, dark haired), they were accosted by a group of thugs who hit them with a doze grenade. Jula woke up alone a few minutes later in the small street where they were ambushed. Neither Bandi nor the two young men (who are part of the gang) were anywhere to be seen.

Jula can describe/identify the tattoo of the three stars the young men had (https://starfrontiers.info/pics/SkillsForHire/TriStarLogo0.png)
Showing that mark around will identify the Tristar group but people won’t say much about it beyond that it’s a local group/gang. They either don’t know anything or are afraid to talk.
After poking around, the team will get accosted by a group of young thugs from the Tristars
Capture of one of the members will point them to a bar where they hang out.
At the bar they can catch a middle level member of the gang (dralasite, Garzdan) that can point them to the manor.
Brandi is being held in the upper rooms of the left tower.

The manor

Level 2 locks on offices

Level 1 locks on bedrooms except on master bedroom – level 4 there

The door to the room where Brandi is being held is level 3

During the day, there are typically 15-20 beings in the manor. Mostly business men or staff with a five being security detail in the manor and five more about the grounds. There are 2 security robots, 4 maintenance robots, and 2 service robots.

At night, there are 8 people living at the manor, Brandi, and a 2 man security detail in the building and four on the grounds. Plus the 2 security robots.

Running the Adventure

That was everything. Combined with the work I had done on the city of Myha’s Beach, the Brekstoone Manor, and the Tristars, that was what I used to run the adventure.

When I was creating the adventure, I suspected that in this case, the challenge was going to require to sessions. I just didn’t see a way for them to get through it all in a single 4-hour block. And it turned out I was right.

I had my biggest group yet for the first session with 8 players. However, due to audio difficulties, one of the players had to drop out. The PCs got to their start point in Myha’s Beach, and after talking with Jula, investigated the location of the attack. They correctly surmised that the two young men were part of the organization that had captured Brandi.

A pair of characters then went looking for groups that were rivals of the Tristars (something I hadn’t anticipated and had to make up on the spot). However, their investigation rolls went so badly that they found a group of Tristars instead and a fight ensued (#3 from above). They wounded several of the thugs and drove three of the four off. The fourth had been knocked out so they took him back to their base of operations for questioning. Under Telol, he revealed the location of a couple places that the Tristars liked to hang out (#4) as well as some other information about the organization including his contact up the line.

They picked one of the locations (the closer one), a restaurant/bar near the old town and planned a raid. Three of the team members went in and got a table to scope out the establishment and try to identify the upper level member identified. The others took up positions around the building including Joey, the humma, watching the back door.

Only about 1/3 of the beings in restaurant were members of the Tristars but they were are clustered to a side of the dining area. With their target identified, the three PCs in the building all tossed doze grenades into the area where the Tristars were seated. At this point pandemonium ensued as the diners all tried to get out of what appeared to be a battle scene. Luckily for the PCs all but 3 of the gang members succumbed to the doze gas. Unfortunately, their target (a dralasite) was one that didn’t. They waded in with stunsticks and electrostunners while other PCs tried to get into the building through the outflow of panicked diners.

Despite several successful attacks on the target, he hadn’t be knocked out, although they had knocked out the other two gang members. At that point, one of the PCs who had gotten in from the outside, a vrusk, fired his laser rifle into the ceiling (set at 1 SEU) and bellowed “Stop!” A very successful (rolled a 1) Leadership check and everyone in the building froze, including their target as he was about to slip out the door into the kitchens. The other PCs hit him once again and he collapsed. Scooping the dralasite up, they slipped out through the kitchen and the back door. They made their way to a place they could be picked up by aircar and flew back to their base of operations.

Questioning the new prisoner with Telol, they learned that he was not involved in any way with, nor had any knowledge of, the kidnapping but that if it had happened, they would probably be holding the girl in Brekstoone Manor. They also gained a bit more information about the organization. That ended the first session.

The second session opened with them trying to decide how to best assault the Manor. Calling several different pizza parlors to schedule a delivery to the manor gates at the same time to create a diversion, they went around to the forested region of the grounds and used the trees, the yazirian gliding ability, and some rope to get them over the walls and onto the grounds. Slipping through the forest, they watched the house from the edge of the trees where they discovered two security robots making rounds around the manor and the occasional random patrol by a human guard as well.

Timing the robot patrol, the roboticist dashed across the open space and attempted to disable the lead robot. Failing to remove the security lock on his first attempt, the robot smacked him with it’s hands doing a good amount of damage. The roboticist got the security lock off on the next round and after taking some more damage, disabled the robot. They dragged it into the garage and everyone else joined them there. In the garage they found a nice sports car, and explorer, and two hoverbikes. I considered having the robot sound an alarm, but since they were doing so well, I decided to give them until the second robot came back around and would have it sound the alarm. But they got under cover before it spotted them.

When the second robot came around they jump it in the same manner. The only complication was that just as that was happening the human guard came walking around the manor from the opposite direction. Luckily, one of the PCs was waiting for this and hit him with anesthetic needler darts and knocked him out. Dragging him in the garage along with the other robot, they relieved the guard of his id card and keys and the roboticist went to work reprogramming the robots to go patrol the outer wall instead of around the manor (They didn’t have time to do anything more complicated and didn’t want the robots completely off-line.

Using the guard’s keys, they entered the manor from the back on both the main level and the first floor balcony. Carefully working through the rooms of the manor, they found someone in the library who they stunned and tied up. They heard noises coming from the stairs to the basement and posted a guard there. They also heard noises from one of the offices on the second floor. Tossing in a doze grenade, they knocked out the occupant there. That turned out to be the security offices and since the occupant didn’t have time to react, the computer was still logged in. They were able to turn off all the door locks and alarms.

Checking the rest of the rooms they discovered that this floor was just offices and took the elevator up to level 3. While one group covered the hallways, a couple of PCs opened on of the doors to discover a bedroom. The noise of the door opening woke the person sleeping and the first PC took a shot with his needler rifle and while he hit, it did not knock the occupant back out. Kneeling down so the person behind him could take a shot as well, he discovered that it was the humma who only had a laser rifle and no non-lethal weapons. The humma took a shot (3 SEU) and hit the occupant squarely in the chest who cried out from the injury. They asked th injured occupant where the girl was and he told them across the hall. The first PC then took another shot with the needler and this time knocked out the occupant. However, the occupant’s chronocom came to life asking if he was okay. They texted back that he was fine.

Quickly moving across they hall, they tried the door into the tower and found a small sitting room with stairs going up. Ascending the stairs they found Brandi sitting on her bed in the room at the top of the tower. First thinking that they were more Tristar goons, she gave them a bit of lip but after discovering who they were, she went with them.

While they were in the tower getting Brandi, Gornar, the owner of the Manor and head of the Tristars, came out of his suite, electrostunner in hand to investigate the noises come from the room right below his bedroom (and he didn’t believe the text). However, the group watching the hall were ready and got the drop on him. Hitting him with an electrostunner of their own and knocking him out.

They left him lying on the floor and made their way down to the ground floor of the manor. While they were searching the building, the roboticist had finished reprogramming the robots, parked the explorer blocking the front door with the explorer’s side door open, and then went into the building. They made their way to the front door and loaded Brandi and part of the team into the explorer. The others went out the back door to the garage and some took the sports car while one of them climbed on a hoverbike.

They they headed for the main gate of the grounds and back into the city. They were expecting to have to ram the gate with the explorer but the gate’s sensors recognized the vehicles and opened for them. They ducked into the the first public parking area near the grounds and the beach and called for their aircar pickup. Being the middle of the night, there was only one other car in the parking lot and no one to be seen nearby. They dumped the keys to the Tristar’s vehicles in the lone car, loaded into the aircars, and flew back to Point True.

Amazingly, they managed to do the entire adventure without actually killing anyone. It was a close thing in the manor and they definitely roughed up a few people but no one was actually killed. It was a fun adventure and I enjoyed seeing how they PCs handled the various situations.

Skills for Hire – Lost in the Mountains

For the first session of the game, I wanted to keep things fairly simple as we’re still getting a feel for the format, and how much can be done in a single session. So we started with a fairly basic scenario, a young girl has gone lost in the mountains near her home and the PCs are hired out to find her (hopefully alive) and bring her home.

Long time readers of the blog, and those that listened to the beginning of the “A New Can of Worms” actual play, will recognize some of the setting and characters. I’ll start with an outline of the adventure, and then talk about the players and how they handled things.

Lost in the Mountains

Background

Alyssa Tinnett, a young woman in the village of Rosegard, went out “adventuring” in the region around the village after school last day-day. She took her “adventuring pack”, which included a small tent and sleeping bag, rations, water, rope, an all-weather blanket, and a pocket tool. She also took her sword, a gift from the yazirian Talnor at the Streel mine compound, which he has been teaching her how to use. She’s done this in the past and typically returns before it gets dark and the next night-day cycle starts. This time she didn’t return.

It’s late fall on Pale and as a farming village, the citizens are quite busy bringing in the harvest. Her parents and grandparents went out searching for her but were hampered by the darkness of the Pale night. They put out a job request to several mercenary companies in Point True and the contract was picked up by Galactic Task Force (GTF). The PCs were assigned to the job.

What happened

Alyssa’s Campsite. Click for larger image.

Her adventure started out like all her other ones. In this case, after playing in the woods with some of her friends for a while, she went north from the village while her friends returned home. She intended to check out the artificial dome that the sathar agent at the Streel compound was using as a drop point and then continue further north to the small canyon in the mountains to the north. She got to the small camping site that some of the older kids had once set up in the canyon and got her tent set up. After that, she shouldered her pack and started further up the canyon.

A short time later, she heard the sounds of something behind her but nothing was immediately visible. A few minutes later, she got to the top of a small rise in the canyon and looking back saw a pair of large bird creatures, something akin to a giant (1m tall) chicken. She recognized them as Nuks from some that had been killed around the village several months ago. With her way back to the campsite cut off, she began hurrying up the canyon looking for a place she could hide out.

The entrance to the cave. The ramp is about a 45 degree slope. Click for larger image.

After a while, she came to a steep rock formation that she thought that the nuks wouldn’t be able to scramble up and climbed to the top of it where she found the entrance to a cave. Exploring a bit into the cave, the slope on the inside was even steeper and extended nearly 100 meters into the mountain. Turning back to the entrance, she saw the nuks at the base of the slope. One of them jumped up trying to get at her but slipped back down. She retreated further into the cave but after a half hour and the nuks not leaving, she got bored and decided to do a little spelunking.

Carefully descending the steep interior slope, the cave opened up into a wide long cavern with some side passages branching off to the left. Following one of these side passages, she discovered another large cavern, although not as big as the first. However, as she moved out into the center of that cavern she must have disturbed something as she passed the entrance because there was a large crash and several tons of boulders tumbled down nearly completely blocking the entrance. There was a small opening, but too small for her to fit through.

After searching around for an hour or more, she couldn’t find any way out of this room back the way she had come. There was a passage to her left, and another straight ahead. The first was on her level but the second was up a 20 meter cliff that angled back out over the ground beneath it that she couldn’t find a way up. Exhausted, she curled up in her all-weather blanket and went to sleep, planning to continue looking for a way out in the morning.

Adventure Outline

The adventure consists of several small steps and encounters that I outlined as follows:

Mission briefing and aircar flight to Rosegard
Meet with the family at the Rosegard town hall
Track Alyssa north
- Encounter with a young sathodragon
- Find nuk prints following Alyssa’s prints
- Find the campsite with damaged tent and lots of nuk prints
- Encounter with a pair of Pale mountain lions
- Track Alyssa and nuks to cave entrance
Fight with the nuks at the cave entrance
Explore the cave to find Alyssa and get her out
Return back to the village
- Possible encounter with a quickdeath or a group of lesser quickdeaths

Encounter and Event Descriptions

Mission briefing

Area around Point True. The locations to the NE of Rosegard are locations from the A New Can of Worms game. Click image for larger version.

This occurs in the GTF headquarters at Point True. The PCs are given the basic information from the Background section above and allowed to requisition any equipment (within reason) that they feel they will need. They are told that they will receive their regular daily pay rate (20 cr/day for my new players) and a 100cr bonus each if the girl is found.

If none of the PCs ask for it, their handler issues them an radiophone in addition to any other gear they request. Once they have their gear, they are flown by aircar to Rosegard. As each aircar can take 3 PCs, there may be more than one. It’s a 30 minute aircar ride but a 4-5 hour drive. The aircar drivers will remain with the aircars at the city center while the PCs are out exploring.

Meeting with the family

This part of the adventure mostly occurs in the city hall building of Rosegard. As they land they are met by the mayor, Genio Washy, Alyssa’s parents, Larroy & Camryn Tinnett, and Alyssa’s grandparents, Steven & Janie Hite.

During this discussion they PCs can learn any of the “What happened” information that the parents might know as well as anything about Alyssa from her background. They know she went north as she told some of her friends and they told the parents when Alyssa didn’t return. They can also learn about the connection Alyssa has with Talnor from the Streel compound.

Tracking Alyssa

This bit of the adventure occurs in the valley surrounding Rosegard as depicted in the map below. I drew the map with Inkarte which doesn’t really have sci-fi assets so it has a bit more of a fantasy feel but I whipped this up in about 30 minutes (mostly relearning the interface as I haven’t used it in years). I then added the annotations in GIMP.

This is the referee version of the map with all the relevant locations marked. Click the image for a full sized version. There is a player version with none of the annotations as well.

The sathar dome is the natural place to start and the villagers can give exact coordinates for its location. It’s about 10 km from the village. The PCs can either walk there (a couple of hours) or have the aircar(s) drop them off (a few minutes). The dome itself is a light-weight, fiberglass pole frame, with a cloth covering. It looks like it was once naturally camouflaged but the grasses and such on it have died and it now stands out against the terrain. It is very light-weight and is about 3 meters in diameter. It is staked down to prevent blowing away but lifting it up reveals that there is nothing under it.

The terrain north of the sathar dome. Click for larger image.

Alyssa’s tracks are easy to find and the PCs can start tracking her north. The terrain is very wild and untouched as only the villagers occasionally come up here. There are small game trails in places and Alyssa seems to be following them and making for the small creeks running through the valley. She’s not trying to hide her tracks so they are relatively easy to follow as the paths have pockets of sand where the tracks are very visible. The waterways are 1-2 meters wide and at most a few tens of centimeters deep. They flow north to south on the map (into the valley from the canyons and then down out the bottom of the map).

Some time after the PCs leave the sathar dome, but before the reach the creek, they will encounter a young sathodragon. As they come up over a rise, it will be on another rise about 150-200 meters away. The sathodragon will see them and rush to attack. If it drops below 50 STA, it will try to retreat and escape.

Shortly after they cross the creeks for the first time, Alyssa’s tracks will be joined by those of two nuks. This will continue until they find her campsite and the destroyed tent with lots of nuk tracks around. As they follow her tracks from the campsite, the nuk tracks will continue to follow her prints.

A bit further on, she seems to become aware of the nuks behind her and the tracks indicate that she’s moving faster and at one point, as the path goes right along the edge of the creek, they vanish. She jumped sideways into the water and then went 20-30 meters upstream in the water before emerging. The nuk tracks are confused at this point but they eventually found her tracks upstream and continued to follow her.

Sometime after the campsite but before the PCs reach the cave entrance, they have an encounter with a pair of Pale mountain lions. On is waiting in ambush near the path and the other is another 20-30 meters up the mountain waiting to pounce as well. If either is reduced to less than half stamina, they will both retreat and try to flee.

Fighting the nuks

Eventually the PCs will arrive at the entrance to the cave. The two nuks are milling around here still not having given up the pursuit even though it’s been nearly 20 hours. When they see the PCs they will immediately rush to attack and will continue attacking until killed.

Exploring the cave

With the nuks dispatched, the PCs are now free to enter the cave. It should be obvious from the lack of tracks leading away and the fact that the nuks were hanging around trying to get up the slope, that Alyssa went in.

I based the cavern roughly on Carlsbad Caverns in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I downloaded a map of the Carlsbad Caverns and then modified it slightly for use in the game. The original map can be found here. Below is the map I used for the game with the relevant locations marked. I took some liberties with the elevations but otherwise used the map as is. If you’ve never been to Carlsbad, you have a long steep decent into the main cave. It’s fairly open in real life, and I closed it up in the adventure, but the blue path is the switchback path you take to get down to the bottom as it is very steep going straight down.

The map of the cave system. Click for full sized image.

As the PCs are exploring, remember that the only light they have is what they brought with them. They are not going to have large vistas and in some cases may not be able to see the other end of the cave.

If they are calling out as they explore, Alyssa will respond when they are by the cave-in location. There is a small opening, about 15-20 cm in diameter that they can look through and see her once she comes over to it. They will not be able to move the rocks as several of them are quite large (read tons). They can move some but not make the opening any bigger. Given time and effort, a dralasite without any gear could squeeze through the opening to get to her but she still can’t get out.

Alyssa will explain to the PCs about what happened and tell them about what looks like an exit at the top of the cliff on the other side of the room she is in. She hasn’t explored the large room in the upper left of the map yet as she will have just woken up when the PCs arrive.

Eventually, the PCs will find a way to the cliff face and can get her out. It’s 15-20 meters down and an overhang above the room floor where Alyssa is located. They will need to figure out a way to get down to her and get her back up (hopefully they brought rope).

Returning home

With Alyssa safe, the PCs just need to get back to Rosegard with her. If they think of it, they can simply call for the aircar(s) to pick them up. If they think to do this, the aircars will arrive in about 15 minutes and there is enough room for one to land at a time and load them up.

If they decide to hike back, they will have an encounter with either a quickdeath (from the AD rules) or a pack of lesser quickdeath. It’s up to you based on the abilities and strengths of the party. Obviously, their main objective should be to protect Alyssa. The quickdeaths will retreat if severely wounded or if one of the pack is killed.

Once returned, the village and family will be quite thankful. Alyssa will get a serious scolding from her parents. If the PCs wish to stay for the evening, there will be an impromptu celebration party in their honor. Several of the Streel mine employees, including Talnor, will come down for this. Talnor will also give Alyssa a talking to which she will appear to take more seriously than the warning from her parents. While a bit shaken by her ordeal, the resiliency of youth will quickly kick in erasing the worst of teh adventure and her natural xenophilia will kick in. She will spend a good portion of the party trying to talk to any of the non-human PCs and find out more about them, where they are from, etc.

Rewards

The PCs will get the 20cr of their pay and the 100cr each for returning Alyssa. In addition, there is a 250cr bounty on each nuk that they can split between the group. If they managed to kill the young sathodragon, that is worth another 1000cr to split between the PCs. Finally, if they managed to kill any quickdeaths, those carry a bounty of 2000cr each.

Of course they need documented proof to claim the rewards. Photographs of the corpses (taken with their chronocoms) will suffice. If they don’t have any documentation, the villagers are willing to send someone up to the locations the PCs give them to get pictures for them. GTF will give them the money immediately even though it will take a few days for the Pale government to issue the reward, which will then just go straight to GTF.

Additionally, the PCs should receive 1-3 XP for the adventure depending on how well they did.

How It Played Out

When I ran this, we had three PCs: Dhuggo (dralasite), Arzdran Garvox (yazirian), and Joey Rufus (humma). They picked up some weapons and gear at GTF HQ and headed out.

After meeting with the parents, they also talked with Alyssa’s friends that had been in the woods with her. After stern words from Joey to Alyssa’s folks about their parenting techniques, the team head up to the dome where they picked up Alyssa’s trail and started off. None of the PCs actually had a tracking skill but two of them had Scout as a secondary skill area so they only had minor penalties since the trail was easy to follow.

The fight with the sathodragon went fairly quickly, Joey used his jumping ability to good effect to get behind it and keep it at a distance while Arzdran and Dhuggo fired on it with their lasers. Wounded, the sathodragon fled into the trees and escaped leaving a trail of blood. The sathodragon didn’t do too well only scoring a single hit on Joey. Joey applied first aid to himself (he’s the medic) and was nearly back to full STA. They marked the spot and continued on. The idea was that if Alyssa’s trail ended and looked like the sathodragon had gotten her, they would come back and track it to its lair to try to find her body.

Continuing to follow Alyssa’s trail they found the nuk tracks and the destroyed tent. Getting a bit worried, they hustled on. Luckily, Joey made a INT roll and noticed the closer mountain lion waiting in ambush for them. Again employing his jumping racial ability, he sprung over the lurking cat landing a few meters beyond it and unloading into it with his laser rifle. Then he notice the one further up the mountain beyond him. He was now between them with his teammates some 20 meters away. However, startled by his jump, and wounded by the laser fire from Joey and Arzdran, the mountain lions decided this was too much work and bounded off, leaving the PCs alone.

The fight with the nuks didn’t go as well. As the creatures rushed the PCs, Arzdran got a shot off wounding one. Joey jumped over them again to the base of the slope up to the cave entrance. The wounded one went after Dhuggo (wielding his nightstick) and the other one turned around to go after Joey. The PCs were doing well, severely injuring the one attacking Dhuggo, but then Dhuggo got a little cocky and started showing off (the player said he started pointing to the mountains, Babe Ruth style, before making his attack) and missed horribly (rolled a 97). The nuk on the other hand didn’t miss and took a bite out of his arm. They managed to finish off the nuks but Dhuggo took a total of 30 STA damage and Joey was wounded a bit more.

As Arzdran examined the cave entrance and kept watch, Joey did a bit of rough field surgery getting Dhuggo patched up and back on his feet.

They then entered the cave and decided to go left once they got to the cave floor. So they almost immediately found the cave-in. Having been calling for Alyssa, she responded to them and they were able to talk to her through the rockfall. She told them about the cliff on the other side of the room she was in. As Joey and Arzdran set off further into the cave complex to try to find a route to her, Dhuggo passed Alyssa all his gear through the small opening and started squeezing his way through.

After taking some twists and turns the others found their way to the top of the cliff where they could see Dhuggo sitting and talking to Alyssa down below. Using rope they brought with them (they had asked about climbing gear back at the GTF HQ and I had told them they shouldn’t need it so I retconed them having it since the reason they didn’t have it was my fault), they hauled Alyssa and Dhuggo up and made their way back to the cave entrance where they called the aircar to come pick them up. It was a little tight with five in a vehicle built for four but Dhuggo and Alyssa were both small and so they made it work.

Getting back to the village, they learned about the bounty on the sathar creatures and one of the villagers offered to go back to where the nuks were to get pictures as proof. They stuck around for the impromptu celebration and the after a while, with a few hours to kill before the day was over and they needed to head back, had the aircar drive fly them up to where they had the fight with the young sathodragon.

Tracking it back to it’s lair, they tossed in a couple of doze grenades which knocked it out completely. They tied it up and called back to HQ to ask if they wanted the thing alive. Receiving an affirmative, they were told that a flying transport truck would be there in an hour to collect it and to hang tight. In the mean time the doze gas wore off and the creature struggled to get free but they had done a good job with the knots (I believe someone rolled a 01) and in its weakened state it couldn’t escape. Joey injected it with a StayDose to try to knock it out which seemed to work. Securing it in the bed of the airtruck when it arrived, they followed the truck back for a while to make sure everything was good an then flew ahead to base to get back home.

All told it took us about 3 hours to play through this.

Thoughts

That’s the adventure and how it played out. I’m still working on getting the audio and video of the game session on-line. So at some point in the future, you’ll be able to listen (or watch) how it ran.

What I’d be interested in is what you think about the information presented for running the adventure. How was the format? Would it be helpful to me organized differently? If you were running this, is there information you would want that wasn’t there? Are there details missing? On the flip side, did I include too much in places? Is there anything too constraining?

Tell me what you think and how I could improve these write-ups in the comments below.

Young Sathodragon

This is a young sathodragon, the creature that the sathar use to make cybodragons. This young specimen doesn’t have the cybernetic implants. These sathodragons stand around 1 meter at the shoulder and are 2-3 meters long.

These creatures are offspring of the cybodragons that were seeded on Pale during the sathar invasion. A female sathodragon will lay a clutch of 3-7 eggs (1d5+2) but the first one to hatch will eat the others so these creatures are typically found alone as they are fairly territorial without sathar influence.

As with all sathar bioconstructs on Pale, there is a bounty by the Pale government for the killing and/or capture of sathodragons. The bounty for a young cybodragon offspring is 1,000 cr.

Type:	Medium Omnivore
Number:	1
Move:	Fast (60 m/turn)
Stamina:	120
Attack:	70 claws / 55 bite
Damage	3d10 claws / 4d10 bite
Special Attack:	None
Special Defense:	None
Native World:	Unknown, found on Volturnus and Pale in the Frontier. Typically found in the mountains, plains, and forested area of a world.

Pale Mountain Lion

The Pale mountain lion is a large feline-like creature similar to mountain lions on Earth. Typically 1.4-1.8 meters in length, these creatures stand about 1 meter at the shoulder. Stealth hunters, they like to ambush their prey and can move quietly through their native terrain. They typically hunt either singly or in pairs.

Their claws are toxic to most creatures. A successful attack that does damage injects a venom that is S5/T10 in strength. Antitox will neutralize the poison with a successful Neutralize Toxins skill check. The venom effect lasts for the first four successful attacks of an encounter, after which the creature must wait several hours for the venom to build back up.

Type:	Medium Carnivore
Number:	1-2
Move:	Fast (70 m/turn)
IM/RS:	8/75
Stamina:	100
Attack:	70 claws / 60 bite
Damage:	2d10 claws / 1d10 bite
Special Attack:	venomous claws – S5/T10 poison if claw successfully attacks
Special Defense:	none
Native World:	Pale, mountain regions

Image by Troy Hisgett. Click for original image.

Skill for Hire – Introduction

Last Wednesday (May 20th) I ran the first session of a new on-line Star Frontiers game. I’ve been itching to run a game again and I finally pulled the trigger on getting it started. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Game Background

The PCs are employees of Galactic Task Force, Incorporated whose slogan is “Secretaries to Mercenaries, we’ve got a place for you!” They are effectively a mercenary group with a wide range of skills that you can hire out for any kind of job. You can see a more detailed description on the Skills for Hire game page on my wiki.

The plan is to make the games very episodic with each adventure taking only a single session. The goal is to allow anyone that can make a given session the opportunity to play. Each session starts a new mission and it can be run with whoever is available that night. I wanted to accommodate as many players as possible, even if they can’t make every week.

I’m also recording the sessions and I’ll be posting them on-line. The video will go up on YouTube and I’ll be posting the audio-only version as a podcast here on this site (and will list it on various podcast sites as well). The video will be completely unedited and the audio minimally so. More on that when they go live.

Games are Wednesday at 8pm MDT and we play on Roll20. If you think you might want to play and are able to join, feel free to jump over to the Roll20 game page and join. Create a character (instructions on the wiki page) and join us for the next session.

Impact on the Blog

As part of this, I’m also going to return to some of the roots of this blog and be posting the various resources I create for the game as part of my prep. These will be fairly rough and not fully polished but should provide some nuggets you can use from the resources as well as small adventures you could potentially drop into your game if you desired.

This will most likely result in a fundamental shift in my posting schedule and style. Namely, if things go as planned, I’ll be posting more often and the average post length will be smaller as I break up all the information across several posts. For example, I created two new creatures for the first session and those will get posted up as small individual posts to make finding them in the future easier. Similarly, I’ll be posting location maps (when I create new places) as individual posts. Once all the pieces are up, I’ll post up a description of the full adventure linking to all the parts.

All of the posts related to this game will have the “Skills for Hire” tag applied to them in addition to any others. Which should make the easier to find. I’ll also preface the session summaries/game outlines with “Skills for Hire” in the title.

So consider this the first of these small posts. I’ll get the creatures up over the weekend and do the full adventure post as the regular Tuesday post next week. I won’t necessarily get everything posted every week. I just don’t have that much free time. But I’ll try to get the more interesting things up.

I also still plan to do more of the typical posts like I’ve been doing for a while. The timeline posts won’t go away, and I might get back to modeling. The starliner posts has me looking at my custom starship system again so maybe there will be a post soon about that as well.

Going Forward

We’ll see how this goes and if I can keep up this new pace of posting. If there is interest, I might also consider live-streaming the games, either on YouTube or Twitch. I’ll just have to check that my computer is up to it. It didn’t have any issue recording the session locally on Wednesday but I’ll have to see how streaming works.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for things going forward.