In this episode of “Things Get Worse On The Moon”, things get worse on the moon….

Some minor repairs and inspections have been made. One of the cosmonauts also brought a habitat module to the bug-out location. Matthew Frelong, the base commander is still sodding missing.

Finish Comm Line to Goddard (quick job, holdover from last session) - Jan and Sanchez

Lovely dayside view of the Earth, but focused mostly on driving. Goddard seems to be abandoned.

A space station blew up. It is now dropping debris on us. This is a Problem, because it is the station that we rendezvous with to get back home.

Well, maybe not: Igloo Station had an explosive decompression event in at least one module.

The base commander is “missing in action”. He was on a separate mission, but the comms blackout is preventing them contact him. Volkova is not willing to send someone to fetch him, because that may put other people at risk: in particular, the base is more resilient to damage than the rovers and similar.

Housekeeping note: I missed a couple of sessions, and my original numbering was slightly off, so this is a chance to correct that. I also had to leave a little early, but it was after a couple of complete cycles, so it should be mostly fine.

When I say cycles, I mean that Sammy is going through small sequences with each player (or players) and then coming to a major decision point. Then, we either can answer immediately or we have some time to think over what we want to do while the focus moves to another PC, in some cases the PC that we have just been talking to. This is obviously not revolutionary, but it is a nice way of doing things when we have all of these PCs off doing their own thing for a lot of the session. Honestly, this sort of game has a lot of potential for a duet (one player, one referee), since so much of it is about PCs slowly going weird on the moon….

A minor rework in the tasks was the main change this session. Currently the PCs have the following tasks on their lists, with NPCs doing other things in the background. Since most of the PCs are on the technical and support side, most of these are maintenance and improvement things, more than actually doing research work. These tasks are larger scale things than previously, and we are working in time units of a week, so there is time to support other tasks as well.

We shifted to thinking about things in weeks rather than days, at least for this session. We might change things later. Things felt a little loose in the timeline in regards to the time taken for various tasks, which was not bad, but felt a little odd given the premise of technical things. More notes on expected time frame for those tasks might be useful: potentially can work on a few small things instead of one big one?

Fairly straightforward session. The troubles that keep building triggered a few times: We needed to deal with an intensification of the Cold War (the USAF and some Soviet soldiers arguing over a weapon test in no-man’s land between bases), we had an issue with one of the vehicles, and a personal Trouble. This all worked quite nicely, and having the players make the choice of which one of a few gives control over pacing, or lets more appropriate things happen.

Recently Sammy, of Scattered Amusement Machine/TrashedTabletop fame, has been running an Orbital Cold War campaign, using an early but complete enough version of Freefallers. I missed the first session, but joined the second one. My PC is Jean-Jacques Desjardins, a CanadianQuebecois mission specialist at Unity Base. Chargen was pretty painless: assign some attributes, assign some skills based on the role (mission specialist, security officer, lunar scientist, that sort of thing), choose a trouble and a couple of things like that. No hassles here if you are comfortable with RPGs in general.