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.

Mission Day’s Recap:

At the morning briefing a few things are highlighted as needing attention. The PCs all choose something to work on, and Jean-Jacques finds himself paired up with Alejandro Sanchez to follow-up on anomalous temperature spikes in the SNAP: Unity Base’s nuclear reactor. A couple of folks worked on it yesterday, but the installation of sunshields for some of the components has not fixed the issue, so we need to take a closer look. On inspecting it, we find that there are three points that need a look, all on different cooling loops. The conclusion is that we need to take the reactor down for a shift to inspect those loops and see if there is something wrong with those. That might affect some of the science programmes, so we do a less invasive fix for now and then go to inform the science leads that we might need to reduce power for a few hours.

• Jean-Jacques talks to Fritz, one of the Soviet scientists. He has no issue, but asks a bunch of questions about it, since he has done some theoretical work on these reactors. Jean-Jacques provides the answers: from past experience, Fritz will come back with something nuts that has an even chance of being completely unhinged and useless or being some brilliant left-field solution. We can live with that, so we will see what he comes up with.
• Sanchez goes to talk to Bryan Floyd, the US science lead. The shutdown is going to throw his schedule out for the week, but he will work around it, so good enough.
• Both of us meet up to talk to the other Soviet science lead, who is also 2IC for Unity Base: Anastasia Volkova She keeps irregular hours, but is sleeping on her desk, with a Soviet computer doing some long-running process. We supply her a battery and go deal with the cooling loops.

One of the anomalies seems to be due to excess insolation, so we extend the sunshields to include that. The other two loops have some sort of sediment in them, which is weird: the system should be closed. We bag a sample for analysis and then lower the operating temperature slightly, reducing the power output by a small amount. This is not enough to be a problem, but we should probably get to the bottom of this.

With that, our workshift is over, and Jean-Jacques goes to sit in silence for a bit in one of the storerooms. While doing that and getting his daily does of existential angst about how little is between him and a messy death, Anastasia Volkova comes in without noticing him. She appears to be looking for something, but is surprised when investigating one of the storage boxes. She leaves quickly. Jean-Jacques pokes his nose in and sees a box of explosive bolts that have been tampered with. All explosives are not verboten in the residential parts of Unity Base, so there is something seriously wrong here.

Thinking quickly he decides that there are three cases:

1. This is a Soviet plot that she knows about
2. This is a Soviet plot that she does not know about
3. This is a US/NATO plot

In case 1, she would not be surprised, so it is probably not that. In case 3, things are bad, but she will probably want to find out what is going on. In case 2, things are really bad, so she will definitely want to find out what is happening.

Jean-Jacques decides that she can be trusted, since this is a threat to everyone, potentially. Leaving the room he bumps into her standing in the corridor in thought almost immediately and confesses that he saw her and saw the explosives. Running her through the reasoning above, she asks him to keep an eye on the room while she goes and does an inventory of the explosive storage: if they are missing then that should show up, but there is probably space there for safe storage at least. She comes back shortly after and removes the explosive bolts. They agree that the base commander (an American) will need to be told, but otherwise Jean-Jacques agrees to keep the news secret for now.

Thus endeth Jean-Jacques Desjardins’ day.

The other PCs did their own things: vacc suit maintenance, drill rig set-up, negotiation re: allowable input devices for the Tetris tournament, sleeping off a strained shoulder, making a Cuban sandwich with smuggled pork, possibly plotting to blow up the base at the behest of the US Air Force, the usual.

Thoughts and Notes:

The core procedural loop of this focused on the technical problems is quite strong:

• A morning meeting where the current problems are outlined and the PCs can choose what they will work on
• Each pair of PCs goes off to handle their thing (this is mostly a time limitation, more than anything else)
• Leisure period which is a little more freeform and will probably lead to interpersonal drama and advancing background problems.

(This fairly rigid structure seems pretty solid for potential play-by-post games, taking a shift per day or something, incidentally.)

The technical problems are multi-step and potentially complex. Other PCs put together a diamond drill rig (which had a very poor set of instructions) and did some maintenance on the space suits (which are in two sets, Soviet and NASA/ESA, and only limited non-interchangeable spares are available). The drill rig is now ready, but it took a shift to assemble it all and the testing still needs to be done to ensure no mistakes were made. The suits have some issues, but none of them are critical (yet), so that maintenance is also mostly done, especially if a solution for the Soviet gloves and the strange wear patterns on the NASA/ESA suits can be found. The temperature of the SNAP reactor is hopefully under control for now, but we need to figure out what the cause of the sedimentation is. We also have other issues that were not handled today: Science 4 has a strange hissing noise¹, the mobile excavator’s arm is malfunctioning, some solar panels need replacement, there is a satellite that crashed nearby that needs investigation.

The interesting part of this comes from the fact that there is always something that will need doing, and not all of it is immediately urgent, but it might become so, and in the context of a lunar base something becoming immediately urgent is probably a really bad thing: if the temperature anomalies in the SNAP reactor are not resolved, then who knows what the result will be? if the space suits become unusable, then we can not do any outside work. If the hissing in Science 4 is not addressed will we all be eaten by snakes? On top of this, there are science objectives from mission control, and this particular campaign has the added potential pressure of that fuss in Kuwait (or somewhere else) starting something between the USSR and the USA and her allies.

Even after just a couple of sessions, the campaign is a great example of how tension builds up. This is helped by a few “trouble tracks” that are increasing:

• The Cold War will throw politics into the joint base
• Something will break
• Various personal problems will rear up

None of these have triggered yet, but they will, and the nice routine of mission>downtime>sleep>repeat might break down somewhat then. The PCs all have various other things going on as well: Jean-Jacques has those explosives, Jan Petersson is conniving with the nearby US Air Force base, Ernesto Rodriguez (the flight surgeon) has seen some shit and it is getting to him….

Fixing problems is not something easy, it is the meat of the game. Each of the problems have multiple steps and multiple approaches. As Sammy’s blogpost says, problems are not always going to be solvable completley. In this session, the vaccsuit maintenance was a great example: there are spares for most of these parts, but if they are already worn, how long will the spares last? Might it be better to jury-rig a repair for now, and hope that they do not fail catastrophically soon in order to stretch those spares out for longer? The decision today was to replace the gloves of one of the Soviet suits and attempt a repair on the other two. For the US suits they are being left for now, and the problem bounced back to the boffins on Earth to see if there is a reason why they are showing weird wear patterns before replacements are put on that show the same weird thing and more parts are ruined. Are these the correct choices? We hope so, but have no real way to know for sure.

Likewise, the SNAP is now giving a little less power, but should be running at more nominal temperatures for the time being. We for sure want to get to the bottom of the issue, but for now we might be able to focus on the snake infestation in Science 4 instead, since the reactor is not critical (well, it is, because it is a working nuclear reactor, but the point stands). So is the best use of someone’s time to analyse the sediments from the coolant loops, or to get a grabby claw and deal with the snakes? I guess we will find out that we got it wrong when one of the two problems explodes (either into nuclear fire or a ball of, presumably flash-frozen, snakes). One consideration is what NPCs are doing. In theory, some problems should be solved, or partially solved, by the NPCs doing similar things to the PCs. So maybe one of them will do the sediment analysis? We should be so lucky….

A quick note: problem-solving like this requires a referee to have a solid idea of what might be done and what leads to what: other players, with the same problem with the reactor as myself and Sanchez’s player set up sunshields, which only helped partially to control the temperature. Much like any investigation, there needs to be enough to dig into by the players. We happened to notice that the positions of the over-heating components were on three of the four coolant loops, so comparing the four loops to see if the one behaving was different seemed like a decent step. If we had not noticed that, then perhaps we would have noticed that the sunshields were not optimally placed and that insolation was still getting to the components, or that the coolant pressure was lower than it should be, or a number of other things.

This investigation and constraint is the crux of a “technical SF” campaign: there is never enough time (or all of the resources) to handle everything, so you handle what you can, and hope that you made the right calls when you made them.