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.

Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. In an overwatch position.
• Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather. Tailing the folks outside (player not available)

Recap

09 May 2011

The previous session had the PCs watch some intruders waltz into their own intrusion. They took this poorly, and prepared to jump them. Yannis knocked at the door, but failed to talk them into opening it. At the same time Padraig sneaked into the flat properly, with a disguised pistol at the ready. The fight was short and sharp, with Yannis choking out one of the intruders in a surprise attack and Padraig shooting the other in the arm, causing him to be overpowered.

Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. In an overwatch position. (Player not available)
• Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather.

Recap

09 May 2011

After returning from Scotland, the agents took a bit of downtime to look into some of the things that they had found. They got access to one of the flight tracker archives and looked at helicopter flights around the eastern coast of Scotland. This turned out to be pretty helpful: an apparently abandoned oil rig was still getting monthly flights. The destination and origin was not the same each time. Looking at the details, they have enough information to make a guess as to the next location - although not 100% sure - and a rough date.

Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot.
• Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather.

Recap

06 May 2011

Being so close to the last known location of HMS Proserpine, as a shore base at Lyness, Scapa Flow, the agents decided to nose about a little. They found a small boat willing to take them across in the morning. They were able to do this while Coop travelled up from London overnight.

Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker.
• Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather. Asset-sitting Cassandra (player unable to attend)

Recap

04 May 2011

Since Cassandra Irving is clearly someone of interest to some organisation, the agents decided to use her as bait. She would go and draw some cash at St Pancras and buy a ticket on the train to Brussels. Hopefully that would get someone’s attention, but she could hop off before the train actually left and so stay safe. Petros would keep an eye on her, while Coop watched for any action at St Pancras and Yannis and Padraig headed to Brussels. The plan was for Coop to possibly follow them.