Thursday, January 10, 2013

(A) Mission Accomplished!

First game night of the new year, woot! We met last night for our Serenity RPG - here's the pre-cap of the mission from Mac:

On New Canton, things break, even when Dao-ming isn't around. Sometimes, a big, expensive piece of machinery will fall into the churning mud and get all full of gunk. Someone needs to clean it up and keep it in working order.

There's a small company in that neck of the 'verse that contracts out all such work. Dao-ming has managed to send a wave to an old friend on New Canton, found out the name of the company and how to reach them. They seem like just the sorta people to clean up a giant weird unidentifiable artifact what's been buried 'neath the desert for a good chunk of time.

The artifact itself currently sits in your cargo bay. The crew has finally cleaned off all the easy stuff. Dao-ming herself just wanted to take a hose to the blasted object, but others in the crew, aware of how easy it is to damage valuable things, have convinced her to let other people do the work for you.

The thing has been stuck in a container now with some padding inside to keep it safe 'til you get a chance to pretty it up and see what exactly it is. Under the remaining grit and grime, the large chunks of dirt, clay, sediment and sand calcified to it in odd places, it sorta looks like it might be made out of some sorta ceramic, maybe? It stands about four feet tall, and the general outline of it is a spiral two feet across, sorta like a braided rope, spreading out at the bottom into a wide base, and with some sort of wider circle at the top.
Only problem is, such professional types as this oft-times require payin'. Convincing them to take a job this small to begin with might end up being a bit tricky, and then you'll have to find some means of recompense.
See this previous post for how we obtained the artifact.

Recap - Wire has the asset Friends In High Places, which allowed him to spend a plot point to have a connection in the restoration company. Since paying them outright would have cost ALL THE MONEY, and we're not (yet) ready to kidnap anyone's dog to hold hostage, we settled on corporate espionage. The company hired our crew to sabotage the operation of a rival company to make them lose face and, hopefully, clients.

The rival company, Recover Inc., had currently landed their ship (containing their administration offices) on a nearby planet to restore a school that had been attacked by a plague of locusts. They had cleaned one wing of the building and were working on another. We decided on a three-prong approach - first, we would infiltrate the admin offices and change their schedule, so that they think that the clients are coming a day later. Then, we'll bring the locusts back to the area they have already cleaned (using a pheromone mimic from the science-experiment-gone-wrong that caused all this in the first place). Finally, we'll sabotage some of their equipment that's currently in use, so that they can't finish cleaning the building their currently working on.

Last night we actually only got through the first part of this plan - Leland and Wire got one of the Recovery Inc. employees drunk and stole her ID card. Leland used a doctored version to get inside the admin offices and change the schedule, but he took so long that he needed a distraction to help him escape. Wire and Dao-ming staged a fight in front of the office building to draw a crowd and try to distract the guards. When that didn't work, Dao-ming swung around and tried to clock the guard holding Leland, with limited success. Still, it was enough for Leland to break free - Rawhide zipped by in a stolen planetary vehicle and picked the two of them up. Wire simply faded back into the crowd. Overall a success, but Recover Inc.will be a might more suspicious from now on...

Thoughts on the game itself - we were kind of rolling crap all night, which is frustrating but a real part of the Serenity RPG (and perhaps the Cortex system in general). Success should not be easy in this game. Also, Mac wants us to explore our options of being a little more morally gray - he's the one who suggested hostage-taking. But unless I'm playing a villain I'm never going to pick the greater of two evils, or the evil option when a more neutral/good option is available. Moral ambiguity in gaming works best, IMHO, when both options are equally shitty. Of course, now that I've said that, Mac is only going to offer us shitty options. Gorram it.

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