Stars Without Number Campaign 1: Session III

I’ve been recently contemplating the problem of ‘keeping things serious’ in my sessions. I advertised this particular campaign as a more personal character-driven drama segment, and I want there to be space for more serious moments that aren’t interrupted by jokes and poor comedic timing. You certainly need a fair bit of that to relieve tension (it can’t be intense all the time!) but I feel I am definitely leaning a bit too far into jokes and comedy. So, last week, I set to work on strategies to sort of maintain a more serious mood. Of course, at the end of the session, all my players agreed that it was ‘too depressing’… so… I did accomplish my goal! But from here on out, I’ll be going back to more gonzo comedy, and deflating more tense moments, I guess!

I started with the communications message log from last time: Pelkan Wales’ scandal, the news report of the casino heist, another advertisement, as well as a ‘mysterious empty signal’ that our programmer PC, Hermes, could not decipher (if he had managed it, he would have been given star coordinates to a specific location). The party will start to receive more of these as time goes on, hopefully gleaning some more information as time goes on… I haven’t quite fleshed it all out yet, but there’s some cosmic space horror nonsense that they may get up to later on…

Back to the party, the group stopped off in the Eurymem system and headed to one of two habitable planets in the system, Shan, which is a large megacorporation and heavy industry planet. The players underwent an awkward ‘routine’ cargo search and interview by the IIN (Interstellar Interference Navy) regarding the heist, restocked some supplies, looked into upgrading their spike drive (on that note, I’ve opted to let go of the Geico insurance ad thing, as they’re planning on upgrading it right away). I actually wasn’t expecting them to not only go to this hex (which I had a few adventure hooks pre-keyed), but also go to Shan (which I completely forgot to key), so most of my prep came from the early iterations of my Sectors Without Number auto generator. Woof, this was a tight session. I managed to improvise an entire mystery scenario on the fly, with a young woman (Sheila) being thrown out of the space mafia (the Ragni)’s local corporate office, and wandering off in tears into a nearby alleyway. Caitlin, our Psychic, recognising the mafia’s insignia, offered assistance, and the crew decided to try and help her find her missing sister, Corinne. I honestly had no idea where I was going with this, but I wanted to start to look into the mafia business and also maybe lead into the casino heist a bit. So, Sheila’s poor situation was born: she Is (or was) a very wealthy engineer working for a prestigious company on the planet, but lost her job recently. In order to pay for their expensive house (the two sisters didn’t think of maybe, y’know, downsizing…), Corinne started working ‘odd, late-night jobs’, disappearing for hours at a time, is gone most of the day, had a closet full of sexy lingerie, and encrypted, coded lists of locations. The group decided that she had most likely been involved in prostitution.

Normally I say to avoid red herrings in mysteries, but in this case, not only was I improvising all of this and so it’s hard to ensure the mystery stays on track, but the clues all lead to a potential ‘funny’ reveal rather than actually be red herrings for the mystery – Corrinne is not a prostitute, and is in fact just… farming gold for an MMO and converting it into cryptocurrency by heading to internet cafes and individual account holder’s addresses for access to their VR pods. This should help deflate some of the ‘too depressing’ moments I built up in this session, and don’t conflate with the actual ‘Corinne really was kidnapped and is in a bad way’ – the gold farming isn’t making a lot of money, and her emails uncovered a strange meeting place a few hours out of town (containing a lot of documents for a secret project called ‘Spice’, and a man who works for a gambling software company named Alan Ortovsky – said gambling company being a front for the Ragnis), as well as a receipt for a one-way ticket to Halfdis – the refugee-filled planet next door. Corinne has been instructed that she will receive a lot of money for flying out to Halfdis, and then arranging a flight back – unknowingly smuggling some data chips back with her after meeting Omen, the catfolk from the previous session, and his crew who were responsible for the casino heist at the behest of the mafia. Of course, the Ragnis won’t actually let her live a normal life after this, and she’ll likely be disposed of once she returns to Shan. But the Ragnis needed someone who wouldn’t be suspected by the IIN traveling. Corrine wouldn’t be searched as she has no record of being at J’Ordain casino, and has been given a careful alibi for her reasoning on heading to Halfdis (which I, uh, still need to flesh out the details on). More on this particular incident next time…

As for other feedback I received: our sessions are so short – we can’t change the time, but the group does want to up the pace a fair bit. Even this summary article is incredibly short compared to previous ones. Most of my sessions are fairly meandering and I need to fix that. I’ll be spending the next week really ramping up on some prep for the next location (they’ve let me know where they’re planning on going) and making the casino heist scenario a lot more robust, and hopefully smash in enough content to finish off the casino sort of ‘questline’ here, and then spin back to the drug peddling. We’ll see how it goes. Overall, maybe a 5/10 session – I’m proud of being able to maintain a serious tone and improvise a mystery on the fly, but it wasn’t quite the angle I should actually be going for, so it’s time to do a bit of re-routing!