As Blanche’s player was missing last week, I started off the session with a bit of downtime minutes to see what she had been up to after ‘falling asleep on the ship’. Content warnings for this session are death and hostage situations.
As the party returned to their ship, exhausted after a day of dancing and chasing down missing persons, they came in to find a horrible stench permeating the area. Blanche, a cat-person, had heated up some fermented fish oil tea – and much like your shitty coworker who cooks fish in the microwave, the entire ship was drenched in it. While Caitlin and Pillboi threw a fuss, Hermes got sick trying to drink some himself and ended up with food poisoning, with everyone offering different methods of treatment for most of the night, slightly getting used to the smell as they later slept.
In the morning, Corrine (the missing woman) entered their ship and immediately restarted the complaints as she brought up the smell. The conclusion she came to was that the people who are saving her are idiots. But Corrine doesn’t have a lot of options herself, so she stayed. The part opened the envelope after much debate about it potentially being a bomb (spoiler: it was not a bomb) and revealed 2.5 million credits in encrypted data chips (stolen from the casino). The party openly questioned the morality of them running off with the money, maybe taking just some of it, or perhaps loading the chips with a virus… to which Corinne rightfully pointed out “Uh, hello? What about me??? I’m going to die??”. There was just one young woman standing in the way of this group being set for the rest of their lives. The Ragni would have no idea it was them (at first, anyway) without careful investigation, and there was a good chance they could get out of the system and be gone before anyone noticed.
But, with as pure-hearted as the party is, the group opted to not mess with the envelope and instead proceed as planned. They would, of course, tip off the Interstellar Interference Navy of the stolen goods, and receive a large reward for information (10000 credits), but they did not want to risk Corinne and her sisters’ lives. Hermes, however, did investigate the Rangi-provided communications device Corinne had on her, and determined that it was also being used as a tracking device. He confirmed that the messages received were from various locations that Ragni had frequented – included that tiny old abandoned house.
However, risk her life they would anyway – Corinne, upon arriving at the starport in Shan, was immediately escorted into a dark vehicle and taken to the older part of the city – specifically the small boarded-up house that the party first found leads of her location on Halfdis. They managed to hail a cab with a very elderly (but speedy) driver, and Hermes quickly uses reverses the tracking information in Corinne’s compad to see where she’s headed. The four of them arrived just as Corinne and the bodyguard had entered the building. The party decided to ‘slash the tires’ (well, interfere with the two grav cars all ‘technologically’) so that they could prevent the men from escaping, and then spied on the package exchange from outside of the house.
Blanche went in fairly close, listening right at the door. Inside, there were three men: the guard who escorted Corinne, Alan Ortovsky (the Ragni’s ‘unassociated’ business partner and dirty-deed-doer), and Alan’s personal bodyguard – who held a gun to Corinne’s back as Alan checked the data chips for tampering and to ensure no money had been missing. The party waited. I set a timer in real life to time how long it would take to upload the data. Blanche headed back to the group and they decided to hide in the bushes behind some refuse and wait out Corinne’s exit. Two minutes pass and… they hear the single shot of a laser pistol. Alan and his two guards leave the building alone.
The party panics – it takes only a few moments for the three men to hop in their cars and to realise the Ragni’s cars aren’t starting, and they’re distracted for a moment with addressing the issue. Pillboi takes this opportunity to rush inside and attempt to use a lazarus patch on Corinne (who had been shot in the stomach). It had been about two rounds’ worth of time since she was shot, and he had a pretty hefty penalty to it. Pillboi makes his roll, and succeeds. Corinne is stabilised.
Meanwhile, Caitlin has contacted emergency services and the ambulance and local law enforcement are on their way. The Ragni do a survey of the area but the PCs have been well-hidden and are not found. As the sirens approach, the three decide to book it down the road. The party is interviewed by the law enforcement agents and provide all the information they have – including their real names in the witness statement (this will important in a future session). Wrapping up, they call Sheila, Corine’s sister, and let her know the situation. The group decides that the party will head off back to Halfdis, and leave Corinne and Sheila in the local law’s care.
En route back to Halfdis, which took a few days to fly to, the group listened to the radio and heard about Alan Ortovsky’s “unfortuante” arrest… however he was still released; he had supposedly also been kidnapped and ‘forced against his will’ to be involved in the Casino heist, as he worked on similar finance software, and is so traumatised from the experience that he has almost ‘no memory’ of the events that transpired. Of course, the party doesn’t know (well, they probably assume) that Alan is absolutely working with the Ragni and this was just his get-out-of-jail free card, and he’s right back to work.
On Halfdis, however, the party is taking a break from space mafia nonsense, and decides to enter the Spire as contracted adventurers to recover pretech artefacts for the local scientists to study. The group is told of the dangers of the Spire – and how it has claimed so many scientist lives that they’re forced to outsource its exploration to any old idiots willing to give it a try (and that if they happen to recover any id tags from the corpses of past adventures, they would also be rewarded). They figure hey, no trouble, let’s go explore, and head down one of the unmapped halls of the Spire (which is actually just ripped from Numenera‘s Jade Colossus). Immediately, they find themselves upon a room full of seven or eight (hard to tell) disfigured, mutated, irradiated human-like abominations (some with id tags around their necks), laying on the ground, seemingly murmuring some kind of prayer. The group decides to leave and try a different route, where they eventually come across a pretech artefact suspended in some sort of near-stasis field. After a bit of trial and error, they decide to tie a rope around Blanche, and launch her at the artefact, which she grabs and the group pulls her back in. They cut their losses for this trip and head back, pocketing a good 25000 credits from its sale, and then greedily plan to go back in for more next week…
Some added GM notes on the Corinne situation: Corrine’s possible death was a bit of a tricky moment for me. At one point, pre-session, I wrote in my notes that “if the girl they’re escorting goes to the meeting place, she will be threatened with death, there will be a few minutes while they verify the package she’s dropping off, and then they’re going to kill her”. The party…. decided to hang back and watch and not interfere. I felt a bit uncertain: would I be a worse DM for causing this girl’s death that they tried so hard to prevent the last session, or to stick with my guns and not pull punches? Did I not telegraph the danger of her enough? But it’s what the NPCs would do. So, Alan’s bodyguard shot her.
I don’t want to go easy on these guys. The trick going forward is now that the group is getting into higher levels, I’ve got to start making challenges harder. While I disagree with the whole ‘scale the difficulty with the party’ paradigm, I’ve been pretty soft, softer than I should be, and going with the safer option of difficulty because I do want them to actually have a chance to succeed, but I think there will be more failure/challenges in their future as I start to ramp checks up to more interesting and complex situations. Corinne was easily manipulated, but many other NPCs will just naturally be more difficult to convince. And Alan Ortovsky is not happy. If this Casino trick got found out by a passing group of idiots, he needs to be on his toes – and is formulating a way to track the group down as we speak…
Slice of Beef 
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