Over the summer, I spent a fair bit of my time helping out with an annual online event, and this meant that pretty much everything else went on the backburner. I still ran sessions, but things like updating my blog became a fairly low priority! I had a backlog of session summaries for my Stars Without Number campaign to write since the last one, and I just didn’t have the time or memory to get them all in! Alas!
However – last week my SWN campaign actually came to its final conclusion! So I’ll do up a brief little bullet-point synopsis of the main events here, chaotic as they are:
- The party lands on the planet Thorunn, where they investigate some Psionics shenanigans, get arrested (Blanche is released on bail and has a court date), and become higher-profile targets of the Ragni. Caitlin’s grandmother assists in their escape.
- The party headed towards Teus, stopping for a few days at a nearby system to upgrade their spike drive. Here, they also ran into the rival party (Tizzy, Omen & co.) and placed a bug on their sip, to track their messages.
- The party then headed to the planet Teus, to both collect the sample (at which point I made a deeply embarrassing accidental Homestuck reference) and do a job for Hermes, whose hacking prowess was requested in an anonymous email. The job involved the party delving underground into an ancient pre-tech ruin – Tizzy, from the rival party was there too, helping out his oppressed people.
- The party decided they did not want to deal with whatever was going on down here, and left before the final chamber, leaving Tizzy to speak with the ancient cryogenically frozen pre-tech being who told him (and in turn, the Ragni) where the super-powerful planet-destroying weapon is. It is, in fact, the Spire itself. The party learns of this later, thanks to their information bug and strips Tizzy’s report. The Spire requires the Lion’s Lily (for some reason), and the Ragni are preparing to go get it.
- The party quickly rush to Terra Purr’ma to collect the Lily before the Ragni do, collect some with the help of a friendly botanist, Nepeta (another unfortunate accidental Homestuck reference – which caused several ‘if I had a nickel’ memes to sprout up in the Discord) and manage to destroy much of the wild population and get the local government to enact protective sanctions on the rest. They’re warned of its potential misuse.
- Blanche virtually attends her court date and gets off as not guilty.
- Medicine Man also arrives on Terra Purr’ma, and tries to break into the botany lab, but is stopped by the players, who stabilise him, kick him in the balls, and then have local law enforcement take him away (they really don’t like killing people).
- The party decide that it is not safe for Blanche’s family to stay here, and Blanche takes them to a nearby outpost (where she also remains – the player had to leave due to some scheduling changes).
- Caitlin’s grandma as it turns out was kidnapped by the Ragni – Alan Ortovsky in particular, who uses her as a ransom for a large sum of money from the party. They quickly head back to their home planet, Ilnar, to rescue her.
- The party tracks down Alan, takes out his bodyguards, rescues Grandma… and then lets him live, in exchange for information.
- Turns out, Alan was actually in line to replace the now-dead leader of the Ragni, but since the party exposed his connections to the organisation, plans changed. There is a new leader- but who?
- After some investigation (and by investigation, I mean mostly an attempted ritual with a doll of Blanche they made out of her leftover fur) the party figures out it is Rocky Brickman, Hermes’ old manager at work, who has also been promoted within the shell company he ‘works’ for. They also discover that the Spire as a WMD has been kept relatively secret, even within the organisation, and manage to interrupt a meeting, preventing the release of the knowledge of its power and secrets.
- The party decides to anti-climactically poison his coffee (successfully), and get the fuck out of metaphorical Bel-Air. It was so underwhelming and perfect at the same time, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
- Knowing that the Spire is relatively unknown, they decide to cut their losses, and head to the nearby Paradise World, where they build up their drug enterprise, retire rich and drink cocktails, and Hermes’s player sends us this video in chat:
There would, of course, be longer-term repercussions for the things they left behind, and there are a few extra details I left out of this summary, like the newly discovered lost system… but as I wanted to wrap up before the holidays…
That’s all, folks!
Slice of Beef 