I mentioned that last session, my gaming group destroyed the world. So this week, we started a new campaign.
We’d brainstormed last session and in the begining of this session, but eventually I offered a postapocalyptic space opera setting, very vaguely sketched:
The Empire fell a long time ago. It had stretched across the galaxy, connected not by FTL spacecraft, but by Gates, which allowed people to step across from one planet to the other. Not everyone could pass through these gates – only certain people had the gift to navigate the hyperspace between them and emerge. These people, the Navigators, carried news, information and materials between the worlds.
And one day, the gates stopped working. The navigators stopped coming through. Interstellar travel (slower than light, minor but still important) has also stopped, and with the worlds left to their own devices, Civilization has crumbled.
Many years later, on a backwater planet, a gate stands alone in the middle of an empty desert plane. There is a flash of light, powerful lightning lancing down from the sky. The gate has been activated.
Who are you and why did you step through the gate? I asked the players. I gave them free rein in coming up with their characters and their home worlds. I also told them that psi powers are available in this setting, but these will be mostly telepathy and similar powers – telekinesis would be very weak, if at all.
The character Oren came up with, Jack, is a "space trucker", a former military-trained covert-ops specialist, discharged for "attitude problems". He comes from an advanced, high-tech world, and works as a shuttle pilot, flying freight in space (to orbit or to the moon, I assume – Interstellar travel is out). He’s also a smuggler, and activated a gate when he got jumped on by security forces who cornered him in a sting operation. He conveniently had his overnight bag with him, and a gun. Oh, and he’s very physically tough. Oren described him as sort of Corbin Dallas from "Fifth Element", but he also sounds very much like Arnold or Dolph.
Boaz came up with a sort-of Jedi/Ninja: His character, Adep, belongs to a secret society/criminal conspiracy group, which have extensive martial arts training ("very cool fighting"), specifically the "Gun Kata" (from the movie Equilibrium); they also have psychic powers, specifically the ability to transfer their consciousness into someone else and control his body. This struck me as an awfully disruptive power – both for the campaign. Bo suggested that it works at any range, targeting people through their photographs; that the limitation is that it doesn’t work on people wearing metal headgear (tinfoil hats!) and that it is fatiguing (when he is possessing someone, Adep’s body slumps unconscious). Bo also added a cool suggestion that his society claim to be the remnants of the Imperial police (the image of the Imperial police taking over people’s minds – of the "Jedi" actually being Orwellian thought-police – was so creepy and cool, I think it what made me let him get away with it). Adep’s reason for passing through a gate was blunt and simple: his boss/master told him to do it, and he obeys without hesitation – a sort of Samurai code of discipline. Adep dresses in black, with pistols, hidden knives, lockpicks, metal armbands and other ninja gear (including the infamous "instant water" bags…)
Ghoula’s character came from an ancient research station – a space habitat inhabited for thousands of years by a dying race of scholars, who had adapted and genetically engineered themselves into an immortal, infertile, dimorphic race of mental supermen. The men had developed more abstract thinking abilities ("Mentats"), while the women had developed more in the direction of empathy, reading body language, social interaction, intuition, and finely-tuned body control ("Bene Gesserit"). Her character, Kachkala, was the last child born to this race, and was sent through a gate in hope that she would find a way to save it. She has solid blue eyes, a shaved head with a tataric horse-tail top knot, and very strange clothes.
Finally, Israel, playing his cards close to his chest, created the dashing Bandana, diplomat from the planet Conan, a wiry warrior in a fur jacket, armed with twin shockguns and mounted on a handsome stallion called Mach.
As we open the game, these four characters find themselves near a Gate in the desert. A boy called Jorn greets them.He is apparently the one who "called" them to this particular planet (which is called Jotun). Jorn is apparently a potential navigator.
Jorn wants to take them to The Man From The Sky, a stranger who traveled from afar to reach the gate and who recruited him to open it. They go to the nearby town. On the way, Jorn insists they stop in a nearby cave to put on local clothing and hide Mach (the horse), since the locals apparently aren’t fond of people coming out of the Gate.
A big temple dominates the primitive desert town, and the streets are patrolled by acolytes armed with truncheons. Jorn leads them to a shed where The Man From The Stars is supposed to be waiting, but he is distressed to find the man missing. A pair of suspicious acolytes show up and try to take them in for questioning. This suits Bandana fine, because he’s in a "take me to your leader" sort of mood; the acolytes were reacting badly, but Adep took over one of the acolytes’ mind and used this to defuse the situation – preventing it from turning violent.
The four outworlders proceeded with the guards to the temple (Jorn stayed behind), where they met the High Priest, who also did not appear very sympathetic – apparently, the locals had bad encounters with people who came through the Gates: the priest referred to them as "demons". He threatened the PCs with an advanced weapon, apparently some gun taken from these "demons". He did not react well to Bandana’s offer to rejoin the Empire ("Good news, we’re putting the Empire back together!"). The high priest suggested his visitors retire to refresh themselves – and had his guards escort them to a prison apartment that was locked once they were inside.
They discover Jorn’s master, the man from the stars, in the cell next to them (they can talk through the windows); they catch sight of Jorn on a nearby rooftop; Adep once again uses his consciousness-transfer power to control a guard and make him open the door’s bolts and pick the lock. They free the man from the stars and sneak out of the temple. They rejoin Jorn and lie low until night time, then sneak out of town.
The man from the stars tells them that he was part of a space fleet, and that his craft crashed on this planet, "near the forbidden zone". They set off across the desert at night, with the general purpose of reaching his crashed craft.
In the desert, they are ambushed by a sniper with a powerful beam weapon, who cuts down Jorn. The others – Adep, Jack and Bandana – manage to close range and overcome their attackers, who are apparently two acolytes. The session ended as they were about to question the one surviving acolyte.
What have we learned:
- If you want low-tech, pseudo-mediaval space opera, find more ways to limit guns.
- Saying "no" to players ("you can’t knock the door open", "this doesn’t work") is fun (and a change).
- Bene Gesserit and Jedi don’t mix that well. The consciousness-transfer trick is too useful and "steals thunder" from more subtle social manipulations.
- "A desert planet" is lazy SF.
- There needs to be more of a reason for people to be together. Conversely, this doesn’t neccessarily have to come from the players. At one point, Kachkala came along with the others because Ghoula thought she wouldn’t go out on her own. But it might have been cool if she had (instead of coming along with the acolytes to the temple). I’m not sure if this is just the player dragging the character along in the precieved direction of the plot, or just the character being sensible.
- Jack was pretty quiet – and he was the only one who actually framed a back story (i.e., an incident that lead him into the gate). Maybe Oren was just tired.
- Israel seemed to have fun, and Bandana is a proper incarnation of his ur-concept of a character apathic or dedicated enough to cheerfully charge into the midst of danger and action.
- Need more background. And scale.