Thursday, February 26, 2015

Strange Stars At The Table!


At Con of the North this year, we had two Fate-based games set in Trey Causey's Strange Stars! The first game was an open registration event for all interested parties; the second was an off-the-books/on-demand two hour game which included people who couldn't get into the first session, as well as one player who wanted to continue playing the Kuath star soldier they created in the first game!

I ran the four hour session. We did on-the-fly character generation, using the Airrotten, a star system I had already developed using the Diaspora-inspired Strange Stars Worlds rules. Airrotten had already been the site of a playtest of the Strange Stars Factions rules. A newly rediscovered system, Airrotten had just been the scene of political infighting between local factions on two resource-poor worlds, and newly arrived contingents from several interstellar factions from the Strange Stars universe.

Airrotten had just been the scene of a space battle between the Vokun Empire and the Alliance. The Vokun fleet was in a shambles. The players decided that they wanted their characters to be rebellious crewmembers on one of the Vokun warships. Since the Vokun Empire is entirely dependent on its specialized servitor races, this looked a a lot of fun! So we went with it!


The players included a Voidglider (a race of star scouts who live in hard vacuum), a Kuath (essentially an adolescent human hepped up on combat drugs and encased in a suit of Cthuloid bioarmor), a Vokun-Yantran hybrid, and a bug-like Engineer. I know there was a fifth player but almost everyone took their character sheet with them - and the action was incredibly fact paced - so the fifth character's identity eludes me at the moment.

All the action took place on a Kuath Comfort Module - a euphemism for a troop carrier. Here is what this double wide, triple decker space trailer looked like:


The Comfort Module is atmosphere capable and can be repurposed if necessary as a kinetic kill weapon.Just have a chat with the vehicle's solicitous AI. At the front of the Comfort Module, there is a hangar bay for amphibious assault vehicles and fighter-subs of various kinds. In the center is a room labelled "SR" which has the aspect Mutiny-proof safe room. This is the armored back-up bridge where the Engineer PC was holed up at the start of the action!  A bit further back is the a spherical salt water temple to the Kuathi dragon mother deities (they're real folks).  Under that and further back there is an armory, as well as a massive engineering section.

The players had a lot to contend with, including a suicidal if solicitous AI, a Comfort Module in a state of orbital decay, a somewhat freethinking Voidglider scout, and a boarding action by an Alliance cruiser. The boarding action was quite dramatic and featured mano-a-mano combat between the Kuath soldier and a hulking armored cloned Thrax woman warrior from the Alliance ship!

I believe the Engineer went into pill bug mode and became a spherical projectile in this combat too!


It was a really fun game! Next time, we'll share some of the action from the two-hour off-the-books /on-demand Strange Stars game that Bob ran!

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