Saturday, August 24, 2013

Shadow Legion: Pirates of Antares

+Frank Falkenberg +Ron Frazier +Brian Boring and I got together to play a game of Fate Core, Shadow Legion style. after a brief, and roughly accurate, discussion of the Lensman Series we got into the meat of the session. Speaking of meat and related viscera, The episode starts with a cameo from my favorite NPC, Dr. Fiallagoo MD. Then our heroes begin the dangerous job of being prime bait for pirates. As soon as the pirates show up, Gamesman Alric begins to plot and scheme, as he does. The crew fakes up some battle damage and the pirates move in for a boarding action.

When the pirates board, Alric leads them into a wicked trap set up by G'Lex and Kevik. The firefight is complicated by the pirates not going down quickly. The fight ends up being a bloody affair, but Frank said my favorite line so far, "Now Killing Squad, kill them all!" Our heroes win the day(despite my phenomenal dice rolls) and manage to take over the pirate ship, gaining the location of the High Tortuga. Kevik is horribly wounded and the rest of the crew are not in the best condition either.To get in good with the pirates the characters decide to become pirates. Next episode, they are pirates...



Problems
+Sharif Abed was unable to join the game this week, as he was away in Palestine. This is a pretty big issue in a game of Fate. In Fate everyone is connected together relatively tightly so when one of your players is missing there is a rather large hole in the storyline. I was lucky, though. We were just starting a new plot line, a whole new major milestone really. If this were a TV show, this would be the second episode of the second season. So I was able to claim that Ginko was away learning new techniques for fighting the Sukar.

Also I was completely exhausted when I ran this. I had not been sleeping well, and it was very difficult to keep my attention on the game. So in some of these scenes it may seem like I am distracted or unfocused. This is the lack of sleep. My advice, get a good night's sleep at least once during the week leading up to the game. I am not certain how useful this advice would be

We had a ruling situation during the the fight with the pirates on board their ship. I did what I tend to always do, is to pause the game for a moment and look up the rule directly. I know there are a lot of GMs who would just make something up and keep the narrative flowing, but I have found that the game flows far better for me if I do it this way, long term. I will be playing Fate for a while into the future, and if I make up a solution there is the possibility that I will not look it up later. This can happen if I forget about the situation, or if I just get lazy. If that happens there is a rules drift that occurs, where I would be playing a game that had the trappings of Fate, but would not be Fate.




Question of the day: Why do the Gura'oh have massive fleets if they have never had a major war? 
I was out walking when I realized that this question has never been answered in the fiction I have written about the Gura'oh. Not that I have written all that much about them, but it is interesting that a group of bankers who have never fought a major conflict would have the largest fleet in all of Charter space. As a fan of the Saga of Seven Suns and Andromeda I think I will make the reason an ancient enemy, kind a mix of Magog and Hydrogues. I am currently calling them the Sun Chainers.

New Species
Sun Chainers: The scourge of the universe. Locusts that worship entropy. They have immense technology and devour whole solar systems. They have chained suns as the engines for their system ships. Whole systems of planets bound together around a sun traveling slowly from galaxy to galaxy devouring all in their path. They darken the skies in the service of oblivion.

Tergaul: a race that believe that they are superior to all other species. They alone speak the divine language. They alone are truly sentient. they see other species as tools and pets, sub-beings at the very best. They never joined the Charter. Most of the Tergaul known are the exiles from their people. These exiles often become Pirates or Slavers. They adhere strictly to the trappings of civilization, but have the souls of monsters.

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