Hooray, we’re back to roleplaying! Dan is running a Shadowrun-ish game for us. At least, the word “shadowrun” has been mentioned in the world, I don’t know if that is really the system or not.
There was once an Alliance in the galaxy, rather idealistic, that was destroyed by alien invaders. The aliens were driven off, but the Alliance was totally smashed up. In it’s place are Corporations, behind the scenes on every planet and local government.
There’s a diverse range of species – our crew has a female human chemist (a bit of a pusher…), an Ogre soldier, a Dwarf engineer and an Orc medic. We are on a largely-lawless pleasure planet, where almost anything goes. On our way to a local restaurateur (Fat Jeff) to look for make-work, we were followed by a shady character. Trying to lose this miscreant we ended up in the robot red-light district, in which another shady character jumped out in front of us and threw a datapad at us. It had instructions for a meeting.
This meeting occurred in an abandoned warehouse, and we were offered substantial rewards for assisting in the resurrection of the Alliance, and the subsequent throttling of Corporation power. We were given free rein to choose what equipment we liked. The mission was to destroy a device involved in time-travel and/or inter-dimensional travel – dangerous stuff.
After a quick trial of combat against some holographic practice dummies, we were ready to leave the planet and head to our destination in the SS Shagnasty IV – an Orc garbage scow.
The spaceport was surrounded by an angry mob… we didn’t see any need to worry, so we snuck onto our ship and set course. Arriving, we found a forest planet with very little traffic and almost no buildings at all – the facility that we wanted was out of the way, and had a landing pad. We radioed in, told them we were in trouble (pushing smoke out of the engines and wiggling the steering wheel to make it believable) and that we needed to land to make repairs. We were allowed, and met by a human woman who said her job was receptionist (good to see some old-school sexism in the fantastic future).
We managed to get a tour of the facility, which stood up to it’s claim of being a pharmaceutical research centre (not the advanced physics danger we had been told about) until we got to the room with a strange device – our guide couldn’t explain the “difficult science bits” but it was a way to get drugs to emergency zones faster than anyone else – the very instant they are required, in fact – and have enough of them produced to deal with the emergency. Sounds like something time-travel-ish for sure.
Just then, the facility was attacked! Our guide ran off to the bunker, we stayed behind to destroy the machine and download the plans for ourselves. We met some of the attackers (who didn’t stand a chance…) and made it through to the bunker. Opening the door, we found lots of dead people and a big creature who had clearly made a nest in there. We closed the door and left.
On the way out, we encountered one of the attackers carrying a big box who asked us who we were before saying “Oh, you must be the distraction.” This rankled us, so we killed him and headed to the ship. As we left, we saw the other ship being loaded with crates and loot so we destroyed it (hooray for hand-held nuke launchers!) and made it into orbit where we were congratulated for a successful job and informed that payment was in our accounts.
A few troubling things here – the technology stolen/destroyed doesn’t appear to be what we assumed it was, the facility was set up and we were part of it, and whoever organised the whole thing either doesn’t know that we screwed the other part of the plan, or are not working directly with the other team (and have no problem with their failure). I’m very interested to see where we go next…