Half the Party Dies
or, the Best Session Ever.
Bryce : hihabnabitmkiii : Hi.
Bryce : Excellent session of the game today. Possibly one of the best ever. Players thought it was exciting every minute.
habnabitmkiii : Hah, nice.
Bryce : I was pleased. Especially since the session previous to this one had been one of the worst ever. Anyway, though, two new characters joined up with the party (with the usual few-questions-asked policy; They seem to somehow instinctivly know: "They look like player characters, let's let them join!"), these were: Wannabe (Spleen Flayer Bright), and Sora (Human-Vulpinian Rogue)
Sora is Josh's new character. Wannabe's player is the father of U Ben Had (Space Gnome Empath)'s player character. He joined the game and said he'll be back, if his work schedual permits.
Anyway, Wannabe and Sora started by looting corpses from the preceding session's battle, as the bulk of the players had moved on from the battle scene - a corridor of the merchant ship Puce Dragon - onto the bridge.
Wannabe beat Sora to the corpse of Skidro (Josh's previous character), and looted it, getting his stuff. (Thus, his dying wish "Give my stuff to the next character!" was fufilled, sort of :) )
Anyway, while the others are messing around (either playing with consoles in the auxilirary control room or looting corpses, etc), the Rogue Biptetk goes into the bridge and finds the injured captain of the MSV Puce Dragon there, alone and holding the purloined Sphere-Compass artifact that was the cause of the previous session's armed confrontation and battle.
The captain gives a brief Bad Guy Speech that I HOPE they paid attention to, because the storyline is about 1/3 along and I wish they had a clue.
Then, he pushes the autodestruct button.
10
9
8
The players, hearing the computer's voice saying "Prompt autodestruct in 10, 9, 8..." go into action. Short story short, they eventually paused the sequence. However, they were slow to grasp that the countdown was not counting down to a big explosion, but was enumerating steps in the autodestruct sequence, timed so that the ship would explode in ten seconds.
Basically, by the time they stopped it, about the only things it hadn't done were overloading the reactor, and actually firing the scuttling charges. (They were armed and ready to detonate.) The ship's antimatter containment started to fail, albeit rather slower than it was supposed to, and the ship began to destruct. They figured this out, I think, when an explosion on the deck below blew a chasm into the corridor floor into which one character fell to her death. (2 more almost did, or at least had the possibility of falling it.)
The players were divided into two groups by this time: 2 of them, the Rogue and the Bright (a type of psionist roughly similar in game role to a combined Mage+Healer in a fantasy game), were ahead of the others and about halfway to their docked shuttle. The other group, consisting of two slow-moving space gnomes, Wannabe, and Josh, found an escape pod that had not launched despite the fact that all of the escape pods had apparently been ejected as part of the autodestruct sequence.
They got in and blasted off, ending up drifting towards apparent Firey doom in an escape pod that did not automatically launch because it had no power at all.
But at least they weren't in immediate danger of exploding spaceships as they were previously. Biptetk, the rogue, gets to the PC's shuttle and gets it ready. However, Yeter Pu, the Bright, lingers, trying to find the Weapon Smith that owes him Sword-Gauntlets. The weaponsmith is unconcious, Yeter heals him, spends several minutes trying to convince him to come rather than look for his daughter, etc.
He eventually gives up and runs, but by then, it is too late.
FLAMING EXPLODEY DEATH IS UPON HIM!
habnabitmkiii : Hahah.
Bryce : Biptetk's self preservation instinct causes him to take off as soon as he sees the explosion propagating down the corridor towards Yeter, who is despretly running for the ship.
The shuttle gets out of the bay just in time, but is knocked out of control by the shock wave. Yeter is annhalated in the blazing explosion and dies instantly. (Along with another player character, Foo, who was locked in the Brig and unable to escape.)
So, at this point, the surviving PCs are five: four in an escape pod with no power, and one in an out of control shuttle. Long story short, the situation improved from that high point of tension. (With the exception of one PC being electrocuted trying to repair the escape pod's energy cells: He was quickly healed by Wannabe.) The shuttle regained control, and the escape pod's power was restored. They both went to the planet they were on three weeks ago. And we broke off there.
habnabitmkiii : Ah.
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