Battlefield Bangkok

We’ll be doing some learning games of VTES on Thursday the 25th, with several more learner sessions to be scheduled too. A great chance to learn a great card game and get ready for the Sealed Deck Tournament in July

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Never played Arkham Horror, and want to learn, or an avid fan that needs a fix? We’ll be running an Arkham Horror day on June 27th.

Our Arkham tour guide has ALL six expansions…an event not to be missed.  Contact Nat at the store to book a place!

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Expecting death to strike the party were rather amazed to see the Cylons depart when they appeared to be in a position to mop them up with little fuss. However they didn’t spend too long pondering this change in fortune and were shortly greated by further good news as Mike, Maton and Jared, all thought to be dead, arrived at the admin station. All looked a little battered and sick from their trek, well atcually Jared looked pretty good, but were in fine spirits to meet the rest of the party and even better to find fresh food, showers, clothes and even a few cigs available.

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After a few more days to recover from various wounds the team decided it was time to depart Picon. The sub space radio at the station had picked up a signal from a lone beacon that was sending an encoded message that gave the team the location of a potential pick up location on Caprica.

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Food packed, everyone recovered, Lt Douglas took control of the available Grav Car to launch into orbit and then set a 7 day trajectory to rendezous with Caprica.  With only three Vacc suits available and the potential of the Grav car being attacked looking pretty high there was a minor debate over who could afford to die. Lt Douglas, as the pilot snapped up one and left the team to haggle over the issue.  Anyway after 6 days it all looked like the debate had been for nothing until Barney, finishing off the last of his whiskey glanced out of the rear view port and noted a rather sleak ship glide into position behind them, priorities kicked in and he finished off the bottle before informing his team mates of their new wing man.

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Grav cars might be able to do 1000 MPH on a planetary surface, but they have the manouverability of a dead slug when in space, it all looked pretty grim.  The craft fired and the right manouver jet was shredded and a little warning light went on in the cabin. “Decompression Warning”! Surprisingly this actually caused now alarm, even for those with no Vacc suits… heck air leaking, hole in the ship, high speed re-entry coming up… eventually this data was processed by Maton who decided that he’d out his moutain of education, and engineer skills, to work patching the small hole. That done the attacking ship was noted to have simply gone.

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Zack cynically noted at this time that “it all seems a little too simple!” and then they hit re-entry and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut until they done that.  Lt Douglas did a wonderful job to avoid turning the team into a crator on the surface of Caprica, though lots of Vacc suit changes were needed and those at the back of ship were coated in everyones lunch from the day before…  Mike actually thought it was food from the fridge that had burst open… one taste soon corrected that assumption.

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Landing on Caprica the team proceeded to the given co-ordinates, noting on the way that Caprica had not been hit be even a hundredth of the nukes that hit Picon, only the capital seemed to have been nuked, other facilities seemed to have been hit by more convential HE weapons and even small arms. Arriving at the given co-ordinates the team were soon met, disarmed and then welcomed by members of the “resistance” , lead by Brigadire General Billings and Captain Reynolds. The resistance were shacked up in a large equestrian centre, around 200 civies and 20 odd military personel that had arrived from around the system, drawn by the same encoded beacon signal.

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The resistance was getting by, with small ambushes of Cylon groups, but generally avoiding any serious confrontation. But they had found a small warehouse complex about 2 days away where they suspected that prisoners were being held.  Unable to spare the small force at the equestrian centre, Billings asked the team to check it our and perform a rescue.

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Mike and Barney set out to do a Recon first while the rest of the team stayed at the equestrian centre. Dr Jared worked to seed discontent and mistrust of Lt Douglas with Billings but was mainly met with a lack of belief as Douglas had done a “damned good job” to get the team to the equestrian centre, plus he seemed to get on well with the horses, and that’s always a good sign.

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Mike and Barney returned with news that the warehouse was protected by at least 9 Cylons, four guard towers and an electric fence. A plan was formed and a daring rescue (that borrowed four of Billings men) was launched (..the full details of which one of our dear players can add.) Cutting to the end of the episode, the cylons were all taken out, no one on the assault team was seriously hurt, even all Billings men survived, and it looked like the prisoners had been saved.… cue music…fade into darkness.

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Ropped into carrying out a covert mission for the military the party carried out 2, 3 system jumps to arrive at the rendezous in their unarmed civilian target.  Docked at the the research station was some kind of small “alien” craft about the size of a Military Raptor.  No visible weaponry and the engine energy system was not something anyone recognized.

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Either way their mission was to facilitate a meeting, not get fussed about alien space craft. They docked and the Lt Douglas went on board with order to the party to stay on their ship until he returned. Time passed, and then the power on the Research station went off. Life support, Gravity and lights. A small debate was had and then the army boys volunteered to head on board while the Navy boys and Doc remained safe on their own craft.

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A slow exploration of the small research station eventually turned up the sound of Lt Douglas “crying”. Following the sniffles, he was found huddled in a corner clutching his Picon Pistol and rocking back and forwards in a state that could best be described as “in shock”. He also had a fine spray of blood over his right shoulder. While one of the army boys decided to see if he could be snapped out of it the other moved to check out the “meeting room”, as he got close to opening the door, Lt Douglas suddenly snapped out of his shock and demanded the team leave the station immedlately and return to the ship. Being ex-army boys the intrepid soldiers shrugged and ignored him. Lt Douglas moved to snap a shot off , but was too slow, taking a bullet in the right arm, his own shot missing horribly and then he was hit in the right arm.  Armless and gun less he still tried to make a run for it until brought low be a punch to the face.  With the navy boy wrapped up and bleeding out, they decided to check out the meeting room.

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They were met by a strange site, a desk, two chairs, a brief case, a lot of blood and a dead body with its’ face blown off…wearing the same uniform as Lt Douglas and of a very similar (if not the same) build.  The brief case was quickly popped open to reveal a strange looking device of tubes and liquids, with a green button.  Where more logical minds might have thought “where is the red button” the army boys just pressed the green button and watched as the liquids mixed to form one new green form in a middle container… cool they thought, time to call the Navy boys in .

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Doc and one of the ex-navy boys headed over to the station and in very short order declared that “It’s a bomb of some kind, it’s a chemical bomb, or maybe a bio agent, and there’s enough in it to wipe out a small planet…” At this point there was still an arguement about taking it along, but before guns could be drawn news of the Alien ship powering up had the team scurrying back to their own ship, along with Lt Douglas and leaving the bomb behind.

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Wasting no time they team dissengaged from the research ship and made a jump, just as the alien ship launched some kind of missle.

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Doc quickly went to work on Lt Douglas, medically as well as psychologically, as well as checking out the dead body. He soon concluded that the body was also Lt Douglas… a worrying fact that… and that the Lt Douglas that was dead, was not the Douglas that they came with. (Clever check of stomache contents) .  The live Lt Douglas was left restrained in the sick bay as well as drugged up once questioning was finished. He seemed innocent enough, cracking under pressure of questions to admit that he had shot the other Douglas after freaking out when he saw him on the research station waiting for him. Though he had no recollection of taking his gun with him on to the station, “I never take my gun to these meetings!” and had no idea why he’d taken it this time or even when he’d taken it.

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A week in jump space left the team no wiser as to what they had seen. Though when they dropped out of Jump space it seemed like it might be a good idea to tell someone, but not everyone agreed….

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After an epic session of character creation,which took a bit longer than expected due to there being a lot of players, and only one had made a Traveller character in the past 10 years. But after some fun the characters developed, learnt, got wounded and eventually mustered out with a range spread of 32 to 52.  An aged Navy Captain being the oldest member of the party, though that didn’t stop him throwing the first attack of the episode. The only Scout of the party fluffed his mustering out roles…no ship!

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While I’d hoped to some what hide the campaign focus of the game, the home worlds were a bit of a give away with names like Picon, Caprica and so forth.. my attempts of “yes well I chose these world’s because I had nice background data on them.” was totally laughed at, “So those Cylons! Which of us is it?”

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The game play started a later than planned and we unfortunately lost some of the players, including the scout, which made Surveying more fun.  Though with all words in the Caprica system known the only danger to the ship was the senile Captain Seldon who was constantly in danger of opening the cargo doors on a planet with a rather iffy atmosphere.

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Episode one : Cue Theme Music. Mustering out the party were not left to their own devices for very long. Approached by an ex crew member of the Captain’s they quickly agreed to meet with a member of Cascia Mining Corp with regard to a potential mission.  The ex grunts motivated more than the Navy boys due to a shortage of on hand cash.  The mission was simple enough. Pop out to the Frontier System and track down a missing mining survey ship (the Anubis) that had gone missing.  Cascia Mining Corp had been under the impression that the party had a ship, so after some grinding of teeth they agreed to loan the team a renovated Far Trade with a J3 drive but no weaponry.  At 80 MCr the team decided that it would be best not to put any dents in it.

The journey to Frontier was uneventful, two J3 jumps with a refuel in the middle saw them arrive and head straight to the tiny planet of Frontier. A very small frontier mining planet with a population in the hundreds. Locating the Anubis took very little time. And the team headed down to the surface and headed towards the downed craft.  Prior to arrival the ship was shown to be totally powered down, and holed in three locations by what the team gunner decided must be some seriously advanced laser / energy weapons.

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A detailed search of the ship found 3 dead crew from suffocation in areas hit in space, three more dead crew from close range shots, obviously the Anubis had been stopped, border and the crew killed, external checks showed interested markings that the team decided were from some sort of towing device, for what ever reason, who ever took out the Anubis had towed it to the planet surface rather than leave it in space. Two crew were missing along with the ships shuttle, a civilian Raptor. At this point the party were pondering on pirates and an inside job, but the ship showed no sign of pillaging.  When auxillary power was returned to the ship the team found the computer system was totally scrambled and unusable. Though they copied the software onto a PDA for further review, no access was found to data on what happened to the ship.

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A visit to the start port saw the Captain Seldon deck the Dock hand on duty for what amounted to his belief they were been ripped off for docking fees on what amounted to a bit of hard rock. Meanwhile in town the team found that at the same time as the Anubis was being shot down, the entire population center suffered a power outage for no reason, and once powered up all the computers were scrambled… all except one guy who lived out in the boonies. The team nipped over to his place, sure enough his old computer was fine, a few questions eventually lead to what the team believed was the prime, no network connection.

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Heading out the team decided to see if they could locate the Raptor in space. No ships had passed through the sector in the past 3 weeks, nothing had left either so there was a good chance the Raptor was still out there drifting, though it had been just under three weeks since the Anubis was downed, so the team didn’t give much hope to finding anyone alive.

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The Raptor was located without any hardship, and sure enough powered down to a bare minimum. But a minimal power field was detected on closer inspection.  So Vacc Suits on pop across to the shuttle…no, not this team, the Captain decided he needed a challenge so they popped open the cargo doors and he proceeded to scoop up the shuttle. Nicely done it was too. That done gravity and air were restored to the Cargo bay though the team kept all their Protective gear on just in case. On first review the Raptor appeared empty, but then the team noticed that one of the low berth racks was on, and sure enough there was a crew man inside. Of course  no dedicated medic on board… who is going to risk waking him up! Up steps JoaT, not for the first time, and does the necessary, and the crewman was brought back.

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The crewman’s  story didn’t help a great deal, he knew little more than the party, the ship was attacked, and he ran like hell to the Raptor as soon as he heard the alarms going off and the engines die. He manually Jacked open the Shuttle bay doors and then gave the Raptor a minimal boost before cutting all power and diving into a Low Berth, praying for a miracle.  Not much new there other than.. one crew member was still missing.

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A return to the ship saw the ship searched again, and nothing found until they looked at the ship blue prints and saw that 30% of the ship was fuel tanks… a quick check and one tank was found to be empty, cracking open a maintenance fuel hatch they soon found the last crew member, dead from suffocation inside the fuel tank, or, I should add, locked inside the fuel tank. The hatch had been resealed from the outside after the crew member had climbed in to hide.

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Well mission accomplished the team headed home to Caprica, job done, no one dead, easy cash in the bag. And it all looked good until the Vipers turned up and requested the team land on Picon.

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There the team were met and grilled by a senior member of naval intelligence, who then shanghaied them for a job for the navy, a civilian craft was needed in order to facilitate a meeting that would raise no suspicions amongst the civilian population nor raise alarm for the Cylons at the meeing. The younger member of the team, had to be updated on the Cylons and the First Cylon War and why this meeting was being kept clandestine. Yes in at the deep end!

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July 13th will see the Traveller RPG launch in Bangkok, using the Classic / LBB version of the rules, along with Snapshot for combat.  Traveller was the first Sci-Fi RPG I ever played and stuck in my mind long after others had faded away. The character generation system is one of the most unique and fun ever devised. Certainly killing off all hope of min / maxing a character or creating a template character over and over again. Variety is guaranteed! The game is d6 based. Stats are 2d6, but can go higher than 12.

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Combat is brutal, fast, viscous and deadly, as it should be. When you get hit by a shotgun at close range, then you and your adjacent buddies should be scrapping your guts off the floor, not picking pellets from their finger nails.  He who shoots first, tends also to be the last one to shoot too.

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Campaign wise, I’m giving nothing away at present for what is planned, other than to say that all players will start on the same world, be human, but have a choice of homeworlds to select from that will give a slight variation in background as well as some initial skills.  All career paths are open though I will be recommending against merchants, for reasons that will become very clear shortly after we start the campaign.

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I’ve created some Snapshot fast reference sheets to help everyone through the first combat incident. Though after a few fights it should become pretty easy to manage as Snapshot is a very straightforward system to use.  So see you on the 13th… bring your Vacc Suits!

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