Friday, Part Two:
My second game Friday was a whole lot better than the first. This was my first game under the Babylon 5 RPG, The Babylon Project. I participated in a demo last year at GenCon, and I had found the system to be cumbersome. The system has been revamped since then and plays a whole lot better.
This scenario was a convention demonstration game run by Chameleon Eclectic, so you are warned if it reveals secrets about the scenario.
The scenario is about a group of Earth Alliance officers, who are under cover as working for a salvage and rescue company. The company officers are EA officials who give us our orders.
We had just finished a job and were waiting for our shuttle out-system when we discovered that the shuttle had been in an accident on the other side of the jumpgate (in its home system). We contacted our superiors and were given the assignment to investigate and salvage the shuttle. It seems there were other accidents involving the company and the area, so EA wanted an investigation as well as the civilian authorities.
Getting to the damaged shuttle was easy. We took along the shuttle’s engineer, who reported that the electrical systems all shutdown just before reaching the jumpgate. The crew had to abandon the shuttle and get through the jumpgate and hyperspace in escape pods.
Upon reaching the shuttle, the four player characters and the engineer split up to investigate the ship. The security officer found a bomb in the ship’s security office, as well as a white noise jammer. In the engine room, there was a strange glowing green crystal that seemed to be hooked into the electrical system. Touching the crystal gave the engineer a severe headache, so I took him back to our shuttle for treatment while our engineering officer and security officer tried to disarm the bomb.
When I reached the airlock, I was met by two hostile unknowns in space suits, holding PPGs on me. One took the engineer while the other kept me covered. I figured that the only reason they didn’t shoot me there was that they didn’t know what was happening on board the shuttle.
I managed to convince him to let me call the others: I was told what to say but the way I did it caught the suspicious security officer’s attention. It would take an overt act to get their attention, however, and that would have been difficult with a PPG at my back. Unless…
By this time the white noise jammer had been destroyed, so we had communications. The guy covering me motioned me to go before him and enter the airlock into our shuttle. When he was directly behind me, I pushed off the airlock back into him, hoping that the backpack would protect me from a direct PPG blast. (As we would soon learn, PPGs blasts are quite deadly.) I was able to knock his gun away while yelling a warning on the radio. As I somersaulted in the hatchway, I was able to pull MY PPG (he hadn’t disarmed me; stupid move on his part) and shoot the guy from directly overhead. (Zero‑G, and I had turned off the suit’s magnetic boots.) He was out, and all I had to worry about was the other guy in our shuttle.
Well, sorta.
The exec and the security officer were leapfrogging their way down the shuttle’s corridor in classic defensive fashion, as I was taking a position against the airlock door, when I was shot from behind. It wasn’t a killing shot, fortunately. It did reveal that there was a third unknown behind me in the shuttle, but he didn’t realize that he was being approached from the rear, himself.
As soon as the other PC spotted the unknown, he was hit with three PPG blasts, all of which struck the chest (the default target). He didn’t have a chest left.
That left one unknown in our shuttle. We swept the central area, closed off the hatch to the hold below, then went to check the control. The others were going to open the door while I covered them.
That was when the hold door blew off. The third unknown popped out, just as I swept him into view. He didn’t stand a chance. He was the last of the unknowns, thankfully.
The engineer and our shuttle crew were all dead. The three unknowns had apparently been left aboard the shuttle to take care of any investigation and to destroy the evidence.
From our investigation before going to the shuttle, we learned enough to present a case against the shuttle company and its owner for insurance fraud. The strange crystal was part of a failed project that had drained the company finances, so the owner was going to use the insurance scam to recover the losses.
It was fun. I got into the military mindset very easily: I guess I was in the mood to blow something up, especially after the other game. We worked well together. I also like the game system: its reasonably clear and simple, and the dice rolling is kept to a minimum. The character creation system, from reviewing the game book, is also straightforward. I hope it has the success the Star Wars RPG has had for West End Games.
Personal Links