GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Violet Ash, Sarah Terman, Meghan Unruh, Steven Drouin
System: Blades ’68
Cold steel surrounds you as you enter the hatch left open by your inside agent and board the Blueraker-5. The Primary Navigation Sparkmind Module (PNSM, pronounced “pensem”) that you’re here to steal is two levels below and now that the safety checks are complete your schematics indicate it should be unguarded. As you go hand over hand down the access ladder however, klaxons blare, the blast doors shut, and you hear a countdown!
T-Minus 10 seconds…You were supposed to have more time. Did someone betray you? Did they change the launch at the last minute? Did you trip some security measure?
9-8-7. There is no way off the Blueraker in time. Disabling the navigation is your only hope!
6-5-4. You make it to the service module. One of you grabs the PNSM and feels an unearthly ripple move through you, separating you from yourself. Who is it?
3-2-1. The rest of you watch as your companion’s resonance echo is separated from their body. Their hand is still on the PNSM controller, unmoving.
The countdown finishes and the ship shudders into motion. Blastoff!
All of you still inhabiting bodies are slammed to the ground from the enormous thrust as the Blueraker-5 launches. A second set of lights flash and instrumentation shows the temperature rapidly rising in the service module. The blast doors are closed above you and in a few moments this room will become a furnace. What do you do?
This is the opening to my Blades ’68 Stretch Goal Cold Open: T-Minus 10. I wanted to give it a test run before calling it good, and what better way to do that than by running it at SeanCon!
Steven raised his hand to accept the out of body experience, so I gave him the Ghost/Echo playbook and told him he might get another playbook if he ever figured out how to get back into his body. He accepted the situation with delight. He played Sway, which was the alias he used with the crew before…and all that he remembered of himself now.
Then I asked the rest of the players to create characters. We’d call them a group of Shadows (I didn’t want to spend time with crew creation) hear to steal the PNSM.
Megan played perfectly normal Kate. Or was it Katia. An Operative (and a double agent at that) will allegiance to the AFU and the Palace!
Vi played Vesper Castel, aka “Moth”. Moth was draw to the light of invention and innovation. She worked at a carnival that on the surface was a competitor with the Golden Hand, but behind the scenes they covered for each other. Vesper’s fascination was all things weird.
Sarah played Mida Skalkallen, a Time Traveler from the future, who went by perfectly normal Mary Scott. She knew that the Blueraker-8 project destroyed the bubble and killed everyone in Doskvol and wanted to stop it from happening.
Highlights
Pensem (PNSM) just utterly hate humanity and all things moral. Its impotent contempt was a delight to play. Once ripped from its housing in the Blueraker-5 navigation system, it could only make offers and insults.
Totally normal Kate telling the Class XI Metadimensional Entity that if it wanted them out of the service module (that was both crushing them in the g-force and threatening to burning them up in the heat), it should let them go, then Moth using reverse psychology on it “It’s probably not a sophisiticated enough machine to understand.” Peak human audacity!
Sway squeezing through the only narrow tube that was unshielded against electroplasmic entities, and coming out the other side shaped like a noodle.
The moment I decided that because Totally normal Kate was here representing Iruvia and Totally Normal Mary representing Skovlan, that there would not be on, but two Sabatours! (Agent #2 from Blackthorn Park and Khuran from AFU).
When totally normal Mary waited for everyone else to climb a ladder before the mechanical arm that comes out her back and was powered by a micro-anomoly picked up Sway’s body to pull him up behind her.
Finding Agent #2 in the service module with a canister of alluvium and impersonating Agent #38. Totally Normal Mary wasn’t a spy at all, but she had read about them, and was able to bluff her way to convincing the #2 that she was on the same mission (which of course, the very alert Totally Normal Kate also overheard).
Finding out that the pilots were victims as well, involuntarily hulled only moments before launch. Now inside metal bodies they didn’t understand. And that any one who was still inside their body would be destroyed (or something else) crossing the bubble.
Sway possessing the body of Brakey, while pulling the resonance from the hull back into the body, and now they were both inside, with all the coordination you’d expect from two freshly minted echos.
Kate finding that one of the pilots still had a resonance inside them…because they were AFU agent Khuran, who had stolen the plans for the Blueraker-5 and took Pilot Alka’s chair, ready to launch the ejection seat.
Totally Normal Kate in Pilot Slade’s seat, Khuran in Pilot Alka’s seat, and Sway/Brakey in Pilot Brakey’s seat (and body) all hitting the eject button at the last moment leaving Moth and Perfectly Normal Mary to pilot the Blueraker-5!
Moth helping the remaining pilots in their hulls to turn the Blueraker-5. Cutting out the thrusters on the port side so that the ships started radically tilting towards the ground. It was effective, but also compassionate. Moth was able to connect to these people who were newly trapped in metal bodies and assume them they were still people.
Learning that Totally Normal Mary happens to be a portable wormhole generating rocket pilot (Time Traveler playbook is so fucking cool)!
Moth first using psychokinesis to: float off the ground when they were being crushed by the gravitational force, rip PNSM from it’s housing in the Blueraker-5, and then at the last moment, when they were nearly able to touch the barrier, hurling it through the barrier and into space…so it could return to it’s kin. The creature made of hate and malice had a little less hate and malice for that one particular mortal!
Sway’s body being abandoned, poisoned by toxic gas, crushed, heat exhausted, and battered by a mechanical claw. I guess it made sense it left it behind, bodies are so fragile.
Moth’s little butler resonance entity (which appeared as a tiny man in a suit), who wouldn’t stop calling her “mum” but did his darndest to be helpful.
Learning that without the Alluvium (stolen by Agent #2) the Blueraker-5 could not create an anomaly around it and pass through the bubble. It would be incinerated on contact!
Ground Control (Doskvol-1) being a mix of reasonable ground crew who were sympathetic and Undersecretary Bowman who, after four failed attempts, was going to send a blasted rocket through the blasted bubble even if it meant the blasted thing burned to cinders!
Learning that Totally Normal Mary’s force field protected people by enveloping them in an anomaly that placed them somewhere else.
The few moments that PNSM (pensem) had alone with Totally Normal Mary and offered to tell her what happened on the Blueraker-8 (which she came to stop from destroying the bubble and killing everyone in Doskvol, despite being from the USC herself) if she would just get it free amongst the stars. DEAL. It was Agent #2! A very busy agent indeed!
We played THREE sessions. After each milestone, I did a short end of session XP granting. I based this on a game I played with Vincent, which was amazing. I think the players dug it!
Thoughts on Cold Open
I made a bunch of updates to the Cold Open, adding names of people in Doskvol-1, adding the Alluvium as an element of danger/opportunity. I also added some Echo specific locations to give the Echo player so options they others don’t have access to. This playtest made it much better!
I’m curious if I made the bubble too scary. Obviously it should be terrifying to the characters, but I hope the players would be curious. I added a question in the Cold Open about the Alluvium being used to allow them to pass through the bubble safely in their bodies. Who doesn’t want to see what’s on the other side?
It was so fun to play with you all!
Thank you for running your cold open for us, Sean. I’m delighted to have been one of the very first crewmates to live through it!
Yay! It was indeed the first successful* Blueraker launch!
Couldn’t have had a better crew!
* for varying definitions of successful. 🙂
Yes, this was so much fun! I too really enjoyed being part of the first successful* Blueraker launch! I loved how many different Scores were happening on that rocket simultaneously; trying to cope with the chaos was great.