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Sunday 8 November 2015

Traveller Campaign Update: Prison Break Edition

The session began with the PCs still trapped in "The Gash", a space-guantanamo that the Empire uses to make 'difficult' prisoners disappear.

So they're basically playing this:


(at least some of the PCs would be right at home with these guys)

In the previous session one of the PCs had been approached by a Zhodani sleeper agent, offering them a chance to defect. When it became clear that they were going for it, she escaped from the complex, causing a red alert and leading to rampant speculation.

They were then interrogated by two different Imperial agents: the silly one who was desperate to push his pet theory about a psychic conspiracy on the PCs, and the not-so-silly one who wanted to know what the fuck had really happened to them.

(Its not quite clear which of these two is the PC in this scenario..)

Meanwhile, one of the PCs keeps having weird dreams of Grandfather Paradox and waking up with more power-ups. New skills, heightened attributes, and finally psychic powers.  This is a bit troubling given that a third interrogator was just arriving on the Gash: a high ranking Imperial Security agent who is also a powerful psychic himself.



Even worse when he realizes that the dream is sending them messages: The Master is in the process of regenerating, and if they don't go kill him first he'll try to conquer the entire galaxy and exterminate all of Grandfather's pet species (which, incidentally, includes humanity).

The non-psychic interrogators find themselves being alternately frustrated and confused with the PCs' apparently total willingness to talk and eagerness to be psychically scanned in order to prove that they really did go through all the insane shit they're claiming they went through.

When Psychic Interrogator shows up, he starts by interviewing and brain-scanning the seemingly dumbest guy in the group, to easily find out all the backstory. Terrified by what he finds out, he interviews the guy who was listed as "most likely to betray the entire party to get a pardon".


The plan Psychic Interrogator has is that he'll arrange for the party to get off the Gash, and go find the mystery planet the Master's Regeneration Loom is found, but when the Master is offed and before Grandfather himself can regenerate, Most-Likely-Traitor guy will shoot him in the back of the head and end the Ancient menace forever.

Unfortunately, there's a problem: Most-Likely-Traitor is also the wussiest member of the party. Psychic guy realizes this and knows there's no way this plan can be trusted to work.  So he decides on plan B: he'll off Grandfather's host-PC right now, and then use all of Imperial Intelligence to find the Master's mystery world and use every last fleet the Empire can muster to blow it all to hell.

Unfortunately, when he has them send up the possessed PC, this happens to the psychic interrogator:


Grandfather takes over the PC's brain and uses Ancient-Level Mega-Telekinesis to blast Psychic-interrogator through the wall and leave little bits of him splattered all over the wall.

Non-Silly Interrogator realizes that the Psychic guy was right, the Ancients must be stopped, but now there's no way she'll be able to convince the Empire to let the PCs go and do the job. So in a spur of the moment decision that, knowing the PCs, she'll be bound to eventually regret, she takes advantage of the chaos to help the PCs escape the Gash.

She manages to get them all to the shuttle bay, feigns being overpowered, and lets them get away in the Psychic Interrogator's shuttle (hey, he won't need it anymore for sure), to a set of co-ordinates around the gas giant of Pixie where they'll find what they need.

The PCs fly off from the chaos of the Gash, fugitives once more, facing the to-say-the-least-uncertain future that having to go kill one-to-two Ancients implies, with nothing more than a very vague description to find one planet out of a billion in the galaxy, with the Grandfather-host guy in a coma after he blew the interrogator to pieces, and everything looks pretty grim, until they get around the orbit of the gas giant and see the location they were given:


It's the Falcon! Er, well, that is to say the Starhunter. A sight for sore eyes the PCs thought they might never see again.

Curiously, in spite of being the Empire's Most Wanted and having to kill two gods, things are looking up.



RPGPundit

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