Post by dmjack on Jul 13, 2015 22:35:18 GMT
Sometimes the most memorable events happen because you had planned it for weeks on end, to every last detail. Sometimes the party wants you to create a random encounter. This is a story of a the latter. This story comes from my space campaign, a homebrew that I am still making. During the test of this, I created this encounter. The party was consisted of: Rose, an ace pilot from the Last Corporate War who had retired and took her ship. Hard-Luck Hank, an every man mechanic whose one remarkable feature was that he was abnormally lucky. Walker, a pacifist bounty hunter, who refused to kill, and used rubber bullets. Dara, a corporate spy and hacker whom they had picked up in their last mission. And Sly, an NPC ex-pilot, who left the service after an electrical feedback had fried all of his nerve ending. They only reason he could walk or move was because of an experimental nanomedic treatment, in which allowed him to gain control over his body. (He also had no sensation of touch, and could never fly again, even after the treatment).
The set up was that the crew had come across a derelict, the S.S. Epimethius, but the ship showed no sign of a conflict. They boarded to find out what was going on. The ship had no artificial gravity, nor any life support. They had to go in with space suits on, and float through the halls. They found active cryo-units (A hallway full of them), but the units were frosted over from the inside. Another hallway was lined with an alarming number of battle drones for a research ship. They of course, split the party, with Hank ranging out alone, and two teams exploring the ship.
Hank came across a room, with blackened walls, floor, and ceiling. With bones and dust floating around. But the bones and dust were deformed. Some of the skulls had three eye-sockets, skeletal frames looked warped and disfigured, fused cybernetics that went far beyond normal procedures. He also found a room, while venturing through air ducts, with giants mech suits, but upon further investigation, he found dead bodies fused into the workings of the suit.
One team, composed of Walker and Dara, ventured down the hallways, finding research data-pads, in which they learned the nature of this vessel. It was a research vessel, lovingly called: "S.S. Mephistopheles" because of fringe, unethical, and illegal human experiments it was doing for war research, during the Last Corporate War. They also found that the bridge and many of the forward hallways were lousy with dead, dehyrdrated human bodies, as if they were rapidly exposed to space.
The second team, composed of Rose and Sly, headed toward the core room, found the reason why the ship wasn't working. A worker, succumbing to the madness of his experiments, ejected the anti-matter core of the ship, forcefully, blasting a hole in the ship. The worker had also cut off back-up power, so the doors flew open, power was gone, and so was air. In the core room, there was a giant hole in the top of the ship.
So what did they do? They turned on back-up power. The mech-units that Hank found, came to life like a cybernetic zombie and started firing at Hank. Hank had to use carefully set charges (Because concussive blast could not work in a vaccuum) to take it down. (He got some plasma throwers out of the deal).
Walker and Dara, floating back from the bridge, noticed that the lights on the battle droids started flickering on. Then, the droids started to come out, two-by-two, using magnetic feet to stick to the ground. The filed out and turned to them, staggered, row-by-row, threatening to enclose them. So they ran. Floating in microgravity, they flew through the ship, as row-by-row of attack droids filed out, and started shooting at them. The reach the hallway, and halfway to the hallway was the was the corridor leading to the airlock where they were docked. Troublingly, Hard-Luck hank was coming from the other hallway in magnetic boots, running from something. You remember those Cryo-Units I mentioned earlier? They flew open, revealing genetic and cybernetically alters abominations, made to survive even the vacuum of space for a short time. They clamoured out, and set their sites on poor Hank, who had been using this hallway to get back. Crawling and scraping at alarming speeds on the walls and ceiling, they chased Hank. So when Walker and Dara were coming from one side, chased by droids, Hank was running from the other side, being given chase by things that looked like monstrosities, and acted like the quick moving headcrabs from Half-Life 2.
Meanwhile, Rose and Sly were stuck in the core room, because as they tried to leave, they noticed the monstrosities clawing their way to the door. They had no way to escape, save for one: The giant hole in the middle of the ship. But jumping wouldn't be enough, because the debris orbiting the outside of the ship. They needed a powerful, well-timed jump. And they had only one method: Sly could Overdrive his nanites. Doing so made him more powerful, dilated time for him, and made him quicker. The consequence: Sly's health was so bad, that doing this had a chance to kill him (He had developed a sort of technological cancer from his nanomedic treatments. Rose, who they were love interests at the time, didn't know this).
So we have two teams, Walker, Dara, and Hank at the airlock of the ship, with abominations and tech droids flooding in, as Dara desperately attempted to get the airlock open quicker than normal (There was a timer for safety, ironically), and Rose and Sly, the door about to be busted down, and only one way out.
Sly activates his overdrive, grabs Rose, and does a perfectly timed jump into the debris field. This makes for a grand panoramic scene, wherein Sly and Rose are "dancing among the stars."
Meanwhile, in the airlock corridor, Walker gets hit by a laser from a droid, breaches his suit, and he is exposed to the vacuum of space. Dara hits a lucky roll, and gets the airlock open, and Hank and Dara, grab Walker, and run to the other side of the ship. Hank and Dara, detach the docking bridge (It was a manual docking bridge. Which meant, to dock to a ship, two people had to be hanging on the sides, while the captain approached docking distance, and manually jump to the other ship and attach two cables, and then jump back, run electricity through the cables so that they straighten up, and then jump over and attach the docking bridge, which looked like a clear plastic sheet with a metal plank. Yeah, their ship was ghetto).
Meanwhile, during their space dance, Sly begins to convulse. The overdrive wore off, and he was in a bad way. Rose signals a distress, and it is up to Hank, the only other person who could pilot the ship, to swing around and get them. He luckily swings around, grabs them up in the cargo hold, and bring Sly and Walker to the infirmary. They miraculously survive, but only by a little bit. But Sly is given only a few months to live.
The set up was that the crew had come across a derelict, the S.S. Epimethius, but the ship showed no sign of a conflict. They boarded to find out what was going on. The ship had no artificial gravity, nor any life support. They had to go in with space suits on, and float through the halls. They found active cryo-units (A hallway full of them), but the units were frosted over from the inside. Another hallway was lined with an alarming number of battle drones for a research ship. They of course, split the party, with Hank ranging out alone, and two teams exploring the ship.
Hank came across a room, with blackened walls, floor, and ceiling. With bones and dust floating around. But the bones and dust were deformed. Some of the skulls had three eye-sockets, skeletal frames looked warped and disfigured, fused cybernetics that went far beyond normal procedures. He also found a room, while venturing through air ducts, with giants mech suits, but upon further investigation, he found dead bodies fused into the workings of the suit.
One team, composed of Walker and Dara, ventured down the hallways, finding research data-pads, in which they learned the nature of this vessel. It was a research vessel, lovingly called: "S.S. Mephistopheles" because of fringe, unethical, and illegal human experiments it was doing for war research, during the Last Corporate War. They also found that the bridge and many of the forward hallways were lousy with dead, dehyrdrated human bodies, as if they were rapidly exposed to space.
The second team, composed of Rose and Sly, headed toward the core room, found the reason why the ship wasn't working. A worker, succumbing to the madness of his experiments, ejected the anti-matter core of the ship, forcefully, blasting a hole in the ship. The worker had also cut off back-up power, so the doors flew open, power was gone, and so was air. In the core room, there was a giant hole in the top of the ship.
So what did they do? They turned on back-up power. The mech-units that Hank found, came to life like a cybernetic zombie and started firing at Hank. Hank had to use carefully set charges (Because concussive blast could not work in a vaccuum) to take it down. (He got some plasma throwers out of the deal).
Walker and Dara, floating back from the bridge, noticed that the lights on the battle droids started flickering on. Then, the droids started to come out, two-by-two, using magnetic feet to stick to the ground. The filed out and turned to them, staggered, row-by-row, threatening to enclose them. So they ran. Floating in microgravity, they flew through the ship, as row-by-row of attack droids filed out, and started shooting at them. The reach the hallway, and halfway to the hallway was the was the corridor leading to the airlock where they were docked. Troublingly, Hard-Luck hank was coming from the other hallway in magnetic boots, running from something. You remember those Cryo-Units I mentioned earlier? They flew open, revealing genetic and cybernetically alters abominations, made to survive even the vacuum of space for a short time. They clamoured out, and set their sites on poor Hank, who had been using this hallway to get back. Crawling and scraping at alarming speeds on the walls and ceiling, they chased Hank. So when Walker and Dara were coming from one side, chased by droids, Hank was running from the other side, being given chase by things that looked like monstrosities, and acted like the quick moving headcrabs from Half-Life 2.
Meanwhile, Rose and Sly were stuck in the core room, because as they tried to leave, they noticed the monstrosities clawing their way to the door. They had no way to escape, save for one: The giant hole in the middle of the ship. But jumping wouldn't be enough, because the debris orbiting the outside of the ship. They needed a powerful, well-timed jump. And they had only one method: Sly could Overdrive his nanites. Doing so made him more powerful, dilated time for him, and made him quicker. The consequence: Sly's health was so bad, that doing this had a chance to kill him (He had developed a sort of technological cancer from his nanomedic treatments. Rose, who they were love interests at the time, didn't know this).
So we have two teams, Walker, Dara, and Hank at the airlock of the ship, with abominations and tech droids flooding in, as Dara desperately attempted to get the airlock open quicker than normal (There was a timer for safety, ironically), and Rose and Sly, the door about to be busted down, and only one way out.
Sly activates his overdrive, grabs Rose, and does a perfectly timed jump into the debris field. This makes for a grand panoramic scene, wherein Sly and Rose are "dancing among the stars."
Meanwhile, in the airlock corridor, Walker gets hit by a laser from a droid, breaches his suit, and he is exposed to the vacuum of space. Dara hits a lucky roll, and gets the airlock open, and Hank and Dara, grab Walker, and run to the other side of the ship. Hank and Dara, detach the docking bridge (It was a manual docking bridge. Which meant, to dock to a ship, two people had to be hanging on the sides, while the captain approached docking distance, and manually jump to the other ship and attach two cables, and then jump back, run electricity through the cables so that they straighten up, and then jump over and attach the docking bridge, which looked like a clear plastic sheet with a metal plank. Yeah, their ship was ghetto).
Meanwhile, during their space dance, Sly begins to convulse. The overdrive wore off, and he was in a bad way. Rose signals a distress, and it is up to Hank, the only other person who could pilot the ship, to swing around and get them. He luckily swings around, grabs them up in the cargo hold, and bring Sly and Walker to the infirmary. They miraculously survive, but only by a little bit. But Sly is given only a few months to live.
