Further out-of-character commentary will be in spoilers! As much as possible, I will be trying to present the game rules to you in character- I like the idea of leaving the actual functions of some things to inference. Anyway, this setting is based on the Lego Rock Raiders series of toys and other such from 1999-2000. I was 7-8 then, if I've done my math correctly, and the Rock Raiders were my favorite Lego theme of all time. I loved the dirty, blocky looking models, it was definitely the darkest, and in retrospect dwarfiest, Lego theme I can recall. I loved the models, the computer game (which was a kid-friendly Dungeon Keeper) and the easy reader books. The Rock Raiders books were the highest reading level of all the Lego books and had the hardest math and logic puzzles, which made them badass. I've actually been thinking about doing a forum game on this theme for perhaps a year, and the various ways I might run it. I finally decided to de-lego-ize it, because the serious aspects of the settings were what originally endeared it to me, and make it a suggestion games because as much as I liked the idea of killing off players in the dangerous mine conditions, suggestion games are much less work. To keep the lethality, you get 100 lemmings! So here's hoping I can keep it updated. I'll probably update it a ton at first and then die off, like usual, but I intend to maintain a strict minimum of an update a week. So yeah, here goes. Hopefully the game is not, as IronyOwl once quipped, a "unicorn with cancer", beautiful but condemned to die slowly and gasping for life. Mood for this post provided by Top Tracks for Blue Öyster Cult.
says that energy may be neither created, nor destroyed. All energy man puts to a useful purpose is, ultimately, lost to entropy. To maintain a system, like society on a planet, which radiates energy into the black of space, more energy must be introduced. This is where you come in.
You are the captain of the L.M.S. Hephaestus, a "crawler", a space ship which is sent out to the depths of space at speeds greater than light on journeys which last several years. The most prized cargo is "energy crystals', which are found with more frequency the farther one goes from the center of the galaxy- only one was ever found on earth. The reasons for this are much debated among astronomers and physicists, but that debate is not your worry. Yours is to fly far from home, acquire crystals, and return alive. This is your third voyage, after which you intend to retire.
Your ship is antiquated and you are growing old as well. In fact, the L.M.S. Hephaestus was the second crawler ever built, after the first successful voyage of the original crawler, the Explorer. Since then many crawlers have been built and returned with energy crystals and other valuable material, but you never quite struck it lucky enough to settle down. The Explorer vanished on its second voyage and has never been heard from again. Such is the fate of many who seek their fortune by flying as far away from home as possible.
YOU ARE SITTING AT YOUR DESK on a much-earned reprieve from the bridge. You're almost done with your opus of art- a three-foot-long Lego model of the Hephaestus itself! Your fellow men say that your hobbies take after work far too much, but your meticulous penchant for engineering is why you're the captain of a mining ship. You're fairly awful at poker anyway. When you swing around in your chair to reach for a bottle of water, you break some of the antennae which protrude from the front of the ship. Immediately you forget about the water you meant to drink and begin thinking about how to construct them in a more durable fashion...
The ship shudders, sending the entire model crashing onto the floor. After a second of staring aghast at the Lego carnage, you realize that if the ship is shaking, then there's greater issues at stake. You rush up the stairs to the deck, struggling to keep your footing as the ship shudders a couple more times. You arrive on the bridge to meet your pilot, Jess, your navigator, Halstead, and your head engineer, Safford. The seats of your geologist, Dr. Berkhardt, and ground team manager, Darric, are empty.
Jess starts speaking without looking up. "Asteroids sir! Halstead didn't tell me about-" "The asteroid shower that wasn't along our original course?" Halstead, after his interjection, turns around to you. The ship shudders again, worse this time. Safford turns to you. "Looks like you came here at a pretty bad time! We lost our shields before that last one, we're starting to lose systems..." Another violent shudder. "We came out of light speed when we detected the asteroids coming, but there's a whole lot of them here and they're moving around fast. It's uncanny, we almost came into the group at a tangent..." Halstead yells to Jess and Safford: "HEADS UP! We've got a huge one coming in right on our tail! Put everything into the thrusters!"
The Hephaestus lurched at full burn through several small asteroids offending its path to avoid a much larger one. The one behind it was an enormous comet, the source of the smaller debris. At a tremendous cost of fuel, and minutes later, Jess maneuvered the lumbering crawler into safe space. Safford offers his prognosis: "We've got a lot of damage and, more importantly, we're almost out of fuel. Until we can find some more, we're about as functional as a strapless bikini." Safford apparently missed Jess' glare as he monitored his computer console. Halstead says, "We're not screwed just yet. There's an uncharted planet not far from here. We can get there in about an hour... but we're not getting any farther."
STRANDED AND WITH NO OTHER OPTIONS, you plot a course for the unnamed planet. You take a few minutes to yourself and start to think about what to do next. You've got to assess your equipment and the state of the ship. You'll need to start scanning the planet for resources. Before you do that, you need to address the crew and tell them about what's happened, while keeping morale up as much as possible. Most pressing of all:
WHAT IS YOUR NAME?CURRENT STATUS:Ship:
-Get Diagnostic
Equipment:
-Get Diagnostic
Resources:
-Get Diagnostic
Crew:
-100/100 Healthy
-Morale is high.
Mining sites:
-None established
Author
Topic: Rock Raiders- You have struck the rock (Read 4577 times)