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[Rolan7]

Another session of Fate of the Ur-Quan today. The heroes arrived at Spathiwa, where they contacted the Spathi High Council (a.k.a. the "Safe Ones"), who after being given the "Secret Spathi Cypher" asked them where they got it. Captain Fwiffo immediately proceeded to lock himself in the restroom of his Eluder, while the crew was trying to get him out. (for some reason the restroom in the Spathi ship had a large steel vault door with multi-factor security and all ventilation shafts leading to it trapped by deadly devices).

Heehee.
Can't be too safe from THE ULTIMATE EVIL!  Its scariest attribute is that it's never been observed, after all.

The Safe Ones gave the PCs a quest to rid their planet of the Evil Ones, savage creatures that had eaten a large amount of their population a few centuries ago and forced them to relocate to the moon. The players set up some traps in the planet, aided by a sample of Fwiffo's DNA of deliciousness. They lured one of the beasts into it (which turned to be some sort of giant teddy bear that moved with the grace and fierceness of a sloth). As they were analyzing the beast, a group of four drone robots attacked, killing Ensign Rico. The drones played a pre-recorded message, that the intruders where to cease and desist trying to ruin their amazing prank, death being the preferred way to cease and desist.

Huh!  Neat twist.  Makes sense to change things up in case they're familiar with the source material.
I wonder if it's even the same group.  Drone robots seem to hint otherwise.

The Ninja player used his ninja skills to climb a tree and then jump onto one of the drones, attacking it with his sword, while the other player, aided by one redshirt + his decoy (technology adapted from the captured Spathi ship - the Spathi fill half their crew pods with decoys to lure the fire away from the real crew) took potshots at the other pair of drones. The lander itself also shot at the robots but was mostly ineffective (redshirts suck at shooting. And other skills. And not dying). I use the same rules from the computer game, btw: ships, landers etc get destroyed or at least seriously damaged and disabled if they run out of crew, otherwise they're undamaged. All damage goes directly to the people inside.

That's a good explanation for the lander not ruling the show, it being full of useless redshirts.
Interesting that you're keeping the crew=HP mechanic though.

After destroying one of the drones with massive damage, I ruled that he could steer the crashing drone into the other one of that pair, by overcoming a Vehicles check. And exactly that happened, to which even more Fate points were piled on which caused the destruction of both drones.

Eventually they destroyed the rest, and salvaged the pieces to try and figure out where they came from (inside the planet) and who programmed them.

...Hm.  I have theories.  Your players don't view this thread, do they?

In the end this played out rather well, I think I managed to make the scene a lot more fun than just capturing some helpless creatures, while still making the point that the Spahi are defenseless cowards and easy prey for the lamest of predators.

The players were throwing out all kinds of solutions at the end, from using superscience to make the Spathi less delicious to these creatures, to make a virus to make them more harmless, or making a zoo or whatever. We'll see how that plays out next game.

Sounds like a great campaign!  And I have unfairly high expectations for anything in the Star Control universe.  Thanks for sharing (:

[Sergius]

The Safe Ones gave the PCs a quest to rid their planet of the Evil Ones, savage creatures that had eaten a large amount of their population a few centuries ago and forced them to relocate to the moon. The players set up some traps in the planet, aided by a sample of Fwiffo's DNA of deliciousness. They lured one of the beasts into it (which turned to be some sort of giant teddy bear that moved with the grace and fierceness of a sloth). As they were analyzing the beast, a group of four drone robots attacked, killing Ensign Rico. The drones played a pre-recorded message, that the intruders where to cease and desist trying to ruin their amazing prank, death being the preferred way to cease and desist.

Huh!  Neat twist.  Makes sense to change things up in case they're familiar with the source material.
I wonder if it's even the same group.  Drone robots seem to hint otherwise.

Well they do pilot a ship called a "drone"  so maybe it's a variant of the same technology, but automated. And tiny.

The Ninja player used his ninja skills to climb a tree and then jump onto one of the drones, attacking it with his sword, while the other player, aided by one redshirt + his decoy (technology adapted from the captured Spathi ship - the Spathi fill half their crew pods with decoys to lure the fire away from the real crew) took potshots at the other pair of drones. The lander itself also shot at the robots but was mostly ineffective (redshirts suck at shooting. And other skills. And not dying). I use the same rules from the computer game, btw: ships, landers etc get destroyed or at least seriously damaged and disabled if they run out of crew, otherwise they're undamaged. All damage goes directly to the people inside.

That's a good explanation for the lander not ruling the show, it being full of useless redshirts.
Interesting that you're keeping the crew=HP mechanic though.

Yeah I've made no effort to hide that mechanic, we even joke about it all the time. We're not going for "immersion" exactly here, just fun, heh.

After destroying one of the drones with massive damage, I ruled that he could steer the crashing drone into the other one of that pair, by overcoming a Vehicles check. And exactly that happened, to which even more Fate points were piled on which caused the destruction of both drones.

Eventually they destroyed the rest, and salvaged the pieces to try and figure out where they came from (inside the planet) and who programmed them.

...Hm.  I have theories.  Your players don't view this thread, do they?

Nah, pretty sure they don't even know this website exists. Can't guarantee a random Googling of names won't land them here. Either way they don't know much about the computer game, they just know I based the campaign on it.

In the end this played out rather well, I think I managed to make the scene a lot more fun than just capturing some helpless creatures, while still making the point that the Spahi are defenseless cowards and easy prey for the lamest of predators.

The players were throwing out all kinds of solutions at the end, from using superscience to make the Spathi less delicious to these creatures, to make a virus to make them more harmless, or making a zoo or whatever. We'll see how that plays out next game.

Sounds like a great campaign!  And I have unfairly high expectations for anything in the Star Control universe.  Thanks for sharing (:

My pleasure, glad you're finding it interesting. It'll be probably several weeks until next episode tho, we're doing some sort of weekly round-robin gamemastering between 2-3 GMs.

BTW, the redshirt that was handling the decoy/dummy was essentially this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4MPKCbfVU4

[Cruxador]

(lengthy post on goblin ecology that I'm omitting here for length)

Considering these things, it makes a lot of sense how in the generic Japanese settings, you get orders of knights going around to subjugate monsters.

[Andres]

I heard that the Wheel of Time RPG supposedly has a very good, interesting, and unique magic system, but I haven't been able to find what said magic system is and I'm entirely unfamiliar with Wheel of Time as a whole. Can someone tell me about the Wheel of Time RPG's magic system?

[Arx]

Based off one review, it appears to be roughly based off DnD's. There are spells, which are each associated with one or more elements and at least one talent. Casters begin with one element they can cast, and can add more using feats. They can also take talents using feats. All spellcasters behave like sorcerers, in that they don't need to prep spells.

Certain talents have a broad variety of spells, like elementalism, and other are much more specific (like balefire), but correspondingly more powerful.

You can choose to invest a certain amount of power into each spell, kind of like metamagic feats I guess, where you use up a slot of a higher level. Not sure exactly what the logistics are.

There's a class called a wilder, which is in some ways like a wild magic sorcerer. They can cast magic even when out of spell slots, but must pass a concentration check (and a fort save if they fail the concentration check). There's a table of the horrible things that can happen, including at the extreme losing your ability to cast at all, with less extreme variants and stuff.

It's kinda neat, but nothing incredible.

(Pulled roughly from here.)

[Tack]

So where's the insanity mechanic?

[Arx]

So where's the insanity mechanic?

This is apparently something that can happen to Asha'man, but the review doesn't expand on it.

[Tack]

Prestige classes: Again the name and a short description

Aes Sedai: If you want to be really good, take this class. Lots of spellcasting bonuses, these women could be really scary.

Asha'man: Basically male Aes Sedai, they have better casting abilites in combat but are a bit less versitile than Aes Sedai. Very, very little less. A powerful prestige class. The only problem is the MADNESS. Very dangerous.

Hehehehehehehehe

[Sergius]

Been having a bunch of fun with my Urquan campaign. Slowly incorporating more and more Atomic Robo mechanics into the game, mega stunts and inventions and such. Last couple of sessions, I decided break a bit from the "adapting storyline" of the video game and just went with a sorta dungeon crawl as the PCs arrived to Earth starbase and find it occupied by a band of Thraddash (lead by a "master pugilist" captain), rescuing the bridge crew and preventing a reactor overload.

Now we started fleshing out the terran faction, substituting for "Tesladyne", adding skills and aspects and so on. I let them pick any name, they went for the Señor Vorpal Kickasso alliance...

[TheBiggerFish]

Now we started fleshing out the terran faction, substituting for "Tesladyne", adding skills and aspects and so on. I let them pick any name, they went for the Señor Vorpal Kickasso alliance...

Ha!

Also, that game sounds really cool.

[Shub-Nullgurath]

What's everyone playing lately, then?

[Tack]

Have been slowly burning through Strange Aeons on Pathfinder

[Sergius]

I'm running my Fwiffo game sunday mornings, and some 5th Edition D&D sunday afternoons (Rise of the murderhobo dragons or whatever). But I took a break from D&D for the summer.

Thinking about running an Atomic Robo game (in setting) over a forum such as this or Hangouts or something, eventually.

[Mephisto]

I've been playing a bit of the Grim Dawn PC game and watching someone play Space Hulk Deathwing. This makes me want to start up a game of my own. I currently have a copy of Warhammer Fantasy and know where I can get Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader for cheap.

But social skills are something I do not have.

[Cruxador]

I may have mentioned this before, but I'm in a D&D 4e game set in Dominions 4, which is good fun although scheduling is becoming rougher as the holidays approach.

And although I'm not playing this, I'm working on a magical girl game, more or less directly inspired by Magical Burst, which I intend to have to 1.0 by the end of March. For anyone interested, a link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TmWonJIbPfqCWwOUKN7H2RrjBSkevnyq_eoGiGIWfy8