Faith Arch II, Adventure 1 'Whispers in the Darkness'

6 months have passed since the last adventure. The 27h a day news cycles have buried all the information about the previous events (Including the fact that the head of special research for the Nations Solution Megacorp was a Skinchanger, a shape shifting Ravager) so deep in the Net that it'll probably never be seen again.

Bit T made some profits and changed business model. He now resides in Tian Tang, and his organisation, the Cibolas deals in art and precious artefacts. He's still small enough that the Tongs let him be.

And here the story begins. Some of the Tong families approach Big T. Someone is preying on ships on approach to Tian Tang. Lightening raids, in and out. Total destruction, total death. Nothing is stolen.

A cursory look shows that every megacorp and Tong family is being hit at the same time. No one seems to be suspect.

The Tongs reach out to Big T, as an independent adjudicator, who then calls the players.

Big T put out some feelers, who were answered by Ka, a minor Megacorp data analyst. He says he's spent months crunching the numbers of attacked ships, and has a suspect.

The players meet with Ka in a small restaurant. Ka is a nervous wreck. He gives the players a data cube, in exchange for money, and says that the cube only has half the data, for security......

.....as a small, thrown, poison covered blade ends his pathetic life.

The players give chase to the assassin, who twists and turns, missing shots and obstacles.

Before it disappears out of an airlock, it turns around. Its a Whisperer, an Iz'kal assassin (think ninja) who simply says: 'Leave it or die.'

Scavengers of the Labyrinth, 1st Arch, Resources.

1- WELCOME TO FAITH

Places:

The Bazaar: Iz’kal resupply station D-224-Blue, decommissioned, bought by a commercial consortium. Placed in a decent sized chamber of the Labyrinth, in a crossroads of wormholes. A market for any who have the credits.

  T’konn VI: Distant planet, about 1 week away from The Bazaar. Hostile fauna (Bettleboars) will attack players. Faint power reading turns out to be a Korian power cell. (Pretty good seed if there are any Raag or Iz’kal players)

 Labyrinth: Space-like events, pirates, mines, unmapped wormholes

People:

Tinn Wu Henn (‘Big T’): Amoral fixer, contracts players to scout T’konn VI. Will usually work out of The Bazaar. Fat, friendly Corvo, that will stab you in the back at the first sign of trouble.

2 – THE WRECK

(using the Faith original intro adventure). Big T hires players to track down the Purple Thunderous, to recover some expensive, high-grade AI chips. Handles over last known location of ship.

Places:

The Purple Thunderous, a Nation Solutions-hire freighter.

The Bazaar

Labyrinth: Space-like events, pirates, mines, unmapped wormholes

People:

Big T

Half dead human on the wreck (Stephen Walters)

Ravagers on board. Ship was boarded by a Ravager scout ship.

3 – A SIMPLE DELIVERY

Players get tracked down to The Bazaar by Nation’s solutions Research Division. They are allowed to keep any salvage if they deliver cargo. Cargo is 3 crates, all 3 are Gravity Bombs, able to destroy everything in 100 meter diameter (Players will not know this, boxes detonate on timer, location beacons, or if hacked, whatever is better).

Places:

Sigma Gamma Prime – Pirate hideout, where the crates need to be picked up

Mronna Station – Delivery destination of the first box (Box detonates before players are out of the system, they need to see the station breaking apart, within hours, players’ face will be on the news feeds as the perpetrators)

The Bazaar

Labyrinth: Space-like events, pirates, mines, unmapped wormholes

Assorted ships, if needed.

People:

Big T

Gu Wei, Head of Research, Nation’s Solutions.

Pirates, assorted races: Chrome, Blade, Spike, etc.

Mronna Station crew (nice and welcoming, they will all die)

4 – END OF THE LINE

Players are now targets. Nations Solution analysts keep coming on the feeds, blaming players for everything (odd that a Corp would be that interested in a civilian station…). Players go to Umbra Station, find info broker. Turns out NS has been trying to reach people involved in Ravager encounters, and then they disappear. Gu finally tracks players, and is revealed to be Ravager Skinchanger (in my case he was just monologuing his success and boasted to the players). When dead, some of his security detail were Coalition Intelligence.

Places:

Umbra Station, Tartarus sector: abandoned colony ship in the middle of a radioactive nebula, worse of the worse, cutthroats and killers.

The Bazaar

Labyrinth: Space-like events, pirates, mines, unmapped wormholes

Assorted ships, if needed.

The Innovative Darkness, a Nation’s Solution cruiser

People:

Big T

Gu Wei, Head of Research, Nation’s Solutions, secretly a Ravager.

Pirates, assorted races.

Umbra Station (makeshift, dirty, scary)

Coalition Intelligence operatives 

Scavengers of the Labyrinth, 1st Arch

So the first Arch is done! If anything, I aimed too low, and made it too simple, but everyone had fun and now understand the system. So the breakdown:

1 - Welcome to Faith: A simple adventure, players were hired to scout a distant planet, simply get some scans. A faint energy reading takes them to a Korian power cell

2 - The Wreck: The original Faith introductory adventure. Where everything started, really. Players fought off the Ravagers, an unlikely high card draw made my Ironskin dead in 1 turn. Players got samples of Ravagers (2 of them have biological backgrounds), an old cargo shuttle, as well as a half dead human, before ship self-destructed. One of the players sent an anonymous message to Nations Solution (Corp that owned the wreck) stating what had happened.

3 - A Simple Delivery: Players got tracked down by the NS Research division, and were forced to hand out the bio samples. As a trade-off, Gu Wei, the Head of Research, a suave and charming Corvo, said they could keep the cargo shuttle if they delivered some cargo. During the pickup of said cargo, players narrowly avoided a mine field.... Whereupon they hacked a few of the mines and captured them. Upon delivery of the first package, the reviving station was ripped apart by a powerful gravity bomb. Players narrowly escaped the shockwave, and were now being hunted as criminals!

4 - End of the Line: A returning character led the players to Umbra Station, in the Tartarus sector. End of the line, a hive of thieves and cutthroats. An information broker told them about many odd happenings involving NS and their interest in Ravagers/civilians involved with them. After a brief chase, the players were captured by Gu Wei, who turns out to be a Ravager Skinchanger (Ravager bred to look exactly like any other race). After a fierce combat, some of the NS security forces were revealed to be Coalition Intelligence, who then helped with the cleanup, and cleared the players' names in exchange for their silence. They were investigating NS until that point, but had no proof.

In the end, back at their ship and their amazing shower room (VERY long story) the players had a message waiting. No sender, and the origin code purposefully corrupted beyond recovery. Two short sentences.

'YOU WERE TOO LATE. WE ARE EVERYWHERE'

I have many resources/NPC's/ideas. If you wish to run any of these, please let me know!

The Ravagers

Imagine if you will, a race as interconnected as the cells of your body. Trillions of beings, their shapes as different as you could imagine in your wildest, feverish dreams, all striving for one purpose. Millions can (and will) sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

What said purpose or greater good are, we can only guess at.

The Ravagers came out of nowhere a few decades ago, and almost at a whim, destroyed two planets without much hassle.

No. Not destroyed. Consumed. Ate.

These cosmic locusts descended upon Izuan Tai and Persaius and reduced all organic material to goo. And then fed this goo to their ships in orbit.

The Corvo and Iz'kal navies managed to get some revenge on these dead worlds, and that, was assumed, was that. The Ravagers retreated into the depths of the Labyrinth, usually reduced to minor skirmishes or strategic attacks.

The truth, however....

The Ravagers are evolving. They are probing the defences of Known Space. Their Harvesters are absorbing victims and learning about them. Their Ironskins are eating the Known Races' metals and instinctively understanding their alloys, their weaknesses.

Soon, the Queens will know much more about Known Space than they did. Information is ammunition, they say. Soon, they will make a move.

And may The Five Gods help us when they do, because there will be no one left.

BERRY IS ALIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!!

So the fantastic folk at Burning Games liked (and helped, 'cos v1.0 was atrociously bad) with my Berry/Robot rules, and THEY ARE NOW ACCEPTED HOUSE RULES, YAY!

ROBOT RULES v 2.0

• Generalist robots have basic (ROOT) abilities. They are a little good at everything but excel at nothing. ATHLETICS, SURVIVAL, INITIATIVE are at 3, all others at 1.

• At level one, you take the ALPHA software package, giving you the ability to raise 3 Skills of your choice to 4. If you have another ALPHA package, and enough time to reprogram the core chip, you can choose to drop any of these three 4-level Skills down to their original level, and raise as many others up to 4 (Effectively changing the speciality of the robot). BETA packages (at higher levels) allow for higher upgrades (5,4,4), and GAMMA higher still (5,5,4).

• A regular robotic frame has the following ATTRIBUTES: AGI 2, CON 2, DEX 1, FAITH 1, LINK 2, MIND 1. (Faith is capped at 1) Frames (i.e. ATTR numbers) can be upgraded by buying a higher-grade one, and downloading the robots’ current core chip to the new one. This will take at least 24 standard hours and requires a skilled technician or engineer.

• Unless otherwise stated, all robots have ARMOUR 1

• They are intelligent, sentient beings, and able to believe in a higher power (Hence Faith)

• The cannot have Bio Upgrades

• They can have LINK + ½ (rounded up) TECH upgrades

What do you think? Let me know on Twitter @Atomic_RPG

'Berry, meet everyone. Everyone, meet Berry.'

You need robots. Otherwise you'd not have sci fi.

If some player can't make my game, I came up with this guy. Meet Berry! What do you think of his stats?

Scavengers of the Labyrinth - What the concept is

SCAVENGERS OF THE LABYRINTH

Out of a population of hundreds of billions, to think that all Iz’kal would be happy to conform to the crushing control of The State, or that all Corvo would be happy to live and die by the amount of credits in their pocket, would be totally unreasonable.

Even going beyond emigration to another area of space, quite a few of these end up as a subclass of undesirables, eking a meager living in the Labyrinth. Some become little more than wonderers, doing odd jobs around Known Space. Some become pirates, preying on those weaker than themselves, or using superior numbers to bring down larger prey.

And some take advantage of the structure of the Labyrinth, and become smugglers.

The Labyrinth has been liked to the inside of a sponge, with an infinite number of chambers and tunnels, connecting most known star systems. Due to the difficulties in communication and navigation, the main volumes are well signaled, with marker buoys, refueling stations, even whole inhabited star systems in some of the larger chambers. Any wormhole terminus opening onto Normal Space in a sensitive system is further patrolled, both by capital ships and customs stations. The bottom line is, if you want to move things discretely in and out of important systems, you’re going to have a really tough time.

Enter the smuggler.

Beyond the large, well known and well-mapped passages, there are an infinite number of other ones. Smaller. Less stable. Like going down a rabbit hole.

They say the probability of survival when navigating an unknown Labyrinth passage is about 45%. Some pop up in systems so distant that there is no reference in Normal Space to any known stars. Some open onto deep space, with no stars or planets or nebulas, just darkness.

And some curl up and rejoin the Labyrinth, linking up with better-known, bigger passages or volumes. And perhaps, sometimes, they do this bypassing a heavily patrolled area. Now you have a very dangerous way to go from A to B, without going through the middle point C, where you’d find a couple of very stern Iz’kal corvettes, with virtually no tolerance towards customs cheats.

A whole subculture was born this way. Like ants walking beneath giants’ feet, a whole class of sentients emerged, dealing, moving and dying, going through the so called back alleys of the Labyrinth. There is money to be made, oh yes. There’s always going to be cargo to be moved and people to be transported beyond the reach of the governments.

And if that’s not your pleasure, well... There’s systems and passages to scout, maybe an individual or two to kill, or some old dead ship to scavenge... 

WHY PLAY A SMUGGLER

The ‘smuggler’ is very much a Role Play decision and not an actual Profession, as its ramifications would be too vast. Instead, think that whatever your profession, being a smuggler will allow you to perform it in a flexible and infinitely exciting environment. For example, although you can be an ex-Special Ops military operative, maybe you’ve been discharged, or you grew disenchanted with it, and are now a mercenary, with interests beyond the martial, and travel the Labyrinth as hired muscle. Or maybe you’re a scientist, or a diplomat. You can be the medic, but you’ll also come across different planets and different living things on a weekly basis, where your science knowledge will be invaluable. Being someone highly charismatic or good at subterfuge would be fantastic in most situations, but it would be almost a requirement in a smuggler setting.

The inspiration is already out there. Maybe you’re scouting some new volumes and come across a dead wreck. Will you try and investigate it, not knowing what lies inside? (like in the Faith introductory adventure). Or maybe you’re a plucky crew, fighting a losing battle against the ruling governments, and spend your time doing business in the shadows, doing things you’re not proud of, and maybe some that you are. Anything, just to get enough credits to carry on (like in the iconic series Firefly). Or maybe you’re a simple, legitimate trader, that seems to continuously run into situations well beyond your control, and have to use skill and courage to get out of them alive and with all your limbs still attached.

The Labyrinth is infinite. There’s, quite literally, everything out there.

So take your hand of cards, and manage your luck. The glory and the credits are out there.

All you need is Faith.