PDQ# SciFi Game Actual Play


TL;DR: We played PDQ# in a space opera setting and the first session rocked!


The Cast:



Two of our group were unable to make the first session, so there are two “grayfaced” NPCs that they are free to claim. Since this was a demo game, I used pregens posted here.


The genus of this scenario, called “Stranded and Hunted” was based on a miserable game some of us played at a Con that ranks as one of the worst role-playing session any of us had been involved in in quite some time. Of the current group, Zac, Brian, and I played in the first scenario, but everyone had heard some of the tales we spin of this disaster game.


My design goal was to make the situation in the game more fair, and more interesting than the submarine drama we were forced to play in the Con game. As such, only the very setup of the game was a reasonable facsimile of the events of the original game (and, even then, only vaguely).


None of us had actually played a PDQ or PDQ# game before and I wanted to put it through its paces and get people used to it before we began a longer S7S or Truth and Justice game. As I will attempt to point out as I go, the game played very fast and things went very swimmingly. We only started getting into the setting coolness and the evolving plot, but much fun was had.


We started the game by distributing the style dice for the start. Vince, the host of the game, had also used his graphic design chops to print us booklets of the rules and the sheets I had posted up. This netted him some advantage in style dice early, but Zac also brought homemade cupcakes and Brian offered to buy my dinner (in return for carpooling with me, but still). This started us out with a good deal of style dice in play.


I started the game by going over the map of the Draco star system, the current position of the crew's ship and explained they were on the final leg of a long journey they had undergone with a very hush-hush cargo that the ship was being paid well to transport. The Draco system was owned by a Corporate entity, the Morgan Corporation, who was trying to keep it from erupting into conflict, as it serves as a kind of neutral zone between the “Core Worlds” close to Terra and the “Alliance of Free Worlds”, which is another group of systems created during the Diaspora centuries before. The Core and the Alliance had a war a decade back or so and some of the PCs have some background in the War.


The Morgan Corporation bought the system from the Core Worlds because the fifth world from the star has ruins of the only non-Terran sentients ever found. The planet has some lifeforms on it, but the sentients of the planet appear to have died off five thousands years ago. Scientists who are based on a station in orbit around the world (quarantined to minimize taint of the site by unapproved explorers) study the ruins and the remaining lifeforms to discover how this iron-age culture lived. There were apparently over 30 species of sentient creatures who lived, fought, died, won, and lost in their day. Scientists all over known space await whatever data can be mined from the world and the Morgan Corporation stands to make a killing.


Speaking of killing, the Alliance and the Core are getting ready to go hot in the system because of some pirate attacks that each side is claiming are deniable asset attacks from the other side. The pirates use high-end tech purchased from Neutral world vendors. The pirates so far have done nothing to expose their backers,but everyone assume sit is their enemy. Morgan has a bounty out for the pirates and has been using its influence to try and calm them waters, but things are still almost at flash point. Bad time for tourists.


The hush-hush cargo being carried is being carried to Morgan Station, the research station over Draco V. One more leg of the run and it is cash-out time. The game starts with the group docked at Austin Station, the Alliance station in orbit around the gate-point controlled by the Alliance in the system. Each gate point to Hyperspace has a gravitic effect on the local area around it, and stations are erected to stabilize the gates and to service space traffic using hyperspace.


A note on hyperspace – it is scary at times. Odd, urban legend style things have been known to happen to those who travel hyperspace without due care or good luck. Hyperspace is heavily respected for that reason. One of the effects hyperspace has is that it can create gravity ghosts of things on the other side of the veil. One of the oddities of hyperspace is evident in the Draco system – the Styx Belt. The Styx Belt is a trail of “ghost asteroids” that are simply gravitic copies of actual matter from the Corbin Material Belt on the outskirts of the Draco system. The Styx Belt is visible to the naked eye as a string of softly blue glowing asteroid objects that are slowly falling into the path of the planets as they drift into the sun. While they do not represent an impact hazard, they do have a gravity buffeting effect if traversed.


So far, so good. Lots of exposition to putt the group to sleep, so I brush through it and take questions. I then go over the ship and the status board – a sheet that lists the status of various ship systems that I intend to use to monitor the exposure of the ship to scans as well as show the players the repair status of the ship as well. I set it up as it is in dock and we get started.


Zac and Kevin decide that their characters would be fast friends, since Chance is very comfortable with machines and Homeboy is a robot. The two start a scene where Chance is Trying to get Homeboy to let him take him apart in places. Kevin drops a style die to create an NPC robot named Bob who is in a state of disrepair in the Engineering Bay. Kevin later tells me he did this early to get player's thinking in terms of using Style Dice to make assertions (thanks, Kevin). Homeboy tells Chance he will consider allowing it if Chance can prove himself by fixing Bob. Chance insists he needs to take Homeboy's casing apart to learn what Bob's issue is. The stalemate is broken when the two decide to break into the cargo section hiding the hush-hush cargo.


Luna is in sickbay and is calling around on the station to arrange a black market meet-up to get some supplies that “fell off a grav-truck” so to speak. Brian establishes that the ship's budget makes such purchases sadly necessary. She taps the ship's security guard to go with her.


Ang is in charge of the Bridge, since the Senior crew is off on the Station having a big dinner with some Morgan Corp muckity-mucks. Bored, he leaves the Comm officer in charge and goes off to the station to privately check his secret mail account for more conspiracy theorist news items and such. He gets logged in right as someone taps him on the shoulder. Spinning in paranoid fear, he finds himself confronted with a creepy but mild-mannered guy.


The guy introduces himself as the station's coroner and asks if Ang could arrange to sell him passage off-station on his ship. Ang asks the man how he knows he is a crewman on the ship and the man replies simply that Ang is wearing a jumpsuit with the ship's name on the back. (Vince grooves on this, since is establishes Ang as a guy who sees all of the angles except sometime the painfully obvious ones.) Ang starts to scrape the guy off and suggest he talk to the Captain instead when I hold out a style die token and say “I think THEY are after me!” (This plays immediately off of Ang's conspiracy theorist foible. Vince takes the style die and Ang perks up.)


The coroner explains that the morgue has been the subject of some mysterious doings of late and that he feels unsafe. Specifically, people killed in violent crimes or sudden accidents have been turning up with strange coins in their mouths and then the bodies disappear. The coroner, Marion Cordo, says he thinks it is some kind of Organized Crime thing and that he wants out. He is willing to pay an extra fee to Ang for helping making it happen quietly.


Ang questions him for a bit and suggests that they man meet him later to check with the Captain. He ten follows up with one of the victim's next-of-kin. One of the strange aspects of the mystery, Ang finds out through a net search is that all of the stations in the system have had the same issue and that a fairly good deal of the people who have died have been Bakers by trade. He goes to a local bakery to visit the widow of one of the missing bodies. The woman talks with him for some time and reveals that the man was an avid reader of a conspiracy tabloid that Ang write a column for. She reveals that she has mixed emotions about the loss of her husband's body – she is happy that the police cannot use the body to bolster their theory that she was the killer, but upset that she cannot use the body to prove herself innocent and catch the real killers. A rattled Ang leaves the bakery.


Luna and the Muscle manage their deal with some comedic effects. They get a great deal of medical equipment and manage to see the seniors in a fancy bistro having a huge dinner with the Morgan Corp big-wigs. Luna gets a call from Ang who wants to discuss the coroner and his request. Luna wants to get Ang to wait on saying yes, but she knows the Captain likes money...


Luna get back to the ship to find Cordo waiting on a bench in the dock area outside the ship access way. He is in no hurry and is reading a tech manual calmly. She offers him some tea and he accepts and lets her know he has no objections to staying outside, in public view, while he awaits the Captain. His bags are already packed and with him.


Chance and Homeboy break into Cargo Module 4, and find a strange array of crates filled with metal scrap that are setup in such a pattern to throw off deep scanning. Inside the boxes they find three very odd crates that have reactive surfaces and who speak in very grim and threatening machine code. One of the boxes tells Homeboy that he will have to deploy fatal countermeasures against Chance if the human does not leave or give the proper stand-down code. The two restore the array and fix the lock they opened so it will not be noticed.


Finally, the Captain and the other Senior crew get back from dinner and have two passengers in tow. One is a Morgan Corp Arms Division Marketing executive named Nicco Reese, the other is the sexy and smart Vana LaRoix, a reporter for Alliance News Service who has come to cover the hostilities in the Draco system. She talks to anyone who will stand still long enough, trying to get a common man's view of the issue. As outsiders, the crew could care less in most cases.


The Captain rubber stamps the passenger list and is more than happy to take on Cordo as well. He orders Chance to switch Bay 4 out with Bay 9 (later, he will not recall he did this, but more on that later.) He then has chance load additional cargo for Morgan Station and has Homeboy take Nicco's special bags on board. Nicco has a briefcase that is very similar to the boxes in the hold and Homeboy watches the sequence Nicco uses when he opens the case to fetch some items.


The Captain also has some take-out meals from the bistro intended for the Juniors, but the Captain tells Homeboy to place them in storage to be served to the seniors later (this turn out to be a life-saver later). Kevin was very careful to play out how Homeboy could care less about this dirty dealing, getting a style die for being emotionally unaware.


Homeboy gets all passengers settled and uses the time to scan then and learn their voices in case he has to mimic them later (sneaky!) Chance gets to work on fixing Bob.


Ang helps set a course for the Navigator and is surprised to learn that the Captain intends to change course once he gets to the “Media Cloud” outside the system and can switch to silent running and get well and truly lost. The senior crew do not seem to like the idea, but the Captain says he will explain at an officer's meeting later.


The crew has supper with the passengers and get to know them a bit. Cordo shows the group one of the coins that the corpses had in its mouth. Homeboy scans it and finds it is electrum and seems to be a compressed nano-tech utility fog of alien design whose power source dies out five thousand years ago. He marks the coin and takes a sample of it for later.


During the cruise to the outer system, Homeboy is told by the ship's computer that the food processors are rerouting a good deal of biomass into the ship's sewage and water reclamation systems and mixing it with cleaning chemicals and acids there. The access to request this was provided by Homeboy, according to logs. Chance and Homeboy get to work on researching the issue and learn the matter is being exported to the Cargo Bay 9. When they approach the Captain regarding the issue, he gives a response on how to handle it that seems to indicate that he has forgotten he ordered the switching of the cargo modules. Chance lets it slip, as he things it is either a dodge or proof that Captain is losing it.


Homeboy accesses Cargo Bay 9 from outside the ship and finds a cube of acidic biogel trying to get into the cargo boxes. Homeboy stay outside of its reach and tries to get the cargo boxes out of tis reach, but it seems to be able to cling to any surface. Homeboy tries a few things and comes back to report when it becomes apparent the gel cube is stymied in trying ot get to the boxes.


Ang monitors the bugs he has on the ship's privacy cutout on internal senors and overhears the Seniors have their meeting a few hours later. While doing this, he feels a compulsion not to check on the sensors, but is able to overcome it. He thinks this may be related to nanotech control chips implanted in him. He continues to listen in.


The Captain has been offered a ton of money for diverting to a new course and delivering the cargo to somewhere else. It is apparently enough money that he is willing to space the passengers if they raise a fuss (especially the Morgan Corp exec he thinks is onboard to stop such a plan). The seniors spend the meeting finishing the remaining meals from the bistro.


Hours later, just as the ship gets close to the outer belt of the Media Cloud (like the Kuiper Belt, only more packed with mattery goodness), a loud clang rings out and an EMP pulse slams through the ship. This does many things – it shuts down the ship's core systems for quite some time, it signals a boarding action by pirates, it drops Homeboy for a few moments, snaps Bob back to the living, and it touches off the nano-poison in the bistro meals, killing the senior crew instantly and messily.


Chance and Homeboy are trying to do something to help the Engineer when a blue ring begins to softly glow on the side of the hull of the Engineering section and six pirates in black vac-suits simply drop through the hull section inside the ring as if it were liquid. The two of them decide to fight it out.


This was the first fight scene with a 6-man mook squad versus two PCs. It was quick and brutal. The PCs mopped the floor with the mooks with only some minor damage done to them. Once the pirates are down, they get the Engineer to Medbay, where Luna begins to look him over. Change and Homeboy get back to work getting the ship back up and running.


In the meantime, the comm officer calls to let everyone know that pirates are also storming the Bridge. Ang and Luna open an access panel in the lift system and climb up to the bridge level (almost expending a style die to create the access-way, but it seemed to be something that should be there, so no charge). The two of them join the Security Bruiser in fighting an 8 man mook squad and manage to seriously defeat them. Luna begins to try and see to the Bruiser's wounds, but he hands her the head of one of the mooks (that he tore off) and takes off to hop in the ships mecha to take the fight back to the enemy. Luna just looks down at the head and wonders (winning a style die for her pacifism causing her to have to take a moment). Luna then begins triaging the wounded and finds that only one of the pirates is still alive. She starts to stabilize him and is joined in the task of policing and moving the bodies by Cordo, who is used to dead bodies.


The pirate who is still grasping for life has some sort of fungus infection on his wounds, so Luna places him in a sealed, quarantined medical bed. The pirate is being invaded by the fungus, which is restructuring his brain mass. He begins to mumble in Cockney. Luna does what she can for him. The fungus seems to be taking him over, but he remains alive even when it invades his heart and brain.


While Luna is working with him, Cordo and she get a call on the intercom that Nicco has a gun and is trying to keep people form getting to the Cargo Bays. Luna gets the position and they head in that direction. Homeboy and Chance come from the other side of the hallway. Chance spots that the floor of the area is really clean in a rectangular section and shouts a arming to the rest of the crew. Nicco is warned too late as he is enveloped by the acidic gel cube and his flesh burns away into hyperspace leaving only his gun and his skeleton behind. Everyone opens up on the gel cube and it begins to spit acid.


Another fight breaks out and this time it is a full-fledged conflict. It goes well for the players because Luna had prepped a base serum to be used against the gel after Homeboy reconned it earlier. The gel cube is killed and the nanotech in it is collected and refocused by a device Chance created for this purpose. The nanotech pulls itself into four coins like the ones Cordo had. Homeboy checks then and sees that none of them bears the mark he put on Cordo's coin. These coins are also powered up. Luna has them sealed up and begins to take the back to the medbay. The bodies of the dead are now all gone.


Ang uses his bugs to replay what happened and the crew watches the corpses lift up eerily and fade into hyperspace. He then plays back the Captain's meeting with the seniors.


Jarl, the Security Bruiser, calls in to report that he has disabled an assault shuttle and two mechs and is engaged with two more in the media cloud. He is apparently very badly injured.


At this point, we were at the limit of the session time and decided to wrap and play a few hands of Monty Python flux to cool down. Lots of good table chatter and the players seemed to be very psyched about the game and where it was going. So was I.


The system played fast, and I cannot wait for a more challenging conflict to come up for them next session. I do need to get Style dice flowing fast. There was a good deal of player gifting and I tried to echo that when possible, but we never seemed to be running too low. I do think I should have gotten stuff from the box to the bowl faster.


I also didn't track training points, forgetting to do so. I will likely just give everyone 1 LP each for the first session to compensate and track it more carefully next session.


Flashy challenges were used several time to gain some small advantages by both PC and NPC. One of the best was a moment where something was trying to bully through hallway and past someone standing there. In order to get a style die, I had that something use a flashy challenge for handle the bully-through. Net result, the something got past the person, and slammed them into the hull to the tune of one injury rank while picking up a style die used later in the Gel Cube fight.


Things to come next session [spoilers, if you are a player, but not huge ones]:



[Session Two]


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