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Post by Rel Fexive on Jul 25, 2010 17:18:00 GMT
This is the game I'm in. The first session was character creation and introductions (though we were short one player at the time). We have my character Ashurstaberinde (Academy student travelling the universe in a TARDIS and trying his best to live up to the title of 'Time Lord'), Tim Alexander (a contemporary Human ancient history student from Cambridge who was convinced into travelling a bit further afield on his gap year) and Captain Alexander McQuinn (a Rigellian hominid biped pilot and space racer who needed to be rescued after his racer and the TARDIS collided with each other). Describing the first session to others as "first the Time Lord picked up a man in Greece..." caused a few snickers, and not of the tasty chocolate and nut variety. The main thing that characterised the first session was lots of Ashurstaberinde saying "...and what's that?" to every Earth-specific thing Tim said. A week, a year (in terms of how long one actually is, different world take different times to orbit their star after all), Romans, tea, Cambridge, television, Captain Kirk, and everything else. As expected, the name got shortened soon after someone remembered to actually ask what it was. One picked 'Ash' (the most likely option) and the other... 'Astro'. Both work I might do the inverse and call the others by their full names every time i.e. Timalexander and Alexandermcquinn. As to where they've landed (no one knows right now) and what's outside (other than it being very cold) we'll see next time. (EDITED to get the space racer's name right)
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Post by Rel Fexive on Jul 31, 2010 10:02:56 GMT
Another session.
This time, before we headed outside, another human stumbled into the control room from deep inside the TARDIS; Captain Second Class Johnpowell - sorry, John Powell. Yelling about not knowing where he is or how he got from the war he was fighting in to a strange broom cupboard while sleeping. He threw everything into confusion for a bit before essentially agreeing to tag along.
The TARDIS had landed too far from the nearest structure to walk to without freezing to death, so a (mostly) successful attempt was made to fly across the surface. It was fine till the 'landing' when it got buried in a snowdrift. Except it wasn't snow... it was some kind of crystalline substance, blown around by the freezing winds.
The huge featureless wall of the mystery structure went off in each direction without (apparent) end (because of the blizzard) so a direction was chosen. Then a body was found; frozen solid, human, in a blue jumpsuit. Every bone in his body pulverised. A fall from a great height? Or something else?
Gaining entry proved tricky, as the way in was not easily found. A "space flare" from the racer's spacesuit made the wall react in a strange way, but only by bringing the corpse into contact with the wall did it "fold open" like sped-up Lego disassembly. It revealed a strange crystal city ("like the Fortress of Solitude") with no inhabitants that could be seen. Numerous identical buildings (again without visible entrances) surround a tall central spire with no discernible top.
By broadcasting the corpse's bio-signature at the nearest building it "Lego-d" down into the ground to reveal six crystal blocks arranged radially around a central point. Each block was not unlike a funeral bier...
Tim volunteered (or rather was prompted) to stand inside when the building was closed back up again, and he promptly vanished from sight...
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Jul 31, 2010 15:10:56 GMT
I am curious as to why the Rigellian pilot is named after a British fashion designer...
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Post by Rel Fexive on Jul 31, 2010 17:12:01 GMT
Oh yeah... I think it's actually 'McQuinn' on his sheet, though, which I only realised this week.
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Post by Rel Fexive on Aug 1, 2010 9:46:35 GMT
I believe the best quote in the game so far is one from the first episode...
TIM: (CONFUSED) So how did you get here then? ASHURSTABERINDE: Oh, I just materialised, you know.
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Post by Rel Fexive on Aug 17, 2010 22:58:44 GMT
After a week without, we returned to our investigations of the crystal city, sans one passenger whose player couldn't make it. His character wandered off and was promptly forgotten by those more interested in gaining knowledge...
This week we encountered the population of the city, apparently either uploaded inhabitants of the planet or software intelligences, who, when they are not 'sleeping' and sharing their thoughts and ideas, 'incarnate' (my term) into crystal-based bodies that can copy living being almost perfectly. Some kind of small-scale matter manipulation no doubt, based on the crystals. The whole city works that way, reshaping the interior buildings as required, except for the central spire.
The 'ceased' person was an aide to the elders who should not have been outside, as that is forbidden by the elders. So too is speaking about 'the dark times' before the establishment of their Home, as it turns out. Also, we were only the second group of visitors ever to arrive at Home in a thousand years... and the others only arrived a handful of days before.
No one seemed able to explain the circumstance of the death so we pushed to see the elders, as a) they would be most likely to know, and b) we could learn all kinds of other things from them!
In the spire the spokesentity of the aides told us the dead person (Carlo - everyone's name seems to begin with C so far) had been 'sent to the elders' to help with the other visitors - their ship was damaged and needed repairing.
When we asked, we got to visit the elders themselves, though we only spoke to an empty room with no 'incarnated' people in it, just a Mysterious Voice. They added a little more detail but refused to let us even see the other visitors.
At which point (after some bickering asides regarding time travel and paradoxes) the elders decided to distract us by dropping the 'missing' passenger down through the ceiling from the upper floor right in front of us...
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Post by Rel Fexive on Aug 21, 2010 12:58:36 GMT
This week we discovered that Powell had been taken off by the Visitors (and met an ex-Elder isolated from the other Crystal People) so they could ask (okay, threaten) him to see about getting their ship fixed. They had another vessel on the roof and the travellers could fly that to the crashed ship. The leader of the Visitors (it seemed likely he was) was called Nilsen and he just seemed to be a regular human-like hominid biped. Most importantly, the ex-Elder revealed that the Visitors were in control of the crystal city and it's inhabitants!
Powell then dropped through the ceiling to rejoin the others, armed with a little gadget that could open and shape the crystalline walls of Home.
A brief discussion followed where everyone compared notes (including a big tangent about vegetables and what it means to grow them - as Powell had not heard of such a thing before - all prompted by a "carrot and stick" analogy and the inevitable "what's a carrot?" question) and then agreed that they didn't really have much choice regarding whether they help repair the ship not.
(Ashurstaberinde scanned the 'widget' with his Slate and was able to not only download all the 'patterns' used to shape the crystal matter but learned how to extrapolate his own 'patterns'...)
It was also revealed that Powell is apparently a very religious man, though details of his faith are scant - beyond it involving someone called 'Gideon'. Ashurstaberinde, it seems, didn't enjoy his Comparative Theology lessons and wasn't terribly interested - though he wasn't impolite about it.
The flight in the ship (which had seats for five occupants) was very boring, entirely because McQuinn's player wasn't present so no exciting flying action occurred. Instead the time was spent trying to hack into the ship's computer records (and failing badly) and working the scanners to determine the location of the crashed ship (and succeeding enough to find it but badly enough to realise they were going the wrong way).
The ship turned out to be buried beneath the 'snow' and the crystal widget dug a nice safe route down to it under Ashurstaberinde's control. The ship seemed more advanced than the other and had seating for six crew...one of whom was still in the pilot's seat, having decayed over a long time to just a skeleton wearing the tattered remains of a pilot suit. Similar scraps of uniforms were found elsewhere in the cabin.
Ashurstaberinde (with hefty Story Point help) was able to access the ancient (but damaged; a 'Success' result) computer and determine that it crashed a thousand years before... right about the time that the crystal Home was founded/built, at the end of the 'Dark Times'. And it's crew included a man called Nilsen... who only arrived a year ago.
Tangled timelines? Or deep-sleep delay?
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Post by Rel Fexive on Aug 30, 2010 12:32:17 GMT
Things get more complicated on the frozen planet. How has the ship avoided being crushed over the last thousand years? And how does that crash relate to the 'Dark Times'? More importantly, why does the interior seem to be 'younger' than the exterior?
A test to try and reveal the presence of a stasis field (using Tim as a guinea pig once again) found something quite different - the ship drained some of his 'life force' while he was locked inside it and gave itself some small repairs in the process.
Even worse, the core of the ship is some kind of TIME TRAVEL ENGINE. Needless to say, the Time Lord is disturbed by this. Mostly by the fact that repairing it would mean sacrificing the function of his own timeship.
Flying back to the crystal city, they are confronted by another of the Visitors, Renton (the engineer) - who seems oddly lacking the sort of ship-repairing know-how you'd expect an engineer to have. When given some vague responses regarding the repairability of their ship, the Visitor offered more vague threats, leaving Ashurstaberinde with decisions to make regarding how much he wants to risk permanent 'damage' to his TT Capsule...
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Post by chickenpaddy on Sept 2, 2010 4:26:41 GMT
Wow, sounds like an interesting mystery adventure. Looks like fun!
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Post by Rel Fexive on Sept 4, 2010 12:15:16 GMT
The final session!
With a need to find out what the Dark Times were and how it relates to the Visitors, the travellers release The Other Elder that Powell met. The Elder offered to show just one of them what happened in the Dark Times and McQuinn stepped forward. The Elder reveals in a sort of "video clip" that 1000 years ago the Visitor's ship started the whole thing, creating the people and the Crystal City they later built after it crashed upon arriving over the planet.
Then, with a nifty bit of work from all involved and Ashurstaberinde and his Slate in particular, they restored his connection to the rest of his people... and the city immediately began to fall apart! Crumbling and collapsing, de-lego-ing into the ground. Naturally, the travellers decide it's time to depart at speed!
Confronted by the Visitors outside the walls of the city, truths are revealed; they were hired to create new worlds and thought they'd try their hand at something totally artificial. But the crash changed things a bit; they used the time tech in their ship to jump the shuttle forward in time, their usual practice for leaping past all that tedious waiting around for their terraforming to finish. But now their ship is damaged and they can't get home in the shuttle, and would be centuries out of time even if they could.
A plan to restore their ship is devised - steal the "damaged" parts from the ship in its own past! Some very fine TARDIS control (and a bunch of Story Points) later and they arrive at some point in the past between the crash and the Visitors reappearing in their shuttle. The city is partly constructed at this point in time. The Visitors go into their ship and retrieve the parts they need to fix/replace in the future/present.
Back where they started time-wise the ship is restored. But... things are different. Clark, the Visitor geneticist, did something to the ship while they were in the past, making it alive and so being responsible for it absorbing Tim's life energy. Worse, "disabling" the ship in the past prevented the crystal people ever rising above the simplest level, since it was ultimately directing their development, resulting in a dangerous paradox.
And then Powell gets his payment - and is told what happened to him. Or at least a part of it... as he is told that the Visitors were responsible for him being in the TARDIS and his memory loss, just before they send him back to that same point in time, bereft of his memories once more and trapped in a time loop, repeating his actions of previous in a time splinter caused by the paradox, as the events he is repeating never now happened...
PLAYER NOTES: Kinda twisty and (as revealed by the GM) some aspects changed as the sessions went on because we kept doing unexpected things! This is normal, of course. The "fix it now by breaking it in the past" idea was mine and quite funny I thought, and naturally backfired on us terribly. And now it looks like the next adventure, whenever that happens, may involve unravelling the paradoxical time loop splinter to free Powell and deal with whatever the repercussions of that might be.
All inspired by the 2009 film Whiteout, apparently.
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