Starship Crash - the horrible fate of the Silver Princess

The characters boarded the passenger ship “Silver Princess” after a few drinks at the space port outdoor cantina. After having mixed it up with murderous outback poachers, space port gangsters and thugs, and a Darkside Marauder, the group was looking forward to a short 10-hour trip to the remote planet of Dantooine, where their two Jedi comrades had already left for a few days prior. The party had a spacious passenger lounge to themselves (there were several such lounges on the ship), and after liftoff they settled in with their datapads to connect to the media center to pass the time.


Several hours into the journey warning alerts sounded, and the ship’s captain’s intercom voice commanded all passengers to strap into the landing seats near the center of the room until further notice. Soon, the vessel rocked from an explosion within the ship, and the captain announced that the escape pod bay had been destroyed by a mysterious blast. There would be no escape from whatever was going on.


Within moments more explosions were felt. The combat veterans of the group knew that ships were assaulting the Silver Princess, and panic set in when the blast doors to the room dropped with a smash. Kruk the Feeorin veteran of the Mandalorian War unstrapped from his seat in an attempt to reach the weapons locker, but found himself flailing around the room, bouncing off the walls, as the ship took a brutal shellacking from the attackers. Beaten and bruised and lucky to not have broken any bones, Kruk got back to his seat.


Soon the attacks stopped. Were they safe? Not by a longshot; the characters hearts sank as they realized the beaten ship was awkwardly entering a planetary atmosphere at frighteningly higher speeds than was normal. With various alarms still sounding, they found themselves pushed back into their seats by the momentum of the dive, and started feeling the air grow thin and hot. The life support systems were failing. They knew there was no way to survive this, as the lack of air and the heat mercifully eased them into unconsciousness. When the Silver Princess hit planet side, there would be no fear and pain.


In the hilly grassland of Dantooine below, the young Jedis Rokran and Lucia were on patrol in a speeder piloted by Cisco Patelli, a teenage son of settlers who did odd jobs for the Jedi Enclave. As they took a break and Cisco heated up a hearty Ibez stew with his camping gear, both Jedi sensed great coming of mass death from nearby. Looking skyward, they saw a flash and heard a boom, and realized a large starship was breaking through the afternoon clouds on a crash course for the planet. Blazing down at an angle, the crippled ship disappeared behind nearby hills, and with a sickening bang and shaking of the earth, a huge fireball shot up, and a huge wall of fire appeared beyond the hills, marking the skidding of the flaming wreck across more than a mile of landscape.


Rushing to the speeder, young Cisco fired it up as the Jedi leaped aboard, and they shot off for the area beyond the hills. As they rounded the gentle slopes of the foothills, they came around the flaming blast area and saw the long and wide trench created by the crash, and beyond that the main portions of the middle and forward sections of the craft lay in a huge heap of infernal wreckage, flames wisping up towards the sky. They knew there could be no survivors…

Mutant Future Campaign done and done

Really, last night I was finally able to admit to my players that we have really been doing Metamorphosis Alpha, just using the Mutant Future rules. The big reveal. OK, they didn’t really know what Met Alpha was. Makes me feel old.

The forest valley is not the entirety of their world, and they finally passed into the between decks areas and eventually to the command deck to meet starship captain and other unfrozen crewmembers, who are striving to save some of the ships failing systems, all the while fighting an ongoing war with androids who have taken over sections of the ship.

The characters learn of the original home known as “Earth,” and that the world they know is a starship that has long since passed it’s intended destination, and now hurtles through space. It was fun role-playing all this, and seeing character reactions.

Actually Andy knew, as he had read many of my blog posts after a mysterious emailer hipped him to my blog, that was formerly only a rumor amongst my players. Well, with the big reveal completed along with this campaign, I was able to go ahead and inform the others about my blog, which they can now read with impunity.

Two secret things, my blog and the Metamorphosis Alpha nature of the Mutant Future sessions, were never that important to keep secret. It’s easy enough to refrain from foreshadowing game events in the posts, and as far as any hard talk about Andy or Dan or any of the others, well, it’s nothing I don’t really say to their face. I think I can continue to be open and honest about my player’s headache inducing foibles without offending anyone. And for the starship nature of the characters world, well, Met Alpha was not designed as a game with keeping the secret. The players knew what they were playing in Met Alpha originally back in the old school heyday of that game, and that fact that only the PC’s were ignorant of the true nature of their world was fairly superfluous. Fun gameplay is fun gameplay no matter how you slice it.

For Posterities sake, here are the characters from this campaign:

Gamo-Ik (Andy): with a hillbilly persona and look inspired by Billy Bob Thornton’s Slingblade character, Gamo has teleport and disintegration powers. He also has Slowness, which makes him take actions every other turn. How did a slow moving humanoid survive the dangers of the valley? Well, he also has Teleport. So he cannot run faster than any of the characters in the party, but his still often appears in front of them when they travel. Slow of body, he is the most intelligent and wise of all the characters, so he is more accepting of the true nature of the world once it is revealed.

Rizgar (Dan): I mutated bear with Quickness, Telekinesis, and Dwarfism mutations. Belligerent and contrary (like most of Dan’s characters).

Will O. (Paul): a mutated tree-man. When travelling with the group, some characters keep a distance from him. See, he gives off a damaging Shriek when damaged to those nearby, and also bleeds out acid sap when he gets damaged. At one point got his hands on a large cell-powered chainsaw that he uses to great affect. One scary tree. Often damages himself in combat to get the Shriek power activated.

Korm (Big Ben): no obvious mutations and looking very much like a normal human, he has Weather Control and combat intuition powers. He also has increased metabolism, so the character is always looking for his next big meal. His use of weather control on the forest valley level over the years may have made the breakdown of ship atmospheric systems occur more quickly than they otherwise would have.

Donald “Don Juan” John Garth (NPC): a ship engineer who got trapped on the forest level over a year ago, he has become a known as a wise travelling shaman to many of the valley people. Let himself be known as “Don Juan” to many as an inside joke to himself – he was a big reader of Carlos Castanada. Eventually led the party out of the valley level and to the command deck at the end of the campaign.

Also, little Ben played in one game as a lizard man from the valley, but actually I forget his name.

Oh, in last night’s final game I got to use classic beasties from The Barrier Peaks D&D module in encounters, including VegyPymies and hostile Android weight trainers in a gym area. Nice.

So there we go, one little campaign wrapped up. We usually played this alternate when Terry could not make a game, so we’ll have to find some other alternates for the future, including White Box OD&D, of course.