Guest starring Willem Dafoe

Eclipse Phase: The Great White Hunter Job

Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star continued from the previous session at Wira Games and Hobbies. Location: Aphrodite Prime, about 50 km above Venus’ surface. Active Gamera Security (GamSec) Personnel: Badal Jones – Lunar Lagrange Alliance (LLA) envoy in the splicer morph, Boris Ivanov Rasputin the Second – a neo-hominid lawyer in the shaper morph, William Cable Jr. – paranoid terrorist in a neotenic pod morph and Hokusai Tarnungshaut – neo-octopus artist in a slitheroid morph. Inactive Personnel: DANAI and Wandering Ina. Mission: To provide security and investigative services to Badal’s superior the LLA’s ambassador during an art show at the Cumulus Hotel, where reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos would be showcasing alien sculptures he collected from the extraterrestrial Factors. LLA had intercepted vague communique about a terrorist attack during the event and would like the attack thwarted. Their secondary mission was help Gretchen Ambelina of Pax Familae by […]

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This neotenic does not see dead people

Eclipse Phase: Machinations of a Lumpy Space Princess

The entry title for this Eclipse Phase session report is play on the title of Machinations of the Space Princess. Gamera Security‘s Venusian investigations continued: Kai took on the role of neotenic-morphed Billy Cable Jr. (a.k.a. Brandon Leigh), Darren played infomorph DANAI (a.k.a. Vadislav Sender) and I was again the slitheroid-morphed Hokusai Tarnungshaut (a.k.a. Heinrich Ausfahrt Plissken). Andrew’s Venusian glider-morphed Wandering Ina (a.k.a. Kana) and Matthew’s Badal Jones the Lunar Lagrange Alliance Envoy were absent and was used as NPCs at crucial times of the session. Ivan GMed, as this photo shows: The mission, which continued from the previous session, was to help Badal Jones with the security for his LLA ambassador’s contingent as they attended the art show that would display the Factors’ alien sculpture pieces collected by the reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos at the Cumulus Hotel on Aphrodite Prime. There was a second, a more secretive mission […]

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The solo player

EOTE: Rugged Road to the Ryll Mines Part 2

Edged by the Empire Episode 02 Rugged Road to the Ryll Mines, Part 2 The adventure continues from the previous entry: I ran the second session for Act 1 of The Long Arm of the Hutt free downloadable adventure (PDF download, low res version, 2.4MB) on Tuesday morning. Barreling Through the Badlands The mission began in the morning. B’ura and Hondo were joined by a Rutian Twi’lek female named Numa. She was in her early twenties and bore a blaster pistol and a vibroknife. Kablo brought them to the east end of Nabat where a tech crew was rolling out an old landspeeder from storage. They were to head east through the badlands for about 300 klicks. At first piloting a speeder over the badlands was a cinch. Then rocky mounds appeared, and forced Hondo to steer carefully past the dangerous rocks. However (with a Piloting – Planetary roll that […]

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The solo player

EOTE: Rugged Road to the Ryll Mines Part 1

Edged by the Empire Episode 02 Rugged Road to the Ryll Mines, Part 1 Last Monday, Irfan and I finally continued his Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG adventures. I ran The Long Arm of the Hutt free downloadable adventure (PDF download, low res version, 2.4MB) from Fantasy Flight Games’ website with some alterations to the story and non-player characters. With the new EotE Core Rulebook, Irfan earlier created his own player character based on the Beginner Game pregenerated character Pash. His new PC in named Hondo Pash, a smuggler with a pilot specialisation, and purchased the Talents Let’s Ride, Galaxy Mapper and Skilled Jockey. He wields a DH-17 blaster pistol and a vibrosword. His story continues from Pash’s story from Escape from Mos Shuuta from the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game. His Obligation was to the safety of his younger sister Yuzy Pash who lived on Tatooine. […]

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From Garfield and Friends

Eclipse Phase: Electromatic For The People

Last time on Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star the team was joined by Matthew’s player character Christoph de Beers from the Jovian Republic. However, there was a quantum temporal flux and the character metamorphosed into the Lunar Lagrange Alliance envoy Badal Jones, a Welshman. The out-of-character retcon avoided difficulties of roleplaying a character from a racist, pure humans-only society mixed with a group of posthuman player characters. Also, Kai played neotenic-morphed Billy Cable Jr. (a.k.a. Brandon Leigh), Andrew played Venusian glider-morphed Wandering Ina (a.k.a. Kana), Darren played infomorph DANAI (a.k.a. Vadislav Sender) and I was back as the slitheroid-morphed Hokusai Tarnungshaut (a.k.a. Heinrich Ausfahrt Plissken). Jones had commissioned Gamera Security‘s services for the upcoming art gallery event at the Cumulus Hotel at Aphrodite Prime. The event would display Factors’ alien sculpture pieces collected by the reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos who lived on the asteroid 163693 Atira and […]

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God forgive me for what I am about to do

Eclipse Phase: A Jovian Jovially Joins

Last time on Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star… the Gamera Security hypercorp gang was involved in several events, namely Cable played by Kai having a freefall date with Gretchen Ambelina of Pax Familae down through the lethal atmosphere of Venus, and Darren’s AGI DANAI having to perform an impromptu psychosurgery on the other AGI Wandering Ina, played by Andrew. But I was absent because of Eid vacation and stuff. In-character, Hokusai was busy setting up a new online ID and creating an art community site called the Digital Easel to boost his F-Rep and attempt intelligence gathering there. (Or is he?) This week! We were met by Captain Christoph de Beers an envoy from the Jovian Republic with military background, played by Matthew. Christoph’s superior Ambassador Marie MacDonnoll will be attending the invitation-only Marquis d’Homem-Christos‘ art show, which will showcase the sculpture he acquired from the mysterious aliens […]

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Puppers

Night’s Black Agents: Hipster Pirates of the Celtic Sea

GOKL returned to playing the modern age vampire conspiracy game Night’s Black Agents after a brief hiatus. Darren – Eclipse Phase‘s infomorph DANAI –  joined us as a burnt Russian agent Nikolai Kaidanovsky, a medical doctor. (No, Darren had not seen Pacific Rim.) The Story So Far The agents had been investigating Emartech Pharmaceuticals, the corporation which was experimenting and mass producing a certain type of blood. This blood had been tainted with a mutated mycoplasma haemocanis virus and had been used as a possible biological agent. In Sweden, the group had recently encountered a white supremacist terrorist group whose members were infused with this blood to wreak havoc during Eurovision 2013. The blood gave their operatives superhuman powers. The previous session was not blogged about here. Why? Because I failed a roll during an impromptu seduction scene on the head of human resources of Emartech in Cardiff, Wales. And […]

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He'll never get a leg up on things

Eclipse Phase: Moose Kipper

Last Sunday, the Eclipse Phase group, playing the members of the Gamera Security hypercorp finished off our investigation of Cloud Nine aerostat on Venus. After their “patron” Kage Musha ordered all GamSec operatives off Cloud Nine so his personal force can take over what seems to be the hypercorp Yamaha-Pacifica‘s illegal weapon manufacturing facility there, Billy Cable Jr. and Hokusai Tarnungshaut pilot their airship back there to pick up DANAI and Wandering Ina, both in the Venusian glider body. DANAI-δ, DANAI’s delta fork in Cloud Nine’s mesh network, masked an airlock from the security systems so DANAI/Ina could jump off the aerostat and onto their airship. (Cable had rolled critical success for airship piloting and was expertly flying the ship, cloaked in Venusian clouds.) Suddenly, DANAI/Ina was/were interrupted by the inner airlock door opening. It hid by jumping off the airlock’s external platform and hanging on to its edge. It […]

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DANAI/Ina and Hokusai posing for a selfie while sneaking into Yamaha-Pacifica

Eclipse Phase: A Hidden Industry

GOKL‘s Eclipse Phase “Clouds of the Morning Star” story arc (gamemastered by Ivan) continues from the previous session. Wandering Ina (played by Andrew) and DANAI (played by Darren) – both in a single Venusian glider morph – continued their investigation of a massive ego theft ring that may have passed through the Cloud Nine aerostat – a floating city in the skies of Venus. Meanwhile, Cable and Hokusai (played by me) manned their newly purchased airship, hidden in the clouds out of sight from Cloud Nine. Since Kai was unable to make it, this session had three player characters, but with two of them inhabiting one body, which was a great concept in roleplaying. The Setup It was time Hokusai delivered more weapons and gear by sneaking onto Cloud Nine. DANAI/Ina had managed to hack into Cloud Nine’s aerostat administration network and gave themselves Security-level permissions in the system. Employing […]

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Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving

The adventure continued on and around Venus… even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we’re not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we’re talking about last Sunday’s Eclipse Phase session. As Kage’s people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock. Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecraft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane… toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to […]

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Ivan prepares to shank his players

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign “Fastball Express” has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two. So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited “for security reasons”. (That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had […]

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Mention Tiree to Mar Barezz and he'll flip his cookies and potatoes

GOKL Escapes The Insurmountable Ned

Modesty Blazing 02 Escaping The Insurmountable Ned *** Earlier today I ran Star Wars Edge of the Empire for GOKL for the second time, using the Beginner Game truncated rules and extra stuff found on the internet. Everyone was given 10 XPs from the previous session with an option to advance their characters. Qillian Ryn the Trianii and Darter Kel the Zeltron advanced their characters. 41-VEX the manumitted colonist droid saved his XPs for later. A Brief Prologue A brief prologue was run to account for the absence players of Lowhhrick, Oskara and Nora. The commandeered Corellian YT-1300 light freighter Krayt Fang landed on a small oceanside shadowport on Rodia. Actually before landing, they kicked the ousted slaver captain Trex out into the humid Rodian swamps a hundred klicks from nowhere. An outlaw tech would be able to install a new BoSS transponder on their ship, but only for 10,000 […]

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Eurovision time

Night’s Black Agents: The Eurovision Job Ends

And thus ends the Eurovision Song Contest Job where the company investigates a white supremacist terror group in Malmö, Sweden. This arc of the game took four sessions and in the final session, things go south for the group and then some. A game campaign recap can be found here, followed by descriptions of certain scenes that led us to the finale. A thematic change in the game is that the players discovered that the Lampir-blood boosted terrorists were not merely from a fringe group, but part of the conspiracy that led to the top levels of the Försvarsdepartementet (Ministry of Defence), who was trying to bring down the Socialdepartementet (Ministry of Health and Social Services) who had become our allies in Sweden. Therefore, we were not just running our operation in neutral territory, but in a country that was steadily becoming an enemy territory. The party split up between […]

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The Two Abrahams

Night’s Black Agents: Zlatan’s Story

This is not a full actual play report of the recent Night’s Black Agents session gamemastered by Kai, but it highlights one of the reasons why I roleplay. One of the many descriptions of a tabletop RPG is a cooperative storytelling game where the gamemaster (GM) sets up a story and referees in-story conflicts and their outcomes. At the same time, players act accordingly as characters in that story and also provide foil for the GM to feed information and story points back at the players in a dramatically satisfactory way, if possible. In a way, we are reading a spy novel or watching a spy movie as we are developing it together. Here’s what happened which involved me playing the Bosnian wheel artist Zlatan Kljujic: But First, A Campaign Recap Here’s what happened beforehand during the first three game sessions of the “Eurovision Song Contest Job”: Sami Härkönen obtained […]

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Epic droid roleplaying going on

GOKL Escapes Mos Shuuta

Modesty Blazing 01 Escaping Mos Shuuta *** I’ve already run Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG Beginner Game adventure for Irfan, so now I would see how it would fare with half a dozen experienced tabletop RPGers, namely the guys at GOKL. From the available pregenerated characters in the adventure Escape from Mos Shuuta, Ivan played 41-VEX as a manumitted medical droid, Razzman played the Twi’lek bounty hunter Oskara, Macx played the Wookiee hired gun Lowhhrick and Doug tweaked Pash the smuggler into Nora Romanova. Darren and Kai jury-rig a character generation using the Beta rule notes found online and became, respectively, Qillian Ryn the Triannii assassin and Darter Kel the Zeltron scout and bush pilot. I might have screwed up the chargen a bit because of lack of complete rules. The adventure’s encounters are designed so GMs and players get the hang of the system. For example, the […]

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Sami Harkonen

Night’s Black Agents: The Little Prince Job Ends

The second part of Night’s Black Agents game run by Kai continued two weeks later with everyone present, namely Shiina “Misha” Mikado the Japanese grifter and heavy hitter, Jacob Novazembla the Dutch hacker, Sami Härkönen the Finnish grunt and Zlatan Kljujic the Bosnian driver! The spy stuff adventure in London continues from the last episode. I did not have the time to produce a play report in my own words, so here’s Kai’s diligently written report (with bonus GM’s Commentary in italics.) Following the confrontation at Waterloo Station, Emelia Sanderson’s team took the wounded thief Vin to a secret interrogation facility in a warehouse near London City Airport. This team consisted of a former mob surgeon named Dr Kana, a former mob accountant named Sachs, and a young driver named Peltier. All of them, like Misha, were off-the-books operatives working for Emelia of MI-6. These were additional NPCs I created […]

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