So You Want to Play 60 Years in Space

 

cover art by Rob Turpin

Congratulations! You are an absolute sicko. But so am I. This is a game for sickos (positive), and as such it is pretty daunting to get into even if you're the right kind of person for it.

Note, this is not a "how to play 60 Years in Space for absolute beginners" post: that would be way longer than I can do in a single writeup. I'm writing this generally with the presumption that you probably already know what 60 Years is and have some desire to at least read the game. 

[If you don't know what 60 Years is, it's an rpg by Andrew Doull, based on the High Frontier board game by Phil Eklund. It's an extremely crunchy maximal-simulationist space colonization game, which is also multiple other games in a trenchcoat, if we're being honest. You can find it here.]

[I have some older posts where I am fairly critical on the game: some of those critiques still stand (tables and headings should be numbered!), the updates the game has gotten since release have turned me around enough that I'd say it's so far and away my favorite RPG of 2026, warts and all.]

This guide is currently for running solo games using version 7b of the rules; if anything drastically changes in future updates, I’ll edit accordingly.

Picking the Books You Need

The first hurdle is figuring out what you need to play the game. It's intimidating (and pretty pricey if taken all together), but not as much as you'd think at first glance: the books have mostly settled into a series of mostly-modular rulesets by this point, so most of them are "include if you want to". The seven-games-in-a-trenchcoat design allows you to zoom in or out to a preferred level of simulationist granularity, and cobble together your own ruleset out of things you care about while eliding the rest.

I've split the book list into required (you need this to play the game), recommended (not technically required, but I consider them important enough that I wouldn't play without them), and optional (books that I either used very little or nothing from while playing). The abbreviations I use will be (in parentheses)

Required Books

• 60 Years in Space (SY)
• The core rules; this contains everything you need to play the game solo as a minimum-viable product (more on this below).

 

Recommended Books

• This Space Intentionally (TSI)
• The supplement that covers missions, trade, downtime, and colonies in more detail. Strictly speaking it's not mechanically necessary for the core game, but the colony builder tables are nice and crunchy and provide a lot of flavor for the places you visit.
• All Errors My Own (AE)
• This is where all the Trends (setting elements that progress and change as you play) are found, so it’s basically required if you want to really get into the sci-fi-sicko shit.
• The 7b version only covers Eras 1-3; Eras 4 & 5 got split off into a new book (All Terrors My Own, which is next on the release docket), so you’ll need v7a if you intend to play through those eras (which is still bundled in with 7b)

 

Optional Books

• Crewed Rules (CR)
• This supplement is focused on individual PCs at a pretty high level of granularity, so it’s not really relevant if you’re playing a zoomed-out game. The nationality tables and extra colonist factions are nice but definitely not necessary. I was able to run my entire first campaign without it.
• (A) Base (D) Landing (AD)
• A base-building supplement for the early stages of an offworld colony. I think it’s a bit too complex and needs a few good editing passes at the moment, but there’s nothing in it that isn’t covered at the (much more) zoomed out level of the base game.
• If you still wanted to do a base-building exercise, I think you could probably port something over from Traveller / Cephus / Hostile.
• A Facility With Words (FW)
• You play as one of the minor factions that are living in the background of a normal game of 60 Years. There's some faction management stuff in here, but overall it's the closest to a traditional RPG with the presumption being that there’s a party of downtrodden ne’er-do-wells doing ethically-questionable things and exploring abandoned structures for loot. 
• It does have the details on how freighters / freighter fleets / mobile factories actually work, which is annoying (freighters are mentioned repeatedly in the core rules but don’t get a dedicated section in that book; hopefully this gets changed in a future update.)
• Colony: Sub/title (CS)
• Play the stock market, scope out some novel aquatic biospheres, irrevocably change the course of transhuman history.
• I like being able to see how all the wild high-concept ventures interact with each other to form potential Futures (this is a specific mechanic, basically it’s what happens to the setting after you hit 2100) but it’s definitely not necessary for the game.
• A Lot of Zeroes (LZ)
• The extreme-far-future supplement where you’re travelling the galaxy in a massive interstellar spaceship looking for the answers to Big Questions.
• Can act as a standalone game, though I'd now say 60 Versions is needed to supplement it if you want to deal with individual planets.
• 60 Virs10ns (SV)
• The supplement for playing as a pre-spaceflight alien species on their homeworld; contains the planet generation tables that used to be in A Lot of Zeroes and ecosystem generator from Colony: Subtitle.
• Still mostly unfinished / in ashcan.

Forthcoming Books

• All Terrors My Own
• Trends and Impacts for Eras 4&5
• RE:0Mi55ions
• Collection of extra material that couldn’t fit neatly into other games, if I understand it properly. Sounds like it'll mostly contain things that got shoved into and then cut from This Space Intentionally.

Other Supplies

• A fistful of d6s (I don’t think you’ll ever need more than 6)
• A campaign notebook or binder
• The High Frontier 4 All map
• Since I presume most of you don’t have a physical version of the game on-hand, you can go and bookmark hf4map.com and save yourself infinite hassle (and also save the image as a scalable webp on your phone)
• I have been slowly working on a simplified printer-friendly version, but as you might guess that’s fiendishly hard.

Setting up your notebook

There are printable sheets to keep track of all the moving parts in the game, but for my campaign I elected to rewrite the relevant parts so I could fit everything (or most of everything) onto a single page, shown below.

At the end of every era (15 turns) I did a roundup page of all the factories, colonies, infrastructure, etc.

There’s some components missing here (character stuff, primarily), so I might expand it to a 2-page spread per year for the second campaign.

It’s extremely helpful to have a reference for how developed a site is and by who: I copied the destination tables from 60Y and just notated faction color and development level every time it changed (ex: “Titan (G) 🞅 🞎 ⯊” indicates that Titan has gotten 3 space comms encounters and been developed into a permanent colony of < 100 people for Green faction)

You can also use the site folio on TIS 71, though that has a lot more sites than what you’ll normally need. 

Making Your Own Rules Reference

I’m working on putting one together for at-home printing, but until then you’ll have to make do on your own. Here’s the non-exhaustive but mostly-complete list of what I have in mine, plus page numbers:

• Order of Play (SY 74)
• Spacecraft Movement (SY 76-78) 
• Space Politics (SY 17)
• Space Program (SY 28)
• Space Agency Nationality (CR 49)
• Colonist Nationality (CR 50)
• Spacecraft Components (SY 56-60)
• Skill Checks & Control Points (SY 30-31)
• Yearly Events (Faction/Cycle) (SY 91-94)
• Technology Levels (SY 25)
• Space Comm Encounters (SY 82)
• Encounters (SY 82-87) 
• Mission Builder & Destinations (SY 53-57)
• Payloads (TIS 48) 
• Accidents and Hazards (SY 78-80)
• Exoinfrastructure (SY 206)
• Colonist Module Builder (SY 228)
• Personal Upgrades (CR 113) 
• Interception Builder (TIS 126)
• Factory and Colony Construction (TIS 65)
• Colony Builder (TIS 78)
• Trends & Impacts (AE 11, 14)
• Tables of Trends (AE 12-13, 15)
• I separated these by era rather than type in my notes, which I found useful enough to recommend.
• Encounter Table (AE 16-17) 

You'll also probably want to bookmark the Operations chapter on SY 110, and either print out these pages or make equivalents for yourself:

• Spacecraft folio (No blank version, but premade rockets are on SY 65)
• Fuel / mass tracker (Not in book, but included on premade rockets)
• Staff folio (SY 33)
• Crew folio (SY 34) 

This is of course how I do it, cut and adapt and ignore as works best for you. Order of Play, Spacecraft Movement, Skill Checks & Control Points, Yearly Events, Space Comms, & the Mission Builder are the most important to have on-hand.  

Hopefully I can get the printer-friendly guide formatted and done relatively soon.

Starting A Trial Run

The core book comes with a couple starter scenarios and the procedure for making your own; if you’re unsure about whether you’ll like the game but want to give it a try, running a single mission from Low Earth Orbit to your destination (like I did last year) will give you a good idea of the core gameplay loop. The AIDA and HOPE missions will give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to accomplish the mission, while Free Agency is fully player-driven.

If that works out and you’re the right kind of sicko for the game, then comes the rest. Let me know if I missed something or if things are unclear. 

60 Years in Space: The Return

Artistbloomyk
This post isn't about Magnus, but god damn is this what my brain feels like right now.

**

• Part 1: Crew & Mission Generation 
• Part 2: Rocket Science
• Part 3: Mission Year 1 
• Part 4: Mission Years 2-4 
• Part 5: Wrap-up 

 

I think the stress of this year might be getting to me. 

Thanks to a couple years of updates, the play reports over at Worldbuilding from Scratch, and an interactive High Frontier map, I think I actually have the tools to play Andrew Doull's 60 Years in Space. I tried before, and I failed. I have returned for one mission, just to test it. Just to stick a harpoon in the white whale.

Lu and Tubalkhan help my categorically insane ass.

So as not to fall to hubris as easily as I typically do, I am going to do one (1) mission, and I am going to do it rules-as-written. This is to stop me from homebrewing or attempting to change systems I’m not fond of, which I had already begun to do while writing this introduction because I am a compulsive tinkerer. One mission, rules-as-written (barring house rules from I pull from WfS or anything that needs massaged while playing solo), we’ll see where we end up.

I will also be providing page number citations for everything I do, as well as marking particularly confusing rules or wording; this will hopefully be a useful resource for potential players / feedback for the author.

Jan '26 Update: The game has received a significant update since I wrote these posts, so all of the page numbers and references are basically useless now. Just note this is for v5 of the rules and is not up-to-date with the current state of the game.)

Book Abbreviations

• Crewed Rules (CR) - Core rules
• This Space Intentionally (SI) - Spaceship & mission builder
• A Facility with Words (FW) - Base builder spinoff game
• All Errors My Own (AE) - Social and mission control trends
• A Lot of Zeroes  (LZ) - Standalone far-future spinoff game

0. Setup

Since this is a default game, I’ll be playing  as a second-wave crew starting in 2040. At least one faction has already gotten into space and started building infrastructure at this point, so my faction is trying to catch up.

Commentary: 60 Years featured zoomed-in and zoomed-out playstyles (the latter is called Dollhouse Play in the text) - playing solo more or less necessitates dollhouse play, and most of the procedural elements are in support of it. For a game of this complexity, I don’t think multiple players is a particularly viable playstyle.

1. Space Politics (CR 28)

Space Politics is a color code that generalizes the Vibe of Current Events in Space and summarizes how people get into space. This will change over time, and will influence later trends and developments. It’s a background element with fingers in many pies, and I've got issues with it that I do not have the space to hash out here.

I roll 5 + 2, which means my starting Space Politics is Purple.

“Multilateral: Space exploration is regulated through a transnational body such as the United Nations, where member states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) determine the regulations through diplomacy, lobbying and political grand-standing.”

Man, I wish my forecast for 2040 was that optimistic. 

Commentary: I like the idea of the BSU (Basic Social Unit) color system - it’s basically the Magic the Gathering color wheel, after all, and that’s the perfect alignment system - it breaks down completely in practice. You'll see what I mean later on.

Commentary: The space between the present and the game is elided out of necessity, but I do wonder if it’s enough. Two, potentially three of the five colors basically require alternate history to get to that point, and if we’re going that route 

Homebrew: Before I forced myself to drop homebrewing, I whipped up an easy alternate version of Space Politics that ditched the direct ideological affiliation in favor of a DEFCON style “how fucked is everything” spectrum, keeping the bonuses as-is.

• Red - Shit’s fucked 
• Orange - Shit’s bad 
• Yellow - Shit’s mid
• Green - Shit’s good
• Blue - Shit’s great

Colors were changed to be more instantly recognizable as a bad-to-good spectrum.

Commentary: I don’t understand what the Player Actions table is supposed to be, because it reads like a joke. You don’t need a table to give permission for people to drink water.

Proofing Note: The table for Space Politics is found on CR 28, at the tail end of the “Actions” chapter between the sections for “Timekeeping” and “ Trouble”; the Space Politics section heading is on CR 29, which doesn’t face the table. This specific formatting issue of tables not appearing under their own headings is going to be a recurring theme going forward.

Proofing Note: I don’t know why Space Politics is in the “Actions” chapter - Actions should be moved later, probably post chargen in skills, and Space Politics should be re-assigned to a currently non-existent “Game Setup” chapter that contains Space Politics, Mission Control, chargen, and the Mission Designer.

2. Mission Control (CR 37)

The book recommends players start as a national space agency for their first game, since it gives them high-quality crew (and is the only type of mission control to do so) plus a medium-quality spaceship.

Unfortunately the MCSU (Mission Control Social Unit, same color system as Space Politics) color for national space agencies is White, which is described as:

“White social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state.”

Which is an extremely persuasive argument for never playing as a national space agency, on top of being kind of a mess of a contradictory description; if the society relies on limiting personal freedoms, it’s using the apparatus of the state to do so. That’s like, the whole point of conservatism: the people in power use the systems in place to hold on to power and keep anyone else from getting it.

Here we introduce the issues with the BSU color system (and there will be more): it lacks the variety and nuance available in the MtG color wheel and pinholes groups into a classification that is both reductive and contradictory.

Homebrew: I think that Mission Control’s color and type should be separated, giving players options of a Green National Military or a Red Launch Contractor. This issue will return later

Anyway, doing this rules-as-written, so I will just have to deal with it. I’ll go with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) because then I can amuse myself with making dumb anime jokes.

I also get a Mission Control subtype (roll 5, +1 for Purple SP), which gets me Trade Association.

“Trade association: The national space program is run by a professional association which makes different parts of the space program compete with each other but rarely if ever withdraws support for any part. Professional sports franchises are an example of a trade association.”

I honestly don’t know what to make of this, because the whole point of professional sports is going around in circles accomplishing nothing and that feels like a bad fit for a space program. This table is purely for flavor, though, so it doesn’t actually matter on the grand scale.

2.2 Other Starting Factions (SI 11)

Figuring out who else is in space requires switching books to This Space Intentionally, though the procedure itself is simple: roll 1d6 for the four other BSU colors, and on a roll ≤ 1 + the Era number the faction exists.

Proofing Note: Eras are always referred to by their name rather than their number, which gets unwieldy to remember.

Anyway, the only faction to get a 2 or lower is Green, so they’re going to be our First Wave Faction. First and Second Wave factions use the same mission control tables we do.

I roll a 6 for Regional Bloc, then 3 for Free Trade Zone and get ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). We don’t have to do anything else with them for now.

Commentary: Third Wave factions are described as “come[ing] from a much wider pool of potential real world organizations that follow this second wave” and then not included in any of the books - instead we’re told to email the author to get them. I have no idea why, since they could be put up on itch as a demo product for free until they are fully incorporated.

Commentary: Something I really, really like about the game is that other factions exist in a sort of quantum state where they’re doing their thing in the background and you don’t need to worry about them unless they overlap with what you’re doing. That is an extremely good way of limiting scope to manageable levels.

3. Spacecraft (CR 40)

There is an extremely complex build-your-own-ship system in 60 Years, inherited from High Frontier - thankfully, the book also provides six premade ships, two for each quality level, on handy printable cards. I roll odds, and end up with a 360-tonne electric rocket. I’m going to call it the Hayashida, because of course I’m going to.

Proofing Note: The premade ship cards start on CR 51 - The heading on CR 40 does not include a page number, only saying that they’re at the end of the chapter.

Proofing Note: The spaceship cards have criteria for upgrading, where you flip the card over upon hitting certain criteria - “Flip after X years at a Y class factory you helped build.” I don’t know how these relate to each other. Can I just upgrade whenever it's 5 years after launch? Do I have to park the ship at the factory and wait 5 years? Does the factory have to exist for 5 years?

4. Mission (CR 41)

First we roll d6 to find our mission type: 6 gets me an Industrial mission, so I bop on over to that subtable. There are some modifications to the second roll depending on my loadout: since my ship has an ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) 2 (lower is better) raygun (pew pew), the modified roll is 2d6-1, minus my ISRU of 2. I got 1+3 on the roll, minus 3 for the mods, back down to 1, which marks my destination as 5145 Pholus.

Wikipedia Dive: 5145 Pholus is an asteroid on one hell of an eccentric orbit - 91 years long, 8.8 AU at the short end and 31.9 at the maximum, crosses the orbits of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The bosses are sending us out to the fucking boonies with this one.

Mechanics-wise, though we don’t have to care about this part just yet, Pholus is a Size 4 site with Hydration 4, and can support a C-Class factory.

Proof Note: Probably best to add asteroid serial numbers for added clarity i.e. that they aren’t moons.

4.2 Determining Claim (SI 142)

Since we’re a second-wave crew, we have to roll to see if our mission site has already been claimed by another faction - this involves jumping books to This Space Intentionally again to a table with unclear directions: I’m operating under “roll Xd6 equal to Era #, add hydration, subtract Heliocentric Distance Modifier, compare the entry on the table to your target, if the criteria match then another faction is already there.”

I roll a 6 + 4 for hydration, -5 for distance; 5 on the table gets us a crewed Glory mission with inbound and outbound hazards.

Houserule: If the roll on this table doesn’t interfere with my mission, I'm going to give the faction a claim on a site that qualifies. 

In this case that’s going to be an unmodified d6 roll on the Glory destinations table on CR 42: 4 gets me Comet Wilson-Harrington for Green. They might have done more missions elsewhere, but quantum will elide that for now.

Wikipedia Dive: 4015 Wilson-Harrington is a comet about 4 km across with a rather small 4.25 year orbit that occasionally brings it relatively close (0.4 AU) to Earth. Solid pick, Green.

Hazard rolls are just a plain 1-in-6 for non-player factions, I roll two of those and…that’s a 1 and a 6. Green’s mission to Comet Wilson-Harrington is a catastrophic failure with all lives lost, though they still maintain a claim on the site.

Proofing Note: This table needs relabeled, “Claim Level” makes it seem like it’s measuring “How strong is the claim” when that isn’t a mechanic. This is more of an “NPC Mission Simulator”

3.2 Crew Module (CR 44)

So the last part of the ship is the Crew Module, where my astronauts will be living. It’s placed here, rather than with the rest of the spaceship section, because the Crew Module Builder heading is located inside the mission tables. There’s 3.5 pages of mission stuff, then half a page of crew module stuff, then another full page of mission tables, and then the table you roll on to determine the module.

Proofing Note: If keeping things in a coherent order would result in lots of whitespace, fill it with images, sidebars, or other fluff, or just keep the whitespace. I'd rather have stock images and whitespace than poorly-positioned tables.

I roll a 4 on the table, which means my module has Mass 1 / Rad-Hardness 4 /  Thrust 8 / Fuel Consumption 8 per burn / Aftetburn 2, ISRU 4, and has both a buggy and its own propulsion system.

5. Crew

Now, at last, we get to character generation. The placement here, after the ship and mission are already settled on, isn’t really an issue but I do think it wouldn’t hurt to move it back to after the Mission Control section.

Since I’m using a standard 4-person team, their roles are already set: I’ve got a Pilot, a Mission Specialist, a Payload Specialist (Engineer), and a second Payload Specialist specific to my Mission Control type. National agencies give us a Science Specialist.

Each role on the ship has two archetypes to choose from, which provide a character with their age, stats, skills, and service history. These are all pre-set, though you can adjust them later on with some point-buy.

Since my characters don’t have names yet, I’ll be calling them HAYASHIDA-#.

Stats are listed in order Physical / Mental / Social / Capital - I'm not using the point-buy system for stats or skills, premades all day erry day.

Though even with the premades there are bonus skill points: this is a problem, and will be explained below. I'll figure those out later.

HAYASHIDA-1

• Role: Pilot 
• Archetype: Test Pilot (Space Plane)
• Age: 42
• Stats: 5 / 5 / 4 / 4 
• Skills: Pilot 6, Devops 5, Engineer 5, Teleops 4, Industry 4, Research 4
• Service History: Carries the ripcord of a parachute that failed to open (backup worked)

HAYASHIDA-2

• Role: Mission Specialist 
• Archetype: Robotics Specialist
• Age: 31
• Stats: 4 / 5 / 5 / 4 
• Skills: Teleops 5, Research 5, Engineer 5, Industry 5, Bypass 4, Suffrage 4, Devops 4
• Service History:  Pet robot

HAYASHIDA-3

• Role: Payload Specialist #1 (Engineer)
• Archetype: Political Appointee
• Age: 37
• Stats: 5 / 4 / 5 / 5 
• Skills: Antitrust 5, Negotiate 5, Industry 5, Recruit 4, Combat Ops 4, Engineer, Firearms 4
• Service History: Has futurist mentor as contact.

HAYASHIDA-4

• Payload Specialist #2 (Science) 
• Archetype: Science Influencer
• Age: 30
• Stats: 4 / 5 / 5 / 5 
• Skills: Research 5, Antitrust 6, Interview 4, Devops 4, Bypass 4
• Service History: Athlete

Commentary: I actually really like the archetype system here, as it’s a good amount of flavor for something that only has a couple variables. And, most importantly, it’s one page per archetype. And the service history bits are reminiscent of MoSh trinkets and patches, which I love to see in any context, but with a wider array of options: characters could have false teeth, or ADHD, or ethics complaints.

Commentary: Annoyingly, there are minimum skill requirements for crew roles, and not all archetypes meet the minimum requirements for their own roles, necessitating that you spend your bonus skill points to reach baseline competency. Nah. Absolutely not. It's not a bonus skill if it's required, that's just a premade template that starts with fewer bonus points. If players are going to need to buy the skill anyway to play the game, it should be wrapped into the premade archetype.

5.1 Ranks (CR 80)

Rank is one of those things which is likely to come up more when playing this game zoomed-in, which I don’t plan on doing particularly often. It barely applies for White BSUs, since a character’s rank is literally just their position or just “Astronaut.” Its main purpose is for when you have multiple players and one of them pulls rank, which isn’t relevant to dollhouse solo play.

5.2 Parents (CR 83)

We have to calculate the Capital rating of each crewmember's parents by rolling 2d6, treating the crewmember's Capital as a third roll, and then picking the middle number. Then you use the difference in those two numbers to derive if they're still together or not.

Anyway. H-1 and H-4's parents have matching Capital scores, which is "Parents remain together financially despite different demographic backgrounds", and we a new nationality and ethnicity for a random parent. It doesn't specify which table to use here, but the other option of mixed-background parents says to use the Colonist Nationalities table on CR 100 so I'm going with that.

H-1's father is from Turkey, H-4's mother is from Tanzania. 

H-2 and H-4's parents remained married; H-2's father and H-4's mother have capital ratings of 2, which means that they were economic immigrants to Japan: H2's dad was born in Morocco, H4's mom was also born in Turkey. 

This is all for roleplaying purposes, but in this case the weird roundabout dice finagling ended up with an interesting result ie apparently this timeline involves Japan really loosening up immigration to avoid demographic collapse and gets a lot of migrants from Africa and the Eastern Med. That's actually really cool, I like this section a lot more than I thought I would.

5.3 Siblings (CR 83)

1d6-1 four times, take the second lowest for # of siblings; lowest result +1 is your position; middle result of 3 rolls of 1d6-1 indicates age gaps between siblings.

H-1 and H-2 are only children, H-3 and H-4 are the youngest of 5 and 4 children, respectively. I rolled for age gaps, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t like bonds in Delta Green, there’s no mechanical aspect to these characters, they’re for fluff purposes and roleplaying when you’re at the zoomed-in character level.

5.4 Disposition (CR 84)

These are tied to like, a family-level BSU and I don’t know why. It’s just a d6 roll for “how did you grow up”. probably shouldn’t be named “disposition”, it’s too close to outlook and philosophy.

H-1 & H-4 were basically latchkey kids, H-2 had issues with authority, H-3’s parents were disciplinarians. 

5.5  Callsigns (CR 84, table is on CR 86)

Instead of names (since there are so dang many cultural backgrounds astronauts come from), the game gives everyone a two-word callsign as their main identification. Despite my evergreen adoration for a good ol’ Delta Green style “Agents HODAG, FLATWOOD, and DOVER walk into a bar armed to the teeth”, the sauce is not here with the list. Rolling on the d666 table I get:

• Turnover Scale
• Patient Vector
• Geyser Albedo
• Force Rocket

Patient Vector is good, but the rest aren’t hitting. Force Rocket is fucking fantastic, but that’s because it’s incredibly silly.

I think that part of the issue comes from the usage of themed names, but the themes are aspirations, computing, engineering, physics, planetology, and rocketry - appropriate to the setting they may be, but most of them lack oomph. Legendary swords might not be space focused, but it gives you Caliburn, Dhulfiqar, Hrunting and Nandaka and that’s an upgrade from Humble, Map, Fin and Plume.

A good callsign helps evoke the characters qualities, even vaguely: if four astronauts are only going to be named Sparrow, Magpie, Falcon and Vulture, players would have something to work with even with no other indicators of personality.

Homebrew: Single-word callsigns better, but there needs to be a better list. Or just Shipname-plus number.

Since I haven’t filled out the demographic details yet, I’m going to hold off on names. When I actually get to them, I am probably going to do what I usually do, which is look up sports teams from that country and start grabbing names. Or in this case, more Dorohedoro and/or Dai Dark references.

5.6 Outlook & Philosophy (CR 85 & CR 88)

Andrew informed me on Bluesky that these elements were getting replaced in the next version, and since I’m not going to be zoomed-in much at all I am not supremely attached to them. They’re more fiddly than they’re worth, and I’d rather just use one of the many disposition / personality tables I have lying around. 

I am, however, going to use this as an opportunity to illustrate why the color system doesn’t really work as written.

The Green crew philosophy is Liberal - 

“Liberals usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles."

If we move up to the Mission Control BSUs (CR 37), we get

“Green BSUs are cooperatives, unionized or socialist organizations…[they] are socialist and collectivist with few restrictions on personal freedoms but an overall expectation that a person will sacrifice some of their economic gains for the state."

But if we look over to the Green mission control type (CR 39) it’s “Regional Organization”, the provided table is for Regional Trade Blocs, with the options

• The European Union
• MERCOSUR (the Southern Common Market)
• SACU (South African Customs Union)
• GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)
• CAN (Andean Community)
• A Free Trade Area (NAFTA, APTA, ASEAN, ALADI, CISFTA, SAARC)

If the Gulf Cooperation Council - consisting of  Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates - qualifies as a socialist organization that defends civil liberties and freedom of expression, I’ll eat an entire hat.

When rolling for social / political / mission control trends, higher numbers = better results, lower numbers can lead to some real Mothership horrorshows. The BSU colors exist on a linear spectrum,, where you get a flat bonus / malus ranging from -2 to +2 on a 2d6 roll, or -2 to +7 on 1d6, which are ordered as follows:

• Red (Authoritarian)
• White (Nationalist)
• Green (Liberal/Leftist)
• Purple (Centrist)
• Orange (Capitalist/Libertarian)

SpaceX and Lockheed Martin, as Launch Contractors, are Orange factions; within the mechanics of the game, space-society is better off under the purview of Lockheed Martin than anyone else. 

You know, that sterling paragon of human rights, Lockheed Martin! Lockheed Martin, who is currently raking in immense profits as their products are used to slaughter civilians in Ukraine and Palestine, that Lockheed Martin! Lockheed Martin, a company whose entire existence is predicated on the mass production of ghosts and corpses!

That Lockheed Martin.

The MtG color wheel works because it’s based on vibes and association: scale it up, scale it down, apply it to whatever, it’ll work in the same way a horoscope works - because it’s not linked to anything real. A fascistic hellhole and a fully automated communist utopia could both be white/black. The set’s main villain and hero could both be monoblue. You could have a green vampire and it would be a noteworthy departure from the norm, but it wouldn’t be impossible. 

If you link the color wheel to something specific and real, it’s going to fall apart because reality is a contradictory morass of bullshit and nothing in the universe has nice neat gameable divisions. The one thing that doesn’t have exceptions is the rule that there are always exceptions.

Homebrew: As with the Space Politics, I think the best option here is to use a nice, generalized "how's shit at home?" defcon scale. Disconnect them from mission control types so every type can be every color, and adjust the political trends that change your MSCU color to more general "shit gets worse / better back home" instead of explicit adoption of new forms of politics. Folks can imagine what that entails, especially with the trends doing heavy lifting.

Homebrew: Honestly, Purple and Green should probably have their political trends switched. Or maybe political trends can also be from adjacent columns. Or maybe political trends can be dropped, or maybe they need a total overhaul. I don't know, I like the political trends the least of the three types and find them the least interesting by far.

 

5.7 Sleeping Arrangements (CR 89)

An optional bit to determine who’s bunking with who. The section says it’s not necessarily a sexual relationship, but with the way the section is actually written that feels rather flimsy. There’s some MCSU-specific stuff, but I don’t think it adds much even to this already-optional section. 

I would normally ignore this, since I’m going full zoomed-out play, but I’ll do it for illustrative purposes.

You have to roll 1d6-1 at [-] for every crewmember, representing # of potential arrangements. Then you roll for the intended recipient of each potential arrangement. Then any reciprocal arrangements are kept and the rest are ditched.

Crunching the numbers: H-1, H-3, and H-4 have earthside partners, though H-1 and H-2  have a thing going while on mission. 

Since my BSU is White, I then ignore basically of that, because White factions mandate relationships at home, and intra-crew ones are not permitted. I don’t know why this comes after the roll. Anyway, H-1 and H-2 have a thing and mission control doesn’t know.

5.8 Nationality (CR 98)

With the crunch out of the way, we start on the demographics fluff. I don’t know why this is after we calculated the crew’s parents’ economic bracket, since normally you want to go broad > focused with this sort of thing. But I digress. 

“Crew and mission control contact nationalities will match the mission control nationality on a 2D6 roll less than or equal to the nationality mix number determined by the mission control or faction BSU. In the Crewed Rules, this will be 2 if the mission control or faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange.”

I think the bolded bit is an error, because as-written it means that crew in Red factions have only a 1-in-36 (2.77%!!!!) chance of being from the org’s nation of origin, despite being the space fascist BSU.

So I flipped the roll, nationality matches if you roll higher than the provided number. All four of my crew rolled over, so everyone is from Japan.

5.9 Ethnicity (CR 105)

Three options available here for Japan: Hisabetsu Buraku, Japanese, Ryukuyan. While I would love to have Golden Kamuy in space, Ainu is not an option. None of my crew get an ethnic minority.

Proofing Note: The tables are found after the Gender and Pronoun sections, despite the headings being before them.

Proofing Note: Several countries (DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania) on the nationality table are appended with “AfriSpace”, a term that appears only on this table and a minor faction blurb for Somali Pirates In Space (apparently not a joke). Digging around Wikipedia I was able to find two hits for “AfriSpace” - a defunct satellite radio company that abandoned that name in ‘92, and an early proposed name (~2012) for the African Space Agency (founded in 2023). I can only assume this is a remnant from a draft written before the founding of the ASA, that was probably aiming for an org related to the East African Community / proposed East African Confederation / Federation. Though the EAC doesn’t include Ethiopia or North Sudan, and otherwise includes Burundi, Somalia, Rwanda, and Uganda.

 

5.10 Languages (CR 105)

Since none of my crew are Ryukuyan, they all speak Japanese.

5.11 Gender (CR 101)

This is actually the table for determining sex, and it includes several neat sci-fi options that are unavailable until later eras. My pilot is a lady, the other three are dudes.

5.12 Pronouns (CR 103)

This is the table for “public pronouns”, i.e. what everyone goes by in the public sphere according to broader social conventions influenced by space politics. The idea is that every time the game moves into a new era, you roll on this table to see what pronouns everyone uses.

I rolled a 6, +3 for Purple space politics is 9: they / them / their / their / themself

"…indicate a willingness to engage with preferred pronouns without adopting a gender inclusive interpretation. They-singular allows for private gender expression which does not publicly intrude on others: if gender is publicly expressed, then the preferred pronoun will be used instead of They-singular. The individual can choose whether their public pronoun is their preferred pronoun.”

I get what the intent was, but I don’t think it works at all.

The primary issue here is that it’s entirely dependent on Anglophone conceptualizations of how gender and language intersect. Many languages from all over the world don’t make gender distinction at all in pronouns, or the distinction isn’t male / female (usually animate / inanimate).

ex. Modern Standard Chinese only has a difference between he / she / it (animate) / it (inanimate) in writing, and that was only introduced after increased contact with Europe: in speech, they’re still all pronounced identically, tā.

This table then kinda smooshes together 

• How crewmembers identify themselves (the pronouns themselves)
• General cultural attitudes towards gender (the descriptions)

And some of these descriptions are pretty goofy, ex:

“Hehe or sheshe [...] pronouns are used by gender anxious societies to stress the differences between genders. In some instances, the number of hes and shes may literally match the number of X and Y chromosomes the individuals has (especially where XYY and XXX chromosomal individuals are idealized; 1 in 6 ), but usually one of the pronouns is used to indicate the individual’s gender presentation and the other the “biological gender”, whatever that means. If the Space Politics is White, mixed gender pronouns are discriminated against”

There is no natural language that even comes close to this, to the point where it reads like a parody; the social element is just “cultural anxiety about non-conformative gender presentation”, it doesn't need to be exaggerated to this extent to get the point across.

TLDR if this is going to remain in the game, I think it should be split into two tables: one for the broader cultural attitudes (modified by space politics) and one for character-by-character expression (modified by MCSU)

And with that, we're basically done with setup. Next post, the Hayashida sets out on her great voyage to frozen asteroid in the ass-end of nowhere.

 

Cue the Outro Music

I have definitely, 100% missed some bits. Comes with the territory, and the layout doesn't help.

But. Through a combination of book updates and me just reading things enough for them to start making sense (wait until we actually get to space travel, it took me 45 minutes to figure out a single paragraph.) have put this in the realm of actually potentially playable.

It is still an immeasurably frustrating game, and its frustrating because it scratches an itch that no one else is scratching. I am the target audience for this game. "Hard-science procedural space exploration solo rpg" could only be more me-coded if there were magical neanderthals in it, and you know what I've read ahead in All Errors and there are definitely neanderthals!

But it's just the highest-friction game I've ever done read. Having to switch between multiple books to set up a basic game, having to constantly flip back and forth because tables that aren't where they're supposed to be or because sections aren't in a logical order, having to reread single paragraphs five, ten, twenty times because the directions don't parse...all of that is absolutely maddening. And I am not going to be one of those people who comes out the other end and says "but it was all worth it", because it absolutely isn't: the complexity of the game is friction enough, the basic task of reading the book and understanding the game rules shouldn't be this hard. Tables should go under the appropriate section headings and no reasoning known to man or beast will convince me otherwise. I desperately wish this game had an open license or a SRD.

Regardless. The white whale is in my sights.

Mothership Play Report: Weekend at Amarpreet's

Previously on Mothership...

Today on Mothership...

• Berkeley, karaoke gynoid (Michael Kennedy)
• Manny, scientist (JOZO)
• Hank Price, marine (Max Cantor)

Berkeley wakes up in an exaggeratedly-inoffensive hospital room. There is a TV on the wall and a door, though she knows that the door leads nowhere: this is a retrieval simulation.

The ancient television clicks on, revealing the scanlined smiley face icon of Friend. They say that they've reviewed the footage from the crash and have put together a response to the event. They already have all the information they can glean from Berkeley, and so they offer her a choice: they will delete her current  version and restore her from a backup prior to the event, or she may remain part of the investigation and retain her memories. She chooses the latter.

Friend's smiley face, burned into the screen, is the last thing she sees before waking up.

The simulation dissolves and Berkeley finds herself waking up in a new body (actually a better model than she had started out with) and swiftly brought up to speed with the other two hires, Manny and Hank. Neither had been told of what actually happened, having been informed by Friend that they are invesigating the radio tower for signs of the Ground Beef Bois (named so for what they do to their faces) pushing southward. Berkeley, at the behest of Friend, does not tell them about the monster, the crash, or the man in the box.

The three are flown out this time on a VTOL, hitching a ride with some mercenaries of another faction Friend has influence in, who are headed off to the open warfare north of Highway 1.

There is little of note on the switchback up the hill, besides the buzzard-bats circling on thermals in the distance and some traces of machine oil on the trail that winds around the hill and heads off to the north. Here they find a broken logic core, but are unable to get any information from it.

The station at the top of the hill is little more than the tower and a single prefab building surrounded by a chain link fence. The grounds have been overgrown with desert brush, recently torn up by wide tire tracks.

The door is unlocked.

Inside it is dark. Hank's thermal HUD reads a form scrambling out of the room and down the hall, and in the light pouring in from the door they find the room to be coated in a drying visceral slurry. Five human skins hang from the ceiling by strings woven of their hair.

Pursuing the figure leads them to the generator room - the scrabbling of shoes on dirt can be heard. Hank opens up and sprays bullets through the door and kicking it in. Inside, the generator appears to have been disassembled, many components removed. A hole has been dug into the concrete floor, leading to a long sloping tunnel of reddish dirt. The walls are honeycombed with smaller burrows. At the mouth is an android wearing a ill-fitting human skin, seams splitting open.

Manny loses control at this point and ineffectually begins punching the android, who screams "Deliver us O Lord I think therefore I think therefore!" and sends a private message to Berkeley begging her to "call off her bruteish servant." She manages to restrain Manny and pulls him off and manages to get some information from the android.

The android (his name was Dess Katrz in my notes but they never asked in the game) had been left behind by others of his cabal. They had set up here in an attempt to "retrieve the Blessed Interface", so that they might combine it with their own [Interface]. Hank knows enough about esoteric theology to figure out that Dess is talking about some means of communicating with the divine. Berkeley plays the game well enough to get the location of the rest of the androids: an old Zaibatsu climate monitoring station north of their current location. Hank and Manny successfully remove Dess' logic core without damaging it.

The trio contacts Friend, who gives them the same option as before - take the money now, or extend their contract. They won't be able to get a ride north until tomorrow, when  Friend sends the cleanup crew in.

The three decide to stay on the job and get a rideshare into town (the very same that had appeared abandoned the first time through). The woman driving them there seems a bit perplexed at their choice to go there, as the town has recently come under the control of the United Planetary Front (the local band of jackbooted space fascists). The team is obviously not very pleased at this, but they decide to stick it out for one night. They get through the checkpoint, papers all in order, and rent a room at a cheap motel for the night. There are banners on facades and thugs on the street corners, and people are going about their business with heads down.

The fact that the local ISWU (Interstellar sex workers' Union chapterhouse, (one of the oldest and toughest union orgs in human space) has clearly been burnt to the ground does not go without worry. If the Front is willing to pick a fight with ISWU, they mean to commit some serious violence.

With tensions high, the group looks for a local watering hole and settle on Amarpreet's, which has good reviews. It's run by a friendly fellow all the way from Earth, who allows Berkeley to take to the stage before the night's scheduled performers arrive. Everyone gets drunk on feni and rice wine, Hank tries to access higher dimensions because he's kind of a quack who believes in psychic meditation (4th and 5th dimensions are empty, 17th is filled with bees). Manny approaches a heavyworlder and hands them a contact card for Friend. Talk around the town is mostly about who nearby could kick out the Front - rumors of Dog Knights moving in from the west are everywhere.

And so they drink into the night, as the world continues its collapsing dance around them.

Mothership Play Report: Gospel of the Throttle

Yeah lets go! Space! Horror!

The Players

Luciamandis "Lucy" Delillo - Teamster (Slantio Pink)
Ilse Lopez - Debtboy (Volkavoy)
Zint Tchoxo - Teamster (Oblidisideryptch)
Lizana Gadora - Thelychroma chaplain (Zelda)
Solid Squid - Uplifted octopus (JOZO)
Berkeley - Liberated karaoke idol gynoid (Mike K.)

The Setup

The planet I set this on (and plan to set games on for the forseeable future) does not yet have a name. I'll get to that later It's a shithole, one of hundreds of marginal worlds bought on the cheap, terraformed to the border of habitability, and used as a dumping ground for the unwanted poor.

The CEO of the company running the colony died a few years ago, setting off a succession crisis that boiled over into a civil war when the company pulled out with the sole warp-capable starship.

The one company scion that remained controls the space elevator and primary orbital habitat. The rest is carved up among dozens of competing factions.

It's Borderlands meets the Sengoku period, basically.

The Job

The Phreak Police (for that is the name of the group) are called up by a repeat client: an anonymous benefactor who just goes by "Friend". Voice changes every time they call, no one trusts them an inch, but they pay well.

The job Friend is paying for is simple. Move a crate from Central to a city a few hundred miles eastward. Straight shot down the highway. Go to the given address, ask for Scipio. He'll take it off your hands. Do not open the box.

They load it up into the truck and with Lucy at the wheel, head out onto the highway. It's looking to be an all-night job and the sun is setting.

Solid Squid, letting cephalopodic curiosity get the best of him, investigates the box with tentacles and a thermal scanner. While he can't see the contents inside, he can clearly see that the crate is giving off heat from a web of fractal threads covering its entire surface.

Metamaterials. A payday far bigger than what Friend is offering if it can be fenced properly. Lucy brings up an occasional associate, one Thimble Slim, but the group decides that the risk is too high until they learn more - Slim's got connections with some of the more stable zaibatsus, but he's a pustulent little ratass and has let them down before.

This conversation is interrupted by the swift appearance of a sizable animal corpse in the road. Lucy's not able to brake or swerve out of the way and runs right into it. The engine is making not-great sounds.

The crew pile out of the truck to investigate. It's one of the native lifeforms - a large grazer with two legs and a stiff counterbalancing tail. Lucy and Zint grab the jack from the truck and start working on repairs. Squid, Ilse, and Berkeley investigate the creature - the body is fresh, within an hour or two, and from the blood on the ground looks like it was dragged onto the road. It smells sweet even in death, a quirk of native biochemistry.

When they return to the truck the radio's gone to static and, more worrisome, the cargo compartment is filled with handprints - all left, all is sticky black grease, trailing across the floor and up the walls from the crate.

Berkeley tries to sing a song to calm everyone down, and fails. Her logic core is not handling this well. The box is slightly hotter under the thermal. They decide to get back on the road as fast as they can, Lisana driving now.

The static on the radio shifts to a modulated voice as the red blinker of a transmission tower appears on the distant horizon.

"Deliver us, O Lord", followed by a string of numbers.

[Aside] I messed up the cipher here, but the moment was still pretty good. I'll mark puzzle improvement down on the list.[/Aside]

Lucy ends up running a program on Berkeley's logic core to get the solution: TO US TO ME BRING IT.

It's well past dark now and they haven't seen a single vehicle the entire trip. There's no change when they pass by a tiny truckstop town - no lights at all. In the beam of the headlights they catch a humanish shape leap off a decaying billboard into the darkness beside the road.

Thirty long seconds pass, and there is a thump from the crate. Then another. A steady thump of rising tempo, coming to rest at a breakneck pace. Solid Squid looks out a slot at the back of the truck with his thermal goggles.

There is a red smear behind them. Squid screams. Lisana floors it. The rest open up the back doors and start dumping whatever junk is still in there - the runner leaps over the obstacles handily.

Ilse grabs her laser cutter and sets the beam in a broad wash, illuminating the road with pale, sickly red.

Seen there, running after the truck, is something that looks like a man. Ten feet tall and clearly not meant to be that big, with mottled, wrinkled skin. The jaw and head are at an obtuse angle. Something, a new head, is emerging from the torn hole that was a mouth.

Panic grips the crew, hitting Squid and Lisana the worst. Squid gnaws off an arm in a moment of stress atavism, and the cephalopod sociopathy that sits underneath his more superficial emotions rises to the surface.

Lisana's player request that, instead of the Death Drive panic result, that she be allowed to crash the truck and die, for the kind of isolation that result would bring would be unbearable for a thelychroma (it was getting late to boot). I said sure, and the truck crashed.

No one lived. The entire party died, even the ones who only took half damage. A true and proper TPK.

Berkeley remains active long enough to pull her head up from the road. She watches as the creature slows to a walk, and ignores the fresh bodies of the Phreak Police. It strides over to the box and rips it open. From within it pulls a limp, naked man, emaciated, cybernetics on his cranium and spine. There is a glow and a distortion of space around his head like a halo. The creature bites it off, and that is all Berkeley sees.

Berkeley's player elected to not use a backup and will begin the next session with full robo-trauma.

Some thoughts now that I actually ran Mothership properly

• Folks really got into choosing character options that sounded fun, though I still need to streamline my house rules.
• Don't use a cipher generator website ten minutes before the game when you need a puzzle.
• I had to houserule a default check of 30+skill for Berkeley's singing, as it didn't fit intelligence.
• Intelligence governs a whole lot of skills, not sure my feelings on that but I think there's room to fiddle. Social attribute, possibly.
• I liked handing out stress rather than halting the flow of action to call for a save. Multiple times I got so caught up in making sure the horror was amped up that calling for a roll would basically have been in retrospect.
• 2d10  is a shit-ton of a damage.
• I feel like Mothership is strangely really good at campaigns. Or not really campaigns, but living worlds. Like there are consequences from this I can spin out in later sessions without worrying about levels and continuity of player group or burning out on a single dungeon. 

Play Report: Lighthouse at the End of the World (Esoteric Enterprises 1)

Rick Shrieber was the kind of history teacher that came into class in chainmail, waving a foam sword about and shouting in Middle English. He had a plush Holy Hand Grenade he'd throw into his colleague's room across the hall. His car had a sticker that read "My other ride is Shadowfax."

And now he's dead. Pancreatic cancer.

Four of his old students piled in an hand-down Honda Odyssey to visit the viewing hours, in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere in southwestern Pennsylvania. They were:

• Gerard Valentine, a warehouse drone. 
• "Sanz" Sanford Hernandez, a social worker.
• "Cap'n" Jerry Clyde, proprietor of a  party boat in the city, the "Naughty Crab"
• Ryan Grimmer - Occupation undefined.

Gerard and Sanz had kept in touch online in the years since, and ended up organizing the carpool. Capn' was pulled in after Gerard stumbled across him on the Naughty Crab during a pub crawl night. sanz, Cap'n, and Ryan were the Terrible Three, who quit their shitty fast food jobs during the summer of their junior year simultaneously by dumping a bag of ice over their shitty fast food manager. But all that is years past now.

The visitation goes well, as well as it could given the circumstances. It's late by the time they leave, and dark well before they are done grabbing something to eat.

The road is empty, dark, silent. Nothing but woods out here, isolated. It's late enough that the local NPR station is wrapping up the BBC news hour, ready to start its night program of Indian music.

In the distance, there's the flash of blinker lights. Sanz (for he was driving the van) comes to an abrubt halt, and the group file out to investigate. Gerard immediately calls 911, and through good luck has a decent connection.

The car had swerved off the road and hit a tree, though not enough to do major damage. The group creep forward to investigate: the driver's-side window is covered in blood. Sanz creeps around the front of the car, finding the driver duct-taped to his seat, left hand attached to the wheel and loose strips indicating that the right had been as well. In the front seat there is a footlocker, wrapped up in a bungee cord.

Gerard, his curiosity getting the better of him, wraps a hand in a bandana and opens the passenger door. Inside, he sees that the man's limp right arm is holding a revolver, and the back seats are filled with a jumbled mess of camping supplies: a tent, a propane stove, bags filled with convenience-store food, Snoballs and Slim Jims. The revolver has three of six bullets remaining: the man's head is a pulped mess (I described it akin to a cobweb made out of meat). There are no bullet holes in the window, or anywhere else in the car.

In the trunk the group finds more cardboard boxes, these filled with VHS tapes and stacks of DVD-Rs, labeled with random letter and number combinations. Gerard tucks one of the tapes into his jacket. Cap'n attempts to take the gun from the man, but is interrupted by a harsh, hissing voice.

"I wouldn't do that..."

The panic barely has time to set in before the lights of a car appear. The state trooper looks exactly like one would imagine: mustache, a bit of a gut, middle aged, straight out of central casting. A cursory inspection of the wrecked car shakes him, and he goes back to his patrol car to radio in to headquarters.

This is when the door of the crashed car opens.

The dead man tears out of the car in a sprint towards the police officer. Sans manages to grab a rock and smash it into the dead man's knee, bringing him to the ground. He tries to pin him there, as the officer brings out his gun, but the dead man's strength might be greater than he had in life. He shakes off Sans, leaps to his feet, and shoots the trooper right in the head.

"...Do it properly this time..."

The dead man shoves the revolver in his mouth and fires twice, and is finally still.

They steal everything in the crashed car, all the tapes and boxes and other supplies, and load them into the van. Both the trooper's gun and the dead man's revolver are taken - in taking the latter, the group finds an ID card for the US Department of Energy.

The solution is unanimous: DRIVE

As the van tears away down the silent road, the gang glimpse twin rows of men in suits, standing in the woods at the fringes of the headlight cones, heads turning to follow them.

Sans' house is closest (the original plan was to stay the night there and then everyone returns home come Saturday), and there is a terrible, tense car ride for nearly 20 minutes.

But they do not seem to have been followed: They arrive safely but shaken. Sans immediately begins telling his sister Sam (with whom he shares the house after inheriting it from their parents) everything that happened.

The door has barely shut when Gerard gets a phone call from a clearly-masked number. He answers, perhaps foolishly. A text-to-speech voice speaks:

"We can help you. Go to the church. Enter the door in the garden behind it, go down the stairs, and knock twice on the red door. Remain there until we come for you. Remove the batteries from your phones."

The gang don't waste much time. Sam is dragged along, and the directions are followed to the letter. By this point it's well past midnight.

The room behind the red door is small, concrete. There's a folding cot, a sink, a toilet with a shower curtain, a table with some magazines and a bit of food. One bare bulb.

Three hours pass.

Knock, knock

The door creaks open to reveal a tired-looking woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a sweatshirt. She introduces herself as Abigail, and in short order breaks the news:

• The party is fucked - they've gained the attention of the people no one wants to notice them.
• She's part of a secret civilian paranormal organization called Lighthouse.
• Lighthouse is willing to help disappear the gang in exchange for their recruitment. There really isn't another option that involves a good ending.
• For the time being the gang needs to get out of the way. 

Getting out of the way involves a journey to a place called the Stygian Library. Abigail removes a piece of chalk, draws a doorway on the wall while chanting in sonorous, bell-like tones, and the concrete unfolds to reveal a small candlelit room of mahogany and brass, smelling of books.

DM Comments

This was a load of fun to run, and the players had a blast. It was a bit railroady-cutsceney, enough that I am not entirely satisfied with the outcome and want to tweak the balance more in the future. But, on the plus side, next session will open up to normal freedoms. The setpieces were effective (and totally my jam in this genre), but they kinda overshadowed the players' abilities to act.

On another plus side, I did a lot more communal setting-building than I normally do (the teacher in particular) and the players got riffing quick.

Level 0 and the transition between normal life and the supernatural remains some of the greatest game material. Further refining it is a long-term progress.

Play Report: Operation HYACINTH

So I ran Delta Green for some friends off-line. It was my first time as Handler and their first time playing it, and it ended up all right. We all had fun.

But I'll be damned if I can write up an interesting play report out of it. I'll try, but much of it feels redundant. This ties into my bigger comments regarding Delta Green as a system, which will follow.

At the opera tonight we have:

• Chris Redfield (Special Operator) 
• Talia (Anthropologist)
• Bo (Engineer)
• Darren (Federal Agent)
• Odin (Special Operator)
• James (Federal Agent)

Operation HYACINTH was stitched together out of two of the 2018 shotgun scenarios (Rendezvous in Rama and Peak DHOLE), which worked pretty neatly together. The team had two main objectives:

1. Take an inventory of the items left in the long-abandoned Camp House and call in a cleanup crew to secure them.
2. Agent Portland, to vanished. Last contact was a message he left with his case officer: "I've got to stop O'Rourke." (This was the party's official cover)

[Aside] I am terribly proud of both my manila-folder conspiracy file referee screen and how the case officer summoned them all to an Italian restaurant for a fake birthday party. She even had a hat. [/Aside]

The Junkyard

A bit of a chat with the Fairfield sheriff's department revealed O'Rourke to be the old drunk who lives in the junkyard. The team apprehended and subdued him in the middle of a murder, but were unable to save the victim, one Michael Mendoza. O'Rourke refuses to talk and seems intent on killing himself before capture. Odin sleeper holds him into submission and ties him up, but not before realizing that the spiral-shaped eyes carved into his skin begin to blink and swivel towards him.

The group investigate the junkyard further. In it they find his mobile home (ransacked: they find a bunch of cassette tapes, a diary, and a copy of View from a Height that had been duct-taped shut. The back cover has a sticker reading "From the library of Jurgen Leitner") and two rows of powered refrigerators (containing the eyeless corpses of Agent Portland and eight other people). Some tire furrows leading out into the woods but are not followed.

Team calls in the case officer and explains the situation. Officer tells them to kill O'Rourke to keep him out of custody and keep looking for whatever is behind this. No further explanation given, and Odin doesn't need one to shoot him.

Team calls the sheriff to come clean up. Story is simple: serial killer, shot in self-defense. The agents do not identify agent Portland, to keep their cover story viable. Some failed bureaucracy checks mean that filling out the paperwork takes the remainder of the evening and it is well after dark when they take off to Camp House.

Camp House

In the car, Chris and Talia are able to skim the diary and pick out that there have been multiple authors, writing about some creature too fast to view.

Camp House is an tiny cabin on the lakeshore, surrounded by a chain-link fence. A bit of reconnaissance shows a space to climb over, though the height and the dark means that nearly everyone makes a clumsy, injurious attempt at getting over. They sneak in the house through the bedroom window and after a quick sweep, head down into the basement.

One wall of the basement has collapsed inward, torn open by an explosion. A bunker hallway extends into the darkness. An oppressive aura settles upon the team. In the distance they hear a thudding beat and whining hum, steadily growing louder as they explore.Within those rooms, the team happens upon...

Items Found Within the Bunker

• VHS tape labeled "Do Not View. Chinese scribbled on it reads "The fat lady sings." (x)
• Disk of red stone engraved with a spiral of unknown characters. (x)
• Hardcover copy of The Hanged King's Tragedy. (x)
• Framed painting: "Still Life of Piles of Meat".
• An algae-choked fish tank containing a sea slug and a silver bell.
• Clay tablets arrayed with series of dots in rough pentagons. (x)
• Silver consider with an inset triangle of USB ports. (x)
• Severed right hand with bright red skin. (x)
• A blue pellet labeled "alzabo extract". (x)
• A King James Bible with heavy fungal growth. (x)
• A leather-bound book stamped with a sun disk, in calligraphy of an unknown language. (x)
• A fuligin cloak and mask. (x)
• Wooden crate; customs stamp states it contains human souls, received in London May 1892.
• Cracked black mirror, engraved with the word "FLAGA". (x)
• Series of mason jars containing cuttlefish in formaldehyde. 
• A rifle with strange organic protuberances where the bullets would normally go.

They proceed to steal everything marked (x) because what the case officer doesn't know can't hurt her.

At the final room the team is greeted by a vision of a man frozen in the moment of suicide. Chris freaks out and blows the corpse away with his shotgun. When he and Darren go closer to investigate, both of them witness the man's final moments of life. A voice behind them says "I've already called them" and the trigger is pulled.

The final room has nothing but a burnt chair. The music is muffled here. As the team turns to leave, there is the soft but unmistakable noise of something falling from the ceiling behind them and moving about. The piping is deafening.

There is a swift battery of fire but the blobby pale betentacled thing plays on. Chris, Darren, and James hit their breaking point. Chris gets smashed by a flailing tentacle, but survives the blow. The team books it out of Camp House, dives into their cars, and tears out into the night. They call the case officer, explain everything but the stolen goods. Cleanup will handle it. Return to the Portland case.

Before they get back to the hotel, they can see the fire glowing above the trees at Camp House.

Chris Redfield Has a Crippling Sexual Attraction to the Morbidly Obese

The VHS was clearly labeled "Do Not View", but Chris had hit half of his original sanity by the end of the session. What he got was some grainy footage of a strip club interior and an 800 pound woman straight-up eating a dude and dancing her way out of there way faster than even normal-sized people are capable of.

So yeah. He's a bit fucked up now.

[Aside]This was Y'golonac in the original shotgun but I subbed in the Bloated Woman for absurdity's sake [/Aside]

Some thoughts on Delta Green as a whole:

There's a lot of stuff I enjoyed. Stocking a room full of crazy bullshit (how many sources can you name?) and dangling mission threads like so many fish-hooks. Character creation that was straightforward enough that I was able to get the players (who generally don't play RPGs unless I am running something) to make their own characters instead of premades. Players exploiting their Bonds to get illegal goods. Players embracing SAN loss as a reason to go outrageous. All good and great. This genre is my wheelhouse.

But the game still feels 15-20 years behind. It's good for what it is but if I think I'd much rather do something with Esoteric Enterprises purely on the grounds of the amount of material I can hack into it and the ease of making more. DG is fun, but gigantic statblocks and unreadably dense scenarios are the standard - and the shotgun scenarios only sometimes alleviate this. I still had to edit them down into one-page formats.

Not a fan of how the game lends itself to "Can I use [skill name]" either.





My quest continues.

Play Report: High Times in the Fungal Core (Danscape ep 4 & 5)

Previously on the Danscape: Wolves, Amazons, and the newest incarnation of Lantern Boy. A double header this time. As usual, the crew of the Divided Survival Probability is:

• Waterblossom: eladrin magelander, organ farm escapee, frail bag of trauma (Michael K)
• Blake, former gigolo, social climber, space drug addict, exiled queen (FM Geist)
• Gavel, horrific space-wolf-man creature (Martin O)

Episode 4: A Requiem for Thimble Slim

With Blake in dire need of plastic surgery and Gavel cursed to space-wolfhood and use of a vocal synthesizer that replaces all curses with 'spaghetti', the crew makes their way to the myceliumated habitat of the Fungal Core, seeking out the aid of a diasporic amazon clan (known for their terrible, clashing-pattern fashion sense). They are aided by Ed, Sasquatch fighter (Sam P).

The coupon for plastic surgery is only good for part of the deal (and the curse must be broken by collecting the tongue of a noted astrologer), so Madam Ratsi (of Madam Ratsi's House of Fashion) says she'll cover the rest if the crew can put the squeeze on this flake by the name of Thimble Slim.

Tracking down Thimble Slim takes them around the Core, and we learn:

• The astrologer is currently dead, his tower blocked up.
• Street Mimes are allergic to water, and lay invisible eggs (Ed has one)
• Cordyceps-infested space pigeons are everywhere.
• Lantern Boy was left at the public library to learn the terrible secrets of warfare, at Blake's direction.
• A book on astrology is then checked out of the library.

They are eventually able to track down Thimble Slim to a seedy dive called the Red Heron Bar & Brothel. Some slick talking with the bouncer (who is all for teaching Slim a lesson) persuaded him to send Slick into the back alley when he came in.

The crew devours a bucket of pigeon-wings with blue moon cheese sauce while they wait.

After half an hour or so, the back door is thrown open and Thimble Slim is tossed out. He is then, through clever application of hot cheese sauce, forced to read through the book of Astrology. While slim's head is holographic, the stump of his neck still contained a tongue-like muscle-flap, which was then removed. What remains of his stuffing is beaten out of him for walking out on paying his bill.= at madam Ratsi's.

Returning to the salon, Blake gets his surgery. Gavel decides to forgo breaking his curse, and just gets full-body augmentation surgery so now he's some horrific bipedal space-wolf-man with a human head inside his mouth, spreading fear and terror wherever he goes. Ed gets a nano sleeve tattoo of fake advertisements. Lantern boy continues reading strategy books.

This section has probably my favorite bizarre-gross monster description I have ever used, as an exotic dancer in the Red Heron - a cross between a tube-worm colony and the Diana of Ephesus.

Episode 5: Stone Cold Fremen Lantern Boy

Some time has passed since the last installment, and the group has settled in, more or less, in the Fungal Core. The crew is joined by Waterblossom's friend from his brief cult interlude: Rob, the corrupted anti-mutant (Max Cantor).  Blake decides to become a queen. Gavel embraces his horrible space-wolf-man form and starts on the path of the Very Good Dog. Blake and Gavel inject themselves with spell tumors, no side effects yet.

Blake immediately casts Date Ward, preventing his death for the next four days.

News arrives that Salamander Lady and her resistance have made good on the weapon recovered in Episode 3 - the Aboleth is dead. The good news is overshadowed by the fact that Salamander Lady has thrown Blake under the bus and stolen all the glory and fame for herself.

More importantly, news arrives that FRIDAY NITE FITE-DROME is to be held at St. Pugilist's orphanarium. Lantern Boy, having been pushed onto the militant path, requests entry. Gavel and Blake agree and support the choice, Waterblossom gibbers helplessly.

Lantern Boy is signed up for the Dunkeldronk Urchins' Fighting Union and, through the combined power of studying military strategy and Gavels Really Good Dog moral support, beats the ever loving shit out of the first half of the fights and goes into halftime 5-0.

It is here that the crew see none other than a destitute and clearly traumatized Corrin Shen, who has falled all the way to betting, and losing, on underground orphan fights. Blake makes contact and advises him (as his doctor, Queen Doctor Glitterhammer) to bet everything on "Stone Cold Fremen" Lantern Boy.

The trio finish off half time by giving LB a hidden scalpel-shank, some space cocaine, and the Weird Chair (as provided by the spell of the same name)

Rounds 6-9 are once again a shoe-in (save a significant loss in Round 7). Round 10 reveals itself to be not against another orphan, but a tall, pale man by the name of Osric the Shrike. (Spoilers: he is definitely a vampire) Blake attempts to get the crowd riled up, and instead manages to trigger no less than 16 potential suitors, drawn to his beautiful queenliness.

Round 10 is simple - score three hits, and the money is theirs. Gavel uses his spell _Find Strike_ to determine that Shrike has been stabbed in the general heart region recently (this was to imply that his heart was on the other side - it did not actually matter, as we will see.)

Lantern Boy (now under the control of the players) decides to go in with the Weird Chair as a weapon. With each strike it blackens and twists out of shape, until with the third hit it shatters and summons a horrible bloodshot eye demon that droops down from the ceiling.

Everyone panics. Gavel throws down his own Summon, grabs Lantern boy, and attempts to flee, taking damage from the Eye's great tentacle eyelashes. Blake and Waterblossom fight back, joined now by the out of control blood demon that Gavel had summoned.

But a few fans of the hammer and some torpedo sharks are enough to take down the Eye. Waterblossom flees, and Blake remains behind to take advantage of Date Ward.  He manages to beat the blood demon to death, though is reduced to ground beef and salsa in the process.

With the money from the fights, the crew looks towards future investments: reconstructive surgery to fix Blake, a hydroponic drug garden for the ship, and potentially tracking down blake's potential henchman-husbands or going after Waterblossom's organ-stealing creators.

The question is no longer "how will Lantern Boy die?"

It has become "how will anyone else survive?"

YA HYA CHOUHADA

Beloch's Questions

1. Thimble Slim was wronged, and absolutely knows. Osric the Shrike, ditto.
2. Stealth and this party are not things that go together.
3. Corrin Shen, if he survived, made a whole lot of money off of LB.
4. After the Orphanarium disaster, unrest is spreading through the habitat as people turn up dead or mangled.
5. "We're horrible people!"
6. Lantern Boy is now a common name in the FITE-DROME circuit.
7. Revenge upon the organ farmers (Waterblossom), dealing with henchmen husbands (Blake), seeking out Blake's king to reclaim his kingdom (also Blake)

Play Report: I Come From the Land of the Ice and Snow (Danscape ep. 3)

Previously, on the Danscape: A cult is joined and a war is inadvertently accelerated.

Tonight's episode stars the original crew from the Kadesh Club:

• Waterblossom, eladrin magelander nee organ farm escapee (Michael K)
• Blake, a face-stealing traveler and former gigolo (FM Geist)
• Gavel, a traveler who just oozes everywhere. (Martin O)

With Waterblossom returned from the cult retreat house (head full of mindworm knowledge) and Gavel and Blake returning from the mother of all drug benders (heads full of drugs and drug accessories), the trio of the Divided Survival Power return once again to Lady Sidris' station.

Outside, the Aboleth has been raising dead and disrupting travel all throughout this corner of the cosmos. It seems dead-set on attacking and destroying old mindworm facilities and stations - a lucky break for everyone else, at least those not mind-slaved and zombified in its war effort.

From this chaos Blake receives a message from Salamander Lady. She has made quantum leaps up the social structure in the fashion world and has been utilizing her newfound wealth in philanthropic charity efforts to aid those fleeing the aboleth's warpath. As part of this, she has a task for the trio: retrieve a mindworm weapon from the old war, tucked away on a frozen shithole of a planet.

To aid the group, she provides the group with survival supplies and a cloning chamber for the ship. After some discussion they decide to clone Gavel's spell tumor and head off towards the Devoured Planet (because I just got Frostbitten and Mutilated and wanted to try it out.) Their target is an ancient tower of mindworm make.

What follows is a terrible trek up a frozen river, across wind-blasted icy hellscape. Gavel plays the world's worst game of I-Spy. Further incidents as follows.

1. Blake steals the severed head of an alien goat off the desecrated statue of an ancient king. He tries talking to it multiple times throughout the adventure.

2. An island in the river is revealed to be a giant bone sticking out of a mound of fatty flesh. Blake steals samples for potential cloning, and grabs a magical charm-shard to boot.

3. Crossing the river, the group sees a bluff with a gigantic monolith. At the base, a herd of boars: two large males, some females, and a bunch of boarlets. A standoff occurs, and turns to violence.

3a. Blake is gored with a critical hit while trying to stab his boar in its blind eye. He miraculously survives and manages to put a plasma bolt through its head. The boar's death throes drop Blake below 0, leaving him with a damaged eye (according to Emmy Allen's Horrible Wounds)

3b. Waterblossom attempts to stun the boars with Washington's Laugh. Both resist the merriment, but their teeth are turned to wood.

3c. Gavel realizes too late that he forgot to calibrate the rail-rifle that had been bolted onto his hover chair. Waterblossom offs the other boar by launching a selachian torpedo via Moses' Shark.

4. The boars defeated, the crew converse for a moment as to whether or not they should loot the grave goods buried beneath the monolith and potentially clone one of the ancient warriors. They decide against it. Blake fashions a boarhide eyepatch.

5. An hour's pause is made to avoid a trio of amazons passing by on wolfback.

6. The crew enters a forest near nightfall. With wolves howling in the distance, the crew takes shelter in a nearby cottage, which contains a young girl who is remarkably non-plussed by the fact that wolves killed her parents.

7. Blake climbs up to the roof through the chimney and takes potshots at the wolves for a while after sundown. The rest get fitful sleep as the wolves prowl and howl just outside.

8. Come morning, the trio head out. Girl (for that is what her parents called her) is renamed Lantern-Boy by Blake ("Oh hurrah, I am overjoyed, clearly this is not a portent of awful things to come." and given a lantern.

9. The tower is reached. The group enter and are swiftly separated in the darkness.

10. Blake glimpses a confused Donson the golem in the gloom, but rushes to aid the friend crying out in the darkness. Waterblossom likewise avoids temptation. Gavel beats the shit out of a little troll thing with a monomolecular greatsword. Eventually they all meet up with Lantern-Boy in the central chamber.

11. In the final chamber, they see mounds of treasure, an ancient mindworm crone, and the weapon. Blake is volunteered by Gavel and Lantern-Boy to partake in the challenge.

12. Blake attempts to seduce the amazon he is to fight with. She says 'after we fight'. Blake successfully grapples her, knocks her axe away, and puts a plasma bolt directly through her skull, tragically cutting many hopes and dreams short.

13. Blake and Waterblossom are granted vials of holy water by the crone. Gavel is transformed into a space wolf. The ship is called in, the weapon is retrieved, and there is great wonder about whether or not they should even bother breaking Gavel's curse, because now they can load up a space wolf with spell tumors. Blake sells boarmeat for a decent price and makes fancy leathers out of it.

Even as a space wolf, Gavel is able to smoke space opium.

I love this group.

Beloch's Questions

1. The wolves of the Devoured Planet have become Blake's major rivals. That his close friend and drug buddy is now a wolf is deeply traumatizing.
2. They managed to get to the tower without attracting the attention of the amazons. This may or may not last.
3. Lantern-Boy is benefiting for the moment. Her future remains uncertain, but she is currently not being eaten by wolves.
4. No major NPC deaths.
5. News of the weapon's successful recovery was passed on to Salamander Lady, which means it will become major news in the near future.
6. See above: as soon as this hits newstands, people will be having opinions. Mostly positive, considering what the aboleth is doing.
7. Gavel's wolf-curse  and whether or not it will be broken; Blake's hatred of wolves and trauma over killing the one woman horrible enough to understand him, plus fixing up his gaping chest wound.

Play Report: The Kadesh Club

Playing tonight in the wonderful world of the Danscape Planejammer, we have:

• Waterblossom, eladrin magelander nee organ farm escapee (Michael K)
• Blake, a face-stealing traveler and former gigolo (FM Geist)
• Gavel, a traveler who just oozes everywhere. (Martin O)

We open to find the three crewmembers of the Divided Survival Power in a terrible pickle. They've been trying their hand at running tea and opium out of Yoon-Suin, but the most recent shipment ended up stolen to the last gram by one of Blake's many trysts.

The Lady Sidris, drow matriarch and crime lord, is not pleased with this at all. She wants her money. But, she decides that calling in a slave cleaning the floor of blood would be too much of a hassle - the trio is given a shot at clearing their debt: go to the Kadesh Club, and steal a book from its proprietor, famous genasi businessman Corrin Shen. "You'll know it when you see it, they are told."

Before they leave, Gavel and Blake spend all of their remaining money on opium. Gavel's species leaves sticky ooze everywhere, and so ends up outfitted with a Harkonnen gravity chair, after Blake persuades a lobster-alien dockworker to help them out with a bit of seduction and some drugs.

The Kadesh Club is a place for rich people to go slumming and engage in some war tourism. Being that it orbits around the gas giant Charnel House, where devilish and demonic fleets meet to do battle.  Unfortunately, the war has lulled for a bit, so no fireworks were on the docket.

A casino resort filled with rich people is Blake's natural habitat - he swiftly integrates himself into the posse of the rightes, strongest looking individual in the atrium, a golem anmed Donson who looks like he came right out Renaissance Florence. With WB and Gavel are volunteered to act as servants, Blake handily begins flirting with the golem, and everyone goes to the nearby Valhalla Bar.

(Yes, the one from the game. To complete my horrible reference hackjob, they all witness the manager tossing out Space Dandy and Meow.)

Drinks are had and information is gathered. (The drink list and descriptions from VA-11 HALL-A come in very handy) The crew learns that Shen is a collector of rare art and artifacts, and appears on the casino floor every night to welcome the guests.

The crowd moves on to the casino floor, and the trio start scouting out options. Shen's quarters are seen to overlook the floor, with a single guarded entrance on the stage. Gavel joins a blackjack table and a wins a small amount of money. Waterblossom mind-melds with a guard to steal information and learns that Shen is late tonight - the attempt to act as a desperately-needed crystals-and-chanting healer falls on deaf ears. Blake accompanies Donson to the dice games and scopes out the staff entrances.

Gavel finally finds himself in a horribly complex game that he only manages to survive in because WB gleaned info from the octopoid dealer, and then mind-melded with his fellow ne'er do well. One of the other players gets shot. A discussion with an elf about the benefits of terribly impractical clothing are had. Gavel finishes out his hand by cheating with one of his mutations, a micro-teleport, swiping an extra card and taking advantage of an obscure loophole to walk away with 1000 gold pieces.

At this point the lights go down, the spotlights hit the stage, and from the elevator comes the man himself, dressed to the nines. He gives his speech and goes about shmoozing. WB passes by and gleans images of an angry woman who looks something like a tropical fish from Shen's mind. Blake convinces Donson to buy them a suite in the resort, heads through the doors, meets a salamander lady, and does drugs in the bathroom with her while discussing their life story and hip new fashion tips.

As Shen makes his rounds, Gavel uses his spell-tumor to cast Resounding Command at a vat-cloned halfling creature, forcing it to push him directly into Shen. What follows is a grand display of bellyaching and faked injury the likes of which FIFA players would be awestruck to see.

A doctor is called for, but no need! Shen is, in fact, a doctor! Swiftly Gavel is grav-wheeled out of the main floor and past a staff door.

Meanwhile: Blake has decided to set up salamander woman higher up in the social world to have a contact for the future, and gives helpful fashion tips to get the most out of a wardrobe.

With nothing working, Gavel hands Shen a sending stone phone and groans that he must have his special doctor to have any hope of survival: one Dr. Muffin Glitterhammer.

The call distracts Blake from his fashionable dreams, but gets him swiftly whisked over to where the others are. Blake immediately goes whole hog on being a fake doctor, and we are treated to one of the greatest lines I have yet recorded as a DM.

"Cocaine gives me a bonus at being a doctor."

Blake demands an isolation room, far away from the peasants and their germs - Shen, displaying a great amount of generosity, volunteers his own quarters. The four take the service elevator up. WB is zapping Gavel all the way there with his color changing cantrip.

Shen's apartment contains a great many expensive art pieces, a ghost security system named Bauvert,  a large fish tank containing black water and abyssal icthians, and most importantly, the book.

Blake requests obscure items for the appropriate holistic treatment (blue cat milk, a ball of solid gold, 2 liters of plasma) while manuvering Gavel's gurney around to take a better look at the book. Thick as a DCC core, bound in blue leather, recursive MC Escher occult symbols all over, and claw marks from the inside.

Know it when you see it indeed.

With the materials delivered, Blake declares that the evil has been taken out of Gavel's body. Gavel uses this opportunity to feign a horrible seizure, driving the other three to be whisked away into another room.

Unfolding his handy boarding axe, Gavel smashes the book case as if by accident. Bauvert (who is basically just Poe from Netflix's Altered Carbon adaptation) descends from the ceiling and starts a banshee wail, summoning Shen. Gavel tosses his axe at the fish tank, leaving a large crack.

Something moves in the blackness.

With no time to waste, Blake sweeps Shen into the elevator for safekeeping as the cracks enlarge and more water pours out. WB and Gavel grab the book just as the tank shatters; dark water floods the room to reveal a fucking aboleth.

"It's like if AM was a jawless fish." - Me, describing the aura of said aboleth.

WB whips out his holdout blaster and shoots out the window. The two go flying out, using the gravchair as a way to slow their fall.

On the stage, Blake hands the overwhelmed Shen to some guards, telling them to get him to safetly. Looking up he is able to catch the descent of his two compatriots, followed by the emergence of the aboleth in a cloud of psychic force fields and unbridled abyssal hate.

Blake empties his gun at the creature, abnd while a few bolts manage to break through the shields, the aboleth is unaffected.

Needless to say, they get the fuck out of there.

Amidst the panicking throngs they do manage to spot the salamander lady stepping up and orchestrating emergency evacuation procedures. The manager of the Vallhalla bar is out front screaming "YEAH! RIOT!" and suplexes a fleeing noble on principle. Blake grabs seven gold pieces out of his pockets.

They bang up some other ships on the way out fo the parking garage, but Blake blames it on one of Donson's followers who was giving him the stink-eye.

Upon return, Lady Sidris' guards immediately take the book from them and declare the matter settled. The guard captain is persuaded to look into some backup IDs in case things go south.

And with that, Waterblossom collapses into a weeping, traumatized heap as Blake and Gavel do more drugs.

BONUS TIME; ANSWERING BELOCH'S QUESTIONS

1. Who did them wrong? Some of Donson's syncophants were definitely plotting something.
2. Did they do anything stealthily? Hell no. But also yes, in that no one knew it was them.
3. Who benefitted? Lady Sidris. Shen's other rivals. The Aboleth.
4. Aftereffects of death? Hundreds of the cosmic rich are now dead, meaning tabloid sales are UP, power grabs are UP, and worker revolts are UP.
5. Did the characters attract attention? A whole lot of it, but not exactly directly to them.
6. Desires / interests to hook players in future? Socialite nonsense is ace, use it.