Battle Beyond the Stars
Feb. 26th, 2005 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothWe had a session of the GURPS campaign last night. At one point, as the party was wandering aimlessly, I picked up one of the jillion GURPS supplements lying around the room, and said, "Okay, I'm going to flip to a random page of this book, and whatever's on it will happen."
"Um, that's Compendium II..."
"So?" Flip flip flip. "Space combat is resolved as a series of contests between individual craft..."
So most of the rest of the session was spent in space. Or at least, in a space ship.
The party, along with a suspicious cat, appeared in the middle of the crater on Kitten's homeworld. It was a big crater -- about a mile diameter -- so they started walking towards the edge, avoiding the molten spots out of habit, even though their heat protections were still up, and they probably would have been fine. As they neared the edge, Don spotted the cordon of police officers surrounding the crater and trying mostly to keep people out.
Not wanting the face the cops and answer for the accidental destruction they'd caused, Kitten made the party fly, and they swooped up and over the police line between two officers. One of them saw something, but couldn't make out what it was, so they more or less got away clean. Ish.
Of course, they were still in a somewhat damaged area of a city that none of them were familiar with, so they wandered aimlessly, listening to bystanders talk about the destruction. Before they could decide what to do next (other than 'find someplace to sleep', since they'd been up almost 24 hours), they were kidnapped by a UFO.
A beam of light washed over them, and they found themselves standing on a circular field in the middle of a small (20' across) circular flying craft, whose presumed pilot (looked like a yeti) slumped to the ground unconscious, releasing a lever that it had just pulled.
The flying saucer (and its pilot) had already been shot full of bullet holes, and through the viewscreen they could see another saucer pull up and fly out of sight -- presumably, about to come around for another pass. Don thought he recognized the sort of controls -- he'd gone through dozens of arrangements while building the car for John -- so he decided he'd take the pilot seat, and with John on the gun controls (that is, the button that fired the guns) and Kitten examining the alien, what might charitably be described as a dogfight ensued.
They did get a few hits in -- the enemy pilot got overconfident, letting DOn hit the brakes to send him hurtling in front where they could shoot at him -- and their innovative 'let's keep crashing into the ground' strategy made it hard for their enemy to keep them in a proper target lock.
All the while, the enemy was shouting at them to land so that they could be arrested for breaking the non-interference treaty -- in a language only Kitten could understand, though. His description of it to the others was 'he's using a bunch of big words I don't understand!' The alien who'd kidnapped them was still alive (or else Kitten wouldn't have been able to borrow his language), and implored Kitten to come back with him to his planet, which was in dire need of 'new genetic material'. Kitten cringed -- this was clearly a request for aid, which he was sworn to agree to, and yet...
Eventually, the party's UFO's engine was damaged, and spewed out a cloud of smoke as Don tried to push it to the limit, hoping to escape. While the enemy's vision was obscured, he accidentally rammed the craft into the ground again, and in a stroke of luck the enemy sped off into the distance, assuming that he'd successfully piloted away at high speed like he'd intended.
Unfortunately, local cops from Kitten's world were now swarming about on flying carpets, responding to the dogfight and assorted collateral damage. Don was flabbergasted. "Flying... carpets?! Who rides around on a scrap of cloth?" The alien was panicked, and screamed that he had to set off the self destruct before he fell into the hands of primitives, who would dissect him.
"Wait!" Kitten said, "I can send you somewhere that none of them will find you, instead!" The alien told him to do it, and so Kitten plane-shifted him to hell.
And, unfortunately, also shifted the UFO and everything in it, and the cops swarming about, and probably some nearby innocents, although they'd have simply fallen into the darkness without much fanfare, so it was hard to tell. All of them went back to hell. Yay.
Unfortunately, not all of them went to hell at the exact same time, and Don had time to fall to the ground as the UFO disappeared around him, before vanishing himself. He quickly snatchered out a magnet, though, and attached himself to its hull, giving him a wonderful view as the cops foolishly cast light spells to see where they were... drawing flocks of blackbirds, which they tried to fight with elemental magic. Oops.
Only one of the cops -- a rat -- was smart enough to ditch his carpets and hang off the UFO instead, which wasn't being swarmed... soon the others had been glommed onto and devoured. The rat and Don stared at each other for a while, until Kitten noticed they were outside and teleported them into the UFO.
They seemed to be safe, at least for the moment, but they were in hell, which freaked out the rat, and annoyed the cat and probably the rest of the party. Kitten thought that he could probably send them back once he'd rested and recovered his fatigue, but that would take a while, and in the meantime they exchanged some information. Or, well, the rat took their statements regarding the UFO incident, then volunteered the name of this dimension (Rat: "This is Melchior." Cat: "Hey, that's my name!") and what he knew about the talismans that had caused the recent explosion:
There were five sets of talismans, stationed at five ley-line crossings near Athens to protect the five 'dangerous' magic schools. Recently, the one under the necromantic college had apparently exploded, while the luck and demonology sets had somehow been moved to Athens proper, where they were causing some amount of chaos (but nothing like the full evacuation of Athens east). The party knew all that. He also told them that Seers had predicted that 'thousands would die' if the sets under Athens were removed, which was consistent with 'they blow up', since unlike the necromatic college (which according to the rumors going around had saved many of their students caught in the blast) they were unprepared for such an event. And, as a bit of history, the rat remarked that the protections had had to be cast across multiple worlds to be fully effective, and two 'essentially uninhabited' alternate worlds had been selected to anchor them. Two thousand years ago, when they were installed.
The rat also 'healed' the alien by giving him a psionic illusion that he was no longer wounded, so the alien started walking around on broken legs, trying to fix the engine with Don's help.
Eventually, before Kitten was fully rested, the cat convinced him that it would be safer to exit the dimension by pushing through the lattice instead of by using his often-unpredictable magic. Don noted that the lattice was too small for the UFO to fit, but experiments with the craft's gun showed that the material it was made out of was much weaker than the ship's hull, so he was willing to try pushing through.
So that's what they did -- with the sound of the lattice collapsing on itself behind them as they cut a wide swath. The cat, impatient as the lattice seemed to go on forever, leapt on the controls and pushed them to full speed -- and the lattice crumbled and dissolved around them, leaving them in empty space. After a bit, the stars started to appear... then a sun started spiralling out of nothing and forming itself. The cat wanted them to fly into the sun, but Don wouldn't allow that.
Kitten and the rat talked about the nature of Melchior -- the dimension and the cat both -- and eventually decided that this 'cat' was no cat, and was in fact an evil entity that had been imprisoned, and which they might have just released. "We have to kill it now, before it regains its full power!" the rat insisted, and the cat finally noticed this and put him to sleep.
That was the last straw -- Kitten blinked the cat onto the field in the center of the ship, then flipped the lever to teleport it out into space. As they were travelling at a high rate of speed, this quickly left the creature far behind... but it still flailed out at Kitten mentally several times, until he snatched up John's mental-nullifying torc and put it on.
The alien activated the ship's astrogation computer, and told them that they were apparently in their home system. "But you have to come back with me, to my homeworld. Our race is dying, and we need women."
"But... we're not..."
"You are all women, are you not? You must be! You have no fur!"
"Do you want me to SHOW YOU?" snapped Kitten.
"Nooo!" the alien cried, hiding his face, "A lady should not say such things! Especially one who is to be the honored mother of our race..."
The planet that was supposed to be there, according to the map, wasn't, but there was a planet-sized glass globe that seemed to be filling up with smoke as they watched. By the time they'd overshot it by way-too-far trying to land manually (John had wisely advised Don not to aim right for it) and were heading back on autopilot, it looked like a planet should... and the illusion of no-injury wore off, incapacitating the alien again.
The craft, on autopilot, hovered to a stop near the edge of a large crater, but this crater was surrounded by trees and fields instead of a city. So they weren't on Kitten's world, at least, assuming this was the same crater. Don took the controls again, and flew high up into the air, and they got their bearings and, at John's suggested, decided to follow the river to Athens, to see which Athens it was.
Unfortunately, Athens in its current state didn't like to be headed to. Their engine went on the blink again, and Don's jerry-rigging trick didn't work twice. The native village and/or mine was closer, so they headed their instead... and Don brought the craft in for a landing in the center of the village... upside down, after skipping across the ground like a rock, then flipping it onto its edge and rolling a path of destruction through the town.
Needless to say, while the craft's inertial dampeners kept anyone inside from being hurt, the party was not enthusiastic about being associated with that landing. Kitten had the bullet holes spew out clouds of tear gas when the village's warriors approached to investigate, to buy some time, but soon enough the shaman (Little Bear, was it?) arrived with his spirits to take care of this 'marauding beast'. It was time to leave.
Don messed around with the teleporter and the engine, and flipped the craft to aim the exit pad up into the air at an angle -- they'd be able to teleport reasonably far away from the village, at the cost of appearing way up in the air. So Kitten flew the party... and *tried* to fly the rat (who'd woken up, awakened by the fifth attempt after the first four went wild in unfortunate ways) but accidentally gave him a 'death vision' instead. "Woah! I just saw myself falling to my death.."
Figuring (falsely) that the rat was simply unable to have Kitten cast spells properly on him, the rat instead clung to Kitten's back while they teleported out of the village, as a giant badger spirit dragged the UFO down underground, where it could do no more harm. With the wounded and unconscious alien still inside it, as the party had forgotten (or otherwise neglected) to bring him along.
After landing, they talked about what to do. John didn't want to go back to the village, as 'Little Arrow' had broken an important law bringing a feral vampire (crow) into the village. Everyone else did want to go there, though, as they were really really tired and needed somewhere to sleep. So, Kitten disguised him as a random (female) Easterner (as the residents of Athens were called in this world), getting it right on the second try, after first briefly disguising not only John, but the nearest 17,000 animals, bugs, and trees...
At any rate, they returned to the village, and gave their report to the chief, once he was done cleaning up the aftermath of the UFO landing. They reported the destruction of the city they'd been sent to clear out "It's definately safe to walk around in now, though." "It's a crater. We need a city to move these refugees into." and Kitten insisted (forestalling any requests for aid, which he'd be required to accept) that it was too dangerous for them to try to break another of these protective fields. The chief asked them if they could at least go and try to find some trace of the scouts he'd sent to the other fields, who hadn't come back... and Kitten agreed that that would be acceptable.
John, who'd given the cover story of having lived in a dwelling outside the field of death that had been destroyed by the explosion, refused to be sent to the kitchens to do women's work, and insisted that 'she' would accompany Kitten and Don. The chief seemed inclined to let her.
As they left, dismissed and given the rest of the day off to rest, the rat indicated that he'd stay behind to talk with the chief some. The party set up tents, dropped John's disguise once out of sight, and went to sleep.
Kitten was awakened a few hours later by the rat, who told him that it was his duty to arrest him for his crimes -- even if he had done nothing wrong intentionally, the accidental destruction of the necromantic school would be punished by compensatory damages sufficient to enslave him as a debtor for the rest of his life (and considering who he'd be enslaved to, probably quite a bit longer than that). "However, I have no legal enforcement powers in this place, so I instead related your crimes to the chief, and will let him punish you as he sees fit."
"I suspected as much..."
"I must get back to my world to report on what I've learned from you," the rat continued. "Can you send me back? Or at least try?"
"It might work better in the dark," Kitten said, "My magic seems more reliable then. Come back tonight and I'll make an attempt."
"Good luck, then," the rat replied, walking off. "I'll come to see you after nightfall."
last session | next session
I wasn't especially sleepy during the game, but I'm sort of tired now... *yawn*
"Um, that's Compendium II..."
"So?" Flip flip flip. "Space combat is resolved as a series of contests between individual craft..."
So most of the rest of the session was spent in space. Or at least, in a space ship.
The party, along with a suspicious cat, appeared in the middle of the crater on Kitten's homeworld. It was a big crater -- about a mile diameter -- so they started walking towards the edge, avoiding the molten spots out of habit, even though their heat protections were still up, and they probably would have been fine. As they neared the edge, Don spotted the cordon of police officers surrounding the crater and trying mostly to keep people out.
Not wanting the face the cops and answer for the accidental destruction they'd caused, Kitten made the party fly, and they swooped up and over the police line between two officers. One of them saw something, but couldn't make out what it was, so they more or less got away clean. Ish.
Of course, they were still in a somewhat damaged area of a city that none of them were familiar with, so they wandered aimlessly, listening to bystanders talk about the destruction. Before they could decide what to do next (other than 'find someplace to sleep', since they'd been up almost 24 hours), they were kidnapped by a UFO.
A beam of light washed over them, and they found themselves standing on a circular field in the middle of a small (20' across) circular flying craft, whose presumed pilot (looked like a yeti) slumped to the ground unconscious, releasing a lever that it had just pulled.
The flying saucer (and its pilot) had already been shot full of bullet holes, and through the viewscreen they could see another saucer pull up and fly out of sight -- presumably, about to come around for another pass. Don thought he recognized the sort of controls -- he'd gone through dozens of arrangements while building the car for John -- so he decided he'd take the pilot seat, and with John on the gun controls (that is, the button that fired the guns) and Kitten examining the alien, what might charitably be described as a dogfight ensued.
They did get a few hits in -- the enemy pilot got overconfident, letting DOn hit the brakes to send him hurtling in front where they could shoot at him -- and their innovative 'let's keep crashing into the ground' strategy made it hard for their enemy to keep them in a proper target lock.
All the while, the enemy was shouting at them to land so that they could be arrested for breaking the non-interference treaty -- in a language only Kitten could understand, though. His description of it to the others was 'he's using a bunch of big words I don't understand!' The alien who'd kidnapped them was still alive (or else Kitten wouldn't have been able to borrow his language), and implored Kitten to come back with him to his planet, which was in dire need of 'new genetic material'. Kitten cringed -- this was clearly a request for aid, which he was sworn to agree to, and yet...
Eventually, the party's UFO's engine was damaged, and spewed out a cloud of smoke as Don tried to push it to the limit, hoping to escape. While the enemy's vision was obscured, he accidentally rammed the craft into the ground again, and in a stroke of luck the enemy sped off into the distance, assuming that he'd successfully piloted away at high speed like he'd intended.
Unfortunately, local cops from Kitten's world were now swarming about on flying carpets, responding to the dogfight and assorted collateral damage. Don was flabbergasted. "Flying... carpets?! Who rides around on a scrap of cloth?" The alien was panicked, and screamed that he had to set off the self destruct before he fell into the hands of primitives, who would dissect him.
"Wait!" Kitten said, "I can send you somewhere that none of them will find you, instead!" The alien told him to do it, and so Kitten plane-shifted him to hell.
And, unfortunately, also shifted the UFO and everything in it, and the cops swarming about, and probably some nearby innocents, although they'd have simply fallen into the darkness without much fanfare, so it was hard to tell. All of them went back to hell. Yay.
Unfortunately, not all of them went to hell at the exact same time, and Don had time to fall to the ground as the UFO disappeared around him, before vanishing himself. He quickly snatchered out a magnet, though, and attached himself to its hull, giving him a wonderful view as the cops foolishly cast light spells to see where they were... drawing flocks of blackbirds, which they tried to fight with elemental magic. Oops.
Only one of the cops -- a rat -- was smart enough to ditch his carpets and hang off the UFO instead, which wasn't being swarmed... soon the others had been glommed onto and devoured. The rat and Don stared at each other for a while, until Kitten noticed they were outside and teleported them into the UFO.
They seemed to be safe, at least for the moment, but they were in hell, which freaked out the rat, and annoyed the cat and probably the rest of the party. Kitten thought that he could probably send them back once he'd rested and recovered his fatigue, but that would take a while, and in the meantime they exchanged some information. Or, well, the rat took their statements regarding the UFO incident, then volunteered the name of this dimension (Rat: "This is Melchior." Cat: "Hey, that's my name!") and what he knew about the talismans that had caused the recent explosion:
There were five sets of talismans, stationed at five ley-line crossings near Athens to protect the five 'dangerous' magic schools. Recently, the one under the necromantic college had apparently exploded, while the luck and demonology sets had somehow been moved to Athens proper, where they were causing some amount of chaos (but nothing like the full evacuation of Athens east). The party knew all that. He also told them that Seers had predicted that 'thousands would die' if the sets under Athens were removed, which was consistent with 'they blow up', since unlike the necromatic college (which according to the rumors going around had saved many of their students caught in the blast) they were unprepared for such an event. And, as a bit of history, the rat remarked that the protections had had to be cast across multiple worlds to be fully effective, and two 'essentially uninhabited' alternate worlds had been selected to anchor them. Two thousand years ago, when they were installed.
The rat also 'healed' the alien by giving him a psionic illusion that he was no longer wounded, so the alien started walking around on broken legs, trying to fix the engine with Don's help.
Eventually, before Kitten was fully rested, the cat convinced him that it would be safer to exit the dimension by pushing through the lattice instead of by using his often-unpredictable magic. Don noted that the lattice was too small for the UFO to fit, but experiments with the craft's gun showed that the material it was made out of was much weaker than the ship's hull, so he was willing to try pushing through.
So that's what they did -- with the sound of the lattice collapsing on itself behind them as they cut a wide swath. The cat, impatient as the lattice seemed to go on forever, leapt on the controls and pushed them to full speed -- and the lattice crumbled and dissolved around them, leaving them in empty space. After a bit, the stars started to appear... then a sun started spiralling out of nothing and forming itself. The cat wanted them to fly into the sun, but Don wouldn't allow that.
Kitten and the rat talked about the nature of Melchior -- the dimension and the cat both -- and eventually decided that this 'cat' was no cat, and was in fact an evil entity that had been imprisoned, and which they might have just released. "We have to kill it now, before it regains its full power!" the rat insisted, and the cat finally noticed this and put him to sleep.
That was the last straw -- Kitten blinked the cat onto the field in the center of the ship, then flipped the lever to teleport it out into space. As they were travelling at a high rate of speed, this quickly left the creature far behind... but it still flailed out at Kitten mentally several times, until he snatched up John's mental-nullifying torc and put it on.
The alien activated the ship's astrogation computer, and told them that they were apparently in their home system. "But you have to come back with me, to my homeworld. Our race is dying, and we need women."
"But... we're not..."
"You are all women, are you not? You must be! You have no fur!"
"Do you want me to SHOW YOU?" snapped Kitten.
"Nooo!" the alien cried, hiding his face, "A lady should not say such things! Especially one who is to be the honored mother of our race..."
The planet that was supposed to be there, according to the map, wasn't, but there was a planet-sized glass globe that seemed to be filling up with smoke as they watched. By the time they'd overshot it by way-too-far trying to land manually (John had wisely advised Don not to aim right for it) and were heading back on autopilot, it looked like a planet should... and the illusion of no-injury wore off, incapacitating the alien again.
The craft, on autopilot, hovered to a stop near the edge of a large crater, but this crater was surrounded by trees and fields instead of a city. So they weren't on Kitten's world, at least, assuming this was the same crater. Don took the controls again, and flew high up into the air, and they got their bearings and, at John's suggested, decided to follow the river to Athens, to see which Athens it was.
Unfortunately, Athens in its current state didn't like to be headed to. Their engine went on the blink again, and Don's jerry-rigging trick didn't work twice. The native village and/or mine was closer, so they headed their instead... and Don brought the craft in for a landing in the center of the village... upside down, after skipping across the ground like a rock, then flipping it onto its edge and rolling a path of destruction through the town.
Needless to say, while the craft's inertial dampeners kept anyone inside from being hurt, the party was not enthusiastic about being associated with that landing. Kitten had the bullet holes spew out clouds of tear gas when the village's warriors approached to investigate, to buy some time, but soon enough the shaman (Little Bear, was it?) arrived with his spirits to take care of this 'marauding beast'. It was time to leave.
Don messed around with the teleporter and the engine, and flipped the craft to aim the exit pad up into the air at an angle -- they'd be able to teleport reasonably far away from the village, at the cost of appearing way up in the air. So Kitten flew the party... and *tried* to fly the rat (who'd woken up, awakened by the fifth attempt after the first four went wild in unfortunate ways) but accidentally gave him a 'death vision' instead. "Woah! I just saw myself falling to my death.."
Figuring (falsely) that the rat was simply unable to have Kitten cast spells properly on him, the rat instead clung to Kitten's back while they teleported out of the village, as a giant badger spirit dragged the UFO down underground, where it could do no more harm. With the wounded and unconscious alien still inside it, as the party had forgotten (or otherwise neglected) to bring him along.
After landing, they talked about what to do. John didn't want to go back to the village, as 'Little Arrow' had broken an important law bringing a feral vampire (crow) into the village. Everyone else did want to go there, though, as they were really really tired and needed somewhere to sleep. So, Kitten disguised him as a random (female) Easterner (as the residents of Athens were called in this world), getting it right on the second try, after first briefly disguising not only John, but the nearest 17,000 animals, bugs, and trees...
At any rate, they returned to the village, and gave their report to the chief, once he was done cleaning up the aftermath of the UFO landing. They reported the destruction of the city they'd been sent to clear out "It's definately safe to walk around in now, though." "It's a crater. We need a city to move these refugees into." and Kitten insisted (forestalling any requests for aid, which he'd be required to accept) that it was too dangerous for them to try to break another of these protective fields. The chief asked them if they could at least go and try to find some trace of the scouts he'd sent to the other fields, who hadn't come back... and Kitten agreed that that would be acceptable.
John, who'd given the cover story of having lived in a dwelling outside the field of death that had been destroyed by the explosion, refused to be sent to the kitchens to do women's work, and insisted that 'she' would accompany Kitten and Don. The chief seemed inclined to let her.
As they left, dismissed and given the rest of the day off to rest, the rat indicated that he'd stay behind to talk with the chief some. The party set up tents, dropped John's disguise once out of sight, and went to sleep.
Kitten was awakened a few hours later by the rat, who told him that it was his duty to arrest him for his crimes -- even if he had done nothing wrong intentionally, the accidental destruction of the necromantic school would be punished by compensatory damages sufficient to enslave him as a debtor for the rest of his life (and considering who he'd be enslaved to, probably quite a bit longer than that). "However, I have no legal enforcement powers in this place, so I instead related your crimes to the chief, and will let him punish you as he sees fit."
"I suspected as much..."
"I must get back to my world to report on what I've learned from you," the rat continued. "Can you send me back? Or at least try?"
"It might work better in the dark," Kitten said, "My magic seems more reliable then. Come back tonight and I'll make an attempt."
"Good luck, then," the rat replied, walking off. "I'll come to see you after nightfall."
last session | next session
I wasn't especially sleepy during the game, but I'm sort of tired now... *yawn*
