A NOCTURNE v0.7.2 / v0.8 — playtest session #2
We cut right back in where we left off. The crew (Nix, our Forgotten, and Bug, our Witch, crew of the Ghost, a Dark Orb) have been briefly left to their own devices in the corporate suite aboard the primary mining station in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant Naturalis III.
The administrators are giving them some space to discuss business, and to take in a little automated presentation – a membrane display that drips up out of the tabletop to hang in the air, rotating, peeling apart to reveal its innards and show how advanced and profitable the Syndicate’s operation is here (membrane is a piece of technology I need to write up in the rules – it’s a kind of silvery-black oily nanotech substance, programmed to take on certain shapes, and the preferred 3D display method over glitchy holograms. It’s also used for high-tech interfaces, with the buttons and switches extruding from surfaces as needed. Fancy stuff).
We reiterate the crew’s goal here: somehow draw out Lamplight, one of the secretive admins of the Naturalis Syndicate, and convince her to take a deal with the Tethisii Mining Council. Testing the waters, and still learning the system, Brendon decides to do a flashback – turns out Nix visited the station a month back, posing as a regular gas miner (chemically-burned pressure suit, breathing apparatus, toolbelt, carefully messy oil stains), and managed to corner a high ranking miner to press some info out of him.
Seems Lamplight has a barely-withheld addiction to collecting rare antiquities, especially those of alien origin. Another flashback, but this one’s a lot cheaper, since it uses some fiction we’ve already established about the crew’s craft – Ghost has a lot of old junk aboard from previous crews. In amongst the debris, their just happens to be an old alien painting, actually a gilt-framed hunk of stone pried of some ancient ruin.
For the past month, they’ve been advertising the painting on the local networks, fishing for replies. There’s an interested buyer, and they’re gambling on it being Lamplight.
Back to the present. The admins come back in (temporarily shelled into their collective android body) to finalise the investment procedure. During the discussion, Nix and Bug (somewhat clumsily) drop hints about paintings. The admins are nonplussed, and the meeting continues as normal after that stumbling block, but a few days later the crew get a message aboard Ghost: Lamplight wants to meet.
Problem is, she’s careful enough that she immediately rebuffs any attempt to meet aboard-craft. Instead she arranges for them to meet on one of the tertiary mining rigs over Naturalis III, painting in tow.
They meet in one of the cargo hangars. Lamplight arrives flanked by heavily-armed guards. She’s a statuesque woman with a ring of snake eyes encircling her head, and she looks mighty suspicious. However, the deal actually goes swimmingly – as soon as Lamplight sets her many eyes on the painting, the deal’s done (Roxanne rolled a crit on her Sway here as she negotiated, and we ran with it). Turns out Lamplight’s love of alien art trumps any conviction regarding who has a stake in the Syndicate. She agrees to the deal with the Tethisii in exchange for the painting.
We close out the score with some payoff (4 Profit), allotting Chaos to the Urci Naturalis system (this was contained – no gunshots or anything, but the admins’ suspicions were raised a little, so 2 Chaos, +1 for a high-profile target), Maintenance (the crew spend 1 Profit to keep Ghost running), and then on to downtime.
There are ghosts in Ghosts machine, something to do with the old crew – the crew need an expert. Thinking this might be a religious matter, they’re headed to visit the Apophatic Order on Fitzwilliam II, in Fitzwilliam’s Ashes, a ruined system orbiting a black hole known as Night’s Mouth. They do a slow burn to avoid spending too much Profit. The trip takes a few decades for them, a few more for everywhere else due to time dilation.
Downtime activities for the first few weeks/months of the trip: both Nix and Bug externalise some of their Damage (Nix talks it out with Ghost’s old and violent AI, who speaks a disembodied voice that echoes through the bulkheads, while Bug trains in an old gym deep in the core, boxing with a virtual membrane opponent); Bug starts a long-term project, designing a special hypnotic function for their artificial snake familiar; Nix trains up their Savvy.
We end the session there, ready to jump into free play next and see if the crew can get into contact with the notoriously tricky Apophatic Order.
Stray thoughts: There were some hiccoughs for Brendon here and there, but nothing I haven’t seen with other people getting to grips with Blades’ flashbacks and the like. It’s early days yet.
Something interesting: we had a brief discussion afterwards about how different A Nocturne feels when compared to Blades. Roxanne mentioned how wide-open it feels compared to the tight pressure-cooker of Duskwall. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on how that feeling develops as we go forward and situations start to snowball. I like it, but I definitely want to nail it down and examine it more.
This session also marked the start of a change-over to the still-in-development v0.8 rules. Overall, it seems to be going well, particularly the slightly looser interstellar travel rules, which sell the time-scales involved much better than the old mass of numbers I dumped into the previous version.