A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #4 “War in Heaven”

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #4 “War in Heaven”

We ended last session in the middle of a score aboard the Ghost, with Nix and Bug caught in a nasty standoff with some of the Pale Crew, a group of ancient crew-members from the Ghost’s dark past, and the Limpets (machine intelligences who’ve been plaguing the craft for centuries) closing. The Pale Crew are at war with the Limpets, and looking to spring a makeshift ambush here, in the microgravity of an abandoned server module. We open on them starting to hide, Nix and Bug still protesting that maybe there’s a non-violent way to deal with this.

The leader of this Pale Crew gang, the bearded, bedraggled Ion Brezhnev, has dragged Nix behind one of the girders, hissing orders to the rest. Nix is trying to wear him down. He seems uncertain. Then, the Limpets arrive, round metal carapaces studded with ports, from which cable-tentacles extend as needed, little claws gripping the netting holding corroded server racks. The Pale Crew hold their breath. The Limpets crawl into the module tentatively, investigating, chirping to each other.

Ion is about to give the order to attack. One of the other Pale Crew has unslung a brutal, improvised blunderbuss and is taking aim. Meanwhile, Bug pulls out of the grasp of the bald woman who had her gun on the uplifted hyena earlier. He’s got a hair-brained scheme. He goes forward and starts to interact with the Limpets. They seem curious. One of them pushes over to him through the microgravity and starts to poke and prod at Bug. Bug has a piece of food in his pocket, a bit of hard candy, which he shows to the Limpet. The Limpet turns it over in its claws, then pushes back to its fellows, and passes it round. They coo and chirp.

Pointing out this behaviour, Nix manages to get through to Ion, impressing upon him the idea that maybe this isn’t the right place, the right time, that maybe they have the wrong idea about the Limpets. Ion’s face softens. Problem is, Brendon only rolls a 5 on his Sway. He’s managed to stay Ion’s hand, but just as the bearded man starts to hiss the order to back off, the guy with the blunderbuss roars and swings out from behind his girder, firing off a burst of shrapnel and machine parts.

Some of the shrapnel catches a Limpet and takes some of its legs off, while some strikes Bug, sending him spinning. Roxanne spends her armour to avoid the lacerations – the shrapnel skitters across the plating sewn into Bug’s clothing. Still, he’s spinning, and hits the bulkhead.

One of the Limpets retaliates, attacking the guy with the blunderbuss. He jabs at it with the butt of the gun. They tussle until Bug pulls the Limpet away, and Nix convinces Ion to defuse the situation – Ion grabs the guy’s shoulder and pushes him back against a girder. Bug ushers the Limpets out to safety while Ion lays into his subordinate for not waiting for his order.

We end the score as the Pale Crew make ready to head back to their HQ, which they refer to as The Keep, deep in the bowels of the craft. Ion tells them they have an open invitation to visit, though he grumbles about the Pale Crew’s defacto leader, a man called Lord Commander Newton. As payoff, they get a +1 status with the Limpets for helping them out of a sticky encounter with the Pale Crew. The Pale crew stay at 0 status though – they may have swayed Ion a little, but he’s just a cog in the machine. Also, the score generates some stress for the craft – only 2 stress goes onto the craft’s track though, since things were fairly contained.

Nix is curious about the Pale Crew and where they came from. He decides to go into the Ghost’s old, partially-corrupted archives to Gather Information on them. He descends into the stacks and starts trawling through, looking for any records that might survive. Brendon rolls a 3 on the Analyse, but it was Controlled, so he presses on by taking a Risky opportunity – Nix opens up the sealed section of the archives, the part where the viruses really set in. It’s cold down here, and the data-stacks are encrusted with leaking, rotting membrane. Brendon rolls a 4 on this – he’ll get some solid info, but we start a clock for the membrane rot, which latches onto Nix’s artificial brain stem and starts to infect him.

What he learns: the Pale Crew used to command the Ghost as part of a larger fleet hierarchy, working for an individual known in the records only as The Patriarch. However, they were forced out of command by the Ghost AI after something they did on Heaven, a station in the Remonstrance system. What they did is uncertain – the data here is too corrupted to read.

Adrift in Fitzwilliam’s Ashes, they get a communique from the Apophatic Order – they’d like to call in the favour the Ghost owes them for the information the Order gave the crew concerning the Limpets. The Order wants them to aid in the pruning of their heavenly garden AKA intercede in the political maneuverings of the ascendant House-Minor Vex, an AgriCorp they’d like to see scattered to the stars before they have a chance to seize power on the fractious planet of Remonstrance IV. The Order want Vex’s power wiped away, their bloodline broken, the earth salted. They leave it open to the crew of the Ghost as to how exactly they want to go about doing that, but impress upon them that this action must be final. The timeline here, though, is on the order of centuries – the AgriCorps, just like the Apophatic Order, play a very long game.

The crew manage to swindle enough Profit out of the Order to take a slow trip across interstellar space to the Remonstrance system. The trip takes a decade for the Ghost, a few decades for everyone else. The blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

However, when they arrive in-system, Nix and Bug decide to divert their activities for a moment, to investigate the strange, silent, modular station of Heaven, to try and find out what happened there all those centuries ago.

They take their little landing craft and manually dock with the station. The interior is airless. Pressure-suited, they pass through the useless airlock and into what might once have been a pristine lobby area. Lights flicker on. Some don’t. A sign comes to life at the far end of the room: “WELCOME TO HEAVEN”. The flickering lights pick out bullet holes and the burn-scars of directed energy weapons, but no blood, no bodies. Nix goes to investigate an information kiosk that sits under the welcome sign, while Bug ventures deeper into the station.

The kiosk shows off pleasant fields, rustic living, azure seas, wide open skies, smiling children. The station appears to house a small uploaded society, and the whole thing has a slightly Mormons-in-Paradise feel. Bug’s wanderings take him past rooms of server racks, blinking quietly. The two crew-members eventually link up and Nix decides to hack into the system. He eventually manages to access the station’s internal records, and what he finds is disturbing. It seems that the Pale Crew came here and precipitated a horrible shift in the virtual Heaven – as I described the information on the kiosk to Brendon, he likened it to a kind of revisionist Christian Stardew Valley, so here I said it’s basically like that Stardew Valley suddenly went Mad Max. Thing is, all the uploaded citizens still seem perfectly happy, according to the latest records. Everyone’s dying again and again in endless virtual wars, and no-one seems bothered.

Thoroughly creeped-out, Nix and Bug are briefly tempted to pull the plug on the servers then and there, but we end the session as they go to consult Ghost about all this. Why did he care about the well-being of Heaven, so much so that he would lock the old crew out for conducting their nasty little experiment?

Stray thoughts: Brendon and Roxanne are sort of perfect players for A NOCTURNE – they like to go all-in on the weird-future aspects of the setting, and they’re endlessly curious about the craft. One interesting thing: they’ve also been very combat-averse up until now – both our opening scores so far have been deception and social scores, after all – so it’ll be interesting to see where that goes when we get to Remonstrance IV’s hornet’s nest of intrigue and assassination, and have to way up their options for ending House-Minor Vex’s entire bloodline.

The craft-as-character is one note I always wanted to hit with A NOCTURNE, and so far it’s panning out really well. This is mostly down to centering the craft sheet in the rules, and to the players engaging with the AI in interesting ways, and to me as the GM making sure to characterise and describe the craft and AI in detail, but I’m already thinking of ways I can further emphasise this in the text.

Also, in case you weren’t aware already: Clocks are so goooood. I can already tell that the membrane rot clock for Nix is gonna be my best friend for a few sessions.

After the session, I polled Brendon and Roxanne on their special abilities, because I noticed they hadn’t used them much, if at all, and I wanted to get their read on wording and so on. Brendon’s is simple – he simply hadn’t had cause to kill anyone yet, so The Subtle Knife was currently just kinda there. Roxanne, meanwhile, was just wary of the implications of Vessel‘s rogue AI, and we had a little discussion about fleshing the character of this AI out further in future sessions.

I also changed damage and scars back to stress and trauma anf honestly it’s been a lifesaver. No more umming and arring, no more confusion.

Next Time: an awkward audience with Ghost in which some very important things have to be hashed out re: virtual euthanasia and Ghost’s own moral compass. Also, how are they going to approach the task given to them by the Apophatic Order? I’m briefly prepping a real tangled web of intrigue and nastiness to drop them in the middle of. It’s gonna be good.