Month: June 2018

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #7 “Artificial Minds”

I told you I was writing this basically right after the session #6 actual play. I warned you bro.

We launch into downtime with an unexpected, but in hindsight inevitable, bang: the craft’s stress track maxed out, giving it the Trauma “Obsessed”, specifically focused on the Patriarch and its own murky origins. We don’t see the immediate effects of this in this session, but I’ve got some dark plans…

Nix starts a long-term project to counteract the spread of the membrane rot inside their head, essentially setting up a race clock against the membrane sickness clock that we already have established.

The other big thing that happened this session was the introduction of fresh mea- I mean new player Edwin’s character Timothy, an AI encased in an artificial brain, wrapped in a cocoon of some gooey, flesh-like smart substance that he can extrude to create temporary, dripping limbs, interface rather disgustingly with more mundane computers, and bud off short-lived homunculi. His first act after sloughing himself out of coldsleep (incidentally, a great way to introduce new characters to the crew) is to bond his fleshy bulk with the core computer terminal while Nix looks on horrified. He starts a long-term project to fully map-out the byzantine innards of the craft. Bug enters with a gun and asks if he should shoot the gradually-expanding flesh monster that’s talking at them in alarmingly pleasant and chirpy tones. They eventually decide that Timothy means them no harm, but remain thoroughly weirded-out.

In his attempts to bond with Ghost’s core node, Timothy discovers the depths to which the old, violent AI is more than just an artificial mind – it appears to be based on a full-on fork of someone or something else’s baseline personality. What follows is a rather off-putting conversation about the nature of humanity between the pre-existing crew and Timothy, who seems bemused but chipper about basically everything.

But before we can learn more, it’s down to business: the crew decide it’s high time they return the personality matrix to Heaven, as Ghost seems to want them to do so, and they surmise that it might help the uploaded society eventually return to its more idyllic state. They’re certain the Pale Crew will attempt to interfere, so they do something risky to stymie Newton’s efforts: they cut off the power from the empathy scrubbers for a bit to make them sweat, hopefully making them a little more manageable (or at least less likely to follow Newton’s wild ambitions) for the next score.

Bug also acquires an asset for the score to return the personality matrix to Heaven – a sizable gang of Limpets. With all of this set, and time running out for the session, we end on an Engagement roll and a cliff-hangar, as the crew enter Heaven and make their way through the darkened corridors to the station’s benighted core. Risky position, folks. Let’s see how that goes next time…

Stray thoughts: introducing a new character via waking them up from coldsleep went really smoothly, far smoother than I thought it would, such that I may just write this into the rules as a easy bit of shorthand when you need to introduce a character quick. Timothy’s already adding an interesting dynamic to the crew in downtime, so it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in the score. Edwin went to town on describing all the oozing and sluicing and general weirdness of Timothy’s strange body plan, and I couldn’t be happier. This is a lot of what A Nocturne is about. Incidentally, for those keeping track at home, he chose the playbook The Broken, with the starting special ability The Carriage Held But Just Ourselves – makes sense for constantly interfacing AI with a fragile core.

No big rules revelations this go around, though it certainly gave me a lot to think about re: the danger of certain types of interfacing and data in the game, and the way’s in which we handle the power (or lack thereof) the crew have over the workings of their craft.

Next time: War in Heaven, Round 2. In the blue corner, two furries and a cheery blob of flesh, backed up by a gang of child-like machine intelligences. In the red corner, a crew of psychopaths with a grudge. And in the nth-dimensional octarine corner, the warped intelligence of a forked super-AI nomad with blue-and-orange morality and weird designs on a society of uploaded Space Mormons. Who will win? Who will lose? Why not both?

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #6

Deep inside the empathy scrubber modules, redubbed The Keep by the self-made psychopaths of the Pale Crew, having escaped from a deadly encounter with a number of foot-soldiers, Nix and Bug find themselves working their way through snaking maintenance tunnels.

The empathy scrubber module is essentially a series of strung-together globe-chambers, with the tunnels snaking around and between them, intersecting and filtering air through their howling, oil-stained throats. The two uplifted clamber hand-over-hand in the microgravity, the sounds of the Pale Crew’s activities drumming on the metal bulkheads, occasional views into the globe-chambers offered by corroded access panels. When they find one big enough to get through, one that leads “backstage” into a space between the chambers, Nix deploys a new special ability, Mercurial, and takes on the semblance of one of the Pale Crew (specifically a man named Tolvig, the rash, blunderbuss-wielding crew-member they encountered as part of Ion Brezhnev’s little patrol). Brendon gave an awesome description here, describing how Nix appears to shimmer and distort like the artifacting on a hyper-compressed video.

Nix slips their way into the Keep proper, managing to perfectly mimic Tolvig’s way of moving. Bug stays behind to cover the tunnels, but sends his familiar Snakey (a weird artificial snake-thing) with Nix. The disguised arctic fox runs into a Pale Crew heavy called Procaine, who seems to be friendly with Tolvig but doesn’t manage to see through Nix’s disguise. Procaine’s tall and angular, their skin made of segmented metal. A circular saw hangs on a leather strap off their shoulder. Nix/Tolvig convinces Procaine that he needs to see the Pale Crew’s leader Newton right away, that the uplifted crew they thought dead are alive, and have escaped re-capture. They start making their way to Newton’s inner sanctum, passing through lashed-together Pale Crew shanties and chemically-fertilised alien fungus farms.

Meanwhile, Bug runs afoul of a maintenance drone the Pale Crew seem to have gotten working again, but manages to escape the tunnel before it crushes him. Back outside Newton’s sanctum, a massive vault door, Procaine and Nix/Tolvig run across Newton and tell him the bad news. Exasperated, he tells them to go after the uplifted crew already, and make it quick. There’s a tense moment where Newton bemusedly interrogates Nix/Tolvig, but they manage to keep up the disguise.

Of course, they’re not going to find uplifted crew. Deep in the corridors cutting between the globe-chambers, the Pale Crew’s jury-rigged pipeline for the unrefined chemical fertilizer is exposed in places. As they pass through an intersection, Snakey bites into a weak spot on one of these pipes, sending a spray of the viscous chemical sludge shooting into the corridor. As soon as the unrefined, exotic substance hits the moist air of the corridor, it starts expanding, an acidic foam slowly filling the narrow confines. Procaine shouts, surprised, a split-second before Nix opens their third eye (a bizarre and creepy interpretation of Nix’s The Subtle Knife ability – they can literally kill without touching people, but it needs eye-contact and a bit of time), their disguise briefly dropping. Procaine is knocked out cold. The chemical sludge starts to engulf them. Nix/Tolvig runs for “help”.

Newton, having to oversee the cleaning of the chemical spll himself, takes a bunch of his personal guard and heads off when Nix/Tolvig comes to inform him. Nix/Tolvig hangs around, keeping a guard on the other side of the cracked vault door talking. Meanwhile, Bug has been moving around “backstage”, and slips into the now-vacated area in front of the vault right as Nix opens their third eye again. The guard collapses in, the vault door starts swinging open, someone shouts from the other side. Brendon didn’t roll great, though, so the consequence is that the door swings open the whole way and Nix gets a face-full of lead. Brendon resists this handily, instead barging in as Tolvig with Bug as his “prisoner”. There’s an awkward standoff in which some awkward questions are asked, but Nix/Tolvig and Bug put on enough of a performance that the guards inside the vault buy it.

As they enter, they spy what’s likely their prize against the back wall of the vault-sanctum – a huge rack of what look like solid-state drives. Quickly subduing the guards (this was a fairly tense fight, but too detailed to get technical here), they get to the drive rack and start pulling drives, searching for the personality matrix. They eventually find it, a large unspooled slice of vat-grown brain matter embedded in a heavy steel platter (at this point, I’m straight-up riffing on Tacoma, ‘cos why not). It’s at this point, though, that Newton and his cronies come back to batter down the vault door, now fully aware of the situation at hand.

Almost shot again, Nix and Bug manage to escape through another maintenance shaft, one that hadn’t appeared on the schematics. We get in a few more long-term consequences here (as well as a few I forgot to mention already): the Newton’s Ambition clock (a countdown to him leading a full-on rebellion against the Ghost AI to retake the craft) gets another tick, and when the Chaos downtime phase comes along the craft is taking +1 stress as Newton tears apart the innards of various sub-modules searching fruitlessly for the escaping duo.

Also, Nix Internalises their stress hard while pushing themself, and takes the Trauma “Soft.” Considering they’re sort of the Designated Stabby Fox of the crew, that’ll sure be interesting.

Stray thoughts: Brendon absolutely loved the Mercurial special ability (thank you for that one, Vincent Baker). I wasn’t entirely happy with how I ran the session (there was a lot of toing and froing and show-leather inside the Keep, more than I would’ve liked, and I really need to give Roxanne the spotlight more), but I feel like I’m really starting to grok how to run a Forged in the Dark game (hey, it only took me something like 40+ sessions and making my own hack). I went hard with the consequences this session, and it lead to some truly tense scenes and wonderfully difficult stress-related decisions.

Next time: Payoff (such as it is), Maintenance, and downtime. What will they do with the personality matrix? Return it to Heaven, perhaps? What’s Newton’s next move? Also, we introduce a mystery third crew member – new blood, friends, new blood! Mwahahahaa- ahem, play-tester, I meant play-tester.

BTW, I’m writing-up session #7 literally right after this because I took too long, so look for that around here real soon!