A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #5

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #5

With a sudden and haunting grasp on the endless digital war waged inside Heaven’s vast servers of uploaded personalities, Nix and Bug patch through to Ghost’s comms for a little chit-chat about what exactly went down here over a century ago.

Unfortunately, despite their established relationship, Nix is unable to get much out of the recalcitrant, glitching AI. What he does learn is sort of a bombshell in itself – the Ghost AI is actually a spliced-off fork of whoever the Patriarch is, and the reason Ghost did what he did (revoked the Pale Crew’s command access) is that they went against the parameters of a very important job the Patriarch gave them. Still skipping around the specifics, Ghost says something about retrieving a “personality matrix” from the doomed station, and expresses a desire for Heaven to return to its original state.

The crew want to learn more. Nix organises a clandestine meeting with Ion Brezhnev, one of the high ranking members of the Pale Crew, whom the crew left last score on good terms with. They meet in one of the now-cold exhaust tubes of the craft, a massive pipe a mile across curving away into haze and thrumming darkness. They converse upside down, magnetised boots gripping to the slick surface, their heads hanging over the miniature cloud systems formed in the tube’s damp air.

Ion, and his second in command Freya (a bald, rather abrasive woman), lay out what happened on Heaven. Their leader, then and now, a man named Newton, always had a flair for experiments. He liked to give populations the little push they needed to do something off-the-wall, then sit back and watch the fireworks. Ion notes that he’s a psychopath, but qualifies that with a shrugging gesture – to Ion, being a psychopath doesn’t seem that strange. Correctly deducing that Newton must have stolen the personality matrix from Heaven after setting his little experiment going, Nix convinces Ion to arrange a meeting for them with Newton. Ion agrees, but not without some trepidation.

So, we hit on the next score: a nice, cordial meeting with Newton. A social score. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, everything. They roll an abysmal 1 on the engagement roll, starting them in a desperate position. Newton’s got some tricks up his sleeve, and some dangerous ambitions (plus a little old-school revenge mixed in). I run with it.

The Pale Crew’s hideout on the Ghost is the Keep, a fortified module deep in the bowels of the craft. I point to the module map as I describe it, bringing the players’ attention to the Empathy Scrubbers. As they enter the Keep, the crew’s path is flanked by row after row of what look on first glance to be metal thrones, but a closer look reveals their true purpose. An exposed mass of circuitry, some sort of interface plate, lies embedded in the back of each throne, at about the height of a person’s head. The crew notice that there are similar patches of scarification, burns, and welts on the back of each of the Pale Crew’s shaved heads. Whatever the Pale Crew’s setup is down here, part of it appears to be a regular dosing on the empathy scrubbers, ensuring that they lack compunctions about inflicting pain and suffering.

They’re lead into the main entrance-hall of the Keep, another orb-like space filled with more of the empathy scrubber thrones. There, after some of the Pale Crew have filtered out, Newton enters, his personal guard flanking him in the microgravity. At the same time, a turret unfurls itself above the crew’s heads and trains its scorched muzzle on them. Next to Newton, Ion gives Nix and Bug an apologetic shrug. It seems he was pressured into revealing exactly what the crew are interested in, and more importantly, where they’ve been.

Bug takes a moment survey Newton, trying to get a read on him, so he can hopefully bargain their way out of this situation. For help on the role, Roxanne chooses to activate the Vessel special ability, and gets her first chance to describe the AI lodged in Bug’s mind. His name’s Billy, and he’s a creepy-precocious child. The sacrifice Roxanne makes to get Billy’s help (in this case, she chooses a bonus die) is that Bug is going to surrender his will to Billy later on, and let the child-AI make an important decision for him. Naturally, I rub my hands with glee.

Unfortunately, Roxanne rolls a 3. The worst outcome. After some basic preamble and pleasantries (Newton is alarmingly pleasant), Bug attempting fruitlessly to assuage Newton’s clear intentions to bully them into submission, the old leader of the Pale Crew grows bored and orders his guards and the turret to open fire. Bug gets his read on him way too late – he wants to take out the current crew, pilfer the information they have on the current state of his experiment of Heaven from their neural backups, and then strike at the Ghost AI directly in order to get back the Pale Crew’s (read: his) prior control of the craft.

The turret open fires. Brendon and Roxanne quickly deploy their armour and some desperate-but-successful rolls, managing to play dead. A couple guards grab them and start carting them off through the cramped, microgravity interior of the Keep, to what Newton refers to the as the Extractor, a kind of black market memory reader with the unfortunate side-effect that it scrambles and corrupts whatever information it scans.

Luckily, Roxanne got Bug a present at the end of last session when Bug advanced – the special ability Vector, which allows him to implant a command in the mind of anyone he touches. Bug subliminally orders the guard pushing him through the microgravity to take him to a secluded spot. The guard holding Nix follows the other one, confused but unaware of the danger he’s in.

And then they get to the secluded spot, a little side-tunnel off one of the main throughfares, and Nix finally gets to deploy The Subtle Knife, killing one of the guards without leaving an obvious mark. The other guard proves a little trickier, and a tense zero-g fight ensues, the combatants tumbling over and over in the half-dark of the maintenance tunnel. They eventually get away, leaving the guard bleeding out quickly from a nasty stomach wound, his blood spilling out in droplets. They descend further into the keep, and I start a very short clock for Newton and his goons discovering the deception.

Stray thoughts: Not many this session, although we did get a chance to talk a little about the special abilities, since they saw so much use this session compared to previous sessions. We agreed that there was maybe a little rewording that need to happen, and a proper interrogation of the scope and nature of the abilities in question, as well as the exact details of their fictional positioning. That said, Brendon and Roxanne were quite positive.

From a GMing point of view, I’m having a lot of fun describing and portraying the Pale Crew. I see them very much as dark reflections of the PCs, examples of what they might become given a little nudge. Of course, I only realised I was doing this about halfway through describing the empathy scrubbers, but then I decided to just double down on it.

Next time: What was going to be a negotiation over information is now a straight-up theft mission, retrieving the personality matrix from Newton’s vault in order to return it to Ghost and…. then what? Will Newton follow through on his plan to retake the craft? What will Billy do? Will Heaven ever be the same again? And what about that tangled political situation on Remonstrance IV, when are getting to that again?