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!
Could you go into more detail on that conflict in the comments?
Adam Schwaninger I honestly don’t remember all of it – part of the reason I’m skipping over it is that it was a bit of a blur, took place almost three weeks ago, and I sort of gloss over it in my own private notes – but essentially it boiled down to a fairly intense standoff involving a very shakey member of the Pale Crew holding a gun to Bug’s throat, while Bug held a gun of his own to the guard’s stomach, and Nix judiciously applying knife to back. I believe it was Nix resisting the gun going off before they managed to kill the guard that contributed to them Internalising so fast. What made it more tense was that both of them had already used their armour earlier in the score, so stress was running high and harm was mounting. It was a pretty classic down-and-dirty slice of Blades combat.