A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #8 “A War in Heaven, Part 2”

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #8 “A War in Heaven, Part 2”

We ended last session with the crew entering Heaven, intent on restoring its virtual society to some semblance of its former self with the mysterious, stolen personality matrix. All of this at the behest of Ghost, who has some obsession with Heaven station and its murky history.

Coming off a Risky engagement result, we cut right to it: the crew are at one of the sealed entrances to Heaven’s corrupted core, trying to find some way in. Timothy explores the door with his numerous extruded appendages, eventually realising that the door is slightly buckled, wedged shut but not entirely sealed, as if whoever passed through here centuries ago (i.e. Newton and the Pale Crew) weren’t able to fully close it. Bug unfurls and hefts a massive directed-energy weapon (ticking their boxes for A Large Weapon) and blasts the door. They get through, but I throw a clock down on the table and tick it: Ion tunes into their frequency and warns them as the last minute that the Pale Crew are on their way. The clanking of docking clamps echoes through the station. Now, it’s a race against time.

The crew steal through the wrecked door, finding themselves in a large capsule-shaped space, its centre bisected by a pillar of super-computer terminals, Heaven’s central processing apparatus. Floating in the microgravity are a number of ancient, corroded security drones, their chassis riddled with bullet holes. While attempting to use the residual power left in one of the dead drones to get a back door into the core, all hell breaks loose.

The Pale Crew have arrived. The crew can see their flashlights arcing across the far walls of the tunnel they just came down. Roxanne has Bug pay some stress for a flashback – they managed planted a command one of the Pale Crew’s heads, instructing them to attack their own when aboard the station. Gunfire lights up the tunnel, and the Limpets (a temporary cohot acquired by the crew last session) spring their ambush.

I make some fortune rolls for the start of this scrap. The Limpets have the upper hand, but they’re taking losses as the Pale Crew push forward. Hoping to turn the tide, the crew spring into action. Nix rushes in, but gets into a mid-air microgravity fight with one of the Pale Crew, and almost takes a knife to the gut – they avoid it, but the blade pierces their pressure suit (remember how there’s no air on Heaven?). Air starts hissing. Helping them out, Timothy wraps his bulk around Nix to block the leak and drags them back into the core, but takes a shot in the back from an improvised rifle for his trouble. The gouged hole in this gooey flesh-like bulk smokes and bubbles.

Timothy finally manages to get basic access to the core via one of the drones, switching on the core’s emergency blast doors. The Limpets and Pale Crew disappear behind a thick sheet of high-tensile strength steel. Emboldened, he attempts to start the process of feeding the personality matrix into the core, but finds the proper operations blocked. He takes some harm (which I cheekily dubbed “system shock”) as the security systems fight back.

As a result, the crew have to improvise, powering up and hacking manual terminal (with the help of one of Bug’s bypass chips) and carefully inserting the personality matrix platter by hand. Timothy reads the diagnostic data being spat out by the system’s monitors of the virtual world, finds them changing as soon as the personality matrix is processed. Whatever’s happening, Heaven won’t be the same again. He saves the diagnostic data to his own memory, but internalises his stress during all of this, taking the trauma “Cold”.

Bug and Nix come out swinging, opening the emergency blast door and gunning down + stabbing the remaining Pale Crew foot soldiers. Bug almost internalises here, but chooses to have their parasitic AI Billy eat the stress, giving Billy another decision to make for them later (that’s two banked so far – this is gonna be fun down the road).

The crew escape Heaven! We add 2 Chaos to Remonstrance’s track, and they decide the salvage the drones for a bit of Profit so they can pay their Maintenance.

Stray thoughts: Nothing specific came up at the end of this session, it was very much Blades’ core system doing its job with the rolling chain of actions and consequences. One thing I’d like to nail down even more is the dangers inherent in hacking unfamiliar, ancient, and/or corrupted systems. We saw a bit of that, but I could stand to play it (and write it) a lot harder.

Unless anything drastic comes up next session, I’m really, really close to starting work properly on the next play-test version, which would be v0.9 – a lot of great feedback has come in, and I’m looking forward to doing some more brutal editing, as odd as that may sound.

Next time: Downtime in Remonstrance, preparing to shake up the tangled political situation on Remonstrance IV on the orders of the Apophatic Order.