Author: Calum Grace

A NOCTURNE v0.8/0.9 — playtest sessions #9 and #10 “PR Offensive”

We’ve got a double whammy this time around, folks. Strap in.

We started session #9 with downtime in Remonstrance after the skirmish on Heaven. Nix did some more investigating into the digital disease they’ve contracted, called Castor’s Syndrome. Turns out they’ll need to go to the Gear-Queen or the Patriarch for more answers. It’s rumoured to be what made the Vordians the way they are now (empty pressure suits, unable to inhabit organic bodies). Meanwhile, as Bug and Nix train and externalise stress, Timothy heals up and starts working on his own long-term project, the addition of keratin armour to his goopy artificial flesh shell.

Then, it’s down to business. They’ve still got a job outstanding: utterly cripple the Remonstrance IV AgriCorp known as House Minor Vex’s ability to hold power on the planetary council, wiping out their entire line if need be. The crew head to the warm agricultural world, putting down in one of the many dry canyons outside the population centres and slipping into Arctura, one of the gleaming, steel-and-glass cities that stud the planet’s winding fertile valleys, dominated by corporate arcologies.

In the shadows of one such arcology stands an Apophatic Order temple. They convene with the abott there to get up to date with goings-on on Remonstrance IV. Apparently Vex is homing in on taking an unprecedented sway over the council. Their leader, Fashra Vex (fashionable clothing, slender but obviously industrial-grade armature) has gained a lot of popularity. Things just got a lot more urgent.

Timothy spends a few weeks digging up all the dirt he can find. There’s plenty, as it turns out – rumours of sloppy assassination attempts on other house overseers, and all manner of blatantly poor employment practices even compared to the other Houses (as alien as the rest of the cluster is, Remonstrance IV operates on pure crony capitalism and a level of technology somewhere only a hair past our modern world – while describing it, I was thinking of a cross between California, Dubai, and Singapore).

From here, we launch into the score. This was where I really got to stress-test A Nocturne and my own thinking regarding how scores work when time and space are blown up to such large scales. This score really stretched the default definition, but it was perfect for how A Nocturne operates: rather than one compact chain of cause and effect in a tight time-frame, we went through a series of short vignettes taking place over a few weeks, following short chains of actions and consequences within them. It actually worked remarkably well, and naturally lead up to an action-filled climax.

In brief: the aim was to completely discredit Vex, to make them look like, at best, evil morons, and at worst, actual villains. Bug went down into the dusty agricultural belts and, after a brief altercation in a worker’s bar, managed to plant the seed of unionising in a few workers’ heads. Meanwhile, Timothy embarked on a dirty campaign of misinformation, sowing bad info and outright confusing reports through the planet’s press network. Finally, Nix came on screen for the final blow, using their Mercurial special ability to impersonate a member of the House (a woman called Sand Obal-Vex) and call an emergency press conference to combat all these vile rumours floating around. Nix intentionally dug even deeper, outright admitting to all manner of nasty things and generally sowing even more doubt and confusion.

Unfortunately, as well as this was going, time was running out. Vex had obviously caught wind of this press conference immediately, and sent a detail to the corporate arcology it was being held in to confront “Sand”, whom the PR man dragged into another room to berate about stepping outside her bounds as a representative of the AgriCorp. It’s at this point that two things happen: first, Timothy emerges from his hiding place in this side room and engulfs the PR guy, crushing him to death. Second, Vex’s private security descend, a wing of black tringular VTOLs gunning in over Arctura’s skyline.

The crew make their escape in a ground vehicle stolen by Bug, across snaking eighteen-laned highway and down into trash-filled side streets. They manage to lose the VTOLs, but not without causing an almighty amount of chaos and property damage along the way. Camera drones raced behind them for most of the chase, broadcasting it to the megalopolis.

But, they did what they came to do, and made it to the payoff. The Apophatic Order quietly ships several tonnes of raw materials, oxygen, and water into orbit for Ghost to pick up, and we add enough Chaos to Remonstrance’s track to bump its next Chaos roll to three dice (that’s a lot of Chaos, lemme tell ya).

A fortnight later we pick up again for downtime, with just Brendon and Edwin this time as Roxanne couldn’t make it. We were expecting a quiet session. Boy, were we wrong.

This session I introduced a new change coming to v0.9: Fallout, which is basically a free-form entanglements phase before downtime proper. I’m adding this to pump some of the urgency and forward momentum back into A Nocturne’s downtime, which was sagging a little without Entanglements proper.

For this round, they rolled Revenge. After a spot of downtime activity, Nix picks up a transmission: they’re being hunted. A mercenary craft, likely hired by House Minor Vex. Luckily, the craft is having trouble finding Ghost thanks to Ghost’s lack of a meaningful heat signature, but it’s only a matter of time. They’re incredibly close, close enough for Ghost’s external cameras to pick the mercs up visually. Improvising, Timothy pulls their breaking-apart old in-system jumper out of storage once again, and leads the mercs on a merry months-long chase around the system, eventually managing to lose them.

Hoping to avoid further entanglements, the crew gun it out to the outer system, to wait it out in the shadow of a wrecked cannibal craft, going down for the long one in their coldsleep capsules. They knew that Vex is on the ropes, but they want to see what a few years might do. At this point, I basically laid bare the Movement rules to the players. They decided to wait a decade, and we rolled Remonstrance’s Chaos. Remember, three dice. Edwin made the roll.

He got a crit. A crit. Two movements, competing or tangled up with one another, and +2 Chaos. Remonstrance’s Chaos level was now at 4 dice. While Edwin and Brendon sucked in their breath and I laughed perhaps a little too much, I had Edwin roll 2d8 on the Movement table to see what was happening in Remonstrance. We got Decay and Deprivation. I couldn’t be happier.

They wake to months-old news transmissions flowing across Ghost’s sensors: Remonstrance is gripped by famine and civil war as the AgriCorps fight brutally amongst themselves in open battle across the planet’s surface, as well as in low orbit. Turns out the Vex situation that the crew precipitated was the straw that broke the camels back. The AgriCorps had been gearing up for war for years, and it all exploded while the crew slept their dreamless sleep at the system’s edge.

Naturally, when we went through XP and found that the craft had earned an advance, they picked the special ability “The Ends Justify the Means”, which means they only take stress for pushing themselves for violence or mayhem if they roll a 1-3. It’s evil and I love it.

Also, and I wrote this down specifically so I could mention it here, but Brendon’s closing remarks were brilliant: “Are we the baddies?”

Next time: The crew get ready to strike the final, fatal blow against Vex, likely plunging the entire system into a forever war if they’re not careful (seriously, Remonstrance IV is one Chaos away from maxing out, and another new thing is that when a system hits maximum Chaos, it tips over and takes on a new status quo based on what’s happened to it so far – think Traumas, but for the setting itself). That session’s tonight, by the way. I’m shaking with anticipation.

Stray thoughts: In case you can’t tell, I’m very, very pleased with how this last session turned out. This was my aim with A Nocturne all along: the crew’s actions having massive, lasting, horrendous effects on the systems they passed through and messed around with. This idea of rippling consequences and situations quickly spiraling out of control as the crew break the surface tension of panhuman society. Even before this was Forged in the Dark, back when it was just a creepy glimmer in my weeping compound eye, A Nocturne had this baked in. The more I can lean into this stuff, the better.

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.

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!

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?