Author: Calum Grace

A NOCTURNE v0.8 — playtest session #4 “War in Heaven”

We ended last session in the middle of a score aboard the Ghost, with Nix and Bug caught in a nasty standoff with some of the Pale Crew, a group of ancient crew-members from the Ghost’s dark past, and the Limpets (machine intelligences who’ve been plaguing the craft for centuries) closing. The Pale Crew are at war with the Limpets, and looking to spring a makeshift ambush here, in the microgravity of an abandoned server module. We open on them starting to hide, Nix and Bug still protesting that maybe there’s a non-violent way to deal with this.

The leader of this Pale Crew gang, the bearded, bedraggled Ion Brezhnev, has dragged Nix behind one of the girders, hissing orders to the rest. Nix is trying to wear him down. He seems uncertain. Then, the Limpets arrive, round metal carapaces studded with ports, from which cable-tentacles extend as needed, little claws gripping the netting holding corroded server racks. The Pale Crew hold their breath. The Limpets crawl into the module tentatively, investigating, chirping to each other.

Ion is about to give the order to attack. One of the other Pale Crew has unslung a brutal, improvised blunderbuss and is taking aim. Meanwhile, Bug pulls out of the grasp of the bald woman who had her gun on the uplifted hyena earlier. He’s got a hair-brained scheme. He goes forward and starts to interact with the Limpets. They seem curious. One of them pushes over to him through the microgravity and starts to poke and prod at Bug. Bug has a piece of food in his pocket, a bit of hard candy, which he shows to the Limpet. The Limpet turns it over in its claws, then pushes back to its fellows, and passes it round. They coo and chirp.

Pointing out this behaviour, Nix manages to get through to Ion, impressing upon him the idea that maybe this isn’t the right place, the right time, that maybe they have the wrong idea about the Limpets. Ion’s face softens. Problem is, Brendon only rolls a 5 on his Sway. He’s managed to stay Ion’s hand, but just as the bearded man starts to hiss the order to back off, the guy with the blunderbuss roars and swings out from behind his girder, firing off a burst of shrapnel and machine parts.

Some of the shrapnel catches a Limpet and takes some of its legs off, while some strikes Bug, sending him spinning. Roxanne spends her armour to avoid the lacerations – the shrapnel skitters across the plating sewn into Bug’s clothing. Still, he’s spinning, and hits the bulkhead.

One of the Limpets retaliates, attacking the guy with the blunderbuss. He jabs at it with the butt of the gun. They tussle until Bug pulls the Limpet away, and Nix convinces Ion to defuse the situation – Ion grabs the guy’s shoulder and pushes him back against a girder. Bug ushers the Limpets out to safety while Ion lays into his subordinate for not waiting for his order.

We end the score as the Pale Crew make ready to head back to their HQ, which they refer to as The Keep, deep in the bowels of the craft. Ion tells them they have an open invitation to visit, though he grumbles about the Pale Crew’s defacto leader, a man called Lord Commander Newton. As payoff, they get a +1 status with the Limpets for helping them out of a sticky encounter with the Pale Crew. The Pale crew stay at 0 status though – they may have swayed Ion a little, but he’s just a cog in the machine. Also, the score generates some stress for the craft – only 2 stress goes onto the craft’s track though, since things were fairly contained.

Nix is curious about the Pale Crew and where they came from. He decides to go into the Ghost’s old, partially-corrupted archives to Gather Information on them. He descends into the stacks and starts trawling through, looking for any records that might survive. Brendon rolls a 3 on the Analyse, but it was Controlled, so he presses on by taking a Risky opportunity – Nix opens up the sealed section of the archives, the part where the viruses really set in. It’s cold down here, and the data-stacks are encrusted with leaking, rotting membrane. Brendon rolls a 4 on this – he’ll get some solid info, but we start a clock for the membrane rot, which latches onto Nix’s artificial brain stem and starts to infect him.

What he learns: the Pale Crew used to command the Ghost as part of a larger fleet hierarchy, working for an individual known in the records only as The Patriarch. However, they were forced out of command by the Ghost AI after something they did on Heaven, a station in the Remonstrance system. What they did is uncertain – the data here is too corrupted to read.

Adrift in Fitzwilliam’s Ashes, they get a communique from the Apophatic Order – they’d like to call in the favour the Ghost owes them for the information the Order gave the crew concerning the Limpets. The Order wants them to aid in the pruning of their heavenly garden AKA intercede in the political maneuverings of the ascendant House-Minor Vex, an AgriCorp they’d like to see scattered to the stars before they have a chance to seize power on the fractious planet of Remonstrance IV. The Order want Vex’s power wiped away, their bloodline broken, the earth salted. They leave it open to the crew of the Ghost as to how exactly they want to go about doing that, but impress upon them that this action must be final. The timeline here, though, is on the order of centuries – the AgriCorps, just like the Apophatic Order, play a very long game.

The crew manage to swindle enough Profit out of the Order to take a slow trip across interstellar space to the Remonstrance system. The trip takes a decade for the Ghost, a few decades for everyone else. The blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

However, when they arrive in-system, Nix and Bug decide to divert their activities for a moment, to investigate the strange, silent, modular station of Heaven, to try and find out what happened there all those centuries ago.

They take their little landing craft and manually dock with the station. The interior is airless. Pressure-suited, they pass through the useless airlock and into what might once have been a pristine lobby area. Lights flicker on. Some don’t. A sign comes to life at the far end of the room: “WELCOME TO HEAVEN”. The flickering lights pick out bullet holes and the burn-scars of directed energy weapons, but no blood, no bodies. Nix goes to investigate an information kiosk that sits under the welcome sign, while Bug ventures deeper into the station.

The kiosk shows off pleasant fields, rustic living, azure seas, wide open skies, smiling children. The station appears to house a small uploaded society, and the whole thing has a slightly Mormons-in-Paradise feel. Bug’s wanderings take him past rooms of server racks, blinking quietly. The two crew-members eventually link up and Nix decides to hack into the system. He eventually manages to access the station’s internal records, and what he finds is disturbing. It seems that the Pale Crew came here and precipitated a horrible shift in the virtual Heaven – as I described the information on the kiosk to Brendon, he likened it to a kind of revisionist Christian Stardew Valley, so here I said it’s basically like that Stardew Valley suddenly went Mad Max. Thing is, all the uploaded citizens still seem perfectly happy, according to the latest records. Everyone’s dying again and again in endless virtual wars, and no-one seems bothered.

Thoroughly creeped-out, Nix and Bug are briefly tempted to pull the plug on the servers then and there, but we end the session as they go to consult Ghost about all this. Why did he care about the well-being of Heaven, so much so that he would lock the old crew out for conducting their nasty little experiment?

Stray thoughts: Brendon and Roxanne are sort of perfect players for A NOCTURNE – they like to go all-in on the weird-future aspects of the setting, and they’re endlessly curious about the craft. One interesting thing: they’ve also been very combat-averse up until now – both our opening scores so far have been deception and social scores, after all – so it’ll be interesting to see where that goes when we get to Remonstrance IV’s hornet’s nest of intrigue and assassination, and have to way up their options for ending House-Minor Vex’s entire bloodline.

The craft-as-character is one note I always wanted to hit with A NOCTURNE, and so far it’s panning out really well. This is mostly down to centering the craft sheet in the rules, and to the players engaging with the AI in interesting ways, and to me as the GM making sure to characterise and describe the craft and AI in detail, but I’m already thinking of ways I can further emphasise this in the text.

Also, in case you weren’t aware already: Clocks are so goooood. I can already tell that the membrane rot clock for Nix is gonna be my best friend for a few sessions.

After the session, I polled Brendon and Roxanne on their special abilities, because I noticed they hadn’t used them much, if at all, and I wanted to get their read on wording and so on. Brendon’s is simple – he simply hadn’t had cause to kill anyone yet, so The Subtle Knife was currently just kinda there. Roxanne, meanwhile, was just wary of the implications of Vessel‘s rogue AI, and we had a little discussion about fleshing the character of this AI out further in future sessions.

I also changed damage and scars back to stress and trauma anf honestly it’s been a lifesaver. No more umming and arring, no more confusion.

Next Time: an awkward audience with Ghost in which some very important things have to be hashed out re: virtual euthanasia and Ghost’s own moral compass. Also, how are they going to approach the task given to them by the Apophatic Order? I’m briefly prepping a real tangled web of intrigue and nastiness to drop them in the middle of. It’s gonna be good.

A NOCTURNE — v0.8 Play-test Session #3

The crew arrive in the forbidding system of Fitzwilliam’s Ashes, dominated by the glowering black hole known as Night’s Mouth. Over the next few days, they drift into the mid-system, where they enter the orbit of Fitzwilliam II, an orphaned moon that serves as the base of the Apophatic Order, a monkish religion with ties across the cluster. They’re here to get some advice, or at least learn something, about whatever else calls their craft The Ghost home, the things that move objects and steal others while they’re down for the coldsleep.

Fitzwilliam II is a scarred ball of ice-rhimed rock. For a reference point, I showed the players some images of Monument Valley in the winter, except that the stone mesas have been carved into massive, faceless statues. They take their rickety landing craft down into the valley where the Templi Apophanai’s obelisk bulk hunches on the shoulders of more of these status. At the huge, sealed doors (Fitzwilliam II is a few hundred below freezing, and mostly airless), they’re confronted by a lone temple guard, a seeming child piloting a war-shell that appears to be an eight-foot classical statue, similar to the giants that flank the valley. It asks for tribute. Nix hands over an old war medal dug from their pile of old stuff on the craft.

After depressurizing in the stone airlock (Nix takes of his helmet, grateful for the now-manageable cold air that reminds him of his frozen homeworld), they’re lead deep into the Temple along a predetermined route, carefully selected to hide the order’s secrets from prying eyes. A short wait in an side chapel gives Nix time to reflect on the frescoes adorning the walls – turns out (according to a quick fortune roll) that his homeworld was host to a branch of an offshoot of a distant cousin of the Apophatic Order. He knows that they’re sort of like a doomsday cult that got their end-scenario, believe space is one big, complicated afterlife.

The few monks they meet are ritually blinded, and tethered to some unseen core by thick cables that hang from their spines. The archivist (wearing an artificial shell along the lines of a headless, 16-limbed arachnid) informs them that they’ve had dealings with a crew of the Ghost before, that these problems may be caused by colony of simple machine intelligences, interstellar parasites they call “Limpets.”

It’s score time, and as it happens, a test of how scores work when you do them aboard-craft. Turns out, pretty much like any other score! This is a “special mission” type score with a Social plan, intended to negotiate with the Limpets, get them to not bug them any more.

Unfortunately (fortunately?), things get complicated fast.

Roxanne elects to roll the 2d engagement roll and gets a 4. Not bad, but it’s a Risky position starting out. They’re descending into the bowels of the craft, down through crumbling air shafts and dripping, pipe-strangled tunnels. Ghost, the craft AI, is guiding them from a distance, sending them Driveward. Sine they’re not under thrust, they’re in microgravity, mostly crawling hand-over-hand along ladder rungs and down upended corridors.

There’s a clanging in the distance. Sounds of movement.

Entering a large, spherical room that looks like it might once have been a node for Ghost’s AI matrix, criss-crossed by girders and mothballed server racks, they spring an ambush. It’s not the Limpets, though – it’s a gang of pale, shaven-headed panhumans wearing ragged pressure suits, their faces daubed with strange symbols. One of them holds a welding element to Nix’s face, while Bug manages to throw off two easily (a fantastic resistance roll, for which Roxanne rolled the devil’s crit of 666, clearing 1 Damage), before one of them (a scrawny woman) pulls a wide-bore service pistol and aims it at the uplifted hyena’s head. They drift in the microgravity, at an impasse.

The pale gang’s leader, an old man with a thick beard that spills over his pressure suit’s collar, claims that they’re the real crew, that the Ghost AI is a false god. He and the rest speak in an archaic form of spacer cant (I got this across in play by doing my best impressions of the characters in THE WITCH). Apparently they’ve been at war with the Limpets here in these sections for generations. They argue a little, but before the leader can get too riled up, one of his men (a guy with a wrench who’d hung back to keep an eye on the other access tunnels) hisses a warning – the Limpets are coming. To save their skin, Bug quickly tries to make the pale crew see sense – Roxanne only gets a 5 though, for less effect – Bug convinces them that they’re fellow crew, worth helping out, but doesn’t manage to make them realise that Ghost is legit, or that the Limpets are worth talking to.

We end the session as the Limpets close in. Maybe this Social plan ain’t gonna be so friendly after all….

Stray thoughts: I admit, I had some doubts about how craft scores might play out when I first introduced them in the text, but this plays like gangbusters. It’s all about building on what’s set down at craft creation, and really laying on the technological decay imagery. Lots of mutated vermin and venting pipework. I’m definitely cooking up some more commentary for how to come up with aboard-craft factions for the new version based on this, too, though it was actually quite natural how some basic factions emerged from selecting the AI and background back in session #1.

This session also inspired me to add a bit to craft creation concerning getting + or – statuses with factions based on whether they’ve had good or bad relations with the craft before play begins, using the craft’s background as a springboard. It seems neat, but I’ll have to see how it plays out when we do it retroactively next session.

I’m also thinking of changing Damage back to stress, ‘cos I keep slipping and calling it that during the sessions. Thoughts?

Again, though, I can’t stress (heh) how good the core Blades system is at failing gracefully. When in doubt, use the core action mechanic or a fortune roll. I already loved Blades a whole bunch, but making a hack of it just makes me appreciate it even more. This is the good shit.

Next time: We find out what happens to the pale crew and/or Limpets. Whose side are the crew gonna take? Are they going to take a side? Will they hire a contingent of the pale crew as an unstable cohort at some point? Is Ghost hiding some things about its past? I may be biased, but I’m liking this game a lot, y’all.

A NOCTURNE v0.7.2 / v0.8 — playtest session #2

We cut right back in where we left off. The crew (Nix, our Forgotten, and Bug, our Witch, crew of the Ghost, a Dark Orb) have been briefly left to their own devices in the corporate suite aboard the primary mining station in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant Naturalis III.

The administrators are giving them some space to discuss business, and to take in a little automated presentation – a membrane display that drips up out of the tabletop to hang in the air, rotating, peeling apart to reveal its innards and show how advanced and profitable the Syndicate’s operation is here (membrane is a piece of technology I need to write up in the rules – it’s a kind of silvery-black oily nanotech substance, programmed to take on certain shapes, and the preferred 3D display method over glitchy holograms. It’s also used for high-tech interfaces, with the buttons and switches extruding from surfaces as needed. Fancy stuff).

We reiterate the crew’s goal here: somehow draw out Lamplight, one of the secretive admins of the Naturalis Syndicate, and convince her to take a deal with the Tethisii Mining Council. Testing the waters, and still learning the system, Brendon decides to do a flashback – turns out Nix visited the station a month back, posing as a regular gas miner (chemically-burned pressure suit, breathing apparatus, toolbelt, carefully messy oil stains), and managed to corner a high ranking miner to press some info out of him.

Seems Lamplight has a barely-withheld addiction to collecting rare antiquities, especially those of alien origin. Another flashback, but this one’s a lot cheaper, since it uses some fiction we’ve already established about the crew’s craft – Ghost has a lot of old junk aboard from previous crews. In amongst the debris, their just happens to be an old alien painting, actually a gilt-framed hunk of stone pried of some ancient ruin.

For the past month, they’ve been advertising the painting on the local networks, fishing for replies. There’s an interested buyer, and they’re gambling on it being Lamplight.

Back to the present. The admins come back in (temporarily shelled into their collective android body) to finalise the investment procedure. During the discussion, Nix and Bug (somewhat clumsily) drop hints about paintings. The admins are nonplussed, and the meeting continues as normal after that stumbling block, but a few days later the crew get a message aboard Ghost: Lamplight wants to meet.

Problem is, she’s careful enough that she immediately rebuffs any attempt to meet aboard-craft. Instead she arranges for them to meet on one of the tertiary mining rigs over Naturalis III, painting in tow.

They meet in one of the cargo hangars. Lamplight arrives flanked by heavily-armed guards. She’s a statuesque woman with a ring of snake eyes encircling her head, and she looks mighty suspicious. However, the deal actually goes swimmingly – as soon as Lamplight sets her many eyes on the painting, the deal’s done (Roxanne rolled a crit on her Sway here as she negotiated, and we ran with it). Turns out Lamplight’s love of alien art trumps any conviction regarding who has a stake in the Syndicate. She agrees to the deal with the Tethisii in exchange for the painting.

We close out the score with some payoff (4 Profit), allotting Chaos to the Urci Naturalis system (this was contained – no gunshots or anything, but the admins’ suspicions were raised a little, so 2 Chaos, +1 for a high-profile target), Maintenance (the crew spend 1 Profit to keep Ghost running), and then on to downtime.

There are ghosts in Ghosts machine, something to do with the old crew – the crew need an expert. Thinking this might be a religious matter, they’re headed to visit the Apophatic Order on Fitzwilliam II, in Fitzwilliam’s Ashes, a ruined system orbiting a black hole known as Night’s Mouth. They do a slow burn to avoid spending too much Profit. The trip takes a few decades for them, a few more for everywhere else due to time dilation.

Downtime activities for the first few weeks/months of the trip: both Nix and Bug externalise some of their Damage (Nix talks it out with Ghost’s old and violent AI, who speaks a disembodied voice that echoes through the bulkheads, while Bug trains in an old gym deep in the core, boxing with a virtual membrane opponent); Bug starts a long-term project, designing a special hypnotic function for their artificial snake familiar; Nix trains up their Savvy.

We end the session there, ready to jump into free play next and see if the crew can get into contact with the notoriously tricky Apophatic Order.

Stray thoughts: There were some hiccoughs for Brendon here and there, but nothing I haven’t seen with other people getting to grips with Blades’ flashbacks and the like. It’s early days yet.

Something interesting: we had a brief discussion afterwards about how different A Nocturne feels when compared to Blades. Roxanne mentioned how wide-open it feels compared to the tight pressure-cooker of Duskwall. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on how that feeling develops as we go forward and situations start to snowball. I like it, but I definitely want to nail it down and examine it more.

This session also marked the start of a change-over to the still-in-development v0.8 rules. Overall, it seems to be going well, particularly the slightly looser interstellar travel rules, which sell the time-scales involved much better than the old mass of numbers I dumped into the previous version.

A NOCTURNE v7.2 – play-test session #1

I’d intended to externally record this play-test campaign in some fashion, like a kind of secondary prosthetic repository of notes, maybe a slapdash podcast or somesuch. As it is, text’ll probably do. Fuck it.

This session was mostly character + craft creation, and getting the group up to speed (we only had two of the group present due to last minute re-jigs – Roxanne’s played Blades before and more or less knew the score, while Brendon had only really played D&D – new blood!), with the first taste of an opening score.

We open on the crew of the Ghost, a patchwork stealth craft (using the Dark Orb playbook) as they set foot on the ludicrously rich mining world of Tethis to meet with a few members of the the Most Serene Mining Council, the promise of a well-paid job in the thick, poisonous air. They enter one of the Tethisii’s artificial palaces through the fungal gardens, the slug-like mining magnates greeting them perfunctorily.

Nix (The Forgotten) is an uplifted arctic fox from a desolate, frontier ice world, forced to hunt and live by their wits, a frightening third eye nestled in the fur of their forehead (Brendon’s surprising and creepy take on the Forgotten’s The Subtle Knife ability – somehow, Nix can kill with a look).

Bug (The Witch) is also uplifted, a hyena-like creature from a desert world that used to be a paradise before being strip-mined for its valuable resources – Bug’s rebellious ways prompted the colonial authorities to implant an AI safeguard in his mind, which has grown strange and mutated over the years (Roxanne honing in on the Witch’s weirdest ability, Vessel, just like I knew she would).

The Mining Council have a simple proposition: they’ve been trying for years to strike a lucrative deal with the Naturalis Syndicate, the shadowy aristocrats who run the gas mines on nearby Naturalis III. The wrench in the gears is one of the Naturalis administrators, codenamed Lamplight, a mysterious woman unwilling to give up control of the Syndicate’s resources. The task: get Lamplight on side, or at least get her out of the way (likely the latter).

The crew’s plan: pose as new money investors hoping to get a small piece of the Naturalis Syndicate, trying to draw out Lamplight in the process. We establish that the Malgren Consortium, established at craft creation as rivals of the crew, may be interfering, but the engagement roll doesn’t go too badly – a 5, so a risky position starting out.

The crew, following some exchanged communiques, arrive at the Naturalis Syndicate headquarters, a bristling mining platform in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, and are greeted by Sub-Administrator Lanthom (a sharply-dress man with a body like a low-poly imitation of a person), flanked by android guards. The androids scan Bug and something suspicious turns up – the android barks something at Lanthom, and he eyes the two. He asks them, bluntly, if they’re armed. Bug quickly allays his fears with some spiel about propriety and some are-you-serious’s, but I start a clock called Admin’s Suspicion and add a tick (a 5 on a Sway roll).

They’re taken to a corporate suite with a striking view of the gas giant’s cloud formations. Lanthom seems to wait for someone, silent. Then one of the androids shivers – a number of the administrators, paranoid about their physical safety and protective of their identities, have all ported temporarily into this android shell for this preliminary meeting. Their distorted voices combine.

The first big question: proof of funds. The players suddenly panic and I remind them about flashbacks. Brendon immediately latches on: turns out the Tethisii Mining Council have given them a fake line of credit – real enough to deceive on a first pass, and disguised enough to seem like it’s from another source. With this, the roll to convince the Syndicate of their story is Controlled. Still, Roxanne rolls a 4 and decides to take it on the chin – I add another tick to the Suspicion clock. The Administrators are mostly convinced, but they definitely have their guard up.

Then, it’s down to initial business, but that’s where we left it as it was getting late. I don’t like to split scores across sessions, but sometimes it’s gotta happen.

Stray thoughts: it’s a testament to the durable core of Blades that Roxanne was able to jump back into the mindset so quickly after several months away from the rules, and Brendon seems to be picking it up really quickly. That said, it’s really too early to tell if my hack is working as intended or not. Looking forward to stretching my system to breaking point over the next few weeks.