So, to catch y’all up, the crew took a noble and his entourage on a safari to another planet to hunt kaiju. After a very eventful first outing, which saw my character stranded for several days, things went mostly well. Only two members of the entourage got mauled and presumably eaten, but were the help and therefore were acceptable loses. So with trophies and specimens secured and loaded onto the ship, we departed.
So remember the
S.S. Bane? Our horrifically haunted/cursed ship? For the first time, the Ref made good on the rule that he gets to put a Bane (roll an additional die and discard the highest roll) on our astrogation check. And boy howdy did we have ourselves a misjump. Normally our result would have been the equivalent to “rocks fall and everyone dies” and the end of the campaign. That is not what happens. So, usually, Traveller is a pretty serious, hardish sci-fi setting and as written doesn’t lend itself wacky space shenanigans. Well, with 5 guys whose brains have been poisoned with WH40k for between 7-20 years, that goes out the window quick. Instead of our atoms coming out into real space at some undetermined point at some undetermined time, the Ref decided to at least have some fun if we’re ending the campaign already. Oh, and the barbershop quartet showed up too.
So we hit jump space with a loud “kerrr-PLANG!” as we tasted copper, sulphur, and something indescribable (Ref’s words), the whole ship shudders, shrieks and roars, and everything loses power. And when I say everything, I mean from the ship’s systems, most notably the gravity, to personal devices had 0 power available. And when I state the obvious “WTF”, the Ref hands out music sheets for us to sing the summary of our situation as the ghostly apparitions of a barbershop quartet. I got the lower range tempo keeping “bum bumbum bum bum” and such more than actually lyrics. Boo. Anyhow, after that was over with, we hear something scrapping outside the bulkhead doors. We crack them open to see one of the panther like lizard/saurian things the competent people captured floating around trying to claw the walls. So we closed the doors.
So, we quickly set our objectives and begin our plan to achieve them:
1) Reach the engineering section to repair and restart the power plant and possibly the jump drive*. This is priority numero uno as all else is moot if these things aren’t functioning properly.
2) Secure the passengers, primarily the client.
3) Secure the rest of the ship and figure out what the FECK is going on downstairs. The shuddering and noise from their sounded ominous.
4) Survive the misjump
So off we went, bypassing the angry lizard panther thing**, confirming the noble and more important entourage members were secured in their upper deck state rooms, and made our way to engineering. Good news: The power plant and JD were functioning just fine! Yay! Bad news: The JD was probably a run away and the breakers to the main and auxiliary power buses were on the lower level for some fucking reason^. Boo! So down stairs we go to find pandaemonium of the grandest scale occurring.
So, after getting to the bottom of the stairs we found ourselves gazing into the trophy room. This is a problem seeing as there is supposed to be a bulkhead, a hallway, and another wall between the stairwell and the trophy room. It takes about two seconds to identify the cause. The flying, not floating, but flying spectral head of a Kaiju whose skull the noble claimed as a trophy. On top of this was a battle royale between the head, various other reanimated trophies, escaped captured fauna and a couple of surviving entourage members trying their damnedest to bring the 106mm from the airskiff to bear in zero-g.
So, initially, we draw our laser pistols to get stuck in. However, we quickly realize that the power cells were depleted and we were now at the attention of a trio of reanimated taxidermied tree crabs. The Army officer, scout and myself screen our ex-hobo convict engineer as he propels himself to the panels where the electrical bus breakers lay. To cut down on a nearly two real world hour battle, the following happened:
a) our engineer successfully managed to repair and reset the breakers and attached cabling to restore power.
b) despite our disadvantage at fighting, untrained, in a zero-g environment, were manage to hold back the zombie crabs, who seemed to have less issue with zero-g.
c) we return upstairs to hear a THUMP and a near simultaneous explosion downstairs as the remaining entourage members apparently proved our assessment of their situation wrong and fired of the 106mm. Inside an enclosed, pressurized vessel.
d) the breakers trip again, we reset them again, noting that the skull was shattered but reconstituting itself. Many of the escaped specimen were stunned and were being set upon by the mostly undamaged reanimated things.
e) we reset systems and prepare to seal off the lower deck for the duration of the jump
d) the lizard panther makes its presence known, and is beaten into unconsciousness with blunt objects and bulkhead paneling used as improvised shields. However, our scout and a entourage member get fucked up. The noble coup de grace it with a slugthrower pistol.
f) doing a quick inventory, we find we don’t have enough supplies to make it the remaining 7 days in jump space
IF everything goes normally. LOL.
g) the three of us still standing set out back to the lower deck to gather supplies. In a fit of inspiration, the engineer disables gravity again to ease the movement of the crates.
h) the skull got the “winner winner chicken dinner” after reconstituting itself in the lower deck battle royale. Then it noticed us.
i) cue Benny Hill as we evade the skull and try to keep it from tearing up the actual pressure vessel as it and the 106mm did terrible, terrible things to the structure down there.
j) the noble and three remaining entourage members come down to assist, about piss themselves upon seeing the head, but make for a wonderful distraction as we begin to execute Operation Mother of Invention.
k) the engineer begins moving 4 crates of critical supplies to the stair well using the zero-g and momentum. We keep the kaiju head distracted while they’re moving to the stairwell. Meanwhile, the injured scout and noble sneak around and place IED directional charges on the vehicle bay doors.
l) The one of the entourage who got her shit together distracts the kaiju head long enough for me to assist the officer into a harness rig attached to a winch. At which point he gets the kaiju’s attention with some high caliber rifle fire that sends him flying into the vehicle bay.
m) the kaiju miraculously follows, at which point I activate the winch in high gear, yank out the officer and realized I failed to account for halting the officer’s momentum.
n) bay doors slam shut on the kaiju, officer slams into the forward bulkhead and is knocked the fuck out with some grievous injuries, and we gather him and fuck off back upstairs, sealing it behind us.
So this is where I must point out, we’re still in jump space. We’re inside a little bubble of reality that doesn’t extend much past the surface of our ship. So when we detonated those bay door charges and the fuel cells on the airskiff in an attempt to eject the kaiju head, we were potentially going to have to deal with more than a simple breach into the hard vacuum of space. But with the now familiar roar of the kaiju and the shuddering of the ship’s structure from it trying to break it’s imprisonment, detonate them we did. There was a split second of a indescribable color and sound that were not seen or heard with eyes or ears, there was a power surge and buckling of the decking. Pressure loss and other alarms began to blare, followed by a strange shift in gravity and tortured creaking of the ship’s frame. Somewhere faintly, almost distantly, you could hear a dirge sung in a cappella and then silence. Looking out an emergency viewport, as the engineer frantically tries to triage the multitude of failures and warnings appearing and the noble and remaining entourage try to stabilize the officer, my character sees a star. We’re back in real space a week early. And that’s where we ended the latest session.
*If the jump drive stopped working completely, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of this because the ship would be directly exposed to jump space and things like physics stop working.
**Even if we thought we could kill it without major injuries, doing so would have probably pissed off the client. So, since it seemed to be having trouble with zero-g, we just slipped around it.
^Not having critical breakers like this easily accessible in the maintenance bay boggles my aircraft mechanic mind. Sadly, I have encountered a similar situation with a B-1 that was dumping fuel, so I can’t exactly call BS on this.
