It's a TL 11 mercantile universe. No one even asked me the date, but I think it's probably the 24th Century sometime. Spaceships are single-stage ground-to-deep-space, with fusion drives. Or maybe they're antimatter. But I think they're fusion.
There are two known alien races. The first are the Molemen. They're Maoist Naked Mole Rats...IN SPACE! Well, that's a bit of an oversimplification. But not much of one. They also like it about 40 C, 100 percent humidity, and quite a lot of SO2. Humans and they can live in each other's environments, but neither side likes it much. Molemen do magnificent bio-engineering and communicate largely through smell. They can see farther into the infrared than we can. They aren't so good with metallurgy; thus they like human starship hulls when they can get 'em. They're happy to trade you just the wheat virus you need to quickly transform the atmosphere of that light-gravity, heavy-on-the-thallium, too-much-nitrogen-and-helium-in-the-air world you've just found, if you can just deliver two colony ships and a dozen free traders for 'em.
The second race are loosely modeled on Niven's Outsiders. They—or it—are called the Visitors and are a collection of asteroids with some very complicated crystals that form their brains, a few square miles of film as a photon collector, and the occasional tentacle. Basically, they're distributed intelligences, and their memory crystals store both their individual memories and programs that allow them to construct energy storage organs (basically, chemical batteries), grow little nanomites, and program the nanomites to construct micromites which can build or be, oh, X-ray lasers, radio beacons, eyes, tentacles, or rocket engines. They can't take much acceleration and although they're pretty resistant to hard radiation (and like bright stars—lots of high-energy photons!), but eventually it will scramble their knowledge cells. But it also feels really good; lots of Visitors die that way. Visitors love collecting knowledge they didn't already have. Sometimes this takes the form of putting a few sense organs into a construction that can survive more gravity, more heat, or more radiation than a usually active visitor can take, and some low-density, but tougher memory. They'll pay to get those back when well-dwellers find them. (They also like to hear directly from well-dwellers, but, after the first five thousand mammalian oxygen-breathing species, they all look pretty much the same.) They also like compact energy sources, and it's hard to mine uranium when you can't take more than .01G. So the Visitors are the best way there is to get rid of your fission waste; get it out of your gravity well and over to them and they're very pleased to take it off your hands. The hotter the better. Calling them "they" might be wrong: reproduction is basically a matter of dividing up the knowledge, and splitting off a bud which does its thing. So "it," then, is very old—a couple billion years, easy—and is at the very least throughout this arm of the galaxy. It's usually the Visitors that clue new well-dwelling races who've discovered fusion drives into how to find the Gates.
Gates are instantaneous hyperspace links. They orbit stars, and there are certain constraints on the local spatial curvature which limit the orbits in which you will find them. If you enter them with just the right velocity vector, and discharge enough energy at the right microsecond as you're going in, you come out somewhere else. Usually that's somewhere within about 15 light-years. One gate can have multiple destinations dependent on the vector of approach; however, no humans have yet figured out how to correlate approach with destination, and prospecting for new destinations tends to lead to lots of ships that don't come out, or at least, not anywhere they can find their way home from. Searching for new destinations is an exotic form of suicide, but since the rewards for finding a new destination are very high, there's no shortage of volunteers. There's a pretty good network within about 50 light years of Sol that humans have figured out or bought the knowledge of approach vectors from the Visitors.
(175 points, up to 80 in disads, plus five quirks).
Transfinity is one of several large multinationals that sponsors exploration and trade; basically, you sign on with them and get training in return for a couple decades of debt. Once that's paid off out of your wages (which are garnished: Transfinity gets its cut first), then you become a limited shareholder, and have the opportunity to captain your own ship. Your own in the sense that Transfinity holds the mortgage on it, and as long as you make the payments, you keep what you can above that. And if you don't, the ship is repoed and you get to work as an indentured employee to Transfinity until the debt is paid off.
(By the way, if this and the Gate description sound Heecheeish, that's because they are.)
Each vessel has two full crews, plus a captain, for a total of eleven. They work twelve-hour shifts. Our group was the B crew of Free Trader Sparrow.
The captain, Hong Ji Brannigan, was pretty much a terrible captain, but grossly overconfident. He's been unhappy having such a shitty ship and having such difficulty making his payments on it. So he hatched a clever scheme. He'd rush a scheduled drydock refit and use the extra days to make a detour to the Sirius system, where there'd been reports of a lot of piracy recently. He had already arranged to illegally modify his transponder to make the ship appear to be a privateer last seen out on the edges of known space. He'd pretend to be disabled and broadcast a distress signal, to attract the pirates. The other part of his Clever Plan was that he had arranged for five Space Marine buddies of his—Guido, Louie, Tony, Frankie, and Biff—to ride along, and when the ship was boarded, he and the Space Marines would swarm in, accompanied by Cyndi (his asskissing Science Officer who was a frustrated movie director), and he would, heroically and on camera, kick the pirates' ass and capture their ship. The remainder of the primary crew would get shore leave.
A great plan. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the jump to Sirius (piloting and Navigation(Hyperspace)) went fine, as did the reprogramming the transponder (Electronics Ops (Comms)). And soon enough a vessel—same model as the Sparrow—hailed the Sparrow, using an obviously computer generated voice to warn that no resistance should be offered. The Science Officer noticed that the light visible through the portholes was very red, and the pilot noticed that sensors were showing 39.2 degrees centigrade in the other ship. They didn't say nothin', like the Tar Baby. The captain, his camerawoman, and his Space Marines, were suited up and expected the gas that was pumped into the airlock. They evacuated that and then charged in to kick some pirate ass.
Weirdly, it was all dark red in there (our heroes were listening via suit commlink). But the atmosphere was breathable, so they took off their suit helmets, the better to see threats with. "Who farted?" was the captain's first question, followed by, "Damn, it's muggy in here."
Soon enough that gave way to "EEEAGH! MONSTERS!" followed by wet ripping sounds, one of the Marines saying "I don't feel so good" and keeling over, consumed by an instant 110-degree fever, the additional marines injecting their battle stimpacks and still being disembowelled, and our heroes, quite sensibly, blowing the airlock and getting the hell out of Dodge.
The pirates gave chase, but a very fine shot by the Security Officer with Beam Weapons holed their hull, and they stopped chasing our heroes, who hit the Gate taking them the farthest they could get from Sol. They all got the Zeroed advantage for free.
That took them to Kapteyn's Star. One earthlike planet settled by Mennonites, and (Streetwise) a space station of ill-repute named the Black Hole near the Gate to Denis 1048-something (I don't have my map with me). Before going anywhere, the crew set the ship down on a handy asteroid and did an EVA to blast the identification markings off the ship with a welder. They also went through the quarters of the other crewmembers , finding some cash, a few weapons, some sex toys (including a vicious double-ended dildo that makes an effective club, because I've been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and a whole lot of pornography (including the HOT HOT Cyndi/Hong Li amateur vid).
For an exorbitant docking fee the crew was allowed to land, and sold a
few cans of paint and a sprayer. The Sparrow had become (with a little
more transponder hacking) the "Free BallerTrader Hijinks." Everyone
picked new identities (sort of; these were kind of organically
developed, but for the purposes of narrative...)
| Player | Character |
| JB | Captain Robert James (BJ) Obvious |
| Aimee | Honey Nahasapeemapetelon |
| Keith | Dr. Hugh Jass |
| Jason | Ivan Ivinithz |
| Amy | Nikalauka Kanauwaa |
In the bar, BJ Obvious made some sex appeal rolls and ended up putting the hammer to a space bar skank back on the ship. A bit later, a cursory tricorder examination by Dr. Jass did not reveal any diseases, but you never know. Also, contact was made with a man named "George," who gave them three crates of stuff to get to some other system (not a memorable name) within 12 days, which would be a remarkably fast trip. But the pay was good. Also, some perfectly legitimate drive parts bound for Barnard's Star were taken on board.
En route it was discovered via sensor rolls that the cargo was some sort of virus-laced heroin. Nobody was able to figure out the virus without actually opening the box and that was deemed unwise. Some tense bribery of customs officials took place upon landing, and the delivery was made. "Ed," the cargo recipient, attempted to swindle the crew out of their money; blackmail was threatened, and a mutually-agreeable settlement (about half pay, in credit, along with new identities and a credit account with NostraBank of Sigma Draconis), was reached. (Zeroed dropped, replaced with Secret Identity).
That's where we stopped for the night. The system worked well, and the group, although they were used to d20, seemed to have no trouble with rolling low on 3d6 instead of high on d20. The freedom GURPS gives you in character creation was viewed with some suspicion, in that everyone wanted a clear role on board the ship, and we have, let's face it, a fighter, a cleric, a bard, and, basically, two mages. Still, everyone seemed to have a really good time, and there's enthusiasm to move forward with it.
So, Week 1 ended with our heroes having delivered a cargo of virus-laced heroin to the underworld on a space station circling one of the gates at Lalande 21158. They had also gotten hold of some fake identities, so now everyone has a Secret Identity.
Although Ivan had designed a ship-based hydrogen refinery—which consumed 10 of the 100 tons of cargo available to the heroes—he hadn't yet tested it. So he and the pilot went off to dive into a local gas giant. After a fair bit of airsickness (marginal success on the pilot rolls) and some necessary tweaking (marginal success on Engineering) the Hijinks had a working refinery that could fill up the ship's hydrogen reserves in about six skims through the planetary atmosphere. (The pseudoscientific, but reasonably plausible rationale for this device is this: if you have a fusion drive you already have some way, probably magnetic, of containing a lot of very high-energy matter. So you take some of that containment technology, and you turn it into a curved-necked bottle. You then use that bottle as a ramjet by diving through the upper atmosphere of a gas giant at reasonably high speeds. Because hydrogen is the lightest element, it will curve the most in a magnetic field, compared to anything else. So you keep the stuff that makes it around the tightest curve in your magnetic bottle, and vent the rest. Hey, for pulled-out-of-my-ass science in the service of a space opera game, it's pretty good.)
The crew needed a cargo.
They also decided they wanted a cargo-handling robot. Now, I hadn't really thought much about AI or robots in this setting, but what the heck. Robots have maximum IQ of 5. They're sort of sentient, but don't really learn as such, although they can be reprogrammed.
Anyway, Lalande 21158 has, in addition to multiple gas giants, several big rocky asteroids, some of which have been put near the Gate termini. On one of these lived an old alcoholic Space Coot with his junkyard. He had three suitable bots, all of them for sale, as is, no refunds, no returns, you break it, you bought it. A brand-new bot would cost about 50Kcr. He had a Personal Assistance Robot, "Maria" model, colloquially known as the "Mechanical Mexican Maid." She looked to be in good shape, came with the pleasure attachment (although the Coot warned that our heroes might want to wash it out first), but, alas, cost 10Kcr.
Then there was a standard cargo bot that a Transfinity ship had junked six years previously. Mechanically seemed to be in good shape, but the Coot was willing to unload it for 5Kcr, claiming that he didn't know what had gone wrong with it such that the ship had decided to scrap it.
Third, there was, well, it wasn't clear what it was. The Coot, as it happened, was not the original owner of this junkyard, and this had been there when he won it in a poker game a decade and a half ago. It was basically a bot brain (obsolete model) and an arm and a bunch of little cogs and random parts in a box. 500 Cr.
So the cargo robot was acquired, and some Merchant skill was deployed to talk the price down and get the scrap-bot thrown in.
Next followed some highly entertaining Electronics Repair rolls, to disconnect the cargo bot's musculature while poking around in its brain (Comp Ops). Turns out that he'd been decommissioned because he, uh, started pulling the arms off of people. Also turned out that there was some fairly major file system corruption down in the social module libraries, which might have explained that. A bit of conversation with the powered-up-but paralyzed bot revealed that his name was "Tim."
The other bot turned out to be "My Wang," an obsequious Chinese navigator's assistant from the previous century; its actual skills weren't really very useful, but it did have a fully functional set of social libraries—for ass-kissing Chinese values of "social" anyway. (If I didn't mention it last week: in this universe, everyone speaks both English and Chinese, and the usual language of commerce is a patois that's mostly English with a lot of Chinese thrown in. "Chinklish," we rudely call it.)
Well, this lure was WAY too strong to resist, and one Weird Science roll, some hot glue, and a bit of solder later, we had Timmy Wang, sycophantic and only mildly psychotic cargo bot, who I'm playing as KOTOR's HK-47, if HK-47 had excessive politeness papering over his bubbling vat of homicidal rage. For instance, "Yes, I would be delighted to move those crates of fissionable materials, O Glorious Master! May the light of a thousand stars shine from your asshole for all eternity, honorable meatbag!"
There was some debate over whether to take fissionables to somewhere I've forgotten, which was lucrative, but pretty dangerous, and would require additional shielding, or whether to take GM grain and corpsicles to Procyon, which paid less but wasn't nearly so scary.
Honey, our security officer, was getting bored. And everyone wanted to see some combat. So some asteroid miners loudly propositioned her, and a brawl, that escalated into a knife fight, and then into a gun battle, ensued in the bar. No one on either side died, although there were definitely some rolls-vs-HT made to retain consciousness. Our heroes were uniformly disappointed with how crappy their gunfighting skills were, and resolved to train them up when opportunity arose. The bartender finally calmed things down with his shotgun, and our heroes quickly picked up the cargo of 30 tons of GM grain and 20 frozen settlers bound for Procyon.
The trips through Ross 128, Lalande 21258, and Wolf 294 went uneventfully. The ship would have to refuel at Ross 882, and while our heroes were doing that, they were hailed by the large refuelling depot in orbit around Ross 882's gas giant. The station offered them 5KCr to do a little investigation.
Seems that the station had been operating a fleet of skimships for a decade or so; these did basically what the Hijinks did: skim through the upper atmosphere and grab a bunch of gas. This gas was then brought back and refined But then the previous year, the station—which also services Molemen ships, and has a separate section run by the Molemen—invested some of its profits in a newer model skimmer. This one was larger, faster, and sturdier, and consequently could plunge deeper into the atmosphere. All went well for the first few runs. Then it came back with its scoop damaged, as if it had hit something solid, which was a bit weird for a craft that just entered the upper atmosphere of gas giants. It was fixed up; a few weeks later, it happened again. And a few weeks after that, the ship disintegrated while collecting gas.
Upon questioning , it was revealed that all three incidents happened over the same basic part of the planet: imagine a globe. Put one dot on Finland, one on Southern France, and one on Greece. That's analogous to where these things took place (except, of course, that the gas giant was somewhat bigger than Jupiter).
So our heroes were supposed to go park in the atmosphere for as long as they could—the station would give them free fuel—and see if they could find anything out. So they motored on over to the right area of the planet, descended into the atmosphere, and began to hover. There were strange blobs of different-composited gas that began to approach the ship from about fifty miles out, and radar seemed to show, well, rocks—carbonaceous rocks, with significant oxygen content—up in the atmosphere. And then a rock showed up immediately below the ship, rising fast (about 500 mph). Our heroes beat a retreat, which was really too bad, because this was the one and only part of the day's adventures I'd prepared for.
The stationmaster tried to get them to go back—they delivered the camera and radar records to him—but was unable to offer a satisfactory deal. So our group left for Luyten's Star, where they failed to pick up any iron for transport, or indeed to question why there was such an overabundance of iron in a system with a small red dwarf star and not much else. The next hop took them to Procyon.
So, Procyon could have been a simple "Deliver the Cargo and Move On" kind of thing.
But it wasn't.
The locals, living in their pressurized dome, were really happy to see some new faces, and were excited about the shipment of grain and settlers. And they were overjoyed when the characters decided to rent the police shooting range for two weeks to each put a point into Guns. The townspeople were even happier that they had a real doctor to act as a sawbones for their little community, and Dr. Jass started treating rickets, cirrhosis, and hands-chopped-off-in-the-thresher.
About this time, Captain BJ Obvious's Lecherousness started acting up.
Yet he made his self-control roll and turned down Susanna, the married and pretty colonist who was making it eminently clear that she was looking for a little excitement in her life. She did promise him a going-away party. And then he made it again with the local bar skank, whose name I don't remember, but whose husband had fallen into the combine a couple years ago, and who had therefore been drowning her sorrows in cheap gin ever since, and had come to the doctor for a quick course of liver-repairing genetic therapy (which is an outpatient course of big pills at TL 11).
Well, that didn't actually turn out too well, as the next time our party wandered into the town's single tavern, much pointing and laughing ensued. Everyone knew, you see, that Captain Obvious was a tiny-dicked fag.
He dispelled the first rumor in the usual fashion, which caused some discomfort at the bar but a general consensus that it was pretty normal-sized. The bar skank was sent packing when she got even more abusive, and, somehow, a bar fight was avoided. Our heroes stood the bar to a round, and the party was underway.
However, the bar revelry did have unintended consequences. Honey, with her Alcohol Intolerance, simply passed out early, followed not long after by Ivan the Alcoholic; they were put in their cabins. Captain Obvious seduced Nikalauka Kanauwa'a, his seventeen-year-old pilot/navigator who badly failed her HT roll while drinking and then her Will roll to resist his seductive wiles. But that wasn't all! Dr. Hugh Jass's Overconfidence made him accept the Grizzlebee's Challenge: eat an entire basketball-sized Bloomin' Onion equivalent (tres kilos!) in an hour, and win $1000! (Yes, they have genetically-modified onions on this planet to go with their GM grains.)
Well, he made his HT roll, but not his HT-4 roll, and so he didn't hurl, but couldn't finish it with about 10 minutes to go. As overconfident as Dr. Jass was, he decided to make his Will roll to try—and did—and his HT-7 roll to choke it down anyway—and failed miserably. Onion puke spattered the bar, floor, walls, patrons, etc. Dr. Jass, now empty and hungry, started drinking heavily, and the inevitable and messy result occurred. The bartender handed him the mop, and he grossly failed his by-now-DX-6 roll to mop, and fell over in a puddle of his own fluids.
The next morning on board the ship, a hung-over Ivan and Honey moped while Niki woke up, punched Captain Obvious, and fled to her room. Captain Obvious rubbed a hand over his eyes and muttered, "Oy." And Dr. Jass woke up to find that the townspeople had given him the mop as a souvenir.
A few days later, the training was complete, our heroes were planning on leaving the following morning, and the townspeople threw them a going-away bash. Captain Obvious tried his Sex Appeal on Susanna, and here the Game Master rolled an 18 for her Will roll to resist his charms. So Captain Obvious began getting a little fellatio right there in one of the bar booths, and then she failed her HT roll and began choking. Hugh Jass, MD, was on the scene, and a quick first aid roll later, the dainty damsel recovered from her near-death experience with a quick quadruple shot of whiskey and began thanking the good doctor in the only appropriate fashion, and then extended her invitation to Honey, who was in the midst of politely declining when Susanna's husband, Generic Guy With A Shotgun, came in.
Susanna was immediately at -5 HP, Captain Obvious at 7, and Dr. Jass at 2. But now our heroes got a chance to use their newly-acquired Gun skills. Hugh stabilized the fair maiden while the rest of the party opened up a can of whoopass on the Jealous Husband. In typical, alas, for our party, fashion, Honey—Aimee's character—couldn't resist the temptation of anal violation, and shoved her pistol through his tattered jeans to where the Sun Don't Shine—she rolled a 4 on her Brawling skill, and he failed his Dodge—and pulled the trigger.
[I don't know what this is about: but in the D&D campaign, very early on, Aimee killed the wererat that was the Big Bad Guy (in "Thieves In The Forest" if anyone's played it) by grabbing a handful of silver coins and attempting to fist it, and rolling a natural 20. And JB's characters are always sluts.]
Then the party ran out of the bar, leaving the husband probably dying (-16 HP) and even if he lives, he'll have a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. The Hijinks took off—with no cargo aboard at all—as the cops arrived at the bar, sirens wailing and lights flashing. It'll be a while before the characters are welcome on Procyon again.
The next jump took them to Sirius. Now, no one had been paying any attention in the first week, or they would have remembered that Sirius is where Captain Brannigan and his Space Marines met their doom. And sure enough, as they were heading for the gate to leave the Sirius system, a computer-generated voice hailed them: "Prepare to be boarded. Do not resist and you will not be harmed."
And, on that cliffhanging note, we broke off for the week and the rest of the year.
Realizing full well that this was the system, and indeed, by the sound of it, the very pirate that had taken their "beloved" former captain Hong Ji Brannigan from them, the crew of the Free Trader Hijinks decided to play along with the pirates for a bit.
So they maintained course, as a ship of a similar make roared towards them, its poorly-tuned fusion drive provoking some comment from the engineer and navigator. The crew donned their vacc suits, mindful of the fast-acting illness that had befallen Brannigan, Cindy, and the Space Marines. The captain, the doctor, and the engineer went down to the airlock with the homicidal cargo robot/protocol droid Timmy Wang to await boarding, leaving the pilot to fly and the security officer to man the beam weapons. However, as the pirate ship flipped over and began slowing, Nika hit the gas and Honey began zapping the pirates with the Hijinks' beam weapons.
The pirates retaliated by simply opening up their throttle, which cooked all the sensors on the front end of the ship and gave the crew an unhealthy dose of neutrons (some HT rolls here). Then a beam-weapon and missile battle ensued, with some fancy piloting making some of the missiles fired by the pirates hit their own ship as the Hijinks darted dangerously close to it. During this fight it was noted that the pirate ship was in bad repair and that a lot of the hull seemed to be patched with, not metal, but something not unlike calcium carbonate. A couple more lucky shots put the pirates' engines out of commission and took down the ominously large and slow missle approaching the Hijinks.
The pirates begged for mercy, offering custom terraforming viruses, biocomputers, and whatever else they might have in return for their wretched lives. During this negotiation it was learned that their recent captives had become "repurposed." The steely-jawed Captain Obvious opened fire. The pirates apparently tried to cut loose their malfunctioning drive, and then it blew up. More HT rolls ensued, and Honey, Hugh, and Ivan all took bad—but not fatal—doses of radiation.
Much of the front end of the pirate ship was more-or-less intact, so after holing it enough that the atmosphere had escaped, and waiting until everything cooled sufficiently that it was clear there was nothing emitting much heat in there, the captain, Timmy, and Honey shot some tethers over to the pirate ship and began looting the cargo hold. They found some fairly valuable medical supplies (painkillers and antibiotics), two dead Molemen, some mysterious alien goo, some terraforming wheat designed to clean soil by locking up heavy metals inside itself ("Fifteen times your lifetime dose of cadmium in every scoop of Sirius Wheaties!"), and a bunch of empty containers that had held engine parts and hull plates.
Proceeding towards the bridge, Fright Checks were necessary, as it became clear that the "repurposing" had something to do with biological computing, and that the spines and heads of the humans captured by the pirates had been wired into some sort of grotesque communications net. Captain Obvious and Honey Nahasapeemapetelan suddenly veered off into Chaotic Evil territory, as they decided to cut down Cindy and Captain Brannigan, not for a decent burial, but as, frankly, souvenirs.
The bridge revealed little but the ship's log, which was mostly in Moleman speech and thus not very amenable to quick translation. However, it did appear that perhaps an escape pod had gotten away under cover of the detonating reactor (which appeared to have been deliberately sabotaged), and that there had been five crewmen at the start of the encounter. Since two had been found dead, perhaps as many as three Molemen had escaped; or perhaps they had been killed in the blast. Sensors showed several fragments that could have been intact escape pods, but could also just have been chunks of the engine room.
The crew quarters revealed that the Molemen had a collective nest; the infirmary yielded what was thought to probably be the Moleman equivalent of Gray's Anatomy, and a weapons locker, which contained the Space Marines' goodies—blaster pistols and rifles, a Gyroc pistol, a couple of revolvers, a Bowie knife, and a really nasty-looking pair of drum-magazine riot shotguns. Also there were a pair of tiny little Moleman guns, probably, that no one had any idea how to use.
The crew returned to the ship with their loot and headed off in the direction of Epsilon Eridani. Along the way, some of their hair fell out, and much barfiness was suffered by the radiation-sick crewmembers (at a -2 to HT for a month or so).
On e Eri, the captain took Hugh and Honey and went looking for cargo, while Nika and Ivan tried to refuel from the local gas giant. Nika critically failed a piloting roll, and the ship was very nearly lost as it plummetted deep into the gas giant. Some quick thinking, some excellent engineering rolls, and the dramatic necessity to not kill 40% of the party and throw away the spaceship saved the day, although the ship was pretty messed up.
Meanwhile, on e Eri, Captain Obvious learned why you shouldn't take two radiation-poisoned malcontents to a combination steak house/strip club. After nearly involving local law enforcement again, and really irritating a taxi driver, the two vomiting vagabonds were left in a flophouse hotel while Captain Obvious headed for a bar in a slightly nicer section of town. There he struck up a conversation with the attractive Ukranian bartender, Ilana, who was working a really long shift and living in terror of her boss, who showed up, yelled at her for ignoring her other customers, and then, after a bit of posturing, got down to negotiating with Captain Obvious. Seems that he had a nephew, Igor, who really needed to take a nice long vacation. Igor needed to go to Sigma Draconis, clear on the other side of human space. In return for the boss letting Ilana off work that evening, Captain Obvious agreed to take Igor on as a crewmember until they got to s Drac; Igor, although skinny and glum, was said to be very strong, and, it was admitted, knew which end of a gun was which. The boss also had a lot of beef (e Eri being a ranching planet) that he wanted to move.
Igor showed up the next morning at Captain Obvious's door (at a hotel not the flophouse, where he had been comped a room by the Nameless Boss). Igor was given a bit of money and told to go get breakfast while Bob, ahem, wrapped up his date. Everyone went back to the ship and Igor was given a room. It was decided that the Hijinks would simply charge for delivery of the beef, rather than buy it outright and find its own buyer; $500 a ton. As my players were all thinking of "Firefly," they had somehow just assumed that this beef was on the hoof, which led to much incredulity from the Ukranians—who the hell ships live cattle from star to star, unless you're colonizing? Two of the destinations were Sigma Draconis and Altair.
The beef was loaded; Igor proved to be strong and able to hold a prodigious amount of liquor. Honey did a terrible job packing, meaning that the cargo hold was full, even though there should have been room for 24 tons more cargo. (A ton being a cubic meter, and a volumetric, not mass or weight, measurement.) Igor was fairly unfazed by the gruesome fuzzy dice that Cindy and Brannigan made.
On to Barnard's Star, where the crew finally sold their 15 tons of drive parts, and Timmy, with great glee, repacked the crates of beef in a more efficient manner. In an old-man bar in the port, Captain Obvious, Hugh, and Igor found another cargo, while Igor morosely drank shots of flaming ethanol. You see, s Drac and Altair are out on the "Coreward Loop"—a long, barren, loop of jump gates leading between a bunch of stars with nothing in particular (no habitable planets, no easily-refined gas giants) to recommend them. So not too many ships go out there. A nerdy guy named Martin was willing to pay $40K—$25K up front—to the captain of a ship that would take him out to Wolf 1055 and wait around while he signaled his buyer, who would come and relieve him of his cargo—and here Martin showed the cargo: a couple crates full of what looked like geodes. After that, Martin merely wanted to be put ashore somewhere back in the general vicinity of Sol: e Eri, Alpha Centauri, Barnard's, wherever.
The stench of rat was overpowering, but on the other hand, the money was really good, and it seemed that Martin was sincere: this was indeed his cargo and it was neither illegal nor hazardous. So the crew took his offer.
And that's where we wrapped up.
This week was a bit marred by the fact that your GM was quite drunk and the players were mostly drunk. Seriously, focusing my eyes was a major chore.
You will recall that the last episode ended with the party at Barnard's Star, with a passenger named "Martin" with a box of rocks, and a depressive alcoholic Ukranian named Igor and a hold full of frozen beef.
Barnard's to Wolf 1061 was uneventful, as was W1061 to Sigma Draconis. Now, as you may recall, Sigma Drac is where our party's bank accounts reside. It's completely mafia-controlled. So of course it was here that the party couldn't just drop off their $10K worth of beef. Well, to be fair, their buyer claimed the meat was rotten, and offered $5K, to be met with a display of force, after which he allowed that he'd just pay the whole amount.
Mr. Ivinitch and Nikalauka went to refuel at the gas giant while the rest of the crew decided to scare up some cargo. They found two tons of antibiotics bound for Luteyn's star, which was not especially profitable, and fifteen tons of energy weapons, with a hefty payoff, for delivery to one Eduardo Gomez on Ross 882. Eddie is supposed to tell them, "The condor has shit." They are to reply, "Was it stinky?" He will then reply "Hell yes, I'm a turtle," and will tell them where to meet for the deal. Remember this.
For reasons inadequately explored, Captain Obvious, Honey Smeeth, and Dr. Jass ended up at a Turkish bath. The proprietor thereof declined to let Honey in, seeing as how she was, you know, female. They pulled guns. The proprietor tripped the alarm. A whole bunch of naked guys ran out into the street, and our heroes dashed into the bathhouse. The boys stripped nekkid and leaped in the hot tub (purely hetero lifemates, I assure you), while Honey started going through the wallets left behind by the fleeing patrons.
Of course, about here, the cops arrived.
$6500 later (and the realization that trying to blast our friends out of a jail on a purely Mafia-controlled planet was probably a career-ending move, unless you desired a career as a slowly wafting drift of vaporized ick), everyone was released and the charges had been conveniently lost.
Igor disembarked on Sigma Drac, after smuggling several tons of grain alcohol aboard at Barnard's, and totally screwing the crew out of their cut on it.
Four uneventful jumps later, our heroes were at Lacaille 8760, a hydroponics ring with no real raison d'etre except growing finest hydroponic bud. A couple of good merchant rolls and some funny roleplaying led to the Space Hippies paying $12,000, not $5,000, for their hamburgers, and throwing in two tons of weed into the bargain.Three more jumps and they're at Wolf 1055. Martin suits up and heads out the airlock with his boxes of rocks, and suddenly there's a THING about 200 miles across on the radar. By listening to Martin's radio communications, it's obvious that a) he's negotiating with it, and b) he's not real impressed with the brightness of the crew. Still, the Visitor eventually strikes a deal: the Molemen memory crystals for a more efficient and safer portable fuel refinery, and two hitherto unknown jumpgates (to be supplied by the GM when he's sober). Martin gives a little backstory about the visitors, and that's where we break off, in a befuddled haze.