Crucible, Part Two

• We open with flashback for Buck as he recalls something about his youth that he did not remember previously. Apparently, he has a highborn cousin who arranged for his memories to be altered.
• Back aboard the INS Drake, the crew attempt to figure out what’s going on. This results in the discovery of a great many corpses, all of whom appear to have killed themselves.
• When Eddy finally breaches aft engineering, he is horrified to discover an armless, legless human being secured in a bizarre contraption tied to the ship’s systems via cybernetic implants. Telepathically, this individual relates his horrific agony and desire simply to die.
• Some hours later, just as the crew are beginning to settle in for the Jump, the Drake abruptly returns to realspace with a hideous shudder. To their horror, they realize that they are dangerously close to a black hole! Something explosively self-destructs and the entire aft end of the Drake is torn free, crippling the vessel.
• The crew desperately race to figure out how to escape and ultimately decide to use the Sparrowhawk fighters still present. One such fighter is nonfunctional and they have discovered three of the Drake’s crew in low-berths, so it is decided to jury-rig fives ‘freezers’ to the fighters (three for the crew, two for Aris and Buck.)
• We end with the fighters launching…

GM Notes:

• As GM, I made a few errors here.
• First, I should have actually read up on the radiation stuff (even though there actually wasn’t any radiation) because it came up.
• Aris is a Klutz and in my notes, I specifically intended for him to be responsible for the aft end of the Drake getting torn free and he fumbles something, it causes a malfunction, which results in a cascade feedback and then boom. And, of course, when that point came in the game, I completely forgot about this plan and did not remember it until well after.
• Finally, and this is something Gigermann brought up after the fact, I really should have had all the people in the cockpits of the fighters make their launch rolls secretly (or “into the box” as we say) and then end the session without letting them know what the results were apart from “Fighters … launch!”
• Since we’re livestreaming our games every Saturdays (6:00PM Eastern) at the Olympus Twitch channel and then later uploading the stream on the YouTube channel, we’ve decided to dial back on the extensiveness of the recap to just the overall outline.