Crucible, Part Five

• Flashback: Ten minutes earlier, on the engineering deck, Rolemnarla sneaks around like a gobliny Obi-Wan Kenobi. He remains undetected and appears to cause a massive cascade failure. Alarms shriek, warning of imminent core containment failure. All hands are warned to evacuate.
• The ‘exfiltration’ team made up of Ella, Buck and Aris ‘borrow’ the system defense boat and launch, hoping to hook up with the ‘rescue’ team on the medical deck; simultaneously, the ‘rescue’ team (Haank, Eddy & Sae … plus the unconscious Ibrahim) opt to get off the station via an escape pod. The two groups reunite soon after.
• A fast gig is observed leaving the station, protected by six fighters. Three of these fighters angle sharply toward the system defense boat, las-guns flashing. A fierce lightfight ensues, leaving the three fighters destroyed and the SDB lightly damaged.
• The crew are able to deduce the destination of the gig: a jump system grav-anchored alongside an icy planetesimal. Recognizing their only way out of system, Ella aims toward it as well and a race is on! The three fighters then move to engage the SDB while the gig continues to burn hard toward the jump shuttle.
• Two of the fighters are destroyed and, when Eddy’s attempts to talk the gig into surrendering fails, it too is shot down.
• A strike carrier arrives in-system during the fight, commanded by Admiral Gloval, much to everyone’s surprise. The crew then realize that far more time has passed than the two or so days they’ve experienced. They’ve lost more than 188 days…

GM Notes:

• We used GURPS: Spaceships for the lightfight and it worked fairly well. I made a couple of mistakes along the way, but that’s par for the course. I also introduced a spaceships range band chart that was heavily influenced by the starship range chart thing in the first d20 Star Wars RPG (which, ironically, I hated at the time because I was so accustomed to actually using miniatures for everything.) We then used some modified Chase rules that I sort of hashed out before the case for the race. I’m thinking of  trying to rewrite them and maybe submit them to Pyramid magazine…
• This completes Season 4, Adventure 1: Crucible.
• Since we’re livestreaming our games every Saturdays (6:00PM Eastern) at Ronnke’s 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..