Corporate Retreat, Part Three

• • Dirtside on Porozlo, Sae observes the approach of the utility vertols and is then startled when Aris passes out after eating some of the newly delivered pizza. The vargr opts to act quickly: he breaks into and hotwires a pair of cars.
  • The rest of the crew exit Sam’s apartment and take the stairs down. Along the way, upon hearing loud noises emanating from the roof, Ella pulls a convenient fire alarm which results in many people in the apartment building attempting to escape as well.
  • Sae, upon seeing armored personnel lurking outside the building while numerous building inhabitants come streaming out, decides to cause a distraction by firing a couple of rounds in the air. This results in chaos as some of the civilians see the armored people and go for weapons which results in some of the armed troopers shooting back.
  • Whoever is running this op orders the troopers to withdraw as distant sirens can be heard. The crew (sans Aris and Sae) don’t immediately rush out but instead try to help the casualties until the EMTs arrive, then make their escape (after grabbing Aris who they discover passed out in the back of an idling car.)
  • The crew decided to take Aris to an urgent care clinic where they learned he’d been roofied. Relying on common sense, I had the on-call medic refer this to a cop who checked with the PCs … who failed their Fast Talk rolls and gave conflicting stories. This led the cop to call this in which resulted in Detective Kennex showing up again. After giving him the full story, he arranged to have them taken to the precinct to fill out paperwork and make statements.
  • In the police SUV, the crew (sans Sae who has lurked in the periphery to avoid notice) are startled when one of the utility vertols drops out of nowhere and opens fire, grievously injuring the driver. Ella takes over and expertly escapes the vertol. Behind, in a rented car, Sae observes a half dozen air skimmers suddenly attack the vertol which is forced to retreat very quickly.
  • At the hospital where the crew has taken the injured driver, the crew converse again with Kennex who is understandably frustrated at these events. Against his captain’s orders, Kennex arranges to get the crew out of the city via a train while he tries to figure out what is going on.
  • The crew board the train-bus Pod and with loud clanks and hisses, it pulls out of New Gevae…

GM Notes:

• • • I thought this episode was a complete mess. The PCs kept catching me off-guard; Sae’s decision to cause the distraction with the discharge of guns, for example, caused me to go all blue-screen of death. The pulling of the fire alarm was not obvious thing that I should have been prepared for but wasnt. Further, the decision on the part of the PCs to stay behind to attend the casualties was totally in-character for many of the PCs but something I had not considered at all.
    • As the PCs got on the train … bus … thing (we started calling it a ‘Pod’ I think), I had each player describe a passenger. Amusingly, the last time we were on a train, the GM at the time did the same thing…
    • 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..