User:Bill/Rifts Week by Week/Series Three Notes/September 2013 to Present
Session One - 11 September 2013
So series three more or less collapsed when everyone seemed to get busy all at once. I attempted to restart with series four in October, but failed to get much traction. We meandered through around three different Rifts series, including one centered on the Great Lakes area, one set in England, and one tripping around the American Southwest. A volunteer GM was spelling me for a few weeks, when due to other commitments and car trouble he had to bow out for several weeks.
Then, Mike showed up out of the blue. With Mike, John, and Rachel all back at the table, it seemed only natural to fall back to this story line. John and Rachel even had their original characters from the series; John has been playing Yavin consistently since we left it even! This session, we were joined by another woman named Rachel. She elected to play Akula, a mutant-lion dinosaur hunter. Mike didn't have Conan's sheet with him and elected to play another of my NPCs, Kaetha Sharin. I don't even recall why I had printed Kaetha, but she was always intended to be a part of this series.
We quickly rehashed where we left off. The group had been tracking the movements of The Eater; a demonic entity which had slipped the control of one of the settlement's shifters. We established that they had managed to successfully vanquish the monster before it could destroy the wards and circles keeping the vampiric forces at bay. We picked up with them meeting Rikard to discuss what to do next.
Yavin suggests that they approach the ant-people for assistance. Rikard approves and the party moves out. Akula borrows a hoverbike from the motor pool, Yavin uses his magical tattoos, while Zoisime and Kaethe make the trip using jetpacks. Flying over the no-man's land and the jungle, they are unmolested. Upon arrival at the inverted pyramid, the player characters discover that a small force of ant-people are battling a hideous chimera of angel-demon and serpent. Seizing the moment, Akula directs his hoverbike onto a collision course with the monster and leaps clear. It explodes on impact, slaying the beast and several of the ant-people as well.
While the rest of the party busies itself with cleaning up the wreckage, Yavin penetrates the pyramid and communes with the queen. He discovers that he can bypass the language barrier by allowing the queen to access his mind directly. This is going to have repercussions. The queen immediately ascertained that Pycel had designs on enslaving her people. Even so, she agreed to help fight off the vampires if the colonists would supply the ant-people with technological weapons. While entering and exiting the ant-people's pyramid, Yavin observes larger, more menacing looking ant-men than he's seen before wielding weapons that appear to be sheathed in some form of plasma.
The party returns to the settlement. Kaethe abandons her fellows to report to her associated leadership NPC while the rest of the party mounts a levitated piece of stone that Zoisime uses to transport Akula and his trophies; Yavin pushes the slab to propel it along a little faster. On the way, the mutant-lion notices a clearing filled with coffins and that the shadows surrounding the field are behaving strangely. Rather than risk being attacked by a shadow-creature, they proceed back to the settlement's walls.
