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.
Session Two - 18 September 2013
This session featured Mike, John, Rachel B, Rachel S, and Bruce. Bruce continues to play Snow Man, a juicer he has been using for the past eight months or so. Mike attempted to bring Conan back into the story, but has misplaced one of the pages to his character's sheet. Upon discovering this, he elected to use Vin Foose, a cyberknight that he has used before.
We picked up with Akula relating his exploits to the crowd of rough and readies that populate the Cantina, the Settlement's only official drinking establishment. The rest of the group was reporting to Rikard and attempting to work out the next step in their efforts to save the settlement from destruction at the hands of the vampires and their minions.
Upon learning that the ant-people would be willing to exchange aid for weapons, Rikard immediately pointed out that Pycel would never allow the settlement's armory to be traded. However, he knew of another cache of arms that they could make their bargain with. He laid out a plan that the group would break into this cache after dark, while the majority of fighters would be on the wall repelling the assault, and indicated that any guards that the player characters encountered would need to be dealt with permanently.
This should have met with some resistance from Yavin or Zoisime, both good aligned characters that would not normally be willing parties to murder. It did not though. Yavin signed on without reservation, while Zoisime followed his lead with minimal objection. I have promised John an appropriate insanity check for later on, and possibly an alignment shift.
After discussing the plan and agreeing to meet Rikard at the motor pool after dark, the group split up. Zoisime returned to her apartment to sort her stones and prepare herself. There, Steve Jones, her love interest, found her and begged her to marry him. She agreed even after he pointed out that her family would never accept their union. She told him to find a priest, and he left to do so.
Conan likewise returned to his quarters to prepare and found himself ambushed by his love interest, Tomomi. She once more begged him to return with her to the Federation of Magic, to set aside his blood feud and come home to the people that love him. He refused. Tomomi warned him that soon her brothers would come and dispatch both of them as deserters.
Snow Man went to find Akula, and succeeded in entering the Cantina just as three surly dwarfs, who had accused the lion-man of being a wasteful fool, were exiting. The juicer overheard their muttering plot to punish the dinosaur hunter for his insolence. After being informed that they had a job, the pair left the bar to seek out the company of prostitutes. On the way to the brothel, they ran into Kaethe; ostensibly the NPC to whom they are both loyal. She attempts to find out what Rikard's plans are and insists that the two mercenaries stay close to Yavin and the other members of the group. Snow Man is elusive regarding Rikard's plans for unknown reason. The interlude with the prostitutes requires a save versus psionics that both characters fail. Consequences of this may take some time to come out.
Yavin spends the time before sunset attempting to meditate. He has strange visions of being part of a greater being, one of a collective mind.
At nightfall, the party regroups as planned outside of the motor-pool. They then follow Rikard to a mostly unoccupied tenement building and proceed to the central stairwell. Here they discover that, unlike most of the other structures in the settlement, the stairs also go down. The group descends approximately 40ft to a basement level of the building that should not exist. Yavin, using his magic tattoos is able to discern an invisible doorway that leads into a concealed armory. Racks of laser-weaponry fill the space.
Rikard instructs Zoisime to create a stone vessel to carry the weapons while he and Yavin gather them, Snow Man, Vin Foose, and Akula are to locate any guards in the building and end them. Akula uses his formidable tracking skills to discern that there are two guards walking patrol routes. One is inside the building and the other outside. They meet at the central stair well after an unknown amount of time.
Vin Foose is left to wait for the outside guard to reenter the building while Akula and Snow Man go in search of the inside guard. Traveling up several floors, they are ambushed by her. A lithe woman garbed in piecemeal armor over a rubber body-suit and full face visored helmet shoots Akula with a powerful energy pistol. She gets initiative on the lion-man and deploys a fancy trident that extends from a metal rod, using it to sweep Akula off his feet and narrowly missing her attempt to stab him with the tines. Snow Man moves in and engages her with his vibroblade. Akula switches from his vibro knife to his trusty shotgun and manages to miss with the first blast, barely hitting his target with the second and only missing Snow Man thanks to his uncanny automatic dodge.
Alerted by the shotgun blast, Yavin and Vin Foose rush to the scene. And there we leave it until next time.
