From: Tun Kai Poh [t_poh@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, March 12, 1999 9:59 AM To: blue_planet@lists.MPGN.COM Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - Game report Malaysian Game Report #1: Flight Hazards, Water Hazards and Sand Traps Tun Kai Poh While RPGs are only played by a tiny niche audience in Malaysia. Blue Planet isn't totally unknown. A while back, veteran comics/rpg/computer gaming reviewer A. Asohan, of the daily paper The Star, managed to get a copy and gave it a favorable review in his monthly RPG column. This induced at least one Malaysian reader to mail order a copy from Biohazard, and he didn't even play RPGs. So at least, I figured, the groundwork was set. But how would a game of Blue Planet go over with local gamers? Last Sunday, I got a chance to find out. An old friend, Ivan, had managed to borrow Asohan's copy of the game and was sufficiently interested in it to let me run a game. Unfortunately, by the time I got to his buddy Rasdan's house I was somewhat exhausted from a job interview I'd had in the morning (Sunday, natch) and delivered a less-than-perfect Gming performance - I killed a player character because of a slight misunderstanding at a critical moment. But we'll get to that in a moment. The party right now consists of a pair of ERT operatives working out of Fort Solitude near the Sierra Nueva Cluster, the GEO military base with the highest attrition rate on the planet. The scenario was Flight Hazards from Undercurrents #4. Ivan played a native orca (motivation: "Hungry") and Rasdan played a cat hybrid covert operative gone undercover as an ERT pilot. I had the orca be a vet who'd worked there a while, and the cat was the newcomer. I forget the names of the characters, who will hereafter be referred to as "the orca" and "the cat." So Rasdan's cat arrives at Crusoe in a jumpcraft, stepping out into a landing field blowing with dust. Kinda like Charlie Sheen in Platoon. GEO Peacekeepers are out in force, storming into the nearby village. Gunfire can be heard in the distance. An assault VTOL flies overhead to provide air support. Native insurgents are at it again, attacking off-duty troops in the village. A soldier missing one arm runs in through the gates of the base, screaming, then falls over dead. An officer greets the cat in the middle of all this mess. GM: "Don't worry, it's a bit slow right now, but things will probably get a little busier later this week. There'll be plenty of work for you soon." Rasdan: "Slow?! You call this SLOW?!?!?" Anyway, the cat is soon introduced to her new partner in the briefing room. Just try shaking hands with a little hover drone, though...the orca is out in the harbor. Ivan contemplates zapping his new partner with the stun gun mounted on the drone, as a "friendly greeting," but decides against it. Their first assignment is to test fly a new ERT jumpcraft equipped with a special, experimental, extremely expensive harness that allows aerial transport of orca troops. Naturally the partners hit it off splendidly when Rasdan decides see how manuverable the hopper is. Just try barnstorming with a killer whale strapped to the belly of the hopper... While airborne, they get a dispatch from the ERT controller who tells them that an unregistered GenDiver transport broke radio silence to send out an SOS before going down somewhere near Epoch Island. Where a Force 4 hurricane is due to hit in mere hours. Oh dear. Guess our heroes are the only ones who can reach it in time. So the orca and the pussycat went to sea... If you've read the Flight Hazards scenario, you know what the scene is like when the characters arrive there. Our heroes set down on the other side of the island to avoid the eel dragons. They see the parachute of an ejection pod in the trees, and a VTOL sunk in the bay with a blimp stuck to it for some reason. The cat wisely decides to set her fans on low power and taxi along the coast as close as she can get. Ivan says that his orca will check out the sunken wreck of the GenDiver VTOL to look for someone to eat, er, rescue. Ha ha, very funny, Ivan. The orca notices a lot of seaweaver nets floating free and avoids them with no problem. But when he gets to the wreck, he finds he has a little trouble getting inside, so he sends his CICADA ahead, cutting through the blimp tentacles and wedging its way into the fuselage. The cat leaves the jumpcraft parked down the beach and walks up towards the part of the jungle where the parachute is, carefully avoiding the nasty nightcrawler that was nesting in the sand right in front of her. She finds an ejection pod and footprints. Hmm. Wonder where the survivors are? The orca finds a pilot in the flooded cockpit. Fortunately she's an aquaform so she's still alive, but definitely unconscious. Ivan figures out quickly that he's got to use the CICADA's arms to cut the seaweaver nets free from the wreck, and the blimp blows out to sea on the rising winds. Then he drags the pilot out with the CICADA and dumps her on the shore for the cat to take care of. The cat has to give up tracking the other survivor to go back to the beach where she manages to stabilize the patient. Suddenly, all the eel dragons in the air flee into the jungle. Uh-oh. Not good. The cat sticks the patient into the back of the jumpcraft. The orca, meanwhile, decides to send the CICADA back in to have a look at the crashed transport's cargo. He manages to find a bunch of unmarked crates and decides to open them to have a look. Unfortunately, the crates contain gear meant for a GenDiver covert operation, (Operation Hospitality - Jeff Barber knows what I'm talking about) and so they're booby-trapped with EMP charges set to knock out any sensory recorders or communications devices. When the CICADA opens a crate, the blast knocks it out, leaving the orca without his "hands." He did manage to get a glimpse of orange uniforms, though. Orange uniforms which look just like ERT jumpsuits. Hmm. Rasdan: "Must be something important inside. We'd better blow up the wreck to make sure GenDiver can't use it." GM: "Huhh?! Okay, whatever. What do you do?" Ivan: "Don't look at me, I don't have a gun. I got flippers." At this point, the Gendiver security guard who had ejected from the crashing VTOL decides to rush out of the jungle and hijack the ERT hopper. Rasdan: "Oh no you don't!" The cat starts to take off, with the GenDiver thug hanging onto the back doors of the hopper. The orca swims up, but being a slow-minded fella, it takes a while for him to act. The cat pulls out her SMG and fires a burst through the back doors, but the shots don't penetrate too well, and the guard is barely scratched. He fires back, ALSO through the door, misses, and hits the ERT's "cargo," splattering the brains of the patient all over the interior. Rasdan: "Okay, we need him alive! He's the only one left who can tell us what's going on!" Ivan: "I jump out of the water bite him on the foot. Gently. I just want to pull him off." GM (checks dice results): "You take off a toe, but he's still hanging on." Meanwhile the guard keeps shooting and punctures the hydrogen fuel cell, which doesn't blow it up, but it does start leaking. Rasdan: "I open the back door of the jumpcraft and kick him into the water below." At this moment, the winds and waves (which are getting really nasty right now) hit the hopper hard. Everybody on board has to make an Agility roll. The cat actually fumbles hers and goes tumbling out the back door into the drink! She shouldn'ta gotten out of her seat to open the back door... Worse yet, the GenDiver guard gets a critical success and climbs inside. The cat, who's floundering in the water, uses her uplink jack to remotely land the hopper on the water and shut it down, stranding the would-be hijacker. She hitches a monkey-drag (or in this case, cat-drag) ride on her big partner, who heads for the floating hopper. GM (tired voice): "He, uh, jumps out the back of the hopper and swims away from it as fast as possible." Rasdan says: "Head for 'im." He means the fleeing guard. GM hears: "Head for it." I assume Rasdan means the hopper. Which is about to blow up. GM: "Are you sure? As you approach, your Edge, your danger sense is warning you..." Rasdan: "Head for 'im." GM: "The hopper blows up. (rolls) Take 5 levels to the chest. Ivan, take 2 levels to the head and temporarily lose echolocation ability." What happened was that the GenDiver guard lit a flare to ignite the leaking hydrogen cell... Rasdan: "Well, if we were so far away but still got caught in the blast radius, so was the guard, right?" GM: "Huh? Uh..." To make a long story short, Rasdan's cat starts dying of trauma, and Ivan's orca, who has no hands and no working CICADA, can't do jack shit to save her. Worse, even if he had an operational CICADA, he couldn't use it since he's lost echolocation. The cat dies, and the orca has to dive deep to avoid the hurricane. And then I find out they meant "go near the fleeing guy, not the hopper." Which would have taken them outside of blast radius. Oops. I accidentally killed a player character. So we whip up a quick explanation for the whole mess. The cat wakes up in the base infirmary. It was all a dream. The last thing she remembers is meeting the orca's drone in the meeting room, and the drone's stun gun "accidentally" going off! The players liked it anyway! So they asked me to GM again next week, when more guys will be showing up to play. Hopefully. Go figure. Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com *************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list send mail to majordomo@mpgn.com with the line 'unsubscribe blue_planet' as the body of the message.