From: Tun Kai Poh [t_poh@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 9:03 PM To: blue_planet@mpgn.com Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - Game Report from Malaysia Malaysian Game Report #2: Con Ayer, Part 1 Tun Kai Poh March 20, 1999, I ran my second Blue Planet game for a Malaysian group. Although technically, the first game "never happened." See Report #1 for the sordid details. And, horror of horrors, the fuel explosion in that game shouldn't even have happened, since I recently reacquainted myself with the main rulebook and learned that metallic hydrides burn, but don't explode. This time, Ivan and Rasdan brought their longtime gamer friend Izhan, who seemed to like the game quite a bit. He already had a character he'd made with Ivan, who has the only copy of the rulebook available to the group right now (I left all my BP stuff in the US in 1998, but I do have a copy of Archipelago for reference). We started by introducing the characters. Ivan: Horaki, a Native Patrol orca who has a Motivation of "Hungry." Rasdan: Myra NLN (No Last Name), a cat hybrid covert operative for Internal Security, working undercover as an ERT pilot. Izhan: Deputy Marshall Solomon Kane, which pretty much says it all, if you've read the Robert E. Howard stories. Stern, zealous and righteous. Imagine Marshall Church crossed with a witch-burning, sword-swinging Puritan on steroids, and you've got it. The adventure was a stir-fried mix of elements from Natural Law, the Red Sky campaign, and the Jerry Bruckheimer motion picture Con Air. The title of the adventure was "Con Ayer," an atrocious bilingual pun which managed to elicit at least one groan. In the Malay language, the word for water is "ayer" (modern spelling: a-i-r) pronounced a-YAIR... The characters were drawn together for a special mission, which involved transporting three dangerous convicts from Vollstadt to Fort Pacifica on a surface hydrofoil disguised as a civilian craft. I used Kamagata Hetsoru, Dimitri Fusilov and Jimmy Lester from Natural Law as the convicts, and a printout of Red Sky Charters' boat, The Last Chance, served as deckplans for the transport. The prisoners were to be kept alive and well, since they could serve as potential witnesses against their organizations, the team was to maintain radio silence barring emergencies, and the whole trip would be strictly low profile. Yeah, right. The players immediately start making the "routine mission" as complicated as possible (I thought this was the GM's job...). Rasdan tells me he wants to rent an identical hydrofoil to serve as the convict transport, while the original boat serves as a decoy. Naturally, being an IS snitch who's really there to spy on his colleagues, Myra has plenty of resources at her disposal and gets the second boat. The intricate, paranoid, devious and tedious plan involves a whole lot more, including the use of GEO Peacekeepers as decoy prisoners, changed refueling routes, secret rendezvous points, splitting up the party, and worse. The Marshall listens to the mad plan and actually agrees with it. The end result is that Deputy Marshall Kane leaves on Boat #1 (the one specially equipped for carrying prisoners) with three GEO Peacekeepers dressed in prison outfits, then Horaki the orca leaves later to scout ahead. A little while after that, Myra leaves on Boat #2 (the civilian boat) with three dangerous but fully shackled prisoners. Dimitri is the brutal thug as described in Natural Law and Jimmy is the fishy-smelling freebooter, but I changed Hetsoru to make him more of a threat. This guy is a pathological criminal genius, one of the brightest leaders of the BWC, and his apprenticeship to a native healer (the biggest skills change) gives him top-notch skills in medicine and poisons. He's still a quiet, brooding type, but now he's a Hannibal Lecter type too. Heh heh heh. GM: "Hetsoru goes on board quietly, totally cooperating in every way. He is silent and utterly calm." Rasdan: "I don't keep my eyes so much on the others; I concentrate on _this_ guy! He's gotta be up to something!" Myra locks him away in the aft storage compartment below decks. Dimitri marches on board with Myra right behind him, and then he decides to make a break for the flying bridge. Bad move. Myra (who has a Speed of 100 and a Strength of 80) kicks him in the leg so hard that she snaps it, with sharp broken bones sticking out through the skin. Ick. She spends ten minutes fixing up Dimitri's leg, but decides not to use anesthetic as punishment (geez, I thought _Kane_ was supposed to be the draconian thug). Since he's passed out from the pain, she leaves him shackled and brings Jimmy Lester aboard, dumping him into the bow storage room. Finally, the Ship Of The Damned, I mean, second boat, leaves the dock. Meanwhile, Boat #1 is already in the open sea, when the orca patrolman notices a group of native dolphins swimming with some friendly sunbursts, and all of them are following in Boat #1's wake, riding the slipstream. A few of the fins sense the orca behind them despite the player's objections - Ivan: "But I'm not echolocating, so they can't sense me!" GM (sarcastically): "Then how are you following them? Passive sonar?" Ivan: "Yeah, that's it!" - and swim back to him to say hi. Unfortunately, two of them decide to playfully say hi by surprising him from below, swerving like drunken torpedoes (hmmm...good turn of words, must try and use the phrase in a story sometime), flashing at him with terrifying abruptness. The high-strung and perpetually hungry orca reacts by sideswiping one of his attackers with an all-out ramming attack, crushing the dolphin's rib cage and rupturing its lungs. The other dolphins flee, swimming to the nice people on the boat in front of them to ask for aid. Dolphin leader: "Please, you have to help us, my son was attacked by a rogue killer whale! Do something, call the ERTs to come and help!" Izhan: "Uh, 'rogue killer whale,' did you say?" Meanwhile, the orca realizes that he's done something wrong. He picks the dolphin up in his mouth, gently. I force him to roll a Will check to resist the urge to bite down, but he makes it. Because he's stopped to mess with the dolphin, Boat #1 has drawn too far in front, so he breaks radio silence. Myra hears all about it on the radio band and agrees to come help the dying dolphin. But the prisoners are acting up again. Dimitri wakes up in agony, while Hetsoru starts tapping Morse code on the door of his compartment to communicate with the others. Jimmy starts banging his shoulder on the door of his storage compartment, the one leading to the crew quarters (see CV Last Chance deckplans). "I need to pee!" he says. Myra threatens Jimmy with a grenade, but he's not impressed. He does stop banging on the door, though. Then Myra sees to Hetsoru, who is merely lying quietly in his compartment by the time she gets there. She overdoses him with tranks anyway, out of sheer paranoia. Horaki finally meets up with Boat #2, which pulls to a stop. Myra manages to drag the dolphin onto the water deck to stabilize it. Unfortunately, according to the interactive access chip in the medikit, the dolphin needs surgical attention, too. Immediately. Horaki, with nothing to do, sends his hover drone over into the aft storage compartment to check in on the prisoner. By now, Boat #1 has also turned around and meets up with Boat #2. Marshall Kane takes one look at the maimed prisoner and the dying dolphin lying on the back deck and goes "What have you DONE?!" He leaps over from Boat #1 onto Boat #2 and surveys the situation. How could things get any worse? Horaki announces that Hetsoru looks dead. Rasdan: "All I did was sedate him a little..." Jimmy starts banging on the door again. He breaks through with a crash. Things just got worse. Marshall Kane pulls his stun baton. He opens the hatch to the stairwell leading down to the ward room. The lights are out. "Lights on." Nothing happens. Great. He activates his Defender reflex program and goes in. Myra uses her uplink implant to call for an ERT with a vet specializing in dolphins, breaking radio silence. Izhan botches an Awareness roll, even with Kane's enhanced senses and ESP implant. Kane doesn't see Jimmy. He starts down the stairwell into the ward room. Izhan botches another Awareness roll, but he makes an Intuition check with Kane's ESP implant, which warns him of danger nearby. But he still doesn't see anything. He takes another step forward and Jimmy appears out of the shadows, swinging a broken chair leg. The GM botches the attack roll, and the next thing we know, it's total chaos in the ward room. Horaki finally gets to act, so he activates the chemical sensors on his hover drone, checking for respiration. No go. Hetsoru's not breathing. Kane drives Jimmy back with the stun baton, shocking him in the chest. They trade blows again, neither hitting the other, then Kane gets Jimmy in the crook of the arm, which is enough to make him drop his weapon and fall convulsing to the floor. Kane cuffs the convict's hands to his feet. Ivan: "Horaki's still checking. Any breathing?" GM: "Still none." Ivan: "Uh, guys? Guuuys!!" Luckily, Myra manages to revive Hetsoru within a couple of minutes with the medikit's crash cart attachment, and he's breathing normally again. Kane checks Jimmy's cell and finds that the myo-skeletally enhanced convict easily managed to break his plastic wrist binders and smash the door down. He makes a mental note to move the prisoners to the other hydrofoil, the one equipped to deal with prisoners. The ERT hopper arrives a few minutes later, just after the team drags Dimitri down below to hide him. Unfortunately, it's too late to save the fin, which is too bad, because the local tribe was a bunch of GEO-friendly natives, and now they're mad at the authorities for letting a tragedy like this happen, yadda yadda yadda. If they ever find the transient orca who did this... Anyway, after preventing the ERT medics from getting too suspicious, our 'heroes' see to their prisoners, heavily tranking them before transferring them to Boat #1 while the GEO Peacekeepers they managed to get as decoys get into Boat #2 to take it back to Vollstadt. Don't ask me what was logical about this plan. I'm just the GM. The party locks the prisoners below decks and keeps going for the rest of the day. They find a small island in the middle of nowhere and park the boat in a quiet cove to wait out a fierce squall that night. In the morning, they find that Dimitri's leg has swollen up to nearly twice its size, plus he's got a nasty fast fungus infection, too. Something has to be done, or Dimitri might lose that leg. Rasdan: "This would be bad why...?" While they're trying to get help from the medikit's IA chip, Kane gets a brilliant idea: Let's get Hetsoru to see if he knows a native cure for the fast fungus! Myra objects strongly, but in the end, Kane has his way. They tell Hetsoru that Dimitri is in trouble, so the ecoterrorist agrees to help, under heavy guard, of course. He asks them to bring him a hard-shelled sea spurt and some seaweed and various other native herbs, which they find after a short search. The whole time, he's nothing but cooperative, speaking loudly to make sure Dimitri knows he's helping him. While Kane and Myra (who's got an SMG pointed at Hetsoru's head the whole time) watch, he prepares a poultice for Dimitri's leg, to kill the fast fungus and speed healing. Once he's done, they lock him up again, below decks. The day goes by without incident, apart from a close encounter with a polypod, which thankfully ignores the boat, and some nastiness from Jimmy Lester, who's swearing to get back at the Marshall and the cat. By evening, Dimitri's leg is all better. In fact, he's regaining his health remarkably fast. One wonders what Hetsoru put into that poultice. Later, the boat pulls up at an out-of-the-way independent refueling platform run by a couple of old-timers, where the characters hear about a recent pirate attack on the GEO refueling stop which they were originally scheduled to go to. Guess that paranoia's paying off. Jimmy makes more racket, so Myra sedates him again. Some time after leaving the refueling stop, Horaki notices another hydrofoil tailing the boat. Myra and Kane take up positions above decks, with Myra at the boat's controls, and Kane sitting on the aft deck, holding a fishing rod and making like an everyday Joe. The other hydrofoil speeds up. Horaki tries to outflank it but gets left in its wake as it accelerates beyond the orca's swimming speed. At 150 meters, two men in the other hydrofoil's bow bring out assault rifles and start firing. Kane drops his fishing rod over the side and takes cover just as bullets start tearing into the boat's hull. Myra turns the boat around and charges right at the attackers! Kane takes up position at the bow, waiting for the moment the pirates get within range of his handgun, which is equipped with a targeting interlink. As the two watercraft close in, more bursts rip into the party's boat, including some hits below the waterline, causing Dimitri's compartment to start flooding. One round goes through the bridge window, clipping Myra in the arm and knocking her out of action, leaving the party's hydrofoil completely unpiloted. Finally, the distance shrinks to less than 100 meters (the handgun's maximum range). Even with range and recoil penalties affecting his Dex check, Kane makes three perfect shots, killing both gunners and the pirate boat's pilot with explosive rounds. It's a beautiful moment, in a John Woo kinda way. The high-speed boat full of dead men zooms past, out of control, but the party is hardly in shape to go after it. Kane brings the boat to a stop, patches Myra up, and fixes some of the worse leaks in the hull. Horaki catches up and surveys the hull from below. It looks bad. The party decides to pull up into the nearest settlement, a mining camp called Destination, for repairs. It's been a long afternoon, so I call it a game at this point. So will the prisoners escape? Will Myra and Horaki escape brutality/finslaughter charges for their blunders? Will Marshall Kane finally lose his cool? We'll find out next week! 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. From: Tun Kai Poh [t_poh@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 12:09 AM To: blue_planet@mpgn.com Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - A bit off topic... Okay, this one's a bit off-topic, but it does involve sea life, environmental crises, and the mass extinctions mentioned in the BP timeline. The dugong (or manatee or sea cow) was believed to be extinct in Malaysian waters since 1975, but a couple weeks ago, an adorable baby dugong showed up in a fishing village across the waters from Singapore. The fisherman who found it named it "Si Tenang" (Calm One) and took it in, nursed it back to health. There was a big media interest, and photographers came from all over to see it, yadda yadda. Then the Fisheries Department and some environmentalist groups put pressure on the fisherman to release the creature. Two days after it was freed despite the protests of the fisherman, it turned up dead 30 meters away from his dock. It could have been because it was freed too soon, or because of its separation from its family group, or all the stress from all those visitors and reporters. There was much finger-pointing for a while. A couple days later, an adult female dugong, possibly Si Tenang's mother, was found floating belly up elsewhere in the area. Then, they found another dead dugong two days later. And then another. Today, they found a fifth one. The Fisheries Department and the Malaysian branch of the WWF are getting concerned, to say the least. It's believed that coastal construction ("land reclamation" and other cheerful stuff) on both Malaysian and Singaporean sides of the straits may have disrupted dugong habitats, causing an attempted migration by the animals to find a new refuge. The good news? The dugong wasn't extinct here all this while. There must have been a population in a remote habitat where there was still some sea grass left for them to feed on. Whee. The bad news? Figure it out. For more, see http://www.thestar.com.my/current/2408jbai.html. Kai Poh, Malaysian Lagomorph. 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. From: Tun Kai Poh [t_poh@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 9:07 PM To: blue_planet@mpgn.com Cc: ccbanzai@showme.missouri.edu Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - CTN Reports Tremors Awaken New Hawaii Residents ATLANTIS: Late last night, the New Hawaii region was shaken by a minor earthquake registering 2.8 on the Revised Richter Scale. The quake was believed to have originated from a point several kilometers off the western coast of Kauai. Seismologists in Atlantis have cautioned residents that there may be more shocks to come, and a HIST research team has been dispatched from Haven to investigate. Ocean life in the region was visibly disturbed by the tremors. A herd of 300 migratory sunbursts mysteriously beached themselves on a beach near the NIS company town of Simushir. One Kauai fisherman reported seeing several ray-like creatures believed to be aborigines. Scientists would not comment on the suspicious timing of the incidents. - Kai Poh, CTN/net Asuka Schneider Says "Hi Poseidon!" HAVEN: Last night's Asuka Schneider concert, which featured a dazzling holographic lightshow and a troupe of cetacean water dancers, not to mention a marathon 5-hour set of performances from the fiery pop superstar, was a resounding success, in the eyes of both fans and organizers. Tens of thousands of attendees were packed into the Haven Coliseum like sardines, but a loosely organized joint effort on the part of the HSS and GEO Patrol kept things from getting too rowdy. "She was wild, fantastic, brilliant!" cried ecstatic young Haven resident Tora Petrel, her hair dyed in imitation of her idol. She and her friends admitted to paying exorbitant prices to scalpers in order to get their tickets. Local drama producer Garth Tung would not speak to reporters, but was seen giving the concert a "thumbs up" after the show. Even native councilman Deacon Kingsley was seen at the show, a surprise to some, since the Schneider Interstellar Tour is sponsored by Hanover Industries. "United Bavaria Media is proud to bring Asuka to Poseidon, and we promise more excitement in the months to come," said Hanover Industries spokesperson Gertrude Baum, speaking from Kingston, where she is overseeing the preparations for Schneider's next concert stop. - Kai Poh, CTN/net 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.