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subplotkudzu) wrote2008-05-10 02:46 pm
USS Carter Ep 13 - Who Knows What Evil Lurks? - After Action Report
In which two of Stephen's campaign goals are achieved, and Dr. Mark belts one to the rafters.
USS Carter After-Action Report: What Evil Lurks?
Act I: The Carter's analysis of the nebula-shrouded world of Samat I revealed that its culture was being altered by an external force that is empowering criminal gangs. An away team beams down, with Rossad and Mark adopting a cover as a nightclub act in a mob bar. While there, they realize the external force was their old Orion adversary.
Since I had been having problems with the Hook I opened with the Sr. Staff conference revealing their findings - I wrote up what each character knew and then let them give their reports to the captain in character. It worked well enough, but it's not something I'm likely to try again. They are able to nail down that this is not a slowboat colony, but an example of Hogkin's Law of Parallel Evolution (societies in similar geographies will produce similar cultures, which is why we find Romans with machine guns in space). Dr. Knox sniffs disapprovingly at the sheer lunacy of it, but Samat I is close enough to Earth culture for her Anthropology skill to apply. Once it's clear something is being changed, Sakhet sends down Funk, Coy Mahn, Dr. Mark, Dr Knox and Ambassador Rossad to the city that's the contamination's epicenter to get the lay of the land.
The pre-arranged scene with the supposedly empty warehouse being a nightclub, with Rossad and Mark scoring jobs as the entertainment, went swimmingly. Even better, Mark blew the doors off her Entertain - Sing (Torch Songs) skill roll, flooring the crowd on her opening night. Dr. Knox had fun just making cultural observations of the new species, clinging close to Funk's side once she realized that if she were more than a few feet away from him she'd be a fair target as a dance partner for the shark mobsters and their apes. Coy Mahn, stationed for a better field of fire at the bar, was not quite so lucky, and spent the night moving from one mook to the next on the dance floor as Funk chuckled.
Darius' light surface scans of the crowd - the telepathic equivalent of having good hearing - let him pick up a conversation about an advanced weapons shipment from "the Green Man". During their set break he informed the others of this, and the players groaned as realized they were dealing with him again. We love returning villains.
Act II: The away team manages to track down the Orion's activities (by some method of their devising) learning that he is directing the mobs to take over several businesses as a basis for disseminating advanced technology and, via a mob-controlled radio station tales of space travel. His goal is to introduce a warp capable kleptocracy inside Federation space. But if they stop him, will this world ever develop space flight?
Coy Mahn follows the Orion's agent when he leaves the club, only to realize that she, as a woman, shouldn't be out alone at night. She calls up to the Carter for "arm candy" and is joined by Ens. Liefson dressed as a Damon Runyon extra. The pair successfully follows the agent until that fellow is cornered by another mobster and his mooks who are looking to make sure the Green Man doesn't cut any other mobs into their action. It devolves into a fight, and Coy Mahn is able to gracefully take out a mook and capture the mobster while Liefson gracelessly prevents the agent from escaping. Unfortunately the other mook gets a shot at the agent, vaporizing his arm with a disruptor blast.
Bernie has a clear enough head to beam himself and the near-dead agent back to the Carter. Coy Mahn, in her black evening dress and flowing black scarf, takes out the last mook and, hearing the police, calls for a beam out of herself and the mobster. Little does she know that this was witnessed from windows overlooking the alley, and stories are told to the police who find the two wanted mooks in a dead-end alley with no sign of their assailants.
Dr. Mark is able to save the agent, and she keeps both he and the mobster sedated in sick bay while the crew works on a plan. Eventually they locate a large, empty hunting lodge on the planet to use for interrogations, so no natives are ever conscious on the Carter. Funk, Knox & Rossad interview their captives, pretending to be federal agents to allay suspicion. It appears that the Orion is using the gangs to not just destabilize the government but as a conduit to get advanced technology into businesses now controlled by his proxies. Other than the energy weapons the mobsters aren't aware of what they're being given, they're just following orders to increase their own power. The planet's low tech base is slowing the Orion down - he has to give them the knowledge to build the tools they'd need to make warp drives and the like, and but more concerning is the Orion taking control of broadcast networks so he can transmit fictions pushing the world to consider space for the first time.
This gives the crew of the Carter pause, but not as much as I'd hoped. Yes, it is clear that Samat I, shrouded by the nebula and only able to see its star, its moon and on clear nights the other two planets in the system, will never make the jump to space unaided. Worse, the nebula also blocks radio and subspace transmissions: the people of Samat I are deaf and blind to the greater galaxy. Still, the prime directive is clear, and unlike the crew of the Enterprise in these situations, the Carter realizes they have time - the Orion's meddling is already going to give this world a generational jump forward in technology, so the Federation can send a ship back in 100 years to see what the Samatians have done and revisit the issue then. It wasn't perfect from the GM perspective (as the players all got on the same page pretty quickly), but it was a solid prime directive moral dilemma.
Act III: The Carter initiates a plan to disrupt the Orion's activities. This could be using the ship's sensors and transporters to locate and remove the caches of high tech hidden on the planet, setting up a sting to take out the mob leaders or perhaps just arming the government to prevent the mobs from taking over. They might also get to see the Orion face to face, though he will elude capture.
The players went with Option A, with the PCs in orbit doing an extensive scan of the effected continent to locate the high tech power sources for beam out. They also managed to turn the agent on the Orion, preparing to confront him when he made the scheduled delivery. I figured it was a stretch to have the Orion show up in person, but the PCs had kept a low profile so far so it wouldn't be stupid of the Orion to turn up, just foolish. This was the task for Funk, Coy Mahn and Bernie. Dr. Mark and the Ambassador stayed in the nightclub, both keeping up their cover and keeping an eye on the other known criminals to make sure the plan hadn't been detected.
That left Dr. Knox, who spent the day wandering amongst the Samatians, getting a feel for both their culture and the degree of contamination. The local headlines were all about the mysterious scarf-wearing vigilante (and her plucky sidekick) who had been seen fighting mobsters, and that set something off in Knox's mind. She went back to the ship and downloaded pulp-era radio scripts from her history tapes, made the appropriate cultural & gender changes and hand delivered them to radio station the Orion had influenced, replacing his tales of two-fisted space exploration with the saga of a shadowy crime fighter with the power to vanish into the night leading a team of stalwart agents who faced crime without fear. In doing so, she both nipped the weed of space flight in the bud and served up bitter fruit to the mobs that ruled the night by fear and intimidation. In essence, she crafted a counter-cultural contamination.
Funk, Coy Mahn & Liefson were a little more direct: staking out the delivery site, they were able to catch the Orion by surprise when he beamed in. The Orion, Bardek by name, was nonplussed, but was able to raise his personal force shield before the Carter crew could stun him. He got miffed when the soft glow of a transporter stole away all his product, but his shield continued to hold even as Funk pushed his phaser to Kill. The ricochets were doing serious damage to the building and Bardek's shield was beginning to show the strain, so Funk called in an airstrike, giving the Carter the coordinates of the building, hoping that would make the Orion's shield buckle. The crimson beam from space instead collapsed the whole structure and caused a gas main to explode. Funk, Coy Mahn & Liefson (who had once again prevented Bardek's agent from leaving with a graceless chase and brawl, letting the Carter follow through with their promise to set him up on another continent with a suitcase of money if he helped them) beamed out. Bardek was, naturally, gone, but when the police arrived they found the Carter's captured mobster tied up with a black scarf, and the beginnings of a legend.
While the bad guy got away, Stephen was thrilled because a) he'd been able to shoot something from space and b) for the first time in 30 months of game time that damned Orion was reacting to them. He was having his plans disrupted, and not vice versa. Better still, the ship's sensors had a clear record of Bardek's not-transporter device's[1] energy signature so they can work out how to counter it. Catching him was secondary - the Carter has finally seized the initiative.
Everyone else had a good time as well - the nightclub bit was flawless, Karen's request for Arm Candy was perfect, and Kris found a way to make Dr. Knox solve a problem that I hadn't even considered - a perfect example of having fun by fulfilling your PC's victory conditions even if everyone else is playing a different game. It was a light hearted action piece wrapped around a core moral question. I think it would have been better if I'd been able to prep more, but that's scraping for small increases as the main goal of player enjoyment was reached and exceeded.