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• May 1, 2017

  Let's Read Hells Rebels: The Player's Guide

  

  This part of a series! Go to the project page to see all entries.

  When reading an adventure in this way, it’s useful and fun to imagine a group of PCs going through them, and try to figure out how they can tackle each challenge. Who should make up our PC party here? Let’s read through the Player’s Guide and find out what the game expects of us.

  The Hell’s Rebels Player Guide

  Out of all the books in this adventure path, the Player’s Guide is the only one that’s free. You can find it here. It begins with a partial account of the background for this adventure path.

  I already talked about the background in my last post, so I’m going to skip it here. Let’s go through the other sections in the book based on the titles I see in its PDF index.

  Character Tips

  This part of the book is meant to guide players on how to create appropriate characters for this campaign. Pathfinder is a system with a lot of moving parts. Base Classes! Archetypes! Prestige classes! Skills! Feats! This section goes over each of these and points out which ones would work best. In typical Pathfinder fashion, it doesn’t explicitly forbid anything, but it does point out in a roundabout way that not following these recommendations will lead to a sub-optimal experience.

  The gist of the thing, and the part most useful to someone converting this to GURPS, is that Hell’s Rebels is a mostly urban campaign with strong elements of intrigue. Your PCs should be able to operate well in a city, and should be good at subterfuge and socializing. They’re also supposed to take charge of a rebel organization, so leadership skills would also be strongly recommended. It goes almost without saying that there will be plenty of combat in the campaign, so your party should have that covered as well.

  This section also presents rules for activities they expect to be common in the campaign: concealing your religion (several Good faiths are outlawed), deciphering old documents, and hiding bodies.

  There’s also a section on religion, describing how the cults of the core Golarion deities operate in the city and how the Thrune government sees them. Generally, the closer to Chaotic and Good a deity is, the more outlawed their faith is in Kintargo. Even those Good faiths that weren’t officially outlawed got hit with arson and assassination prior to Barzilai officially taking power. As long as your PC doesn’t worship an outright Evil deity, they’ll have a reason to rebel on religious grounds if nothing else.

  Reasons to Protest

  The first scene in the adventure is a protest, and this section lists possible reasons for the PCs to be there. Yes, actually protesting the government is one of these reasons, but they could also be looking for a missing celebrity they’re a fan of, looking for a contact with information on the Silver Ravens (see below) or just tagging along to keep another PC out of trouble. Each choice gives minor bonuses for that scene only.

  Campaign Traits

  This one should probably have appeared before Reasons to Protest, as the information here provides some much needed context for some of those reasons. Each PC is supposed to pick a trait, and they both tie the PC to the setting and give them bonuses to paper over the deficiencies in Pathfinder’s skill system (such as making a skill important to the campaign a class skill for the character, or boosting their Charisma for the purposes of one rebellion-related activity).

  Milani

  Milani is the Chaotic Good patron of rebels and hope, and this bit contains some additional mechanical benefits for worshipping her. I imagine the other gods get these in other Pathfinder books.

  Kintargo At a Glance

  This section contains information any PC living in Kintargo would know, some of which I already touched upon in my last post. The Chelish Civil War gets a lot of mentions - that’s the period of strife following Aroden’s death and ending with House Thrune in power. Kintargo only submitted grudgingly, and has remained a particularly rebellious place ever since.

  There’s a list of all the significant factions in Kintargo, and there’s quite a few of them. They can be generally divided into factions friendly to Thrune, rebel or dissident factions (most of which got hit pretty badly) and neutral factions which can go either way as the campaign progresses.

  Then there’s a stat block for the city of Kintargo itself! After that we get to a fairly long list of locations, all marked in a city map. I imagine most of them will become significant at different points during the campaign, so I’ll probably discuss them in the detail when they come up.

  And finally, we have some publicly known info on Barzilai Thrune. Unlike the politician I’m obviously satirizing, this campaign’s villain sports a spartan buzz cut and apparently never took a lover in his life. He does have a tendency to fly into an incoherent rage over the smallest annoyances, though.

  The Silver Ravens

  The Silver Ravens were listed among the factions of Kintargo, and mentioned in passing several times before that. They’re an old secret society that defended Kintargo from outside threats as far back as the Chelish Civil War. They sorta faded away after that, and if any members remained today they were killed by Barzilai’s goons. They’re still important, though, since the PC’s goal for the campaign should be to re-establish the Silver Ravens and use them to liberate the city.

  This section provides complete campaign-specific rules for statting up and running the organization. It tracks the size and influence of the rebellion with a character-like level chart, using its number of supporters as XP. Each level gives the PCs a personal benefit. There’s a whole strategy minigame where players can recruit specialized “units” that can perform specific actions, and so on. PCs will be able to make use of these special actions to obtain an edge in the various dungeon delves in the adventures themselves.

  GURPS Conversion Notes

  If you plan to run this in GURPS, I would recommend using the Dungeon Fantasy rules as a base. The “gist” of the character creation guidelines applies here too: your PCs should either start with social, subterfuge and leadership skills, or should be able to quickly acquire them with earned points.

  Like all adventure paths, this one assumes the PCs start at first level. 250-point delvers are quite a bit more powerful than that, so GMs who feel like replicating that “level one” feel should use the 125-point templates from DF 15. Personally, I would go with the full 250-point templates, as I’m somewhat tired of low-level challenges and like to get through them as soon as possible. The differences between the two systems and the characters power levels will interact with the adventure in an interesting way, with several challenges become easier and some becoming harder.

  Character progression can be handled in one of several ways. You could give them one character point whenever the original rules give out “story award” XP, and use the system in DF 3 to award CP for fights. You could also just give a larger sum whenever the PCs fulfill important story goals. Either way, the resulting progression is likely to be somewhat slower than in D&D, but faster than in a typical GURPS game.

  It’s probably safe to ignore the minor mechanical bonuses given under Reasons to Protest and Campaign Traits. They seem to be there because not all character classes have access to the skills marked as important for the campaign, which isn’t a problem in GURPS. The GM should instead allow all PCs to spend points in the equivalent GURPS skills! The story aspects of those traits are still interesting, however, and might be useful as inspiration.

  As for the “rebellion management system”, it seems to be entirely centered around skill checks. This means an enterprising GM could simply replace the Pathfinder skill checks with GURPS tests and use the whole thing mostly as-is. Another interesting alternative would be to come up with a system based on GURPS Boardroom and Curia and/or GURPS Social Engineering: Pulling Rank.

  So Who Are Our PCs?

  It’s my understanding that the standard party size in Pathfinder is four, and the cover of the first adventure helpfully suggests we use Valeros the Fighter, Lem the Bard, Merisiel the Rogue and Kyra the Cleric. Some interior illustrations depict other characters, but these four are particularly appropriate among the Iconics because their alignments are at most one step away from Chaotic Good, and Lem in particular is all about opposing Cheliax. I also happen to have ready-made stats for all of them, so that’s another plus!

  Picking out campaign traits for them is a bit trickier than I anticipated, but not as important as it would be in Pathfinder because there are no mechanical effects. “Gifted Satirist” fits Lem well, and “Natural Born Leader” would fit Valeros because he already has the Born War Leader advantage. Kyra, somewhat counter-intuitively, would get “Star-Struck”. She’s not quite a fangirl, but Shensen the half-elf singer was one of the most prominent worshippers of Sarenrae in Kintargo, and she vanished during Thrune’s purges (which also saw her shop/Sarenrae shrine burned down). Merisiel gets nothing. The opportunity to pick some pockets and shank some dottari gives her more than enough motivation to join in. Lem and Kyra would have ample reason to travel to Kintargo, with the other two tagging along out of friendship.

  In my estimation, this party is vastly stronger than their 1st-level Pathfinder equivalents would be. Not only because they’re built on more points, but because having a fighter in your party is not a handicap in GURPS - quite the contrary! Aside from combat power, each of them has several useful skills: Valeros is, well, a Born War Leader; Lem is an adept socialite; Kyra can serve as his backup; and Merisiel brings those ever-useful thief skills to the table. Magic-wise, Lem has incredible utility (including the ability to read minds) and Kyra can See Secrets in addition to the usual sun-cleric tricks of healing allies and burning enemies. In the next post, we’ll begin going through the first adventure in the path, the absurdly named “In Hell’s Bright Shadow”.

• Apr 29, 2017

  GURPS X-COM: Operation DARK JUDAS, Part 2

  

  Welcome to another mission report for GURPS X-COM: Noises in the Dark! Our characters for this mission are:

  • Kendall Fairbarn: A paranoid hacker from the UK. Was completely convinced human society had been heavily infiltrated by shape-changing aliens… and it turned out he wasn’t entirely wrong.
  • Minette Duvall: A bomb-disposal expert from Southern France, Minette is also quite handy with a rifle. She’s devoutly Catholic and swears a lot when faced with danger, which is all the time. Currently wounded and minding the Skyranger as an NPC.
  • Niu Yulan (AKA Julia Yulan): A former hostage negotiator from China, built without a template but approaching a shootier Face. Her innate kindness and empathy came in handy in several of the missions! Currently controlled by Minette’s player.
  • Jack Choi: A former police detective from Hong Kong, and a staunch adherent of the “kick down the door” school of policing despite his light frame.
  • Sam McCall: A brave and burly former US Army Ranger, run by a new player.

  Puppet Theater

  In the previous post, we saw how Strike One had a rough landing in the blighted iron mine that comprises their Area of Operations. That firefight left Minette wounded, so she decided to stay behind to help guard the Skyranger. The rest of the squad pushed forward, going through the abandoned security checkpoint to the west of their landing zone and then south following the road.

  The 2.5km along the road to the crash site wouldn’t be a significant obstacle to this squad, but it would be a long enough stretch of time and space that I decided a random encounter roll was appropriate. Yes, a random encounter! The Dreams of Ruin are from a book written for old-school D&D, and I couldn’t let all those wonderful tables to go waste! The level of Dream activity around here meant I had to use the “Edge of the Forest” tables, and as for the result…

  About halfway through the trek, they spot a particularly large Black Tree growing on the middle of the road. Around it was a large group of puppets, prostrating and contorting themselves as if in worship. That it was Christmas Eve in the real world when this happened was entirely a coincidence! This was an instance of “Puppet Theater”, which is just what it sounds like: the Puppets of Ruin put on spooky displays in places where an unwary traveler might watch them. Why? Only they know.

  Like all the other trees, this one had human bones scattered around its roots, and this particular bunch of puppets had left their weapons in a pile nearby. After some discussion, the squad decides to sneak through the woods at the edge of the road, get as close as they can and open up with Sam’s grenade launcher followed by rifle fire. The plan goes off without a hitch and they manage to take all the puppets out before they can react. I messed up a bit here, since the explosion did damage the trees and this should have caused another wave of battle-ready puppets to drop, but by this point I just wanted to move forward and get to the main set piece.

  I did make sure to point out the pile of shiny, intact alien weapons just lying there, which made the PCs a bit paranoid. They checked around it, poked them a bit, and came to the conclusion that there was no booby trap or anything - the weapons were indeed just lying there. In truth, the Forest in that region kinda wanted them to take the weapons. It was an attempt to win them over, sort of, and of course carrying these things elsewhere would also spread spores.

  The squad proceeds to take one of each weapon, but instead of trying them out they stash the lot in the nearby woods and blow the rest up with a grenade, treating them more as samples to take home than new equipment. On the one hand, good on them for resisting this temptation! On the other, they’re sure going to miss that RPG launcher in the next scene…

  Visage of Ruin

  The squad proceeds along the road, and passes by one of the huge reservoirs that were used to store mine tailings for processing. It’s basically a huge pit dug into the earth and shored up by dams where needed. This one is 1km from north to south and 500m from east to west, and though it’s not the one whose dams burst it still presents a horrifying sight.

  The floor of the pit is grayish brown and scarred by the toxic sludge that was regularly dumped in it. A little of that sludge still pools at its southern end, making a shore of sorts. The scale of the thing makes it hard for the PCs to not stop and stare, and that of course is when they notice the trees. The anomaly in there was so strong that even Strike One, inured as it was to the effect, took a while to pierce it. The whole pit is teeming with Trees of Woe, and they look right at home rising out of the toxic ground. It’s a disquieting sight, but there’s nothing they can do about it now.

  Continuing on, the squad spots a building at the end of the road. From about a hundred meters away, it looks like it was originally a fairly practical structure, single-story, brick walls and metal roof. It’s been defaced in a manner similar but more deliberate to that of the buildings in Cologne. All the windows are broken, alien graffiti covers the walls, and there’s this ropy white stuff hanging everywhere. That’s Bakegumo webbing, but the PCs didn’t know it at the time.

  They’re close to the crash site not, but don’t have eyes on it yet, as it’s still a small distance to the southeast and currently obscured by vegetation. They do hear gunfire and explosions coming from that direction, and after some quick discussion on what to do decide to sneak east through the woods to take a closer look at the situation.

  Traversing the dense subtropical vegetation is difficult, but thankfully it’s all Earth-native. They get through and to see a large open landscaped area, ringed with fancier looking (but also defaced) buildings and criss-crossed by roads. The crashed alien craft is right in the middle of a small roundabout in the center of the area, and it looks like… a house. It’s built in a style that’s a cross between a Chinese junk and a miniature Taj Mahal, but it’s clearly a house, and it’s still somewhat intact despite crashing. Since the craft is about eighty meters away from the squad they can’t see much more detail, but there are definitely people in it, human-looking, wearing white-sleeved clothes, having a firefight with the occupants of a building 70m to the east of the squad. Those people wear gray.

  Now that’s an interesting situation! Who are these two sides? Can the squad trust any of them? What the heck is going on here? Find out on the next installment!

• Apr 27, 2017

  Crafting Imbuements in Gransys

  

  Pyramid #3/102 was recently published, and it contains a system for making magic items that would be an excellent alternative to the one I wrote for the Dragon’s Dogma setting! It has the advantage of better fitting the theme of “master crafters using alchemy to improve equipment” that I was going for, and it uses the Imbuement system in a way that doesn’t bog down fights

  The system can be used mostly as written, with only a couple small changes required to make it fit in Gransys. The Imbue advantage necessary for the process always has the Alchemical (-10%) modifier.

  • A piece of gear can be improved after its creation! Use the original item’s value, unmodified by pre-existing Cost Factors, to calculate the cost of the new change.
  • The special components described in my post can be used to pay up to half of the imbuement’s cost, using the same rate. They also reduce the time necessary for Infuse Gear by a similar rate, and if the PC provices enough components to completely cover the cost the infusion could be done by the same day. The artisan would still charge half its price in that case, though.

  And since it’s possible to improve the base quality of pre-existing gear in Gransys, the following skill would make itself necessary:

  Refined Gear (General; IQ/VH)

  This skill improves the mundane quality of a piece of gear. Cheap gear becomes Good quality, Good gear becomes Fine, Fine Gear becomes Very Fine. The change in CF is the same one for buying an item of that quality.

  Modifiers: +2 to make a Cheap item Good; -5 to make an item Very Fine. Jumping multiple quality levels in one sitting requires multiple simultaneous uses of this Imbuement at the usual -1 penalty per use.

• Apr 24, 2017

  Let's Read Hells Rebels!

  

  This is the start of a series! Go to the project page to see all entries.

  Introduction

  Like most roleplayers, I am quite familiar with multiple versions of Dungeons & Dragons. The third edition ruleset, in particular, holds a rather peculiar position in my mind. I like that it streamlined the game’s basic rules, but I wouldn’t consider the editions that use it to be my favorite. In fact, I would rather do the work of converting a 3.x/Pathfinder adventure or campaign to another set of rules than play it out using its default system.

  That said, I came into possession of a whole bunch of Pathfinder books due to a large Humble Bundle sale from a while ago, and in reading the setting guide and some of the adventures from that bundle I realized Golarion can be a rather interesting setting to play in, particularly if the PCs are allowed to affect it in significant ways.

  I found the adventure path partially included in those rules (Hell’s Rebels) to be particularly fascinating, first because it was all about taking the horrible nation of Cheliax down a peg, and later because some of the events that happen there resonated with me in light of certain disappointing real-world developments. I want to read it in depth, I want to talk about it, and I want to include conversion notes for GURPS because why not? This blog is a perfect venue for that.

  In this post I’ll give you some exposition on the setting in which this adventure takes place and the events that happen just before it begins.

  First, Some Setting Background…

  It’s likely some of the people reading this aren’t familiar with Golarion, which is perfectly understandable: I didn’t know anything about it myself until I lucked into those books. So here’s some background on it before we get into the nitty-gritty details of the adventure.

  Golarion is basically a “kitchen sink” fantasy world: a setting meant to contain examples of everything published in any of Paizo’s books. The big backstory event that sets the tone for the world is that about a century ago Aroden, the god of humanity, died suddenly and without explanation, leaving a whole bunch of prophecies unfulfilled and throwing the mortal world into disarray. Golarion tends to be a bit darker than the typical D&D-ish setting. It occasionally veers into horrific territory, though usually not with the same glee as a Lamentations of the Flame Princess title (a fact for which I’m thankful).

  This particular adventure path takes place in the city of Kintargo, inside the nation of Cheliax. Like Renaissance Spain or Italy, Cheliax can trace its existence back to a mighty, ancient empire; it’s economically and military mighty itself; possesses a rich cultural and artistic tradition; and its people will never let you forget that. The people of Cheliax were some of Aroden’s most fervent worshippers, and they believed the god granted them special blessings and protections. His death caused a civil war that threatened to unravel the kingdom, until the head of one of its most ruthless noble houses made a literal deal with the Devil and took the throne.

  So now, 110 years later, Cheliax is pretty much a devil-worshipping fascist state. Queen Abrogail and the ruling house of Thrune will tell you that they don’t worship Asmodeus, ruler of the Nine Hells, they just admire the way he organizes his domain and try to emulate it. That doesn’t fool anyone - the Church of Asmodeus is pretty much the state religion, and any faiths that publicly oppose it are banned. As you would expect, slavery is a huge institution here, and the government employs a large army of censors to redact any inconvenient truths from the history books. The kingdom also houses multiple orders of “Hellknights”, all of them working in service to the state.

  Despite all this, Paizo seems to be of two minds about the place. The setting text often calls Cheliax out as being a really bad place, but the rules material seems to say you can totally be a supporter of the regime without being Evil - that anyone with Lawful tendencies would be more in favor of keeping it in place than of changing it.

  Fortunately, we won’t have to stomach that particular logical fallacy here, because the adventure text is very emphatic that players have to make PCs who will readily take up arms against Cheliax’s oppressive government and practically mandates Chaotic and/or Good alignments.

  … And Now Some Adventure Background.

  Kintargo and its surrounding province of Ravounel are located in Cheliax’s northern border and separated from the Chelish heartland by an imposing mountain chain. They took much longer for house Thrune to annex than the rest of the kingdom and remained somewhat rebellious and unruly even after that.

  Just before the start of the campaign, recent victories in the heartland by a rebel army calling themselves the Glorious Reclamation have caused the Chelish government to crack down hard on any form of dissent. Though Kintargo has no direct ties to the Reclamation, it’s still getting a dose of martial law.

  This bitter pill comes in the form of Paracount Barzilai J. Thrune, a man so evil even his family of diabolist despots thinks he’s an asshole. He’s both a cleric of Asmodeus and a government official, and has been stuck in the equivalent of middle management in both organizations because further progress through the ranks in either one requires dropping the other, and if there is one thing Barzilai J. Thrune doesn’t like to do is divest himself from his conflicting interests. Recently however, he made a deal with Mephistopheles to learn an unholy ritual that will make him immortal. This ritual must be performed at a certain place beneath Kintargo, and will slowly turn him into a genius loci, a powerful “spirit of place” eternally bound to Kintargo and Ravounel. So he volunteers to become the city’s new Lord Mayor, secretly kills anyone who could oppose him before officially taking office, and begins his reign of petty oppression.

  With his ritual being the fruit of a devil’s bargain and all, it will only complete successfully if The Barzilai dies a natural death while near the site where it was performed, which means he has to live out his days in peace. If he’s killed before his time, he goes to Hell to be tormented until the transformation completes. This is a process that takes a long time, and can be stopped by exploiting the right loopholes in his infernal contract.

  The adventure begins just as Thrune’s reign gets seriously bad, a time also known as “week 2”. It expects the PCs to form and lead a resistance movement capable of opposing him - anyone else who could do it has been killed or co-opted by dark magic. In the next post, we’ll look at the Player’s Guide and pick an hypothetical party to go through it.

• Apr 19, 2017

  GURPS X-COM: Operation DARK JUDAS

  

  Welcome to another mission report for GURPS X-COM: Noises in the Dark! Our characters for this mission are:

  • Kendall Fairbarn: A paranoid hacker from the UK. Was completely convinced human society had been heavily infiltrated by shape-changing aliens… and it turned out he wasn’t entirely wrong.
  • Minette Duvall: A bomb-disposal expert from Southern France, Minette is also quite handy with a rifle. She’s devoutly Catholic and swears a lot when faced with danger, which is all the time.
  • Jack Choi: A former police detective from Hong Kong, and a staunch adherent of the “kick down the door” school of policing despite his light frame.
  • Sam McCall: A brave and burly former US Army Ranger, run by a new player.

  Julia participates in this one as an NPC, as her player dropped out quite early in the mission.

  After the voting for the strategic phase concluded and I posted the rewards for it, we entered a small hiatus as I planned the next field op. The group made a few in-character posts with scenes from the month or so in which their PCs spent recovering from the last mission.

  The general tone of those is that the soldiers were somewhat traumatized by the experience, but now that it’s over they’re all itching to get another shot at the aliens. Kendall mentioned something about BRUTAL ADVENT deserving the “Golden Slenderman Award for Most Fucked-Up Story”, which I thought was amusing.

  Anyway, after a suitable rest period, the squad was reorganized with some of its members being transferred out and a new one joining in. About a month after the end of BRUTAL ADVENT, they had been cleared for duty. And soon after that, they were pressed into action!

  Rushed Briefing

  It started with a blaring alarm waking everyone up before dawn. All members of Strike One dressed as quickly as they could, picked up the loadouts Nobby had prepared for them, and piled into the Skyranger for a rushed takeoff, all the while wondering what exactly was that they were getting into. Out-of-character, the players got to pick their gear, but the characters themselves had no time for that.

  Their briefing came after they were already in the air: X-COM’s satellites had finally spotted an UFO. More than that, they had spotted four of them entering Brazilian airspace, with three of them apparently chasing the fourth. X-COM fighters stationed nearby had already been scrambled to intercept the UFOs, and the Skyranger was launched early to minimize the time it would take to reach any resulting wreckage. Their mission was to sweep downed UFOs to mop up any survivors before they reached the local population, and to collect any artifacts before said population got to them. If one of their fighters was downed instead, they were to rescue the pilot.

  Over the next few hours, the squad would get periodic updates about the situation. The pair of modified F-15SEs could barely keep up with the alien craft, only managing a few inconclusive engagements. The three pursuers eventually managed to take down the fourth UFO somewhere over Minas Gerais, and disappeared soon afterward.

  The crash site was bad news, plain and simple:

  

  Now, in real life, we began playing this mission in November 2015. Just a few weeks prior, the area depicted on the map had been the site of an horrendous environmental disaster. There’s a big iron mine in that location, and they have several large reservoirs to store the toxic byproducts of the mining process. The dams on one of those reservoirs burst, and the resulting toxic flood completely destroyed a nearby small town and tainted the surrounding rivers. To clarify, this is a real life disaster that actually happened. You can see a before/after map overlay here.

  This was the first instance of me using real-life events directly in the game, and even then it made me a bit uneasy. At the time, I went forward because I figured it would be a good way for me to process what happened.

  Now, in-setting, it had been about five years since the disaster happened, and the clean up efforts there had never amounted to much. The reason for this became obvious once an X-COM sattelite imaged the area: it was completely covered by an alien anomaly much like the one in Cologne. As this one covered a much greater area, the squad’s goal wasn’t to shut it down, as it would likely be impossible. Their main goal was recovering the downed UFO, and a secondary goal was to bring an intact sample of one of the black trees.

  Rough Landing

  The group looks over the map and agrees on a landing zone: a parking lot about 2.5km north of the crash site (which is located near the red map pin in the illustration above). From there they would proceed on foot, either on a road that leads from the parking lot to the main complex, or through the forest.

  The landing zone seems peaceful from afar, but it’s quite creepy up close. The squad can see many of the black trees scattered about, not only amid the native vegetation but also growing out of the asphalt on the parking lot and even on the rooftops of nearby buildings. They look like slightly smaller versions of the trees found in the first mission - black ash trees, which are in no way native to the region. The temperature on the ground is several degrees colder than it should be. The buildings they can see are all defaced, and the only vehicles in the parking lot are a couple of rusted out car husks. One of the trees has a skeleton hanging from it by the neck, and many others have human bones scattered around their roots. Interestingly, Korsakov seems unable to see the trees, though he believes that they’re there when the party tells him.

  The squad finds the landscape quite unsettling, which was my intent. They approach the tree with the hanging skeleton and examine it more closely. The skeleton is real and from someone who was hung to death on that branch. It’s tied with common rope. Aside from it, the tree also has several immature mines growing on it, as well as large yellow flowers the squad hadn’t seen before.

  Kendall checks the airwaves for the now familiar patterns of alien interference, and finds them all around the group. Each tree emits its own field! It also becomes clear to him that this interference seems to be actively malicious, spoofing their sensors for maximum scare value. Listen to the static long enough and it begins to call out your name, but you’re the only one who can hear it.

  Minette manages to cut the skeleton down without disturbing the mines, and with the help of the others she proceeds to brace one of the tree’s largest branches with rope and belts so she can cut it down with the chainsaw Nobby thoughtfully loaded into the Skyranger for just such an occasion.

  As soon as she begins cutting, though, all the black trees in the area seem to have their branches shaken by a strong wind, though there is no wind at all. The yellow flowers begin to bloom, and then it’s like someone skipped ahead in a video as they suddenly look like large cocoons that open up and disgorge unclothed but fully armed puppet soldiers!

  The ensuing firefight is quite brutal, as no one has decent cover in this open parking lot. The PCs drop what they’re doing and begin a fighting retreat towards the Skyranger, which is still landed in the middle of the lot. They take several hits on their trauma plates, and the puppets seem to immediately wise up to their armor as they begin aiming lower and manage to score a hit on Minette, crippling her leg. After that, they get a little reckless, and the PCs manage to keep their cool and kill all the opposition.

  Julia (who by now was an NPC) treats Minette’s wound while the rest of the PCs manages to cut down the tree branch. I think it’s safe to say that this puts a damper on their original plan to torch every tree they come across. Julia’s ministrations recover most of Minette’s lost HP, but her mobility is still impaired and they have a 2.5km walk to look forward to. At this point, Minette’s player decides to switch to Julia for the rest of the mission, leaving their original character to guard the Skyranger. The squad packs the branch and a couple of the more intact puppet corpses into the craft, and proceed with the mission. What they found next will be told in Part 2!

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