Well, Baylee has simple needs. Chief among them are food, drink, sex, and money. So, the money heist is probably appealing. But her ultimate goal is freedom. Pirate she may be, Freedom-loving is also in there. Haha. Well, specifically, cleithrophobe, fear of being tied down.

Still, I think whoever said supplies is probably hitting the most pressing thing that would keep the group together. Food, water, and creds to fund any sort of intention to set out back into the great wide open.

I might suggest making it so the ship barely has enough supplies to get us to a very narrow set of destinations with some opportunities to relieve the situation but limited opportunities. Might be able to string the group along a series of raids that barely keep them going headed for more occupied space. By the time we reach that place, perhaps we'll have bonded. Perhaps we'll have all killed one another off.

As for our NPC problem, Baylee is fine solving it for you all. That's what airlocks are for.

Heh.

That depends on how quickly and in what manner CSX is able to help the injured folks.

If the change of scene has given him enough time to recharge his healing capabilities, he will start trying to do so right now.

If he is able to spread his healing around to heal multiple targets just enough to set and keep them on the road to recovery, he will start trying to do so right now.

Once I know that, then I will know enough to post IC...  :)

Bek's immediate goal is to quietly disarm the Marines, if they didn't already leave their weapons behind or turn them over when they got on board; Bek won't let them take their friend to the infirmary unless they give them up. Anything recovered will be squirreled away someplace, with the power cells removed and stashed someplace else. I figure that as Bek's been on the ship before they may be able to figure out where the best hiding places are even if they don't actually remember any of them. I don't have a need to play that out, though.

After that, a people inventory; how many refugees total, what the breakdown is between stationers and prisoners, and what skills they have (for the ones that remember). While doing that, Bek will also try to quietly divest the rest of Amin's people of their guns as well, along with whichever prisoners seem like they don't know how to handle them. So, PCs and Lincoln (but not Virtanen) can keep theirs if they want. If no one else is doing it already, Bek will delegate people to inventory the ship and supplies.

Over the longer term, Bek is a social creature. Even though they don't know any of the other people on the ship, sticking around is far preferable than heading off on their own at the earliest opportunity.

Baylee is running an inventory as best she can given the faulty memory.

CSX:
You used Laying on of Hands on Barrett, but I don't think you spent the fate-point to bring Rapid Regeneration into play.

I think that, given the interplay between the two stunts, that I am okay with taking the "once per session" restriction off of "Laying on Hands".  If Sheng-Xin wants to kill himself to heal others, who am I to prevent that?

That being said, Sheng-Xin is still carrying the Moderate Consequence Intense Psychosomatic Pain.  You need to write something to kick off the recovery process.  Otherwise, he will continue to carry that Consequence until there's a narrative excuse for recovery to start.  I'd accept something a simple as finding a time and place to meditate...  and making some mention of him actually doing so.

This would downgrade the Moderate Consequence to a Minor Consequence, and you'd have that Minor Consequence set with the recovery flag on, so that at the beginning of the next scene--not session--it'd be healed up and removed.  But there absolutely has to be some narrative reference to this.

But, yeah, you could use Laying On Hands on the others. You've got a Minor Consequence and a Major(Severe) Consequence that are currently free.

By the same token, someone else in the crew could see if this ship as a medbay, seek out a first-aid kit...  Because ships like this would definitely have a first-aid kit or two... unless the tech-crew stripped those out, too... (nah, I'm not that cruel today).


Also, for what it's worth... your using Laying on Hands on Barrett obligates me to make sure he comes back into the story... you didn't heal him for nothing!  I promise that it will come back into play and possibly make a difference.  But it's a long-game benefit.  If/when Barrett shows up again you'll have that history to call upon as an free-invoke Aspect.

Then Maissa tried to locate the android AI Gilina had told her about.

Okay, so how does viper try to locate an unknown AI?  You've got moments before Gilina leaves if you wanna ask questions of her.

Rayfe:
For now, he's limited to the databanks on the Orishi.   And for that, he'll need to either hack the Orishi's systems (Beat Orishi's current system rank of +2.   You could just "take zero" for the success or wait for Baylee to acknowledge you as being allowed on-board, which'll grant you standard access.



New Narrative fact introduced:
Cockpit has an illuminated ships deck-plan

Baylee

For metagame reasons, I'm not going to give an individuated breakdown.  But there is no indication that there is an unwanted or unknown entity on-board.   Also OOC, the ship's AI is not including itself in the list as it does not consider itself nor repair drones, etc as unregistered autonomous entities.

The approach I'm taking with this is that after Ling-Li was captured, acting command of the Orishi passed to someone else, and there was some passage of time before the Orishi itself was captured.  But the Orishi's command database was not purged in that time, so the Orishi still recognizes Ling-Li.


Everyone
If there is anyone who wants to jump in and establish that they were a part of the crew (or passengers) of the Orishi at the time Baylee was, now's the time to speak up.

And finally...


I've also been giving some thought to how such IDing might work and how "Quick-Loading" from cryo-stasis might work.  And I've come to the conclusion that you each have been implanted with id-chips (a  chip the size of a grain of rice implanted in your wrist)  and cortical stacks (which is a lot more invasive and sits at the base of your skull).  Cortical Stacks are new tech and are basically similar to that described in "Altered Carbon", but the tech hasn't been perfected yet.  Zenda-Meier is a pioneer in this field...

I have not seen Altered Carbon. Could you perhaps elaborate?

Question about the ship!

A vessel like this would have computer control as part of the basic design concept - there must be a master control console, or a computer core, from which someone can control/repair stuff. A ship doesn't fly by magic, after all - when the pilot manipulates the controls, something has to process that, and make the engines and so forth react accordingly. Likewise life support, comms, sensors, and everything else on the ship. Sure, they COULD all be completely independent systems, but the most logical way for a vessel to be designed is to have one simple controlling system, which can be accessed from a master control of some sort.

If there is one, where might it be on the ship? And if there isn't one, can I patent the concept and make myself super rich and so forth... oh, no? Damn. :P

Re: Cortical Stacks:

The peripheral component of a system that allows for the backup, upload and download of a person's non-physical characteristics--ego, memory, etc.   About the size of a two silver-dollars (or, if you're Canadian, two toonies), it was implanted and recorded your ego, backed it up to the stasis system.  When you were "quick-loaded" It was a progressive writing, sort of like how a jpeg image can be written from tart to end or progressively written from multiple concurrent starting points.

Breakthroughs in this field are reputed to allow for downloading your personality to a different body, to a different species (ie, moving a meat-mind to a robot-body) and "far-casting", sending a stream of data across thousands of light-years rather than travelling physically yourself.  You'd be farcast into a temporary body, do your business and that data would be farcast back to be integrated with your primary personality.

In this setting, the technology is in it's infancy as the biological to technology bridging is unstable.  current-day fiction of the setting would have all sorts of stories about "ego-editing" and "brain-hacking".  But this level of technology is not in common (nor uncommon) use.

Mostly, it's a justification for the how and why with a big edge of creepy around it, because it provides a narrative hook for possibilities down the road.

Such as... who the hell put those stacks into us in the first place, and why? After all, it isn't something you would do to people and then dump them in a prison for the rest of their lives - unless they're an experiment!

Ships Propulsion, Life-support, Jump-Drive, Fuel, Consumables (water, required gasses and reactants), Sanitation and the drone-bay would mostly be located below Deck-1.  They'd all be accessible at various points from Deck-1 depending where you're going and what you want to do.

AI Core, Communications, Sensors & Pirate Suite, would mostly be located on Deck-2, and probably fairly close to the cockpit.

A vessel like this has an AI computer control.  It also has a peripheral autonomous entity that allows the ship to self-monitor and effect repairs (in addition to the ships drones).  You haven't met Ashe yet.  (It was gonna be Tau, but I'm changing it for thematic reasons... Ashe ties in with the Orisha much better).   Viper might be looking for it.

Gotcha, thanks!

Bek was part of the crew; not sure if they would have had an official position, or been more of a miscellaneous-tasks handler.

Maybe it is an experiment; if you need to test an infant technology that's both invasive and has a high potential for backfire or abuse, why not use someone who's already been deemed expendable? IRBs as we know them would completely lose their shit over it, but maybe those don't exist in this world, or the world's version of the Helsinki guidelines is different. Or maybe the experiment itself is illicit, who knows?

In Altered Carbon everyone gets a cortical stack as toddlers, and as long as it's intact the person is considered to be alive even if there's no body  attached to it. In theory, everyone who loses their body can get a new one, so destroying someone else's body is just property damage while murder is destroying the stack itself. Not everyone can afford a new body though, so there are stack-storage facilities for people who don't want or can't afford a new body. There are also . . . (ominous music) . . . stack-incarceration facilities. The protagonist of the books is a convict, paroled from storage and re-embodied in order to solve a murder.

And, in fact, in a setting with multiple nations, planets, systems and multi-system "star-empires", there are very few galactic commonalities.  One such empire might well decry the use of such technologies, while others... it's not even a blip on the radar.

As another example, "The Galactic Authority" as a galactic police force is a laugh.  It hardly encompasses the entire galaxy.  The Galactic Standard for time measurement is one of the few things that is universal, and only because there's a lot of software to translate time and a commonality makes it vastly easier for us to discuss the timeline of events.

I'm not interested in making cortical stacks a central plot-factor, unless you really find it interesting and want to pursue it, because it opens a lot of cans of worms that can totally sidetrack your personal stories.  But, that's why we can discuss this in a metagame context.

At the moment, your characters aren't aware of the cortical stacks.  It should probably become a priority, once discovered, to have them removed or disabled or rendered inert...
This message was lightly edited by the GM at 07:37, Sat 15 May 2021.

I'm down for whatever you think is fun. On the subject of different systems, different peoples, different empires, I have put some thought into the one I came up with. As you may have guessed from my RTJ, the Unity is a pretty nasty place. The primary planet is a playground for the super wealthy. It's a decadent paradise planet, centre of a huge (and highly amoral) banking consortium. It's the Cayman Islands, in space.

The other worlds are exactly the opposite. They are vast balls of industrial slag, refineries, foundries, and mining operations. Life there is miserable. The majority of the workers end up indentured in one way or another, and anybody suspected of even the most trivial of crimes has all their assets seized, and are confined to the very worst jobs, with no hope of ever getting out of the vile life they now lead. The death rate is very high, and the life expectancy very low.

It's a fascist, totalitarian nightmare. But very few people get to see, or even learn of, the factory planets. When one thinks of The Unity, they think of the beautiful beaches, the bright, airy cities, filled with the epitome of artistic and scientific talent. Glorious green fields, and sparkling blue seas. The fact that is can only exist because it is supported by a slave population, who toil in the worst conditions, for almost no reward... that seems to get overlooked, somehow.

And of course, Since Rayfe tried to steal money from the Banking Cartel, that was just about the most heinous crime imaginable, to those heartless, spoiled, wealthy elite types. The excessive brutality of his interrogation, and the grossly overdone sentence he received, all reflect precisely how greedy those elites really are.

He was not sent to the factory penal colonies, because of reasons. Which may have to be labelled FOIP. (Because I am pretty sure that our GM has all sorts of sneaky plots going on in this backstory, and I am looking forwards to seeing them come to the surface!)

(Why, yes, Metropolis is one of my favourite movies, why do you ask? :P )
This message was last edited by the player at 07:15, Sat 15 May 2021.

See, now I want a game to explore the 'Time Wars' as various states and corporations fought to have their standardized measurement of time become the universal standard! THat sort of existential theme intrigues me.

But here, now... stacks are creepy. But I like the inclusion as a minor plot thread later. Baylee's cleithrophobia will go off like alarm bells once she finds out.

Altered Carbon explores a lot of interesting concepts.

For fun, anyone have something to add to this list?

Awesome Science Fiction shows:
Babylon 5
Start Trek
Farscape
Stargate franchise
The Expanse
Battlestar Galactica
Firefly
Falling Skies
Earth: Final Conflict
The Arrival (?)
Contact
Dune (barely makes the cut, still iffy on whether it has 'magic.')

And I did NOT include anything with magic. ESPers can get a pass depending on how they are handled. Jedi are just religious wizards.
Interstellar doesn't make it because it is schlock nonsense.

On another note: perhaps a thread to collect of collective home systems and other Information about the universe as we piece it together?

Until the eventual standardisation of time due to the proliferation of the railways, this was exactly what happened here in Great Britain! Time was so localised, that two villages even only a mile apart, might have different times. One might have 12 noon as the time, the other might only have 11.30. It was a logistical nightmare, and was one reason why people often arranged to meet "at lunchtime" or "for supper" as giving an actual time could lead to major scheduling clashes. But people knew more or less what time of day meals would happen (or church, for example - they could tell by the bells, and how long they had been ringing) so it made sense to arrange to meet then. Sure, people might then be hanging around for a while, but they would all more or less turn up at about the right time.

Furthermore, the vast majority of people did not have access to timepieces, other than those displayed on buildings, so arranging to meet at a specific time was more or less pointless. A couple of labourers in the city might find it easier to see a clock, but in the country, the only clock they likely saw was on the church. Which is fine if you are in the village, but if you are out in the fields, with nothing but the position of the sun as a reference, specifying "half past two" would be utterly redundant.

Add Blake's 7 to your show list. This character is a huge ripoff from one of their characters. Who is indeed the thumbnail I am using. :P

If you don't know the show, it is a late 70s/early 80s BBC show. The budget was tiny, and the effects were hilariously bad. But the storytelling, plot, and actual acting tended to be superb. It has cult status amongst those who know of it. It was pitched as the Dirty Dozen in space - a bunch of convicts end up trying to take down an oppressive galactic empire. I am an avid fan. :D

And Doctor Who is superb. I am a huge fan of the original series. :D

Maybe add Buck Rogers onto the list, and Star Cops. Alien Nation. And Colony, which is up on netflix at the moment.
This message was last edited by the player at 07:29, Sat 15 May 2021.

Also... V. Original 80s V is a bloody masterpiece!

Awesome Science Fiction shows worlds:
Dark Matter :)
Startide Rising, etc. (Brin)
A Fire Upon the Deep, etc. (Vinge)
Foundation Trilogy (Asimov)
Robot Series (Asimov)
Hyperion, etc. (Simmons)

Past time for my beauty sleep, but I'm sure to think of more during the night... :)

A friend of mine runs an Asimov Robots LARP. It's magnificent.

Technically Foundation and Robots are the same universe. Just radically different times. Daneel Olivaw does show up in the Foundation series, very briefly. I forget which book. There are so many of them!