British elections primarily interest me from a watching-the-train-continue-to-crash perspective, because I don’t think the UK has much to teach the rest of the world on how to run a social democracy well. The electoral system is completely broken; their Tories are the very picture-perfect image of the born-to-rule upper class who don’t care, their Labour party is weak and achieved its only long run in modern politics by electing a vampire; their only “functioning” industry is banking, and by extension the only economic plan either party has is to keep bankers rich and use the taxes to buy off everyone else; and their media are rotten. However, there are two aspects of British elections that interest me from a policy perspective: what they are going to do about the NHS, and what they are going to do about their terrible education system.
Before the election I was going to write about both of these, but got lazy. My first post was intended to be about the perils for Labour of “weaponising” the NHS (which I think they obviously have done), but the election outcome kind of made my point for me on that regard. However my second post was going to be about Labour’s education policy, which seemed to be the most sensible thing anyone had presented in the entire election period and thus, of course, the only thing that got no coverage. Sadly, that election policy is now going to be dead for at least five years, which leaves the Tories free to pursue their ideologically-driven and intellectually bankrupt, evidence-free Free Schools Policy.
The Labour education policy included two interesting and positive moves, and one very realistic and sensible principle. The first, and in my opinion biggest, move was a plan to make mathematics education compulsory to 18 years. As someone with a strong bias towards maths education, and someone who thinks that mathematics ability is more about education than talent, this plan really appealed to me as a way to turn around Britain’s woeful mathematics performance. The policy received support from an Oxford mathematics professor, du Simonyi, who is kind of famous, and also from the head of Britain’s National Numeracy charity, who said
We really need to challenge negative attitudes that assume that maths is a ‘can do’ or ‘can’t do’ subject. It is not. Everyone can – with effort and persistence – learn the maths they need for everyday life and work
Which is something I very strongly agree with, but something which apparently many British children are struggling to realize, with the result that Britain consistently underperforms its OECD peers in mathematics. It’s really sad to me that the country that did more than any other to advance statistics and mathematics has decided to abandon the census, and basically given away all its mathematical advantages to the USA and Europe, and Hunt’s policy seems like it would have been a first step to undoing this problem. I guess it’s just as well 16 year olds can’t vote though, because that policy alone would be enough to have the entire age cohort rushing to vote Tory …
The second policy, perhaps much less comprehensible outside of the UK, was a plan to abolish GCSEs and introduce a 10-year reform of education. This would break the long-standing division of British schools into technical and academic grades, recognizing that education in the 21st century isn’t just about getting a job and that a formal education until 19 is valuable to everyone in the modern world, not just those planning on going on to further education. This kind of reform finally breaks down an old-fashioned idea derived from Britain’s class structure, and essential to getting rid of that structure. Of course it’s not enough, but it’s a start. Furthermore, Tristram Hunt, the education spokesperson, made clear that they would not set forth on these reforms straight away, but would aim to enact them over two parliaments, giving teachers a break from the constant annoying reorganizations they are forced through every five years and building a coherent, long-term strategy for the system. This kind of long-term thinking is rare in any policy area from modern politicians, and when I read it before the election I was very surprised and hopeful that Britain might finally be making a positive step out of its education duldrums, and maybe even towards sensible policy.
Sadly, though, the election was dominated by Labour talking about the NHS and the Tories wailing about blue-skinned picts invading the mainland, and rational policy-making didn’t get a look in. So I guess now Britain gets the Tory bootheel it asked for. With a Tory majority you can bet that sensible education for the masses will not be part of the policy mix … I wonder if Tristram Hunt even kept his seat?
It’s Friday night here in Japan and I have better things to do with my time than political punditry, but I’m very interested in the shock results coming in from the UK general election. It appears that, against the flow of two years of opinion polls, the conservative party (the Tories) have not just held on to their hung parliament, but may have actually seized enough seats to rule in their own right. If they don’t get those seats it looks likely that they’ll be able to rule with the help of either just UKIP or just the Democratic Unionist Party.
It’s too early to tell but it looks to me like Tory gains have come primarily at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, who have been (deservedly, in my opinion) slaughtered at the ballet box, with the Guardian at this point in the count suggesting only 8 seats remain – down from 53. Another three might cling on, but even the best case scenario is a disaster.
The obvious dark horse in this race was the Scottish National Party, which took Scotland from Labour – they gained 50 seats, almost all of which were from Labour, and have basically ejected Labour from the North. This would not, however, by itself have been enough to prevent Labour from governing, if they had been able to get enough seats by themselves to form a majority with SNP support. Labour leader Milliband (immorally, in my view) refused to enter a coalition with the SNP, but he could have changed his mind on that had he seized enough seats in his own right. And this is where Labour failed – they couldn’t take seats back from the Tories south of Scotland, and this election, obviously, was a referendum on the performance of the ruling coalition. This coalition is very unpopular, but they only suffered (at this early stage) a 0.44% swing against them to Labour, indicating a dismal failure to punish the Tories for their unpopularity at the ballot box.
I think this is possibly because of the spoiling role that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) have played in many Labour seats. According to the Guardian, UKIP issued a statement that said
In many constituencies we are the opposition, on behalf of working class voters who have been neglected and taken for granted for decades. This is true of both Northern England where we are the opposition to Labour and in Southern England where we are the opposition to the Conservatives.
We’ve provided hope and truth for the electorate and driven the political agenda.
In Britain’s first past-the-post system, it’s possible that the spoiling role of UKIP in conservative seats was not enough to win Labour the vote, or that it was equally spread between the two parties, so Labour couldn’t capitalize on Tory unpopularity. Did UKIP cost Labour the chance to lead?
Of course this question would be moot if the UK had a functioning electoral system, with preference allocation, held on a Saturday. More working people would have come out to the vote, and those UKIP votes would have flowed back to the party they defected from. But the ruling parties have both resolutely refused to consider electoral reform. This election shows in stark detail the consequences of continuing with the UK’s flawed electoral system: it benefits regional parties, which both major parties have claimed don’t have Britain’s interests at heart, but worse still it disenfranchises a huge proportion of the electorate. Between them UKIP and the Greens won 16% of the vote but hold 2 seats out of 650; while the Scottish National Party won just 5% of the vote and hold 50 seats. This is because the SNP is a holdout from the time of local politics, while UKIP and the Greens are parties of national opinion – broad movements across the whole country, connected not through local constituencies but through national issues. In a system like Australia these parties would gain significant representation in the Senate, where they are nationally representative – but the UK “Senate,” the House of Lords, is unelected and the ruling parties have refused to give UKIP and the Greens seats in the Lords consistent with their vote share. In a system like New Zealands, these parties would gain some representation through lower house lists – but the UK ruling parties refuse to countenance any change to first-past-the-post systems.
Essentially the UK ruling parties want to cling to a system that dates back to the 19th century, when politics was by necessity local, or the immediate post-war era when politics was strictly defined on class lines and classes were strictly segregated by region and area. Labour thrived under this system 50 years ago as the party of the industrial north, and the Tories as the party of the landed gentry; residual class barriers and geographic prejudices mean they can maintain this benefit for the short term, but at a huge cost to the political aspirations of a large minority of the country. You may not like UKIP or Green politics, but their voters have a right to be heard; you may like SNP politics, but that doesn’t mean they deserve representation in parliament well beyond their ultimately very localized base. Yet this is the result of the current system in the UK.
I hope that the sudden surge in the SNP presence in parliament will get the major parties to finally seriously think about electoral reform. If they don’t do something about it, then at some point in the future the conservative vote will collapse, as always happens in the electoral cycle, and the country will find itself being ruled by a coalition of labour unions and Scottish nationalists. If the conservatives care at all for the future of their country they will look on that prospect with genuine fear, and start working on real electoral reform. Or not … given that if they do UKIP will eat them from the right.
Drew contemplating the value of bad combat rules after taking a headshot
The original Cyberpunk rulebook has a simple and nasty system of armour, which is completely broken. In this system your gun does a handful of dice of damage, between 3d6+1 for a good submachine gun to 7d10 for a high quality sniper rifle, and your armour has a stopping power (SP) that ranges from 4 for a leather jacket to about 24 or 30 for full-grade military armour. If the damage you roll exceeds the SP of your armour, you take damage, from which you can subtract your body type modifier (BTM) before you take any actual damage to your body. BTM is usually between 2 and 4, and you can take about 30 hits before you die, but you can only take 8 hits before you start having to make shock checks to stay conscious, and 12 hits before you start making death checks. These checks become progressively harder, and these wound states (in blocks of 4) come with increasing penalties to activity. This means that taking damage is a rapid death spiral, and as soon as you can you buy one of the basic, easily-accessible armour types that makes you immune to low level damage. See the example at the bottom of this post for more details.
The result of this rule is the exact kind of nihilism I decried in a post on cyberpunk some time back, which attracted a lot of negative attention. It also drains out a lot of the sense of tactical battle skills and planning that seems like it should be the essence of a fight in cyberpunk, because highly-protective armour is much more easily accessible than highly-destructive guns: for example, “Motocross Armour” (SP 24) is easy to get, but the most easily accessible gun is the FN-RAL assault rifle (Drew is a proud owner of one of these) which does 6d6+2 damage, not enough to get through the Motocross Armour + BTM, and definitely not enough to penetrate Drew’s Motocross armour + body-weave + BTM (total target: 31). So instead of dashing from cover to cover, worrying about getting hit, Drew can just stand in the middle of the room gunning people down. If she’s up against people with SMGs she can use the same tactic naked (SP12+BTM=target of 15). Under this rule system you don’t need cover, tactics or planning, you just need a good set of motocross armour and a spine of steel (or, in Drew’s case, a complete lack of any sense of self-preservation and a COOL of 9). This rule is also, I suspect, unrealistic: although this blog says that armour has outpaced guns, this highly entertaining youtube video suggests that even a normal pistol firing certain kinds of normal ammunition can go through very effective armour and still do a lot of damage (the hole from the Hungarian bullet at the end looks to me like it must be at least a Mortal-2 category of damage!) Obviously we don’t want to play in a world where the first shot kills us, but as players we want to keep at least some sense of that furtiveness and care that we assume real soldiers must engage in, especially in close-range firefights of the kind we’re regularly caught in, and we don’t want the game to degenerate to a slugfest between heavily-armoured foes at 10m.
Our house rule, that bullets that don’t penetrate armour still do one point of stun damage, completely changes the dynamic of combat. When someone lays down suppressive fire on a small area you suddenly value cover very highly, because if your dodge/escape check fails you’re looking at 1d6 points of shock damage; you can only sustain this for a few rounds before you’re out for the count. And finding cover makes fights tougher, because moving around and ducking in and out of cover reduces the number of shots you can take and increases your activity penalties. This is why Drew bought her armour-cracking gun …
Drew’s Beautiful New Gun
Realizing that we are usually outnumbered in combat, and with this new rule making force of numbers a dangerous foe, Drew decided to invest in a weapon that can even the odds rapidly. Our street dealer, Coyote, can’t buy really good guns easily (probably because he is so ugly), and so Drew hasn’t been able to get the sniper rifle she keeps asking him for, but he is also very good at modifying existing weapons. So Drew bought herself a cheap, easily-available Nomad 7.62 bolt action rifle, and Coyote modified it to fire electro-thermal (ET) shot. Neither Drew nor I know what this means, but we don’t care: it adds 50% to her damage. This mod can only be applied to non-automatic weapons with caseless ammunition[1], but it means that Drew now has a 9d6+3 damage rifle with an accuracy of +2 and a six-shot cartridge. The accuracy bonus for this gun means that if she is not moving and focuses on just the one shot she hits the head with a roll of 2 or more on a d10; if she has to perform a second action she hits on a 4 or more. Head shots do double damage after SP and BTM modifiers, which is why in our last session Drew killed 3 men with 5 shots.
This gun is also in a tasteful pastel blue. Drew tries to avoid pink when she is working with other combat teams, because she wants to be taken seriously as a riflewoman.
Tactics for breaking armour
In our last session we ended up facing off against five guys with power armour, which has an SP of at least 28, carrying fairly heavy automatic rifles (probably FN-RALs, like Drew’s) and at least one shotgun (scary!). We lucked on a very effective method for breaking down armour within the revised rules, however. This was pretty simple: Coyote used a high-rate-of-fire Kalashnikov to lay down suppressive fire when they first arrived in combat, forcing them back through the door they were entering by, and Pops dropped burner grenades on them. Burner grenades don’t do huge amounts of damage but anyone who is hit by them has to make a COOL check to stay in combat and not put out the flames, and the flames themselves continue for a few rounds, causing additional stun damage under the revised rules. Drew, of course, was laying out head shots, because a single headshot with her beautiful new gun will probably kill someone even if they have SP 30 and BTM 4, especially if it has armour piercing ammo. Once Coyote and Pops had expended their initial ammunition, Coyote switched to throwing fragmentation grenades and Pops switched to three-shot bursts with his FN-RAL, which don’t do heavy damage but are likely to wear down single opponents fast with stun damage. Meanwhile Drew continued with the head shots, aiming at individual opponents who posed the most threat.
Unfortunately Pops and Coyote are really shit at delivering grenades, so most missed, but two of our support team managed to do that job. With this tactic, Drew cleaned up the riskiest guy in the first round, a lot of damage was laid down on the enemy in the second round, and in the third round the burner grenades caused two of the remaining guys to expire; the last two went down from another fragmentation grenade after that. None of these guys were dead (except Drew’s first target), just shocked and exhausted; but Drew soon fixed that.
This tactic works because it maintains a heavy pressure of stun damage on the whole group, because no one can stand in the blast zone of three grenades while they’re on fire and being shot at without eventually giving up the ghost. Under the previous rules, everything we had thrown at them except Drew’s ET round would have done nothing. If Pops now improves his heavy weapons skill so his grenade launcher is actually effective, and we find Coyote a better suppression weapon (e.g. a mini-gun) then this tactic will be even more effective. Even power armour won’t stop us now!
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Example: The original rules
Ghost has come out of his hidey-hole in our first adventure, and finds himself facing off against a squad of three gangers armed with SMGs, who are there to kill him. He has warning, and has donned a set of full combat armour that he spent much of his starting money on. He needs to get down the hallway to the lift. The three gangers fire 3-shot bursts at him, hitting him twice and delivering 1d3 shots per successful burst, for a total of 3 hits. They roll damage, but their SMGs are crumby, doing 3d6 damage, and his SP is 24, so there’s no risk he will take any damage. He walks down the hallway towards them, shooting them down one by one as the rest of the group catch up and start gunning them down with assault rifles. Ghost is a hacker.
Example: The revised rules
Drew is lying on the ground unable to move, in plain sight, after a lunatic ganger tried to wrestle her and get her helmet off in our sixth adventure. Two men at the end of the hallway armed with assault rifles let rip on her with suppressive fire, and unable to dodge properly she takes 5 bullets. The men are using kalashnikovs, which do 5d6 damage, but Drew is wearing full combat armour plus SP12 sub-dermal armour (she’s a sensible girl!) so she has a total SP of 28. All five bullets hit her for less than 28 damage each, and she takes nothing. The GM, in a fit of rage, makes up the new rules, and so Drew takes one point of stun damage from each bullet that hit her. The GM, who is a complete bastard, also degrades her armour slightly. Drew is now in the lightly wounded category (-2 on everything) and if she takes 3 more bullets, even if they don’t penetrate, she will need to start making stun checks to stay functional.
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fn1: One amusing thing about this game is that, since I’m not a gun nut at all, with no experience of any form of projectile weapons (I have never touched one, and have only even seen one in someone’s hand once), I have no clue what any of the language means, I just treat it as categories of stuff like magic items. One of our players was a conscript in his national army, and has a lot of familiarity with the various barbaric instruments of death that Drew deploys; I leave the details to him.
I’m sorry Doctor, you won’t be able to leave … that way …
[Faustus’s note: I wasn’t actually present for this session and wrote it up based on other players’ reports; this is why it is late and out of order with session 10. Go to the end for a summary of events]
Kill, it’s such a friendly word
Seems the only way
For reaching out again
– Old oil age rockers
Date: 8th October, 2177
Weather: Sunny!!!
Mood: Deeply satisfied. This is the first time in my life that I’ve really enjoyed close combat, usually it just seems icky and sweaty and kind of dangerous, it doesn’t have any of the elegance and clean lines of rifle-work. But there was something really powerfully satisfying about beating cyber-psychiatrists to death with an iron bar, close in where you can see the horror in their eyes and smell their fear. It’s the first time I’ve relished the smell of blood in my whole life.
Outfit: Blood-soaked boiler suit and metal bar. I was meant to be wearing a nurse’s outfit, because that would be the right outfit to wear when you’re breaking into a mental asylum, but the others insisted on going disguised as electricians, so here I am in a boiler suit. Everyone knows blood looks fetching on a nurse’s outfit, and just boring on a set of overalls … and I’m covered in a lot of blood! But as always I do what the team wants, even if it means I have to be like completely unfashionable when I’m doing my day job.
So we decided it was time to get looking for Alt’s mysterious transubstantiating sister, which means we have to bust a truck-driver out of a mental asylum. The truck driver is Hog, and he was shifting Ghostshock for Alt’s psychotic brother Lima back before we iced Lima or whatever shell of a body he was currently using. We wanted to ask Hog a bit more about the deal he had with Lima but we couldn’t because he disappeared, and Alt worked out that he had been suddenly declared cyberpsychotic and locked away in some top class rehabilitation unit topside. Of course now we know that “rehabilitation” means being reconfigured into a Full Body Replacement cybersoldier, which has got to be all kinds of scary. My guess is that is what they planned to do with me when I was held in the psych ward after Tunguska, and I have been really wanting to liberate Hog and teach those cyber-psychiatrists a few manners.
So I was happy when Coyote turned up at my apartment and told me and Pops that we were ready to roll, that he had used a tenuous contact topside to set up a van and cover as maintenance workers, and that the visas for topside had come through from Pops’s contact Blacklist. So all we needed to do was get a plan ready and head up. The good news: we were leaving as soon as possible. The bad news: we couldn’t take any weapons and even my Rippers had to come out, so we were going to be completely unarmed.
First, however, we needed to secure access to some fingerprints and an access card, which is how I got to meet Lady Zodiac.
Lady Zodiac at the club
Lady Zodiac
Pops knows a lot of pretty interesting people from his days as a cop and one of them is Lady Zodiac, a courtesan and sometime drug dealer who has a bit of a debt to Pops, which he won’t explain to me and which I try hard not to think about the details of. So he called her up and asked her if she was free this evening, and she was, and before we know it we’re outside some high class club on level 2, just below topside, and this beautiful woman is tapping on the window of Pops’s rundown little car. She was tall and pretty and perfectly dressed and she walked so gracefully and her voice was like music. I’m pretty sure she had some careful cyber enhancements to make it all perfect but they were really high class and subtle, so she exuded this sense of natural beauty that’s really rare in our plastic world. I had to sit in the passenger seat feeling small and uncouth and like I stank of gun oil while Pops carried on this conversation with his beautiful friend that was half flirting and half business. She was really sweet to him, and for a moment when I wasn’t staring at Lady Zodiac’s decolletage and imagining what I’d do if I was as beautiful as her, I had these visions of him back in the day, before he met me, handsome young cop with a family and a life and a mind of his own and goals and dreams that weren’t all attached to keeping me alive and finding the people who wrecked it all … like he was once a real person, and somehow Lady Zodiac floated through his life and he did something good for her like he did for me, and I bet he didn’t try to bed her either, at least they just seem like friends to me now, listening to her lilting voice teasing his rough looks and small car, and she’s looking at me all inquisitive like but not jealous, not that someone like her could have any reason to be jealous of a smouldering little nutcase like me, but then Pops introduced me to her, “this is my d-, ah, my friend and colleague, the Druid. You can call her Drew,” and she did that little moment of vague disfocused stare people do when they go online to check me out, and then that little doubletake when they see the video of one of my better jobs that always appears when the ‘net throws up information on me. Then she shook my hand and her skin was smooth and coloured like pearl and her eyes were this luscious blue-green like a gem and she talked to me like I mattered, then she whacked Pops on the shoulder and said that this means they’re quits but stay in touch and she really seemed like she meant it, and then she gave me a little wave, told Pops to wait five, and sashayed off into the club. Pops rolled up the window and looked at me kind of shy-like, but he didn’t say anything except “When the mark comes out you stay in the car and don’t do anything unless he starts shooting,” then he got out and went and lounged nearby.
And she was right, because five minutes later Lady Zodiac came tripping down the stairs, wearing nothing except this iridescent club lingerie, and this kind of nerdy dude was with her, holding her hand and urging her to wait. She came running across the road and she was saying something about “we can do it right here if you have the money” when she breathlessly bumped into Pops who was standing there stern in a leather jacket with this massive gun out and he dragged the guy around behind a truck and started yelling at him to turn around and stand still and was he armed and was he alone? And he was calling him by this random name even though we both knew that this guy was a technician at NaoCorps on topside called John Baylish, and he kept trying to tell Pops he was Baylish but Pops kept roughing him around and telling him to tell the truth and Lady Zodiac was squealing in this really fetching way that wasn’t actually loud enough to get attention, and Pops told her to shut up ’cause he’s from Goliath security and if she brings down any white knights that he has to kill the clean up costs will be all hers and she goes quiet with these little theatrical sobs. Then Pops start telling Baylish that he’s under arrest for a triple murder in the USA, and he don’t have any rights at all, so he better come quietly, and the dude’s like earnestly trying to tell Pops that he’s never been to the USA and he’s a New Horizon local and what is going on here? And then Pops acts all confused and tells him he better give him some ID so he can confirm that, and then he takes his fingerprints and gets the guy’s ID card and gives him a receipt on real Goliath letterhead and tells him he’ll get it back in three days or so and gives him a number and tells him to dial it every evening and give a full report of his whereabouts and he is now a person of interest in an international murder investigation.
And that’s how we got the access card and the fingerprints. Coyote worked overnight on the fingerprints and we had a bypass ready by morning. So we set off topside and I don’t think I’m ever going to see Lady Zodiac again …
So THAT’s why there’s so much water dripping through our roof …
Topside
We went topside on the first lift the next morning, so we could get there nice and early and be out before the end of the day. Getting to topside is easy, on this three-minute long hyper elevator that you queue for for about an hour. It goes up so fast your ears pop, and you don’t see anything outside so when you arrive you don’t even know how high up you are but it must be pretty high because the first thing you see is blue sky. Then there’s this phalanx of guards and machines you have to pass through, and they check everything, with multiple scanners that must tell them everything about even what you had for breakfast. If I’d tried to smuggle in my rippers they surely would have found out, and would have sent me straight back. I followed Blacklist’s instructions, dressed nice and simple in a clean skirt and boots and simple blouse, like a good girl going to work for the nice people, and I didn’t make a fuss and I followed instructions and I must have showed my visa to like 8 different people and been through 10 different scanners, but finally we were all through. Coyote took a bit longer because they didn’t like the look of his face, which shows that people up here have got at least a bit of sense, so we had to wait for him but they let him through which was just as well because he was our contact for everything. We had an hour to kill before the van with our contacts arrived and I wanted to go shopping but Pops said no and anyway it was really early still and even some of the cafes weren’t open, so instead we just spilled out of the reception area into this park on a kind of a little rise near some office buildings, with a street going down to a little shopping zone, so we just wandered around for half an hour checking out our first and probably our only view of topside ever.
It was pretty amazing. There was lots of grass and real trees, and there was this gentle breeze that was cool and wild and you could tell it came from somewhere far away over the sea, and you could see the sky wherever you looked, and it wasn’t raining so you didn’t need an umbrella to keep off the constant foul-smelling water, and everyone was beautiful and well dressed and no one was really armed, though I saw a few police here and there who had guns, and the buildings were all clean and looked new and there was no rubbish anywhere and noone lying on the street looking sad and dirty and when you stopped and closed your eyes you couldn’t hear a single siren of any kind. Bliss.
Then our van turned up, and we set off to kill some doctors.
Asylum
In the van we changed quickly into our overalls, and we dropped off the guy who’d delivered it for us near a little tram stop of some kind. Coyote took over driving, and we headed out to the asylum, which was a NaoCorps unit out near the edge of this whole zone of upmarket medical places. On the way we dropped off Ragut’s wife at one of the cheaper clinics, with a change of clothes and what we hoped was a valid insurance ticket that Alt said she’d said up for us, then we drove on to the hospital. We parked around the corner and waited while Ghost hacked into the matrix, broke into the hospital system and set up a distraction.
Unfortunately the distraction Ghost chose was kind of big. He told us later that he discovered the Husk around here was constrained, like someone had chained the remnants of the Husk to the walls of buildings and structures, so instead of trying to arrange anything elaborate he just unchained some parts of the Husk. This cyberwaffle doesn’t make any sense to me, but the effects were pretty clear: the computer systems of the entire hospital district started going crazy as the Husk started fighting to regain control of cyberspace, and security systems started failing – along with lights, power systems, and even lawn sprinklers. We gave the chaos a few minutes then drove up to the car park at the front of the asylum, got out in our coveralls as cool as could be, carrying toolkits that contained nothing more serious than a metal bar and a comms unit, and walked up to the front doors. These doors were open and there was a guy at the front reception desk but when we explained that we were there to start fixing the trouble he just waved us through. He was furiously punching buttons and talking on what looked like eight different phones, and as we talked to him we heard this big bang outside and looked around to see a patient had just fallen from up in the building. As he waved us on we heard him saying to someone on a phone, “All the window locks have deactivated and the windows on the secure level are going mad, someone just fell out. Yeah, there’s a team on the way up now to check.”
At this point Pops told me to go back to the van, keep it ready to run, and keep an eye on what was going on outside. I did what he said, but that didn’t exactly go according to plan …
So I don’t know what happened inside but they told me later when they came out. They got as far as the level Hog was on, but at that point some kind of Artificial Intelligence started cruising around cyberspace looking for the source of the Husk’s release, and it saw Ghost. He tried to fight it first but it was way too powerful and really dangerous so he had to run, and it sent guards to his physical location to get us. Pops ambushed the guards and killed them both with just his bare hands (and his cyberleg – Coyote tells me he stomped one to death with it, mostly on his groin). To add to the confusion Ghost managed to release all the locks on patient doors while he was running from the AI, and so patients started coming out on all the levels. At this point the AI started activating the hospital’s full defenses, and these big blast shields started lowering over the front doors. I was worried I’d be left out the front with no way in, and that the way out would be blocked, so I drove our van straight into the glass doors. It smashed them but didn’t go through, and I got out and inside the building just in time for the blast barriers to cut our van in half and seal the hospital shut.
This was when I turned around, iron bar in hand, and saw the first cyber-psychiatrist come running out from the hospital, hoping to leave by the main door, a few half-sedated patients shambling after him.
What could I do? I beat him to death and made sure I did it thoroughly, but there was another one coming through when I got done, and I had to corner him at the reception desk. He was throwing phones at me and screaming and crying, but I got him a nice crunching blow on one knee when he turned to run and he fell over and slipped again trying to get up over one of the desk chairs. So I dragged him back by one leg and explained to him what all the problems with his profession were while I smashed all his limbs. I had to finish up a bit quick though because then this doctor and this nurse came backing into the room, with this little gaggle of really angry-looking patients coming after them. The nurse was a big, nasty-looking man holding a hyperdermic needle of some kind, and I didn’t want that in me so I slipped around behind them under the cover of the reception desk and pushed the dude in the back, so he went forward into the patients. He looked real surprised when it happened, and he started yelling when they were grabbing him and kicking him. The doctor was even more surprised, because he turned to me and didn’t understand what I did and he said “Little missy, you aren’t a patient are you?!” And he had that condescending look in his eye that some older men get when they see me and they don’t think I’m anything more than long hair and a set of breasts and maybe something for them to put themselves in, and I hate that look so I jabbed my iron bar in his eyes and then I pushed him up against the glass and made some pretty patterns all over it. I was still grunting over my artwork when another group of nurses came in. They were all big men too, which got me thinking that they have very special requirements for the nurses in this place, and the patients don’t seem to like the nurses at all and these nurses were talking about some patients they were especially scared of but when they saw me one of them said “Uh, no way man” and they all ran out of the other door. I always thought nurses were more sensible than doctors! I didn’t bother chasing them because another doctor came in – you can tell the doctors because they have longer coats and this supercilious manner that gets your anger up before you have even cleaned your iron bar off from the last one – and he saw me and started trying to run back down the way he came but I went through those doors like a demon and I caught him just before the men’s bathroom with a sliding trip because I’m a lot faster than some unaugmented, paunchy middle-aged sadist, and I was on his back before he hit the ground. He tried crawling but the floor was really slippery and I don’t weigh that much but it’s hard to crawl when you’ve got a piece of iron smashed into your spine and then I kicked him a bit and then the door opened and this really ragged-looking group of patients came in so I left him to them and moved back to the main reception area, because Pops was calling me to catch up with them.
They had found Hog but he was strapped into this huge machine and they didn’t know what to do so they had called Alt to investigate. While Alt was doing her megadata download processing thing another six guards came at them, but Ghost managed to lock down the closet they had gone to for weapons, but then this huge dude with cyberarms came into the room to rip off the panel, but Ghost used the software he’d been given by Alt a while back, hacked into the dude’s cyberarms and shut them down. Then they managed to get to the stun guns while he was getting all confused and his friends were backing away, and started stunning them. Then they got Hog out of the machine following instructions from Alt, but they had to leave fast so we all ran up to the roof of the hospital. There were helicopters coming from somewhere, with guards in with real guns probably, but Ghost managed to hack into their systems and crash them, which probably killed quite a few topside guards but really who cares when the joy of battle’s raging through you? Though Ghost seemed to because he set down the second helicopter without damaging it, which enabled the four heavily-armed guards inside to enter the hospital and come up to our level. We were panicking and telling Ghost again how he needs to learn to consult more when Coyote activated our get-out-of-hospital-free card: he smashed a medivac insurance card Alt had given us, which calls the medivac team tied to the card. Up on topside those teams arrive fast, and we would only have to wait maybe two minutes. Unfortunately those guards emerged after a minute, and we were running madly from cover to cover while we waited for the medivac. The medivac came real fast and when it arrived it laid down some really heavy suppressive fire with its machine guns, which I guess goes to show that topside is not as peaceful as it looks if the ambulances up here are just as vicious as the ones down below. Once it set down we threw Hog in, and we all piled in after it, but those guards didn’t let up easily and they let rip a final volley into the back of the ambulance before its doors closed. That volley hit Ghost square, and tore his legs up so bad he died on us right there.
Fortunately there’s no better place on New Horizon to die than a medivac vehicle. They got him back and kept him alive at the same time as they gunned down the last guards, and then they took us on this insane hectic ride out of topside, down the centre shaft, to this unnamed and dubious building. It took maybe 8 minutes of reckless flying and during that trip none of the medics in the car asked us any questions, they just worked real fast on Hog and Ghost. Nobody asked me any questions either, except Pops raised one eyebrow at all the blood, and Coyote flicked a lump of probably brains out of my hair with this real decent big brother-little sister gesture that made feel part of a real team. Then the back doors opened and this crew of grim medical professionals unloaded Ghost and Hog and we were led into this really bland waiting room for a couple of hours and then they came out and told us that Ghost would live but without legs. Since when does a hacker need legs? He’ll probably be happy to see the back of them. We discussed recovery options for a few minutes, then Pops observed that we were all beat and I really needed a shower, and we decided to come back and talk about it when we were all better.
So that, dear Diary, is how we smashed up a hospital on topside just so we could liberate a no-good drug dealing trucker from a bunch of sadistic doctors, and the first step on my road to rebalancing some of the things that have been done to me since Tunguska. I’m happy about what I did, and I’m reconsidering my opinion of close fighting, but it’s good to remember what the Falcon said about lackeys:
Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets
I didn’t waste any bullets on those cyber-psychiatrists, but I’m listening to the Falcon’s advice, because hopefully liberating this Hog dude is going to get me one step closer to some more worthy targets. But for now anything we learn depends on his medical team, and we have a big job to do for Pops’s contact Blacklist, to repay him for the topside visas. So I gotta rest, and do a train robbery, and dream of bloody restitution. Good things come to girls who wait!
—
Summary of events for those who can’t bear Drew’s breathless prose:
The team have to go topside to liberate a contact of their sometime-employer, Alt
They got visas from a dude called Blacklist, to whom they owe a job
To get access cards to the hospital holding Hog, Pops set a trap for a staff member called Bob Baylish
The trap used an escort called Lady Zodiac to lure Baylish out of a nightclub where Pops could pretend to be a cop arresting him for triple murder; to prove he was not the murderer Baylish handed over his ID card and fingerprints
They went topside using the visas, and used the ID card and fingerprints to move around the facility
Ghost set a distraction, but it was an insanely big one – he freed the Husk to go crazy in cyberspace, which set all the security systems and lawn sprinklers going wild
They found Hog and got him out, but had to beat about 8 guards to death in the process
While they were doing this, Drew killed a lot of cyber-psychiatrists
They all fled to the roof and called in a medivac team using an insurance card Alt gave them
While they were loading into the medivac team some heavily-armed guards fired on them and killed Ghost
It’s very hard to die when you’re shot to death inside a medivac car, so Ghost survived after some work
He’s going to need an anti-gravity wheelchair but whatever, it’s cool
Time to move on to Blacklist’s job, to pay for the visas!
SECURITY TRANSMISSION, ARASAKA DEBRIEF UNIT 4, NEW HORIZON. CASE 147801C, TITAN TRAIN WRECK: WITNESS STATEMENT. WITNESS “BOB”, RATING: EXPENDABLE.
Bob Millet, 3rd Arasaka Free Division. I was demobilized from the Indo Zone and taking the 11:31 AM Titan train from Calcutta, just a routine repatriation train. I was demobbing with my corps buddies Alec and Milwall, and we were booked for a berth in economy on deck 4, carriage 11. That’s not very comfortable but I tell you I’ll sit on a bed of nails for 24 hours if it’ll get me out of the Indo Zone a day sooner, I’ve seen enough buddies die to know when a 12 hour journey on a 10 deck monster train is worth my while! I just didn’t expect to see my mates die on the train journey home, just an hour out of New Horizon.
And not like that.
So we were meant to be in the economy passenger class, sitting there getting pissed with each other and bumping elbows and reading magazines and trying to sleep but instead at the last minute Arasaka command told us this was some kind of special military hardware delivery, so we needed to do guard duty in carriage 4, deck 1. That’s a huge cargo wagon, and the decks are kind of a formality, more like balconies around a central open space. In our carriage there were a couple of crates in the open space but most of the cargo was on decks 2 – 8, with more guards on deck 9 and nothing on deck 10. We just had to sit in these spacious dropship-style seats on level 1 with our weapons, and up on deck 9 they could move around a bit, there was a kind of lounge, like a real guard room.
We were 10 hours into the trip when we felt the train come to a halt. Nobody raised any alarm or anything, it was just some kind of routine stop as far as we knew. But then there was this insane crash and a huge chunk of the ceiling landed next to us. It was glowing red hot all round the edges and it was about a metre thick and it came out of nowhere. After it there was this rain of burnt cargo and body parts from the upper levels. Me and my mates, we unbuckled and jumped up out of our seats to see what was going on, but we had to stay under the balconies of higher levels because of this rain of cargo that had been cut in half. The techs tell me someone cut a big hole in the roof of the train with laser cutters, but the lasers cut a big hole in anyone who was in the way on deck 9 and all the cargo in decks 7 and 8. We didn’t hear anything happening, but the techs think some kind of mute mines were used so no one knew what was going on.
Anyway once the cargo stopped falling around us me and my mates ran out into the middle of the hold with our guns out. Everyone on level 9 was completely messed up and still trying to work out what was going on, but there were these three crazy people coming right down the middle from this massive hole in the ceiling. One was carrying a grenade launcher, with a FN-FAL assault rifle strapped to his back; there was another who also had a FN-FAL assault rifle but who was carrying this insane old-fashioned bolt action rifle that had to be electro-thermal modded, or my aunt has balls; and then there was this third dude who was carrying an honest-to-god kalashnikov and had this god-almighty pistol strapped to his belt. They were rappelling down the middle of the hold, and when we came out they had already shot down the only four guys on level 9 who were in any condition to move. We moved to take up positions under cover but the one with the bolt-action rifle was super fast, and he shot Milwall through the head before he could blink. He had his helmet on and everything but that modded rifle blew his whole head off like it was a melon. Nasty. Me and Alec got under cover quickly and started shooting, but then the dude with the grenade launcher let rip. His first grenade landed right on top of us, and it was some kind of incendiary. When the flames cleared me and Alec were on fire like all over. Grenade dude didn’t even give a toss, he’d lobbed a second one down into one of the doors from the side corridors in the train, blocking it off, which was real unfortunate for us because there were some really serious Arasaka crack marines coming through the side corridors on level 1. Those guys have power armour and serious weaponry but they were blocked off by the grenade, which messed up the door into the room.
Me and Alec didn’t care about that though, because we were covered in flaming shit. Alec was down and yelling like a maniac, screaming and crying and rolling around trying to get his fire out, but I managed to keep my cool, so I ripped off the jacket and the pants before they got too serious and ducked down under cover. Somehow my helmet was unaffected so there I was, hiding behind a crate in my underwear with only my helmet for protection, and my gun out of reach in a pool of sticky fire, while my mate from a thousand Indozone missions is rolling around between two crates and I can’t reach him because that dervish with the bolt action rifle is going to air out my brainpan if I so much as twitch from behind that crate.
Fortunately there were another five Arasaka elite in the other corridor, that our friendly grenadier from the sky hadn’t shut up all fiery-like, and in they came like the dutibound salarymen they are. But the kalashnikov guy let rip on them with the whole magazine of his rifle, and they had to go back into cover. One managed to dive for cover inside the room, but the rest headed back. The one diving inside was trying to throw a grenade but that bolt-rifle maniac hit him with a single shot and blew up the grenade right in his face, took off his head and most of his shoulders even through the power armour. Then grenadier guy dropped a fire grenade on them, and then they decided to let rip with their heavy weapons through the wall. Everyone on the other side of that wall, including me, had to watch as our cover got evaporated by their heavy fire, but fortunately I was hidden behind a crate of plantains and no bullet can get through them. Rifle dude and kalashnikov guy weren’t so lucky in their choice of cover so they had to do a runner, but that kalashnikov arsehole, as he was running he got out that pistol and put a single bullet right into my mate Alec, even though Alec was still trying to put out his flaming armour. It went in his spine and came out his chest like a lung fountain, and me and Alec aren’t going to be having any more beers now – and I guess his kids are gonna have to satisfy themselves with Arasaka compo cheques in place of a daddy. That bastard could have let us alone!
Anyway now there were more people rappelling in, and the first three threw in two more grenades that took out a few more of the Arasaka elite. The ones who were left were still burning from grenadier guy’s fire grenade, and they just kind of gave out and died and the whole area was pacified. That was when I really thought my number was up, because the bolt rifle guy was coming over to finish me off – I could see his badge, it said “DRUID” in bright red, you can check the feed from what’s left of my cybereye, and that’s when I thought maybe it was THE Druid, you know, from Tunguska, and she’s got a reputation for shooting wounded men – when all hell broke loose. These guys must have had a hacker, because this train has an automated cargo moving system and suddenly that system was going crazy, all these crates moving around and stuff. Next thing I know I hear someone yell “Target incoming!” at full volume, and this huge crate comes hurtling out of the darkness at the other end of the carriage. The Druid has to go dodge, and the crate smashes into the piece of ceiling that fell down from up there, bounces over it, and hits my plantain crate at high speed. The plantain crate bounces over me but the main cargo comes to rest right above me, kind of hanging off the edge of that metre-thick disc of fallen ceiling. And there I am underneath it, my friend Alec all smeared out just past my boots, and this huge crate teetering on the edge of that disc of metal, right above me. And inside there’s all kinds of noises happening, banging and sounds of movement, I don’t know what’s in the crate but it sounds like there’s some kind of monster truck rally going on in there.
Then I’m just thinking that at some point that crate’s gonna come down, so I’m gonna have to choose to lie here and let it squish my legs, or scramble out just to have the Druid shoot me in the head, when someone yells “EMP!” and I hear the thunk of EMP mines on the crate, and there’s a big silent whoop, and my cybereyes start going apeshit, all blues and greens and crazy lcd kaleidoscopes. The crate goes dead for a moment, and somewhere near me a couple of charging Arasaka elite fall to the ground, and off in the distance I hear the bolt rifle go off again and one of those Arasaka elite does a kind of splattering sound, and then next I hear someone yell “Magnets!” and then the crate goes whooshing off into space, someone yells “Evac!” and I guess everyone must have left then because I’m still alive.
You can watch the feed if you don’t believe me. So there were 10 Arasaka elite and me and my mates down on level 1, and everyone except me died, and I don’t know how many people up on level 9, and these train robbers got away with just one crate that must be real special. I guess it must have had some kind of cybertech in it, because why else would anyone want to use EMP on it before they started lifting it out? And what else would be moving inside? That’s kind of interesting isn’t it? … Wait, what are you doing? It’s just speculation, you don’t have to … hey, man, I won’t tell anyone anything if you don’t …
Background for this mini-campaign is set out here. In this first session, our heroes leave the Gyre for the first time in their lives, to head to the arctic. They are given a few basic conditions and information about their mission:
They will be accompanied by 8 marines, led by a Captain Azel, to use as ruthlessly as they wish
They have food for 18 months, or two summers, during which they can stay in the arctic searching for Ziggurat 2
There is no time to equip the Vladimir Putin as they like, so Ryan cannot take his sea lion Arashi with him, but will be given a special drone to use in Arashi’s place
They are to take the contents of the Ziggurat no matter who or what they find there
Although Mithrades is a man of his word, do not trust him: his future depends on admission to the Gyre along with his crew, and he may opt to use desperate measures to achieve this goal
Once beyond the Gyre they will be able to contact the Gyre once per day for one hour by connecting with a certain satellite
Once in the arctic they would only be able to access a single satellite to report back to the Gyre once a month, for one day
I have made a slight break from my usual style of adventure report: if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, scroll to the end for a summary of events.
Vladimir Putin runs into trouble
The secret rig
Their journey out of the Gyre was uneventful, with the Vladimir Putin heading northwest as fast as possible. They soon passed through the area of rough and unruly seas that marked the ocean-current boundary of the northern edge of the Gyre, and sailed into seas becalmed by the passing of the recent world storm. For a week they sailed across a vast, empty blue plain, unperturbed by waves larger than a finger’s height and making excellent progress in a warm, still and sunlit world. After a week, however, Mithrades announced that they were making a small detour to stop at an oil rig community that he regularly traded with: his plan was to do a routine stop for two days, during which time he would trade energy from the Vladimir Putin‘s nuclear plant for food and sex. He and his community would organize a two day party during which the oil rig’s residents would come on deck and have a long orgy, to make up for lost opportunities at the Gyre. The PCs were surprised by this unannounced detour but not by the nature of the trade – it was normal, and indeed essential, for isolated communities to do this kind of orgiastic trade in order to ensure biodiversity, since many of the residents of the community were too closely related to be able to interbreed.
At least some of the party were gladdened by the thought of a two day orgy, and although they initially queried this unexpected detour, they soon acquiesced and began preparing.
The oil rig was a poor and seedy affair, a small structure that must have been floating on the ocean for 100 years and that was obviously on its last legs. Shabby and rusting, the pillars holding it above the sea were heavily patched and repaired, and the decks looked tattered and world-weary. Here on the open sea beyond the Gyre they guessed it must be floating on perhaps 6kms of water, and the action of waves and salt water had not treated it kindly. There was no sign of any large boats, and although the pontoon and supporting pillars were laced about with flotsam, junk and seaweeds sufficient to support a thriving ecosystem, there was no sign of any industry beyond fishing. As they approached in the light of the late afternoon they saw scrawny, tiny children scrambling around these artificial reefs, catching fish with their bare hands and eating them raw and living at the water’s edge. Beyond the sussurration of the ocean’s waves they could hear the raucous crying of thousands of sea birds, that roosted on the old refinery tower.
They weren’t allowed to dock, but instead a kind of rope bridge was thrown over, a power cable drawn across, and preparations made for the party. As the sun sank the sea around the rig lit up with phosphorescent lights from tiny sea creatures, and by the time the party started the sea around the rig was thick with the lights, like a constellation of stars lapping against their boat. The rig’s residents had also perfected some method for capturing these phosphorescent lights, and when the men and women of the party came on board their hair was sparkling with the same lights. The party started, and soon some of the PCs and most of Azel’s men were enjoying the lissom, shy and sparkling delights the oil rig community had prepared for them.
Not all of the party, however. Ryan was in the water on his drone, cruising around the rig looking for trouble, which he soon found: he was drawn to one pillar by the sound of someone falling into the water, in time to see the body of a guard from the decks above floating face down in the water. Nearby, someone was climbing into an ancient wooden row boat and quietly pushing off from the pillar. Ryan followed them at a distance, as they headed to the stern of the Vladimir Putin. Diving underwater, he texted his colleagues the information.
Meanwhile, up above, Quark and Dean had noticed Mithrades was not on deck at the party despite his professed eagerness to enjoy a local girl. Their suspicions aroused, they headed to the stern, and found him in an observatory overlooking the ocean at the very rear of the ship. One window was open, and he had thrown a rope out of the window. When challenged, he told them that his lover from the oil rig was making her escape, and would be attempting to sneak onto his ship. He wasn’t going to settle at the Gyre without her. They didn’t have time to challenge his recklessness, however, because at this point guards on the rig saw the rowing boat silhouetted against the phosphorescence around the rig, and opened fire on it. Battle was joined!
Up on the stern Leviathan was looking at the rowboat below when the firing started. Captain Azel came running up from the party, buttoning up his hose and demanding, “those on deck! Kill or capture?” Leviathan, with little time to think and no one to consult with, replied “Kill!” and Azel and his men set off to slaughter the young men and women they had just been loving. Leviathan dashed off to get his gun, as too did Quark and Dean from below. Meanwhile Mithrades set the ship into motion, hoping to get the engines running for a quick escape as soon as his lover was on board, safe in the knowledge that Ryan was helping her.
Ryan received a text from Quark: “rope at the stern, save the fugitive”. He realized that the person in the boat was dead if the shooting continued, so emerged from the water below the boat and pulled it over so that the woman in the boat fell into the water. He yelled, “take a breath” and then dragged her under, but unfortunately she didn’t take a breath in time. She hung below the surface in the inky black water, scrabbling at his face to resurface for air as bullets hit the water all around them, driving corkscrews of phosphorescent past his face and body. After a few seconds he was able to drag the drowning woman a little away from the boat and the shooting and allow her to surface for air; once she had calmed and taken a breath he dragged her under again and set off, aiming to run under the keel and emerge on the far side of the Vladimir Putin, safe from shooting.
As all this chaos erupted, the inevitable happened: the nearest set of battleship guns stirred to life, and began rotating to face the stern of the Vladimir Putin, its barrels lowering from their resting position aimed high. Leviathan tried in desperation to throw a grenade into one of the upward-pointing barrels as they rotated, but his grenade fell short and landed in the water, exploding in a small tower of phosphorescent water. The ship was still only barely moving, and would surely be an unmissable target for those formidable guns, unless someone could disable them. Quark attached a bomb to one of his drones and sent it off, hovering fast over the rig platform, and fortunately many of the riflemen who should have seen it were running away from the edge to repel boarders, having mistaken Ryan’s movements for a submarine raider[1]. The drone reached the gun turret unmolested and through its camera Quark saw a sight that truly warmed the cockles of his tiny heart. As might be expected on a poor and struggling oil rig in the middle of the ocean, the entire rear half of the turret had been long since cannibalized for use in patching the pontoons and pillars of the rig, so it was open to the elements and to his bomb. A stack of three shells sat at one side of the turret, a single man loading a shell into the third barrel of the battery, and a second man operating the mechanism to turn the turret. Quark let loose his bomb, and it landed perfectly, killing the operator and setting off the shells in a chain reaction of massive explosions. Unfortunately the shell that was partially set in the barrel also exploded, killing its handler and sending the warhead out of the barrel; it soared over the Vladimir Putin and landed harmlessly a hundred metres to starboard.
Now they were free to make their getaway, too far away in the dark to be shot at by mere rifles and unmolested by the gun turret. There was no one left to operate the second turret, because that man had been at the party, and now lay dead on the blood-slicked deck of the Vladimir Putin, party lights flickering silently above him. They were safe. Ryan swam up to the stern of the ship and he and the lover climbed aboard, to be greeted by an ecstatic Mithrades. They had made it.
They sailed away into darkness, and the last thing they saw from the rig was the corner where the gun emplacement had been, sliding into the sea. They sent information on the rig’s coordinates and armaments back to the Gyre, and a week later received a video report from Dilver; it showed three combat tugs raiding the rig, its residents lined up and hurled overboard after a brutal 10 minute battle, before the tugs began to drag the rig back to the Gyre. They had, once again, worked to enlarge the Gyre.
Who hides in here?
The arctic: life in the ice
Having destroyed that tiny community and run away with the wife of its leader, our heroes turned their satisfied gaze to the far north. For the next few weeks they steamed rapidly northwest, heading for the point where the second ziggurat was believed likely to have entered the zone of sea ice. This meant crossing much of what was once the Eurasian landmass, with 6km of water beneath them, and fortunately not over the deeper, wilder and more terrifying expanse of what was once the Atlantic ocean. They reached the first icebergs sooner than they had thought, and soon found themselves moving slowly through a ghostly world of great white sculptures that stretched as far to the north as they could see. In a cooler world, unconstrained by land masses, the sea ice had extended from its traditional arctic home to encompass much of the arctic circle, and they soon could see the distant line of white that marked the only natural solid landmass they had seen in their lives. Unused to the sight of anything above the surface of the ocean that was not made by human hand, they were shocked and amazed by the beauty of the ice sculptures they passed.
They slowed the ship, and began looking for signs of life. The possibility that people might live here in these ice islands had not occurred to them, but one morning soon after they arrived, while he was practising his arctic swimming techniques, Ryan stumbled on a block of ice that held fragments of human rubbish. He took it back to the ship, and after some discussion the characters agreed to take their linguist and a single marine, and head in the direction of the current that had borne this rubbish to them, moving carefully in the submarine. They had to move carefully because the submarine was not ice-strengthened, but after an hour of careful, slow and painstaking movement they found an amazing sight: a small warship, perhaps 40m long but heavily armed, moored to an iceberg that had been turned into a homestead, its upper area carved out into a tiny apartment. People were living up here!
Initially they considered attacking, but Quark ran some careful investigations with one of his airborne drone, and soon saw that they were outgunned. Not only did the little patrol boat have a more powerful weapon than their submarine, there was a machine gun nest on top of the iceberg and the patrol boat appeared to have two torpedo tubes, though they might not work. Far better to negotiate. With this in mind they sent Ryan ahead underwater, to attach an explosive to the ship as a bargaining tool. They then gathered on the deck of the submarine and sailed it from its hiding place towards the iceberg.
As expected, the man in the machine gun nest woke up quickly, and both his machine gun and the deck gun of the ship turned to point at them. Holding their arms up in the universal gesture of non-aggression, they brought the submarine as close to the iceberg as they dared, and watched as a man emerged from the iceberg, walking down stairs carved in its sloped side and picking his way carefully across to the edge facing them. He was small, in his fifties, and gruff. The linguist told them he spoke English, and translated for them. They soon found themselves invited inside the iceberg.
And here is where the adventure ended, with our characters drinking instant coffee around a wooden table with this gruff middle-aged trader. He told them he and his fellows were just one of a large number of settlements on the ice, people who wintered deeper in the ice where it was stable, and came out in summer to fish, hunt and trade. Ryan had noticed in his swimming expeditions that the water was thick with plankton and hard to see through, and the trader confirmed that fish and mammal life up here was rich, so in summer they could easily lay in enough food for the winter. But he hinted at more, larger communities in the ice. He himself traded diesel – diesel! – for food and furs, and was about to visit a group he called Settlement 11 to trade diesel for a battery. Would the characters like to come with him to meet the representatives of this community?
Stunned, the PCs could only say yes. They had found civilization where they had been told there could be no life. What had happened to the Ziggurat, and had they come here to loot an empty building, only to confront a community as powerful as the Gyre? What were they to do…?
Summary of events:
The characters set off in the Vladimir Putin
Ryan received a private message from Captain Dilver after they left the Gyre, which made him very angry
A week or so after leaving the Gyre, Mithrades announced they were making an unscheduled stop at an oil rig community on the open seas
When they docked at the rig, they noticed it had two battleship gun turrets on its decks, but was otherwise very poor: they were swapping energy from the Vladimir Putin‘s powerplant for food and a two day long party with men and women from the rig
As the party started they noticed Mithrades was not joining. They found out that someone was trying to sneak aboard under cover of darkness, with Mithrades’ consent
Of course this someone was discovered, and battle ensued. They were nearly sunk by the battleship guns, and all the oil rig citizens on the deck of the Vladimir Putin were killed by Azel and his men (even though some PCs and Azel had just been having sex with these people!), but they managed to escape after Quark blew up one of the battleship guns with a drone-mounted bomb.
The fugitive turned out to be Mithrades’ secret lover, who was escaping from the tyrannical leader of the rig
They sent information about the rig back to the Gyre, and week later the Gyre raided it and killed everyone on board, then towed it back to the Gyre
They reached the arctic, and soon found evidence of human habitation (floating rubbish)
Following this evidence, they found a small warship moored against a floating iceberg, which had been carved into a home
They approached this iceberg and actually negotiated with the residents (something of a first for our heroes), and learnt that there was a large network of communities living on the sea ice, trading with each other
The man they met on the iceberg, Tom, agreed to introduce them to other communities – their search of the arctic had begun!
—
fn1: I rolled three 1s on my awareness checks for the guards to see the drone, out of eight; so four ran away and only two saw the drone, but they missed when they fired
One of the PCs in my Flood campaign, Quark, has gained a level (even though they don’t exist in Cyberpunk rules), so he has access to a new set of abilities – the ability to make and deploy poison. He has two types of poison: poison darts and gas canisters, which he can deploy from his drone or throw. This post describes some Cyberpunk house rules for poisons.
Quark takes the shot
Poison darts Quark can deliver two types of debilitating poison through poison darts. He needs to make an attack roll using athletics against a target number of 15 or the armour value of his target, whichever is higher (for targets with multiple armour values use the torso value unless Quark declares a called shot). If he hits this target number he does no damage but the poison is delivered, with either of the following effects. Debilitating pain: The target suffers from debilitating pain and weakness, which makes existing injuries worse. As soon as the target is injured in any way, he or she suffers the full effects of the next highest level of injury. This means that the affected person needs to make death checks at the critically wounded level rather than at Mortal 1, and will start suffering additional penalties as soon as they suffer any wound of any kind. The effects last for the remainder of the battle, and for several hours afterwards. Paralysis: The target does not suffer any pain or distress, but is at risk of paralysis. Every time the target acts he or she needs to make a successful BODY check (with current penalties) in order to act; otherwise he or she is forced to remain still. The effect lasts 1d6 rounds. The target is able to perform basic movements and other similar actions (e.g. drinking an antidote) but nothing more severe, so only walking movement and no combat actions, controlling vehicles, etc. Targets still think clearly and are allowed to drag themselves into cover. They can attempt to evade attacks but this counts as an action, requiring a BODY check. LUCK can be used to reroll BODY checks forced due to this poison. Poison gas Poison gas is delivered by a canister that Quark can throw or drop from his drone. The canister affects an area of 5m radius, but people can attempt to get out of the area before inhaling the gas if Quark’s timing is off, or if he throws/drops the canister wide and it needs to bounce and spray. To reflect this, delivering the canister requires Quark to roll an athletics attack against the Dodge/Evade skill of everyone in the area of effect. Anyone who fails this check takes the full effect of the gas for 1 round per point of failure. Note that getting out of the area of effect uses up one of the target’s next actions. Note also that they need to make a Combat Sense check against Quark’s same athletics roll in order to be able to choose the direction of escape. If they fail this check, they are required to leave by the quickest, most direct method forward from where they are (or sideways if forward is blocked by someone else faster than them). This means that they may emerge from the gas into an area with no cover, and will need to use the second action in their round to take cover. This may also mean that people who can act before them (but after Quark) will have an opportunity to change actions and take shots at these people. The effects of the gas are described below. CS Gas: The target must immediately make a BODY check and suffer 1 point of (stun) damage per point of failure. Regardless of the result of this check, they suffer a -2 penalty on all actions for one round per point of failure of the original attack roll.
Quark rolls a 1 (again)
Crafting poisons Quark can also use his Tech attribute and Chemistry skills to craft these poisons. For the poison darts he needs access to certain reagents, and a laboratory. Making a single dose takes 3-6 hours and requires a target number of 15. A fumble means he poisons himself. For the poison gas he needs access to certain reagents, a laboratory and certain mechanical materials to make the canister. A single canister takes about 12 hours to make and requires a target number of 20. Again, a fumble means he poisons himself. If he rolls below 20 and above 15 he can choose to make a successful canister with a bad action, which has effectively an accuracy penalty = (20-roll). Any failed check means that the reagents are destroyed. The canister materials are only destroyed on a fumble. The necessary reagents are listed below. Debilitating pain: A certain type of deep water shark, which is caught in most areas of the Gyre and preserved for food. By draining the blood, fermenting it and mixing it with certain chemical reagents the poison can be stabilized. Paralysis: Any stinging jellyfish, which needs to be carefully milked for its poison, which is then mixed with certain chemical reagents and formed into a kind of unguent using whale oil. CS Gas: A large quantity of chilli powder or, alternatively, a lot of fresh chillies. Some chemical ingredients, a flask and a certain type of stopper which requires precision crafting that Quark cannot do.
GM Note: I may be running a short mini-campaign in the world of the Flood, probably only three sessions long, which I have tentatively named Vladimir Putin’s Last Voyage. It’s a direct follow-on from the last adventure (described here, here and here in order). This post is background material I am sharing with my players, to make it easier to set the scene for the mini-campaign.
After Captain Dilver found and captured the Ziggurat he named Mount Arashi there was a frenzy of investigation in the labs and computers of the Ziggurat. The sole surviving member of the pirate crew, the scientist who had discovered the trick of drinking human blood to develop immunity to jellyfish, was questioned extensively before his eventual painful demise. These investigations revealed a startling fact: Mount Arashi was one of a pair of Ziggurats, the larger of which might still exist …
The two ziggurats, which Dilver called Mount Arashi and Ziggurat 2, were conceived in the last years of the Flood, when the industry of whole nations had been committed to building floating structures that could survive the Flood. A whole host were launched by many nations, and these two ziggurats were just two of many. They were conceived as a pair, with Mount Arashi established as the living quarters and Ziggurat 2, the larger of the two, used for storage, farming and factories. Small boats ferried people between them, an ill-conceived idea with no respect for the vagaries of ocean life. But this was the first and last time anyone had to build such things, so who can blame them for their mistakes? The two ziggurats were what they were, and once they had been floated on the growing ocean no one could do anything about it.
At first they drifted together on a slow eastward current, heading towards the oceans south of what would one day become the Gyre, but they were soon to be separated by fate. After some years of slow drifting, moving at a crawl across the oceans, they ran into one of the first world storms. With no means of propulsion and no experience of the new world, these two ziggurats floated helplessly, unprepared for what was coming. Fortunately for both of them, however, they were large enough and well-enough built that they survived the storm. Most of the other structures thrown out on the ocean with them at that time – floating oil rigs, packed rafts of ocean liners, smaller islands of wood – were consumed whole, but Mount Arashi and Ziggurat 2 made it through with their population alive, though not unscathed.
Unfortunately, they were cast apart by the storm. Mount Arashi spun through the storm vortex and fell into the current that would eventually drag it into the Gyre, but Ziggurat 2, being larger and heavier, was not thrown out of the storm, instead drifting with it until it dissipated. When the storm raged itself out, the two ziggurats were separated by several hundred kilometres of ocean, and Ziggurat 2 was trapped in a northerly current.
This is where Mount Arashi’s tale of cannibalism and piracy began. For many years the ziggurat drifted untroubled, though the loss of its supply-and-factory-oriented sister ship necessitated a change in way of life, and the community had to learn to adapt fully to the post-flood world. At first they managed, though they had their challenges; but then, after a few generations, they ran into the miasma. Stranded in a vast soup of jellyfish, they soon began to run low on food. A small gang of the most vicious members launched a mutiny, and with their thuggish fellowers they imprisoned the community and began slowly eating them, in a desperate bid to preserve their food. One of their number, the scientist, studied ways to control the jellyfish and eventually found a way to kill them or control them with electrical power. Some of the mutineers then suggested freeing the remaining prisoners, killing the jellyfish and returning to past life, and there was another mutiny in which the scientist’s gang prevailed. They chose to keep the jellyfish close, and use them for piracy and locomotion. The remaining captives were handed over to the scientist for experimentation, and over the next 10 years they prowled the seas near the Gyre, threatening small communities and extorting food and women. Then they drifted into the Gyre, and their evil actions became a matter of history.
Things went very differently for Ziggurat 2. They drifted slowly north, too far away from their sister ziggurat to continue trading and swapping resources because the only ships that remained functioning after the world storm were those that were small enough to be dragged inside the ziggurats for protection. As they drifted they remained in contact with Mount Arashi by satellite and carrier pigeon, but this contact too slowly dwindled. Nonetheless, it was apparent that Ziggurat 2 was also doing well, partly because Ziggurat 2 had been the one initially stocked with all the communities’ supplies and partly because they had drifted into rich fishing grounds and temperate weather. But they continued drifting north, and soon things became harsher. As they entered the far north, the few communiques reaching Mount Arashi spoke of hard times, food rationing, and strict and authoritarian rulership. Then communication ceased, but everyone assumed the same thing: that Ziggurat 2 had drifted helplessly into the arctic, become trapped fast in sea ice, and was lost to the world. Perhaps its residents had lived on their stores of food, but eventually – within a few years probably – these must have run out in such a harsh environment, and then they would have fallen to eating each other. By now the ziggurat would be an empty shell, drifting at the whim of the seasonal ice, undefended.
Captain Dilver, of course, settled on that word: undefended. He had uncovered the cargo manifest of Ziggurat 2 when it was launched:
100,000 tons of steel
10,000 tons of copper, nickel, tin and other valuable metals
30,000 tons of soil
10,000 tons of wood
1,000 tons of fissile uranium
10,000 tons of rubber
One nuclear plant, whose waste could be used as fuel by the Ark’s reactor
Three water purification systems
A small factory and workyard
A seedbank with 1000 species of plant
A small flock of goats, and preserved semen and ovaries for maintenance of the flock
A large plastic extrusion plant
All he needed was a freighter capable of carrying a couple of hundred thousands tons of cargo, and a small crew of enterprising adventurers to accompany him. How fortunate, then, that our little group of PCs should return to his attention just as Captain Mithrades came into port on the nuclear-powered ice freighter the Vladimir Putin, telling a story of desperation and willing to offer almost anything in exchange for the right to settle in the Gyre …
A lesser figure than Captain Dilver might have offered Mithrades, captain of a ship with a storied history of adventure, shelter out of mere magnanimity, but Dilver was no lesser man. He paid attention to sailors’ stories filtering back from the bars where Mithrades crew were on shore leave, and he soon learnt the truth: a tragic accident in the nuclear engineering section of the Vladimir Putin had exposed Mithrades’ long-term engineer and both of his apprentices to lethal doses of radiation. The engineer was dead of cancer one year now, and for his apprentices it was just a matter of time. Very few communities of the Flood had nuclear engineers, and none were willing to release such valuable people to the high seas, so Mithrades was now looking for somewhere to settle. He had tried the Himalayan Archipelago but their conditions were harsh; instead he approached the Gyre, believing them more compassionate. Unfortunately he docked at the Hulks and met Dilver before he could stumble on a person of compassion. And so the deal was soon struck: a trip north, and then he could settle.
Ziggurat 2 was abandoned and held fast in ice, but the summer was approaching, when the ice would melt. Dilver’s eyes turned north to that vast treasure floating in the arctic ocean, and then to the heroes who had captured Mount Arashi. They had captured one temple … now they would loot another, or die trying.
After the Flood the oceans’ depth doubled. Where before humanity had understood some tiny proportion of that zone at the top they called pelagic, but now it had grown so vast, encompassing the world in a shroud of sun-dappled blue mystery that no one could ever hope to understand, let alone conquer. As the scientists of the old world watched this fickle, fluid world rise up to conquer their own they supposed that its surface would be an angry maelstrom, believing that only the land had tamed the sea where it stood in the path of currents and broke up the ocean’s mercurial tempers. But this was not to be. With the land finally vanquished and submerged the ocean became a tranquil and placid conqueror, its great depths too solid and stable to sustain the tempests of old. Where once the land had broken up currents, and continents had impinged on the ocean’s majesty, there was nowhere for heat and cold to go. Large gradients of temperature formed between the shallows and the deeps, unmolested by circumnavigating currents. From these gradients grew winds and storms, as if the ocean flung its anger at the irritations of land and people. But now, with the ocean free to move where it willed, heat dissipated from the tropics in every direction, unconcerned by the petty barriers of continents and undersea mountain ranges. Its reign uncontested by the earth, the sea grew complacent. With this change in fluid dynamics the nature of the earth’s storms changed. Storms still rose up, and winds could travel for thousands of kms across the ocean unstopped, driving waves before them; but these winds were not usually very strong, and for much of the earth’s turn the sea was still and quiet. Cyclones still formed in the tropics, and when they did they could travel long distances across huge stretches of warm ocean; but the well-mixed waters of the world ocean ensure that heat cannot gather on the surface, sinking instead to the frozen darkness of the abyss. As a result these cyclones, though long-lasting, tended to be weak, and they never crossed the current barrier of the gyre, where the waters mixed too much to allow heat to gather. But sometimes … Sometimes, in summer, the ocean would still. Perhaps a circumnavigating current would deviate from its usual path, or break for a time. Perhaps the deep churn of water would change under some gravitational, tectonic or tidal influence, and for a short time the surface would be becalmed. Not becalmed so as human communities could notice, but becalmed in such a way that the heat gathered under the tropical sun, over a continent-sized expanse of water. Such confluences of currents are rare, and this becalming might only occur once in a generation. But when the pulse beneath the sea stops like this, a pulse stirs on the surface. The storms gather on this great sheet of hot water, and a storm forms whose power was unheralded before the Flood: a world storm. World storms grow beyond anything humans have ever experienced, covering areas much larger than even the strongest cyclone and moving slowly over the ocean. Whichever direction they head, the vast size of the heated ocean will sustain their power, and they can last for weeks before they finally exhaust their generating power. As they travel, smaller cyclones – mere category 3-5 babies – break off from their flanks, spinning away in random directions to cause havoc of their own, or reforming into secondary monster cyclones in the wake of the main one. The world storm has a power well beyond the traditional system of categorizing cyclones, and usually it invokes its own unique fluid dynamic properties that make a taxonomy of such storms impossible. While such storms rage the weather across much of the hemisphere will change, as they distort the whole atmosphere. In their wake will come an unusual calm, as the ocean temperature equalizes across the range of the storm: winds stop, the sea calms, and the world heaves a sigh of relief. Nothing human can stand in the way of a world storm. Raft communities will be shattered and their inhabitants lost to the tempest. Larger structures too large to capsize will be simply broken apart, smashed by waves no human has ever seen or simply consumed whole if they are close enough to the centre of the whirlwind. Around the edges of the world storm, sometimes thousands of kms from its middle, powerful waterspouts and smaller storms will form, or lightning storms that will destroy anything floating. Communities in the path of the storm, even hundreds of kms away, cannot escape, because the winds being draw towards the world storm will prevent any sailing vessel from escaping. Only the largest, most seaworthy vessels with their own power can hope to leave the storm, and indeed this is the only way a community can survive: pack as many people as possible onto a large, powered vessel while the storm is still spinning up, and flee before it can open its maw and suck in everything living on the surface of the ocean. When a world storm forms, communities in its path will face horrible choices, because they are unlikely to possess enough vessels to liberate everyone. The privileged or the most violent few will rise up and grab what they can, fleeing with the colony’s most precious effects (and maybe their loved ones) to take their chances on the open ocean, knowing that everyone they leave behind them is doomed. Such are the dilemmas of an ocean-going life… World storms have never touched the gyre, though one or two have passed near it. They usually veer northward before they reach it, but if they do come too close they will usually lose their strength as they approach the broken and mixed zone of water around the gyre. History records that one particularly strong world storm managed to partially cross the gyre and spawned a minor cyclone inside, but fortunately the Hulks was at the opposite side of the Gyre at that time, and the Arc weathered the cyclone’s passing without loss of life. Outside the gyre, however, there are few people alive who can say they have weathered such a storm. Rumours abound of structures large enough to weather even this monstrosity, but no one has ever found evidence of such a community… until Captain Dilver of the Gyre discovered and captured the Ziggurat he named Mount Arashi. — Picture credit: I took this picture from the homepage of a fluid dynamics researcher called Gary Davies. He has a blog on fluid dynamics – cool! Check it out! A note on the science of the Flood: I’d originally assumed, like Stephen Baxter’s books, that the world after the Flood would be warmer and more tropical, with all that extra moisture floating around (water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas). But the extra vast amounts of water should act as a huge heat sink, and I think that this means that the world would actually be meterologically very stable. In the book Baxter talks of a permanent storm like the Eye of Jupiter, but I think that wouldn’t happen because the uninterrupted undersea currents plus huge heat sink effect would prevent the storm conditions required, except in occasional instances when the currents deviate.
Having scouted the immediate vicinity of their landing point, our heroes needed to prepare to storm the ziggurat, which would mean taking on guards in two distant towers, and whatever soldiers were huddled in the main part of the compound.
The safest approach appeared to be splitting the party, and this is what they decided to do. Dean sneaked into the powerplant, while Ryan slipped away to the opposite end of the ziggurat to approach its guard tower, and Thorne ran around the base of the ziggurat for no apparent purpose except the joy of the miasmic air.
Dean’s stealthy incursion was successful; he was able to sneak into the base of the powerplant, climb some stairs to a high room that was clearly the control room, and confirm that it was a nuclear plant. From there he found a gantry that led joined the control room to one of the two watchtowers. He slipped into the watchtower when the two occupants weren’t looking and crept through a doorway that led inside the ramparts of the ziggurat. Here a narrow corridor led right through the ramparts to an observatory that overlooked the outer slope of the ziggurat, and the grim cloud of the miasma. On the left side of this narrow corridor was a door, through which Dean could hear a group of people arguing about a plan…
Voice 1: I say we use the negotiating tactic. There are too many to fight. We can send our last captive back with a message, then meet them and tell them to give us what we want. They’ll do it, they always do.
Voice 2: This community is big though, Marionetta, too big … they likely have warships, they might be able to hit us harder than we can handle if they know we’re here.
Voice 1: Not if they can’t see us, they can’t do –
Voice 3 [interrupting]: What if they have radar or satellite? They might work it out. A couple of lucky shells from a big warship and we lose the plant. Plus we only have the one captive, we’re running out and we need to drain that one or we’re going to be naked.
Voice 2: I agree. We roll the swarm over them and hit them quietly while they’re fighting it. They have a big ecosystem, they’ll throw everyone and everything at defending it. While they’re trying to protect themselves we slip in, grab everything we can and get out. They won’t even guess where we came from, and we’ll be safe.
Voice 1: But they’re big, we can get them to give over more than we can take … more food, more women, more than we need … it’s a big chance …
Voice 4: Okay folks, I got some draining to do, I’m out. We can figure this out over dinner. Keep tight …
[Various voices indicating assent and farewell]
Dean, realizing he might be caught at the door, slipped away into the observatory. No one emerged from the door, but he decided discretion was the better part of valour and ducked out of one of the observatory windows, creeping around the outside of the ziggurat to return to his colleagues.
Ryan had not been so successful, however. He drew close enough to the watchtower to see that it held two guards, but as he was assessing their position one saw him and opened fire with a sniper rifle; the other began ringing a bell. Ryan was forced to slip away fast into the mist, keeping low to avoid bullets that would carve him open through his weak sharkskin armour, and returned hastily to where Crimson waited. Realizing that the alarm had been raised, they peered over the ramparts and saw a gang of 6 men running out of the aircraft sections towards the watchtower where Ryan had been seen. It was time to act …
As this scouting had been happening, Thorne had run halfway around the base of the ziggurat, youthful exuberance carrying him forward faster than commonsense could catch up. He passed a trio of boat ramps, with three boats hitched up high on the ramps and connected by winches to the top of the rampart. Passing through this he ran on until he came to another boat ramp, upon which a huge dead jellyfish was beached. Three men stood on the far side of the jellyfish, near a cart of some kind that was full of jellyfish parts and waiting to be winched up the ramp. Thorne seized the moment of surprise, sneaking up behind them and grabbing a long, thick jellyfish stinger from inside the cart. Appearing around the edge of the cart, he whipped this at the nearest man, whose back was turned. It slapped all across the man’s back and over his shoulder, but he simply flicked it off irritably, and turned around to see where it had come from. Somehow these men were immune to jellyfish! Instead of falling paralyzed and screaming to the ground Thorne’s target charged forward to attack. One grabbed a boathook while the other two charged in with knives, but they were no match for Thorne’s savagery, and soon he had beaten all three to death. From there he crept up the boat ramp toward the ramparts. Here he found a small building that contained a biodiesel fermenter of some kind – clearly these people had found a way to convert dead and rotting jellyfish into biodiesel. Thorne was investigating when he heard the bell ringing, and wandered off to see what the fuss was about. However, he emerged from the mist at the wrong point, and the men in the watchtower opened fire on him. The 6 guards that Crimson and Ryan had seen charging up the ramparts now turned and chased after Thorne, who decided now might be a good time to return to his colleagues. He turned and fled back the way he had come.
The watchtower battle
Ryan, Leviathan and Crimson waited for Dean to return to them and then all four slipped down the ramparts and into the powerplant. They passed through the control room with the intention of reentering the watchtower unobserved, but as Crimson opened the door to the gantry someone above fired at him – they had been seen by the guards in the watchtower. They had to charge across to the watchtower under fire, but once inside they fixed the problem quickly with a well-thrown grenade. Dean climbed up into the watchtower itself, taking possession of a sniper’s rifle and using it to fire across at the sniper on the other watchtower. The mist and distance confounded him though, and he and the sniper in the far tower exchanged pointless shots.
Down below in the tower Leviathan, Crimson and Ryan were attacked by three of the leaders that Dean had heard in the inner room. These three were a huge, heavily-armoured man carrying an old-fashioned glaive; a small and fast-moving man with a knife; and a lean, vicious-looking woman with no weapons at all. The battle was short and brutal, with Crimson delaying the armoured man while Dean fired crossbow bolts at the other two, Leviathan tried to kill the smaller man and Ryan tried to avoid being killed. They were starting to win, the armoured man badly hurt and the little man dying, when the woman dropped a grenade at her feet, obviously intending to kill everyone in the room. Everyone managed to dive out of doorways and avoid the worst of the blast, but were still hurt. Fortunately the explosion ended the battle, and they were able to pick over the woman’s splattered remains for a key. With this key they opened a door to an armoury just inside the doorway, and found a heavy machine gun with 30 rounds of ammunition. Dean and Leviathan took this up to the watchtower and returned to a futile engagement with the sniper in the far tower, while down below Crimson and Ryan explored the complex of rooms inside the ramparts.
Desperate science
The first room opened into a kind of conference chamber, where Dean had previously heard the leaders conferring. At one end of the room was a large screen, that showed a static view of a laboratory. As they watched, a man appeared on the screen and saw them! For a moment they stared at each other, and then the man uttered a stream of profanities and dashed out of the room he was in. The screen must have been linked to some remote part of the complex, and the remaining leader was now aware that the game was up. They rushed inside the ramparts to find a way to get to him, but couldn’t find anything, and soon returned to the watchtower. At this point Thorne rejoined them, having given his six pursuers the slip through a tunnel in the ramparts. In fact, his pursuers had been forced to retreat by Dean’s heavy machine gun – they had fallen into Dean’s field of fire as they ran along the ramparts looking for Thorne, and after the first two were heavily injured they retreated towards the other watchtower.
The battle with this watchtower remained futile, although Leviathan and Dean were nearly killed when the distant guards unleashed a torrent of anti-drone rockets on their tower. These rockets fell short but Dean and Leviathan had to take cover from the onslaught. Dean managed to recover from this and finally reeled off a lucky shot, blowing the distant rocketeer’s brains out, but during all this time they had been ignoring their surroundings. Finally Leviathan noticed a bank of cctv screens on one side of the watchtower, one of which showed a man in the control room of the nuclear plant, madly fiddling with controls.
The implications were obvious. They charged out of the watchtower to the control room, but were trapped on the gantry because the man had locked the control room door. Inside the control room red lights were flashing and a klaxon was screaming. Leviathan hurriedly placed some explosive on the door handle and blew his way into the room, the explosion so perfectly set that it blew the inner doorknob out perfectly, preserving the door and driving the doorknob deep into the man’s chest[1]. The door swung slowly open, to reveal a room bathed in emergency light and a calm electronic woman’s voice saying, “Three minutes to initial containment failure. Please evacuate.”
Three minutes!! Leviathan began working madly to understand the controls of the plant. He soon identified that the plant was a liquid salt-cooled thorium plant, so meltdown would release a huge quantity of molten salt into the plastic innards of the ziggurat, undoubtedly sinking it very rapidly. This would release the miasma, which probably would drift away from the Hulks, but it would definitely kill the entire group, and they would lose the ziggurat. Everyone watched in horror as Leviathan struggled to reverse the shutdown, scrabbling at controls and desperately running from panel to panel. Finally, with just seconds to spare, he managed to cancel the reactor core failure, and reverse the meltdown. They all fell back onto the panels in relief, and watched as the system returned to normal.
Aftermath
The remainder of the guards were easily dispatched, being mostly injured and trying to flee. The last two had to be shot down as they tried to escape in a boat, with one choosing to dive amongst the jellyfish and take his chances on the ocean rather than face the party. They found the scientist cowering in his lab underneath the second watchtower, and here they found a horrible scene of torture and cannibalism: two fishermen from the Hulks, held captive in cells near the lab, hideously deformed with thousands of jellyfish stings, and near to death. Exploring the ziggurat, they found a captive slave woman, one arm disfigured with jellyfish stings, who told them the tale of the stings. Captives would be tested for their reaction to jellyfish stings, and if they reacted a certain way they would be taken out to sea in small boats and submerged in the miasma, held in the water until they were insane with the pain. They would then be treated in some way, and their blood drained and drunk by the pirates on the ziggurat. This blood would grant the pirates temporary immunity to jellyfish stings, though the immunity required regular boosting with fresh blood. The slave woman had failed the initial reaction to the sting, so she was not drained but kept alive and used. The pirates, it appeared, were also slavers and cannibals.
Common custom in the Flood holds that cannibals are to be destroyed, down to the last man and child: anyone old enough to walk who has tasted human flesh or blood is to be exterminated. It is grim work, but it is a strong custom that stems from the last years of the era before the flood, when desperate communities turned to cannibalism as their societies fell apart, and cannibalism is viewed as a throwback to the worst horrors of the collapse of landborne society. It is known that some floating communities maintained the tradition, and they are seen as horrid abominations to be destroyed at any cost. It was necessary for the characters to hunt down everyone on the ziggurat and destroy them, saving only the maid and the scientist. The scientist would, of course, die horribly, but first he would be taken back to the Hulks and forced to teach them all he knew about the jellyfish.
The characters returned triumphant to the Hulks, to announce to Captain Dilver their successful acquisition of a nuclear-powered ziggurat and the extermination of a cannibal jellyfish pirate cult. Soon they were ferrying soldiers and scientists back to the ziggurat, guiding them around it, and helping to secure it. Though they had nearly all died, their mission had been a resounding success, and position of trust with Captain Dilver assured. The Gyre had become incalculably richer through their efforts, and even Dilver had to concede that they had done well. He fated them personally, inviting them to a private party on the war sloop the Gunfather, so that they had alcohol and fine foods and a grand view as the scientist was flayed and hoisted high on the Eiffel tower, for the birds to pick to death.
A successful adventure indeed …
—
fn1: Leviathan’s player rolled an incredible 48 with three criticals on the demolitions check!
Compromise and Conceit 