Log from session 28

We lost connection to Kyle, our logger, near the end of the session.  We played for a few more minutes after that, before realizing that he hadn't shown back up.  Guessing internet trouble.  Here's hoping your cooler fan didn't break just to show off the ironic power of chance. For Kyle, here's hoping your cooler fan didn't break just to show off the ironic power of chance.  The life-or-death combat that was in progress ended well.  Important lesson: spaceship combat is really deadly.  Anyways, I'll wait for you to post your part of the log before I fill in the parts that happened after we lost you.

Hey Guys, sorry about that.  There were some nasty storms rolling through Ohio last night. I guess one of them took out the cable. Here is what I have captured from the logs. If I missed anything, add away. ______________________ Kyle sneaks into Landbreakers in his HoloScreen. As he is moving through, he overhears bits of a yazirian conversation about a spaceship that has lost life support. He makes it through several of the rooms, getting lucky as he stays unnoticed. He makes it to the brainbot and hurriedly deactivates and installs a holoscreen on the bot. Simultaneously with the deactivation, Eusyl turns on a spoofed chronocom to mimic the brainbot signal, so that no one will know it has been deactivated. On the way out, he is discovered by two janitors. He takes a few potshots with a needler and only hits one guy...barely. He was lucky and resisted the sleep darts. As they run away, Kyle bolts and drags the brainbot out. Getting to the trash dock, he encounters a locked door, which he handily picks. He drags the bot out to the edge of the building and hides. The guys run home to get the aircar to come pick me up. While they're traveling, the spoofed chrono rings and a guy asks for Manuel. Rodworth answers and tells the guy that Manuel isn't available until tomorrow. A little bit later, they come back in the aircar and pick Kyle and the bot up and head back to base. Back at the base, Kyle has a devil of a time hacking this bot. Rodworth listens to the robot babble on about wanting to be free as Kyle finally gets through the security. He finds a hidden set of commands and files that the robot didn't know it possessed. This code altered the robot and its mission radically. It becomes an intermediary between a contact and the person who calls in for information and whether or not they should take a job. We play through a few hours of calls and get the main chrono number that it dials when it gets a call about a job. Digging through, we find a hit about a ship that the robot thinks should be hidden and not be known to the UPF. They discuss recovery options, but choose to leave it there for now. The ship is in orbit and we decide that we're going to take the Claw up to do some investigation. We head up to Pinnacle Station to deliver Mamba some files that we recovered from the brainbot. He's a bit astonished by the amount of information we recovered. He's sending it off to be data-mined. We give him the number of the the contact chronocom and he gives us a deadshot location of the owner of that chrono. It's in one of the tech labs in Styrigi University. We find a small, one-man system ship hanging out in space. When we leave the station, we head over to it. It takes a couple of hours to get there. Upon arrival, it starts moving away, to try to escape. Rodworth starts talking at the ship, negotiating to try and get it to stop. It stops, waiting in a suicide position to crash on the planet, should they deem it necessary. As he approaches, a small HS 3 freighter approaches and a yazirian, tattooed blue with an eyepatch, starts trying to claim the launch. He says that one of his crew stole this launch and he wants him back. Rod negotiates and get the crewman as part of the deal. The captain of the other ship tries to get in on a grapple shot, but Kyle gets our ship in the way. Rod heads over with Sax and tries to get the crewman out. He finally gets through to the drunken dralasite as the freighter makes another poke at getting to the pod. They out manuever Kyle and get a clear shot. However, they don't shoot a grapple...they shoot an assault rocket. The dralasite blows the hatch into hard vacuum and Rod catches him and heads back to the ship. As the freighter captain is trying to line up a shot on us, the UPF show up and attempt to get things under control, but the freighter captain is ignoring the commands. <my cable went poof>

<continued from memory> In a flurry of action, Kyle makes an emergency retrieval of Rodworth, Baltasax, and the half-fried Dralasite.  In the meantime, the blue yazirian ship tries to turn and line up a second shot to finish the job. Upon arrival, the Dralasite appears to be dead and Baltasax cannot quickly identify whether he is even alive.  A staydose is applied. The enemy ship finishes his turn, aiming for the Neon Tiger's ship.  Tensions rise as Kyle does his best to evade, trying to lead the enemy onto the UPF fighter's line of fire.  (The three parties roll for initiative, UPF is lowest, Pirate and Kyle tie!  The tie breaker is Kyle's 55 RS vs the pirate's 54... wow!)  Using an unexpected maneuver, Kyle swings his ship out of the pirate's target lock.  The UPF fighter then fires an assault rocket into the pirate freighter, wrecking it.  Secondary explosions rip the hull apart. Survivors unlikely. Mamba calls expressing interest. Rodworth asks for medical aid for the rescued Dralasite. An Assault Scout that was also rushing to the scene is dispatched to give assistance. Upon matching airlocks, the crew's medical officer that the Dralasite is alive and is able revive him. Noting the slurred speech, he also adds a dose of detox to "cure" the Dralasite's inebriation. Once the Dralasite is speaking clearly, the party suddenly recognize their prize: it's Mr. Beadle!  A bunch of unhappy questions ensue, and the Assault Scout crews bows out stage left (through the airlock).  Mr. Beadle explains that he was being hunted since he knows the location of Mr. Jones - and says the Malthar has him.  Since nobody trusts Mr. Beadle, a decision is made to Telol him.  Baltasax provides the dose, skillfully avoiding Mr. Beadle's trick-sack to avoid such a procedure.  He also asks the first question followed by four more from the group: 1: What is your real name?: Doblathoadad 2: Where is Mr. Jones?: in a freezefield in an apartment in Old Dome (gives address) 3: Why did you try to kill us?:  I didn't! I was paid to make it look like I was 4: By who: The rabbit 5: (I don't remember?) Rodworth calls Mamba and gives Mr. Jones location.  The UPF send troops on the ground to get him as quickly as possible.  A short time later, Mamba calls back.  "I can neither confirm nor deny whether Mr. Jones was at that location.  However, I have been given authority to pay you 1M credits as we had agreed upon.  It has been deposited into a separate account to avoid suspicion.  Please use the money wisely and carefully so as not to attract attention or alert our fellow enemies of what has transpired." After the cheers die down, somebody (Rodworth or Eusyl?) suggests trading Mr. Beadle to the Malthar to try to make friends and get rid of him. He calls the Malthar and suggests a trade for Alice Styrigi. Strangely, the Malthar agrees immediately, and redirects all other space traffic so that the ship can land immediately at Darkstar station. The Malthar is waiting himself at the docks along with eight warbots and a dosed-out Alice Styrigi in a wheelchair.  The trade is handled effortlessly. The Malthar seems very pleased, and expresses himself, "You've just made a friend.  Tell me if you need help in the future."  He also reports that Alice is no longer useful to him anyway because he will be ending his campaign for the presidency, "now that I have what I want." He places a pseudopod on Mr. Beadle's shoulder and leads him away. The group departs with Alice, heading to the surface to report their success to Lisa.  In hindsight (GM reminder), they realize that the person who told them that the rabbit had Mr. Jones (now proven false) was that Vrusk spy.  Which leaves the question: was anything else that she said was a lie?

I think we're down 2 sessions w/o experience points. I need my fix.

Good point! XP tally: +2 everyone that was expected to be on time was on time +2 logs Major goal: get back Alice Styrigi +20xp Minor goal: deal with Mr. Beadle (or not) +5xp Minor goal: get the brain-bot +5xp No new goals completed The new total: 193 + 34 = 227 xp

Hey Yaz, you're a better technician than me. You should likely take over as the pilot, as your skill can go higher. I'd have to raise my Technician to raise my piloting (3 to fly Assault Scouts).  To raise my technician kinda steps out of my vision of Kyle and makes me feel kinda generic. I started piloting to be a backup, but for the life of me, I can't remember who was primary.  Unless I raise my T level, I'm stuck at L2 Pilot. Scott, this raises a question.  Are all the hot shot pilots in all of the Frontier, master technicians? Could someone be pilot-trained, but not know how to do a complete disassembly and reassembly of the ship they're flying?  I don't see every military pilot in the UPF being an ASE certified mechanic.

I agree that the skill requirements for the spacer skills seem kinda odd.  However, they are built into the original system, so I kept them - although I decreased the cost of entry.  As with all house-rule discussions, I tried to change the original system as little as possible.  The changes that were made were either to improve gameplay or to support a suspension of disbelief (example: spaceships aren't cars in space).  Plus, it fits the 1970s feel of SF, where anybody who drove a car was supposed to know how to repair it too (and thus exactly how it worked). The real problem in this case is that the system doesn't have a "driving" skill at all.  Either your ability to operate a vehicle is based on your Technician skill (which I interpret to apply to unfamiliar vehicles) or it is pure reaction speed.   I think when the authors wrote KnightHawks they were probably kicking themselves for some of the decisions that they made in AlphaDawn.  Zeb's seemed like a good reboot, but too little, too late - and right before StarFrontiers was axed by TSR to move resources to BuckRogers RPG.

As noted yesterday - I have raised my pilot skill to 3. Scott something that I believe we discussed and doesnt seem to be working on the spreadsheet is using RS vs Dex modifier. With my RS of 75, I believe I should be seeing a higher mod for Pilot 3. Of course I took high RS with piloting and driving in mind.  With Tech 4 and Programming 4 - can I only get to Pilot 4? What do I need to do to get to pilot 5? Thanks, CR

There are multiple flaws with the character sheets.  When I get up the gumption, I'll do something about it.  On the other hand, it's gotten us this far, and nobody is using it but us... and it's a lot of work to fix them. Each level of Tech opens up another level of Pilot.  You only need Computer 3 to get all the way to Pilot 6.

Yeah, in the last few sessions, after taxes and fees, we've accrued 600,000 credits. With the basic plans on the tables, I'd like to see what we could get for our two ships and see if it can work to getting a new ship made. Ed suggested we pop the ion drive off the Tiger claw and put it on the new ship.

Actually i was thinking of contacting pan galactic, maybe we can have them give us discount due to our knowledge of how their computer was use to hack every mainframe on the planet ( and maybe the Frontier) maybe we can get a nice Privateer vessel like the ones from the dragon with the funds we have...