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| Causing chaos today. |
Alright, let’s do something more risky. We are going to the Palace to see what kind of trouble we can cause with royalty.
We are going to move a different way. We can fly the ship up to low orbit in one hour and spend a hour descending into the Palace area. This avoids contact and detection rolls for all of the intervening areas.
The Palace area has no services or goods for sale, every contact is a special event. On entry, have a chance to sell 3 specific exotic items, if we have them. We don’t have any, so we move on to regular contact roll.
We encounter a Royal Party. A member of the royal family is here protected by 4 bodyguards. We can kidnap him and try to ransom him off. This is wonderfully risky! Failure could mean “wanted” or get all of us killed.
Duke, Lefty, Doc and Ratchet approach the Royal Party and call in Emily and Deadeye to strafe them. Then we open fire with heavy side arms, TL-1.
The enemy has side arms, one TL-4, a TL-3, and two TL-1’s. Higher tech level weapons go first.
The guys with the nice hand weapons go first. They have a marksmanship of 3 each. We add the tech level to their marksmanship score, so they must roll a 7 or less and a 6 or less. They roll a 9 and 7 against Duke which are two misses.
Everyone else goes next. Duke fires a heavy side arm at the guy with the best weapon. Tech level 1 plus a marksmanship score of 5 is 6, and he hits with a 5. The weapon does 7 points damage killing the target. Duke is hit by a side arm for 2 points of damage. Lefty fires and instantly kills his target. The other guard shoots at Duke and misses. Doc can’t shoot and Ratchet only shoots in self-defense.
The round isn’t over, Emily strafes the area. Deadeye has TL-5 guns and adds a 6 to this due to the ship’s targeting computer. He rolls and 11 which is a hit. Starship guns do 10 points of damage automatically. Another guard is dead.
Next round. Since the ship is right here, moves the fastest and has the best TL, it fires first. The last guard is down. And we quickly hustle the Prince or whatever on to the ship at gun point.
Now for the record keeping. High tech devices can breakdown. I have to roll for the ship’s guns and the two side arms used by the guards. I roll 2d6 and if it is lower than the tech level, they malfunction. None of them do. If the Engineer does maintenance on them, they will get a bonus of 1 next time.
Next, each enemy was carrying pocket change. We gather up 100 secs. from the dead.
As a final move, we go to orbit. This ends our day. Tomorrow, we’ll have a princely ransom!
1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe 117,000 secs. in principle.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
12 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
6 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
7 Side Arms TL-1, 1 Side Arm TL-3, and one TL-4.
13 U-suits, 7 for the crew, 5 for sale.
5 Doses of pheromones (e009) in secret compartment.
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.
I have 3,331 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.
Some notes on this post. First, I broke a couple of rules. Since the Starship is faster than everything else, it should have gone first. Also, it has TL-5 guns, which would also make it first. However, I would vaporized a guy in one shot which would have eliminated some of the die rolling I wanted to display. I pretended that one of the players called in the Antelope, which took some time.
Second, the rules state that all characters are matched against one by one, with any imbalance being adjudicated by the player. I had each and every guy shoot at Duke, because I felt that it was obvious as to who was in charge. I also wanted a chance to show the healing system, tomorrow.
Had Duke been killed the game would normally end. However, in post one, I said I was cheating to have a blog series and Emily would simply pick up where Duke met his end.
