Doc Professor

filenames:

creaseintime:

as much as i’d love drew carey to be hosting the new whose line
look at the hoodie the new host is wearing
that makes her alright with me

drgenome:

othartryggvassen:

fireteamdorks:

DAGDA:

They were supposed to just be random gunfights, playtests for an original combat system based on Mass Effect. But we knew we a narrative would creep in no matter what. The core testers were eager to rp the kind of amoral thug you spend half your time shooting in Mass Effect 2- a Bad Company of rejects from the Blood Pack and so on. We all got pretty hyped about the hijinks that kind of group could get up to in the Terminus Systems.

So for the first real test- PCs versus a crowd of Cerberus mooks- I threw in a basic story premise. You’re hired security for some remote ExoGeni facility, tucked away in the jungle on some backwater Terminus colony world. 20 minutes ago all comms stopped working beyond a distance of several hundred feet. They’ve sent you to secure a secondary outpost several miles off-base. You disembarked 5 minutes ago, and a Cerberus troop transport just roared overhead. Pick your starting positions.

When we finally shifted to running a proper campaign, I wound up deciding to continue that same scenario- we’d start right where it left off, with 3 surviving PCs plus 2 new ones to work in somehow.

• Quinn, Dr. Nurse’s human soldier. Merc Guard #1.
• Vurm, Othar’s krogan biotic. Merc guard #2.
• Denon, Dr. Professor’s drell biotic. Retconned from hired muscle to hired grey matter, i.e. one of the facility’s lower-tier scientists. He’d tagged along to retrieve some data stored on the outpost’s servers, bluffing that it was orders from above rather than his personal notes. 
• Pallus, Dr. Genome’s new turian infiltrator, was declared to have been the fellow guard flying their transport. He’s picked them all up again and they’re getting the hell back to base.
• Meanwhile, Virtudo (Askal’s turian combat engineer) has yet to make his appearance.

The first session wasn’t done in a way that left chat logs- and to be frank, that’s no big loss. I was brain drained and had to throw the towel in early. Here’s the gist of it:

The team’s racing back to base, but are met with a series of unpleasant discoveries:

• They’re in the equivalent of an attack helicopter, but Cerberus is fielding a fighter jet (i.e. atmospheric fast-attack craft). 
• Correction: Two fighters. And they’ve noticed you already.
• The facility’s best defense, a corvette (light battleship-class vessel), is a burning wreck- shot down mid-liftoff. 
• Did I mention that was also the only on-site craft capable of space travel?
• And that the planet’s colonists are all on the planet’s opposite hemisphere?
• Also, it’s going to quickly become clear that the base itself is overrun. Most Cerberus forces are already inside the main complex, and sporadic gunfire indicates they’re no longer facing organized resistance.

Pallus flies like a madman, barely making the high rolls needed to avoid both fighter’s attacks and make a very hasty landing. Party rushes inside and from there swiftly conclude that best chance is to beat Cerberus into the facility’s restricted inner area. Not that they know what’s in there, mind. But there’s a reasonable chance of finding a weapon or SOMETHING useful. 

They use maintenance passages to catch up to the enemy just in time, ambushing a group of Cerberus while they’re still cutting through one of of the inner sector’s fortified doors. That battle forms the start of the next session, and the resolution is where our skype transcripts begin- right when things started to get interesting.

We’re officially releasing info on the Mass Effect tabletop rpg in the works, and our first major playtest turned into an actual campaign, whoops

System’s still iffy, so you won’t be seeing much of our dice rolling yet, but you can follow the first MERPG playthrough at this blog; it went from goofy ME2 type shit to hell pretty quickly, and it’s a lot of fun rereading how terrible some of these games go.

Ah, the memories. We were so innocent back then.