Hidden Suns session 2: Rough Sailing

Date: 2018-07-26

Player Characters (333 points):
ESA1000 45460 (4-5 for organics), humanoid engineering robot
Gaichu Koschei, android infiltrator/assassin
James Titus Kane, human legendary starship Captain of the Stewards Navy (retired)
Alva von Kirchess, aasimar diva / Captain of the Knights of Golarion (retired), breach and clear specialist

Notable NPCs:
Archibald Grey, renowned explorer

The session started with the PCs packing up for their expedition to the planet Glacigneous. They eventually made their way to one of the hangar bays, where Archibald was waiting for them with his ship. It was a small shuttle-class vessel, among the smallest types normally used for interstellar travel. It had a cockpit, a small cabin and medbay, a 4-bed bunkroom, some cargo space and a blaster turret on top. Archibald was just about done with loading it with his equipment as the party approached. They boarded, made themselves comfortable and didn’t dally a lot. They took off of the Wanderer and jumped into the Drift a couple minutes thereafter.

As soon as they entered the Drift, the alarms started blaring. Floating pieces of a hilly landscape could be seen around the ship, as well as four draconic-looking flying creatures twice the size of a man. Angrily swarming the ship. The drift drive seems to have ripped off a decent chunk of another plane.

Jimmy, who was already at the helm, started evasive maneuvers as the draconians’ intention was clearly to board the ship. Alva took the turret seat and started blasting while 4-5 manned the sensor console supporting her targeting efforts. The first shot missed its target, but none of the draconians could keep up with Jimmy either. The second shot turned its target into a pink mist, but one of the remaining three managed to latch onto the ship. Next shot was aimed at him, but he successfully dodged. Jimmy didn’t have much luck either and the remaining two draconians also latched on. The first draconian dodged another turret blast. Fortunately, that kept him from making any progress on ripping through the ship’s hull, which seemed to be their intention. Jimmy attempted to shake them off, but managed to lose only one. The third draconian started ripping through the hull. Alva finally managed to score a hit on the first latch-on, misting him. Jimmy managed to evade the airborne draconian, but the remaining latch-on got another round of hull-tearing. Alva tried to shoot him just as he was jumping into the ship, but he dodged. As he jumped down through the hull and into a corridor, Gaichu revealed himself from the shadows and shot him full of gauss crossbow bolts. Unfortunately, they didn’t penetrate his thick scales. Jimmy, on the other hand, managed to keep the remaining flyer at a distance. Next round, Jimmy managed to avoid the flyer the final time, as Alva blasted him out of existence.

The boarder, however, attacked Gaichu with two claw attacks and a bite. Gaichu dodged the claws and teleported himself a couple of hexes away to avoid the bite, simultaneously vanishing in the darkness. He striked right back, this time managing to damage the draconian. Alva and 4-5 both started running in the direction of the fight, but Alva had to fetch her shotgun first. The boarder repeated his attack pattern against Gaichu, who also repeated his defenses and the vanishing act. His crossbow burst, unfortunately, again failed to pierce the target. 4-5 arrived to the fighting area, in the opposite side of the corridor where Gaichu was currently in relation to the draconian. He drew his modified plasma cutter. The draconian did a claw-claw-bite against Gaichu, who once again dodged and teleported away from his attacks, but this time not vanishing into the shadows and ending up between the draconian and 4-5. He shot the draconian with a variety of ammo using his Dial-a-Round, unfortunately to no avail even though most of them hit.

Alva finally reached the fight and shot a burst from her gauss shotgun into the draconian, who unfortunately dodged all of the hits. The draconian once again attacked Gaichu to no avail, who started reloading his crossbow. 4-5 loaded his Beam Weapons program into his Computer Brain. Alva fired another salvo, but the bullets did not penetrate even though the draconian didn’t dodge. The draconian performed yet another series of attacks against Gaichu, who yet again successfully evaded them all. He finished his reloading and threw himself with his back to the floor. 4-5 finally shot the draconian with his modified plasma cutter, over Gaichu, but the draconian dodged the beam. Alva emptied the remainder of her clip into the draconian, again to no avail. The draconian wasn’t successful in hitting Gaichu either, who shot him with a full RoF worth of tranquilizer bolts. Unfortunately, for the couple which did penetrate its DR, it passed its HT rolls. 4-5 shot and missed yet again. Alva started reloading and the draconian flailed once more in Gaichu’s general direction without success. Gaichu shot another burst of tranq rounds, this time bringing the behemoth down. They finished him off with a starknife to the base of the skull, and after Gaichu took some trophies, they dumped the body into the Drift.

After spending a couple hours patching the hole in the hull, the company continued their flight. The six days of travel through the Drift were otherwise uneventful. Gaichu and 4-5 maintained each other.

Upon exiting the Drift into realspace, the alarms blared once again. The ship was in the middle of a debris field. Jimmy started with evasive maneuvers immediately, with Alva and 3-4 assisting him by manning the sensors. Even with his piloting skills, the ship took a lot of damage in the 5 or so minutes until he managed to get her out. Three sections were disabled: part of the cargo bay, one of the two reactors, and the reactionless drive. Oops. And they were already in Glacigneous’ gravity well. Double oops. 4-5 and Gaichu scrambled to keep the drive at even a semblance of being operational so that Jimmy could crash-land instead of just crash. Entry into the atmosphere was tense. But Jimmy is a great pilot, so he managed to crash-land in the region where they were intending to land in the first place. Even though the ship otherwise suffered minimal damage during the crash landing, the sensor array was busted but much less than the reactor and drive.

After the dust settled and everyone came to, they surveyed their position and assessed the damage. But that is already the story of the next session.

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The draconian actually did start to use Deceptive Attack after missing Gaichu during the first round of their combat, but Gaichu’s first three defenses in a round are coincidentally almost a sure thing. Especially when they’re against a single opponent and he can step back. He still was lucky though. A couple of hits from that thing would have been bad news. Had more than one managed to board… well, things wouldn’t have been pretty at all.

For those interested, here’s the writeup of Archibald’s shuttle. It’s a SM +7 vessel, and I didn’t bother writing down any stats beyond the sections since they were irrelevant to the game.

Front Hull

• [1] Light Alloy Armor
• [2] Control Room
• [3] Defensive ECM
• [4] Enhanced Array
• [5-6] Habitat (cabin, 1-person medbay, bunkroom)

Central Hull

• [1] Light Alloy Armor
• [2!] Major Battery (turret with light particle beam)
• [3-6] Cargo Hold (15 tons)
• [core!] Light Force Screen

Rear Hull

• [1] Light Alloy Armor
• [2] Hangar Bay (10 tons)
• [3] Engine Room
• [4-5] Fusion Reactor (4 PP total)
• [6!] Standard Reactionless
• [core!] Stardrive

Design Features

• Streamlined Hull
• Artificial Gravity
• Gravitic Compensators
• Total Automation (Engine Room)
• Winged