Our group is currently playing a home-brew Mass Effect RPG that is mostly written by Ep!c. Our last adventure was fun enough that another player wrote up a summary for a friend. I asked him if we could post it here as well... anyway here it is.
The tagline for the adventure was as follows:
"After stopping Icarus' nefarious plot of creating a rogue planet, astrophysicist Merkel is struggling to recover. Even the citadel doctors can't wake her up from the coma but perhaps an infusion of quarian blood will revive her. Only problem is there is 23 blood types for quarians and she has the rarest type. Her only chance is to find her brother in the Galileo cluster."
Okay, looks like a one-off - we didn't know the scientist was comatose and not just unconscious, so at the end of this one we will be no further along than at the end of the last one.
Turns out the Galileo system is Volus space, and her brother's on Magnus, a volcanic planet with a mass effect core, the surface of which is mostly lava. The platform her brother works on has been attacked and taken over by geth, who've taken hostages. Just before we arrive, they shoot the negotiator and another hostage. We breeze past C-Sec, leaving the operatives with the sort of perplexed "I'm not sure what just happened but holy shit those guys were obnoxious, and they're gone now, so I guess that's a good thing?" look that we see so frequently. They lend us a lava skimmer and our cyborg captain flies it to the platform. He connects to the geth net and starts trying to negotiate. The geth ask for us by name (well, they ask for some people we left on the ship, but eventually settle for my salarian mercenary and Koshen the klepto quarian). They let us in, lowering the microfilament razor wire barring the entrances and exits.
Inside are about 15 geth and 8 hostages: 6 volus and 2 quarians. The hostages have their hands cuffed and are wearing collars rigged with three vials of nerve gas each. The room has 3 exits: south by southwest, north, and east. The geth scan us as we enter the north exit. Their DNA scanners identify us easily, but when they start scanning Captain Foos's cyborg parts, their equipment interacts with the prothean artifact he uses as an arm. The arm starts to hum.
We negotiate for the release of the hostages, and 2 volus escape by the east exit. The northwestern volus try to escape by the north exit, but Foos's arm speeds into a whir, and the noise begins to shake the gas vials of the nearest hostage. The hostage has enough sense to step back before the vial shatters, thankfully. We start directing traffic, sending the hostages out the other 2 exits. One of the volus starts to hyperventilate (hah), freaks out and rushes the nearest exit, which is the north. As soon as he approaches the cyborg I hose him down with my flamethrower (I don't carry a gun). Everyone freezes as this guy collapses to the ground, writhing in pain. Koshen puts out the fire as I yell at the rest of the hostages (DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, BUDDY).
The quarians approach the east exit, and I pass my medigel to a nearby geth, asking it to tend to the injured volus, who by now has managed to roll over and crush one of the gas vials. The geth tosses it outside the facility, as the razor wire rises again, trapping the remaining six hostages and us in with the geth. I stare at the geth in disbelief. my temper rising quickly. As Koshen steps away from the expanding gas, he notices one of the geth troopers is now in pieces on the ground. As he does a double take, another geth trooper falls. Someone's sniping at the geth from the southwest. There's a moment of shocked silence before the balloon goes up.
Koshen and Foos start firing their weapons. I lift the medigel-tossing geth by an arm and slam it into a pile of razor wire, then left it up and slam it back down again. I repeat the process twice more before the arm breaks off the rest of the broken body. As the geth start firing I dash to the east exit, bathing some geth in flame on the way. Foos calls the quarians to him, an order I immediately belay, planning to toss the quarian we care about over the razor wire to safety. The female quarian obeys Foos, and immediately collapses as his arm detonates her gas canisters. I mouth the word 'moron' at him in disbelief as I'm riddled with geth fire. The quarian we came to rescue hesitantly approaches the group of geth surrounding me. I charge one of the geth, knocking him backward, grab the quarian, hoist him onto my shoulders, and throw him clear. The difference between trained commandos and civilian engineers is immediately made clear as he lands hard on his side, sliding several feet and crushing one of the gas canisters around his neck. He lies there unconscious as I glare at the DM.
The fight continues, with the hunters and primes ruining our shit while we take down all the troopers. Things get easier as the geth net gets weaker, but I'm wounded in the northeast corner as the other two try to maneuver to the west around the rapidly expanding gas. The DM is audibly disappointed when Foos takes care to avoid the remaining hostages, prompting the player to explain that "you only have to demonstrate horrible consequences to me twice before I learn to avoid them." Though I take three injuries, we reduce the opposition to one hacked prime and one hunter. However, the gas is expanding rapidly, and Foos is having trouble staying away form it in his heavy armor. He makes a beeline for the door, using physical mana cards and movement powers to speed his passage... right into one of the remaining hostages. The neck vials shatter, gas explodes around him, and he slumps to the ground. I finish recovering and escape the platform as Koshen uses his jump pack to save 2 of the remaining hostages. Just as we reach our lava skimmer north of the platform, another skimmer arrives to the southwest and uses its fan to disperse the gas. One of its occupants jumps out, dodges sniper fire, grabs Captain Foos's still form, and jumps into the skimmer, which quickly departs. As we stop for the night, we're left with a gas-filled mining platform between us and a mysterious sniper.
No comments:
Post a Comment