Five Parsecs from Home - Turn 1

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Reece traded (gaining 2 credits), Nathaniel recruited Mila; Anul and Kari Explored (gaining a rumour along the way), and Jack trained.

The crew were then given a mission by Nathaniel’s Patron.  A group of raiders had stolen a military grade Nano-fabricator machine during an attack on a Unity convoy.  Unfortunately, contrary to standard protocol, it had been left with its memory bubble installed whilst in transit.  In the wrong hands it could be used to construct anything from a handgun to a tactical nuke.  To make matters worse, the officer responsible for it is politically well connected and suppressing information about the incident, hampering any attempt at recovery.  Time for our heroes to step in…

The raiders had been tracked to an abandoned agri-research station out in the red wastes.  The job was to get in there, find the fabricator, and enter the kill code provided by the patron to reduce it to a useless pile of junk.

Former Agri Station R1101

Facing them were four raiders, with rifles and a shotgun, rated as ‘aggressive’.

As the encounter started, the raiders were holed up in the agri station’s hab unit.  Half the crew, armed with rifles, would cover it, while the remainder searched the three storage sheds (needing a 5+ to find the fabricator, with it being in the last one searched if not found before; the raiders would hear something was up and leave the hab on a 5 or 6 in any turn).

Taking up position covering the entrance to the Hab in the distance

Jack, Nathaniel and Kari took up position behind the abandoned harvester, watching the hab unit door; while Reece, Anul and Mila went to search the stores.

 Sneaking the side way, but Reece has been spotted

Unfortunately, Reece was spotted crossing open ground in only turn two, and the raiders came spilling out looking for trouble.  Jak took one down immediately on opportunity fire, and Nathaniel another, but Jak was knocked down himself by the raider with the shotgun (rolling a lucky 6 to hit).  Having taken casualties, both sides took morale tests, racking up one failure each.

The raiders sally ahead

 "Man Down!!!"

A short, but deadly exchange of fire (for both side) over the abandoned station

The next turn saw Kari taken down by another lucky shot from the raiders, but Anul evened the score, taking one out with his blast pistol at short range.  Nathaniel hit the raider’s leader, but failed to wound, only stunning him.  With the choice of either moving or shooting, the last raider attempted a last stand, but was obviously too shaken by his near miss to hit anyone.  Nathaniel had no such problem though, and bagged his second raider of the day.

Blast pistol to the face, nearly don

Just four turns and it was all over.

Checking afterwards, it turned out that Jak had taken a leg wound that would put him in sick bay for one campaign turn, while Kari was only knocked out.  The team gained another rumour, but also another enemy (the raiders weren’t going to take this humiliation lightly).  Loot rolls went well, gaining a total of 12 credits, rations (no need to pay for upkeep next turn), a repair kit, and an alien artifact (which turned out to be a suit of flex armour once 10 Cr had been spent analysing it).

Thoughts:

A quick and really fun game.  Th campaign system encourages a strong narrative, gaining a new enemy seemed just the right result.  The crew were lucky not to come out of it worse though.

Which brings me to the combat system.  It’s pretty basic, but that also makes it very quick to resolve, so it depends where your priorities sit.  One thing I struggled with a bit was the initiative system.  The turn is split into three phases, quick, normal and slow actions, and you roll a number of dice equal to your crew size then distribute them to determine who acts in what phase, which is a nice idea.  The difficulty was that, as I read it, any dice roll over your highest reaction score is discarded.  As most crews will start out with a reaction score of only one, there would be a good chance of none of them acting during a turn, giving the enemy free reign.  I got around it by assuming that anyone not acting in the quick phase would act in the slow, regardless of dice.  Of course it could be I’m just mis-reading it.

I have to say it wouldn’t be difficult to use whatever your favourite combat system is instead (for example I was tempted to try using the Rogue Trader one, simply because it’s engrained in my thinking ) as the real strength in this game is the narrative created by the character generation process and campaign system anyway.

The worst part of it is that I also want to be having a go at Five Leagues from the Borderland as well…