Shootout in Montana

So the session went down more or less as expected. The PC's went into town, gave themselves away to a local barkeep who ratted them out to TerraSec, investigated the site, and ended up in a shootout with the arrest squad. Mission accomplished.

A few notes on this session. The opening operations went quite well, and the news story regarding the execution of the ComGuard personnel in New Haven had exactly the effect it was calculated to have on the players; the sense of "getting caught is fatal" is now demonstrably reinforced. The players set out for the hills of Montana the day after the ComStar party got back from mothballing the Firestarter in the mountains of Colorado. They reached a small town near the site, spent the night there, and asked a few questions at the local bar and grill about where the incident in which two hikers had been mysteriously killed had happened. Alexander was particularly blatant and was spotted by the barkeep as a person of interest.

The party set out to investigate the site the following day. I was resistant to give up to much too fast about the presence of branths, so I tried to draw out the investigation to make it more interesting, but I'm afraid I overshot the mark and made it start to get a bit boring toward the end, although three of my four players were involved in a lively debate about the biology of branths. Once we started to peter out, I had the ComGuard members make perception checks. Alexander did fantastically and score a MoS of 13, spotting the TerraSec Marshals as they prepared to ambush the party. As a result, he and Shin started the engagement with weapons drawn. Unfortunately, Simon and Clark were unarmed, so they spent much of the engagement hiding, although Simon attempted to tackle the head of the marshals, and failed miserably.

The fight went surprisingly well for the PC's given their restrictions, and although Alex was hit twice, there was little serious damage to the party. They killed two of the TerraSec personnel, and captured the other two, including the leader. Then cleaned up the site quickly, and took the TerraSec personnel off to the woods to interrogate them. They got a bit of information out of them, and closed the session trying to decide their fate.

I'll get into deeper analysis of this session over the balance of the week.