Session 17.5

In the immediate aftermath of Session 17, Shin and Cho read the news report that their mission to Chicago had spawned.   After catching six hours of sleep, they departed the next morning back to the outskirts of Chicago to fix the mess they had made.  They reached the city, and in a frantic search, found a beaten truck they could rent for a few hours, broke into a quarry in the dead of the night, and stole away with two and a half tons of high explosive.  The next morning they parked the truck in front of the building containing the TerraSec DNA testing lab, the lab which would lead TerraSec directly back to Simon and Clark as soon as it completed its testing of their blood from the attack site.

Cho headed back to the helicopter, and Shin stayed behind to set the timers.  He discovered that he was unable to get the first one to work, nor was he able to get the second timer one to work.  On his third attempt, at 0606 on 19 April 3075, Shin accidentally detonated the truck's payload while trying to arm it, and was killed instantly as the building he destroyed the testing lab.

I am a bit mixed on this intersession game.  First off, this represents the first character death the party has had.   Shin was completely out of Edge points when he botched the demolitions check.  While character death is a healthy thing for a party to experience, and in this particular circumstance it opens up a number of narrative options for me when Morgan rolls up a new character, it still has the stench of some kind of failure around it.

After the session, Morgan and I discussed his options, including dropping the campaign or re-rolling.  We talked a bit about the future of the campaign in broad strokes (it helps that Morgan is by far the best briefed on BattleTech history), and the immediate future.  Two considerations came dominantly into play; the first being that the party needed a good technician, and the second being that soon I needed a clever way to re-establish contact with ComStar or the Coalition so they could coordinate pre-invasion operations with the Resistance.  The logical conclusion was to bring Morgan back to play a liaison that is sent to the party to provide them with direction and instruction.

The second item I feel a bit ambivalent about is the surprisingly terroristic turn this campaign has taken; while each individual action was a mission that had a clear objective, the way in which the party executed a number of them, culminating in Shin's truck-bombing to save the party from TerraSec, has a definite asymmetric feel to it that harkens to the worst parts of modern current events.  While I suppose this allows expression of how regular people could find themselves caught up in this sort of misadventure, narratively the story this campaign is taking has taken a serious turn for the dark.  It is not quite as light as I intended a game that runs on Sunday morning to be.

Onward and upward, though.  Session 18 (which has not run at time of writing), it seems, will now be largely a 3075 session dealing with the immediate aftermath of Session 17.