First Session

The first session of Ten Years on Terra has come and gone, so I'm going to take an opportunity to go over what worked and what didn't. The session began with a quick run-through of the events leading up to and during the Fourth Whitting Conference, along with the WoB assault on Tharkad. After that, I distributed handouts with communiques from the Precentor Martial, Commander 394th, and Commander of the Many Paths, the party's Level-III. They all alluded to a major operation in the Terran Corridor, which out of game, we all know to be Case White.

The game started with the players going into simulation against the Word of Blake Ninth Division, which their intelligence indicates is much in the same condition it was in in Field Manual: ComStar, which is to say, one under-strength Level-III, as opposed to the much closer-to-the-day Field Manual: Updates, which shows it to be four full-strength Level-III's. They'll figure that out when they get planet-side.

The simulation went much as expected, with the players' two 'Mechs and a VTOL chasing the Mobile Headquarters that was their target as a Level-II of Light 'Mechs tried ineffectually to stop them. They completed the exercise in about 9 rounds, and we called the session.

Setting this up was as much an exercise for me as it was for them. I tried to set the mission up as a MegaMek scenario, which provided me with a number of advantages in quickly setting up the mission, but also limited my options, especially with the big wins I was expecting from Edge and A Time of War Special Piloting Abilities (SPA's). Fortunately, with only four hours of effort, I was able to download a Java IDE, connect to the MegaMek repository, download the MegaMek source, and modify the scenario scripting language to permit using Edge and discover how I was using the SPA's incorrectly. So now I believe I am in possession of the only version of MegaMek to that allows Edge in scenarios, but I've submitted the patch to the project. We'll see if it gets included.

I also gave my players the opportunity to write up their After Action Reports and submit them by next session for 10 extra XP (given this was a 3XP session, that's quite a bit), and I've tabled dealing with the question of tracking the XP for a bit while they do that; XP should be spent immediately, but I see no reason to harp on that fact while we're still learning the system. After all, I still need to find a reasonable way to track it all. I've already gotten Shin Magnusson's report back, a charmingly Old ComStar analysis of their engagement through the eyes of a True Believer. I look forward to seeing what else he puts out. When the site's website is up and running, I'll be sure to post the link here so you can all share my players' creativity.