Visiting TerraSec

It is always a wonder to watch player operation planning. The party ran around in circles for almost the entire weekend working up various plans that, at their height, involved a box truck repainted as an ambulance, a sewer-based extraction plan, and robbing and possibly having to assault a police officer. The negotiation went on a full hour into session before I was able to gently guide the party to consensus, and they decided on a plan that involve using their great and mighty amount of Communications/Conventional to break the TerraSec head quarters communication system, then show up as technicians to fix it.

The team showed up in the middle of the night to take advantage of the lower shift size, and set about fixing the phones. Simon and David went in under aliases. The officer observing them proved to be a bit too on-the-ball for them to blatantly get away with just downloading what information they wanted out of the computer, so Shin came in and created a disturbance in the police station. That created enough of a distraction for the undermanned staff that Simon and David were able to grab the information they needed. When they got ready to go, however, the entire station computer died. A bit of investigation revealed that nobody had actually powered down the system since 3053 at least. Simon responded by calling in "more technicians," Alex and Clark, and the four of them working together were able to fix the system.

The key improvisational points for me in this session were the officer watching diligently over them, who had enough understanding of the system to recognize that they were poking at places they shouldn't. David was able to make a high success on his Acting check, so this wasn't an enormous problem, but it gave the players the feeling they really had something to worry about. The computer failure was also unplanned -- the players simply breezed through the checks to remove the data, and Morgan did a magnificent job of roleplaying Shin as a vagrant with a stack of badly-made pamphlets, trying to bring the Word of Blake to TerraSec. He made himself enough of a nuisance to get locked in the drunk tank overnight. The system failure allowed an excuse to bring the rest of the party, who had been waiting outside, in for a little bit, and also allowed Alex access to the weapons locker, where he was able to get some concealable armor.

The second part of the session, which I did not expect us to get to, was mothballing the Firestarter. The party found a place to hide the 'Mech about 80 km into the mountains of Colorado, and set out to put it there. While moving overground, though, TerraSec located the 'Mech. Alex, at the controls, was able to down the TerraSec chopper with a laser, raising suspicions, but not revealing his location to the rest of the world. The ComStar party spent the next two weeks camped in the mountains mothballing the 'Mech, resulting in two engine criticals and two destroyed flamers, but otherwise an intact vehicle.

Over the course of this week, I'll talk a bit more about the individual mechanics of each of these phases of the operation, and how I handled them and how my players reacted.