Alexei's Apartment

An equipment shortfall prevented me from running the session and mini-game I had planned (it turns out both large maps of California and large compasses are non-trivial things to find retail.)  The session was still a considerable success, perhaps because I enhanced the story development in Alexei's apartment.  Rather than one document, I created four, the remaining three of which introduced a new actor on the scene: a Terran Resistance cell with a decidedly less subtle approach to resisting the Word of Blake.

The party started with David Cho returning from Europe, where he had been while his player, Henry, was on an international trip.  He returned with the details of David Alsace's family's death, as given in the BattleCorps fiction story To Serve and Protect.  The party was distressed to learn they would likely not be able to frame TerraSec for their deaths.

The party then proceeded to their plan to break in Alexei's old apartment to ascertain some idea of his location.  They were unable to do so directly, but found a number of documents referring to things they cared about.  First off, they found a not indicting Alexei had left for somewhere called "Site A", and would return in the spring.  It is unclear if he was referring to the spring of 3068 or 3069.

They found a second document giving details about an attack on a Word of Blake facility in St. Louis, in which thirteen people were killed and computer hardware was stolen.  A third document questioned whether the group operating in Denver (i.e., the player characters) were behind this attack.

Finally, there was a document of unknown origin that had a picture of Simon, Clark, Alexei, and Alexei's accomplice Chad as they were moving documents out the storage facility very early in the game.  The caption on the document suggested one of the individuals in the picture was a war criminal, but didn't say which was the accusation was being leveled against.

The rest of the session was spent with the party sitting down to put together all the puzzle pieces of plot they had been given into some semblance of a narrative.  A great deal of discussion happened, of which I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say it was a useful exercise.  After that, the party prepared to make their first large time leap, into October of 3068, when the Bioweapons plot picks back up.

We computed downtime, and the ComStar members found menial work to occupy their times and take some of the load off of Clark, who until now had been shouldering the bulk of the expenses in keeping the party fed.  Again, a question of the exact mechanics of the XP system came up, and we logged and spent a fair bounty of experience before the next session.