From A Hat

So, hilarious circumstance.  It turns out that David Cho's player missed Session 20 entirely -- slept through the whole thing.  That changed things a bit.  Also, two of my other players showed up pretty badly sleep-deprived, so today was a very low-energy session.

To break into the ROM Archive, the party decided to approach via the utilities tunnels.  Lacking both Cho and Shin, there was actually no Security Systems skill in the party.  After a great deal of discussion, the party reached out to the Missouri Group to get help bypassing the physical and electronic security to get into the building.  They proceeded to knock out a guard, and Simon hacked into the computer system while the rest of the party waded through hard-copy records.

Since there were a number of secrets I wanted to come out in this session, and I didn't have time to write a large number of in-game documents, I tried a different mini-game.  I wrote up a bunch of one-or-two sentence descriptions of what various records contained, put them on slips of paper, and dropped them into a hat.  The party members searching the filing cabinets took 1 per action, while Simon on the computer took Margin-of-Success slips per action.

The party seemed to enjoy this mechanic, and I was able to reveal bit by bit the Sarna plot line that lead to Alexander's parent's assassination, and Alexander's true past on Sarna.  In addition, the fact that David Cho was, in fact, an assassin who was terminating some of the escaped Sarna HPG employees came out, which makes it particularly sad that he wasn't present, although it may have resulted in intra-party violence; Alex did not take the news well.  Finally, they also found a record indicating that quite recently an assasination order was issued for Simon; Simon has not returned to his apartment since.

We also did some scheduling for Session 21.  It looks like April 1st is our first candidate date; after that the next opportunity to have everybody at the table is at the end of May.

We're in the home stretch.