Periphery Episode 12: Downtime On Kaspa Station

Welcome back! Apologies about the title - as I mentioned in the last post, we're starting these after-action reports very much mid-campaign. Maybe I'll come back later to fill y'all in on earlier events.

Last night I ran the 12th session of Periphery. Since this is my first full report, let me set the scene a little bit.

Currently I have 4 players at the table. Their characters are:

• N-8: The mining crew's android, here to assist with mining. Particularly in situations with lots of underground gas or other human-unfriendly conditions. They're a strange android - about 7 feet tall, decorative wires sticking out of their head, and strangely obsessed with human culture and mysticism. When we met the Furanan witches, N-8 was the first one to ask "can we use their magic?". N-8 is especially important because, as an android equipped with the Logistics skill, they are the only crew member who has successfully pieced together any proficiency with the local Furanese language.
• Cowboy: Our ever-ready security officer. Cowboy is ex-military, a bit trigger happy, and loves animals. His impulsiveness makes him a questionable choice for the security post at an important mining outpost, but he has successfully resolved several security emergencies. He also picked up a stray, 3-legged dog on Furano. He's called Stumpy, and he's joining the crew on the trip back to Terra.
• Ace: Ace lacks any special position in the mining crew - he's just a miner. He's the most level-headed member of our core mining crew, and that makes him essential to mission success. When the others get distracted chasing witches, rescuing dogs, or gambling away the few credits they've earned, Ace keeps his eye on the mission. He's also our only PC with Rimwise. It shows. In our brief time off-moon, Ace has been an enormous boon to the others. He helps them navigate the eccentricities of spacer life in the periphery.
• Solo: The "safety officer" of the crew, a mid-campaign addition. He showed up around session 5, long after the others had realized there was something wrong on Furano. He was also recently revealed to be a corporate spy sent by the rival Ohtani Group to spy on Beltek's mine. The betrayal hit the crew hard, but it does also provide an opportunity in the upcoming legal battle. Ohtani is suing Beltek, and they want to make sure Beltek can't throw the mining crew under the bus as "rogue agents".

There's also a supporting cast of NPC mine site crew, but we can introduce them as they become important.

Like I mentioned last time, the miners just left Furano to travel back to Terra for a court hearing. I have several legs of the journey planned, assuming the PCs don't find a reason and a way to deviate.

1. Take the 2-day shuttle from Furano to Kaspa Station (see the Lyra system map below).
2. 8 days of downtime on Kaspa while we wait for the FlyMor Voidliner Silong to finish its stop at the station.
3. Board the Silong for a 2 day FTL jump to the Cheynelle system.
4. 7 days downtime at Bojorney Station in Cheynelle as the Silong refuels and picks up new passengers and cargo.
5. Board the Silong again for a 1 day FTL jump to the Sol system, where it will enter Terra orbit and the PCs will complete their trip.

I baked a lot of time into this journey for two reasons. Firstly, I want to give the PCs a chance for Shore Leave (I didn't even think about shore leave when I plopped them on Furano for a multi-month mining contract... rookie mistake on my part). Secondly, I want there to be adequate time for shenanigans in space. My players seem to think that being taken off Furano means that the worst danger is behind them. I will show them that civilization has dangers all its own.

Now, let's cover what actually happened this session. 

We picked up shortly after the mining crew arrived on Kaspa Station. High Terra Court (HTC) investigators picked them up off Furano at the end of last session, along with some evidence in the court case, and dropped them off on Kaspa. The PCs have their run of the station, but they're fitted with trackers. The HTC will know if they try to escape trial, and the HTC has long arms.

FMV Silong is already docked at Kaspa, and since the HTC booked passage for the PCs they have bunks aboard. Those bunks are serving as their base of operations during their time on this station.

Now is a good time to touch on the court case. From here on out, we can't avoid the details.

During the Beltek mining crew's first couple weeks on Furano, they encountered some Ohtani prospectors trespassing on the moon. Beltek Corporate gave pretty explicit orders to eliminate competitor employees on sight. Conflict ensued (the Ohtani folks opened fire on sight) and all the Ohtani employees died. The problem is that there is no hard evidence that the Beltek crew acted in self-defense. Even though Ohtani was trespassing, under HTC law Beltek does not have the right to terminate Ohtani employees.

Ohtani had vitals trackers on their employees and swiftly reported their disappearance on Furano to the HTC. They'll be fined for trespassing, putting some credits in Beltek's coffers, but murder is a greater charge. Once the PCs heard that HTC would be sending an investigation squad (remember: Ohtani can't lawfully investigate themselves on a Beltek moon) they dismantled the weapons they used in the conflict and destroyed most evidence of the firefight and subsequent looting.

Also, Solo captured audio recordings of the PCs planning this cover-up, as well as pictures of the various pieces of discarded evidence. All this was sent straight to the Ohtani legal team.

Luckily for the PCs, Ohtani has more interest in suing Beltek than suing them individually. Ohtani has offered the PCs legal support in exchange for testifying that it was an Official Beltek Decision to kill those Ohtani prospectors. Assuming they win the case, Ohtani will take over the PCs' employment rights. Everyone's happy (except Beltek).

Ohtani also slid one more offer across the table, unofficially. They want the Bragg Crystal currently at the mine site. It's Beltek property, but if it somehow made its way to Bojorney (an Ohtani-owned space station) then Ohtani could secret it away to their labs with minimal scrutiny. And if that happens, some cred sticks would find their way to the PCs' pockets.

Surprisingly, all these big corporations are breaking all kinds of Terran laws.

Now, back to Kaspa. 

When I prepped this session, I had expected it would start with a handoff and some sneakery. Possibly followed by shore leave. 

As they left Furano, the PCs made a deal with a local Lyra smuggler. The smuggler, Kwabena, would scoop up the Bragg Crystal at the mine site and hand it to the PCs in a Kaspa Casino run by a local, discrete crime syndicate. From their, the PCs just need to get it aboard Silong. Much easier than smuggling it onto an HTC shuttle and then aboard Silong.

As often happens, my players surprised me. Before the meetup, the PCs spent quite a bit of time wandering the station trying (semi-successfully) to sell artifacts they'd gotten on Furano. Given the fact that the Beltek mine site is the only modern settlement on Furano, and given the publicity of the Ohtani v. Beltek case, the PCs were effectively announcing their identities to the whole station. Now everyone knows that they're implicated in an incident that is publicly regarded as murder. I'll have to play with that thread a bit down the line.

In the midst of all of this, a Beltek Logistics Officer (Saadiq Osmontous) reached out to the party. He's a good employee, and spent some personal time digging into the facts of Ohtani v. Beltek. He realized there's a single Ohtani ship in-system, it's been here since just before the "incident", it's currently docked at Kaspa, and there's no solid reason for it to be in Lyra at all. Osmontous is convinced that this is the ship that dropped off the trespassers, and he thinks there's a good chance Ohtani has engineered this whole chain of events in order to drag Beltek to court for ownership of Furano (spoiler: He's right, as far-fetched as it sounds). Obviously breaking into a ship and rooting around the captain's logs is illegal, but he told the PCs that if someone did it and incriminating evidence of an engineered legal case was found then it'd help Beltek's case. By extension, that'd help the mining crew. Clearly he doesn't know that the miners have shifted allegiance. The PCs unanimously decided not to investigate, and they informed Ohtani about Beltek's interest in the ship. 

The PCs don't know this yet, but Beltek's fallback plan is to eliminate evidence that the kill order came from up high. Glenn Ashton, the site manager of the Furano mine, was the individual who got the orders from corporate. If Beltek can't prove that Ohtani set this whole thing up, they'll just kill Glenn before he reaches Terra and pin the whole thing on the PCs. That'll be a fun chain of events. A dead silent, untraceable killbot hunting Glenn on the Silong.

Another surprise, at least to me, was the amount of time the PCs spent buying new clothes. Being Beltek miners, they all arrived on Kaspa station in standard Beltek uniform. On a 1/3rd Beltek-owned facility, this doesn't attract much attention. The PCs decided to replace these uniforms with:

• Cowboy: A reptile-skin cowboy hat and a fringed suede jacket with a snake on the back.
• N-8: A haori with a pigeon on the back and a too-short skirt with an embroidered circuit board pattern.
• Solo: A heavily grease-stained sweatsuit purchased from the crew of the Silong.

Ace retained his old duds. Needless to say, the party really stands out in a crowd now.

After the shopping spree, the PCs made their way to the handoff at "Big E's" casino in Cronustown. This went pretty smoothly - Kwabena has connections to Maulitz (the local crime syndicate, owners of most of the seedy establishments in this part of the station) and was able to leverage their help to get the Bragg aboard the station. During the drop-off, Maulitz offered to handle the smuggling of the Bragg crystal onto the Silong, for a fee. They're shipping some other sensitive goods to Cheynelle anyway, they'll just pack the Bragg in (and they don't really know what it is, yet, or how hot it is). I set this fee expecting the PCs to balk, but they paid it happily. They gambled some of their remaining funds on the way out, leaving Cowboy quite a bit poorer. As a result, they may not all be able to afford shore leave. We'll see if Cowboy can convince his companions to front him enough money for shore leave before the Silong departs.

That was the end of last nights session. It was a bit less eventful than I expected, but I got to deliver a lot of station flavor to the party and separate them from some of their credits. I also introduced a few plot threads that will become more important as the journey to Terra progresses. 

Next session we'll handle shore leave and (most likely) board the Silong for the jump to Cheynelle. Speaking of shore leave, I've made some house rules.

First, the why: Periphery is a longer-form game than most Mothership games seem to be. My players spent a long time on Furano before getting an opportunity for shore leave. Even though they accumulated quite a bit of stress from hallucinations, Carcoshta's creatures, and more mundane setbacks, they also elected to take several days here and there reducing stress by resting in their well-fortified camp. As a result, at the first opportunity for shore leave I found everyone a bit short on stress, and after 11 sessions without shore leave I didn't want to leave my PCs without an opportunity for meaningful advancement. Thus, I made some shore leave rules that will allow character advancement roughly every 10 sessions without requiring the players to metagame and avoid stress reduction in between.

All that said, please feel free to critique what I've done here. These shore leave rules are a pretty major departure from Mothership's default shore leave and skill advancement, so let me know if you think I'm breaking the game. Here is what I came up with:

Shore Leave
Shore leave is an opportunity for PCs to advance between long assignments. It takes 5 days consisting of both relaxation and training in a holosuite. It costs 1,000cr per character, resets stress to minimum, and allows characters to spend High Score to improve Stats, Saves, or learn Skills.

High Score can be spent as follows:

1 High Score can be spent to improve a Save by 1 point
2 High Score can be spent to improve a Stat by 1 point

10 High Score can be spent to learn 1 skill (with prerequisite skills already met)

As you can see, I also reduced the cost of shore leave, along with the cost/time requirement for skill advancement. This was intentional, as my PCs are very poor in a world of underpaid workers. I think that the infrequency of shore leave opportunities makes this a reasonable trade-off for a long-term game. 

As a teaser for next time, here's what's planned:

1. Shore leave
2. The Silong departs, the PCs explore the ship
3. A little cargo heist to pick up the Bragg Crystal from the secure Central Cargo
4. A glimpse of an empty android transport container in the cargo bay (the killbot is loose)
5. Some news from Sol about Beltek's shiny new Bragg Core AI

Anyway, I think that's it for this post. Feel free to let me know any thoughts you have about the direction of the campaign or my house rules. I'll update sometime in the next week/week-and-a-half with an after action report for session 13. Hope you're enjoying, and thanks for reading!

-Hank