Planet Bosch

Exciting session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars this week. Here's a summary:

Planet Name: Bosch
Planet Description: Heavy Gravity
Alien Description: Felines
Alien Special Ability: Flee

I ended up with a really low AA for this planet, and knew the aliens were gonna be creamed. Especially since "Flee" is a really wimpy special power. Once the PCs were aware of it, they just started every combat at Close Range. Since you get to adjust your range after a successful FA roll, as long as they succeeded at one roll in the first two rounds of combat, they'd never fall out of the combat. It may have slightly reduced their kill count, but not by much.

So, given the wimpiness of my aliens, I made them sympathetic. Cute little cat-guys, who'd be receiving transmissions of old b&w shows from Terra. "Humans!" their village elder exclaimed ecstatically upon seeing them. "We've been looking forward to meeting you." Then he was chopped apart with a power blade. Others quoted I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and old game shows at them, before being blown apart.

The aliens went down fast, though not without twinges of guilt along the way. (Very brief twinges of guilt. Like, "I felt bad... until one of them mentioned The Price Is Right. It's a mercy killing.") Knowing there'd be little planetary resistance, I decided to move along various other sub-plots.

Captain DeMolay (a PC) has treated several of his NPC Lt's with contempt and scorn, and really not done anything to convince them he has any power to back it up. So, there was a bit of friendly fire, and an avalanche that he refuses to believe was caused by the High Gravity.

But the real show-stopper was the visit by Major Schwimmer.

Now, the real Schwimmer, Captain Schwimmer, was found by the PCs tied up in an air duct in the previous session. They'd been hunting through the ventilation system and jeffries tubes in search of possible infiltration by one or more shape-shifting aliens. Capt. Schwimmer says he's been replaced by said aliens, and that Major Schwimmer who'd recently been promoted was a fake. So they tried to lure fake Schwimmer to pay them an inspection, and since their efforts were good ones (and the aliens pushovers) I decided to give them their opportunity. What surprised me was the gusto with which they approached it. They lured him into an APC, dropped a TPK bomb in a hatch, and the blew up the APC from outside, just to be safe. I was thrilled to death with this.

Their cleverness didn't end there, either. They also managed to track down Watkins (an NPC who'd gone AWOL back in session 2, and been helping the aliens ever since) and capture him and his invisible alien ship. Victories all around.

...unless they killed the wrong damn Schwimmer. But what's the odds of that?