The Old School GM

For our 12th Eclipse Phase session I mixed up both my gamemastering approach and the flavor of the game a bit. So why not experiment with how I present the summary of the game session? This is a series of snippets designed to give you a feel for how it progressed:

Martin Wallace Flynt (in Octavia, floating above the surface of Venus)

There is no such thing as a “bad” Morley Watlins party. S/he sometimes throws parties that are not up to her usual high standards, but then again, his standards are so high that even a party s/he might deem a failure would be a colossal success in anyone else’s book. One of the Warhols recently dished in City of Ether that Morley spends two months recouperating from the last party before s/he can even start thinking about the next.

Anyway, although it’s all been done before, s/he never does it the same way each time. The novelty never seems to wear off. So here you are, down in The Spine, in the swirling, pumping midst of a Morley Watlins “thing”, trading bons mots with a very clever young seductress from Fairhuit Station. Already three or four assignations have taken place, and a couple of Sylphs are doing rather amazing things with their… wait… you’re receiving an encrypted inbound… .

Your muse decrypts the message. It’s from Smyth, your Firewall handler. You’ve never met Smyth. You just receive missions from Smyth, and feed Smyth mission debriefs when it’s all over. Who is Smyth? You may never know.

Proceed immediately to Dock 17A. A small Wayfarer-class orbital shuttle will be waiting. The shuttle pilot is a member of your team. The other team member will meet you in the shuttle.

Ambrose Webster (in Octavia, floating above the surface of Venus)

You often find yourself here when you’re not working. The Cloister is possibly the smallest bar on Octavia. The decor is garish, the brew is of questionable heritage, and the clients tend to keep to themselves. Someone programmed the service bots with a preference for the sounds of chanting Benedictine monks, so there’s always a weird, low droning noise in the backround. The Cloister is the kind of place you’d expect to find down spindle, but it’s here on 35, in the Basket, tucked between an Uncle Leo’s Pervatorium franchise and a high class mod clinic.

It’s been a while since your last gig with Saldor Protection Services ended. Guarding the pampered children of hypercorp bigwigs isn’t exactly stimulating work, but the pay is decent. So you were mildly disappointed when the daughter of one of said bigwigs blew off Venus and created all kinds of trouble for everyone. There were investigations. There was an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny from Morningstar intelligence. Because SDS was guarding the Cyrene girl when she bolted, the hammer came down. There were indictments. The company was dissolved.

In order to keep up appearances, you’ve been looking for gainful employment in the most rudimentary way, all the while praying for a mission. A Firewall mission. A way to escape the dreary, humdrum life of a security drone in a ‘stat floating above the toxic Venusian surface.

Tonight there are only a half a dozen people in The Cloister, and Lala the info broker is holding court with a couple of off-planet noobs. By the look of them they’re Lunar, all dangling earrings and metallic clothing. Half of what she’s feeding them is garbage, but she’s just goofing. Despite her rep, she would never give anyone the kind of false info that would get them killed. Unless, of course, they deserved it.

You’re about to order up one last drink when you get an inbound. Hmm… it’s encoded…  .

Your muse decrypts the message. It’s from Smyth, your Firewall handler. Maybe there is no Smyth. Maybe Smyth is just the name used by a group of inner sanctum people way up the Firewall food chain. Whatever. It’s a mission. You need a mission.

Proceed immediately to Dock 17A. A small Wayfarer-class orbital shuttle will be waiting. The shuttle pilot is a member of your team. The other team member will meet you in the shuttle.

For Your Sins, A Mission

The trip to low Earth orbit was uneventful. Never having worked together before, Flynt, Versace and Webster spent most of their time occupied with individual pursuits. The unspoken rule in situations like this applied: Until you’ve been briefed, it’s best not to reveal anything.

Time was of the essence, so the three strangers didn’t even leave the shuttle upon reaching what was quite possibly the system’s smallest orbital habitat. The briefing arrived in the form of a quaint anachronism – a data stick delivered by hand. The mission was simple, if suicidal: Fly the shuttle through a supposedly safe gap in the Earth quantine, make it on foot to a Russian port city, infiltrate an ancient iron and steel works, and assassinate Walter Klein, a genius Firewall agent who had gone rogue. Oh, and do all this before he used a repurposed VK-355 Velociraptor air defense mech to fire modified scramjet missiles equipped with nanobot-armed warheads at a secret Firewall orbital surveillance hab. Fail and Firewall’s extensive surveillance network would be exposed to anyone paying attention to Earth orbit, meaning pretty much every faction in the system.

Welcome Home

The craft buckled again. Versace’s voice was a bit less panicked now. “I think we’re past the worst of it.” A ripping sound tore through the cramped vessel. Then he slumped in his seat, his head bent unnaturally to the left. A small hole appeared in the cockpit, just above the command console. Red lights flashed. A soft feminine voice announced, A structural breach has occurred. Loss of oxygen. Please take action.

Webster grappled with the five point harness that kept him safely lashed to his passenger seat. After a seeming eternity, he broke free. As the craft tumbled into the Earth’s atmosphere, it was buffeted by yet another close explosion. His head smacked against the hull. He dove for the pilot’s chair and clung to it, clawing at the harness that tightly held Versace’s now useless body.

“Get him out of there!” yelled Flynt. “I can try to land this thing!” Webster worked Versace’s harness frantically as the craft continued to twist and gyrate seemingly at random. Finally he managed to haul Versace out of the way. Flynt grimly pulled himself into the seat and strapped two of the harnesses in place, while Webster leaped back to his own seat. Versace’s body bounced around the tiny cabin in a macabre dance. Please take action.

Wordlessly Flynt shut off the alert system. They’d die sooner from hitting the ground at terminal velocity than they would from air leaving the cabin. Thankfully they were in atmosphere. While he knew nothing about flying in zero-g, Flynt had qualified as a pilot many years ago, when Earth was still teeming with people. The AR instrumentation was unfamiliar. On the viewscreen he saw bolts of blue and red flashing past, evidence that the killsats weren’t content with the damage they’d already done.

As he moved his hands across the virtual instrumentation, intuition and old memories took over. He gained control of the little craft, leveling it out and pushing the nose up. The surface temperature gauge shifted from red to orange, then disappeared. But they were still coming in too fast. They were screaming in toward a sea of gray, and altitude readings were confused, probably because the instrumentation array had taken a hit. Flynt reached for the mechanical lever to the left of the seat, disengaged the trigger lock, and punched the button. Immediately the craft jerked upward, as three giant parachutes deployed above. “Brace for impact!” Flynt yelled.

Snow and Fire

A quarter moon exposed nothing but gray. No trees. No plants. No animals. Just an endless expanse of ice and snow under angry clouds. Webster had shambled through waist-high snow, making only a couple hundred meters for an hour’s effort as he hauled an unconscious Flynt over his left shoulder, when a multirotor hunter-killer drone arrived to investigate the wreckage. 

Cuts and bruises covered both of the agents. Webster popped his head out from under his invisibility cloak. His right shoulder was still dislocated. The pain was nearly unbearable, but he knew if he tried to fix it now he’d probably pass out. That drone wasn’t going away. It began following the deep groove their exit had carved into the snow. 

Webster shifted his weight as he aimed his launcher at the drone. He blinked tears of pain from eye and squeezed the trigger. In a flash, the drone went down, angrily spitting fire as it spun out of control. With a spray of snow it died. 

A Ray of Sunlight

Even underground parking lot was a frosty white tomb. The ice and snow had invaded every last centimeter, accruing over the years until it was no longer a blanket covering the detritus; it was the shape of the landscape, and the things under it were only the faint outlines of what had been. They kept searching for something, anything they could use to get to the iron and steel works in time. It was now daylight, and a brief radio message from Mr. Smythe indicated that the wily Klein was now expected to be launching the rockets on an accelerated timeline.

Wandering in the middle of what must have once been a busy thoroughfare, Flynt absentmendedly kicked open the door of a long-dead passenger bus. Lo, a motorcycle sat in its belly, fueled up and in working order. After some initial trials, the two agents rode off to the southeast, toward their target, pushing through the ice and snow on specially-modified wheels, grateful for their unseen benefactor.

Up Close and Personal

Webster could tell it had been a direct hit. He didn’t know who fired, and he didn’t know exactly what had been hit, but the wrenching, grinding sound told him a mech was about to go down. Then it lurched around the corner, two stories tall, raking the dead buildings across the street with assault cannon and flechette rounds. From the beaten zone, a lone rocket fired. 

Not waiting to see the results, Flynt and Webster scrambled around the corner, autocannon fire following close. The mech was down but not out, and it continued hunting them down even as it tried to eradicate the threat from across the street.

The Wolverines

Only four of them. They’ve lost so many, even in the past few months, yet they keep fighting. Flynt shook his head. It was almost impossible to imagine. The thought of attempting to leave never even crossed their minds. 

The small group of smelly, scruffy resistance fighters laughed and joked as they led the Firewall agents through a long forgotten sewer. It was big enough to walk through standing, and there was nothing nasty in it that hadn’t been frozen ages ago. Viktor got serious for a moment. “Klein is dangerous. He has sensors all over the place. You’ll need a diversionary attack. We’ll provide it.”

Webster looked at the other three Russians. They nodded grimly. Andropov, who hadn’t said a word in the three hours they’d been making their way through the sewers, left no doubt. “He took Vanya and Jacob, and when we finally got them back, they weren’t the same. He’s evil. He must be stopped.”

Walter Klein

Defiant to the end, Klein stood his ground. He had to know that another hit would take him down. He had to know that once this morph died, all that would be left of him would be a backup sitting in a data bank on an orbital hovering over Luna. He had to know that those three years of hardship on Earth, all those days and nights ducking TITAN remnants, searching through the nooks and crannies of a dead world for lost technology, was for naught. He had to know that the cause of his sudden descent into insanity would never be known.

The echoes of distant gun battles raged in the background. His two implacable assassins stood before him, bloodied but still firing. He tried to get off one last shot, but before his finger could make one last squeeze of the trigger, he was ended.

Aftermath

Just how much of a presence does Firewall have on Earth, wondered Webster. And how many agents need to die in order to keep it a secret? Viktor had told him that he knew of two Firewall teams, both much larger than their little three (make that two)-person operation, that had been wiped out trying to eliminate Klein. 

He shrugged and stepped into the egocaster. They certainly do think of everything.