For the first mission, I ran the Downing of the Atychos. This is the suggested/example/starter adventure from the core rulebook. I made no tangible changes to this adventure, with the note that the Atychos was an AAP flyer.
I tried so hard to get everyone to fit a comms module to their mechs, but two players were unconvinced. I don’t need a Comms Module, I need a Weapon Link! This turns out to not be true, so just imagine this play report is punctuated with me having to gently remind the players that their characters can’t talk to each other in their mechs. I feel a little bad being this fussy over the rules, it’s not something I’d usually do, but if you make an active choice not to take comms, I feel I have to lean on it.
Mission Report
The crew dismounts and decides to make a beeline for Hope Falls, hoping to get to the wreckage before anyone else can.
The raider base is ignored after a warning shot is fired, but on the highway the raiders led by Tex are bearing down on a group of Traders. Hoping for a reward, the crew steps in and swiftly dispatches the raiders. No stress, no mess. A brief chat with the trader Mercury, and they promise to meet them back on the Crawler.
On to the city, and moving in they spy part of the Atychos perched on top of a building. Jack and Steve dismount, to clamber up through the ruined building and see what’s inside. At the top, peering into the darkness, Steve lights a flashlight and illuminates three headless corpses. They shift, lurch upwards, to reveal their heads are black, ferrofluid orbs of meld. Their bodies repurposed to the hive-swarms will, Steve decides that he wants absolutely nothing to do with that and chucks a grenade into the wrecked cockpit of the Atychos. Problem solved!
Back in the mechs, the crew makes their way to the centre of the city, coming across the main wreckage of the flyer, and a mercernary team on retrieval duty led by Baines.
The party get into range undetected, and scope the scene. They use their IR vision, spying a very large warm patch in the centre of the wreckage. This is nothing whatsoever to worry about. A plan is hatched to take out their lookout with explosives, then move in for the kill on the rest of them from behind. Athena scrounges up a remote detonator for their explosives, and Laz0rbrn moves in to plant the charge.
The plan goes off without a hitch! Battle is joined!
Battle is swiftly also joined by a gigantic Meld Behemoth that was under the central region of the wreckage! Oh my god!
The fight goes well, notably with Laz0rbrn reaching out and trying to communicate with the meld. They partially succeed, which causes the meld to flee.
Finally, the mercenary crew is largely destroyed, aside from Tricksy who is forced to exit her mech under pain of being exploded. Jack doesn’t think she can be safely left alive, he isn’t fucking around, this man has hate in his heart. Notable salvage is the Brawler chassis, and the entire intact Sentinel Mirrorball.
Laz0rbrn hacks into the mercenary mechs, and determines where they were contracted to take the reclaimed contents of the Atychos to - the Arch-Novel facility at Scamander Point. Picking through the wreckage they find cracked sub-zero containment vessels. Presumably the meld was being held in statis for transport. Note that Scamander Point was not the flyer’s ultimate destination (the party knows this too).
Outcomes
- Lots of scrap and mech parts.
- The location that the mercenary team were tasked to deliver the recovered meld to.
Final Notes
- I probably shouldn’t have let them have the whole Mirrorball for free. This was a big GM mistake. Along with the Brawler chassis, it was too massive a power spike.
- I felt under pressure to make sure everyone else had at least something fun to use, so I made a lot of stuff available at the trader post in the next downtime. I think this was an understandable reaction, I didn’t want to have 2 players with T2 & 3 gear and everyone else stuck with starter stuff, but I think ultimately this made the problem worse. Hindsight is 20/20 - but I’m not really blaming myself for this mistake.