Runaway Rich, fleeing the calamity

FREFNA

An encounter / chain of encounters for players in Syntheim who've escaped the dying world of Tethra, finding a holdout of the escapee nobles.
Finding them with indignity and depravity, breaking the laws they held those below them to and repeating the same fatal behaviors that bought them to ruin once already.

These are the rich fleeing the titanic, before anyone else knew the iceberg was coming.


What they looted from our dead world
-Synth bodies, some organic, currently populating them with VI for hard labour, many in cryo
-Luxury Cyber Drugs, 20% chance of BlueDart Subverters in the stash, Wargrave will take hold
-Tip of the Fountain, the Lotus Engine, storage of those who would escape Tethra & Orna
-Vast amounts of Credits, stored and encryped to codes left to those within the Lotus Server
-Several ships, now damaged and stranded in Frefna Prime's Orbit


Notables

Marisha Tanner
-Claims to be one of the incarnated few who are to repair what's gone wrong, the VI do not follow her commands
-Will take desperate and extreme measures to get to the old Cyber supply, will be applying all she can find to the Lotus engine
-What is her goal here? Is she really willing to murder for a relatively mundane thrill for the others stuck in storage?

VI11226
-Broadcasting distress signal but will fire on non-Tethran ships (matters for what ship the players escaped Tethra on)
-Virtual Intelligence inhabiting a heavily modified synth body on the bridge of one of the falling ships, plugged in haphazardly like a computer with organs spilling out
-Would be overwhelmingly painful to a human embodying that synth, what butcher ordered this?
-Are they a VI or were they once a regular synth soul, now downgraded?

Engineer Aden
-Heavily Wounded Synth, broadcasting on local comms from Engineering
-Complaining of terrible Digital Migraine along with physical injuries crippling his escape
-Victim of Wargrave Subversion, puppet mode dropped on seemingly fatal injuries
-Auto Defences in room still subverted

President Ossian
-Former President of Tethra
-No shame over decisions made on Tethra
-Will form from a hologram if the Lotus Engine is approached and powered
-His recordings litter the ship if emergency power is restored, a request for evacuation of precious cargo
-Distinctly looks like a Synth in the party, if there are any hidden



Time Pressure?

The ships the runaways of Tethra have acquired are damaged from the recent jumps, out of fuel and systems failing across the board. They're going to fall into the freak geology of Frefna Prime and anything of value is going to burn up with it.


What makes this different from other 'Distress Call' encounters? 

The ships are recognizable to the players, these are the privileged who got to escape the apocalypse weeks earlier than they did. There is an element of vengeance and a definite theme of resentment to boil to the forefront.

There's a possibility of the group moving from singular ship play to fleet play, it would be a tough jump to accomplish and the desire for some retribution about what they've been going through the last 10 sessions may outweigh that.


Frefna Prime? 

The offshore taxhaven of Tethra and the Gaelic colonies. Megacorps founded this outpost as a token settlement to dance around paying their share and to host those from the other empires who would want to reach agreements.

Mountainous with vast canyons filled with clouds of an unbreathable mix. Oxygen just about sticks to the mountain settlements when pressure masks are used.


What else is in Frefna system?

An abandoned Sangha shipyard, from a failed colony attempt. War hit this place and now only the ruined shells of half built ships and asteroid scaffolding remain. Perhaps a safe place to hide.

Extreme Solar activity is blocking sensors and making spike jumps into rest of the System a slow affair of several smaller safer jumps.

The other world in Frefna system is Celia, a banking world hosted on floating islands. Cut off from outside contact and having a major economic crash due to recent Apocalyptia.

First Post!

Howdy,
So, I'm Harry and this is my first run at a blog!


I've been playing or running RPG stuff for 10 years or so.
Starting with those janky 40k Classics of Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch.
Before moving swiftly on to World of Darkness and Scion.
Eventually got to try D&D, but it was way after I was hooked on the wider scene of games.
Recently I've heavily gotten into Blades in the Dark, Godbound and Masks: A New Generation.
This year jumping in with Stars Without Number and Scum & Villainy.



Hoping to keep a steady flow of material here, some of it may even be useful.
It'll be salvaged from what I've been running, writing and specific lessons learned over 10 years of this hobby.


I've found the hardest part of a campaign to be the introduction, refining whatever the opening pitch is meant to be took me a lot of failed games to get right. A lot of games just assume I'd get it, for my money I think Blades in the Dark has the best setup to get a compelling campaign going.


With that in mind, first up will be Syntheim.
A short module I've written as a hot-start into a scifi setting of apocalyptic displacement.
It begins with the end of the world, in a transhuman setting where a single death isn't the end, but an existential threat pushing them out into a hostile space just might do it.
It definitely accomplished the goal of being a compelling set of hooks and the playtest group is still after more.

More on that later.