First PC death
Turns out making yourself more prone to nuclear meltdowns, then taking the mech that makes flashy nuclear meltdowns is a recipe for Blowing Up
Ok, got to drop some fun lore at the end of this, party got their first Core Bonuses and I remembered I Can give Talent Points As Bonuses, so I retconned something for it.
Mission construction was a protection mission, a straight fight, and a Strike mission.
Protection mission was fine, the straight fight was a laugher because the damage output of the enemies was bad. Tonight's Strike though is where some stuff happened.
The big thing is first player death. During the rest leading into this, they activated the Castigate feature of their Manticore.
I also realize I am Too Lenient of a GM.
- Mirage, when using a weapon that would self-heat them into rolling Stress, moved just enough to put them at their weapon's max range (3). They overheated and got meltdown, which happens immediately when Castigating. At range 2. That felt really bullshit, so I let that go long to hit the guy.
- I misremembered the Brace rule. Let someone use their standard Move after Bracing, and just limited them to one Quick Action.
- Retconned Harper working on their Comp/Con over two downtimes, initially making it an Improved Comp/con reserve, into giving them the Technophile talent, so they have upgraded it to a rudimentary AI/NHP.
- Forgot enemy Armor, and when I remembered, I didn't apply it.
- Repeatedly held Reinforcements out of the battle when people started taking multiple structure damage
- Repeatedly would have people not take actions if they were "too far" away from the battle.
I don't know why... OK I know exactly why I pull my punches. It's because I don't want to TPK even though there's no penalty for it. I also don't want to feel like I'm flexing more system mastery than them in a combat. I don't count the armor because I don't want them to go "well fuck I'm useless here" instead of them using hacks or focusing objectives or whatever. So a lot of problems with their play are my fault.
As for the final Strike mission, they had to take out a Turret that had a line 22, 20 Kinetic AP cannon that needed to recharge. As they took out the batteries powering it, the recharge would take longer. I was actually REALLY surprised that the Tortuga was the MVP though. They were able to knock out 2 of the batteries using their Juggernaut 3 talent to cover a ton of ground and crash into the batteries since they were objects. It went really well for them, apart from getting obliterated by the cannon at the start of the encounter.
So Mirage beefed it, and the way I have cloning work is that everyone's licenses are constantly recording things. When Harper and Anders were picked up after the mission, their Licenses were doing an upload, and when Mirage awoken, she had the image of her death from 3 different perspectives seared into her brain. She also took Technophile at level up to reflect the next change, which iiiiiis: she's got the spirit of Mike (the Shadowrun Orc) and all his forgotten warrior spirits in her head.
Downtime: Holy Man's organization didn't roll crap, so they got some points of Efficiency. He has no idea what is going on with his religion so I'm taking over and saying "Hey they'll be a spy network for you once they spread out".
His downtime action was related to his group via Scrounge and Barter, helping furnish their small church.
Mirage's downtime was Get Connected, as a way to make amends for framing a pilot from the team that shares their barracks/flat. She's on cleaning duty for awhile as a way to patch things up.
Harper wanted to keep working on their Comp/Con slash NHP, now that I retroactively awarded Technophile 1 to her. She got a mixed success so she now needs Specialized Knowledge and Tools to do so. I think I'll put a research lab in the middle of their next encounter, so if she wants something she'll have to go on foot.
The last bit of the session after levelling involved a sort of cliff hanger. Mirage was watching TV with Ek, the person she patched things up with, and after channel flipping, they noticed the same event was on like, 5 channels, from the country of Dynamis. It was a huge event. A stage the half the size of a city block. The religion duo leadership giving an address about how the pilots behind them were heroes, who returned from battle miraculously. Forged from the fires of combat, they survived what some would call a failure, and brought back information about enemy forces. And for that they should be rewarded.
Ek flagged over his team, because he was able to see that two of the five seated, robed pilots, were ones they had faced before. Upon hearing that Mirage noticed that one was someone they faced last mission.
One at a time, the pilots were presented a thick bead necklace, a sword rested on their lap, and then a silver mirror was held up to them. Once a pilot was shown the mirror, the beads around their neck had wires burst out of them, burying into the skin of the pilot. The sword, acting like a conduit, starts glowing, and the silver on the mirror starts peeling off and making quicksilver flesh, stretching the body of the pilot and turning it into an amalgamation of flesh and metal.
The crowd cheered every horrific second of this.
Brekka Della Donne, from the other team, fired her gun at the screen, but it just went through the holo screen. She spiked her gun in frustration and walked away cursing.
Mirage and Holy Man were horrified by this.
Mechanically, this means that every pilot from that stage got a new Template: Horror.
Next session they'll be dealing with the other country in the conflict :)
If anyone cares about new builds, I'll update my website and link it.
