[Savage Worlds] Empty (Star)Child (Star Wars crashes into Doctor Who - log)

[Kato]

So, I decided to try to this time properly log my campaign, on the one hand for possible entertainment, on the other to give people the chance to help out.

System and party:
We're using a homebrew variant of the Savage Worlds rules, which is made to fit Star Wars. (Which isn't really much work as SW is pretty setting independent and we've decided to not or hardly include force users, so it's basically a generic scifi adventure set with a sprinkel of Star Wars in the Old Republic Era)
We're a group of atm five people, playing changing systems and settings, and next week we'll return to me DMing and the rest playing mostly a band of smugglers/ scroundels along with our latest addition player getting a special role. The old players are a Rhodian, a Togruta and an HK-47 style droid who have already proven they can not be trusted to do what they want or they'll burn the whole galaxy to the ground. So I need to reign them in a bit. Also, them having usually a fully available space ship I need to railroad where it goes, sadly, but whatever. They don't mind.


Adventure:
As I usually have a hard time creating entirely original ideas I tend to borrow from good stories and work based on them. This time I decided to take the early NuWho (that is the new version of BBC's Doctor Who series) episodes Empty Child/Doctor Dances. In short, it's a bout a WW II torn London, haunted by a creepy kid in a gas mask. I'll update the time period to a futuristic city at war, with a similar child. And a bit more combat thrown in. (London didn't get much ground combat but my players need stuff to shoot.) The new player will be a scientists native to the planet/city and directly involved in the creation of the kid, albeit somewhat unintentionally and also not completely aware what exactly is wrong with it. She's been very entusiastic about making her character and getting heavily involved in things, which seems like it will be fun. Or at least I hope so.
So after I force the party to land in the city, encounter the kid, the new player, some soldiers from both sides, I usually leave my adventures pretty open, giving them options to do whatever they want, as long as it's not "I'll nuke the city and see what happens". I prepared a bunch of ideas for characters and how they'll react to the party, but most should be done by them meeting the new player, running from the kid, and fighting soldiers or, maybe, unlikely (?) negotiating with one army or the other. I guess if they actually decide to join a side, I can make up some actualy missions for them. Not sure how long they'll take to get out there again. And not 100% sure what will make me let them leave. I guess if the town is in rubble there is not much left to do..


The center point of the story should be the kid. If you're unaware of the idea behind it, google Empty Child. For the players it will be a young kid in a breathing mask, hiding its face, that's immune to bullets and "infects" people it touches by first dropping them unconscious, then them "growing" breathing masks, and later rising zombie like similar to the kid. The source behind it is a crashed alien ship, in my case of Skakoan origin. Finding the ship would be pretty helpful to the crew, but while the new player knows about it, I made it quite clear she should be reluctant to talk about it unless it becomes very necessary.

Spoiler: solution and episode resolution

Show

The source of the problems are as in the episode nano machines that have a problem with the species change and in a kind of super focused action defend and heal the kid to the point where it's unwittingly a super soldier with no intent to fight but only find its mother. Other people in contact with it get infected by the machines which try to alter them similar to the kid.
The more in episode, cheesy solution would be to calm the child down on the risk of getting infected and this could also calm down the machines. More likely once they figure out what is going on they could try to hack the machines or control them from the ship, fixing the problem this way. Extreme violence might also work but... oh well, I know my players. But they'd at least need to make both armies work together for that! Can't make it too easy.

So, that's the essence of my plans. Tomorrow is the first session, so the day after I might post an update on what has happened and keep doing that if there's an interest.
Opinions, hints, etc are always welcome!

[Kato]

Okay, so even with so far lack of interest I'll at least give a short review of the first session.

First off, the day before one of our former players called and asked if he could join for the session since he was in town. I somewhat reluctantly agreed since it meant he'd bring his progammer/mechanic Jawa who was part of the crew (or alternatively some jedi) and this would probably lead to hacking hijinx. Also, before getting started we finished another campaign which ended with me subtly backstabbing everyone in order to support the resurrection of an evil deity. Well, the characters don't yet know they got backstabbed but the players do. Anyway, mistrust is fun.


The crew was surprisingly cooperative and decided to just follow the distress signal. Which means I didn't have to shut down the ship by having the signal hack them and they got rewarded by keeping control over it. Win-win. So they headed to the planet, first tried to land at the enemy camp but got scared off because a few anti-air cannons were directed at them. (I mean, who wouldn't aim at an alien ship suddenly trying to land in your camp?) Then they decided to land on top of a hospital and after a short talk with a nurse made contact with the new player (who is now a scientists with an important mission from the government, mostly related to the crashed ship and the kid)
sidenote I forgot: As a quirk I've been trying to run the adventure bilingual. Since we're all native Germans with good English skills, I had them use German as Basic and English as the local language. Which means one player who is the translator droid had to do translations. After the first session I'm not sure if this really adds anything, so I might drop it but for the moment we got at least a few laughs out of it. (also, because I'm using English audio bits for the kid's lines)

After meeting up and a short, brusk talk, the new player decided to take them to her boss, the local general. In between I gave her the chance to encounter the kid but since she didn't really know what she would do if they met, she didn't take it. But it got the others suspicious about what is going on. Upon meeting the NPC general the new girl and I agreed on a few things to tell the players which would not fall under military secrets. There was some arguing and some attempts at intimidation, I leveled a dozen soldiers guns at them and we had a laugh. In the end they agreed to help out for a few hundred kilogramms of gold. Well, to look for the distress beacon, anyway. Which the locals are notsure yet is the ship or the kid or...??? Sometimes it's fun to look at these things from the outside.
So, new girl and the crew stuck together, I gave them an NPC military officer to go along and they headed back for their shipped still parked on top of the hospital. Then they spent like an hour trying to triangulate the position of the ship despite my less and less subtle hints the atmosphere wouldn't let them do that but eff if it if we just try again and again and again it will work at some point. (It seriously sucks if you try to argue scifi physics with real physicists Okay, it is mostly fun but it can be annoying) After a while they gave up and argued for what felt like another hour on what to do.
Somehow I got them to at least get off the roof and look around th city. I was about to finish when I decided to give them a glance of the kid. So I engineered an encounter. (At this point the visiting player also figured out what I was referencing since he knew the episode. Stupid me dpouble checked none of the regulars was watching Who but not him. Luckily he didn't spoil anything on accident except a minor bit but nobody noticed) The droid was weirdly nice and tried to talk to the kid and got a minor static. (Note: I need to plan what the nano machines will do to him next time) Then he decided to try to blast it and he got backfire from the atmosphere which he took as backfire from the kid. Well, he'll learn next time he tries to blaster somebody... I got them to move away and wonder what to do next...

So, yeah, it wasn't perfect but for what we usually do it was pretty decent. They made contact, they were mostly cooperative, some surprisingly so. The new girl fit well into her role considering it was her first time in the setting, system and character. She later complained I shouldn't play the creepy sound bits I used for the kid this late at night (we finished after midnight) which I guess is good and bad.
I guess next time they'll try to contact the enemy forces since the players don't seem too trusting of their current allies. I'll give her more than one soldier to go along so she has the man power to intervene if the players decide to act against her side's interests. Or just act up in general. Need to figure out what the kid does to the droid next time or if he hwas some kind of long term consequence from touching it... maybe he'll just get slowly reprogrammed.
Otherwise the players are good at doing their own things, worst case she gets advice from her superiors on what they might do or I'll throw some enemies at them.

[Kato]

Well, I'll give this another try and attempt to stay shorter


So we pciked up after the encounter with the child, heading back to the government building. (Before short exchange of characters because the Jawa had to be swapped for the Togruta) T
Not too much new from the government... I put a few more soldiers with them so the scientist/ I could interfer if the players attempted something seriously stupid. (Well, they did and I didn't because I can have fun with it)
They spend a night there and next day after a bit of persuading from my side decided to talk to the enemy army. I wanted to give them the chance and possibly see if they'd start fighting... which they didn't... Seriously, our assassin droid usually shoots at anyone that annoys him and now he hardly does that? Well, he did annoy my military avatar and got shot in the foot. But he's a droid, so...
Talk with the enemy went surprisingly friendly. They went there with a white flag, pretending their two government attachees were from space like themselves. Surprisingly the players actually asked what the reason behind the war was now, so I decided to spout something about royal family infidelity. They seemed to buy it. But neither could they help the players or could they convince the players to help their side in the war instead. Before saying goodbye the droid shook the opposing officers hand..

So, not too much to note.
Not surprisingly, the player who couldn't be there last time started to ask questions about society and food and whatever which have nothing to do with anything and I had to make stuff up on the spot. She can be y bit of a handful...
Scientist didn't do very much this time... next time I'll force her hand when I make her pick between her government and the other players most likely. We'll have to see.
The droid contibuted the most. I decided he did get affected subtly after he touched the child and had him do a few checks against it which he failed. Now he has to occasionally say "mummy" for starters. Also, since he touched the opposing officer, I can now make it spread among the enemies and then have them roll over them as a zombie army. Hoorray.

Next time I'll probably force the scientist to pick sides, as mentioned and throw in an air raid. Considering how slowly the plot usually advances that will be the second half of the day, maybe I'll add another encounter with the kid. Next day or so I'll have the zombie army march in, so we will have to get some action.