lame mage productions

Beyond man’s small blue world a vast cosmos awaits. What wonders of the universe are yet to be discovered? Is space more grand or terrible than we even imagine? Are we alone?

InSpace is out. You can download it from RPGNow or straight from the Lame Mage website. And yes, it’s free.

Thanks to Shock: by Joshua A.C. Newman for proving you can tackle big sci fi in small games, Geiger Counter by Jonathan Walton for showing our crew that shared authority can be fun, and of course to Jared A. Sorensen for making InSpectres in the first place and turning detective work on its head.

Kudos to the brave crew of the DAUNTLESS (Mike “Stark” Frost, Jem “Conrad” Lewis, Ching-Ping “Kessler” Lin, and Stephen “Duchamps” Scholz) and our other InSpectres gamers from the Third Eye Detectives, the Copernicus Agency, and the Gentlemen of the Royale Arms (Greg Gorden, Chris Haddad, Robert Haskell, and Kevin Lewis).

Now go explore. And if you make it back tell us how it goes.

The InSpace draft is done and in the hands of bold peer reviewers. With a little luck it should be ready for download in the next few days. It’s packed with just about every iota of wisdom we gleaned from our missions aboard the DAUNTLESS. And what did we learn about playing a good cosmic mystery with InSpectres? You’ll find out soon enough.

“Wow,” you say, “life on the DAUNTLESS sure looks exciting! I wish I could navigate deep space and explore the mysteries of the cosmos and roll d6 and stuff!”

Well gnash your teeth no longer. I’ve got the greenlight from Jared Sorensen to release InSpace as a micro-supplement for InSpectres.

InSpace should be ready for download in November. How much will it cost you? Free, as in free. You’ll need the InSpectres rulebook, so if you don’t already have it stop stalling and go buy a copy.

If you don’t think you can stand the wait, use this time constructively to come up with cool names for your ship, because you cannot roam the uncharted reaches of the cosmos without a cool ship name.

It’s a rule.

Spoiler alert: Like the other DAUNTLESS games, mission three was a lot of fun. Unlike the other missions the story didn’t really wrap up in one neat package. Why not? We accidentally skipped the mid-game pow-wow. Seriously: do not underestimate the power of the pow-wow.

Once again Jem takes the GM helm and Ping and I take the player seats, bringing back Kessler and Hollis from game two, Trapped in the Void. Mike isn’t around so Stark is still absent, leaving Hollis the XO at the helm again.

The DAUNTLESS is responding to a distress call from a remote colony. The colony itself is fine, but a mysterious illness is afflicting the crew of the orbiting Prospect Station. The station is actually the used up old hulk of the colony ship that carried settlers to this planet (which we spontaneously named Valora) years back. It was stripped for parts and left in orbit as a docking station and communication point, manned by a skeleton crew.

So ends the intro. The DAUNTLESS is at 10 franchise dice but we don’t want a super long game, so we settle upon a 12 die mystery.

There’s always a little moment of pause when we look at the total dice needed to solve the mystery. After all, with reasonably good rolls you can win 2 dice with every skill check — you can wrap up a mystery very, very quickly. Sometimes that makes things a little intimidating: everyone’s a little shy to roll the dice and potentially lock-in a chunk of the mystery.

We agree that we’ve already spoken to the surface and gotten the intro, so the focus is on the station. I break the ice and open a hailing frequency to the station (successful Contact check) but narrate that all I get is a recorded message warning anyone to stay away. The tone is unmistakably hostile: they say they’ve sealed the hatches and they’ll repel anyone who tries to board.

So friendly! It’s a recording so we have no idea how long it’s been in place. Kessler makes a sensor sweep of the station (successful Technology check) and announces that the station’s engines are warming up. Ping was clearly paying attention during the intro and is now taking advantage of the fact that the station is actually a decommissioned space ship to put us under a little more time pressure. Thanks Ping!

We’re ready to move in but Jem decides to give us a push and reaches for the Stress dice: there’s a blaring alarm and a crewmen on the scanner yells out that the station has fired a missile at us! There’s a distinct pause, a “why does an old colony ship have missiles?” moment, and after a little consideration Jem re-describes it as some kind of a cargo pod they jury-rigged with boosters to launch it towards us. Crude but dangerous in close orbit. Clearly the act of desperate men. We embrace the idea and prepare to take our lumps.

[GMs take note: Jem certainly could have just said "yes, that is a good question, why do they have missiles? Now duck!" and made the incongruous fact part of the mystery, but after he thought about it for a moment he didn't want to so he edited instead. Either one works, so long as everyone is on the same page about whether what just happened is a) expected or b) unexpected.]

The junk-missile rockets towards the DAUNTLESS and we take evasive action. Kessler gets pummeled with Stress damage, while Hollis remains cool as a cucumber and navigates the ship to a higher orbit where the would-be saboteurs won’t be able to get another shot at them. This becomes an ongoing theme for the game: Kessler takes a total of 5 Stress hits this game and Hollis takes nada, zero, zip.

Leery of more drastic measures by the crew of the station, Hollis orders a boarding party to don vacc suits: they’re going to keep the DAUNTLESS at a safe distance and then space walk over. Yeah it’s true: any chance I get I suggest a space walk. Really, what’s the point of going all the way into space if you aren’t going to go for a walk? Sitting on the bridge reading sensors all day is for sissies.

Since we’ve already been met with hostile force the boarding party is a mix of security and medical personal. It’s still a rescue mission, but everyone is armed and sternly ordered to defend themselves if they have to. Hollis is leading the party personally (of course) and Kessler argues that she should come along to head up the medical team (of course). That’s all just as it should be.

Hollis makes a check for the space walk (successful Athletics). It’s a breeze, but I narrate that even as we drift cautiously towards the silent hulk, what we _don’t_ see is that on the far darkside of the station there are glowing trails criss-crossing the hull, like the luminescent trails of some alien snail. Dum dum dum! Are they only on the far side, or are they only visible in the dark? We don’t know.

After the boarding party touches down and is milling around trying to override one of the cargo airlocks to sneak aboard, Ping decides to drum up some trouble, so she says that while Kessler is standing around taking readings (successful Technology check) she spots a hint of the glowing stuff at the edge of the darkside of the hull and wanders over — alone — to check it out. But just as Kessler’s stooping to take a closer look Ping narrates that the ethereal slime lashes out at her! She yells and recoils and the rest of the party bounds over, but by then there’s no sign of motion. Was it just her imagination? She’s frazzled and her frantic protests that “it moved!” are met with skepticism — no one listens to the person who’s already taken Stress damage on their Contact.

Just like in the last game, I’m secretly angling to show different sides of our characters than we have before. Sure enough, we’re once again in different roles: faced with a medical threat to the crew and the possibility of armed resistance, Hollis is all hard-nosed authority, issuing side-arms to the boarding party and warning them to exercise extreme caution. Kessler wants to go play with goo on the hull, but Hollis is shutting her down and telling her to stick with the plan: the people on board probably need medical attention. They come first.

It’s a flip (again): now Kessler is the idealist (um, scidealist) and Hollis is the close-minded by-the-book commander. After all, he hasn’t seen anything weird yet and she has.

Kessler grumbles but falls in line, reluctantly agreeing to save further goo examinations until the station has been secured and the crew located. Ping doesn’t mind, because at the end of her narration she had already said that though Kessler didn’t notice it, a strand of the goo had reached up and stuck to the back of her suit…

Attentive readers will now notice our mistake: that little chat on the hull was the halfway point. We should have had a pow-wow to theorize about what our characters thought was going on. We did have a good roleplaying interaction, but we never discussed the actual mystery.

Once inside Hollis orders the boarding party to split up into teams and secure the station (successful Contact check). Its spooky creeping through dark hallways with flashlights — still in spacesuits of course — and with my success I narrate that we have to overide the lock on the engine room because a dead crewman has sealed himself inside. The logs show that he set the engines on autopilot to fly the whole station into the sun (as soon as they finish coming online). I also add that he’s not just dead, but whole sections of his body have vanished — they’re still there in some sense, because for example his arm is still attached even though his whole shoulder has faded into non-existence. Are they invisible, warped into some lower dimension but still physically attached? As usual, we don’t know.

Kessler gets the call to come examine him, but as soon as she starts Jem grabs the Stress dice and declares that the not-as-dead-as-we-thought crewman opens his eyes and grabs her. There’s a quick “wait, do you mean he’s alive or do you mean he’s a zombie” dicussion which comes down on the “he’s alive” side. More Stress damage for Kessler and then the hysterical crewman is sedated — which we rapidly decided was probably a dramatic misstep, since asking him what had happened would have been more interesting.

Too late, he’s out. Kessler goes ahead and examines him (successful Academics) and uses her success to narrate a completely unrelated fact that the whole station suddenly starts shuddering. Sneaky duck! Now normally that would be fine, but this is the second to last clue and it doesn’t get us any closer to an answer. We also don’t know if the shuddering is the engines firing up to fly us into the sun or the slime on the hull coming to life godzilla style.

Down to our last mystery dice, Hollis overrides the engines (successful Technology) and forced to wrap-up I describe that the goo on the hull does indeed seem to be reacting to the sudden firing of the engines (the vibrations? the radiation?) but once we cut them off it settles down. It isn’t an intelligent creature, more like a space mold or fungus.

Prospect Station is saved and (theoretically) we’ll be able to tend to the other crew members, assuming we find them. The end, sort of.

I know what you’re thinking: that game wrapped up somewhat inconclusively didn’t it? Yep. We didn’t move towards answering the mystery fast enough, so when the last franchise dice got earned we still had a lot of explaining to do. As I mentioned at the outset, a big part of the problem was that we unintentionally glossed over the half-time pow-wow, so instead of solving the mystery in the second half we were still wading through random events.

The details were all there, so I think with a little liberal epilogue we could have wrapped it up if we tried. A fairly simple explanation (in hindsight) is that the goo on the hull was something carried along in space that hit the hull and then spread. The crew either brought it aboard for examination or (more likely) carried it in by mistake while working out on the hull, just like Kessler with the goo on her suit. As far as treating it, we’d already seen that it wasn’t making the hull disappear, so we could have easily narrated that it behaved differently in vacuum than it did in atmosphere.

InSpectres has a rule that you only earn half the franchise dice if you solve the mystery early, and I think the same penalty would fit for solving the mystery late or not at all. On the bright side we already played game four and it was a win: we learned from our mistake and made sure to pow-wow.

This was the second InSpectres tale from the gentlemen of the Royale Arms. The first being The Case of the Peripatetic Pharaoh. It was also the first InSpectres game I had ever GMed since so far I’ve been a happy player in the InSpectres in Spaaaace! games. In addition to the game summary, I discuss a few lessons learned about this game.

The Cast:
The Honorable Professor Phineas K Boss, III, Esq.: professor of law and former judge, lover of The Hunt (view halloo!) - Chris
Sir Percival Walsey Kichner: expert in linguistics, timepieces of the world and sporting a monocle but only when there are no other men with monocles - Ben
Colonel St. John Blythe Stockton: handlebar mustache, “stocky” build, butterfly enthusiast - Jem

At the Royale Arms, relaxing over a glass of port and a cigar, the three old friends recount their adventures to the ever-suffering butler Montague:

In their younger days, the three gentlemen were on holiday aboard a steamship in the Mediterranean, on its way to Crete. They enjoyed the company of the other passengers, often dining at the Captain’s table as gentlemen of distinction and good breeding. One evening, the Captain interrupted their brandy and cigars and asks them discretely to come to the first-class cabin of one Madame Merriweather, a passenger who for the most part kept to herself. They rushed to the the cabin where they found the Madame dead on the floor, a vial of poison in her hand. The Captain asked the gentlemen to investigate and find the killer before they reached Crete. Both his reputation and the reputation of the shipping line were at stake… Thus began The Case of the Vile Vial…

Sir Kichner immediately notices the vial was put in her hand after she died to make it look like suicide. Ah, foul play, most foul. Investigating further, he thinks he hears something in the hall, but alas, a bad roll results in a bump on the head for his trouble and the shadowy figure runs down the hall. Our man of action with the revolver, Colonel Stockton, immediately gives chase huffing and puffing after the figure, but oh no! he slips on the deck and loses sight of the culprit, but luckily he left behind a mysterious letter fragment with a strange sigil.

Ben then leaps in with a confessional that all of this brought back bad memories for Colonel Stockton (Jem) who is haunted by the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife.

Later, Sir Kichner, no doubt nursing his head in the lounge, strikes up a conversation with another passenger, young Charles, who as it turns out is so love struck for Madame Merriwhether that he’s followed her onto this passenger ship. Charles is particularly distraught because he’s sure that the good Madame, recently widowed, is meeting her new paramour in Crete, probably some Greek shipping tycoon he thinks.

Professor Phineas continues to search the room and finds nothing but the dead woman’s little poodle dog. Using his keen canine training skills of the The Hunt, he shows the dog the scent of his master and follows him deep into the bowels of the ship. The dog yips up to a woman he knows. The woman turns around and Phineas is shocked when it’s none other than the dead Madame Merriweather! Still in awe of this revelations, Phineas doesn’t notice the blackjack above his head. Fade to black.

Back in the parlour, the gentlemen enjoy a nightcap ice bags in one hand and brandy in the other. This is half-time when the characters get together and discuss the case so far. Never, ever forget half-time. Sir Kichner has the idea that perhaps Charles can identify the body to be sure that it is Madame Merriwhether herself, but before they can do that, he takes a look at the letter with the Sigil and immediately identifies it as the sigil of a mystic cult of the dead known to be from Crete, and the letter was clearly addressed to Madame Merriweather herself.

The gentlemen regroup and decide to investigate the cargo hold and steam engine area since that’s where Phineas saw the other Madame. Colonel Stockton already knowing the layout of the hold from the Captain leads the way and sees a light from one of the cargo rooms — but he’s distracted because the memories of his wife are flooding back, the dead Madame Merriweather, the dead Mrs. Stockton! He kicks in the door and they realize they’ve interrupted some sort of mystic ritual! A scuffle ensues but the gentlemen are outnumbered and soon they find themselves tied up in the back witnessing the ritual’s completion. Luckily, dogs really are man’s best friend and Phineas has the pooch well-trained as he (the dog) bites through the rope. Meanwhile, Sir Kichner realizes that the mystic ritual is no real ritual, it’s a fake! And just he is going to announce it, the Captain and the crew rush in and all the cult members are arrested on site.

It turns out that the imposter cult members had convinced Madame Merriwhether they could resurrect her husband through their mystic rituals. They also convinced her to fake her own death so that she and he husband could disappear untraced intending most likely to gain control of her fortune.

Case closed.

This was my first time GMing InSpectres. I confess to having watched a lot of Agatha Christie recently and was thinking about (unduly influenced by?) Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express type mysteries. Unfortunately, this thinking led me astray when it came to the Royale Arms. Even though it’s set in the same relative time period, I didn’t realize the genre was off. The gentlemen of the Royale Arms don’t investigate ordinary murders of kitchen cooks or heiresses, and on top of that in Agatha Christie the detective is usually hired or is familiar with the suspects. Still, the game turned out pretty well because the players made the game into something interesting — a sure sign of good players who make their own fun. I only wish I had given them a starting premise with more meat so they didn’t have to make themselves dive in and use early franchise dice to make the story strange enough to be an actual mystery.

So what I learned from this game is that the mystery has to fit the genre of the characters and there has to be enough of the right information to make it interesting to them. You don’t need a ton, but just enough to put it in the “huh, I want to know more” category. In this game, a dead woman with poison in her hand didn’t quite get there. Anything can be made to be enticing with good players as evidenced by this game, but you’re better off starting off well rather than making the players dig out of a hole right off the bat. You want the players to be excited and be thinking of potential solutions when they first hear the mystery, not 4 franchise dice in.

Our first InSpectres in Spaaaace! game turned out to be a great way to do cerebral “mysteries of the universe” adventures. But is InSpectres really a winner for this kind of game or did we just luck out? Science demands more data points!

Recognizing that GMing is easy street, Jem steps up to the plate so I get to play. This makes our cast of characters:

Dr. Miranda Kessler — returning scidealist and stubborn crusader from the previous mission / Ping

Hollis — on the surface a calm and competent commander and roleplaying straight-man, but deep down he’s a seeker of the universe’s mysteries. His (secret) talent is philosophy and with careful play it will come up, oh, only about a hundred times this game / Ben

We’re still on the DAUNTLESS, so what happened to Stark, our de facto captain? Or plucky Conrad? We decide that Hollis is the new XO but is acting Captain because Stark is off-ship. Could it be Stark is standing in front of a formal review board, explaining his actions on Telos-3? Or maybe he’s just boozing it up somewhere on shore leave.

We don’t want a rigid chain of command, since that leads to things like “the captain says do it, so we do it” so during the first mission we had an understanding that the scientific decisions had equal weight to “command” decisions when we were investigating mysteries (aka all the time). So while Hollis is acting Captain, it’s more about division of labor (running the ship vs doing science) than about being in charge.

The setup: cruising through uncharted space, the DAUNTLESS gets trapped in an inky void. The sensors failed to give us any warning and before we know it we’re right in the middle of nothing, all screens showing black.

After some discussion we agree that instead of starting play right at the moment of impact we’ll pick things up several hours later. Entering the void jarred the ship’s systems and we just now have main systems back online and operational. That makes things a little more contemplative, less actiony.

The DAUNTLESS has 7 franchise dice so Jem sets the mystery at 14. Time to figure out what we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Ping doesn’t want to start, so just to be a jerk I throw her the ball: “Dr. Kessler, now that the scanners are back online can you tell us what’s out there?” Curses. Kessler scans the black void but much to Ping’s delight can’t get any solid readings (failed Technology check).

I ad lib that the ship had taken some micrometeorite damage to the hull a few days prior. We thought we had fully repaired the power couplings on the outer hull, but clearly these sensor failures mean our repairs must have shaken loose. We’re going to have to go out into the mysterious void and double-check the repairs. In space suits.

I really just want to force us to go out in suits because that seems a lot more fun that sitting on the bridge doing scans all day. Go 2001! Kessler naturally wants to take direct readings with hand-held sensors and won’t be left behind. Wanting to get a first hand look at the damage I lead the repair team out on a space walk (successful Athletics). Herein lies the fun of InSpectres. I succeeded, so that should mean things go great, right? Maybe, but it really means I get to define the truth of the mystery. Screw placid space walks! I narrate that once we get out into the void, it isn’t an inky void at all — it’s a shifting field of shadows, where strange visions seem to emerge and fade away again before they can be fully recognized. Is that the lake where I fished as a boy? Are those trees by my house? Or am I just imagining things, seeing the familiar in the abstract? The DAUNTLESS doesn’t have physical (glass) windows, just sensors, so seeing it in suits is our first direct observation, and clearly it’s a lot different when seen with the naked eye.

I’m going on about how the shifting visions are both disorienting and overwhelming, and Jem runs with it and hits us with some Stress (yea!). We take some lumps and narrate that we send the overwhelmed crew members back into the ship but personally fight it and push on. The void also seems to interfere with anything but short-range communications (of course).

Kessler makes a sensor check from a hand-held unit (successful Technology) and finds there’s something strange about the space — it’s bigger than it should be based on our last readings before entering the void.

We make some additional checks to complete repairs and get back inside, establishing that each person is seeing different shapes in the void, and the visions seem simultaneously familiar and foreign, like deja vu. The last thing we spot before limping back into the airlock are cathedral-like arches surrounding us in the vast space. Unlike the other phantoms in the void, both Kessler and Hollis see the same thing. Does that mean the arches are not an illusion, that they’re really there?

We’re half way through the mystery franchise dice, so we cut to a mid-game conference. Note to all would-be InSpectres players: the half-time pow-wow is an invaluable tool. The games where we did it rocked. The games where we skipped it (mistakenly or intentionally) sucked. You do the math.

We cut to the sick bay, where many of the crew members who went on the space walk are recovering and getting checked out for after effects. Some are worse off than others. True to halftime form, our heroes compare notes about what they’ve seen so far and debate what they think is really going on.

Hollis and Kessler rapidly fall into a cool Mulder/Scully dynamic but with more bickering. Kessler is the skeptic scientist. She argues that they need more readings, that science can shed more light on the void (so to speak). These “visions” are explainable scientific phenomena. After his experiences outside Hollis is a believer: “you saw it yourself, the sensors don’t pick this up — this isn’t something you can explain away, it’s something you have to _experience_.” Philosophy powers activate!

The dynamic is also particularly entertaining because in the last game Kessler was the scidealist who bitterly argued that alien contact was right around the corner, but here she’s on the other side of the fence, arguing rational science while I go on about embracing the unknown. This becomes my new personal goal for the DAUNTLESS games: having every character stand in a different light each game, but in ways that are still consistent as a whole.

Kessler does a database search to find images that match the strange arches she saw in the void (successful Academics) and finds passages from an old fiction story that seems to describe them. What the heck?

With the “analyze vs experience” battle lines now firmly drawn, Kessler steps up her attack. She already performed experimental brain scans on the crew members who went on the space walk, but now she’s determined to get Hollis to go under the scanner: he was out there longer, he saw the mysterious cathedral-like arches, so his brainwaves might reveal more. She’s modified the apparatus to collect deep brain activity (activating her jury-rigging talent) and sure, that might be risky (Jem starts to warm up the Stress dice) but if Hollis is serious about finding the answer to the mystery and freeing the DAUNTLESS he’ll do it. She’d do it to herself but she needs to run the (dangerously modified) machine. Hollis thinks she’s barking up the wrong tree but any prospect of finding the truth tempts him so he agrees. Jem cackles as he describes the pain of the deep probe and throws Stress dice at me, which I promptly use to finish crippling my Academics and Contact. Dr. Kessler determines that the void is reflecting images from our own minds (duh!) and Hollis slowly regains consciousness.

Hollis is called to the bridge — Kessler momentarily tries to stop him, threatening to have him declared medically unfit for duty because of the mental experiences he’s been through, but she backs down and fumes instead. Oh that man!

Early on in the game I took the confessional chair and made a personal log entry about how I had no idea Dr. Kessler would cover for me and try to take the blame on herself (blame for what? no idea, just hedging my bets). Now Ping finally fires back with a blistering confessional about how Hollis put the ship in danger for his own selfish ends. Ouch!

On the bridge the crew are flustered trying to get the sensors to work, and the now eerily placid Hollis tells them not to be concerned, the sensors aren’t going to tell them anything anyway, the truth is right in front of them they just have to open their eyes to see it, etc.

I’m intentionally playing up damage taken from Stress — since I dinged my Contact, I’m sounding more distant and inscrutable, thinking I’m putting people at ease with my “embrace the unknown” talk but of course having quite the opposite effect. Same with my damaged Academics: I think I understand so I’m not analyzing the situation anymore, I’m embracing the experience. Hollis doesn’t so much reassure the crew as make them more worried about him than the ship (successful Contact with some tapped franchise dice) and I narrate that while Hollis “explains” things to his uneasy crew he comes to realization that it’s not just reflections of our own minds we’re seeing in the void — there must be something outside trying to reach us as well. Hence the unfamiliar shared images like the cathedral arches.

Slipping off the bridge Hollis decides to go for his “Spock meets V’ger” moment and return to the void — alone — and make contact. Normally Star Trek references are verboten in DAUNTLESS games, but this is a rare exception. He’s off the ship and drifting into the sea of phantoms before anyone discovers where he’s gone.

When Kessler finds out Hollis is missing, she puts two and two together and guesses what he’s done. No way! She struggles into the clumsy suit and goes after him (Athletics failure) but gets disoriented among the shifting visions (Stress!). Hollis finds her tumbling in the void and tries to calm her down. He doesn’t seem concerned that their suit jets are expended, the interference of the void makes contacting the DAUNTLESS for help impossible, and they’ve only got six hours of suit air and no hope of rescue. He seems content to just drift along.

It’s irritating, then disturbing, and then finally peaceful, following Hollis’ example and drifting among the everchanging shadows that surround them. In cool character moment of understanding, Kessler turns off her comm and records a personal log in her suit computer for whoever find them: she lies and says it was her idea to leave the ship. Getting lost was her fault, and Hollis only came to rescue her.

Meanwhile Hollis has been lost in contemplation, striving to make contact with whatever is out there. For a fleeting instant (succesful Contact, finishing the mystery) he loses himself in the void… and feels the presence of the another sentience, an intelligence in the void. And then the moment is gone, and all around them the shifting blackness fades from view, leaving the familiar field of stars and the welcome sight of the DAUNTLESS coming to their rescue…

…

Back aboard the ship there’s time for reflection. Was there an alien intelligence trying to make contact? Was it trying to communicate with ideas gleaned from humans it touched in the past, like the images from the story? Or was that author recounting images impressed by alien contact on Earth long ago? As in all good space mysteries, we’re left with a healthy dose of the unknown, some satisfying answers but also so many questions: all the more reason for the DAUNTLESS to fly again.

Total game time: 2 hrs flat. We are once again pleasantly amazed at home much fun InSpectres packs in such a short time. And after healing all our terrible Stress damage we still gain a net 3 dice for the franchise. Win!

After each (quite poetic and very satisfying) InSpectres game, I look up at the clock and it’s only been 2 hours since we sat down and started. 2 hours. Blinky Blinky? My internal gaming clock just can’t process that information. 2 hours of InSpectres in Space feels like about 4-5 hours of other gaming. Not to knock any of those games — the length of a game is not directly related to its fun and I’ll gladly game for 10 hours, but something is going on here that’s messing with my inner gaming ear. Somehow it feels like I played more, gamed more in these 2-hour explorations in The Dauntless.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s rocket science. Ben and I have discussed that in InSpectres in addition to playing a character, you’re refining your theory, coming up with your next clue and thinking of confessionals. You’re listening intently to scenes with other people, not just because you should, but because it directly impacts what you’re thinking, possibly completely sabotaging it. You’re running the game as much as anyone else while still playing. In short, InSpectres compels you to be engaged 100% of the time.

Now, I’m not discounting other great players-as-GM/world creator games such as Geiger Counter with the rotating GM and Shock with the issues, but those games have a lot of set up, set up that could easily take hours, possibly the most fun hours ever, but it could be a while before you actually start playing. As InSpectres has no prep, just a starting premise, and character creation is very simple without any constructs such as appropriate conflicts (IAWA), you’re out of the gate in no time and into a game that really packs it in.

After our last excellent InSpectres game (the Matter of the Missing Mummy -or- the Case of the Peripatetic Pharaoh) we decided to take it out for another spin and see what else we could do with it.

If you’re unfamiliar with InSpectres, the idea is that it takes traditional game structure and flips it on its head. The GM creates the starting point of a mystery (”there are strange lights in the old Crowley manor!”) but the GM doesn’t decide what is really going on. Really. The GM doesn’t know any more than the players do. The players come up with ways to investigate the mystery (”I’ll sneak into the basement after dark!”) and if they make the skill roll, they _make up_ what they find and how that reveals the answer to the mystery (”Ummm, I stumble against a bookcase that opens a secret door to a room with a radio and a codebook in German. Crowley must be a Nazi agent!”). You’re not just rolling for narrative control of what happens, you’re deciding what reality was in the first place. If all goes well the pieces each player adds creates a coherent answer to the puzzle.

The game is written for a Ghostbusters-like paranormal investigation setting, and it would obviously work well for any mundane detective work game, but since we weren’t interested in playing those we wondered what else could you do with it. Obviously there had to be a central question, a hidden plot that the players were revealing/creating. The question had to be overt at the onset so everyone was on the same page.

We decided to try it with a cerebral “mysteries of space” game, in the tradition of 2001, Solaris, Ringworld, and Contact. After we nailed down a vague setting all the GM had to do for each game was come up with a strange cosmic phenomena or an inexplicable alien artifact and we’re good to go!

We decide to make the characters the key crew members of the space vessel DAUNTLESS. Despite its bellicose name the DAUNTLESS is not a military ship, it is a science vessel committed to exploration. Its fearlessness is of the unknown, the mysteries of uncharted space, the wonders of the limitless universe. After all, this isn’t going to be an action game, it’s a cosmic wonders game.

The characters are:

Stark — seasoned veteran, decisive commander in a crisis, and as it turns out human supremacist (an older but possibly more rigid James T. Kirk) / Mike

Conrad — optimistic thrill-seeker, in love with the excitement of space and theoretically lucky with the ladies (best misquote of the game “I’d rather first base than first contact”) / Jem

Dr. Miranda Kessler — incurable scidealist, unstoppable once she gets an idea in her head (think Jodie Foster’s character from Contact). Why does Kessler have a first name when no one else does? We don’t know / Ping

These characters are in charge, but the ship has a crew of maybe a hundred or so because we want to be able to narrate big science things like building whole space stations, sending out survey teams, etc. For the confessional seat we substitute personal entries in the ship’s log — a perfect fit.

To start the game I throw out a mission briefing: urgent messages are coming from the terraforming colony on Telos-3. The planet’s rotation is slowing down, and the deceleration is increasing.

How is such a thing possible? The sheer energy involved to slow down a planet is staggering. Could it be a natural yet unexplained phenomena or is something else at work? That’s the point: I have no idea.

Whatever the cause, it could lead to catastrophic seismic activity in the planet’s crust. The colony includes twenty thousand people and there are no ships nearby to evacuate that many people. The DAUNTLESS is the only ship in the area, so EarthGov is diverting them to investigate and render whatever assistance they can. Other help is on the way, but there is no guarantee it will be in time.

[From a GMing point of view this was "mystery of space" with an added motivation to rescue the colonists. I could just as easily have made the planet uninhabited and kept it pure scientific investigation, and in the future I probably would, but a more pressing situation seemed a good place to start.]

To start off the action, Dr. Kessler makes a careful examination of the initial data sent from the colony. Ping makes her Academics check and narrates that she finds unexpected concentrations of gas in the planet’s atmosphere — the atmosphere was only semi-breathable in these early stages of terraforming, but these gases seemed incongruous with the natural atmosphere of the planet or the breathable atmosphere being expelled by the terraforming plants (fact #1).

Dropping out of lightspeed the DAUNTLESS shudders violently (Stress!). Conrad’s skillful piloting saves the ship and brings it into normal space in one piece (Technology success), and he narrates that the turbulence was caused by gravitic interference emanating from Telos’s second moon, unfelt in normal space but sufficient to cause dangerous ripples for a vessel coming out of lightspeed (fact #2).

Stark contacts the nervous colony and assures them that help is underway. Kessler leads a survey team down to the surface to take further samples of the strange gas (failed Technology) but winds up lost in the thick fogs after communication and transponder links are blocked by strange interference.

Meanwhile Stark and Conrad land a vacc-suited team on the barren second moon. Delving into the deep lunar caves (successful Athletics), the team finds strange glowing crystals in a grotto far below the moon’s surface… just before piercing electromagnetic waves shriek out from the crystal, overloading their suit communications and driving the hapless explorers to their knees (think the lunar monolith scene from 2001 — the skill check was actually a complete success, but having the strange crystals lash out was just too cool to pass up so Mike voluntarily narrated this as part of his victory).

We’re at 5 out of 10 franchise dice meaning the mystery is half-solved, so following the lessons learned from the Case of the Missing Mummy we narrate a half-time pow wow. Kessler and her team have slogged out of the wilderness and made it back to the ship, and the never-say-die Stark managed to drag away his incapacitated crew members, and even take away a sample of the crystal in the process (hey, he won the skill check after all, and making a second trip just to get a sample would be boring).

Back aboard the DAUNTLESS the characters compare notes (and fish for story consensus). The players take the chance to amp up the roleplaying and start an ideological slap fight. Everyone had forgotten about the confessional during the first half of the game, but as the discussion heated up suddenly confessionals are flying left and right (well, one per scene, but every scene without fail). Kessler won’t let a theory go once she latches on to it! Conrad is dangerously naive! Stark pretends to be open to establishing contact with undiscovered alien races, but really he just wants to make sure humanity stays on top. He’s a human supremacist, a space racist!

Tempers flare. Kessler is strongly in the “clearly these crystals are signs of an alien presence, and we should try to communicate rather than destroy them” camp, and Stark is in the “thousands of lives are at stake! To hell with first contact!” camp. Lover-not-fighter Conrad is embarrassingly misquoted as saying “I’d rather first base than first contact.”

Kessler analyzes the crystal sample in the lab (successful Academics, burning a franchise die to increase her odds) and discovers an energy field linking the crystals on the moon with crystals buried all over the surface of the planet! See! Signs of intelligence, rants Kessler.

Stark says screw it and orders an examination of the energy matrix to see if there’s some way to disrupt it (successful Technology, kicking in his decisive command talent). We still have a strange mix of clues, and Mike’s success puts us at 9 out of 10, but he pulls it all together and narrates that while examining the energy matrix they discover that it’s actually a communication system, that the crystals on the moon are sending instructions to the crystals on the planet and collecting data from them. The whole matrix is actually an alien terraforming system, placed here who knows how long ago. When the human terraforming plants started changing the atmosphere, the alien system went into overdrive to correct and push the atmosphere the other way. War of the terraforming systems! That explains the strange gases (expelled from the alien system). The alien system draws its power from the rotation of the planet itself, so when it went into overdrive to counter the Terran terraforming it literally drained the momentum from the planet.

Big points for Mike, and normally that would wrap up the mystery (a premature wrap-up actually, which would be bad), but in this case knowing the answer doesn’t solve the problem of how to save the colonists. They try to follow it up with a signal to interrupt the matrix, but that fails and starts a crystal meltdown. Oops.

Dr. Kessler jumps in with an urgent communication to the colonists to “shut them all down!” (successful Contact). If you can’t stop the alien system, take away the counterforce: without the gases released by the Terran terraforming (possibly even reversing the systems, but we didn’t get into that) the alien system has no reason to escalate, dropping back to a fairly stable state and buying time to evacuate the colonists. Victory!

…

The verdict? A solid win for InSpectres in space. We’ll be sending the Dauntless out to explore more cosmic mysteries soon.

update: the free InSpace supplement for InSpectres is done so you can play it yourself