LogCrucible-Jason-3

Game log for the 2017/10/02 session of Legacy: Crucible, as taken by Jason

Phineas starts the session in Girdertown, talking to Neomi. He wants to establish a permament trade base, but she's unwilling to negotiate because she's not sure how the Googans fit into the fight between the Kinmont and the Mesans.

The Kinmont read the wind to figure out who's still trading with Mesa after all the treaties we've recently negotiated. The nomad families like the Old Suns and the Tech-Bedou have kept trade open. That's going to cause some difficulties. He hears that there are Googan emissaries in Girdertown, and it turns out that the Old Suns are there too.

Chevron visits Girdertown and stumbles into the Googan booth. The opportunities for trade just leap out at them. Chevron starts leafing through a book, and then he tells the rest of his group to spread out and see what's there. He chats with a booth keeper and then ends up talking to Phineas. He wants to arrange marriages with some of the younger Old Suns with some Googan, to bring in some new blood and channel that youthful energy. Phineas accepts, and the injection of culture improves the mood of the Old Suns quite a bit.

Ash goes to check out the bunkers. They send their familiar to scout out the bunker, to lower the risk a bit. It finds the crabs are still there, and they seem to chitter to one another instead of being controlled by any central system. They scrounge through their tech and come up with a sonic transducer that should temporarily disable the crabs, allowing them some time to search. They draw the crabs into pursuit, then turn and blast them with sonics. The next step is to lasrer their way in to the chiller, which is not just food safety cold but cryo cold. The cylinders are translucent and contain human-sized shapes. Atop each cylinder sits an electronics package of some sort, but it's not obviously a control panel, at least not as far as the Tech-Bedou can decipher. They decide to burgle one and then seal the cryo-chamber door behind them. On the stolen tube, a light turns red. As they leave, they hear crabs waking up.

Adriel settles the hippies in Down Low. The children he had with him are now indoctrinating the new recruits, freeing Adriel to heat east through the tunnels and into the desert. Unfortunately he makes some mistakes in navigation and finds himself lost in the tunnels.

Walton sends Cleat off to sabotage the gantry, but Cleat gets caught. No more sabotage and infiltration for Walton's group for a while. On a less covert level, he makes contact with the Googan, who respect him as a statesman. They make a treaty that the Googan will not trade with Mesa if the Kinmont will protect their trade and escort them on to their next settlement.

Chevron hears about the failed Kinmont attack on Mesa and decides he doesn't care, but declares that any interference with the Old Suns from the Kinmont will have more serious consequences.

Ash's cryotube is warm enough to touch now, but the lights are all red and there's an unpleasant smell coming out of it. They try to figure out the protocols for opening it, and when it pops open, it throws sludge everywhere, with an entirely unexpected force. Inside it they find something like a cross between a frog and an NFL linebacker, like a Deep One sort of thing. The things starts moving, and Ash retreats and readies their weapons. "Are you OK? We didn't think you were going to make it?" It acts like it hears them, but not like it understands. It does seem to be waking up. It focuses on Ash. They tell it to wait, but then they express pleasure that the thing in the tube can stand up. They offer it water.

It crawls to within a couple yards of Ash, then stands up, and suddenly it eclipses the sun. Ash suggests heading to the river, which is a bit of a hike. They try to route the group away from settled lands, but unfortunately, they stumble into some Old Suns. Ash tries to talk their way out of this by saying that Chevron said it was cool. The Old Suns start to use their new radios to call Chevron, which Ash tries to forestall by calling in a debt. Meanwhile, the frog monster is getting nervous about these unfamiliar smells. Ash tries to convince the Old Suns to wipe some cryo-scunge on their faces to calm it, but Chevron doesn't care.

"What does it look like?" "It's big, and tall, and it has like six eyes." "Well, pick two and put a bullet between them!"

Ash turns and apologizes to the monster for how short their time together was, and then starts backing rapidly away. A hail of gunfire knocks the monster down, but not dead. The Old Suns don't quite have the firepower to kill the beast in the open like that, but the Tech-Bedou decide to cut their losses with the Old Suns and add their firepower. That kills it, at which point they wait for reinforcements before trying to cart it away and dispose of it. The Tech-Bedou then agree to take the Old Suns to the facility, and agree to split any tech looted from it.

In Girdertown, the Old Suns bugger out to go reinforce the squad that Ash met. The Suns up north go over the body and conclude that it had limited intelligence, but was built to be a murder machine. Meanwhile, some Mesan traders in Girdertown aren't happy to find out that their trade with the Googans is embargoed. They'd like the Old Suns to escort them to Mesa. Phineas and Walton agree to wait another day or two before the Kinmont escort the Googans north to Ft Passage.

Adriel tries to get himself oriented and find a way out. He gets himself headed in the right direction but runs so low on supplies that he can't feed his war dog anymore.

A couple days later, Chevron and his troop meet up with Ash, who shows them the facility containing the rest of the cryotubes. They also warn the Old Suns about the crabs. That prompts Chevron to pull out the designator for their new satellite orbital laser system. Ash tries to warn them that it might not be powerful enough to burn through, but Chevron doesn't care. Of course, the weapon does nothing. Ash has no explanation and eventually hands the Old Suns an EMP blaster as compensation for whatever went wrong with the satellite weapon.

Chevron arrays his forces, then attacks. Use of this new EMP weapon forces them to change their tactics, and nearly leads to disaster, but the nearby Tech-Bedou volunteer to help work the EMP blaster, which enables the Old Suns to revert to more familiar tactics and enjoy some success. They get access but the chiller is sputtering - it seems like the EMP interfered with its control mechanisms. Chevron doesn't care but Ash goes running in to try to reactivate the chiller, and puts on a convincing display of technological mastery. In the process he learns that this was a cloning lab creating genetically engineered guard beasts, which he concludes was an abomination.

Meanwhile, Chevron goes to wipe out the crabs. He scavenges some good tech from them, and concludes from their control systems that maybe they're related to the queen scavenger that they saw before, but it's a hard fight. One of the Old Suns suffered a traumatic amputation of the left leg, and Chevron himself takes some flesh wounds, but he's too tough to care about any of that. Ash keeps things running long enough for Chevron to set the charges and blow it all up before anything bad hatches. They think they got them all in the blast.

Adriel finds his way out of the tunnels, returns to the Children, and goes to recruit from Mesa. She also sends out some Children to recruit, and those Children don't come back anytime soon.

The Kinmont escort the Googan to Ft Passage. They encounter some Mesans on the way, and Walton sends a messenger to them to announce that he chooses not to harm them, but the Kinmont could have killed them, and will continue to reserve the option to prey on Mesan traders until the people of Mesa turn Clive over. The Googans decide that this is an opportunity.

Ash and Adriel arrive in Mesa and finds it's an armed camp, tense as hell. They're still willing to trade with the Tech-Bedou, but on their first night in town, Shiny Sally disappears. Ash goes to Clive, who claims to have no idea what's going on, nor time to worry about it. Ash then goes to talk to Adriel, to see if they recruited Sally. He invites them to join the celebration, and they accept. Sadly, Shiny Sally did not join the children. Ash asks about the Children's treaty with the Kinmont to embargo Mesa, and confirms that the Children have no goods on site. Adriel confirms that the Children will not try to interfere with the Tech-Bedou trade, since they don't have any obligation to enforce the embargo on anyone else. In the end, Clive brings Shiny Sally, badly beaten but alive, to Ash. The place where it happened had tracks of something with webbed feet and a big tail, but Sally never got a look at her attacker, and now her stomach really hurts. Ash decides to scatter the Tech-Bedou and seek information. They conclude that Sally has become a host for monsters, which were grown at the bunkers, properly known as The Farm. The monsters, called "nylo", are following the Tech-Bedou by smell. Of course, if they can learn all the secrets of The Farm, they could commercialize The Farm and the nylos. Ash also starts to worry about the crisis between Mesa and the Kinmont, and concludes that Clive must eat some crow if the war is ever to end. Ash thinks about offering Clive tech and feeding him a story where he becomes an equal partner with the Kinmont, which would end the war.

The Googan, new to the area, decide to claim the irradiated drug plants as their very own stock in trade. They sent people in but they return looking burned, and the stuff they bring back is useless. Maybe this plan sucks.

Ash catches up with Walton at Ft Passage and shows him a neat gadget, which Walton indulges. Then they talk about how to end the war. Ash tries to convince Walton to trade the prisoners for a cease fire and calling the whole thing quits. Walton won't take that deal - Clive has to be seen to acknowledge the supremacy of the law and the Kinmont, but whatever he does with the prisoners before then does not change anything. Clive kills them and then agrees to the Kinmont terms.

Chevron shows up at the Holes, with a feeling that something is watching him. He orders the Old Suns to set up security while protecting Jamison and keeping him from dying of his missing leg.

The Age ends.

The Children find a hidden vault, still intact from the world before, but they have become isolated and need trade. They go to war, and up enemies with the remaining free love hippies who would not convert.

The Tech-Bedou fall apart into feuding factions, but eventually become unified again. They find a windfall from scavenging and become bloated.

The Old Suns suffer persecution and violence and end up looking for revenge on the Tech-Bedou who persecuted them during the Tech-Bedou civil war. Through their intermarriage with the Googan and the Tech-Bedou, they gain some secrets.

After Walton died of old age, the Kinmont fall into civil war. The eventual victors are stronger, more unified, but lacking refinement. Gain +1 Grasp and Surplus: leadership, but gain Need: culture. Your Family goes through a golden age, questioning old philosophies and forging new paths. Gain a new Family move but gain Need: leadership. The new Kinmont are Tooled Up and Looking for Trouble.

The Googan suffer when something comes out of the wasteland and savages them. Your Family invests heavily in a place of safety and commerce, creating a new haven in this land. Gain +1 Reach and Surplus: peace, but take Need: obligation.