To Boldly Go: Odds and Ends

Originally published June 6, 2014

My space exploration game To Boldly Go has come to an end. This week I'll cover the odds and ends from that game: important NPCs who cropped up, interesting locations passed by, and an interesting weapon "recovered". All using the Fate system. More can be found here.

Characters

Ensign Maroon

• High Concept: Expendable Asset
• Other Aspects: Not Really a Red Shirt
• Skills: Combat Training +1, Deceive + 1

Ensign Maroon worked on the FSV Columbia as an "interpersonal expert". Aiding Steve Walmart, she infiltrated the black market of Alpha City on New Earth to track down the source of stolen Federation gravity weapons. She also was helpful in gaining the confidence of the PR departments of Samsung and the Hite Corporation.

Tragically she was crushed to death by a collapsing tower while exploring an abandoned alien city. Then the fog of nanomachines that cloaked that world rebuilt her. Though physically fine, she still suffers memory loss and nightmares due to the experience. Efforts to remove the alien machines from her blood have yet to succeed.

I created Maroon when the player of Steve requested a Red Shirt with useful skills. She became a sort of the spy/red shirt. Though she never gained the same level of character detail as Ensign First Class Roux, she did become very important in the final story of the campaign.

Fiona

• High Concept: Feral Child Clone
• Trouble: Alien Biology
• Other Aspects: Attached to Rho
• Skills: EVA +4, Physique +3, Notice +2, Empathy +1
• Stunts: Innate Knowledge: Fiona can spend a Fate point while in the Mist to command the Fog with Rapport.
• Stress: 4 Physical/2 Mental [Mild Consequence]

The child given the name Fiona (Fi for short) was "born" of a fog of nanomachines. Constructed from alien DNA and that of Ensign Maroon, she initially lacked any memories or past. She instinctively attached herself to Security Officer Rochelle “Rho” Total.

As time passed however, she began to learn words from a half-dozen languages, stringing them together in a unique creole. She also seemed to be able to create toys like stone blocks from nothing. Then she began remembering things that didn't happen to her but to Rho and her comrades. The nanites had begun to fill her mind with scans of those around her.

Rho has the Aspect Always Making Friends. So I made her a friend.

Gear

Singularity Gun

• Aspects: Collateral Damage, Bleeding Edge Prototype

Less a rifle than a hand-held cannon, this long angular weapon creates a miniature black hole in the center of whatever massive body it is pointed at. Undiscriminating, the singularity rapidly consumes anything or anyone it touches before evaporating in a stream of radiation.

Recovered from an illegal sale in the Sol II system, Rho used this weapon to great effect in her escape from the Primate Liberation Army, an uplifted ape supremacist group seeking their own world. They had stolen the weapon and others like it from a secret black lab run by the Federation in contravention of the treaty against the use of weaponized gravity technology.

Locations

Hermes

In the Hermes system, a pair of cool rocky worlds circle a red dwarf, their ore rich crust supporting several thousand miners and their equally numerous biological android servants. Thanks to the revolt in the nearby system of New Earth, bioroid revolts rack this impoverished mining colony. Shipments are down and those who can are moving out.

Persimmon

This system of icy and rocky worlds circles a bright orange star. Dwelling in a series of orbital bases lurks a society of isolationist elite. As soon as word of the bioroid revolution spread to this world, they clamped down and began shifting to an entirely AI workforce.

Steading

This small solar system consists a few gas giants and several asteroid belts circling a tiny red star. With no remarkable resources, this distant region is sparsely populated. A small refueling and trading hub constitutes civilization in this distant corner. Run by an extended family of former space gypsies, these colonist value their freedom and privacy.