Tag: Xia

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Story 39

‘Yes’ to the King

Who could pass up a chance to see that classic ship, have a couple of drinks, and hang out with someone while they tell old stories and play some music! Clearly, this guy knows how to Rock!

—

You’ve made your way across your inter-ship docking tube and are starting to get a  little anxious while waiting for the airlock to finish cycling when it stops and pops open. You’re not sure what you expected to see when you first entered, but this was not it. The floor and ceiling are both covered in green shag carpeting with deep piles, and dark wood everywhere from the wood paneling to the ceiling cross beams, to the arms of the furniture which happens to be carved in the shapes of animals. All over the walls are paintings on black velvet canvases. In the far corner you see a tiki bar being ‘manned’ by what looks like a robotic butler. 

The robot speaks up, “Don’t worry, Elvis has NOT left the building, he simply needed to visit the powder room.”

As if on cue, you hear a toilet flush in the next room followed by the brief sound of running water. Out of the double ‘R’ steps your host for the evening. 

“Hey Austin, offer our guests some refreshments and make everyone some peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Austin is probably the best robotic butler and karate sparring partner in the galaxy.”

“Thank you sir.”

—

You spend an unexpectedly unique evening with the King where he tells you how he spent most of the past century. He tells you that he originally fled the Drift System when he was visiting the prison colony on Loath. Loath had just placed a group of their most hardened criminals on a cryoship and launched them. Elvis was there for PR, and even back then his monarchy had no real authority but only had diplomatic and ceremonial responsibilities. He decided to play ‘Jailhouse Rock’ for the guards and prisoners when a riot broke out and his honor guard barely got him out alive and sent him to a planetary system located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It took him a while to gather the necessary resources to come back. In the interceding years, planet Earth also made him an honorary king. 

As the evening wraps up, he ends it with a gift giving you some black velvet paintings for you to decorate your ship with as well. (1 Fame Point)

Retrieve The King NPC card and have the ship start wending its way to Kemplar II.

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Story 38

‘No’ to the King

You and your crew have work to do and hanging out with an old guy that clearly dyes his hair with shoe polish doesn’t seem like the best use of your time.

When you decline, the guitar playing geezer looks sad, but simply responds, “I understand, you’ve got to TCB baby.” 

Retrieve The King NPC card and have the ship start wending its way to Kemplar II.

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Story 7

Hail from the King

An old classic ship in cherry condition flying in from a distance with a brass colored undercarriage, large gun metal black barrels attached to beautifully curved wings, a red paint job that just makes the ship look fast and completely unnecessary fins that your grandpa would have loved. Then a hail comes in on an old frequency that you didn’t even realize was supported by your comm system. Without even thinking your comm officer accepts the hail. Appearing on your screen is a man with black hair and sideburns wearing sunglasses and a white jumpsuit covered in rhinestones. Most interesting is that he is holding a guitar.

“Thank you, thank you very much for accepting my hail. I would like to invite you over to swap stories about the past century and maybe you could enjoy a couple drinks at my wet bar while I strum out a couple of chords on my old ‘63 Gibson.”

No: Proceed to Story 38.

Yes: Proceed to Story 39.

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Story 6

Death Ray

Deep in one of the caves of TafJur, you and your crew are searching for relics from a culture that died with this now cold and barren planet. The caves you are in right now are no natural phenomenon. These caves were cut into the side of this mountain. You find a set of hidden doors while carefully inspecting one of the rooms. You manage to wench it open. While various things line the walls, your attention is drawn to the center of the room where a large metallic object is resting. Before you have a chance to think better of it, you brush some of the dust off of it. It starts thrumming and the room grows a little bit darker as if it is sucking in the light from around it. You call out to a couple of your crew members through your suits comm, “Jenkins, Z, I’ve found something, but I want to know what it is before I decide if we should bring it on board.” 

“Aye, Capt’n,” they both respond in unison.

“I’m sending you my location data now.”

When the two additional crew members step in, even through their helmets, you can see that they know they’re going to be pulling an all-nighter on this one. 

Early the next morning you hear a rap on your cabin door. You open the door and standing there is a tired but excited looking Z. Before you even ask, Z starts talking animatedly, “At first we couldn’t make heads or tales of this, but then I found that the interface was written in a scripted program language but even that didn’t solve all our problems because we didn’t have the foggiest clue about the written languages that this long dead culture used. Then I farted and Jenkins had an epiphany!”

“Wait, what?”, you interrupt. 

“Oh,um I farted, broke wind, ahhhh…flatulence”

“OK, I just wanted to make sure I heard you right, go on.”

“So as I was saying, the mere idea of the odor of flatulence reminded Jenkins about how the Zhian communicate via both words and smell, so we pulled up a copy of the Zhian Prime official alphabet. A few of the characters matched. We started isolating all the characters and matching the ones we knew and started to try and assign values to the other symbols and let the Universal Translator take a crack at it. What we found was a really elegant programming language that linked to various other pieces of code and data structures…”

At this point you raise your hand to stop Z. “This is great work that you and Jenkins did, but what’s the bottom line?”

“Those ancient aliens created a super weapon! During the past hour Jenkins and I have taken to calling it the ‘Death Ray’. Much of its hardware and software are still beyond us but we think we could rig it up and fire it. Calling it a little dangerous is an understatement. What do you think we should do Capt’n?”

  1. You could decide that such a device should never see the light of day and destroy it.
  2. You could install it with the intention of using it one day. It is a one time device that will successfully destroy all NPCs and players in the same sector as you, and even knock out a planetary shield for one round (ships on a shielded planet would still be unharmed as the planetary shield will have taken the damage) and it also causes 1d6 unblockable damage to your own ship. This is a one time use device and ceases to function afterwards.
  3. You could try and sell this to other space faring parties, although tight beam communication is better as you probably don’t want to announce to the entire drift system that you have a super weapon for sale. If doing this last one, you will need to meet the other ship on a planet to complete the transaction.

Clarifications: While the Death Ray can knock out a planetary shield, the Zhian have a double shield around Zhian Prime. Their inner shield would still be up. It is also noteworthy that this device does not harm the Space Kraken.

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Story 37

You said, “Yes.”

A small space lab suddenly appears adjacent to your ship. The transponder ID suddenly pings and it lists as ‘Merv’s Missiles or Arken’s Arsenal’. Please come over and dock with my lab. 

Once onboard, the scientist explains, “I’m selling this so cheaply because I need more data from field testing, some funds for more supply, and…  there is still a safety concern over whether or not the high levels of electromagnetic radiation that it emits can cause long term physiological problems.”

After completing the sale and installing the cloaking device, the space lab once again disappears.

When activated, the cloaking device lasts till the beginning of your next round. If you do leave it active at the end of your turn you will not be able to re-arm that marker and at the beginning of your turn you will need to take 1 unblockable damage. You can fly , shoot, explore, use shields, utilize various gadgets and scan while cloaked. However, there are limitations. You can not buy, sell, trade, dock with space stations, or utilize mission points while cloaked. While cloaked, you must write down very accurately your starting point, where all you have gone, and what your final stopping point is.

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Story 5

Cloaking device

Your comm crackles to life, ‘I have a unique offer for you.’ 

You accept the comm and your view screen comes on showing someone that is probably technically still human, kind of. He is clearly older, but his nose is either extremely up turned or partially missing with larger than usual nostrils. He has a third eye grafted into the middle of his forehead that seems to move independently of his other two eyes, but most striking is his brain covered by a clear dome. It appears to be an amalgamation of organic bits and technology. You can see his gray matter with lots of filaments and pulsing lights throughout it. There is also some sort of semi-viscous fluid inside the dome that appears to be slowly swirling. Despite the slack jawed response from everyone, this bizarre visage continues on with his spiel. ‘With my vast intellect I have created an advanced piece of cloaking technology, but it’s gonna cost you 1,000 cr. Are you interested?’

No: Then this card goes back in the deck for someone else to possibly gain it later.

Yes: Proceed to Story 37.

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Story 34

So you rolled an 11-20 (on Story 4)

Somehow, you managed to avoid setting off the old space mine. Your scanners show that it is nuclear in nature. You have several options:

  1. You could just leave the mine there for the next guy. Place this card back in the Encounters deck to potentially come out again later.
  2. You could move to a distance and detonate it with your ship’s weapons. It will create a nuclear zone that causes 1d4 damage (blockable with shields) anytime anyone passes throughout. Place the radiation marker there. (1 Fame Point)
  3. You could tractor on to your ship and have your engineer and your munitions expert spend the rest of the turn disarming it. (1 Fame Point)
  4. You could tractor it on board your ship and save it for a time that you find useful. At some point you can rig a quick timer on it, drop it in space, and create a permanent nuclear zone, making it more dangerous for others to go through that area that you will mark with a radioactive token. That space will cause 1d4 damage (blockable by shields).

Note: This radiation zone only functions to heal the Space Kraken if it encounters this space. Roll a d4 to see how much health the Space Kraken regains.

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Story 33

So you rolled a 1-10 (on Story 4)

Suddenly a blindingly bright light surrounds your ship in every direction. You feel overwhelmingly nauseous, and as you and the rest of your crew all start purging, your vision starts to create a halo effect around the interior lights and you have an incredible migraine. Despite your pain and roiling gut, you can see the radiation counter on your display is spiking through the roof. One of these old derelict ships must have used nuclear weapons and you’ve just set one off!

As the initial light of the blast starts to fade, you also see a flickering green aurora lingering around the magnetic fields created by all this old space debris. Your ship takes 1d6 damage (no opportunity to block it). Place the radiation token on the spot where your ship is positioned. From now on, anyone that passes through that space their ship will take 1d4 damage (blockable with shields). 

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Story 4

Radioactive

As you coast through the debris looking at some of the past relics that have found themselves here, you are amazed at how old some of these less than intact ships truly are. Even in their broken states you find yourself appreciating their curves and large fins. 

Suddenly, you see something dreadful, an old space mine!

Roll a d20:

1-10, proceed to Story 33
11-20, proceed to Story 34

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Story 3

Skip Drive

While you are at the Mission Point your engineer starts looking through old archives on various technical specs to see how the Zhian handled a myriad of technology challenges when your engineer stumbles across something that he doesn’t believe is supposed to be there. It’s written in an ancient dialect of Zhian. He ends up being curious enough about it that he starts feeding the universal translator other examples of this dialect till it is capable of translating it into something your engineer understands. This archive includes all kinds of interesting history that he has never heard about before including the insinuation that the Zhian used to have colonies on other planets, the idea that they had a super weapon whose name simply translates into ‘Death Ray’ and most interesting to your engineer, are some old designs for a ship engine that worked on completely different principles than modern FTL drives. It folds space and relies a lot on unproven quantum mechanic theories to simply help you jump from one point in space to another. Your engineer also realizes that for about 1,000 credits he can probably get the parts here on Zhian Prime to build one for your ship.

  1. Do you choose to ignore building a skip drive because either you don’t have the spare coin, or don’t like the idea of relying on schematics translated by your ship’s software to move your ship to potentially random points in space?
  2. Do you go with the idea that this is something that might just give you the competitive edge that you’ve been looking for to quickly traverse to the far flung edges of the universe nearly instantly. Sure it’s a risk, but that’s why your ship comes with the safety feature of temporal displacement. Give the engineer 1,000 credits and see what happens when he builds and installs the Skip Drive.

If you build the Skip Drive, grab the appropriate piece to install it on your ship. It does require an armed marker to activate it and then roll a d20 to see what spawn point you end up at. If the specific spawn point is not out, appear at the spawn point with the closest number always going to the higher number if two numbers have equal difference from the number rolled. Example, you roll a 17 but that spawn point has not come out yet. The closest numbers in play are 15 and 19 which both are only two away from the number rolled. You are required to go to the higher number, 19. If a 20 is rolled you may choose any space already revealed on the board even if it doesn’t contain a spawn point.

After any player has had the option of building a Skip Drive, the archive that this information was found in mysteriously disappears and no one else will have the opportunity to try and build a Skip Drive.