Friday, January 31, 2014

Wordslingin'

Last night's Our Heroes (tm) engaged in a mostly failed interrogation and a mostly failed negotiation, but at least we now have a hostage we have no idea what to do with. That's gotta be worth something, right?


[We prepare for this week's game.]
Zac: "So, where did we leave off?"
Julie: "We lost Bhakir."
Georges the GM: "That could be any of the last twelve sessions."

[Our plan: storm Theresa Vendar's home in the hopes of picking up the trail to Bhakir. Step 1 would be entering the premises.]
Brock: "How vehicle-resistant is the fence?"
Georges the GM: "What vehicle do you have? It's all relative."

[One option is to pose as Bhakir's guys and bluff our way in.]
Fennec: "We don't look like any of Bhakir's people."
Lukas: "We could by the time we get there."

[We consider the opposition forces we are likely to face at the Vendar estate.]
Lukas: "Everyone here is second tier. Because anyone first tier is already a POP."

[To prevent security from piling up on us, Fennec plans to build us an ECM jamming rig from parts scavenged from our tactical crate.]
Lyta: "Will you be able to un-jury rig it when you're done?"
Fennec: "Uh... people don't usually ask me that. Hypothetically, sure."

[Fennec gets her first glimpse of the stuff in the tactical crate.]
Fennec: "Good. I'm gonna need... all of this."

[Fennec makes us our ECM rig.]
Zac: "I bring you back a cardboard box of electronic bits."
Lukas: "Great. You're gonna put it all back together later."
Fennec: "...Sure I can."

[We lay out the nitty-gritty. Kinda.]
Brock: "Based on my recollection of everything, we do a plan."

[We remind ourselves how confident we are in this plan. i.e. Not very.]
Lyta: "Radsley, what do you think?"
Okran Radsley: "Well, from what you've told me, we're going after her because we're all out of other leads."

[The mission begins. Step 1: Fennec will sneak in and hack the hard line.]
Georges the GM: "Roll stealth to approach."
Zac: "I'll spend. Because why screw it up now?"

[Fennec successfully hacks the hard line. Step 2: take out the patrolling guards with our drugged sfika flechette rounds.]
Georges the GM: "If the MOS is high enough with a sfika, they can go into a coma."
Ariel: "Yay!"
Brock: "Don't be too happy -- you'll have to babysit him."

[As Torgath shoots one of the two guards in the first patrol, Lyta trips the other.]
Julie: *rolls 10 on stealth attack*
Georges the GM: "He doesn't see you coming."
Brock: (as guard) "I'm on the ground!"

[We take down the patrol relatively easily and check out their equipment.]
Georges the GM: "They're wearing medium flak. Because, as we've established, why wouldn't they?"

[We take out three of the four patrols with speed and precision.]
Ariel: "Only one more."
Brock: "Don't get cocky, kids."

[Indeed, things go slightly to hell as everyone rolls poorly on their sneak attack for the fourth patrol.]
Georges the GM: "It's a free for all! Roll initiative."

[We still beat the fourth patrol, naturally. It just takes us two rounds instead of one. Thank goodness we've got the radio jammer active. Step 3: Raid the house.]
Georges the GM: "Into the fray!"
Zac: "I thought we just got out of the fray."

[Step 3, engage!]
Brock: "We storm the building and take out the security."
Georges the GM: "No problem. I'll just roll for which of you is deeply wounded."

[We decide to take the slow, dice-rolling approach that hopefully won't end with any of us being deeply wounded. Consequently, we must confront the eight security guards in the house.]
Zac: "Is she home tonight?"
Georges the GM: "It's a lot of security if she's not here."
Zac: "She has secrets..."

[We take out the security in the house and find Theresa Vendar sleeping in her bedroom.]
Brock: "How creepy do we want this to be?"
Zac: "We are wearing head-to-toe black gear with mirrored faceplates."

[We give up on creepy for the sake of expediency.]
Brock: "Fuck it. I get my gun and put it under her chin."
Zac: "Oh, is that how we're doing this?"

[Vendar wakes up.]
Georges the GM: "Surprisingly, she doesn't lose her shit."
Ariel: "That's not surprising."
Georges the GM: "It is to me!"

[Getting the preliminaries out of the way first.]
Lukas: "Your guys are all dead. If you want to scream, you can get that over with now."

[The questioning begins. Kinda.]
Lukas: "Let's start with the easy questions. Where do you keep the cash?"
Theresa Vendar: "What makes you think I have any cash?"
Lukas: "...You're gonna start resisting now?"
Theresa Vendar: "Doesn't make much sense to start resisting later."

[Theresa Vendar initially implies someone might ransom her, which leads Lukas to a whole new line of questioning.]
Lukas: "Who would ransom you? Because we were just gonna loot and kill you, maybe a little rape. But if there's a possibility of a ransom, that's much more attractive."

[The questioning is not going well.]
Zac: "I don't have the temperament for it, but someone better be bad cop pretty soon."

[Lukas keeps going down the 'cash and ransom' line of questioning.]
Lyta: "Are you forgetting why we're here?"
Lukas: "No."
Lyta: "...Okay."

[Ah, Theresa Vendar. Such a nasal voice. So condescending...]
Zac: "She's so smug, I kinda want to hit her now."

[Vendar continues to be smug.]
Lukas: "Oh! You live in the Humanist Alliance! That's why this didn't make sense before! You don't think we're gonna kill you!"

[Lukas asks about the 'wine'.]
Theresa Vendar: "Why do you wanna know?"
Lukas: "Isn't it enough that I want to know, and we're here in your bedroom?"

[Vendar realizes she has something we want. This is never a good thing.]
Theresa Vendar: "What do I get out of it if I tell you?"
Lukas: "The hope that we leave here and you get to live."
Theresa Vendar: "I think I'm gonna need more than that."

[Lukas lays out the situation for Vendar.]
Lukas: "I not only have a royal flush, I'm holding every card in the deck."
Ariel: "Even the bad ones."

[Vendar lays out the situation as she sees it.]
Theresa Vendar: "You can threaten to kill me, which won't get you any closer to what you want."
Torgath: "I could cut all your tendons."
Theresa Vendar: "But you wouldn't be closer to what you want."
Torgath: "But you wouldn't have any tendons."

[Vendar realizes we must have been in her home before, and seems relieved.]
Georges the GM: "Until a moment ago, she was worried you were someone other than who you are."
Zac: "That worries me."

[Okran Radsley reveals that he has a webbling net.]
Okran Radsley: "I'm not sure what your grasp on this technology is."
Fennec: "...I'm not a doctor."

[The webbling net could theoretically be put on a human. It just needs a few extra parts to be functional.]
Zac: "I get the dirtiest-looking electronics I can find."

[A bit more about the webbling net.]
Lukas: "What happened to the subject you got it off of?"
Okran Radsley: "He wasn't sad to see it go."
Lukas: "Is he dead?"
Okran Radsley: "Not... technically."

[Lukas shows the webbling net to Vendar.]
Lukas: "Do you know what this is?"
Theresa Vendar: "Ugliest piece of jewelry I've ever seen."

[Lukas lays out the basics of what he's holding.]
Lukas: "I'm sure you know webbling research on humans is strictly illegal and no one has developed the technology."

[More of the same.]
Lukas: "The astonishing thing about this fictional technology is that it's been developed for ease of installation."
Theresa Vendar: "This isn't exactly the proposition I had in mind."

[To install the webbling net, we need to shave Vendar's head. Fennec returns with a huge, nasty-looking knife as opposed to, say, a razor.]
Fennec: "It's all part of the presentation."
Lukas: "We're not presenting the knife."
Fennec: "It's part of it."

[Radsley was banking on Vendar knowing what the webbling technology would do, and thus being intimidated into talking to us. He didn't quite foresee this turn of events.]
Okran Radsley: "I'm not sure it'll work. And I have no idea how we'll get it off her head."

[Lukas, meanwhile, continues to impress the severity of the situation on Vendar.]
Lukas: "If you don't tell me what I want to know, I'll put this one you, and then you will want to tell me what I want to know."

[It becomes clear that Vendar is a member of the Free Will Movement, the terrorist organization that wants to blow up the Olympic garden party.]
Zac: "What happens if they do blow up the garden party?"
Brock: "The city becomes much less significant, for one thing."

[None of us really want to webble Vendar, no matter how reprehensible she is. Sadly, that doesn't leave us with a lot of choices.]
Okran Radsley: "At this point, we have three options, the way I see it: leave her alone and admit failure, see if this device will extract anything, or put a bullet in her head and be done with it."
Lukas: "There are more rudimentary methods."

[Laying our cards on the table in-group, Lukas reveals what we know about Gustafson.]
Fennec: "I've never heard that name."
Lyta: "You're really small fish."
Lukas: "Smaller than us, and we're small fish."

[Radsley considers the information we've provided.]
Okran Radsley: "Is this Gustafson the sort of guy who would cringe at innocent lives--"
Lyta: "No."

[Back to the interrogation. Going for the option no one really wants, but that we all feel might be inevitable at this point.]
Georges the GM: "Are you actually hooking the webbling net up for real?"
Zac: "That's what he told me to do."
Julie: "You're just following orders."

[Vendar realizes the depth of the trouble she's in.]
Theresa Vendar: "That bitch. That damn bitch."
Zac: "You might wanna stress that names are important now."

[We realize that some of our idle speculation may not be as far-fetched as we thought.]
Okran Radsley: "Maybe you weren't bluffing. Maybe Bhakir is taking off with the bottles."
Lukas: "Sounds like a great way for the Comptroller's people to get someone else to pay for whole whackload of explosives."

[We contemplate what Bhakir might be doing.]
Lukas: "Oh, he may blow up the party. He may just do it with something else."

[We realize we're not gonna get anything else useful out of Vendar.]
Torgath: "So we're gonna kill this one because she knows too much?"
Fennec: "Doesn't know enough, apparently."
Torgath: "About us."
Okran Radsley: "She doesn't know anything about us."

[We decide to loot the manor, because why not.]
Okran Radsley: "If her first thought was ransom and we're actually ransacking the place and stealing all this art, it might buy us a few days."

[Do we need to do anything about all the guards we knocked out? No, probably not.]
Lukas: "When they wake up, al they're gonna be talking about is how a team of fity guys took them all out."

[The session looks like it might be drawing to a close.]
Zac: "Uh-oh. Georges is adding up how many sentences we progressed."
Brock: "It's hard enough doing an interrogation when I know what's going on, let alone when I don't."

[We prepare to leave the manor.]
Zac: "You know what? Let's take her food. I could use a drink after this."

[More of the same.]
Zac: "I take everything from the security office I think might have a resale value."
Georges the GM: "This van better have a roof rack."

[We steal the art and kidnap Vendar.]
Brock: "She can't report it stolen... because we kidnapped her!"

[We didn't really get all that much out of the interrogation, sadly.]
Georges the GM: "It's okay. I know what your next step is... because I'm gonna spoon-feed it to you."

[We are contacted by Benelice, who is surprisingly back in town.]
Benelice: "I have tracked down Bhakir."
Lukas: "If only you'd called me an hour and a half ago, you could have saved someone you know a lot of turmoil."

[We agree to meet up with Benelice.]
Lukas: "This is one of our local contacts."
Okran Radsley: "I thought you didn't have any local contacts."
Lukas: "This one's... complicated."

[Lukas fills in Radsley on Benelice.]
Okran Radsley: "What's your level of trust?"
Lukas: "Not zero. Moderate?"

[We meet up with Benelice.]
Brock: "We go in all tacti-cool."
Benelice: "So this is how you sit around watching trideos?"
Torgath: "It's very comfortable."

[Benelice informs us of Bhakir's recent doings, including buying yet more explosives.]
Benelice: "Why would he need more explosives? I don't understand."
Julie: "So Lukas' hunch was right."

[Riley offers a trade: he will help us get Bhakir in exchange for us giving him all the bottles of explosive 'wine'.]
Lukas: "Now, what would Riley do with the wine?"
Benelice: "Nothing nefarious."

[Lukas counter-offers: we will give Riley half the wine and keep the other half for ourselves.]
Riley Markus: "What would you need half of it for?"
Torgath: "Renovation. Landscaping."

[Lukas is unimpressed by Riley's offer.]
Lukas: "So what are you bringing to the table? A location and twenty guys? Now, that's not nothing, but it's not everything."

[More negotiations.]
Lukas: "You can sleep better at night knowing..."
Benelice: "Knowing that you have his explosives?"

[Benelice gives another counter-offer.]
Benelice: "I get your word that you will sell me your half."
Lukas: "Why would I trust you with them?"

[The negotiations are not going well.]
Benelice: "I think it's best if we go our separate ways again."
Lukas: "Then we get all the bottles."
Benelice: "Yes."
Lukas: "I feel you're doing the math wrong on this one."

[Fennec sums up the negotiation so far.]
Fennec: (to Lukas) "Wow, you don't like leave any bridges standing behind you, do you?"

[Lukas offers Radsley the chance to enter the negotiations if he wants, with a few caveats.]
Lukas: "Don't show weakness in front of Doc Chambers' people. They'll talk you out of your shirt, your truck..."
Torgath: "The scantily-clad bound woman in the back of your truck..."

[Radsley probes a bit deeper.]
Okran Radsley: "How well does this Doc Chambers know you? Well enough to..."
Fennec: "To anticipate you wouldn't deal on a matter of ego?"

[The negotiations fall through.]
Okran Radsley: "Right. Well, as far as I can tell, it's a race."
Lukas: "So we should shoot them both now?"

[The game wraps up.]
Georges the GM: "I really thought we'd get to map set #2 tonight."

[Zac has some observations about Lukas' negotiating skills.]
Zac: "We had a woman tied up in her bed and we couldn't negotiate with her!"
Brock: "That's not my fault!"

[As the session ends...]
Brock: "It doesn't matter. We're not gonna get the bottles anyway."
Zac: "I'm glad we're alienating people for no reason."
Brock: "We're alienating them on principle!"





Heavy Gear Roleplaying Game

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