Friday, June 5, 2009

Bright Star

In a recent sci-fi game that I GM'd in, I found myself in a conundrum. One of my players had rolled himself up a character that did not work well with others. He was good with the other PCs, but when it came to NPCs he would create friction. This did not work so well in a game based around a close nit crew on a small ship. Particularly, Mac the character had a problem with Johnson the NPC.
Introduce the ghost ship. The Bright Star misjumped, and found themselves stranded in a system with no way home. One of the few things in the system is an incredibly old capital ship. A derelict that had been sitting in orbit for thousands of year. However, since the White Star had reached the system, the old ship had started to power up again.
A small away team, including Mac and Johnson, went aboard to search for anything that might be of use on the ship. One of the first things found on the ship has a low birth with several occupied cryo-pods. One of them was open.
Johnson was good with alien tech and began fiddling with a console to bring up a map. After fiddling with the map for a time, he pointed out a few doors that were open that he claimed were closed before. There was something else on the ship.
Johnson stayed behind to help guide the away team over the radio using the map. He kept on sending them updates as to the location of a mysterious red dot that as traveling around the map. Occasionally old droids would jump out to attack the crew. The away team would have to jump out of the way when a door would slam shut almost on top of them.
Then it came to a point when Mac found himself isolated from the rest of the crew. He was in a position where he could easily be jettisoned into space.

I took Mac out to the balcony so we could play out the next bit away from the rest of the players.

Instead of carrying on the adventure from that point, I took it back in time to Mac and Johnson
s days at the academy. I left mac in a scenario where he would have an easy opportunity to play a brutal prank on Johnson. Then I skipped forward a little, to another opportunity for Mac to mistreat Johnson. Then forward again. And Again.

It did not take long for the player playing Mac to clue in. There was no one else on the ship. Johnson was at the map. Johnson was learning how to control the ship. Johnson hated Mac.