Peregrine

In the early 2100s, Earth was suffering. Continue reading “Prologue”

CURRENT AP TOTAL 58, less advancements:
ALEJO: 24
MILLICENT: 17
TUELLER: 4

Continue reading “Advancement Log”

page 120, append VEHICLE PARKING section with:
The Canary and the Gregor Samsa may share a single Cargo compartment.

Additional Rule: CLOSE UPS
A player can earn a Close Up. It’s a digital state, so you either have it or you don’t (you can’t have it twice), and you earn it for: making a great joke, doing something particularly clever or interesting, or a roleplaying decision that costs the character something. Your Close Up can be used to add +1 to any roll before it is made. You can give your Close Up to another PC before they make a roll.

page 162-163, supplement ADVANCEMENT section with:
LONG-TERM ADVANCEMENT
These new advancement rules are balanced for long-running campaigns, reducing skill-bloat and giving more options for spending XP in campaigns that last dozens of sessions.

Maximum 7 Skills
The rules for gaining new career skills are unchanged from the original rules: gaining a new skill costs an amount of experience equal to the number of skills the character currently has (including Origin and Career skills, plus any Species and/or Group skills). A character’s fifth skill would cost 4xp, the sixth would cost 5xp, and the seventh would cost 6xp.

However, a character can only have a maximum of 7 skills, including Origin, Species, Group, and Career. Any further XP earned can only be used to gain alternate advancements (For more information, see the following section). Characters can gain alternate advancements before they have reached their maximum number of skills.

Alternate Advancements
When a character has significant downtime, the player can spend XP to gain one of the alternate advancements listed below. The following rules apply:

XP can only be spent on a character during downtime that lasts at least a few days. Some advancements require more time than others, especially those that require “extended downtime”.

Only one advancement can be pursued at a time. Even if a character has accrued enough XP to purchase multiple advancements, they can only actively pursue a single one until the next downtime.

The chosen advancement should make narrative sense to the character and the current situation. Characters should avoid choosing advancements which would be nonsensical or impossible, such as trying to adopt a Primal lifestyle (Adapt) while on a space station.

Choosing a new Advancement Trigger
Once they have advanced their character, a player can choose to change their Advancement Trigger.

Unlike the base advancement rules, it is not necessary to choose a new Trigger each time the character advances. However, the player is strongly encouraged to reconsider their Advancement Triggers after certain major milestones or life changes (such as critical injuries, emotional turning points, story arc completion, changing careers with the Renounce advancement, etc.).

Alternate Advancements. Spend XP during downtime to choose an Advancement.
Research, 1 XP: Gain a Data point about the subject that you spent all your downtime studying, or about a topic related to your field of expertise.

Therapy, 2 XP: Ongoing physiotherapy/psychotherapy erases your current major debilities.

Relate, 3 XP: Choose an NPC who you frequent during the downtime, and describe your new closer personal or professional relationship. The NPC still has their own life.

Plan, 4 XP: Describe a goal, event, or act. The GM will provide you with a lead, the first step to accomplishing that goal. Example: Liberate Novanna station, find my parents, dismantle the smuggler network, start a criminal cartel, etc.

Acquit, 5 XP: Choose a Faction. You spend your downtime negotiating, mitigating, or obfuscating your outstanding Debts. Reduce your Debt to the chosen Faction by 1, to a minimum of 1.

Prosper, 6 XP: Your personal wealth has increased, improving your overall lifestyle. It remains to be seen whether you can maintain this new level of prosperity.

Establish, 7 XP: Choose a workspace from any Career. You establish, claim, or otherwise create that workspace, appropriate to the current setting (Starship room, Colony building, City business, etc.).

Refine, 8 XP: Choose a skill from one of your Careers to refocus your efforts. You may discard one of your Career skills (of any Career) and replace it with the chosen skill.

Adapt, 9 XP: After extended downtime immersed in a new way of life, you forego your Origin, and take on that way of life as your new Origin. You lose your old Origin skill, and choose a new one.

Renounce, 10 XP: Choose a Career. After extended downtime immersed in that trade, replace one of your current Careers with the new one. Name a new archetype. Replace any old Career skills with skills from the new Career.

page 75, add to CAREERS section:

page 113, add to ASSET TYPES section:
Cybernetic Modules and Bio-modification (Mods)

As technologies advance, many species find themselves stunted not by their tools, minds, or determination, but by their own physical limitations. Cybernetics and Bio-modification (Mods) are two fields of research that seek to artificially enhance the individual and break through those limitations. Each Mod is designed to enhance a certain aspect of the subject, such as senses, resilience, multitasking, beauty, and so forth.

Mods are Class 1 Assets. Like all the Assets presented in Uncharted Worlds, Mods grant narrative tools to the characters (Uncharted Worlds core book, page 110). Unlike other Assets, Mods are relatively permanent and can’t be swapped out at a moment’s notice. On the other hand, they can’t easily be stolen or lost (without a lot of messy side-effects).

A character’s body can only support ONE Mod. Each additional Mod grants a permanent major Debility until removed.

page 127, add after CARGO section:

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

– Dr. Millicent Breedlove, Millie to her friends, is a brilliant scientist from Erde-Maris (the wealthy, scientifically advanced human civilization occupying Earth, Mars, and Luna) who lost her mentor and lover after he killed himself, distraught over rejection from the Ark scientific council. She traveled to Neptune and violated General Order One by contacting the Collective directly and pleading with them for acceptance. They declined, but Noma, an AI consciousness, left the Collective to join Millie and be her friend.

– Tueller Ya’Makasi is the youngest scion of one of the three crime families of Consolidated Jovan Holdings, the corporation that controls daily life for the inhabitants of Jupiter’s moons. He is absurdly wealthy and for most of his life gave little thought to his contribution to the universe. He loved Nandini Bhattacharya, also a scion of one of the three families, and carried on a romance in secret with her until his poor leadership got her killed on a mission. Wracked by guilt and grief, he struck out on his own with Alejo. His sister Esinam runs the muscle and acquisitions branches of CJH, has high expectations of Tueller, and is terrifying. The other dons are Bilbo Bhattacharya, who runs science and R&D, and Somebody Ndrangheta who I have not bothered to name yet, who manages the money and information. Sergio Ndrangheta is second in command for the Ndranghetas, serves as CJH section chief for the Ark (sort of an unofficial diplomatic position), and has hated Tueller since college, when he challenged Tueller to a duel and Tueller cut off his hand. He’s a miniboss and is awful.

– Alejo Soto, spy extraordinaire, isn’t actually Alejo Soto – he’s Number Five, a child agent of the revolutionary faction Roti Dan Garam, who fight for the religious and political freedom of Saturn’s people against the Evanuris, a strict theocracy. Alejo does not remember much of anything before he killed and replaced the real Alejo Soto and was used as a young poster child for the revolution. His “sister” Calixta, also an agent who replaced a real child, is Number Three, and they’re close though they don’t get to see each other often as they are both still active spies. Alejo joined CJH as a double agent and worked alongside Tueller and Kahn for years, falling in love and having an affair with Tueller’s twin sister Akilah. His archenemy is Tormod Chandra, an Evanuris industrialist he captured under CJH orders and made disappear so he could deliver him to RDG. Since the capture, RDG has merged with the Evanuris to form a new government, and under those terms Chandra was released. Calixta is currently in deep cover working for RDG as Chandra’s bodyguard and wife; it’s unknown whether she is actually loyal to him but she has been in position with him for more than a year.

– The three major factions in the Sol system are Consolidated Jovan Holdings (Jupiter’s moons), the Evanuris/Roti Dan Garam (now known as Exodus in combined form and occupying Saturn’s moons), and Erde-Maris (Earth, Mars, Luna). They all get along icily and mostly stay out of each other’s respective turfs. It’s uncommon but not out of the question for them to do business deals or work together on large projects, like the building of the jump relay. There are settlements on other moons that are for the most part independent, and the Maitri, an alien race closest to a blend between the Klingons and the Krogans, have taken over Mercury and are mining it for something or another. The Collective (more an enormous and mysterious hivemind AI than a faction or civilization), aside from their initial visit to Sol to harvest humanity’s AI and provide jump relay plans, has not appeared or involved themselves in Sol’s concerns. The Collective visits each civilization at the moment they develop AI, and offers them a trade: you give us your AI, we give you access to interstellar travel in the form of jump relay plans and a map. They make their terms clear by doing some display of power; in Sol’s case they turned off every networked computer in the system for one minute.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR

1) First they steal the Peregrine. Kahn and Jac come with Alejo and Tueller, Tariq is Millie’s research assistant.

2) Then they steal a macguffin from the Maitri on Mercury and figure out how to get it to work as a fuel cell. They rescue a wounded Maitri, Thasht, who stays on as crew. Jenny joins as an Erde-Maris babysitter. They leave the Sol system and head for the Ark, the known universe’s space station hub.

3) Ruma Bhattacharya, a CJH contact of Tueller’s, hires the crew to retrieve her embryos, lost in an accident during her journey to the Ark. Millie meets Three Sing Flowers, an alien who has traveled The Long Way (as in, through space at near-light speed, no jumps) to the Ark and whose civilization is on the brink of destruction. They need to recover genetic data from the remains of their home planet, destroyed millennia ago by war and ecological disaster. It happens Ruma’s ship was destroyed by the still-active, now-sentient symbiotic-fungus-defense-network living in the remains of Three’s home planet. They recover the data and the embryos and return back to the Ark. Esinam is revealed to have set the whole thing up, and menaces them after securing a promise that Alejo will not fuck with her business or her brother. Three stays behind on the Ark and attempts to establish diplomatic standing.

4) The crew goes to New Vesta, a planet where the population is under mental control by the grell, creatures who live in the physical world but exist natively in the Weave, the dimension most people only access when they dream. The grell can stay in and move freely throughout the Weave. Some grell, if they misuse this ability, turn into gigantic bloodthirsty monsters. The crew attempts to save the grell, running into Alejo’s old friend Tux along the way. With help from a grell, they travel into the Weave and are shown their worst nightmares and greatest wishes and tempted to stay – all refuse, but not before Alejo is spoken to directly by an unknown entity living inside the Weave and seemingly controlling things. It warns Alejo not to let Tux continue his research into the Weave and threatens vague apocalypse if Alejo doesn’t stop him. Jac confesses her love to Alejo, but he is interested in Millie, and she leaves the crew.

5) Millie and Alejo go on a date, but Sergio arrives beforehand to blackmail Millie into betraying Tueller – he figured out what she did with the Collective, just putting the pieces of her publicly accessible travel records together with her history and a trip to Neptune to pull the physical records of her communication. He secretly threatens Alejo to make his point, and Millie cuts off the date to avoid putting him in danger. They all go to the wedding of Tueller’s sister Akilah, where Millie decides not to betray Tueller. Sergio steals the portable deck Noma is occupying as retribution and hands it off to Chandra, to whom he owes a debt. Alejo reconciles with Akilah and runs off with her, escaping with the rest of the crew and kidnapping Sergio. They strike a mutually-assured-destruction deal with Sergio and go into business with him. On Sol, they are all declared persona non grata, with hefty bounties on their heads if they ever return. Millie confesses to the crew about violating General Order One, and Tariq leaves in disgust. A year passes.

6) Sweet, a pacifist quartermaster, and Figgan, a rakish scavver, have joined the crew. Tueller has adopted a pet Lying Cat. Back on the Ark, the crew is asked by a group of 300 Maitri who are occupying a hotel to look into a matter for them. They do so.

7) Someone attacks Akilah’s office on the Ark. Miguel, an old associate of Alejo’s from RDG, is the assigned detective. He double crosses them and attempts to steal the data Akilah had escaped with, which includes Noma’s location. They recover it after a chase in which Miguel dies. There’s a heist involving pretending to be Erde-Maris university students so they can narrow down the location, and they proceed to a ship that indeed has a large part of Noma’s codebase, but not all of it. Also, the ship is set to crash into the planet it is orbiting. Noma rejoins the crew in her diminished form. As they escape, they realize dozens if not hundreds of ships have been tipped off to their location, and they Wild Jump to escape.

8) The crew crash-lands on an uncontacted planet, one occupied by people from a wide variety of races who all seem to be living in medieval-era earth. There’s even a dragon that almost kills everyone! They do their best to blend in, per Ark guidelines about uncontacted planets, and more or less succeed. Tueller wins a tournament to get an audience in front of the king, and he’s chosen to marry the princess, who also thinks something weird is going on and wants to find out. The three of them travel to a distant mountain to fight the dragon, and during their journey Tueller is led down some metal stairs (??!) by Noma into a subterranean silo, an unthinkably vast store of weapons. She tells him she does not know what it is, but had suspicions that something like that would be here and asks him to keep it secret. They fight the dragon and realize it is a spaceship full of young children. They return the children to the village and seek audience with the king, who rather than explaining kills his own daughter, who wanted to tell the truth to the commonfolk, and banishes the crew. The crew fixes their ship and departs, angry that their questions are unanswered and they are once again forbidden to tell anyone under vague threat of annihilation. Noma refuses to answer questions about why she brought the crew there.

9) They return to the Ark and get two leads: one, an auto-generated message from Tux, telling Millie he is dead and asking her to find and raise his kid, a grell he adopted for research purposes. Alejo, Millie, Thasht, and Sweet depart for his last known location to find out what happened. He is not dead, but stuck in cyberspace on a Black Hat space station trying to hack someone. He’s looking for records on research into The Weave and anything he can find about clinical or scientific studies on dreaming – in this case, he’s trying to access the data lake belonging to Gwairin Bhattacharya, another high-level CJH scientist, who has done some work in this field. The crew frees Tux and he helps them recover a second piece of Noma’s dataset before they all return to the Ark together, now with his son Erwin in tow. He warns them that AI do not have separable datasets and the Noma they think they have been traveling with is likely an impostor algorithm or a trap.

10) The other lead is that the Maitri that the crew had previously helped are under suspicion of having killed an Ark ambassador and are requesting their help. Akilah and Kahn stay on the Ark to investigate on their end, and Tueller, Jenny, and Figgan travel to a CJH-owned penal colony after getting a lead from Sergio’s consigliere that she may have been taken there. They recover her during a riot, then return to the surface to help their accidental rescuer, a pirate named Steuber, look for his own first mate. They find everyone on the planet dead, victims of the crowd control device Sergio had installed on location. Ezio, Sergio’s consigliere, is the one who unknowingly flipped the switch, and he’s wracked with guilt. The Ambassador convinces Ezio and Tueller to flip on their family and begins gathering evidence to take every member of CJH to court as part of a massive RICO-style investigation. She’s already got contacts within the organization ready to leak to her, though none as high up as Ezio or Tueller (or Akilah, who they have also enlisted), and before this point the Ark had been turning a blind eye to CJH’s dealings as they were generally keeping things under control in their system and not a particular pain in the ass for Ark leadership; however, with the Ambassador’s kidnapping an example will be made of them. Tueller & co capture Sergio and give him over to the Ambassador. Akilah breaks up with Alejo. Sweet leaves the crew and goes back to rehab.

11) Tux convinces the crew to head to Memory-Alpha, the massive library/museum a day’s travel from the Ark where the sum of the ark civilizations’ histories are kept. He’s after the personal computer of Dr. Manaaki, Millie’s dead mentor. It’s in an exhibit dedicated to him and was thought to be wiped. Tux suspects it has Manaaki’s notes on the jump relay plans and answers for what is going on with the grell. During their journey, Noma convinces the crew to give her the missing data set, and the combination causes Noma to glitch out and become a danger to the crew. She releases gases into the atmo that knock out the crew, and Tux, having gotten into a gas mask beforehand, spends the night disassembling Noma from the ship and isolating her in a powered hard drive.

12) When the crew arrives at Memory Alpha, it is quickly put under attack by unknown mercenaries. The crew, separated, uses the confusion to make their move on the exhibit with the deck, and Tux recovers it. He is killed by stray gunfire from a security drone. Millie rushes the deck back to the ship, while Alejo goes after the mercenary’s leadership, Kahn falling to enemy fire in the process. Tueller rescues Alejo, who has correctly identified these mercenaries as part of Exodus, the group now led by Tormod Chandra. Chandra meets Millie at the ship with a handful of his mercs and takes the drive from her. He invites her to come with him to be reunited with Noma and to help save Kahn’s life. She accepts.

13) On returning to the Ark to regroup, the Maitri leader asks Tueller to recover a store of trirubidium that was stolen from them – the reason they came to the Ark in the first place. Tueller knows the trirubidium was stolen by him and the Peregrine crew, and at Jenny’s suggestion tells them so in a display of their strength. The antaam fights Tueller and loses, and Thasht, realizing this band were all maraas, takes command of the group and departs to return them to Mait for judgment.

14) Back on Chandra’s ship, he offers patience and polite company, but few answers to Millie. She attempts to move against him alongside his COO, Ryo Hanaka, who was involved in the original operation that put Chandra away and still harbors doubts about Chandra’s leadership. Together and (surprisingly) with the help of Calixta, they steal from Chandra’s quarters, dispatch his CTO when she discovers them, and turn on a beacon that will lead Peregrine to them. Millie ends up in a cell in his base on a remote moon, with a singing neighbor.

15) Alejo and Tueller infiltrate Chandra’s base to rescue Millie, with Chandra detecting their presence and inviting them to sit down and discuss their situation. Immediately after he incapacitates Alejo, Tueller kills Chandra. The crew scramble in a desperate attempt to rescue Millie, Kahn, Calixta, and Noma before Chandra’s plans are carried out and they are all killed. They gather their crew, with Ryo and his assistant Astra joining the escape, and steal Chandra’s ship, but Alejo sacrifices himself to allow the ship to depart and is killed by Chandra’s forces.