Tales of the Space Princess - AP Report: Space Port Hassle

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Starship

Yesterday I finally got around to running a session of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess for my wife, daughter (10) and son (8). Although my son lost interest about a third of the way through (sitting still was not going well), in other regards it was probably among the best games I'd ever run. My wife laughed probably the hardest I've heard in a quite awhile.

Player characters had been generated months in advance.  They included:

• Chedna a Human Psychic (Wife)

• Star Llama a Llamoid Alien Scoundrel (Daughter)

• Fire the Freeze or Freeze the Fire a sentient, chair-sized, burning block of ice, also a Star Warrior (Son)

The scenario itself was created as an afterthought to a pirate base raid adventure I'd written notes for earlier.  But after detailing how the pirate scenario would run, I realized it might be best to have an earlier scenario to establish some key setting details and background.  Which led me to more hastily assemble the current adventure.

Player Starting Information

The Commonwealth of Worlds is union of star systems including humans and other non-human species.  The Commonwealth Armada protects the region, but spaces is big and the larger ships are stretched pretty thin.  The Admiralty relies on scoutships and troubleshooters like you to take care of local problems where a larger force isn’t needed or can’t be quickly dispatched.

You’re all down on your luck and out of money on the Spaceport Town on Cadence VI, a backwater world off the major interstellar transit routes. Looking for income, adventure, an opportunity to serve the Commonwealth or just a way to get off world, you’ve all recently signed up at a recruiter’s office for employment with the Armada.  Your skills are a bit more specialized than the usual cadets, so you’ve been given positions as semi-autonomous Troubleshooters.

In theory an Armada transport will stop by to pick you up and deliver you to your first investigation mission, but you’ve been languishing in spaceport coffee shops for two weeks now waiting for your comm link to chime, bored out of your mind with no transport arrival in sight.  Finally a messenger calls from the Jeg Tallor (Human-F) at the recruiter’s office:

Notification just came in from the Armada Administrative Branch:  Paperwork just surfaced that the Armada has had a Chiroptera-Class Hyperspace Scout docked in long term parking for the last three years.  Apparently the records got misplaced and we only found out today when they got a notification that docking fees are about to be overdue.

Normally we wouldn’t issue new recruits such a valuable piece of property as your own spacecraft, however, this is an emergency: If we don’t have that ship off the ground in two hours the overdue fees will exceed the value of the ship itself.  We need you to go across town, take charge of the craft and take off immediately!

Actual Play

The whole adventure is a fairly linear/converging gauntlet of obstacles preventing the player characters from getting to the space port on time to get their ship before the two hour limit.  When PCs come to a problem, I generally suggest a couple ways they could try to solve it, but also remind them they're free to try another solution if they can think of one.  My wife ran with that out of the gate.  The conversation went something like:

Me: It will definitely take you more than two hours to walk from the recruiting office to the star port. The recruiter suggests you go downstairs and get a runabout rental voucher or call a cab.

Unknown to the players, the financial office which provides runabout rental vouchers is a paperwork nightmare, run by a multi-tasking/many-tentacled alien with priorities which don't favor rando troubleshooters.  They will have to find some way to schmooze, out bureaucratize or steal the vouchers they need. Or they can hail a cab from one of the quirky drivers in my random table.

Me:  Or if you can think of some other way to get there, you can try that.

Wife [cutting the Gordian knot of my planning]: Couldn't we just steal a parked vehicle off the street, like borrow it and bring it back.

Me: ...it's up to you and your companions. The Scoundrel could certainly try and Defeat Security Systems to get it started though.

Wife: What do you think, should we steal a vehicle?

Daughter [a true Llama Scoundrel]: Sure.

Son [a true Star Warrior at heart]: Maybe we should go downstairs for the voucher.

Wife: Okay, that's two votes for, one against. I guess we're stealing a car.

Me: You head out into the streets intent on committing a crime. Roll to see if you can find any cars available.

[Wife rolls incredibly well.] 

Me: You find a beat up old clunker parked right across the street that you think you can still get to fly pretty well. In fact the thing is so clearly abandoned that you've managed to convince yourself taking it off the street is actually a prosocial action, a service to the neighborhood.

[Daughter rolls well. Hotwires the car like she was born to the work. The clunker wobbles cautiously into the air under her deft piloting skill.]

The rest of the session was a string of incidents:

• Rescuing a trilaterally-symetrical alien girl's bear-sized pet carnivore from a tree.

• Dodging and fending off a gigantic moth intent in finding a nice warm vehicle engine to lay it's eggs on. Freeze the Fire lured it aside momentarily with a bodily flare of fire, sending it off balance. Previous ideas of how to accomplish this had been less fruitful:

• Psychic:  I seem to have ... ceremonial robes?  Is there any way I can use those?  What are they?

• GM:  They're ordinary robes.  Everyone wore them at the monastery where you trained. When you decided the contemplative life was not your style, you just absconded with them rather than fleeing naked into the street to pursue a life of action.  Clearly the idea of theft hadn't bothered you then either.

• Psychic:  This is an enduring character trait.  I also have with me a suitcase full of bathrobes, towels, shampoo and soap samples obtained from various hotel bathrooms since then.

• Contending with a swarm of hovering, advertising nuisance bots ringing the starport entrance at the legally mandated half mile radius.  Rolled several times on the advert-bots table.  Involved a lot of hood jumping, tricky flying, blaster and laser sword antics against bots intent on snagging you into the services they were selling by any means possible.

• At the spaceport robots-entrance a couple burly low-life scavenger bots had set up a racket, extorting body parts out of other robots whose orders required them to enter the facility.  The PCs weedled the scavengers into leaving to obtain some notional uranium component salvage they claimed to have seen on a spaceport sublevel.  One of the appreciative bots receiving their limbs back assisted the PCs with the paperwork necessary to depart, which would otherwise have been yet more delay.

• All these successes eliminated the need to race the meter maid down the spaceport access roads to their ship. They launched with time to spare.

Although I'd run a game for them before, this was the first one that didn't use minis and tiles, pure theater of the mind.  And, it was definitely the one best received by my wife.  Although my playing with friends nearby amuses her sometimes, this is the first time she really seemed to take any joy out of the idea of playing though. Actually seeming interested in when the next session might be.

I'm a little afraid the rollicking spaceport jaunt might be a tough act to follow up, since next session I had planned was a bit more strategic raid on a space pirate base.

Time will tell.