Aethera session #1: Thai takeout ship

Google Hangouts and Skype are equally suboptimal across at least four of my devices.

Late last year, I was brought on by Robert to write a little bit for his Aethera setting for Pathfinder. Ever since then, I really wanted to try my hand at GMing a sci-fi campaign, especially with Aethera's weird blend of Prohibition-era jazz hovercars and living tree-people ships. I've been running another, more traditionally fantasy Pathfinder campaign since March and I've been wanting to talk about that for some time also. Between the constantly rotating player roster, the effort I've had to put forth to design crazy shit, I just put the idea to bed.

Up until yesterday at least. Circumstances have rendered my player party short for our usual Sunday game, so I decided to do a one-off Aethera session that could very well be our new game, or at least our side campaign which may-or-may-not be related to the Seclusi Legend of slugmen, Drowlabama and Boricua monks.

Dread Hawk, 2nd level phalanx fighter.

Bri is one of the original players of the last campaign. There, she was an emberkin rogue/druid charged to raise and ultimately restore a phoenix chick. Later on in-game, she became a technical pacifist and sought the righteous path, immediately earning her the ire of the other homicide-inclined characters in the party.

In the Aethera system, Bri is a phalanx fighter, bashing you with a warhammer stab-slicing you with chakrams. Aethera's setting doesn't have any gods, but that didn't stop her from putting down "THE STRONGEST" as her chosen diety.

Rokkel, 2nd level infused telekineticist.

Austin is another one of the original players from the aforementioned Pathfinder game. There, he was a chaotic neutral half-elf wizard and played him about as you would expect. Here, Rokkel is a neutral evil kind-of-a-force-wielding-Jedi-but-not-really type asexual playing the long con. This is also the best picture I currently have of him.

They're currently living in St. Louis and play with us via alternating forms of inadequate telecommunication, but we're all managing.

Benny, 2nd level human gypsy bard.

John is a relatively recent addition to the group, and the most experienced RPG player among us. He previously played Castian, a half-elf dervish defender warder who was Serious Business Man, but is now a conniving tattoo artist bard out to clear his name.

#3, 2nd level phalanx monk.

Kyle is completely new, and is John's stepson. He's also totally in your face.

I'm forever intrigued by sci-fi. I understand traditional fantasy and all of its permutations. Even if you limited yourself to western European mythology and Tolkeinesque mythos, you have a fair amount of variety (especially when you include fantasy derived from other world mythology) but you have an understanding: savage monsters befalling meek pastoral men. Hack, slash, save the world.

Sci-fi is a different beast of fiction that's about navigating contemporary society removed from contemporary times, informed by the speculation of the course of technology. I emphasize navigating contemporary society since much of the genre is social commentary in all of the ways fantasy is generally not. 

(Which isn't to say fantasy doesn't do that. It can. Sometimes it does. I just feel that fantasy's about psychological creepiness and internal pathos made external vis-a-vis monsters and the archetypal dungeon.)

So, sci-fi does a lot of things and its represented by all sorts of gameable springboards. Alien, Star Trek, Independence Day, Star Wars, Gundam, Dr. Who and Gurren Lagann all offer completely different frames of reference for the mysticism of space, which might just be what links all of these disparate things. Knowing what characters my players rolled up, I decided that I'd go with a little Star Wars (at least, the dogfights, desperate protagonists, and the fascist regimes, and not so much the mysticism, predestination and the thousand different alien species), and a little pulp grit since my party is designed to beat things up.

Don't leave things in the refrigerator.

So I went with Cowboy Bebop.

Or you have to fight them, as represented by a lone die.

First, the party started off with the ship, christened the S.S. Jessyn (named after a prince from the last campaign that everyone seemed to like). I had everyone roll a d20 before play began, and averaged the results. They came up with a 10.5, which was enough to let them have a decent ship starting off and one functional turret. 9 or under would have netted them a derelict space tour bus; 16 or higher would've landed them the White Base, while four 20s would have netted them the gotdamn Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren. Instead, the get something in-between the Serenity and the Bebop.

Actually, before anything else, I gave the players an overview on Aethera. The long-standing war between the humans and erathi, the cruel creation and exploitation of the infused and the phalanx, the okanta who were just cool, and the badass taur dudes with inexplicable labyrinth ships which may-or-may-not adhere to Euclidian geometry. They seemed to really like that bit. I'll keep that in mind.

Cowboy Bebop's Toys in the Attic episode had the gang forgot about leftovers hanging out in the fridge for months, allowing a fungal entity to incubate in it and stalk the crew. So, that's what happened here. Rokkel and Benny, the only crew members who have to eat, get attacked by a black pudding. It grew out of the Chinese takeout they had in there a while back, and Benny vowed to get Thai the next time they encountered a takeout food ship.

This sort of thing works as an introduction for people who haven't played RPGs or anything before, but I forgot that my players know what they're doing. Rokkel mage hands the pudding out the trash chute, but not before Kyle's #3 grapples it and uses Brazilian jiu-jitsu holds to crank it into submission.

That's when I realized, "yeah, that kid's good, he's gonna go far in this life."

The party of the Jessyn received a job to meet up with Gull, political activist and DJ vox rider of Radio Andromeda, a wandering radio broadcast mothership that airs progressive political commentary and jazz-hip hop mashups. When they arrive, they see Radio Andromeda fighting this thing: 

Like this, only think there's an actual orchestra playing beneath the speakers.

The Horizon Hallelujah. It's based on Nonon's Symphony Regalia from Kill La Kill (a fact Bri picked up on immediately). How it works is, it's a cruiser-class ship that has a symbiote attached to it and a human owner. The Halleljuah is a covert-ops ship sent from the Hierarchy, the human-run government entity, to take down what was basically the Young Turks' spaceship. 

A cantor, or Aethera's own divine spellcasting class, conducts the ship which looks like speakers blaring from an orchestra. She's able to survive in space due to the symbiote which holds the symphonic-mechanical monstrosity together. I had Bach playing in the background, frustrating players who had to speak over it, while the cantor herself talked shit. It's actually kind of a hard boss fight at only 2nd level, so I gave them "just kill the squishy human" as a win condition.

Bri, realizing that phalanx were robots and did not have to eat, therefore did not have the energy conversion system other organisms had. So, if phalanx didn't have to eat and did not have a discernible biology, they ought to be able to survive the vacuum of space.

I couldn't argue with that. Dread Hawk and #3 leapt out of the trash chute from earlier and spoke to the cantor. Dread Hawk was immediately charmed by the immense power the cantor wielded however, and immediately bowed before her in admiration. When the cantor demanded Dread Hawk kill her companions however, the phalanx responded by beating her over the head with her warhammer. Dizzied, #3 put the cantor in a kimura lock before chucking her into space. Then she died.

Austin and John tried, but they soon lamented how their classes didn't allow them to do anything particularly awesome during space combat. I guess I'll allow them to buy more turrets and fix the teleporter on the ship.

An unfinished sketch from last year which, looking at it now, is kinda not bad.

They finally meet Gull, who gives the party 1,000 GP (or aether-credit equivalent) each for saving the station's ass. Austin, as per his nature, pops off at Gull for more money, which he gives him for the job they're about to take. They're to travel to Orbis Aurea, the icy wasteland planet home to the okanta beastmen, to recover a former elite Vanguard soldier who's defected and wants a tell-all interview with Radio Andromeda.

Afterward, the party barely survives entering Orbis Aurea's atmosphere and lands far away from their rendezvous point. The Jessyn is ensnared with hooks and ropes by cloaked tiger okanta who look kinda like this:

A jankier unfinished sketch from a couple years ago.

But Benny talked good enough shit (and Rokkel shot a mage hand through the ship's turret to pull in one of the okanta up through the garbage chute) and they let the party go.

So, that's where they're headed. It was anime. It was cool.