Hello everyone,,
I have a problem: I collect way more RPG books than I play. So I've decided that 2018 will be the "Year of Getting to the Table". I invited members of the DnD and SWRPG group I play with to do a one-shot of Coriolis (at an incredible game cafe in Upper West Side for anyone in NYC).
I had my merc players (a soldier, an operative and a data spider) meet with a new buyer (Yazid). Yazid needed my players to travel to a nearby asteroid palace maintained by his mentor Tarik, who had suddenly gone incommunicado a couple weeks earlier.
The players traveled to the station aboard a ship piloted by Yazid's personal pilot, Sallah. The palace itself was a grandiose construction, with a massive golden dome and four towering minarets, all enclosed within an atmospheric bubble--and with no life signs present. No sooner did the player characters begin to explore the palace than Sallah abandoned them saying in effect: "Nothin' personal kid."
The palace AI "Xa" warned the players that another ship was inbound--this one full of mercenaries responding to a security alert. The players scrambled to sweep the palace looking for clues about its owner and also triggered the station's anti-asteroid autocannons. As soon as the inbound merc ship was within range (point blank), my players rolled for ranged attack. Critical damage.
I interpreted the results as the merc ship taking a full broadside and over-correcting, causing it to crash through the atmospheric bubble and smash into one of the minarets causing malfunctioning gravity, sudden decompression alerts in some of the palace's rooms and general chaos. Eventually the players escaped aboard a luxury yacht berthed elsewhere in the palace, but not before one of the players said, "This is a lot of fun!"
To make a long story short, our players ended up tracking down Yazid and Sallah to the jungle planet Kua but fought to a standstill with both enemies escaping -- although Yazid will now be paralyzed from the waist down which should lead to some interesting character interactions later on. After the fight, Tarik "the Mentor" shows up and praises the players for their tenacity and admonishes them for jacking up his very expensive palace. He explains that Yazid was likely a member of the Consortium, a powerful commercial body in the Third Horizon and he was trying to hire a crew of useful idiots to discredit Tarik by showing how he couldn't keep order in his own house. He then offers them a job and a ship if they're willing to track down his enemies--enemies of the Free League.
Moderator Action: Removed link since I can't verify what that link is or where it goes to.