Scum & Villainy Solo - Spitfire - Part 1

We’re going to start in the middle of a job, picking up Hellhound (the leader of the Paxton Raiders). She’s trying to form an alliance and has been lured to a meet in the jungle. She’ll still have a squad of guards but not all the protections of her base.

Score: On Hellhound’s Trail

Who does she believe she’s meeting with? Looking at the factions, the best choice seems like the Turner Society who use rare animals from Aketi (the planet we’re currently on) for producing their drugs. Actually, are they meeting for real? 2d => 6,6 yes, definitely, and they’re concluding a big deal.

The Raiders don’t have vehicles, so they must move on large steeds native to this planet. We’ll grab Hellhound as she and her guards leave the meeting by tranquilizing these animals. Of course, tranquilizer darts for these must have been difficult to get and it’s not certain they’ll work on these huge beasts. Let’s make a fortune roll to see how effective they actually are, 1d =>3, meaning not very.

So that sets the effect when Cosmo tries to skulk and tranquilize them: Risky / Zero (considering the potency of the darts established above). But we still might spook or distract them, so we could push for Limited effect. Wait, it makes more sense instead just to scrap and then it’s Risky / Limited by that nature. I don’t want a Devil’s Bargain yet, but we can spend our gambit for the die. If it goes wrong, the Raiders might hightail it out of here, or the beasts might stampede in the wrong direction - directly towards us. 1d => 1, so this doesn’t work.

The noise and horns don’t spook the beasts at all, but now the Raiders know something’s up and start fleeing. We lose this opportunity, and at some point we might attract the Turner Society’s attention.

To represent this case, we’ll start an 8-clock, “Hellhound Reaches Base”, and put three ticks on it. ((I didn’t manage this clock well, something I’ll note in the Conclusion section.)) Obstacles at this moment include her movement, of course, but also her squad of guards.

Snaps comes roaring in at an angle with the rover and Cosmo swings on. “This was never a good plan!”, she yells over the whine of the engine. Time to make the best of things. Cosmos tries to set up Snaps to use the winch to grab Hellhound or her steed, but that will take a rig here to get the hook loose. We’re in Desperate straits; at best, this will have Limited effect (the winch will only have one shot). We could even break the whole mechanism. 2d => 2, it breaks and we put two more ticks on Hellhound’s clock.

Cosmo will resist the breakage, at least. Her Insight helps her hold the winch together as it’s about to come apart. 3d => 6 - 6 = 0, so no stress here. Thank the Way for small favors, I guess.

This is not working at all. Snaps keeps helming the rover and tries to bring it alongside. While it’s still Desperate, it should have Standard effect since a vehicle will be fast enough to do this. In addition, due to his Ace Pilot ability, the effect is pushed up to Great. 2d => 2, and that’s it: three more ticks and Hellhound fills her clock. We lose the opportunity completely - Hellhound got away. The Janus Syndicate won’t like this, so we’ll still owe them. Regardless, we’re now at -1 with the Paxton Raiders.

Payoff

We don’t get any cred or rep since we failed the job. 2 Heat, which is standard exposure with no aggravating elements.

Entanglements in this system are always at 1 die, then interpreted by a table based on your Wanted level. 1d => 1 with 0 Wanted, so that’s Ship trouble. Only the rover makes sense here, since that’s all we used. It’ll be out of commission until we repair it.

Downtime

Somehow, neither of our scoundrels have any Stress, so we’re not going to deal with their vices this time.

Snaps

The pilot sends a perfunctory note to his parents, but doesn’t really attend to his obligation. And he’ll leave the rover for Cosmo to deal with - that’s her job after all.

Instead, he’s kind of hoping to establish a connection with the Lost Legion (rebels against the Hegemony), so we’ll start a long-term project for that. It’s going to be an 8-clock for this long-term project. Jezri can help, of course: he knows everybody, although this takes a little time. We’ll use his Consort rating, plus an extra die for Jezri: 1d => 3, 1 tick. Jezri needs to make some calls - the Legion is laying low right now.

We’ll also study some applied psychology and thus train in Resolve.

Cosmo

Our mechanic will obviously work on repairing the rover, which takes 1 of the crew’s 2 cred. They won’t have enough for upkeep this time. ((That should have been during the payoff phase, but it didn’t really matter since we didn’t get the bounty.)) 1d => 2, no worries on the skipped upkeep.

I’d like to start designing a new schematic, too, but what? Maybe some sort of sonic device to neutralize large steeds, but that’s not really what Cosmo’s about. Instead, we want a drone that we can enhance later with an AI core.

1: What type of device is it, and what does it do?

A drone that uses electrical prods to immobilize a target. It should fly and fit in normal human-sized corridors.

2: What’s the minimum quality level?

2 - slow flight / hover (not fast!)

3: What complexity did we have to overcome that keeps this design from being widely used?

It’s difficult to stun a target without also causing the drone to overload.

4: What drawbacks does this item have, if any?

Unreliable, Complex (2 stage, drone and stun)

That means we have an 8-clock for study: 2d => 4, 2 ticks.

Next time, we have got to make some cred.

Lessons Learned

Despite the fact that I started off by envisioning a job, my crew didn’t really have a good plan to do this and it doesn’t fit what should be our normal mode of operation. Future jobs will lend themselves to our crew a little more, or rather they’ll do a better job of figuring out how to approach the jobs.

More importantly, I don’t think I set up the mission clock very well. First, I made a mechanical error: it should have been 2 ticks for a 1-3 result on a Risky roll). Second, I didn’t have anything tracking success. That wasn’t necessarily a huge problem, because our fiction never got close, but on future jobs I need to set up clocks with greater care. And as a last note, the guards as an obstacle did not get enough attention in the fiction.

So next time I think we’ll try to head up into space.