The OSRchivist

Rediscovering the magic of old school roleplaying.

Moonbase Blues Session 2 After Action Report

On Wednesday, July 15th, I ran Session 2 of Moonbase Blues for Mothership. Session 0, which includes PC descriptions can be found here. I’ll be organizing this report per the “Taking Good Notes” section from the Warden’s Operations Manual, p. 27, but then worked out a little more. This session saw the PCs survive a 0hr frenzy, and move on from the dome to head towards the mechanics bay.

Roster

I’ll be referring to the human beings present by their PC names, which means the following people were present:

  • BeiBei, Teamster;
  • Camilla “Wakeup Call” Garcia, Marine;
  • Karen Whiteford, Scientist;
  • Wheeler, Android.

NPCs

  • Sarah Suzuki
    • Data Analyst;
    • Working on the Comisc Background Radiation Mapping project;
    • Has an open chest wound, stuffed with android components pumping around blue lubricant.

What Happened

The PCs spoke to Sarah Suzuki, who asked them to join her to meet the unnamed others on the base. During this conversation, Wheeler psychoanalyzed Sarah, and noted that she seemed obsessed with the meteor and the color blue. Prompted by Sarah’s apparent mania, Camila tried to get her to relinquish her weapon, which made Sarah defensive. When asked who the others were, Sarah said she’d introduce the PCs to them, before running off into the Hab, asking the PCs to follow.

BeiBei and Wheeler started to feel the first of the effects of the Blue Light as it started cresting the horizon, both progressing to Stage 1 Meteor Madness. The PCs decided to hole up in the Security Dome to weather out the Meteor cruising over. They set up a camera feed outside in the hallway, and barricaded the door to the Greenhouse as more colonists started to gather around and stare eerily at them from the lunar surface. As the meteor crested over, all hell broke loose: screams erupted throughout the base, the camera in the hallway showed fights breaking out and blood splattering in the Greenhouse Dome. As the PCs huddled together in the Security Dome, knocking on the outside of the dome escalated to banging, which worsened into the sounds of many fists and tools raining down on the metal.

When the meteor passed, the PCs ventured back out to survey the aftermath. Karen took the time to grab a body, hack the AutoDoc, and analyze the corpse. She discovered that there was targeted neural damage starting at the optic nerve, and deduced the stages of Meteor Madness from the progression. Meanwhile, Wheeler and Camila headed out into the Hab, finding four colonists who were bizarrely ignoring them: one batting at a dangling blue light like a cat batting at a toy, another slumped over a table, a third rocking in a fetal position, and the last tumbling in the low gravity. They headed into the vehicle airlock section, and found three more working vacsuits, which they quickly put on to head to the Mechanics Bay.

On their way, they spotted tracks in the lunar soil heading off to where they assumed a crashed ship was located. They ignored these tracks and kept going to the Mechanics Bay, where they spotted it under siege by meteor-mad colonists. They decided to sneak on over and jury-rig one of the outside floodlights to emit blue light, to lure the colonists in. They were partly succesful, as the colonists in front of the vehicle airlock moved off. A smaller set, however, stayed behind. Wheeler attempted to lure them away, by miming them over to point at the blue light. However, the colonists ended up surrounding him instead, being confused by his actions.

What Worked?

  • Providing vacsuits for all of the PCs motivated them to head out and act more.
  • The body horror of the colonists hit home well (such as the prisms jammed into eyes)
  • Having prepped FoundryVTT more to have tokens easily generated paid off during the session.

What Didn’t?

  • The PCs were stuck in analysis paralysis for a while, staying close to security without much drive to go out.
  • Hinting that the dropship was near their movement didn’t encourage them to head out.
  • I gave rather short timeframes for actions, which means that not much time is passing to threaten a new meteor passage.
  • I didn’t adequately signal the outcomes for player actions beforehand.

Prep For Next Time

  • Rework the Mechanics Bay map to include walls and lights, so the PCs can explore it next time.
  • Decrease the size of the FoundryVTT tokens to match the scale of the map.
  • Prepare what the meteor-mad colonists will do at the start of the next session.
  • Read up on pp. 30–33 of the Warden Operations Manual.