Session Report: Dirigible Smugglers in PB

Dungeon Master: CyberChronometer

Players: 

SunderedWorldDM (B I G J E F F, currently)

FifthDragon

Reneford (this is me)

Day/Time: August 8th 2021

System: PB, designed by SunderedWorldDM

Art by Sundered also

Summary:

We start off as a crew of three misfit smugglers 

Essim, a Noble Thief played by Fifth: a professional and serious dirigible captain who is long-term borrowing his ship, The Fanny Mae, from an old woman, with the promise that he will give the Inquisition hell and eventually return the ship so she can use it as her funeral pyre. He can manipulate noble gases with glass knives filled with the aforementioned gases.

Taz, an Ex-Inquisitor played by Sundered: a former Inquisitor who abandoned their order after too much torture and murder ensued. They seem to be of remarkably high moral fibre and sound like Zevran Arainai from Dragon Age. (That’s a compliment, I guess)

Hexatius, an Arcane Harbinger played by Reneford: a talented and therefore very illegal mage with the ability to manipulate arcane magics around him and is somewhat of a charmer. He and Taz met when Taz was tasked with torturing information out of him, cutting off bits as he went. Taz declined and they escaped together.

Our job: get some highly combustible and exceedingly expensive contraband fuel out of the empire and into pirate territory, on our smugglers dirigible, The Fanny Mae.

Off to the edge of town we go to secretly load our contraband cargo. Our contact shows up slightly late and very carefully pushing a cart full of the dangerous fuel. We begin to load it up, carefully, because looking at it the wrong way might blow you and your nearest buddies to kingdom come and back again.

At this point, Hex notices some sort of magical aura out of the corner of his eye. Using his ability to manipulate spells and his quick reflexes, he identifies this as some sort of distortion of space, and twists the threads of magic around to throw the bit of magic about 250ft into the air.

The magic shimmers and a golden sword appears, piercing through the rift and into thin air, followed soon after by a very confused and horrified Inquisitor who then plunges to his death. 

It becomes clear that his target was meant to be our contact (Codename: Chain Thief)

All hell breaks loose as the rest of his inquisitorial team run into back him up. 

The three of us panic, Taz grabs the Inquisitor’s sword that he dropped when he hit the ground and Essim uses his ability to manipulate noble gases to dampen the fuel’s ability to combust. We then run onboard with the fuel and take off as quickly as possible, with our new Chain Thief friend in tow, who is not dead thanks to me us.

The inquisitors fire hand cannons at us, but with some careful maneuvering by Essim, we absorb it with our hull and, critically, not with the balloon part of our ship.

We find out that the sword from the now-very-flat Inquisitor can cut holes is space that you can pass through, which is what he was attempting to do to kill the Chain Thief before I flung him 200+ feet into the air.

Hex ends up getting the sword, on Taz’s suggestion but Taz mopes about it so hard that Hex lets him play with it for the next few hours.

We depart!

We encounter a check point ship as we leave, which signals us to stop and state intent. Taz, our ex-inquisitor, slaps his golden inquisitorial handcuffs on Hex and reports that he is taking a dangerous fugitive off planet for study and execution.

The officer seems unconvinced, but not enough to risk angering an inquisitor. Hex mopes about being in handcuffs, and also makes the requisite joke about Taz buying him dinner first next time.

Off we go again!

We arrive at our destination, Iunathar, except it is currently on fire.

More than that, there is some kind of battle being waged, between an imperial church ship, The Dreadnaught, and the pirates. 

We do not want to be involved in this, and our contact, the Chain Thief, suggests that he will pay us for the extra trip is we can drop off the cargo somewhere else, a few days out.

We accept, and dip down beneath the cloud layer in order to hide from the dreadnaught, which is risky due to the Numerous Unknowns and also Horrifying Abyssal Creatures that we know lurk down there. Also there’s no oxygen and no one comes back from the Aether depths, ever, so this is risky by itself.

With Hex reaching out with his arcane abilities in order to sense anything with Way Too Many Eyes or other Weird Shit, however, we avoid anything too scary.

When we ascend, the fighting is over! The Dreadnaught has won and that’s pretty bad for us, seeing as it is now turning in our direction and likely wants to fry us all like an egg on a hot day in Death Valley. We put pedal to the metal and high tail it, but not before they shoot lightning cannons at us.

Essim diverts the lightning by creating channels of more conductive gases around our ship, and we out-pace the Dreadnaught, breathing sighs of relief.

We then set about charting a new route to our new drop-off point, attempting to stay out of any shipping lanes and away from any other questioning eyes as we go. 

As we are floating in the vast expanse that is the sky, we come to notice that we are being followed, by Inquisitorial ships: two smaller cutter ships of 8 crew members each.

We can’t really run and we definitely can’t hide, and realizing that they had no way of finding us in usual methods, we suspect we are being tracked somehow. 

Hex suggests they all take their clothes and search them and themselves for tracking devices, Taz gets embarrassed because apparently Hex too strongly told everyone to basically get naked even though Hex actually just meant for everyone to be thorough, not search their arseholes or something. Based on his awkwardness about Hex being shirtless and/or naked, Hex assumes Taz has a crush on him.

We search all of our pockets/coats/backpacks/etc for anything that may be a tracking device.

Essim suggests it’s the sword, which has both Hex and Taz making sad faces. Hex suggests that maybe they’re after the Chain Thief. Chain Thief admits he stole some plans for their big Dreadnaught ship right before we left port. We high-five him for being so ballsy and also because fuck the Inquisition.

It turns out that, in some unknown way, the inquisition got a tracking device onto Hex, so they pitch that overboard and then argue about how useful it could have been to throw off the inquisition, even though it’s way too late to go get it back now.

We then attempt to lose the Inquisition in a weird looping maze of debris and such, but they are simple Too Skilled and manage to keep up.

Plan B, we attempt to lure them into following us into the Shattered Fist, a bunch of destroyed pillars and large chains floating about that are obviously very dangerous obstacles for dirigibles. We also discuss Hex using his yet undetermined ability named Abomination Ouroboros. They unanimously decide that that seems too dangerous especially without knowing what it does exactly, and that the spell is to be reserved for emergencies only.

This works fairly well - one of the two Inquisition cutters gets tangled in a chain, and Hex takes the other out by casting Brain Rebellion on their helmsman. This second cutter slams into a large piece of debris and falls into the Aether.

Unfortunately, Hex’s casting (and a poor roll) means that they scrape along side a rock, ripping a gash into their balloon. They are sinking, and though it can be countered, they need to fix it soon.

At this point, a looney-toons-style sequence of failures, attempts to patch the hole and other attempts to not fall off the side of the dirigible are had. Almost everything that could go wrong does, and Reneford cannot seem to roll above a six to literally save their life. (This system wants high rolls for success)

Hex climbs up and fails every roll, falling off the rigging and only barely being caught by his ankle in a rope. Essim climbs up to help him, with the very sweet sentiment of “It’s cheaper to repair a balloon than replace a crewmember” which was possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said to Hexatius. Unfortunately Essim fails his roll to grab Hex, and Hex plummets towards the Aether, staring doom in the face. He remembers only at the last second that he has a sword that can cut through space itself.

He draws the blade and desperately makes a cut, throwing himself through the rift in space to impact onto the ships deck face first. He breaks his nose, but considering the alternative, he accepts this fate and lays there for a while to work out how bad of a concussion he has.

While this is happening, Taz manages to crash-land the ship onto the top of a large spur of rock so that we don’t sink into the horrible Aether.

We manage to eventually patch ourselves up and decide that it would be best if we took care of the surviving Inquisition agents on the ship still tangled in the chain, as we saw at least 4 or 5 fall off on impact but we don’t want them knowing that we survived.

We then spend a few hours carefully using the sword to hop from cairn to cairn as stealthily as possible, towards the Inquisition ship. Chain Thief stays behind to watch the ship and helpfully tells us that he’ll leave in about a day if we’re not back. That seems fair enough.

We get to the Inquisition ship and, with some well-timed hops through space with the sword, Hex gets Taz and Essim into position and then teleports himself behind one of the three surviving inquisition agents and kills him with a blow to the chest, while making some quip about being there to “take their lives”.

A fight ensues, wherein the last Inquisitor manages to evade many of our attacks, until Taz, being an ex-inquisitor with their special golden handcuffs, manages to manacle one of her hands so that Hex can knock her out with a punch to the face.

They then mercy kill her because there’s no point in taking prisoners and we’re also space smugglers so fuck it I guess, and toss her body over board after looting her. We’re not savages, we want that loot.

I say “so fuck it I guess” in a way that implies that I did not kill her. I definitely did. Hex absolutely cut her head off. 

We then slowly limp to Zenith Mons to deliver our cargo and the Chain Thief, and get to meet the pirate council, who give us commendations for our work and for helping deliver the Dreadnaught plans to them, as well as our original cargo. We get our pay and invite Chain Thief out for drinks, who accepts because he’s our new friend and business partner. He compliments us on our abilities and that’s probably the first time I’ve ever had someone in a game hire me and compliment me afterwards, which felt nice.

Then, as we drink and have a good time, a ship shows up. Hovering menacingly above Zenith Mons.

You guessed it. It’s the Dreadnaught. 

The End