Thread: Hidden Planet RPG

Hidden Planet RPG
Somebody's Gonna Die

Players:
Foxee – Lee Taggart – Women's Holding Pen
Blossom – Lana Fallon – W. Restraints
Tsaeb XIII - Tueurnino – W. Restraints
Mistique - Madeleine Maria ‘Maddy’ Harper – W. Restraints
ppsage – Ithika Uli – Men's Holding Pen
Kamisama420 - Ryuutarou Kamisama – Men's holding pen
Teele – Alexander James Vincent – M. Restraints
Nefieslab – Gabriel Weston – M. Restraints

GM: Foxee

The Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure

The Goal: Survive & Prevail

The Story: A prisoner transport ship sets out from Earth bound for TGT-15, a newly discovered planet in need of slave labor to terraform it. Struck by an asteroid, the damaged transport ship with all 213 souls on board is caught in a spatial anomaly and crash-lands on an uninhabited planet. This RPG begins just after that crash and the prisoners will need to get free of their restraints and the wreckage. (Details to come in the introduction)

The Planet: The planet seems to be uninhabited though it is habitable. While the surviving convicts may notice some effect on their bodies from the differences that this planet has from Earth, they won't result in superpowers or drastic mutations. The crash site is a green mountainous region; the temperature is the cold of early spring. There are animals on the planet, which may be similar to Earth animals, but with some major differences. We’ll make them up as we go.

The Background: Earth is ruled by a global totalitarian regime. Though humans have become adept at space travel there has been no first contact with any alien race. Prisoners on our ship would run the gamut from actual criminals to minor offenders, government dissidents, and even innocent people wrongly accused.They've been sentenced to hard labor on a terraforming crew for a newly discovered planet. They won't make it to that planet.

The Game:

You are a criminal, minor offender, a wrongly accused, or a guard (only two guards initially, please). You should be honest about which you are in your profile but your character can lie about this in the game.

Your only resources are whatever you can scrounge from the wrecked ship and whatever you can find on the planet. Prisoners would not have been carrying weapons or personal effects. Remember that your fellow convicts are also resources! Don't be too quick to write them off even if you can't stand them. Everyone has skills/strengths.

If we get stuck in a scene that should have ended I will post a plot advancement rather than let it drag.

You can die in this game. Characters are bound to end up in dangerous situations. GM can rule you dead or injured if you neglect to write this realistically yourself.

You can join this game at any time, simply PM me and we'll work you in.

Foxee’s Ten RPG Commandments:

1. Read everyone’s posts! Not only does this keep us all on the same page, it’s fun to know your posts are being read and acted upon. Respond to stimuli and events from other players’ posts.

2. Avoid writing one-line posts or extremely long posts. A range of 40-300 words is good to shoot for.

3. Edit before posting, we’re all here to improve as well as enjoy.

4. No God-modding or perfect characters. (boring!)

5. Fighting between characters should be kept to a minimum and I would like to see no killing of humans at all. However, if a fight or killing is unavoidably called for the players concerned must work the action out in PM and both parties should be amenable to the outcome.

6. Do not control another person’s character without their express consent.

7. If a player is AWOL and holding up the game the character will be NPC’d at the GMs’ discretion. If you know you’ll be gone for some time you may hand over your character to another player’s care. If you abandon your character, expect them to end up dead.

8. Don’t flood the thread with long conversations. Give others a chance to post.

9. Please discuss any issues in the Discussion thread or PM Foxee with your concerns. Gossiping about issues or spamming up the story thread is counterproductive.

10. And lastly…the GM's word is law.

Building characters:

Depth - If you’re playing a criminal give them some admirable attributes. If you’re playing an innocent, give them some flaws. If you’re playing one of the badly outnumbered guards you’ll be in a sticky situation and fear is normal.

Humans only.

Profile Template - please copy and paste the template and fill it out to create your character's profile. Post it in this thread.

Name:
Type of character: (criminal, minor offender, wrongly accused, or guard)
Gender:
Age:
Appearance: (clothes will probably be the standard prison jumpsuit and lug-sole boots. Prison guards wear a black uniform with a grey stripe up the leg, short sleeve shirt with the name stitched on and shoes or boots)
Vocation/Skills: (Skills should be believable and go along with whatever the character did for a living. Not everyone will have been a survival expert or a military dude. Think ordinary. It would be great to have at least one character with some medical knowledge.)
Personality:
Background: (Long story made short, how did your character get to this point?)

This game is open for profiles till 8/18/2010 (unless there are a zillion signups and a lot of begging in the first two days...then we'll start sooner) If you wish to discuss the game please go to the Hidden Planet Discussion & Affairs thread.

Lee Taggart
Type of character: minor offender
Gender: Female
Age: 17

Appearance
Height: 5'2”
Hair: shoulder legnth honey-colored, slightly wavy, usually tied back in a ponytail
Eyes: Hazel-green
Pleasant oval face, medium build, standard prison uniform (grey jumpsuit of a tough synthetic fiber with a double orange stripe up the leg and down each sleeve, lug-soled boots)

Vocation/Skills: Student, rudimentary gardening knowledge, some ability in dealing with animals

Personality: tomboy most of the time, somewhat rebellious, guarded

Background: Lee is from the Northeast Region of Unified America. Growing up outside of the cities gave her an agrarian point of view and an independence that doesn't go well with tight restrictions on the populace. Her parents' farm was seized and her parents arrested, charged with sedition two years ago. Lee was moved to a government boarding school and hasn't heard from her parents since. She has repeatedly played truant and has been caught out after curfew. She was finally arrested and charged with theft from the school. Old enough to be charged as an adult she has been shuffled through the system and sent to become part of a terraforming crew.

Lana Fallon

Type of Character: Criminal
Gender: Female
Age: 20


-Appearance-
Height: 5’6”
Hair: Dark brunette, straight, cut to chin length
Eyes: Cinnamon brown
She’s fair-skinned, with a heart shaped face and a thin, angular build. Her features are symmetrical, her eyes long-lashed, her nose straight and her mouth slightly wide. Her fingers are long and agile. She has a hard, hungry look to her, underscored by her intense, unsmiling gaze. Wears the standard prison uniform.

Vocation/Skills: Lock-picking, good memory, some street-fighting skill and gymnastic ability, fair cook.

-Personality -
Lana is a reserved, private person, who maintains a wary guard and is typically mistrustful. She keeps herself distant from people and won’t let anyone get close to her, but though she has a hardness about her is not a cold person; she actually has a protective streak and hates to see anyone treated cruelly. While not outspoken, she speaks plainly and truthfully, not worried about tip-toeing around others’ feelings.

-Background-
Born in the west of the New European Union, Lana lived a fairly ordinary first five years until her parents - an unremarkable, middle-class couple - were killed in a motor accident and she was left to the care of her much older half-brother, Luc. A cold, unfeeling person in his youth, over the next few years Luc became crueller, darker, treating his sister as little more than his personal slave.

As she got older, if Lana showed any defiance then Luc would take his fists to her in what he termed her ‘education’. She was hospitalised more than once because of his beatings, and her body still bears several scars. As a result of this abuse she became internalised, cold and distrusting of other people. She started skipping school, fighting, shoplifting, and several times was picked up by the police and so earned a reputation as a troublemaker - a waste of her natural intelligence, according to her teachers.

In her teens she did a couple of terms in juvenile detention, and did whatever she could to prolong her sentences rather than return home to be beaten and abused by her brother. It was in detention that she met Warren Quinn, a local boy a little older than Lana and who had also been in and out of juvenile detention. He agreed to help Lana revenge herself on Luc when they were both released, on the condition that she first help him with a job.

The job was robbing a flat on Warren’s estate. Lana picked the lock on the window and climbed inside, and let Warren in through the door. But half way through, the flat’s occupant, an old man of seventy, appeared. He threatened to call the police and Warren pulled a gun on him. Lana grabbed Warren’s wrist and tried to wrestle the gun from him but the weapon discharged; the recoil caused Lana to fall and hit her head, blacking out. When she came to both Warren and the old man were dead, and she was holding the gun.

Unsure exactly who was responsible, Lana pleaded guilty to two counts of murder.

Alexander James Vincent
Type of Character: Criminal
Gender: Male
Age: 25
--Appearance--
Height: 6'0”
Hair: Short, black
Eyes: Cold, deep blue
Alex has a tall, lithe frame with pale skin. His face is clean-shaven and handsome, but grave and cool. He wears the standard prison garb, keeping the jumpsuit zipped to his neck. His expression is usually analytical, and he rarely smiles.

Vocation/Skills: Alex is a skilled hunter and killer, specializing in stealth and tracking.

Personality: Alex comes off as generally cold and quiet. There is little he misses with his blue eyes, and he always seems to exude the air with a presence like a snake ready to strike. He won't kill for no purpose, however. In fact, he is greatly influenced by money and wealth, though strangely, he doesn't seem to indulge in many comforts or vices. In conversation, he tends to be direct, and unfond of small talk. He focuses on the task at hand, and is very guarded about himself; especially his past.

Background: Alex (or, as he is better known in the criminal underworld, Vince) was born in the New European Union. He spent only five years on Earth before his father, a surveyor and terraforming expert, was called off-planet to manage a new colony's early efforts. Vince and his mother went with him, but the transport was attacked and raided by pirates, and Vince's parents killed.

Vince was spared by a young rough-and-tough female pirate, and she raised him for seven years. The boy lived alongside the men who had killed his parents, and his new adopted mother would tell him, 'Once you're old enough, you kill them.' At eleven, he tried, and failed. He was beaten badly for it, and turned off the ship. He worked odd jobs throughout his teens, making money wherever he could. He'd listen intently to stories of hunters and killers that he met in bars and on transport ships. At eighteen, he returned to the ship and exacted his revenge. Empty and void of purpose, the desire was in him to kill again. Thus, he became a bounty hunter, and the price on his own head increased almost as quickly as his reputation.

Vince was finally turned in by a 'business' contact and arrested for numerous charges of first-degree murder.

Ithika Uli
Type of character: criminal
Gender: male
Age: 62

Appearance
Height: 5'4”
Hair: monkish, receding, ponytail, thin but wavy and not grey, facial hair wiry with silver muttonchops
Eyes: Faded blue, whites with faint pink stains, squinty and puffy
Jovial, creased face, obese, standard prison uniform roughly slit and retailored to accommodate his absurd figure, with a hunchback like rear carrying pouch.

Vocation/Skills: Long term prisoner, original background in space biology but also some slipshod ship mechanics, studied extensively in prison library, especially existentialism.

Personality: Sneaky chess player, incorrigible philanderer maintaing pretense of reform, silver-tongued devil. Often thinks he's a character from Homer's Odyssey.

Background: Uli is from the Northwest Region of Unified America. Moderately privileged bureaucrat parents, decent education. Employed in space travel for bio assessment. (Uli, before he gained all that prison sloth-weight, counted, or looked for, botanical organisms, he was a space timber cruiser.) Lady, then wife, in every port. Arrested initially for nefarious spousal irresponsibility, which snowballed with bribery and fraud, culminating with menacing and two ridiculous attempted assaults. Made an example of in the famous Six Planets Family Dead Beat Trial. Got the book thrown over himself. Works as prison grounds man and procurer of minor contraband. Favorite saying, "Don't tell Penny we're meeting like this."

Name: Gabriel Weston

Type of character: Criminal

Gender: Male

Age: 24

Appearance;
Height: 6'1
Hair: Long, tied in a ponytail, black
Eyes: Dark, stormy, blue
Years of hard work have defined his muscles and kept his figure taunt and without a trace of fat. Along his back he has a tatoo of an angel being cast down into hell, in intricate detail.

Vocation/Skills: Unemployed murderer turned Private Detective, rudimentary body language reading, knife fighting skills, religious

Personality: Gabriel has become a very religious man since his first murder and as such has tried to become very forgiving. However, Gabriel also became a private detective so he has trained his observational skills to try and maximise his efficiency as a PI. Although he is usually relaxed and easy going, he is abrasive and confrontational towards people who he sees as sinners. This last feature gives rise to some prominent self-loathing.

Background: At the tender age of 17, Gabriel Weston planned and preformed his first murder. His english teacher was dead when the police arrived and due to his careful planning, he was never suspected. However, after getting away with murder he began to be plagued by nightmares that even made him run as far away from the murder site as possible. Eventually he found an old church, abandoned when the small community around it had dried up and moved on. Their religious text was left in the church and Gabriel read from the book to try and avoid going to sleep.
By age 19, Gabriel could recite the Bible from memory and had decided to try and make amends for his crime. Instead of turning himself in to the authorities, Gabriel decided to help people with their lives and became a private detective. What set him apart from other private detectives was that he asked for no payment, only further recommendation. Still operating out of the old church, Gabriel took jobs over the phone and only ventured out for jobs and food shopping. As a self-styled religious zealot, Gabriel didn't see the criminals he encountered as worthy of life anymore. So, after each job involving a criminal, he would kill the criminal and loot his corpse for the money he used to feed himself.
During one of his jobs he was caught by the police. The only reason he was caught by the police was that he had been tracking a child molesting serial killer. Gabriel spent six hours slowly torturing him to death before cutting his throat just as the police arrived. As he was dragged out of the building, some of the slum's other residents began to cheer for him. He nodded once and said one thing, that would soon become his mantra, "If God wills it, then so shall it be done..."

Hopefully I'm not too late to join.

Name: Tueurnino
Type of character: Prisoner - status unknown (see below)
Gender: Female
Age: approx 18

Appearance:
Height: 169 cm (5'7")
Hair: Shoulder length, natural red, straight
Eyes: Dark brown
Scars cover her body, and her frame is slim but well toned. Her expression seems vacant, as though she is trying to grasp a thought that is no longer there. She speaks with an unusual accent, that seems to be a mix of many others. The dominant tone seems to be the Austro-Asian accent common in the ASEANZ Union.

Vocation/Skills:
Nobody is quite sure of the exact extend of her abilities. She has proven herself an adept fighter during conflicts with other inmates, and seems to understand most of the languages spoken by the inhabitants of the prison ship. During gym and athletics sessions, she more than holds her own against the other prisoners, often winning competitions designed to pass the time.

Personality:
Tueurnino is extremely withdrawn, fearing almost anyone that she is unfamiliar with. She is almost child-like at times, struggling to focus on any one topic for more than a few minutes, and quickly becoming restless when locked up in her cell. She treats those few that she trusts like parents, accepting their word without a second thought. Intrigued by his tattoo, she has become interested in Gabriel and his deep faith. She tries to learn more from him, and about him, wherever possible. These times seem to be the only occasions during which her attention does not stray.

Background:
Tueurnino has no memory of her past, remembering nothing prior to waking up for the first time in her cell. Lingering in her mind was the word 'Tueurnino', and clinging to the only fragment of the past she had, she took this as her name. She doesn't know what she has done to end up on the ship, but her dreams are haunted by images of innocents dying at her hands. On the ship, she mostly keeps to herself, but she has developed an attachment to Gabriel.

Name: Madeleine Maria ‘Maddy’ Harper
Type of character: wrongly accused
Gender: female
Age:17


Appearance
Height: 5'1”
Hair: Very short black hair.
Eyes: deep dark brown
Maddy is tiny and skinny, like the sort of girl that needs to be set down to a good meal to put some meat on her bones. She wears standard prisons uniform (grey jumpsuit of a tough synthetic fiber with a double orange stripe up the leg and down each sleeve, lug-soled boots)

Vocation/Skills: Street kid. She lived in the shadows of the city. She is good at being ‘a shadow’: not literally, but Maddy can live close to people without them ever being aware that she is around. She is fairy skillful at finding food even when there doesn’t seem to be any around and has some basic medical skills.

Personality: Maddy doesn’t trust or understand people much and prefers to stay away from them. When she is around people she is quite and withdrawn. She doesn’t feel the need to talk a lot as she doesn’t believe that she has a lot to say. As a person she is honest and friendly (in an evasive way) and is very loyal to those that she gives some (if not much) trust.

Background: Maddy doesn’t know where she was born of who her parents are. As far as she knows she has no family and has lived in the shadows off the city (abandon warehouses) all her life. At a young age she was more or less cared for by a elderly homeless lady who taught her how to be self-reliant. She was kind to Maddy, but she imposed her unusual views on Maddy. She taught the young girl that the world consisted of two sort of people: day walkers (the normally people who lived in a home and who in Maddy view always seem to be in a hurry somewhere) and the shadows (the homeless of which there were quite a few) and those two should not mix. From the elderly lady Maddy learned basic medical and survival skills. When Maddy was 12 years old she watched a teenage day walker beat the elderly lady to death for no apparent reason other than that he liked it. Maddy was on her own after that and felt very little reason to interact with others. At seventeen she witnessed a stabbing and as it reminded her of what had happened to the elderly lady she rushed over to help the victim. The police however found her with her fingerprints on the knife and the blood of the victim on her hands and clothes. It didn’t take much for them to assume her guilty especially with her strange and evasive behavior. Maddy was shipped off to become part of the terraforming crew.

Name: Ryuutarou Kamisama
Type of character: standard offender
Gender: male
Age: 24

Appearance: Typical Asian look (i.e. short black hair, black eyes, tan skin, lean... you know). Currently wearing the prisoner uniform.

Vocation/Skills: High robotic knowledge (as in "can make a computer from a paperclip, a shoe box and a cellphone" kinda knowledge). Also very high hand combat skills. Surprisingly good at shooting a longbow, but for some reason can't seem to be able to use firearms right. Lastly, he's a born genius when it comes to languages, although he doesn't know that because he's never been out of his hometown.

Flaws: Cannot speak English, or any other language besides Japanese. Has no idea how to survive if left alone in an inhabited place. He cannot swim at all, and is actually pretty scared of water deep enough to drown him (1m or deeper).

Personality: Looks very reserved because he doesn't speak much, but that's only because he has no idea what the discussions are about. Extremely carefree about almost anything and everything. Just can't be bothered unless danger is in his face. When talking, he uses sarcasm most of the time, which is usually funny to everyone except the person it's directed at.

Background: (All right, now this is where I might go overboard... This is a huge wall of text, hopefully not too boring, if you feel like reading it. If not, a Brief Version can be found below)
Kamisama (in Japan, people are called by their last name) was born in Japan. After many generations, the history of Japan became mythical. After the Edo period in 1868, Japan opened their closed ports to foreign countries. After years of trying, Japan slowly came to the conclusion that the world around them was not suited for its customs and traditions. Americanization, as it was called back then, quickly spread throughout the country, and soon the authorities evaluated that the outside influence was negative on the general population. Following the creation of the "ASEANZ Union", they decided that it was enough and wouldn't join another Union of whatever. From the outer perspective, this is what happened:
On a certain day, there was a tremendous earthquake. The epicenter was Tokyo. A few minutes after the earthquake, major tsunami alerts were turned on, and everyone got busy doing their things; saving lives or panicking among total chaos... you know, the usual in those days. China, Korea, Taiwan, Russia and The Philippines all got from strong to out-of-the-chart-strong tsunamis and floods. Even the United States and Canada got some waves from it. But the most unusual thing was: Japan was gone. Out of the map, disappeared, like a modern version of Atlantis.
From the inside perspective though, this is what happened: Japan, having by far the most powerful technology on the planet, especially what they kept secret, used it. They built an ion shield all around the country, like a bubble, that would dissolve anything that touches it and reform the molecules to make air inside the so-called "Babulu", as Japanese people called it, at a set rate to prevent EVERYTHING from getting dissolved. Upon activation of the shield, nothing happened above the country (since air transformed into air is pretty much the same), but UNDER the country, that was another matter. Long story short: they put the Babulu to the max power. The lower part of the shield started to dissolve water and earth under Japan into air (that would whoosh out of strategically placed vertical tunnels to prevent the land from being crushed) and the country sank to the bottom of the sea in seconds. At a set location, the shield was set on Automatic, which meant they wouldn't go any lower nor higher. The Babulu was calibrated so that the amount of air present was enough to sustain life at a comfortable level, without the Babulu getting too full of air, which would result in the country resurfacing, or too low, which would make them sink even lower where the pressure was getting a little bit too high for the shield. They turned on an anti-radar and anti radio-waves device, a very well developed cloaking mechanism, and that was it.
Since then, Japanese people have been living in total solitude and know nothing of the world outside their reversed aquarium. Above sea level, the few remaining Japanese people got assimilated after a few generations, and now people know them as "Ancient Civilization" and one of the "12 Greatest Mysteries of All Times", along with "Who Stole The Statue of Liberty's Torch?" and "How Did the Great Wall Moved From Around China To Around Brazil?". Everyone think they are an instinct race, and Japan intends to keep it that way for as long as they can.

Now, Kamisama Ryuutarou was a normal boy with great talents and potential in robotics starting at a very young age. Under his father's strict regime, he concentrated his efforts to building on that talent (along with Aikido (hand-to-hand, non-lethal combat style) and kyuudou (longbow archery)), and soon was able to make machines from spare pieces to help around the house (dish washer out of a washing machine, toaster out of BBQ grills (if you can get two of them to have a fast enough friction, heat is created in the metal, but it's amazingly noisy and takes forever)); in short, all sort of stuff. But soon, he developed this behavior of just not caring for anything. He became more and more sarcastic, and after a while, would just not do anything of his talent. Actually, nothing at all, talent related or not.

Now you have to understand that every person of this community gets assigned to a certain role to preserve the whole bubble thing from bursting, sinking, surfacing or being detected. Not doing your job (especially in robotics) was a felony. Not having changed too much in terms of traditions and customs since the "Shizumu" (The Sink), the punishment for the crime was exile. Preparations were made, and a miniature, auto-piloting Babulu was created. And off Kamisama goes. The trip up was extremely scary and confined, thus the water fear.

(Ok let's wrap this up, this is getting ridiculously too long...)
He arrived on the surface, breathed the amazingly polluted, humid and hot air for the first time and had a nice cough for a minute. Then the police came. What Kamisama didn't know is that the pod used to send him up wasn't equipped with all the radar-blocking, invisibility-thingy devices, nothing. They found him, coming out of nowhere from something that couldn't be found anywhere (auto-pilot, remember? Went back down); someone that didn't speak any currently known languages but sure did speak an odd one, and from there, it was all downhill until the bottom; terraform ship. ("That's what happens when you don't cooperate and try to screw the ID investigation off by inventing a weird language!", they said).

On the trip, he was trying his best at listening and understanding the languages on board. He could grab a few words of English, what seemed to be the mainly spoken language among the "passengers", but never enough to fully understand the meaning of even a full, simple sentence.

The irresponsible, totally ignorant of all "Gai-Babulu" (Outside Bubble) things, incapable of speaking any useful language, robotic freak Ryuutarou Kamisama, was now part of the terraform ship's survivors that crashed on TGT-15 along with 212 other very, very bad people...

Brief Version: (yes, I do think I need one lol, but it'll be BRIEF, seriously, you'll probably end up having more questions than answers if you only read this)

Ryuutarou Kamisama lived in the sunken city of Japan since he was born. Undetectable, the population of Japan stayed way below the sea level in an ion bubble for generations, completely oblivious to the outside world that was still changing above. There, they did their thing, their way, without being disturbed or disturbing anyone, keeping their customs and traditions intact from the ever-expanding globalization. The rest of the world was amazed that Japan simply disappeared from the surface of the globe, but since that happened during a gigantic earthquake of epic proportions, the general population concluded that the island was destroyed, and soon the Japanese was an "instinct race".

Master at the art of robotics since a very young age, the talented kid soon got an attitude of his own, and started to care less and less about his job and responsibilities. Not working when the lives of millions depend on the combined effort of every single soul in the Bubble is a major crime in Japan, so Kamisama was sent in exile, i.e. above surface in a totally unknown world. The pod used to send him up there not having any kinda of stealth device, the police came to pick him up pretty quickly. As the investigation for his ID was going nowhere (no records, no birth certificate, strange language that no one knew anymore, not trying to help at all, etc), they decided to just dump him on the next terraform ship.

In the ship, he tried to learn the mainly spoken language, English, and did grab a few words, but never enough for decent and effective communication.

....

pfffff....
2 hours guys... No kidding... Two hours to get this done... And I still feel it's missing information lol....

Somewhere in deep space at 06:11 hours, a microwave dinged.


Gerald gravely retrieved his Chicken a la Francais from the machine, removed his co-pilot’s cap and sat down to eat. Just because a robotic piloting system made he and the pilot somewhat redundant didn’t mean that life should not be taken seriously.


In the next moment the asteroid scored a direct hit, stopping Gerald’s watch forever and ending the lives of two other crewmembers of the prison transport ship, crushing the hull in the forward crew quarters and hurling the ship off-course.


Remaining crew sealed the damaged section off and fought regain control. The transport slowed its spin and they began to hope. However, as they prepared to return to their previous heading, the transport began to move again, pulled into a rip tide anomaly of space, speeding faster than the craft’s engines could have propelled them.


All attempts to free themselves from the anomaly failed. The blocky transport ship scudded through space like thistledown on a swift breeze for at least six hours. Watches were consulted and navigation inspected with deepening gloom.


When the anomaly finally lost its grip on the ship the momentum flung the transport at a small blue-green planet. The pilot, ignoring the unfamiliar patterns of stars, wrestled with the controls as they broke atmosphere, the transport shaking, the stitched green quilt of the terrain coming up much too fast.


The ship had been designed for station-to-station docking, not terra landings, and it dropped like a stone.


When the transport plowed into ground it left a furrow two miles long and broke into two pieces, the mangled front section of the ship taking the most force of the crash and breaking off during the slide.


The two port shuttles were crushed, somewhat saving the main hull of the prisoner section though the doors were damaged and fused shut. The back prisoner section of the craft came to rest at the edge of a plateau, tilted steeply to the starboard side pinning the mangled doors shut, wisps of fire beginning to appear from an engine and one of the crushed shuttles on that side. The starboard side (where the male convicts’ holding cell is) is highest in the wreck; the door locks popped open by the crash.

(The top right corner of the drawing is the the front starboard part of the wreck, it is the lowest point as the wreck is lying.)


Attachment 1160
This diagram is WAY too small but it's giving me headaches to fix it. Of course I have to run out for the afternoon to my mom's but I'll fix this up when I get back.

GM notes:
The rear part of the ship is crashed at the edge of a ravine (sides slope steeply but it can be cautiously walked), a rushing tributary at the bottom.


Front section of the ship (crew quarters, bridge) is about a mile back along the furrowed landing strip, mostly crushed.


The only characters that can move about freely at the present time are those in the holding pens. The male prisoners can get out of the ship IF they can climp up to the popped-open exit doors which are above them.


All female prisoners are trapped due to the ship lying on the damaged doors.


There is a small control area to the rear of the ship behind the prisoner’s section (the observation gallery leads here) where the chains of the dangerous prisoners are anchored, etc. You do not have the codes to release these. If you find someone who has the codes and manage to release them...all the chains release at once. You can't pick and choose.


There is a surviving guard named Tigs hiding in the rear room, cradling a rifle. Expect him to shoot at you. He is an NPC so you can control him...but don't make it easy! He's scared but not a pushover.

There is a very limited supply of weapons of any kind on the transport. A few long guns (traditional gunpowder weapons) and the guards would carry taser-like weapons.

Those prisoners in the retraints are in the rearmost (and highest due to the pitch of the wreck) in a special area behind polymer and steel mesh basically suspended by your right wrists.


It is possible that with the front section of the ship torn off there may have been damage to the front wall of the holding cells. While not easy this may be helpful for getting the trapped women out.


Do your best to get yourself free! If you can't I'll probably give you a hand later.


Any questions? Please use the discussion thread.


Ready?


Are you really ready?


I warn you...somebody's gonna die)


…Go!

***

- Lee -

Lee woke to pressure and a hollow moaning shriek like two metal hippos rubbing against each other. There was the faint acrid burning smell and, sounding distant somehow, women’s constant screaming.


She tried to sit up and had to struggle out from under another woman's heavily unconscious form to do so, a few panicked feet buffeted and kicked her, the ship was up on its side, the exit door below her. Other women prisoners were trampling those who were knocked out or dead. She swung wildly, yelling at the others to get off of her and managed to stand on the steep pitch of what used to be the floor. It was like standing on a pitched roof.


She looked up, the oval observation windows were blank, and the prisoners shackled behind the white screen were hanging against the floor much like meat hung up in an abattoir. She could see a few of the prisoners up there kicking and moving about, suspended by their wrists.


The screaming went on and one word came clear.


“Fire!”

-- Vince --

Sudden impact in space, lights flickering. They’d been hit, some systems had been disabled. The artificial gravity fields on these craft weren’t top of the line. They did their jobs, but there was always some latency. From that, it was simple to deduce that they were spinning slowly. For hours. The subtle shifts in the gravatic field made Vincent’s stomach turn.

There was a rise in temperature, and a squealing sound from outside. They were entering an atmosphere. Vincent had taken hold of his restraint chain with both hands. When they hit ground, the power went. Lights, grav gen, and all. Vince hung for dear life to his restraints as the ship bucked and rolled, and he found his body pulled in every direction. The wall became the floor one minute, and then the ceiling was the floor. He kept his head down, but still took several blows to the face and head.

When everything finally came to rest, he was dazed, but not unconscious. As others began to come to, panic ensued.

“Fire!” Somebody screamed. Sure enough. Probably caused by leaking engine coolant. Vince was now hanging along the wall, dangling from his restraint, which he still clutched with both hands. Hefting himself up, he tried to inspect the wall socket for anything he could pry free. There was nothing. He’d need a cutting tool, or someone to turn him loose. And then there was the problem of getting past the bars. And then, after that, he’d have to deal with being on a shipful of criminals like himself.

With him were a few others. Several were bruised, bloodied and unconscious. Others were also coming around. Across from him, he could see the women dangling in a similarly precarious position. He couldn’t get out of this by himself. None of them could. If Vince was to survive, they all had to survive. He turned to his cellmates, arrayed along the wall like decorations.

“We need to get out.” He said to them. “How can we get out?” If someone had any sort of idea, it would be better than what Vince had to go on.

-Lana-

It was the pain in her wrist that woken Lana.

She became aware of it at first as a strange weight settled over her arm and shoulder, and then of the tight, shooting pains lancing through her muscles. The pungent smell of smoke began to fill her nostrils and she felt her body spasm as she began to cough. That was when she realised her arm was suspended above her head, and her feet were resting on nothing but air.

Sounds of shouting and screaming echoed in her ears, and she came to the vague conclusion that they were ... below her? Wincing against the throbbing in the back of her skull, she slowly opened her eyes and tried to make sense of the scene she was seeing.

The ship must have crash landed at an angle; she and the other restrained prisoners were hanging from the wall by their restraints, and she could see the other prisoners through the white screen now below her feet trampling each other as they frantically searched for a way out.

One word suddenly rang out above the screams. “Fire!”

Suddenly alert, Lana looked up at the manacle shackling her to the wall. It had no visible lock, threaded through the wall with, she assumed, the release on the other side. Reaching up with her free hand she grabbed the chain and pulled herself up, setting her feet firmly against the wall socket to relieve a little of the pressure on her now agonisingly pained wrist.

She took a moment to examine the wall socket; no way she was getting out of this without tools ... which, as a ‘dangerous’ criminal, she of course didn’t have.

A few of the other restrained women were kicking and thrashing, but were in the same predicament as she.

She looked downwards at the freer prisoners.

“Hey!” she shouted as loudly as she could, throat slightly hoarse from her coughing fit. “Hey! Any of you down there! Are any of the guards still alive?”

--Ithika Uli--

The shock of being sent into space again had somewhat unhinged Uli, and he drifted out of reality quite a bit. The anomaly effects preceding the crash sent him into a complete tailspin and until the ship ploughed onto the planet, he lay in sheet-twisted bondage on his bunk, in a state resembling self-induced psycho-catatonia, with his mental function somewhere between deep dream-quest meditation and a total dissociative fugue state. The violent landing left him puddled at its foot, against the forward bulkhead. At the cry of fire his head jerked up and his eyes opened abruptly in the manner of a sleeping animal regaining its primitive consciousness.

In his addled thinking, Ithika Uli came to in an ancient Bronze Age far removed from the present century. He saw movement in the compartment, probably one of his fellow inmates. "Achilles," he cried, "To arms. The Trojans are burning the boats." He froze for a moment, rebooting, then grabbed the sheet and gathered it into a bag, his pudgy hands throttling the neck as if holding inside a clutch of writhing demons. "I have saved your winds Aeolus," he cried this time, "Although the galley is surely lost."

A frantic yelling commenced behind and above, as the manacled prisoners' desperation rose. "Silence," he roared. "Keep order in the ranks! I shall consult the dead, as Circe advised."

Uli reversed himself so that he half stood, his feet toward the damaged wall. A narrow fracture there had to him the semblance of a sacrificial trench. He mimed pouring libations and sprinkling sacrifices, holding the totally deflated, sheet-bag-of-winds in one hand. "Milk, honey, wine, water," he chanted, "and barley." He whipped the bag through the air twice as if it were a sword. "And the black blood of sister ewe and brother ram." He waited expectantly.

"There," Uli cried, pointing to the crack. "The shade of Tiresias. Tell us great seer, the course for Ithaca. Yes, yes! Follow me faithful seamen!" The step from the bed to the doubly pitched floor proved too treacherous for the paunchy old man and he tumbled hard against the weakened internal partition which gaped under his inordinate weight.

The flexing wall spit Ithika Uli into the air and he fell rather a good distance, especially considering his age and physique, to the base of the rear module. A pillowy succulent big as a large tortoise broke his fall and ingrained botanical training from his early life took over whatever was left of his senses. He still held the sheet bag and was busily filling it with melonish chunks when he heard what sounded to him like the voice of a Siren coming through some hidden break in the bulkhead.

--Tueurnino--

Only two things were stopping Tueurnino from curling up and assuming the foetal position: it was rather difficult to do so while essentially suspended from her right wrist, and an instinct that told her she knew how to deal with situations like this. Granted, she didn't know where the instinct came from, but she supposed that's why they called it an instinct.

Tueurnino had been sleeping, her rest plagued by the same old pictures of endless death. In some ways, the deafening crash that dragged her kicking - figuratively - and screaming - literally - back into consciousness was merciful. Looking around, her gaze clouded by smoke, she noticed that not all of her fellow prisoners had survived. She felt like that should sadden her, but that same instinct told her to forget about them - it wasn't like they'd ever treated her all that well anyway. She listened - who was she to argue with herself?

A fellow prisoner - she couldn't tell which one - shouted towards the unrestrained prisoners across from - actually, it's 'below', not 'across from' now, she corrected herself - them. Tueurnino didn't exactly trust anybody in the cell with her, but now wasn't exactly the time to be picky. There was that instinct talking again. "Hey, who's that?" she shouted.

Waiting for a reply, Tueurnino dragged herself up the restraint towards the upper wall of the cell. Even if there had been a release on this side, she wouldn't have known where to start, but she remembered a guard once boasting to the restrained prisoners that the only release was outside the cell. This wasn't going to be easy.

--Kamisama--

Kamisama was in a very dark place. Nothing could be seen. The only light seemed to be coming from a spotlight above his head, lighting himself and a very small area of the immaculate black floor around him. There was no wall, nobody, nothing to be seen wherever he walked. But concentrating, he could hear something. Voices speaking in a very very low tone, as if calling him.

- ...ma.
- ...misama.

As he listened, Kamisama thought he could recognize the voices. Friends, family members, co-workers...

- ...up.
- We... p.

He frowned as he tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Suddenly, the face of his angry father came rushing in the lighted area, unmistakably looking right into his eyes and spoke loudly and clearly:

- RYUUTAROU ! WAKE UP !!

Kamisama woke with a startle as if coming out of one of the most horrifying nightmare. But as soon as the initial scare was over, he closed his eyes again, a sharp pain in his head. Then the pain proceeded to expand its domain, starting with his ribs, then back, arms, legs... He was hurting pretty much everywhere.

He moved slightly for a few seconds, making sure that nothing was broken. Then he looked at the cell's door. Although bent at a few places, it would still require quite some effort to get out.

But he wasn't feeling ready for that. He decided to rest for just a little while, and closed his eyes again. He couldn't suppress the need to make small sounds of pain once in a while though.

The only thing his brain didn't grasp was the fire slowly spreading in the Holding Pen area.