We’ve completed a couple more sessions of our Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse! Sorry, I’m falling behind since I’m running one campaign, doing session summaries for this one, and doing other RPG work on the side. But this should catch us up.
Sixteenth Session – As we’re heading to a system overrun by kroath, the “Take An Orphan To Work Day” program backfires terribly as it turns out the guy who runs the orphanage is a spy. He is lucky to only lose one of his four limbs in the bargain.
The kroath are kinda like a mix between Predators (who they resemble) and Aliens (in that they can transform people into more kroath). We were looking forward to mixing it up with them, but turns out that’ll be unlikely. The planet where the kroath has a gravity of like 4 g’s and only mutants and cyborgs can exist outside the cities. And, we didn’t get much done on that because we spent most of the time chasing the head of the local orphanage.
A lot of the campaign’s plot has been driven by these plotline writeups Paul has us do. He has some index cards with stuff like “Old Enemy” or “Star-Crossed Lovers” written on them that we pick and then write up a related subplot for our characters (or another’s!). He is pretty much constructing entire sessions from those. A previous subplot had Martin St. John masterminding “Take an Orphan to Work Day” as part of his community service efforts with the Lighthouse’s orphanage. Turns out the kids have been stealing intel from secured areas and the guy running the orphanage takes off. At first we think maybe he’s a garden variety pedophile; then we think maybe the kids are infested with alien mind control worms; but in the end it turns out the guy’s a VoidCorp secret agent. We quickly come up with a very elaborate and amusing plan to catch him.
Seventeenth Session – We’re in the kroath infested system, but most of the session is spent dealing with an irate auditor and an alien threat that can best be described as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Again, we actually get to the kroath planet but most of the initial action is from Klaus Otterschmidt, some Concord auditor that has been making a nuisance of himself; he jails Martin St. John and tries to depose Captain Takashi. The Captain gets sick of him and has Haggernak throw him in the brig; the guy reveals that he is getting payback for his family dying in a botched mission Captain Takashi led like ten years ago (a subplot helpfully written up by Chris for me, apparently).
Then, the dhros (space bunny-cats) that live in the station air ducts (the fodder from many a subplot writeup) figure in again; three of them get psychic powers somehow and try to force-choke their frequent tormentor, Martin St. John.
And finally some huge 10 km across tentacle-and-maw-intensive Lovecraftian space monster shows up. We promptly dub it the Flying Spaghetti Monster, much to Paul’s consternation. There’s a long confusing sequence mostly happening in Pepin’s mind where he makes contact with other aliens and gets superpowers and talks to the FSM and sacrifices himself to save the station… He lives, and some sci-fi author somewhere is very proud.
Kroath? Maybe next time!
Geek Related 
Fight the kroath? Nah. I never planned to have you guys actually do that. I was thinking maybe we can start the next session with some kind of minigame to resolve the ground assault on the Jaen dome and then we can move on to other things (like finding Otterschmidt’s long-lost family, and finding out what happened to Ambassador Peppin out there).