'Playing Out In The Rocks' Cepheus Engine Rpg PC Workshop & Session Report One

 

Last night's PC workshop was anything but serious with the players slinging dice & doing all of the Covid 19 purcautions (again). This work shop was to generate PC's using the Cepheus Engine rpg rules & Hostile rpg setting. Holy crap was this Eighties inspired sci fi madness from the ground up. This is my original campaign setting with stuff tacted on. 

So last night's character creation workshop using Cepheus Engine rpg rules mixed with Hostile rpg went from interesting to full on 'rough & ready'. 'The New England bouys' were born even as three of our players PC's died in character creation. Basically the 'New England bouys' are a group of miners ( read veterans) who have mustered out to become asteroid & comet farmers. But dream of turning their attentions towards violence & the lives of mercenaries or adventurers. 
The party is in the arm pit of the interstellar asteroid fields known as 'back yards'  that border the psionic debris field that created during the A.I. Wars known as 'the War of Miracles' that separates the old Earth empire from the setting of 'These Stars Are Ours'.


There is travel but its rare & two our party members are psionic. But the debris field is hot psionic death to any starship trying to cross it. There are space cops but this area is corporate legal limbo with 'shadow wars' over mining rights fought by corporate backed miners & marines. The cops get called in to solve the big profile cases or clean up after the marines when it comes outlaw claim jumpers. 

Asteroids added for colour, so the degenerates erm miners rolled up a beer cooler droid as a mascot & that was fine with me. But then they wanted a star ship & that became a little more complicated as their were broke & needed jobs or a claim fast. So they went to check the job board on 'Playground' a miner's roving pleasure ship & on going bar so that the corporations get the miner's money coming & going out. Playground also serves as 'the company store'. For this end of the campaign I turned to two sources besides Hostile's Roughnecks, Uranium Fever, & Joseph Mohr Gold Rush. Here we turned up the Eighties film Outland vibe & lowered the hum of Cepheus Engine rpg goodness. 

'Playground' is served by Robo cabs & here we whipped out the random robo cab encounter table. And boy did the players hate that little bit of random goodness finally finding number 3 in the back. This stash belonged to an ex Soviet miner called 'Old Reg' and the PC's exited the cab with this stash!? In it was a claim?! They immediately headed straight for the claim office to register it & claim Reg's asteroid shack station. And then we ended right here! 

Cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov, Expedition 18 flight engineer, performs a task during the Dec. 23 spacewalk on the International Space Station

Here's what was in 'Old Reg's stash: 

1. Designer drugs of some type pills & liquids ( to be scanned & cataloged players have seen Outland).
2. Sensor bypass unit common in the underworld of this campaign 
3. Automatic computer clock used for asteroid guide lines
4. Vacc suit repair kit 
5. Black lap top with omnious looking stickers in Russian all over it. 
6. Asteroid mining tools 
7. Bloody space knife 
8. Star maps & hyperspace jump coordinates 
9. Strange glass like finger computer unit possibly part of a hand 
10. An amulet with incredibly intricate circuit board work on it. 
    
    

The players & there's eight of em. We'll get into them next week have zero idea what the claim is. If 'Old Reg' is alive or dead or who might have dealt with him.