Out of the Frying Pan - Adapting Mutant Epoch rpg's Outland Arts's One Day Digs 7:: The Ascent To The Cepheus Engine Hostile rpg As a Oneshot Adventure - Session Report Part I

 

So I'm literally getting home right now & we've just gotten done running Outland Arts's One Day Digs 7:: The Ascent for the Mutant Epoch rpg with Zozer Games Hostile.  And this is going to sorta pick up right from here on the blog  The events on the space station activated a transmission to an explorer's ship in the Livitus system. The USS Crowe & Reynolds is a deep space explorer ship and her crew is awakened out of hypersleep when they crash land on a planet. 
"You've survived the crash. Now what?

"What horrors face a team of lunar cadets who crash land amid the ruins of the old ones? Can they work together to ascend the mega tower and call for evac, or will they perish in the attempt?"

In this unique one day dig, written by Timothy Berriault and illustrated by William McAusland.

"Players take on the roles of trainees who are forced to cope in the toxic, mutant infested and treacherous world of The Mutant Epoch. Will their training and advanced technology be enough to see them safely home, or will the perils, opportunistic predators and wily inhabitants of the old city bring about their doom?"

The cadet explorers woke up & immediately had to fight for thier lives to get out from thier starship before it sank beneath the waves.  They have no idea where they are or how they got there only that this is a failed colony and from the literature they found it was a post Recession II failed colony. The party found itself in the middle of a ruined city. 

Then they had to fight thier way through the ruined city before we even began this adventure. The encounters in "The Ascent" are balanced and were not that hard to convert over to Stellagamma's Cepheus Atom with a twist of first edition Barbaric.  So we winged it when it came to the players dealing with some of the local inhabitants. 

The players managed to save Captain Darius & thier equipmet bundles from the remains of the ship. And then it was quickly moving after getting a pep talk from the captain before he passed out; " I’m not going to lie to you, this is grim, and worse than you know. The denizens of the earth aren’t the stupid and ineffectual beasts the governments been telling you about for years. They’re mutants, freaks, and weapons from a bygone age who live in brutal harmony with this twisted rock, and we are smack dab in the middle of a likely war zone. Our ship is valuable plunder to them, and they won’t hesitate to kill all the men and violate the women before stripping every scrap from our vessel. You need to get to higher ground and contact a rescue ship. Trust nobody, kill anything that approaches you, and keep moving." Each PC cadet explorer had the following: 

1 Suit of tactical armor per player character cadet 1 Laser pistol, full power cell, per player character cadet 1 Dagger per cadet 1x 20m synthetic steel core rope 10x self anchoring pitons 4x Palm lamps 10x 5 day ration cubes 10x Cyanide tablets (Take 1 to kill a PC, type M, endurance based hazard check) 1x Medical kit (Bandages, tourniquets, bindings, antiseptic solution and 2d6 anti-toxin injectors.) 1x Damaged Long range communicator

We converted all of the stats from Independence Games G.E.A.R. book and kept going. The player's PC's made it five miles away from thier present location to get to a high sky scraper ruin to transmit for a pick up from a mothership vessel. 

The party camped for the night and here's where we ended tonight. There's a few things going on here. First of all it's not hard to use & convert the Mutant Epoch rpg material over to almost any Cepheus Engine or old school 2d6 based Science Fiction system. 

The real challenge was moving over the player's expectations from the usual Cepheus Engine rpg over to this straight up post apocalytic Hellscape that is this failed colony world. Fortunately there's a ton of resources that  I recently downloaded thanks to the Keith Frye Memorial Bundle [BUNDLE]

Now all the party has to do is get across town, set up on the high end of the ruins, transmit to the mother ship and get picked up!?!