Session Two of Alien: Chariot of the Gods (Spoilers Warning)

Our second session of Alien was played a couple of weeks ago. This recap will not be as detailed as session one. I should start by stating that everyone had a good time, which for me is the ultimate objective for any game. I don’t want to come across as having had a bad time. It’s just harder to recap this session because the notes weren’t as detailed and we ran out of our allotted time and had to handle the final parts of the game in narrative fashion.

Session two took a while to get going. I did not have my “A” game from the start. It had been a long tiring week at work and I was really mentally exhausted going in. Since we had re-scheduled the session I wanted to press on. Unfortunately I didn’t push the players as hard as I could have in their decision making and I felt like we were grinding gears and spinning wheels at times after the initial rest interval. I also made a tactical mistake by an NPC that detracted from a scene I was looking forward to – one that we had to skip due to time constraints. In addition to all that, I have had some seriously bad dice recently. This may have made some of the encounters less challenging than I was expecting.

After the ending scene of session one; the timely intervention of Sergeant Reid saving Captain Miller and Agent Wilson from the Neomorph threat, there was about an hour of calm in which the players were able to reduce stress after repairing the air filtration scrubbers in the central air shaft. The players were having a lot of luck on their air supply rolls. The crew of the Montero had been able to stay inside of their spacesuits, which was a good thing as it effectively made them safe from a biological threat. While cleaning the air scrubbers the crew found egg sacs of some kind in the old filters. The crew decided to burn them with Davis’ incinerator unit.

During the rest interval Wilson was approached by Agent Clayton and offered a chance help her leave the Cronus along with Medic Flynn. Clayton had a secret stash and a way off the ship if things went south. She wanted Wilson to join up with her should it be necessary to sacrifice the rest of the humans remaining on the ship. Wilson hated the idea of using his shipmates as expendables but skillfully played along with Wilson’s idea by promising cooperation (to an extent). Miller listened in to the conversation and had a separate discussion with Wilson about his real intentions once Clayton, Reid, and Flynn had left for the storage closets.

The crew of the Montero realized that Technician Rye had gone off on his own and Miller ordered him to head back to the bridge. Rye was pretty vague on his whereabouts just saying he had gone off to find additional oxygen tanks for the spacesuits. First Officer Johns of the Cronus was complaining of a headache and fatigue. Medic Blanchard wanted to check him out and get him something for the pain. While Cham was sealing the air vents on the bridge, Johns began shouting incoherently and he and Pilot Davis got into an argument. Suddenly and horribly Johns began mutating before the crew of the Montero’s eyes, leaping at Davis to attack her. John’s arms extended with a sickening popping noise and he smashed through Davis’ helmet with his bare hands stunning her. Cham swung an axe at Johns but buried it into the wall. Agent Wilson opened fire on Johns with his pistol but missed. Miller hit johns with the shotgun but Johns kept going. Finally, Blanchard took aim with his pulse rifle and took Johns out just as he was about to throttle Davis.

Once Rye got back to the Bridge, it was decided that Rye would fix the piloting station while Wilson assisted him. Blanchard, Cham, Davis, and Miller would EVA outside the Cronus to fix the navigational array and align the main engines. Clayton, Reid, and Flynn were still off working on the storage units. Wilson informed Clayton of what happened with Johns. Clayton said that she was going to speed things along and would contact again when finished. By now the crew was worried. Davis was worried that she had been exposed to the air on the Cronus and might now be infected by an alien lifeform. Everyone else was worried that any of the Cronus crew could mutate just like Johns had.

It was the next sequence that I messed up. I should have waited for Miller, Blanchard, Cham, and Davis to leave the ship. They had gone to med bay to make sure Davis was okay and capable of going outside. On the bridge, it was just Wilson and Rye. The problem is Rye wasn’t really Rye at all. Rye had been replaced by a special operative android named Lucas. Lucas was sent by a rival of Weyland-Yutani to make sure that the Montero’s mission to recover the Cronus would be a failure. Since Wilson was alone, Lucas decided to make his move to kill Wilson. The surprised Wilson would have had his skull crushed in by a wrench but for the use of story point to buy a success on armor save roll. At that point Wilson did the smart thing and ran for the med bay where the rest of Montero’s crew was preparing to EVA.

Miller began trying to negotiate with Lucas but he wasn’t having it. The conversation, however, stalled Lucas from going after Clayton and the others or from sealing himself in on the bridge. The crew of the Montero caught up to Lucas and attacked him. Everyone was shocked to see the white fluid spray out of “Rye” when he was wounded. To their horror, Rye kept coming at them even after he was set on fire by Davis’ incinerator unit. Finally the android collapsed and began to melt down in the fire. Miller extinguished the fire hoping to interrogate the remains of Lucas if they could connect him to a terminal for power. Upon a reboot, Lucas began trying to download his program into the Cronus and so Miller pulled the chord and they set Lucas on fire again to melt it down.

The party decided to head for the reactor room instead of going outside. Once they got to the reactor control room, Miller noticed that something was moving. It was an Abomination and it was hungry. As the creature began pounding on the reactor room door the crew of the Montero readied themselves before opening the door manually. A fight ensued. During the fight Davis had her armed ripped off at the shoulder before collapsing in pain and starting to bleed out. It should be noted that my dice went ice cold again and the group was able to finish off the abomination rather easily as a result. I could see that we were running out of time so I decided to push things along. The crew of the Montero heard Clayton scream out over the com-link just as their fight with the Abomination was over.

Blanchard took Davis to the med bay in an effort to save her life and arm. Cham, Miller, and Wilson ran forward towards Clayton’s last position. At this point, we had to wrap things up. There wasn’t enough left in the adventure (I did not use the option to have the Raiders show up in Act III) to make another session out of it with the long distance that some of the players had to drive.

Ending Conclusions:

-The players found Clayton and Flynn dead, ravaged by a mutated Reid.

-They found the canisters of alien material Clayton wanted to take back to the corporation.

-The players would have encountered the mutated Reid. We assumed they won that fight.

-The players would have encountered another Abomination on the outer hull while trying to repair the navigation array. This was a fight I would have really enjoyed doing but unfortunately we will never know how it would have turned out. Again for wrap up sake we assumed a win.

-The players found Clayton’s safe and her hidden escape vehicle, which also contained some more of the canisters. The safe contained a million dollars in corporate bonds.

-There was a brief discussion about what the crew wanted to do. The majority wanted to destroy the scientific data and canisters so that the corporation wouldn’t get it. Everyone but Wilson had forgotten about the damaged lab that had been sealed up, one that had canisters and samples of the strange parasitic organism egg sacs. So Wilson parleyed this to his advantage. The crew destroyed the stuff they wanted WY not to get but agreed to deliver the ship.

Wilson got credit for the ship and the contents of the lab and was given a bonus and promotion. The other players walked away with a million dollars in corporate script which Wilson “forgot” to include in his reports to his superiors. It was a win-win, except for the missing “real” Rye, and of course the poor crew of the Cronus dying to the last man. May Rye and the brave crew of the Cronus always have our sympathies, well except for Clayton (it was karma).