Savage Incursion: I Hate Space...

The following are the logs of my Savage Incursion campaign: I Hate Space

This log is the first session, where the players find that they are screwed and that the aliens are, well, not on the bright side. So of course, this first log is from the point of view of a NPC, who might stay with them a while...



Greetings soft skinned mammalians of the planet Dirt! I am !gzzbzzzt^zzt!, a merchant, though most people call me "Bug". Do not be afraid, I am not carnivorous, I prefer my protein denatured. My race, the Greezebe are pacifists, so do not worry that I may attack. We prefer to trade and impoverish our enemies.

My story is a sad one. I was hired by Captain Jat Cragyl to help him sell primitive technology that he had collected. What I didn't know was that he was also selling primitives as well!

Recently your world lost its Anshani Sentinel, opening your world up to full scale plundering. The crew of the Ardanna Nuu have been chief among the plunderers. At first they only stole items of value from your world, but such speciality goods can either fetch one a handsome price or a miserly sum depending on your skills in bargaining.

Captain Cragyl was not the best bargainer. So he decided to partake in the more lucrative trade of slavery. For the past forty standard years, he and his crew have been abducting you Dirters and selling you into slavery.

I must be honest, such activity is not unique to Cragyl and his crew. I've met other Galactics who claim to be descended from Dirters. Some have names like Lucius, others have names like Hanse or Ito. They claim that their ancestors were abducted from ocean going vessels, island colonies, or from other locations on your world. There are many Galactics in known space with Dirter ancestry.

But the current story begins when Cragyl began to mistreat the Ardanna Nuu's Greevals. Every Anshani ship has a crew of these small gray humanoids that help maintain the black boxes that run the ship. There is no need to maintain a white box, these wonders of Anshani technology maintain themselves.

I digress. Not only was Cragyl was engaging in slavery, he was mistreating the Greevals! That is just asking for a mutiny!

And we did mutiny. The Greevals, myself and the ship's doctor, Ysdrl Urlla. She was a wonder with the autodoc and could repair any wound, or even regrow an entire body from a severed head! (Dirt was only one of the worlds we plundered, other worlds, the locals knew about the Ardanna Nuu and her crew would be caught in ambushes by the natives with devastating results for the natives.)

Urlla decided that when we visited Dirt again, she would drop the bio- filters. Luckily the pirate crew was entirely made up of Galactics, so any contagion would only spread amongst them. She hid the bio- filter white box in her secret locker down in Engineering.

We spent several months abducting Dirters as well as other goods. One of the Dirters showed signs of infection: His nose was red, he had watery eyes, his lungs expelled much mucus when he coughed. I heard him say "Wow, aliens and I've got the flew!" Fly he did into the ship, past the non-existent bio-filters and into the ship. He coughed and wheezed his contagion throughout the ship.

Within days of of him coming aboard, the weaker crew began to show signs of this disease. Massive quantities of mucus and phlegm formed in their nasal cavities and lungs. They drowned in their own bodily fluids. Other Galactics were more resilient, but in the end, of the forty crew aboard the Ardanna Nuu, only six survived. And they were getting better. Angered, Cragyl strangled Urlla with his own bare hands. He would have killed me as well, but I hid.

Together with the Greevals, we hatched a plan: We would revive some of the Dirters, arm them and let them kill off the crew. We were able to bypass the locks on five of the stasis tubes and decanted a ragged bunch of Dirters, their skin bright neon orange with a UV glow, all body hair removed and a Ng^gatz slave barcode on their foreheads.

We clothed them in some coveralls I made in the tailor and armed them with weapons I had been able to secrete in my cabin.

While they were discussing their fate, two of the crew saw us in the cargo area. One ran back updeck to the rest of the crew and the other tried to confront us.

The Dirters proved very capable and incinerated him with a hand flamer. I then told them to go after the rest of the crew. While this happened, I and the Greevals took cover. Let the Dirters do what Dirters do best: Kill.

After the all clear was given, I went updeck and found more dead crew and... Sorrow! The captain's log book incinerated! I had felt a tremor earlier, so I ran to the navigation cube room and... Aiyeeee! All the cubes were scattered about the room! We are lost!

And even more trouble plagued us! The five Dirters were not chipped as crew! Our only hope was this world the captain had been heading for to retrieve some missing navigation cubes. From the way he talked, finding them would not be a problem, which made me think that he may have marooned a former crew member on this world.

I took the Dirters for a tour of the ship, I showed them the Tailor, the autodoc and then Food Service and dinning rooms. The large male Dirter was constantly invoking his deity and saying that he hated space. I do not know why.

The next morning we arrived at our destination, a cold iceball of a world the Dirters promptly named "Hoth".

We landed and the Dirters made some clothing using thermal cloth, as it was very cold outside. I had made a cold weather survival suit for myself.

We left the ship, leaving two Dirters behind to guard her. On the ground we found foot prints of one Galactic and five massive beasts! I fouled my survival suit at that sight! But the Dirters bade me to stay with them while they followed the tracks.

We stopped when the ground erupted in gout of snow, ice, and ferrocrete. We had found the marooned crew member, one Dakkel Shurnel, armed with a homemade railgun. His story was that he was a lift ball and FTL drive tech that had a falling out with Cragyl over the slavery issue. He felt that opening up trade with Dirt would be more profitable than abducting the locals. Cragyl was a bigot, "Primitives are only good for one thing: Slaves!"

The Dirters were able to convince Shurnel to join them, and he was able to bypass the security lockout on the crew chipping system. After some fiddling, one of the Dirters (they all look alike) figured out how to use the chipping system and soon the Dirters were all crew. They also worked out how to remove the orange coloration from their skin as well as restore their pelts to their heads using the autodoc.

Now Dakkel is trying to convince them to travel to the trade world Zemex, it is one of the destinations on the nav cube currently residing on the bridge...