Wages of Sin Bounty 87 FTL: Nomad Session Report
I ran bounty 87 from Wages of Sin using FTL: Nomad and had a great time!
The Session
Cromwell the scholar, Grey alien played by Shaman. Rook the outsider, Reptilian played by Valibuk.
The party found an advert for a bounty hunting gig that sounded too sweet to pass up. Some spoiled rotten rich kid who got a cushy job on a research vessel has ghosted his uncle and now the uncle is paying 450KCR to find him. Eager for a big payday the pair jumped into their vessel, Mothership, and jumped to X-1.
X-1 is a fairly large black hole. The crew's scanners picked up signs of another vessel and picked up sensor readings of the Liturgical Deviation, the ship their quarry Surya Hersch was stationed aboard. Rook hailed them on comms and the crew responded somewhat expectantly. They seemed utterly uninterested in trying to protect Hersch from the bounty hunters. Before coming aboard the research vessel did have one request for them- to leave their weapons behind as firearms were forbidden on the research vessel for fear of making a very expensive repair bill.
Stowaway weapons hidden, contingencies prepared, the crew boarded the shuttle and were welcomed by a large gathering of the crew and the two security officers. Jayleen Mabelle ushered them in and gleefully told them their arrival was foretold. Cromwell was curious about this as a learned member of the Grays. Jayleen took them to the sensor lab so they could witness X-1 for themselves.
Cromwell quickly translated the binary on the screens:
They will come seeking the interloper amongst you. By this act they are anointed. As sacrifice. Once they are within our dominion will grow and you will be rewarded. The time grows close.
Cromwell communicated this to Rook via telepathy. Jayleen encouraged Cromwell to speak with X-1. The two had a spirited debate about the beauty of not knowing everything that will come to pass. X-1 attempted to appeal to Cromwell's intelligence by offering him unlimited knowledge, but Cromwell refused the temptation. With the threat of being fed to the black hole, they asked about Surya who was holed up in an office doing a whole lot of nothing. During a fairly frank conversation the pair learned that Surya knew nothing about the malign intelligence of the black hole and was ostracized for being a nepo baby.
With the VIP in tow they found the research wing empty and locked down. Rook grabbed a debris axe and Cromwell got to work on making some thermite and downloading a copy of all the data. BOOM, they were through the door and ambushed by some researchers armed with scalpels. Rook cut one in two and Cromwell took one out with his mind blast. They subdued another with a smuggled stunner and threatened the last foe to lead them to the bridge or their comrade would die. He obliged, opening the door and getting cut down by a hail of SMG fire. Rook tossed a thermite charge into room. One guard was cooked instantly and the other fled.
A moment of quiet and the pair stashes Hersch in a safe lab. Cromwell got to work on making some tear gas. A horde of researchers came armed with scalpels baying for the pair to nobly sacrifice their lives. Instead they threw tear gas and disabled the horde.
Storming the bridge was easy after that and they managed to arrest the rest of the crew, save Hersch, and give a copy of the data to the research group in charge. A nice big payday for all involved.
Wages of Sin
While this won't be an extensive review as I have only experienced two of the hundred bounties on offer, I will say that Wages is certainly the only modern game book that has surpassed the sheer quality, variety, and openness of 76 Patrons for Classic Traveller. Luke's writing makes running the adventure clear, focused, and gives you the fruitful kind of insight that a writer should consider for an adventure. I particularly like the varied loss conditions that detail what a job done poorly or gone sideways would entail. They're a valuable jumping off point for figuring out how other permutations to the adventure might end.
This is the best book you could buy to support any science fiction game.
FTL: Nomad
One of the many CT/Cepheus spin offs, FTL: Nomad's difference is that it eschews the modifier hunting of Classic Traveller shaped things and uses an advantage/disadvantage dice pool similar to Luke's other work Violence. My players had a blast and so did I. The game was smooth and we were focusing on the fiction to apply advantages and the like. While I do not think FTL: Nomad will replace Classic Traveller for me completely, it is an excellent system for any 2d6 skill based adventuring you might want to do. I have a feeling that it would be very popular with folks who don't like the military backgrounds of CT or the amount of modifiers. And though the archetypal background may rankle the noses of some of the more serious gamers in the audience, in play it was just about the same as the different backgrounds for CT chargen in how they could approach problem solving. Nomad is a bit more heroic than CT but still a decently deadly game. The book is quite verbose but the core mechanic is all you need to understand how to run it. I intend to use a hack of it for my upcoming Bad Kansas City game.
As far as conversions go I was probably a bit off. I would keep damage for weapons between 2d6-4d6, enemy health between 10-20, and be sure to understand that a PC hitting 0 health isn't instant death for them so you can push the aggression.