The TL;DR outline recap can be found here if one doesn’t want to listen to almost 4 hours.
I was worried about this session, but it turned out pretty okay.
Aris’ player was out for this session which actually worked out to my benefit because I had no idea what to do with his character. The player – and I’m going to have to harass him about this – still hasn’t really given me much of anything to toy with. Unfortunately, he’s pretty split apart from the rest of the crew at the moment so I’m not entirely sure how to weave him back into the narrative next week without it being a total asspull…
Buck’s player caught me completely by surprise with his decision to buy off his Enemy (a commercial rival) and change him to an Ally, yet this was absolutely the most apt time for it to happen since I told him (after he offered to buy the Enemy a drink) to give me a reaction roll … and he rolled 3 sixes! I’d originally intended for the character to be a pest and maybe (hopefully) start a fight with Buck so he could really screw over Buck in the next session. Instead, the player declared that they were going to spend multiple hours getting drunk together and completely forgetting why they disliked one another in the first place.
Ella’s player also surprised me with some great off the top of her head plot hooks with her former roommate that I already ended up starting to incorporate into the current plot.
Eddy getting mugged was always part of my plan – he is Unlucky, after all – and the Chase was okay – I really should have tried to spice it up somewhat by throwing some obstacles into it. I know that most recent Pyramid has additional rules for that but I haven’t gotten around to buying that yet. After the mugger got away, I have no idea why Eddy’s decision to hunt him down caught me by surprise because … urgh. Of course he’d chase after the guy who just stole something like 90K from him! I sure as hell wouldn’t just shrug that off! Still, I think I managed to handle that okay and have some pretty good ideas about what to do next with him & Sae.
In the course of the game, one of the players – Eddy’s, I think – jokingly mentioned that we needed to discover that Sam (an ex-PC who is currently missing) was actually the Big Bad (which naturally led me to throwing out a picture of Blofeld as a joke.) This, along with Buck’s buying off his Enemy, has resulted in me having to radically rewrite my plan for the rest of this adventure and the beginning of the next one (for the better, I hope.)
Amusingly, my GM style somehow keeps resulting in the crew being super split up. Next week, I have two PCs (Ella & Haank) planetside on Porozlo & surrounded by a lot of armed dudes, one PC (Buck) in a shuttle making an ’emergency landing’ nearby, two PCs (Eddy, Sae) in the highport in orbit and a third PC (Aris) also at the highport but very far away from the others. It’s like I’m trying to make things difficult for myself!