Everybody's campaigns

Ley Line walkers, Juicers, Coalition Troops, Samas, Tolkeen, & The Federation Of Magic. Come together here to discuss all things Rifts®.

Moderators: Immortals, Supreme Beings, Old Ones

User avatar
Rifter11
Wanderer
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2020 8:22 pm

Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by Rifter11 »

I just thought I would start a thread where everyone could share info on the campaigns they are running or maybe the details on one of their favorite campaigns. Hopefully this will be fun and perhaps inspiring. I will go first:

The campaign starts with the PCs coincidingly arriving at an inn/tavern in the small town of Sunset. They have just sat down to relax when a distressed woman bursts in the tavern and says "My baby! My baby! Someone please help me find my baby!"

When questioned she explains that she was foraging in the woods with her child when they got separated. Now the child isn't answering when she calls for him and she can't find him. Will they please help her find him?

When they get to the area the woman leads them too she goes in one direction while they go another. Soon they start hearing a "kathunk!" noise over and over and when they get closer they hear cries from a child coming from the same direction. When they arrive on the seen they find a boy cornered up in a large tree. On the ground below is a huge creature with a large horn growing from its head (a devil unicorn) that is leaping up at the branch the boy is on and is just barely missing it. The "kathunk!" noise is coming from the creature landing after each jump.

As the players watch, the creature (who is so focused on its prey it hasn't noticed the PCs) realizes that it doesn't have to make it up the tree when it can just tear down the tree. It moves to the trunk and runs its claws along it, producing thick curls of wood while watching the child and relishing the fear it is causing. It intends to take its time.

That's when the PCs attack and are able to destroy the creature and the boy comes down from the tree. Then the woman comes running and crying "My baby! My baby!" Then she throws her arms around the creatures neck and cries "You've killed my baby!"

Then a second battle ensues. The woman was a witch allied with the devil unicorn who was setting the PCs up.

Afterwards they went back to town and approached the town's only operator(well, him and his brother) about getting their armor repaired. He was impressed by them saving the boy and offered them a deal: he would repair their armor for free if they go on an "audition". If they succeed at it he will offer a much bigger and paying job.

They agreed (seeing how they didn't have money for the repairs it was an exceptionally good deal) and set off to some ruins that were infested with grigleapers. There "mission" : return with 8 grigleaper heads. They wound up fighting at least a couple dozen of the things (6 at a time) but were successful.

The bigger job turned out to be to provide security for the brothers and their assistant on a trip to the skelebot graveyards. Hyperion, the brother they've mainly been dealing with, believes that if the self-destruct mechanism in even less than 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands failed then there would be many in which their most expensive component, the nuclear power plant, would be salvageable.

In addition, they could look for other salvageable items in any battlefields they come across. The pay: half of whatever Hyperion's take home is to be split amongst them plus free armor repairs and e-clip recharges for the whole expedition. They agreed.

Getting there with Hyperion's Cargonaut and APT trailer (both rigged to be all-terrain) took a week plus a 3 day sidetrip to Merctown where Hyperion established some potential buyers of their salvage. Along the way they fought bandits twice and encountered some Xiticix as well.

Once there we established that they could work in three two-man teams in two 5 hour shifts apiece giving them 6 rolls daily on the skelebot graveyard salvage table on page 13 of Siege on Tolkeen book 5 and a daily roll on the random discovery table on page 87 of Siege of Tolkeen book 3 (which gives a 35% chance of an encounter).

Hyperion brought enough supplies to last two weeks. They are on day 8 and have encountered bandits three times but have had some great rolls (they got 3 TW Demon Claws!!) And when we start next week it will be with an encounter with a Immolater Daemonix.

After they finish up with the salvage they will head back to Merctown (possibly having another encounter along the way). There we will tally up what they've made but it will turn out that Hyperion's buyers back out after only buying two of the nuclear power supplies. They will likely set up a shop in the flea market to see about selling the rest which could take a few days. Antics will hopefully ensue.

Afterwards, Hyperion will tell them that if they accompany him back to Sunset he will make them a deal on another expedition that could potentially make MUCH more money.

I have more but will wait to post it until I am sure there is interest in it.
User avatar
sanka
D-Bee
Posts: 42
Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2014 4:35 pm

Re: Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by sanka »

Nice start to a campain, I would not mind reading more.
User avatar
Blue_Lion
Knight
Posts: 6226
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2001 1:01 am
Location: Clone Lab 27

Re: Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by Blue_Lion »

Not currently running one, Platoon leadership is horrible micromanaging workaholic that has us working long shifts for the sake of working long shifts. The work just is not their. I can see working 12-14 hour days if you have work but doing 12+ hour work days with busy work.

The next campaign i intend to run is CS DRAT (Defense Research Advanced Technologies/ CS Darpa in my campaigns) -basically players will be CS SF, CS commando or CS rangers testing 3 lines of prototype gear that is proposed as possible gear for the next CS refit.(CS 3G gear candidates) The results of the campaign will decide the next generation of CS gear used in other campaigns post minion war refit of CS factories.
The Clones are coming you shall all be replaced, but who is to say you have not been replaced already.

Master of Type-O and the obvios.

Soon my army oc clones and winged-monkies will rule the world but first, must .......

I may debate canon and RAW, but the games I run are highly house ruled. So I am not debating for how I play but about how the system works as written.
User avatar
Rifter11
Wanderer
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2020 8:22 pm

Re: Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by Rifter11 »

sanka wrote:Nice start to a campain, I would not mind reading more.


One day into the trip back to Merctown, they come across a newly established, comparatively tiny, Xiticix hive. Hyperion makes note that there is probably a queen inside and there is a bounty out for the heads of queens of 500,000 credits. This is where they are now and they have decided to go after the queen. They have lured 14 of the warriors (including two super-warriors) out of the hive and dispatched them. Next week they will enter the hive.

After dealing with the Xiticix and selling stuff at Merctown, Hyperion invites the PCs to return home to the small town of Sunset where his salvage yard is located. There he will make them an offer to join him on a venture that will make some, as he refers to it, "real" money.

Once there, he explains that when he was an apprentice Operator at the salvage yard in the town of Char, in dinosaur swamp, a barbarian offered to sell him some pieces of armor that he had found in the swamps. The stuff was only good for scrap which isn't worth anything unless it is sold in volume. Hyperion felt sorry for the barbarian though and offered him a bottle whiskey for the stuff. The barbarian happily agreed.

In that small pile of scrap was a helmet that for some reason caught his attention. After some tinkering, he was able to download some of the last video captured by the helmet. The data was badly corrupted (the helmet may have been digested at one point) but there was one clear image. It was of the hand and wrist of an absolutely gigantic robot sticking up out of the mud and water of the swamp. Even then, Hyperion was an expert on the different kinds of robots out there (He was and is a huge fan of the battledome in Northern Gun.) And the hand was not only something alien but it was also bigger than anything else out there.

Up until now, in the five years since his discovery of the video he has shown it to only one other person and that was one of the lead directors of Northern Gun's R&D department who said that if the robot does turn out to be an advanced alien design it would likely be worth something in the tens of millions of credits range to them.

Obviously, Hyperion wants to go and try to retrieve the robot. He explains that his plan isn't without it's risks. The robot may have sunken even deeper into the muck and be unfindable from the surface. The barbarian they would need as a guide may have died or disappeared. Obviously, the fauna and, likely, the natives will be trying to kill them. The robot could even turn out to be mundane or ruined by the muck.

However, he has a backup plan to make some money that should at least cover the expenses of the trip. Sauropod meat sells for a minimum of 3 credits per pound. A single sauropod can weigh up to 40 tons. About 30% of that would be waste (bones, hide, etc.) Leaving 28 tons (56,000 pounds) of meat to be harvested which would have a value of 168,000 credits if they can get it to a city. It shouldn't be a problem to convert his APT into a refrigerated car afterall.

So the plan will be to try and retrieve the robot but failing that they should be able to harvest a sauropod.

Assuming the party agrees to go there will be appropriate random encounters along the way (lots of dinosaurs, man-eating plants, barbarians, assorted swamp monsters, civil war ghosts, gangs from Char, etc.) and a fight with a "named" spinosaurus.

Once they get to the robot it will turn out to have been completely sealed up from the swamp and still operational! However, one of its features turns out to be a fully functional nuclear ICB cruise missile (although much smaller than a real life missile thanks to higher tech than we have) mounted to its back. (It was designed for conflicts in space.)The party will have to decide what they want to do with it. If the CS learns about it they will stop at nothing to destroy it (they can make their own afterall). NG won't want anything to do with the missile and won't even allow it in their territory. Archie, via Titan Robotics, will overtly have nothing to do with it but secretly send robots out to retrieve or destroy it. The Tundra Rangers could use it in their fight against the Calgary Rift monsters. Reids rangers would love to have it (so they could explode it in the lair of one of the vampire intelligences during daytime). Even Lazlo might want to use it against the Xiticix after all. It would be a dream come true for a Tolkeen Retribution Squad or maybe even the Fedration of Magic!

What the party decides to do with it should turn out to be fun and interesting. Even if they decide to just abandon it in the swamp. (NG will buy the robot as planned and then backward engineer it and realize there was probably a nuke attached to it. Information they may pass on to the CS who again will stop at nothing to locate and destroy it.)
User avatar
Prince Artemis
Voice of the Gateway
Posts: 1746
Joined: Mon Apr 12, 2004 10:19 pm
Comment: I love how people are quick to make demands, make spurious claims and then play the victim when you call them on it.
Location: North Sydney, Nova Scotia, CANADA. NOT Austrailia, CANADA.
Contact:

Re: Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by Prince Artemis »

The staff of vidar campaign is the only game I'm currently in. Runs every Saturday and started in 1999. Original plot was going collecting ingredients needed to return the norse god Vidar to his body (with subplots along the way for every ingredient). Then it transitioned to fighting the knights of ya'blik (who orchestrated the body heist in the first place and used his devine power to spawn some supernatural followers, with each knight getting their own flavor of sol'grenaid). After dealing with them, we discovered a mad man-god on the south pole killed him and freed the other proto gods that he had been torturing (they were part of the cause of the coming of the rifts in our game, as they did a ritual to unlock power, but this guy basically used the others as a kind of battery. Fortunately, he didn't have a clue with what to do with his power other than torturing the rest). We then had to deal with a people known as the nemisis. Super powerful beings that are pro-humanity and anti-everything else. The group basically worked to stop them from cleansing rifts earth. It wasn't hard though, just a multi-year quest that required them to finding the cosmic forge. From there, my character dueled and beat lord dunscon and claimed the now empty city of brass, which he's using as a kind of common ground project for the CS and surviving federation of magic to bond over. My character is a mage that has taken to making his own magic, and through one magical accident created a spell of legend that basically acted as a Rift lighting rod to a dimension. They're going to use the City of Brass's pocket dimension for it, to basically turn it into grand central station for all the rifts on earth, stabilizing it. We beat the lord of the deep, helping several worlds it had all but destroyed recovered. We expanded the feline pantheon in south america several fold, dealt with a lot of devine shenanigans from many pantheons, and currently we're hunting the knights of nos'gna.

I'm missing A LOT of the other things we've done but considering I've now been playing this game for more than half my life, you'll have to excuse me :) I'm sure Nekira and Misfit will have more details they can add.
guardiandashi
Hero
Posts: 1437
Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 12:21 am

Re: Everybody's campaigns

Unread post by guardiandashi »

the last long term campaign I was involved in was a few years ago, but the Character I played I had played the char for several years.
it was a d hopping campaign where the character kept ending up in various places.
the character ended up being crazy over powered in most campaigns as in the only way to teke them down in a hurry would involve using weapons intended for use against capital ships.

I made a character that I haven't gotten to play in a campaign, who is a lot less overpowered but broken in their own ways.

and I am thinking of trying to run a new west and or "high tech western" kind of inspired by the star wars Mandalorian series.
right now I am working on building up the ideas for the main town, which needs the players because the town is dysfunctional for "reasons"
as I am thinking about it the capability to turn the town into a thriving (and growing) town already exists but for various reasons hasn't been used and leveraged properly.

for instance the town "smith" has a 3d printer manufacturing station, that can build a bigger "modular" 3d printer, but hasn't been able to get the resources needed to build it (inspired by the manufacturing system in the basically abandoned game (Take on mars available on steam) )
the Sheriff has a partially destroyed jail and no deputies (because the town won't hire any) so has been held back from doing anything about the issues keeping the smith from upgrading their crafting abilities.
the saloon is also doubling as the main restaurant in town (because the restaurant next door was burned out)
the "bouncer" at the saloon COULD singlehanded clean up the entire region, but she hasn't because she is "on vacation" and no one has managed to get her interested enough to actually do more than protect the saloon, or provide access to the weapons and gear she CAN sell (provide) if she wanted to.
they also haven't asked her if she CAN help because they assume she can't. (if approached the right way, the bouncer has access to: an entire trans dimensional arms and equipment manufacturing and sales organization on a par with Naruni enterprises, she also has personal access to enough equipment to outfit a medium army (depending on your definition) including armor and mecha. she also has access to 2 capital starships that could perform orbital bombardments. )

etc.
it would give the players an opportunity to either be relatively "normal" or get crazy overpowered in a hurry
Post Reply

Return to “Rifts®”