Session Report — Fire in the Heart of Ordan 1

A session report for a sci-fi mech campaign.

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4 minutes to read
A colored hex map that represents the battle in the first session of the Jotun campaign.
A colored hex map that represents the session battle.

The year is 2597 AST.

With the invention of Jotun, twenty foot tall bipedal war mechs, the Frontier has freed itself from the yoke of the fascist One Earth Alliance. But peace was not meant to last.

Earth was destroyed.

The bastards that did it call themselves “The Ventiri.” They tried to do the same to Mars, but a brave few souls stopped them and destroyed their dreadnought. Despite the victory, our losses were significant.

Now the Ventiri have regrouped and invaded Ordan, a metropolis world and headquarters of Dretyl Armory. The Frontier Militia is sending all nearby forces to engage.

The campaign uses a new tactical ruleset I made and host online. It’s basically Lancer but solving all of my personal mechanical gripes with it. I will update the rules over the course of the campaign and then release them for free online.

There are six player characters:

  • DEADEYE, a sniper jotun. Piloted by “BULL”.
  • OBELISK CORVID, a shield generating jotun. Piloted by RUTH.
  • SOLAR WOLF, a CQB jotun in a man-sized frame. Piloted by “DIZZY”.
  • MARA, a sword-wielding jotun with active camo. Piloted by “GLASS”.
  • DEDP 709, a jotun with an experimental drone platform. Piloted by Finè.
  • WHALE, a massive jotun with a mini orbital cannon. Piloted by “STARFISH”.

The session began with the players receiving orders from Sergeant Bo. Ventiri forces had taken control of a vital transit station in the heart of Nill, the Many-Ringed City. Any forces that approached by ground were devastated by mortar fire. The Frontier Militia Forces had a simple solution: drop all of the Jotun on top of the enemy position from low orbit.

Summary

The players dropped into the rain-soaked city at night. They found and defeated all hostile Ventiri forces, securing the transit station. Near the end of the fighting, Finè received an unexpected distress message saying “Please help me” that appeared to come from a museum deeper in the city. This was made all the odder by the fact that there is some kind of jammer nearby blocking all other long-range communications, yet the message somehow came through. The players will have to figure out what this means next time though.

Player Actions

  • “BULL” took a wound early on that slowed his jotun, making it difficult to maneuver around the battlefield. While he did destroy several key enemies with his sniper rifle, an inability to remove the slowed condition restricted his options significantly.
  • Ruth could not join for this first session unfortunately.
  • “DIZZY” launched himself across the battlefield to find and destroy a mech with an auto-tracking munition. Along the way, he also discovered that several nearby “Goblins” (Ventiri robots made in the image of humans) were accessing computers and searching for schematics of underground facilities on the planet.
  • “GLASS” used their jotun’s active camo to avoid strikes and made their way to one of the bombard “Trolls” (dumb AI controlled mechs) and destroyed it with her arc sword.
  • Finè launched several drones throughout the battle to support teammates and also performed many scans of the area to uncover hidden combatants.
  • “STARFISH” began the session by crashing into a skyscraper, weakening its base. They later went on to charge their magnetic rail-cannon to its highest level, firing it directly into a nearby skyscraper. This destroyed that building and two nearby buildings, including the one next to STARFISH. You can see the wreckage in the image above. Needless to say, their mech took extensive damage this fight.

Rulings I Would Change

I stand by every ruling I made this session. I did need to ad-hoc create some rules for how much damage one takes when a skyscraper partially falls on you, but other than that, we played Rules As Written.

Rules I Will Change

  • I am changing the wound rules so that players can use their limited mission repairs to remove the conditions imposed by wounds. This means players can more easily remove nasty wound conditions like immobilization, but they will have less healing than they would otherwise as a result.
  • I am increasing HP across the board for players to make wounds a little less common. Taking 1 HP of damage is a little too much right now.

End Report

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next session report, where our players investigate what’s going on and possibly go to a museum? It should be out sometime in the next two weeks.

The Dolent Chronicle is an RPG blog produced by Dante Nardo. If you liked this post, please consider sharing it on whatever doomed planes you reside.