How my players destroyed my story-line and created space Nazis

part 1


4
4 points

This is a story about how the group I run took a flaming sledgehammer to my game, and challenged me as a GM in ways I have never been challenged before. Now, before I start, let me say this is a mix of a horror story and a tale of how the group made me proud to be a part of the hobby, and gave me a much needed restoration of my faith in the people who take part in the game. 

Roll game.

 This happened roughly a year ago. I was running a Star Finder game for a group of friends. Two of them, Mike, who was playing a vesk warrior who referred to attacking as “I CAST AX!”, and Brian, who was playing a psychopath Android Rogue. The newcomers were Kyle, who was playing a vesk warrior focused on Sharp Shooting, his wife Yvette, who was playing a Yashunta envoy, and her friend Andrew who was playing an awakened bear mystic. Andrew joined later in the game. 

         The game was a legacy game, a world where all my games happen and the actions and effects of the groups carry through to the next games. Technically this is in the same world as the game world I’ve been running for over 10 years, but in space do the actions of previous parties. The game settings were just after the invention of FTL, also known as the drift drive, except in my world it’s more like warp travel from 40K. 

         The group was sent out to re-establish contact with a long lost colony ship that was sent out pre-flight,, and to acquire a sample of a  mysterious classified substance known as Unidentified Substance Alpha (U.S.A). They found the lost colony ship still in space that was being used as a governing hub for a space-based civilization, due to the planet they were sent to colonize, having a drift storm around it that made landing virtually  impossible. 

On session zero, the party found out that their captain was a drug addict and tricked him into overdosing, used his bio print to unlock his files, and discovered the party was sent on this mission due to the first four choices being attacked by unidentified pirates before they could establish contact with the system. There were files on each party member and this included their dark secrets, and discovering a major corporation bribed galactic officials to make this mission priority and would have a legal claim on something called ‘Unidentified Substance Alpha’ (U.S.A.) 

part 2

The first-mate, Fred, a simple-minded good-hearted guy who was lazy and always screwed up, but never stopped trying to help people, took the wrong meds that put him in a waking coma. The party made it look like Fred did this on purpose, and threw him in his room. Then Mike screamed “I CAST AX” through the door when Fred started screaming who gave him the drugs to give to Captain Pike. Nat 20. 

“You feel a thud and when you pull the ax away; you feel it pry loose of something through the door, and blood flows under the door. What do you do, Mike?”

Mike replies, “Standing perfectly still, I look to my right, then my left. Then I turn my head to look behind me, do I see anyone?”

         “ No, Mike,“ I told him

          “Good, I lick the blood off my ax and walk away.”

Brian then rolled a nat 20 to make Pike a remote-controlled chair that was interfaced with his brain via a text-to-talk device. The last was not his intent, but it was a nat 20. Brian, seeing that the Captain was pleading to be helped, removed the text-to-speak,and replaced it with a blinking light. One blink meant “yes”, and two blinks meant “no.” ( and no, Pike was not his actual name, but after Kyle made the reference, I can only remember him as that.)

The game went fairly smoothly at first;  the party established contact with the grand captain, who was for all intents and purposes, the leader of the civilization. Kyle was being very diplomatic despite having the lowest diplomacy and was navigating the meeting well due to some very inspiring comments that lowered the dc of his diplomacy tests and playing the grand captain's ego while being aided by some very high rolls.The party learned how the lost colony was a meritocracy, whose population was divided between crew, people who possessed skills that were deemed essential to fleet operations, and passengers, individuals whose skill sets were deemed non-essential and had poorer lived conditions and little chance of improving their station in life. Along with discovering how, until recently, their governing body was a council of captains called the Beatles, a group who shared power, were efficient rulers, made real efforts to improve the lives of all their citizens, but whose ethics and decisions did not appeal to the focused view points of the ruling crew or religious elements of the passengers, had been in charge. 

While he did this, Brian hacked their systems to ensure the grand captain was not trying to double cross them, and Mike was staring down the honor guards of the grand captain. I left subtle hints, like how the grand captain referred to A.I. as ‘abominable intelligence’, how he commented that the colony ship’s A.I. went rabid which caused the death of a third of the crew as well as destroying their long-range communications, and how the parties computer network received no hand shake signal from any of the lost colonies A.I. The grand captain comments of how he was impressed with the extensive prosthetic augmentations of Brian's PC, asking how much of his body was artificial, Brian replied “Oh, I’m not an inefficient bacteria-ridden talking monkey like you, I am an android, and while you were hearing yourself talk, I hacked your communication and network systems. Pretty easily I might add.” 

I imagined his PC sharing the same smug look of superiority that the player had. I even gave the party a chance to rebound when the captain asked, “You allow abominable intelligences to possess bodies and walk on your ship!?!” His hand went to his weapon and his face went from shock to being flushed with rage. Alright, I thought, they can bring this back. No, no they did not. 

During Brian's next monologue, mixed with Kyle's attempt to assure the captain that he was one of the good AIs, Mike said “If they make any sudden movement, I cast ax.” 

The guards went to surround their captain in a protective circle, and the grand captain drew his ceremonial ax with Mike responding, “I want that ax!”, as I described the weapon the grand captain brandished at the party. Brian, seeing infrared signatures of the  invisible guards running through the docking hatch, triggered the release on the clamps to the docking tube...while the ships were linked…. Mike cheered as his critical hit let him sever the captain's top half from his lower half, and the rest dealt with the guards who fought to drag their grand captain's body part to safety.

Now, how the party dealt with this was impressive; they cast the bodies into space, even going as far as to use their ships pressure door to maul the wounds of the victims  (I mean the enemies) before tossing them into space, and communicating to the colony ship that the grand captain’s ship suffered a catastrophic malfunction due to the ship they sent out being so old. They did not think to recalibrate their ships docking tube to composite and apologized profusely for the death, stating that they still sought out diplomatic channels and invited another ambassador to their ship. They also took the time to study the bodies, and found out that the invisible guards they spaced could turn invisible not due to technology, but genetic modification.

And so they met with the new grand captain, Yoko Ono. She told the party she knew what happened, but if they agreed to work with her, go on a few errands, and let her defuse the situation by allowing her crew with tec implants in their heads that acted as broadcast and recording devices to do a pr move of the party giving her a tour of the ship, with most of the interview taking place in the engine room, she would agree to accept the parties offer to integrate her nation into the pact world’s alliance. It went well, until Mike said his pc got bored and started cleaning his new ax...while the cameras were rolling… live… with A natural 20 the party turned it into “we recovered the weapon to hand to you personally.” Then Mike said “ I don't wanna give up my new ax…” 

Now let me rewind, Mike is an amazing, kind-hearted guy, who is a veteran of the Iraq war. If I were ever cornered in a dark alley, he is someone I would want to get my back. He makes games fun, and is the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back, but in the heat of the game, he tends to go “all you need is kill’.

During the meeting, the party found out that the civilization was mining the system, that they had samples of Unidentified Substance Alpha (U.S.A) and that they had a problem with fertility. According to Yoko Ono, due to the high levels of radiation in space and the colony ship being very old, they had an entire section of the station with the highest levels of radiation shielding devoted to safely housing pregnant women and raising children until their systems were advanced enough to handle the radiation levels of the colony. Due to the nature of the crews’ jobs, they were exposed to the most radiation and normally had passengers carry a developing embryo from a crew member. Yoko said most passengers were happy to do so due to their allocated resources being increased during and for a few months after the pregnancy (if the child was healthy). This slightly disturbed the party, as it was meant to get  them looking at the society they had agreed to work for and integrate into the galactic community.

The group agreed after finding out some more information, and picked which errand to go off on, which was finding out why the detached nursery and incubation section of the ship had activated its engines and moved away from the colony ship. Yoko Ono had told them outsiders had come to the system, attacked them several times, and had taken control of the nursery. During this time they brainstormed about what they knew, made a few spot-on theories about the situation, bonded with the crew, and Yvette’s PC began attempting to seduce the female elf communications officer, Leth...while her real world husband was 10 feet away from me… I am really glad Kyle is one of the coolest, easiest-going guys I have ever known. I deflected the seduction attempts until I could talk to him one-on-one, asking him if he was comfortable with the npcs entering relationships with his wife’s PC. He laughed it off saying “Dude, it's just a game; if she or I were worried that you might take it into uncomfortable territory, then we wouldn't be in your games.”

The party found and boarded the nursery station, not being able to scan it due to the high level of radiation shielding, and could barely see due to the ship running on reserve power. They found an altar of Ripley Rothchild (a deity of fertility, love and strength in my world, who a previous party had helped ascend--long story) and discovered that the candles to the altar would not ignite, no matter what was done. A man in a full-sized bear costume who had his frontal lobe replaced with a computer, was guarding the entrance to the station, along with half-dozen mutated and feral newborn babies, mutant women with monsters protruding from their stomachs and tentacles the color of a pale flawless skin reaching out from the vents. They defeated the monsters and took note of how the bear guard did not attack nor was attacked by the monsters and fought against the party when they started killing the mutants. They tried to reactivate power from a few computer stations, but found that some red ropey substance was gumming up every system and console they opened up to bypass the security measures. 

To the party’s credit, they took the bear guard captive, rolled very high to reprogram and access his, and through him, the station's memory core. Discovering how the bear guard was a lobotimized doctor known as a serveitor, and his brain was mutalated due to him performing an abortion on a assault victum. I did not make these encounters easy, but the party did WORK. Using the environment to their advantage, funneling enemies, protecting each other, and lots of flamethrowers and ‘I CAST AX!” even going as far as to turn O2 tanks into bombs, they fought and cleansed most of the station, room by room. Seeing the mutants would not attack the bear doctor, they used him to barricade doors and act as a shield, all the while being harassed by the pale tentacles from the vents that would retreat back into the vents if damaged enough or exposed to fire. Every now and then, finding caches of modern ammo, holy symbols and supplies foreign to the system next to blood streaks leading further into the station, the only bodies they found were  people not native to the system with more holy symbols and surgical scars on their throats and front of their heads, sadly, none of them rolled high enough to discover the faction of these people. They even used Captain Pike as a lure, remote-controlling him to go up and down the hallways, and strapped explosives on his Pike chair so they could shoot if something big or nasty grabbed him.

The crew also found a doctor locked up in a room who was suffering from withdrawals between monster waves. They learned that abortion was indeed illegal, but it was made in the first years of being stranded when the population was approaching levels of critical failure, and had never really been enforced after the founding years.  Even when it was performed, punishment was normally a few years in the brig or a slap on the wrist under certain circumstances. These days, abortion was normally kept quiet, until Yoko Ono took over. Indeed, it was the topic that ousted the Beatles from power when they refused to enforce the law and Yoko Ono made it public. I will hand it to them, this party did an amazing job of gathering information and putting their heads together. Between the logs from the station, the nursery and the doctors they solved it: Yoko Ono was the b.b.e.g. She had risen to power by stirring up the extreme viewpoints of the ruling council, sabotaging mining operations, and blaming it on her political rivals. She was good at seeing that people more competent than her suffered ‘accidents’ if she couldn't blackmail them. She exaggerated the effect of radiation on the crew to gain the favor of female crewmembers who wanted children, but could not go through pregnancy and childbirth. She had fed the head doctor's drug habit so she could control him, using him as a tool for assasination, and was using Unidentified Substance Alpha (U.S.A.) to modify the next generation, and was using the now lobotomized assault victim as a test subject by injecting large amounts of pure Unidentified Subject Alpha (U.S.A) into her to produce mutated organs and just to see what the substance did to a body.

There was a moment of silence as the party digested this, and they unanimously decided, and I quote “ THE BITCH MUST DIE!” end quote. The group learned that the invaders had sought to take the station and when endangered the seemingly normal children transformed into monsters and overwhelmed them, the last group making a mad dash to the power core.  They stuffed the doctor into a locker with a camera receiver (that will come into play later; Yvette had something special in store for him.) The group took a detour to restore power to the station, finding a group of the invaders bodies at the core. When proceeding to the maternity ward, the last level, they found the assault victim ‘Eve’. The lobotomization and pure Unidentified Subject Alpha (U.S.A.), along with the dead bodies of the pregnant women and those without surgical scars on their necks and heads, she had absorbed, had mutated her into a giant fleshy blob whose tentacles had grown into the station and was becoming part of it and gaining control of its systems. All too late, they realized that restoring power meant that Eve’s control of the station was renewed, and with electrical working, more Unidentified Substance Alpha (U.S.A.) was being pumped into her. The group opened the door to the maternity ward and saw Eve in all her three-story-tall glory. After describing what their pc’s saw, Mike cried “ Oh, fuck this!” and threw one of his homemade bombs at Eve’s shark-toothed mouth, and rolled a nat 1 while they were in the docking tube between parts of the station…

Kyle, invoking his god Whitetusk, the god of soldiers and sharpshooters in my world, with a nat 20, shot the bomb away from the feet of Mike without it detonating and closer to Eve. Yvette, invoking her god Will Spartan, the god of intelligent warfare and luck in my world, managed to get the party members who were ko'd by the explosion behind the blast doors as the docking tube crumbled.

 The group hacked the station and fully severed the maternity ward and the rest of the station, and thought it was over, until they saw Eve’s tentacles grow from the exposed sections of the ward and that the explosion had shot the detached station in the direction of the colony ship.

Without hesitation Brian cried “battle stations!” and they proceeded to speedy Gonzalez to their ship and do battle with station Eve. I wish I had recorded the fight, each player using their skills to take a system of the ship. Eve tore off damaged sections of the station to fling at the party's ship. Yyvette scanning Eve, looking for anything they could take advantage of, Brian desperately piloting the ship, cursing as a few bad roles let Eve knock out the ship's weapons. And I thought the party would retreat after that, but no. Mike and Kyle put on their space suits and used their weapons as the ship got within firing range.  Mike, who attached his vest to a cable and launched himself out of the back of the ship, shot at the tentacles that took swipes at them. He then hit them with his ax when he got angry that he kept missing with his gun, and Kyle was using his sniper rifle. One too many lucky hits took its toll on the ship, and Brian, being the best repair PC, surrendered the control yoke to Kyle so he could keep the ship together. It was a close fight, but Eve landed a critical hit and took out the party’s engines.

 I thought it was going to be a tpk but then, I am not making this up, Yyvette made a successful god call. A 1 in a 100 chance, divine intervention. Not wanting this to be a deus ex machina scene, I wanted the party to feel like they did this, and they did. Yyvette saw out of the corner of her eye, her god messing with the controls and hearing the words “blow this up” as her computer screen revealed a vulnerable point in Eve’s shielding. Brian, with the help of a npc, squeezed every last ounce of power from the already in the red reactor, to turn their dead ship so they could use maneuvering thrusters to force the ship to move, as Kyle performed the first trademarked, tested and true ‘ducktales maneuver’. Making a sudden and violent nose up turn, he opened the loading doors where the last bomb was, the one attached to Captain Pike, with Pike still in the chair. Captain Pike, in his chair, spun with his light blinking twice rapidly as he drifted to Eve in all her tentacle glory, and Mike made the hail marys to end all hail marys with a modified shotgun pistol to blow it up right as the Pike chair hit where Eve’s mutated body met the fuel cells. BOOM!!!

The party took a flamethrower to every part of the ship that was struck by Eve’s tentacles due to cancerous growth with teeth growing on the ship that was spawning ant-like creatures with human faces, used the remains of the station to repair their ship with 2 out of 5 repairs being nat 20s. The party looked at the station, and Kyle proclaimed  “PURGE THIS FUCKING HERESY!!!!” and Brian activated the new and updated main weapon (hey, it was 2 nat 20s, I had to give them something), and Yyvette turned on the video receiver she gave to the doctor, let him see what was about to happen as they powered up and fired the lancer cannon, turning on the audio so she could hear him scream as the station was blown apart.

A good ending? But wait… THERE'S MORE. The party went back to the colony ship. With a plan. With a mystic awakened bear being launched out of the drift in an escape pod. Next time we're the good(ish) guys.

The party, in all of its rag- filled glory, decided that they would take out Yoko Ono and her government. Earlier, Brian had hacked their systems. ALL of their systems, and they had files and video of what Yoko and her doctor had done. So Brian disabled all, and I mean ALL, of their communication and played all of the government's dirty secrets. Now, have you ever been at an airport traffic control? Have you ever seen power go out to traffic lights during 5 o'clock traffic? Now imagine both of those, times a thousand. The entire civilization was space-based and countless thousands of smaller ships traveled through and around the main stations, and Brian was going to stop all these moving objects' ability to talk to each other along with the automated traffic control. I explained this to Brian and he laughed and replied “ You see, Josh, I was a communications officer in the navy, I know EXACTLY what's going to happen'' and proceeded to laugh so hard that I was surprised he didn't piss himself. 

Kyle performed his tried and true ‘ducktails maneuver’ when they had a fighter who was rolling very good on their tail. Not wanting to waste ammo, he opened the ship's septic tank and the pilot rolled a nat 1 to try to dodge. 

They saw hundreds of collisions, ships hit with debris and corpse sickles. Keep in mind, this entire time all of the current government's secrets were being broadcast, and it was the only thing on. The party managed to hack into the station's cameras and saw scenes of carnage that made the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia look like a 5 K fun run. They got to see nearly every passenger take whatever they could find and use to test the integrity of any and all crew members’ skulls they could find, and any child the mob found was assumed to be a monster in disguise, which in a few cases, the mob was right as galactic hell spawn showed some of the mob what happens when you back a cross between a honey badger and John Carpenter’s The Thing infused with the power of Satan into a corner. They witnessed groups of guards unloading high caliber munitions into crowds of civilians .They also bore witness to innocence getting caught up in the chaos, parents trying to hide their children, elderly crew members trying to run as fast as arthritic legs could carry them, and some crew and passengers uniting to try to stop the chaos. I gave the party the option of helping the ones trying to stay alive and save some of the innocents. I thought they would, and then Kyle asked “ what’s going on at the command center?” 

When I replied that they were loading governing officials into escape shuttles they all agreed to let the carnage play out, and used their new weapon. Yyvette clapped with glee as she rolled critical success to shoot the fleeing escape shuttles. Then the party docked and invaded the command center… and split up. Yyvette and Brian stayed on the ship to guard it and shoot any shuttle that got too close, Kyle, Andrew and Mike charged into the hub.

You see, an option I gave them was to start at the bottom of the station, save some people, and try to convince people to join them, and have the majority of the captains and their guard be evicted from the station. No, they walked into a boss fight, with no allies, without the full party, where the b.b.e.g. was waiting for them. And well, after seeing that the party was shooting down any and all hope of getting out, the people in the command hub knew, the only way out, was through the party. It was a snowball's chance in hell, but if your only hope of survival is through a hoard of zombies, you accept Darly Dixon as your spirit guide and hope you're a main cast member not in a season premier or fanaley. 

Yoko Ono knew what was coming when that ship started firing, so she did the only thing she could. She injected her already augmented guards with diluted U.S.A., sent them in camo mode and had them try to take the ship. And she drank her cherished 300 year old wine as the party and her ruling captains and their honor guard fought. 

On the ship, the camo guards killed half the npcs and ko'd Brian and Yvette. It was only by burning an inspiration and blowing up the medical bay that they managed to get out. Brian immolated himself with an incendiary grenade when one mutant was swallowing him whole. They joined the fight outside the ship, and dear god, it was a dog fight. Yyvette led a charge with every combat capable npc from the ship, most of them badly wounded. Each PC went down at least once. And Andrew, I have to give him credit, his first time gaming and he played his PC to a “T”. He used his healing to keep the party from dying, and went down himself twice. Mike was casting axes and fighting his way up the stairs of the high captain’s command platform, Kyle having to use his Vesk bite attack and rifle as a club when he got swarmed. And then, then all that was left was Yoko Ono, finishing off her bottle of pre drift ftl wine. As they walked up the stairs, an empty blood-stained syringe rolled down the stairs. Yoko One, knowing she was past the point of no return, injected herself with the purest strain of Unidentified Subject Alpha (U.S.A.) she had. Her final form was that of a keeper of secrets from warhammer 40 k. She tore into the party.

They used all of their ammo, taking shots and retreating, Andrew healing all he could, as a 13 foot tall four-armed demon from space hell screamed in a multi-dimensional voice. The npcs sacrificed themselves as the party realized, with how fast Yoko was now, there was no escape. Rickie T, the rat folk ship cook was cut in half, James, the acting captain had his leg severed, two nurses dead, Mike down to 1 hp, Yyvette desperately trying to run as she had no melee attacks whatsoever and was running out of ammo, Brian’s android skeleton showing in places where he had been burned, Andrew down to one spell, and Kyle looking at his last rifle charge as Yoko advance on them, screaming in triumph. Then it was Brian's turn. He asked ``I still have a grenade right?” metally preparing to kill the party I said” yes, you have the ones you haven't used already, but the blast will hit your party, and you just saw this thing tank a point blank shot in the face from a high powered sniper rifle.” 

Brian smiled, “ how high is her ass from the ground?” he asked deep in thought.

“ She is 13 feet tall, so I’m gonna say about 5-7 feet, depending on if she is walking or crawling on all six limbs.”

Brian smiled. “ Is it an athletics of strength check to shove my grenade up her ass and pull the pin?”

After a few moments of contemplation, I remembered when, years ago, a GM told me what to roll to shove a bottle of holy water down a demon's throat. “Make an unarmed attack, then roll strength to see how far you get.”
He rolled attack, nat 20. And a 17 plus his modifiers on his strength check. The entire table cheered. Once they were done laughing.

He blew Yoko Ono in half with a lv 8 grenade. 


part 3

The party saved the npcs they could.

Then they got to the master controls. And used them to space the entire station. Everyone. Every man, woman and child not in a locked-off section or in a sealed compartment was launched into the void. Hundreds of thousands of people met their end and became orbiting bodies of the station.

That got the civilizations full attention. Brave medical teams speed to the station dodging other crafts and corpse cycles to try to save who they could. And the leaderless military ships began using line of sight and morse code to communicate to each other. Yvette acted on the interception. She spoke very carefully as to highlight that she did NOT activate visual and got on the radio and rolled total 25 diplomacy to say that there was a civil war between the captains and they are restoring order and will offer any assistance they can.

Then Mike spoke.

To my dying day I will have this burned into my memory.

“ I switch on the camera, step in front of it, heft my new bloody ax, and lean down into the camera, showing my pointed teeth as I grin  and say ‘you will lay down all your weapons, isolate your children and tell us where to easily find them or ELSE!!!!!.’ and step away from the camera, letting everyone see the mangled and burnt bodies of their governing body...

……..

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

He rolled a nat 20.

Some of us laughed. Some of us face-palmed. One of us laughed so hard he cried.

Mike tried to say the nat 20 was for diplomacy.

It took the entire table 15 minutes to convince him, that what he said was no diplomacy, that was intimidation. 

The party decided to run. And as they made their way to their ship and took off, they saw medical ships docking, and fired all rear weapons at the station as they fled. With every ship capable of giving chase on their ass, the party managed to make an emergency jump out of the system. 

After some time, I thought about what long term effect the actions of the party would have on this civilization. Fantasy races stuck in an unbalanced caste system whose first contact with modern space-fairing science fiction races led to…..I don't have a word for this. Who would be concerned with genetic purity, knowing that there is a genetic code for evil and that they must make every effort to catch up to the advanced galactic community who had declared war on them ( or at lest the party, but the group introduced themselves as representatives of the galactic community, and they kinda were). And, remember how Yoko One got a tour of the engines… ya, those guys with implants, they scanned the ftl engines. And the party left discarded modern weapons on the command. 

So, a group of people who would come together and develop a sense of strong national pride, whose former government had betrayed them, and obsessed with genetic purity who would institute a new government that provided all basic needs for its citizens above all else…. National. Socialist. With a strong effort to militarize. NAZIS! IN! SPACE!

And this is a legacy setting. I had originally planned on making the lost colony an entire campaign arc that the party would spend a quarter of the planned game working on, but the party had other ideas.

But I feel responsible. You see, I had scripted events where I would have shown the bad along with the good of the system, but the party bypassed them and I figured that I would show these scripted scenes when the party came back from the nursery mission, and I underestimated how much hate I would instill in the party for the b.b.e.g. and the problem she had created. I should have baited the plot hooks more to make them WANT to see both sides of the argument. Myself, I am politically neutral and wanted to showcase how even the best political systems can be hijacked by greedy politicians playing to the fears and hatred of the masses. And how by pandering to people's hopes and fears, that the worst of us who have no skill sets other than manipulating the very people they are meant to serve, can over shout the voices of reason and villainize people who know what they are doing. How, in the end, we often drape our own worst enemies in the cape of a hero, too blind to see how we choose to put our very destruction in power.

In the end, everyone had fun, they players came back, and I still run games for them, except Brian who found out he hates science fiction games and is waiting for me to run a fantasy setting, which I will do once this virus thing is over. The biggest mistake I made was not knowing my audience. 

But the biggest impact of all, was how the party came together. They all as players, did not, even once, complain or say ‘this is too hard, or this doesn't make any sense.’ They acted as one and fought to save each other. Every.single.time. They took my story, shredded it and made something unexpected and original. They became invested in the story and saw it through to the end, and had fun. And in the next session, they role played the mental effects of what they did, how after the battle was over they all went off to drink and or contemplate the fact that they murdered hundreds of thousands of people, and did a great job of role playing their characters being driven to their versions of insanity. That arc ended with them destroying theri samples of Unidentified Subject Alpha (U.S.A.) and vowing to scour the stars and destroy each and every sample of Unidentified Subject Alpha (U.S.A.) they could find. Even Yvette, who was busy with her side quest to create an elf harem.

The game did continue, right into Brian picking a fight with a monkey priest. But that is a story for another time.

End story.


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