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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 5000084" data-attributes="member: 63">Quick overview of the plot.Intro. We'll make characters, and I'll explain any details of the ship or background they're curious about. What sorts of questions should I expect?Act I. The group is all in stasis pods, like Alien. The last thing they remember is lying down, feeling the stasis field come on, and thinking that they sure hope this ship doesn't brea-. And now, suddenly, they're awake, the pod is opening, and the ship's sirens are blaring. As they fight off the grogginess of prolonged biological shut-down, one by one they are injected with something. Their senses snap to alertness, and they realize things have gone horribly wrong.A group of men and women in unfamiliar combat gear stand watch, their unfamiliar weapons trained on the doors to this stasis room. One explains that it's been two centuries, and their ship, the Conrad, has been captured by intelligent aliens. The strangers are a human ranger patrol, the crew of a ship called the Vishnu. Oh, yeah, sorry to break it to you, but humanity developed Faster Than Light travel a few years back. Sorry you wasted 200 years traveling sublight.The aliens nabbed the Conrad and were holding it hostage as a bargaining chip with humanity. The rangers were sent in to rescue them.  Most of the rangers head on to awaken more of the crew, but one stays behind - Tizona Reese, who, in the fine tradition of Durandal (from Marathon) and Cortana (from Halo) is named after a sword. She arms the group with spare pistols and escorts them through the ship to the ranger shuttle, the Arjuna.As they sneak past alien patrols they get regular radio updates from the rest of the rangers, but when they're near the shuttle suddenly screams break out, and the connection is cut. The AI aboard the Vishnu sends one last message saying that he has been infected, and is shutting down to avoid giving the aliens access to the ship.Just then, the aliens find them and attack.The PCs manage to survive the alien attack and get into the shuttle, the Arjuna, which has its own lesser AI. It warns them that an alien boarding party is heading for the Vishnu, and that when they reach the main ship, the PCs will need to hook up the Arjuna to the Vishnu's engines so it can warp them away to safety. The aliens don't have FTL, so if the aliens sieze control of the ship, the Arjuna will have to self destruct to keep the technology safe.Cue a combined battle/skill challenge where the PCs can trade up to better gear and try to hold off the aliens as Tizona sets up the coupling between the two ships. It looks like they'll get away safely, but at the last moment the aliens spitefully fire a nuclear missile at the Vishnu. It doesn't destroy the ship, but it damages and irradiates it.Already in bad shape from the drugged rapid wake-up from stasis, now the PCs can look forward to a slow death, because the Vishnu doesn't have the power to make it to any Earth colony. Not to mention that a few of them probably have fragments of alien consciousness wriggling around in the recesses of their minds, slowly gnawing away at their sanity.They have a way out, though: resleeving.The Vishnu crew kept several back-up bodies in case of death, and with modern technology it's fairly simple to digitize your brain and download it into a new body. That solves the radiation part (though it certainly does wonders for the mind to suddenly be in someone else's body).As for the power problem, well, there is this pirate mining operation on a gas giant moon in a star system within range. It's a bit of a long-shot, but if the PCs pretend to be official military rangers, and if they don't let on that their ship is nearly out of power, they might be able to bluff their way into a new power plant. Once they're powered up, though, it will still take months to get back to Earth, which might be too long to wait for the rest of the sleeping crew of the Conrad.So the PCs' mission is to sleeve into new bodies, negotiate (read: shoot pirates) to get the parts they need to fix the ship, then return to the Gliese system and rescue their crewmates before the aliens assimilate them into their collective. And hopefully before the stress of combat, dying, returning to life, and having alien thoughts in their brains drives the PCs crazy too. I've got more, but I figure there's no point posting about Acts 2 or 3 if no one's reading the thread.</blockquote>

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