[Pirates of Drinax] GM seeking help (Spoilers)

Talmor

Mongoose
I’m running the Pirates of Drinax campaign for two of my players. They are in the second module, The Treasure Ship. They’ve come up with a plan to steal the ship, and it seems like an…ok plan. But I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for how this plan might break down in the game.

Here’s the situation—Player1 is a former Space Marine, and loaded to bear. Player2 is a former con-artist and now the Captain of the Harrier. Between the first adventure, some side quests, and a few straight up piracy actions, they’ve managed to recruit a full complement to the Harrier.

The Martin II is still on Arunsidiir. It’s been 5 weeks since the explosion, and the players just showed up at port. Once thing I mentioned, more as a random “local color” thing, is that the planet has a beacon in space directing traffic to the port. It’s an old and crude beacon, which tends to overload a ships sensors until you dig it out a bit.

Anyway, their plan currently is to take off and “accidently” ram the beacon. They’ll have their Engineer (who is pretty good at Electronics) in the fixed Hard Point and in a vac suit (he has the skills). They’ll rig the Hard Point so they can open it. He’ll access the beacon, set it to “crazy maximum” and basically blast landing coordinates everywhere, shutting down ship-to-ship communications.

They assume that the Gazelle that’s in orbit (which they are assuming is both slightly paranoid and EXTREMELY bored) will come over to investigate, esp. since it CAN’T radio them. They’ll allow the Gazelle inspectors on board, give them a tour. The Harriers marines will be hiding in the cargo bay, and will ambush the boarding part. Well, all but one, who will be by the air lock the whole time as the “XO” of the ship. When the shooting happens, he will grab his grenade launcher (!) and secure the entry between the Gazelle and the Harrier (they have a place to secure and conceal the weapon). With the bulk of the Gazelle’s marines eliminated, they hope to be able to storm the Gazelle and seize control of it.

With the Gazelle under their control, they’ll divide their ship’s crew between the two ships, threaten to blow the Martin II to kingdom come if it tries to take off (and hide somewhere else on the planet), while the Marines head back dirtside to storm the Martin II.

Now, this is a plan that could easily go horribly, horribly wrong. It also could go awesomely right.

How would you run this?
 
The gazelle would never dock with the harrier. The harrier is an obviously armed vessel and has difficultly passing as anything else.

The gazelle is equipped with a gig, the boarding party would use that for any inspections, with the harrier under the guns of the gazelle. The gazelle's boarding party would leave a guard at the airlock, electronically secure the hatch to the gig and have open comms to the boarding party. The gig will also be running an anti-hijack program in case someone tried exactly what the PCs are planning.

It is also likely that the gazelle will disable the beacon first to re-establish comms - possibly using its guns to disable the beacon's antenna
 
Ah, forgot that the Gazelle had a launch. That makes much more sense. Thanks, I'll go with that.

One final question--one of the players is a former space (not Imperial) Marine. He has a copy of the rule book, and looked up the Gazelle when they saw her in orbit. He knows all of her stats, and therefore can/should know about the launch (I'll admit I didn't look up the Gazelle, as I am a lazy GM, and when the players went "there's no way we're taking THAT thing out in a direct assault" I stopped worrying about it). Should I Inform him that them using the launch is possible/likely, or let it be a surprise?
 
Talmor said:
...Should I Inform him that them using the launch is possible/likely, or let it be a surprise?
My only advice here is that "The GM's name is ALWAYS 'Murphy'.".
 
Let it be a nasty surprise.

It should not, in theory, be an insurmountable problem; if they can take the launch, they can return to the ship in it - after all, the Gazelle can't challenge them by radio until they dock...

It's the 'disabling the beacon' that would be more of an issue. If comms come back up, they're in trouble.

If you really want to make them sweat, let them 'ram' the beacon, set the radio jamming in place, kick back and grin and generally feel really smug about their plan.....

....and then have a comms laser message come through from the Arshad, asking politely if they require assistance!
 
If the gazelle loses contact with the gig, they will not allow it to dock - there will be password exchanges etc.

Grabbing the gig is not easy matter. I would expect the boarding party to require all personnel of the ship to muster in a common room - not possible in this case due to the jamming so the boarding party will be on edge. I would imagine they would leave a pilot on the gig safe behind 2 locked air lock doors, and probably leave a guard at the airlock as well.

Misquoting Sean Bean "One does not simply walk into an Imperial Navay vessel" :)
 
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