Ravenshade here with another story. This time the crew and I were playing a custom adventure, tracking down the handlers of the Sathar agents in the first scenario. We'd tracked them to an asteroid in Vince's starship
, and were preparing to enter their base and attack. We made it through the airlock, and managed to clear the first room. Raven burst through the door of the second room and threw a tangler grenade at the first person he saw. He hit and tangled three enemies, and the other three members of the party fired at the one remaining agent. He got knocked woozy and was down to 3 STA, so Raven decided that instead of using his perfectly good weapons, he would pick up a chair and hit the poor guy with it. He successfully picked up the chair, but then I rolled a 99. Raven tripped over one of the tangled enemies and threw the chair over the guy's head. Vince saw what happened, rolled his eyes, and zapped the guy with an electrostunner. Going into the next room, Raven saw an enemy at the far end of the corridor, took aim with his bow (his primary weapon in the early days) and fired. The shot, against impossible odds, hit the agent... with a roll of 01. The agent took one look at the arrow in his knee and fainted. Octavia stayed back to move and guard the prisoners, Vince went up one level to look in that room, and Ronin followed Raven into the control room, where a Yazarian agent was messing with the computer, trying to destroy the data. Raven burst into the room and smacked him with an electric sword. He went down in a heap and promptly surrendered. Meanwhile, Vince, our main technician, went up the stairs with a pistol in each hand. He peeked into the room and promptly slammed the door just in time to block a fragmentation grenade. He then fired around the edge of the door at the three agents firing at him. Vince radioed for backup, and his robot SN-36 and Octavia came running and rolling to the stairway, firing at the agents as well. Eventually, the agents were subdued, and Vince had managed to critical hit one of them against impossible odds, as well as doze one of them. This was the first time that Vince seriously surprised me with this sort of gunplay, but it wouldn't be the last...
Vince's Golden Gun
After stopping the Sathar agents, Vince and his crew were in high demand. Eventually they were hired by Clarion Station to use
Aphelion to patrol around the base. A few weeks after that, the
Marionette was spotted, and they were sent to stop it. They did, and after fighting through bunches of enemies the four adventurers were able to confront the final boss. After a few shots with laser pistols (and a bow), Vince took three shots with his gyrojet pistol, one of the few weapons he could use well, at the critical point of the boss. The first two missed horribly, but the third one, against nearly impossible odds, achieved a critical hit on the one spot it was vulnerable in. The shot penetrated the armor of the boss, killing it immediately. Everyone else looked at Vince, almost too shocked to speak. Vince spun the pistol on his finger. "Got 'im." We eventually were able to fix the
Marionette, and it became one of the first cornerstones in Raven's conglomerate empire, along with a used spaceliner the group bought called the
Deus Vult (Ronin named it.) This was probably Vince's finest moment as a fighter, but as a commander he did much more damage than as a fighter alone. Because of his high Robotics skill, he was able to command a large part of Raven's robot legions, and with his high Pilot skill he could maneuver his way out of almost any bad situation with fancy flying.
A story of Vince's Heroics, part 2
This story brings back memories. (Warning: Spoilers for Dramune's Run ahead!)
It happened sometime after we'd managed to put together a large group of gamers. (I think we had about four Yazarians, five Dralasites, six Humans, and two Vrusk.) At the time, we had decided to embark on Dramune's Run... and here's where the fun began.
The first encounter you could have was with a size 9 freighter, the Nightshade. Fairly straightforward stuff. That's when things got interesting. Instead of being captured, we knocked their drives out and boarded them, eventually taking the ship. Our main medic revived their pilot, and we diverted half our crew onboard to keep an eye on him. This allowed us to bypass the next three encounters, as it looked as though we'd already been captured!
Eventually we arrived at the space station. We docked the Gullwind, but left the Nightshade outside. (This was absolutely nowhere to be found in the rulebook... and this was just the beginning!) Since we had eyes on the outside, we knew that there was a large army of robots outside the ship... and that's when our two demolition experts decided to use the munitions inside the Gullwind, as well as the robot inside, to create and deliver a nuclear bomb explosion into the midst of the large droid army.
It worked perfectly.
In the initial blast, 28 of the robots were taken down immediately. Four more were lost due to subsequent burning. That's when things got really hectic. The Nightshade had been recognized by the five separate Malthar ships sitting in orbit around the station, so we crashlanded it into the bay, taking out four more bots. Vince, who had been on the Nightshade, immediately ran over to the Gullwind, as the battle raged on.
After we'd destroyed the first wave of bots, the next wave of 40 charged our positions. At this point, it would be good to note that the five Malthar ships mentioned earlier were sitting just outside the hangar, watching the battle rage down below. Vince ran out of the Gullwind with a spacesuit on and a rocketpack strapped to his back. Thankfully, he knew what he was doing. We'd already had half of our crew get tangled or gassed by the time he managed to take off, so he knew he'd have to act quick.
There were two frigates, two corvettes, and an assault scout.
Vince rocketed out into space without getting noticed, then immediately set a course for one frigate. He wired the engines of that frigate to explode using a panel on the outside, quickly rocketing over to the second frigate when he was done. He then accessed a control panel near one of the hatches, quickly hacking into the security system to open all doors on the spaceship. This sucked all the occupants out into space. As soon as he'd done that, gotten inside, and closed the hatches, the first frigate exploded, taking one of the corvettes with it and severely damaging the other three ships. The second corvette quickly fled the scene, leaving just the assault scout. Vince was preparing to fire on it when it targeted his friends on the deck, sending him a message that he should surrender or lose his compatriots, all of whom had been captured at that point. Reluctantly, he surrendered, sparking the next part of the mission.
(Footnote: later on in the mission, when attempting to sneak back onto the Gullwind, our resident psycho, Indie, noticed that they hadn't stolen all her knives, as they'd missed the one in her boot. This prompted her to float undetected to the sleepy guard and cut his throat in 0G, making it the most interesting kill I've ever witnessed.)