First half od day quest done... Party were suitably "oh crap!" when they heard they had to get to one of the Aotrs' capital worlds to find a pocket dimension to perform the magic ritual to cleanse them of the BadWrongThing that's affecting them. They considered but rejected the option to just say "can we come and do this," because the decided that while the answer would almost certainly be "yes," it was what happened afterwards that was the problem. (I mean, I had written up for what would have happened if they had done that, and on the one had they'd have had an easier time, on the other, they would gotten The Bad Ending...!)

They didn't need more than a minor prompt from me to remember that they had something lying around that would help them reduce their sensor profile (They'd even brought it up, they just didn't put two and two together). The gor down easily enough, aced the first "locate the portal" scans, worked out pretty quickly that the area was perception-filter-warded so they needed to approach the other way. Through a local village (out in the Styx of Tusharnos, where the Aotrs occasionally have to remind who is actuall in charge.)

They ran into the local bloke who was all "gerr out of it, furriner!" and, to my GREAT hilarioty, both the Jedi and the archmage telepath elected to go tell him to naff off seperately. (Like, the players said it at the same time, so I was like "off you go...!" So the dude, unsruroisngly, wasn't making two RRs verses level 12 characters at onc and sodded off, maybe with a little bit of blood trickling out of his nose from the brain haemoharrge...!)

Finding the mine they needed to go through to bypass the wards was sealed, they ent back and talked to the old crazy man (Old Man NtMukBit) (yes, he was crazy and had missing teeth and a big white beard...) With a little charm and a bit of mental prowess (the archamge was absolutely spamming her telepathy today, which is, thy player pointed out, something he didn;t get to to do very often!) they got some maps from the villagers and headed down.

Then they ran into the nasty Things Uncovered By the Godsruin that devastated Tusharnos (otherwise know as the galaxy-spamming ten thousand year old conflict of the Xakkath Demon Was). Little spidery-things with disquietingly human-looking faces seeming trapped intheir abdomans.

That was a short combat, since the archmage pulled out more stuff she'd not used before, a spell Gravity Field, which forced creatures to make an RR or be immobilised and also take a Krush critical (which she boosted to 'C'.) Needless to say, all twenty of the scuttlers failed their RRs, and at that point, the explorer at the front with his plasmatic repeater rifle hosed them down ito they were dead. (Thing about plasmatic repeaters is they essentially have unlimited ammo because they have microfusion reactors, so they only run out of fuel if the player basically gets a fumble of a particualr sort, and they are recharged by that most rare of chemicals, dihydrogen monoxide... So they didn't even use any ammo.)

The ran into Mummy Spider-thing, next, and also made fairly short work of her. Despite her having a massive shield that meant her DB was sky-high until they chisled it away, she only got off one round before getting stunned and that was that.

Oiut of the mines/underdark caverns, they found the runestone to turn the wards off and also the portal to the pocket dimension. Which was 300' up in the air, 250' away from the nearest cliff-sde (10k years ago, there was a stone causeway leading to it. Not now...)

Portal can be entered from any orientation (blip on the scanners is spherical), but they chose to enter in the same direction as the causeway would have. They'd got 90 feet of space to fit the Fightercruiser in between portal and cliff, they were fine. It's a bit (had I but realised it before it struck me describing it to them one the day) like the wormwhol in DS9, you can't see until you get closer enough to enter, and then it opens just big enough for the thig getting within 102feet of it, such as at first, the PCs with the grav-flight pack, and then the rock he chucked through it.

So, the took the ship through. Basically, the pocket dimension looks a bit like those asset=flip bad Steam games, where, like, only half the map's completed. There's a cacking great crevasse running left-to-right right in fron of them (they come out as dead stop about thirty foot of the deck), with a subtripical rainforest in it, and sod-all else from the rest of the thrity-mile radius apart from a bit rain-erosion.

They had their first scan/look about and went, "oh, hey there's a temple over there, twenty miles away, directly opposite, that must be the right place that we need to go to, oh crap it's extending a weapon turr-" BANG! As the temple took a shot at them with a full-on capital lazer cannon. It - thanks to astonishingly poor rolls and a hithertoly-unknown terrible attack table, got some computer damage from the first shot. Plus side, it meant the couldn't shoot back - or turn the shields on. Cue panicked reverse through portal. On that side? portal is sphereical. On this side. Circular. You can enter the portal from the outside at any orientation, but you appear in the same facing in the pocket dimension - and you can only go out the one way, which is in the direction of the causeway. So they had to sharpishly back out and not run into the cliff behind them. Which they did, because their pilot is frackin' awesome.

No time to celebrate, though.

The lazer can't trigger the portal, 'cos it's energy.

The triple-railguns?

Different story.

Terrible rolls again, despite literal sitting duck target. Eh, they didn't need that proton torpedo launcher anyway, right?

Engineer (NPC, one of the ex-PCs who played isn't with us) looks at the computer and goes "nope, busted. " (Open-ended low!) The jedi's wife has a look as says, "yeah, few hours to fix, but we don't have the parts." So, their plan is, now they know what they're up against, basically just dash in and nose-dive into the chasm and thus be out of the line-of-fire (sinc eit's the ONLY place the turrets don't have a clear shot at them.

They go off, the laser misses. The railgun hits, and I roll nothing higher than 22 on the criticals. Terrible - the sensors break, the Elecrconic warfare goes down oh, no, it's not like they are being attacked by missiles and they have interdimesional communicators, so the loss of ship comms don't even matter much). Come to the last roll, the worst, 11, and THAT is the one that knocks the engines out. (Finally!) Cue the pilot suddenly having to get this:

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To glide. Because he's so damn good, and got a good roll, I only gave 'em all a +30 Fall/Crush attack each (same as if they'd have been knocked-out on the first feet from 30 feet up). Virtually nothing other than hit point damage (minor hit point damage) across fifteen characters. One guy had to spend a couple of invulerablity points (i.e. a bit like fate points) to not die when I rolled a natural 100 on the A Krush crit, so he was technically fine, the jedi cracked a rib. SADLY sodding Gillman got away with not being killed (he does NOT have invulnerability points...), but I did break his leg. HA!

Sadly, this damage will be fixed by the tim they traipse across to the temple via the rainforest tomorrow, but victories where I can...!

And that was where we left it, them having crashed into the dirt. It was about where I wanted. If we have a quick start tomorrow and I don't hang about, we can have the last token combat and then get to the final boss and have time to do it proper-like. And THEN we shall see if they survive...