RPGs with Kids, 6: Prepare for RAMMING SPEED

The game: Any Planet Is Earth

The players: Ted, my kid son (playing Miles, two-term expedtionary). Brian, my older brother (playing Chet Lancaster, three-term expeditionary, two-term mercantile). Nate, my kid nephew (playing Blaze, five-term military). 

The situation: Dornami Station, at the edge of a long trade lane, is evacuating due to a sudden solar shift in the system's star, dooming everyone on board with an imminent supernova.

The complication: The player's are dead-broke and want to hijack the expensive med supplies in the storage complex but are being forced to leave by the private security firm running the station.

The scheme: Leverage guile, lateral thinking, and a bit of gumption to score and leave without a bust (or a blast, ahem).

Ben Nicholas - Artstation

Dornami Station is managed by RadniCorps, a sector-wide private security firm whose bottom line rarely suffers against acceptable disruption and disaster thresholds. Within these thresholds is the rarely-occuring but still accounted-for nova event. Sadly, stellar monitoring had little time to figure that a shift in the next-system-over's gravity well could compromise the stability of Arta, the sun around which Dornami orbits at a modest distance.

Immediately, the players are faced with an incontrovertible mandate: get off of the station by free choice, or get shunted into an airlock against their will by RadniCorps. Thing is, Blaze is deep in debt to Mercator Pacis, the biggest shipping conglomerate around, for, uh, missing shipments... Leaving the station now with nothing to show for it would be a total bust. Besides, he argues, if all of this stuff is about to get vaporized, shouldn't he and his friends stand to profit from it?

The security storage bay is locked down behind deep protocols several levels below the residential deck where the party begins play. They ride the lift down to the level just above the storage as that level is locked out of entry. Up ahead, a patrol of RadniCorps soldiers crosses the intersection ahead, so the party slips down the corridor and listens to wait for them to pass. They then proceed past the patrol's blind spot and find that a company barracks is up ahead. 

On the one hand, they could bolt, but Chet realizes there could be an access terminal in the barracks for use in bringing down the security protocols on the storage bay. Miles has a few small non-lethal screen explosives that he rolls down a waste chute on the left, and when they detonate, the RadniCorps goons pursue the incident thinking the station is already beginning to break apart from the solar stress. Blaze covers Chet and he runs in, finding a heavy locker room to the left and a forensic lab on the right.

Hacking quickly, Chet runs through a number of root menus using a personal-access-card lifted from the empty officer's lounge outside of the barracks, proper. It's obvious that he is running against time as he begins to access some protocols which this card is cleared for but are outside normal use. Finding the door controls, he jacks open the secure bay the next level down but also triggers a pair of drones in the lab! Blaze wastes them with a new automatic rifle he found with some ranked gear down the hall.

Miles books it towards the secure bay while Chet handles the situation over comms from the lab access terminal. He and Blaze are stopped by a RadniCorps squad and pressed against the wall, clearly in a dire situation. Chet uses the last of his luck with the terminal access to shoot over the loudspeakers on the next level that Armand Singh, a VIP under direct protection of RadniCorps big-wigs, is currently lost and needs backup to get to emergency evacuation. 

Matthew Trevelyan Johns - Artstation

Finding egress to the storage bay behind otherwise-impressive security lockdown measures, Blaze and Miles signal for Chet to catch up with them, especially since the hacking routines are starting to do more harm than good due to ongoing network probes. The three enter into the huge bay and see that most of the goods here are stashed in large plasteel containers on tall racks, but the good stuff--oh yes, that sweet, sweet high-grade medical supply--is locked behind a triple-thick chain fence in the corner.

A locking mechanism stands between the party and the goods on the other side, but even with Chet trying to security spike the access port and Blaze wasting little time in opening fire on the lock itself, it won't budge. Miles does a quick lookup and realizes its a Mullitsi Vanguard, simply one of the strongest and redundant lock systems on the market. They scramble for ideas, realizing that as the klaxons keep firing across Dornami Station, it's only a matter of time before they're discovered here.

Chet (vis a vis Brian) defers to the younger two players to come up with a savvy solution, and Blaze runs to the side door, opening it to reveal a maintenance bay. Inside are standard tools and cleaning gear, as well as a mag-lev hand cart. Blaze tries to use the heavy-duty brushes and shovels here to leverage the gate, but the reinforced metal barely budges, and the Vanguard lock all but mocks his efforts to strong-arm a way past to the material within the fencing. 

It is at this point that Chet's comm, cleverly tied into the RadniCorps security blotter, alerts him that a large contingent of armed forces are headed down for a sweep of the secure levels to ensure all personnel have been successfully evacuated. In a move that truly makes me smile as a proud papa, Miles turns on the mag-lev cart and starts overloading it with heavy crates from the nearby shelves. With all their might, the three shove the cart as hard as possible towards the gate, smashing it to pieces.

The Vanguard lock still hangs from the side brace where the gate was secured, but the freight-train momentum of the overburdened cart sledgehammered the whole infrastructure to bits. They quickly unload the junk from the cart and pile on the high-value medical supplies, then find that the freight lift across the way has been manually shut down from central controls. Without time to reactivate it, and with standard lifts too small to accomodate the load, they simply shove the mag-cart down the shaft.

With only moments to spare (I had a live clock counting down at the table, pinging away until supernova doom) they load the cart into the cargo bay of their cutter and fly into the metaphorical sunset as the literal sunset detonates with unmatched force across the solar system.