Friday was such a nice change of pace!
After cleaning up a few things as far as character creation goes, the group settled in for David's run of the 2nd book of the Haarlock's Legacy Trilogy, Damned Cities!
I have to say, for all that I spoke of the other day on how I feel the system can be very top-heavy and clunky leading up to gameplay, once you actually get into the action, things go quite a bit more smoothly than one might anticipate. For those who have played an RPG before, especially, the systems involved are very intuitive, the play's the same, as might be said, with the rolling mechanic being the only real difference.
With Angela being our one new player to the system, we only really encountered having to explain how modifiers affected your target numbers as the only "problem" on the night, and I can honestly say that's a blessing within a system as rich as the one Fantasy Flight uses for its 40k line of RPGs.
At any rate, we got off to a somewhat shaky start when David realized he had read the 3rd book instead of the 2nd for preparations, but made a good show of it, not having to pause much (except for a few hilarious tangents) to get us rolling.
And so, with our orders patched Astropathically to us, we made course for the planet Sinophia to deal with some rather interesting and gruesome murders that had baffled local authorities, and was giving even the tech adepts trouble when it came to collection of evidence in any spectra.
Touching down after a flight that would make a squig rider complain, we disembarked onto a platform that shared a color with the rain, that shared a color with the nearby canal's water, that shared a color with the sky...into a rain heavy enough to soak through our clothes.
Our pilot departed as soon as possible, leaving us with no clue on where to go, our orders giving us names of locations, but no relative spatial coordinates.
Then came Charon, a munitorum clerk and pilot of a water craft that could get us to Haarlock's Folly, where we were to rendezvous with the local Arbites. An easy enough task, save for the fact that we came across what appeared to be gangers trying to board and destroy a barge that was manned with the personal guard of a local noble house...at least according to Charon, which was good enough for us, so we sprang to action!
I made the clerk pilot us closer, so that we could attack the skiff-bound pirate/gangers, ("Skags" they call them here, apparently,) and aid the servants of the Imperium in restoring a modicum of normalcy to this place.
The battle was exhilirating, and the Emperor lent his wrath to us in dispatching justice! With just a few warning shots fired into the air from me, and one shot that I meant to hit, to show that our justice would be swift, the cowards routed from the fury of the Emperor's true subjects!
Next time, we interrogate a prisoner and the barge's occupants!
