Session 3: July 20, 2012
The third session continued with the character generation (using the Leverage rules and mixing in the Serenity rules as necessary).
- S played Marcus Devereaux, The Road Warrior (Wheelman/Hitter)
- X played Lance Fielding, The Confidence Man (Grifter/Mastermind)
- C played Shannon “Mandy” Fielding, The Gadgeteer (Hacker/Thief)
- P played Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest XII, The Director (Mastermind/Grifter)
- J played Thomas Harding, The Ninja (Hitter/Thief)
Planet: Hera
System: Georgia
Year: 2515
After making some cash selling the genetically-engineered animals, the crew find themselves on Hera, in the city of Medford.
Medford is the grain shipping capital of Hera, as Hera is the breadbasket of the Verse, and is close to Serenity Valley. (There is one other major city on the planet, called Custer, built up around the Alliance base General George Armstrong Custer. The base was built on the other side of the planet from Serenity Valley during the Battle of Serenity Valley for use as a staging area and remained there after the war.)
Medford is a large city, with major food corporations holding offices there, a variety of ship yards spread around the city (but mostly around the star port) and a large warehouse district. The crossroads of commerce and spaceships lead to a rather active business day and a very exciting nightlife.
The crew were enjoying the fresh food available in town while their battered old Firefly Aught Three was getting fixed up, with Shannon helping out the repair crews.
Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest XII was in the Battle of Serenity Valley, on the Independent side, in charge of the 1188th Lift Infantry Brigade (“The Aces and Eights”). Four years after the battle and finding himself on the planet for the first time since then, the Colonel took an opportunity to visit the Serenity Valley Memorial and Cemetery. The other crew joined him and they flew one of the ship’s shuttles over to the Valley.
While wandering through the 1188th’s section of the cemetery, they noticed a group of people looking through the section and the overlap of the graves of the Alliance’s 11th Londinium and the Osiris Brigade. This group of people were not acting like the usual mourners, instead they were mapping the graveyard in an attempt to find a specific grave.
Lance approached one of them, a man called Dylan Kelly, and managed to “fake out” the man into thinking they were old friends. Turns out the group was from an organization called the Truth Foundation.
Lance found out from Dylan that during the war, the Alliance built a prototype cruiser called the Lord Nelson. The Nelson was lost on it’s first patrol and the Alliance scrubbed the ship and it’s crew from the official record. According to the official records, the crew of the Nelson were killed in Serenity Valley (it's pretty easy to hide 10,000 deaths among half a million dead). The Truth Foundation was formed by the families of the missing crew, some of them very rich, to find out what happened to the Lord Nelson.
The rest of this group from the Truth Foundation were engineers John Pettigrew and Elizabeth Appleton and the project head, Thaddeus Withers. They where at the cemetery looking for the grave of the commanding officer of the 11th Londinium. The CO was the brother of the captain of the Lord Nelson and they believed that if they found out where he was buried, they could get a lead on his family, which may lead to further clues.
Withers was also interested in whether Lance had a ship, as the Truth Foundation is creating a network of ships on the Rim that are on the lookout for the Nelson and would be paid a retainer for possible trips that intensify the search. Would Lance and his crew be interested?
After Lance told the rest of the crew what he’d learned, they found out that Thomas was a marine on an Alliance ship and had some friends on the Lord Nelson. He even had a bunch of illegal captures (pictures that would have been top secret at the time) of his friends standing in front of a viewport with the Lord Nelson in the background in spacedock.
Colonel Forrest also had information on the 11th Londinium’s CO. In fact, during the Battle, Forrest was the fellow responsible for shooting him in the head. Forrest knew where the CO was buried and actually had contact information with the CO’s family. After the war, Forrest had written to them to let them know what had happened during the battle and offered his condolences. The relationship was strained (obviously) but polite.
Sharing all this information, including the first pictures of the Lord Nelson that the Truth Foundation had ever seen, the crew gained a new job with a retainer fee from the Truth Foundation and returned to Medford to continue with their ship repairs.
That night, Lance, Thomas and Nathan end up playing cards with the crew of the Free Wheelin’, a pilot named Jack Shaw, a doctor named Polanger and the Free Wheelin’s captain, Logan D’Root.
During the cardgame, Jack asked Lance to do him a favor. The Free Wheelin’ had a few shipping containers that … well, they needed to get rid of. Turns out that the shipping containers contained “livestock” (aka slaves, actually) bound for a medical experimentation station owned by a company called Pharmacorp and run by a crime lord named Ho Van Tian. If Lance wouldn’t mind, the crew of the Free Wheelin’ were willing to give them to our noble heroes for free, just to get rid of them. “Dump them in space, for all I care,” said Jack, “or sell them on some backwater.”
The session ended with Lance agreeing to the deal, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the shipping containers were owned by a crime lord! Yep, that’s gonna come back to bite them in the ass.
Assets defined:
History with Dylan Kelly (Lance and Shannon, permanent for the job) D6
Knowledge of Lord Nelson (Thomas, permanent for the job) D6
Knows 11th Londinium COs Family (Nathan, permanent for the job) D6
Complications defined:
Suspicious (Truth Foundation) D6
(Many thanks to the old Rolemonkeys Podcast, specifically the Serenity sessions from which I've shamelessly stolen the crew of the Free Wheelin' and the Truth Foundation plot. If you can find copies of these sessions, much less any of the Rolemonkeys Podcast, count yourself fortunate)
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