Steel Rain

System: Eclipse Phase
GM: John Ossoway

Mars.

What should have been a routine patrol has ended with a Ranger flyer wrecked in a dust storm—20 klicks inside the Titan Quarantine Zone.

With your fellow rangers stranded inside the Zone, your station was preparing to deploy a search team to their last known position, but someone high up in government has had other ideas. Rumour is the patrol officers saw something they shouldn’t have, and now you have been ordered to leave your comrades to their fate.

But fate seems to be favouring you. The dust storm is preventing the powers that be from tasking an orbiting kill-sat to target and drop a tungsten-steel rod on the crash site. There is a window of opportunity.

Can your team reach the downed rangers in time—get them the hell out of there while their cortical stacks are still intact and perhaps learn what they saw?

Additional Information

Eclipse Phase is a game of Sci-Fi Transhuman Horror, using many of the troupes from modern cyber-punk like Altered Carbon.

More information can be found on the games home page.

  • Eclipse Phase Home Page

Bad King John

System: OpenQuest
GM: Newt Newport

All of England is aware of King John the First’s public shortcomings as a king. His disastrous wars to retrieve English lands in France paid for by an ever-increasing tax burden on his people. His irreverence and refusal to play along with the church got the Pope to declare him an Atheist publicly! His falling out with his Barons, who are at war with him after he annulled the Magna Carta, a powerful document of law to curtail his reckless spending, which they forced him to sign at the start of the summer.

As bondsmen of the Bishop of Norwich, a close ally of the King, you’ve also seen his majesty at his worst first hand at court. The drunken, murderous rages and the blasphemous words that constantly froth at his lips. The pale faces of those who cross him when they know they are going to be ‘disappeared’ by his lackeys after spending a rough night as his plaything. Whispers at court say he is in league with the devil, but you know he is willingly possessed by Satan!

Now your Liege Lord has called upon you to serve him. So, with a heavy heart you prepare to take yourselves through dark pagan woods that surround the godforsaken port of Bishop’s Lynn, on the North Norfolk coast, where the King and his army currently camp. You suspect heavily that the mad, bad king intends to take his army across the stinking marsh of The Wash to do battle with the rebel Barons in neighbouring Lincolnshire. It’s September now, and the weather is turning bad. This will be an ill journey, were cunning, treachery and baseness will have to be employed to keep body and soul together.

Additional Information

Bad King John takes place in a fantasy version of historical England, where magic and superstitions of the time are true.

OpenQuest is a D100 OGL rules system similar to Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Mythras. It is rules light and quickly picked up. Instead of Classes and Levels, characters are defined by percentage skills and every character has a bit of magic, as determined by their previous experience before becoming adventurers and membership of magical secret societies commonly known as cults.

More information can be found on the D101 Games website