Songs for the Dusk: Mission 1 Recap
May. 17th, 2025 01:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dismallyorientedHello! It's been a hot minute since the last one of these. In hindsight, session-by-session updates was never going to be sustainable. However, as dedicated table notekeeper, I do have a nice big document I can hammer into a full-mission update. We'll do this in sections: player character intros, an NPCs reference section, and then the sessions themselves.
First, player characters. We're running the "Magpies" crew type, a party based around engineering, salvage, and demolitions work. Songs for the Dusk features crew playbooks, so that any given party has a "class" of its own, with a missions specialty. Ours was demolitions, hence the party name of "Crashers" and our home base, which we dubbed "the Crashpad"
On the roster, we have:
- Marl, the Aegis (it/she) - the team bodyguard, an ex-military wilderness guide who ran escort and protection missions for people in remote locations. It is a quadrupedal crab-like robot with shield-shaped legs and armor plating that it can swap in and out for different missions
- Yara of Nowhere, the Scholar (she/her) - An owl-esque person with feathers and big eyes (enhanced by her glasses). Scholars are the general nerd and research class. Her player came up with the organization "Nowhere", a semi-secretive order which preserved the infrastructure of the internet and archived digital knowledge through the apocalypse and into the current times. All formally inducted members of Nowhere have access to a set of accounts and digital permissions that allow them to hack into systems from the Radiant Era
- Quentim Parable, the Charter (he/him) - my guy, bog standard human, a former traveling caravan merchant who stayed in town to help during a time of struggle and has failed to notice that he no longer intends to leave. The most concise way to describe Charters is the "logistics & support" class. All of the abilities are themed around Blades in the Dark-style flashbacks, planning ahead, and giving mechanical advantages to the rest of the crew. It's very "all according to keikaku" and I love it so much
- Gail, the Scrapper (it/she) - the team techie, a bat-like person with a prosthetic left leg, and a dragon therian. She came to New Haven in the hopes of learning how to become a dragon. Gail is the hardware person to Yara's software expertise, and she has a toolkit full of Fun Gadgets and a lil dragon buddy-bot named Byte
- Morena "Momo", the Witch (she/they) - a New Haven native, a human with green-tinted skin and gold-speckled eyes from a childhood case of dragonpox. She works at the town library, and was granted some small mobile DIONE nodes that can function as her familiars. They take the shape of animal-themed jewelry that can spring into action when needed
NPCs:
Included mostly for reference; I'd recommend going to read the recap summary first
New Haven NPCs
- Imogen Constant (she/her) - distracted, forgetful, outgoing - 13yo forgetful messenger girl, Library apprentice; probably plural, doesn’t know what that is; one of like 4 kids and the only one in her age group
- Isaiah Constant (they/them) - overeager, prepared, homebody - Home base cartographer. Very pouch heavy and loads of gadgets and drafting tools
The Lithobreakers - rival Dragon's Rest squad
- Terrance (he/xym) - quiet, impractical, mercenary - The heavy, meant for protection and carrying a spark blunderbuss; native to Dragon’s Rest
- Brother Preston (he/him) - cop, traditionalist, devoted - The leader, somewhat arrogant and insistent that they should be allowed to scavenge (likes quoting laws like they matter); native to Dragon’s Rest
- Cat (they/them) - curious, shy, inventive - Techie (hired for this job, will stick around) who's eager to catalogue and protective of artifacts, nonverbal; immigrated to Dragon’s Rest recently
- Isabel (she/her) - sympathetic, superior, suspicious - A witch, happy to talk shop about magic and transcendental forces but disparaging of technology and not keen on the Radiant Era as a whole; member of Plant’s Breath and does not care about the community rivalry
Observatory Employees
- Scrivener - lonely, confused, protective - AI in charge of the Observatory Substation
- Gulliver Noweigh (he/him) - lanky, gullible, overeager - lab technician for the Observatory Substation
- Yasmin Assad (she/her) - anxious, dutiful, competent - security officer for the Observatory Substation, older sister of Julius
- Julius Assad (he/they) - younger sibling, cluttered, competent - IT technician for the Observatory substation, younger brother of Yasmin
- Nigel Tenpen (he/him) - crabby, meticulous, traditional - senior IT technician for the Observatory substation, kind of a jerk
- Unknown Technician (she/her) - dedicated, harried, expository - lab technician and grad student for the Observatory Substation
Mission 1: Stellar Nursery
Our mission starts with the team members scattered around town, before one of the teens in town comes bringing a message to meet her at the library later. Her parent, Isaiah Constant, is part of the planning committee for the annual Perihelion Festival to celebrate the town's history, and they want us to help clear out a Radiant-era ruin to hold the festival there.
This is unusual. Normally this festival is held within the boundaries of New Haven, and this ruin is out in the middle of the woods in a place none of the rest of us have been to. Quentim tries to press him for more information, and because I'm a fool who put all my stats into Command instead of Connect, I have to roll the talky skill that makes me sound like a demanding asshole. Isaiah confesses that they've been in contact with a group of people from the rival town, Dragon's Rest, and has been planning a joint Perihelion Festival to try and foster better relations between the communities. Hence, needing to pick a spot somewhere between the two, on neutral ground.
We take the job and travel to the ruin together, with Yara, Gail, and Momo using their various lil buddies and remote drones to survey the place first. Yara figures out the ruin is surrounded by an active forcefield. Gail flies its robot, Byte, up close to try and figure out a way in, but accidentally triggers a security measure. The ruin's PA system crackles to life and orders us to leave the premises, while three spider drones[1] emerge from the main doors to deter us. Gail throws some slipwater from its toolbelt to deflect two of the drones, sending them careening off into the woods, while Marl smashes the final one with an axe. The whole team works together to briefly disable the forcefield long enough for Marl to charge in and break the door down. Yara tries to hack into the system with Momo's help, and with the account permissions from Nowhere, successfully shuts off the forcefield. We all make our way inside, Gail accidentally stepping on her own slipwater patch and falling flat on her back.[2]
Session 2 begins with us exploring the ruin, after a long battle with IRL technical difficulties. Yara's player can't use VC that night, so she's taking a remote mission control/sentry role with Yara stationed outside the facility and speaking over text. There are 3 levels still standing, per the map she acquired from her first hack - the basement, the main floor, and the second floor. The third floor no longer exists, having crumbled years before. We head to the basement first, trying to systematically search for salvage and clear out dangerous obstacles before we can begin demolitions. Isaiah and the rest of the festival planners have no payment to give us, so the only payment we'll get is whatever we can salvage from the facility itself.
The first point of interest is a server room, with a door and two keycard swipe points. We're able to scrounge up a forgotten keycard from an office where the IT people worked, but still need some way to deal with the other access card swipe. Before we can continue, Yara spots some new people approaching the ruin - a rival crew from Dragon's Rest.
We decide to split up, with Quentim and Momo heading upstairs to speak with the new crew, while Gail and Marl stay downstairs to continue trying to enter the server room. Gail tries to swipe the one keycard, but gets flustered when the solo keycard doesn't work and asks Marl to smash the door down. Up top, we speak with the Dragon's Rest crew. Once we establish that nobody wants to hurt anyone, Quentim starts to speak with their leader - the very didactic and patronizing Brother Preston, who insists that the Crashers have no legal right to be here. After all, according to the Dragon's Rest town charter, their town had legal claim to all Radiant ruins in the area.
Quentim objects to the legal argument, since the people of New Haven would have zero fucking idea of this law and Dragon's Rest has no right to lay exclusive legal claim to anything outside its borders when both towns exist in the area. Despite his best attempts, the most that Brother Preston will grant us is more time with which to leave the premises. As both Quentim and I the player start getting frustrated, Yara offers the Lithobreakers her map of the facility as a gesture of goodwill, while Momo entreats the rest of their crew - we're at the ruin to help hold a joint Perihelion festival to honor their town. Is this really the way they want to be acting toward us?
Thankfully, the rest of the Lithobreakers are much more reasonable than Brother Preston. They pull a team huddle amongst themselves, much to Brother Preston's chagrin, and the witch, Isabel, offers to talk him down and strongarm him into an arrangement where we both get to explore the ruin together.
At this point, due to a combination of player frustration from the stalled social encounter, and GM exhaustion from a long day, we called the session early and opted to continue next time.
Session 3 picks up right where we left off, with the downstairs team finishing their search of the server room. Gail hacks into the servers and finds a load of dragon-related observations and other useful data for DIONE. Marl helps carry the server back out, while Gail sends its dragon Byte off into the facility to search for additional keycards to access other locked doors - namely, the storage room with an unusually thick door.
Upstairs, Quentim, Momo, and Yara watch the Lithobreakers have a Heated Discussion with Brother Preston, who "is unhappy and keeps quoting laws" at everyone around him. Isabel the Witch gets back to us and explains that, "You have been, quote, "hired". As, quote, "contractors."" We have free run of the ruin now, except for the second floor, which the Lithobreakers have reserved for themselves. It's a bummer to lose one of the floors, but we're mostly just happy that we no longer have to fistfight Brother Preston to look at anything anymore. With all that settled, we reunite with the downstairs team and elect to continue exploring on the ground floor.
However, play starts stalling partway through, as we encounter another locked door and have to figure out how to bypass it. Eventually, the GM calls for a pause and asks the players about whether or not we're actually engaged and having fun. What follows is another very good meta-conversation, not unlike the one that sparked this entire campaign premise in the first place.
There was a combination of factors making it tough for folks to interact with the game. Some of it is just lack of familiarity with the setting, or the playstyle that Songs asks for. If you don't remember what's within the fictional possibility space for a given game, it's hard to remember what levers or options you have to try on a given challenge, or what ideas might "make sense" within the world. Aside from that some of the players were also struggling with fatigue problems - maintaining focus for an uninterrupted 3.5 hour session was not on the cards for them, not without a longer mid-session break that gave them the opportunity for meaningful rest.
The GM also shared her own fears - the lack of engagement making it more difficult to run the game, because it came across as lack of interest and made it more difficult to build momentum in the session. She felt stuck herself, trying to find obstacles and problems that felt fun or interesting. Our crew playbook and specialty was not a premise that she entirely knew what to do with. It's very easy to tell a story about a crew of thieves, scholars, or rangers. There's loads of existing stories to draw inspiration from and build narrative intuition around. But a crew of demolitions workers seemed to lean heavy on people interacting with a location, and she was struggling to figure out what conflicts could emerge purely from an environment, and how to make a building feel reactive and alive.
We arrived on a handful of solutions. The first of which was to implement a 30 minute break in the middle of the session. This would give the fatigued players some time to recharge, and would help me and the GM (my wife) get dinner in the middle of a session without having to wait until like 8pm. The second was a general reminder to the table as a whole (GM and players) that Songs for the Dusk is a pulpy science fantasy game. There's magic, there's magitech, there's room for fantastical unlikely things to happen. This a game that encourages you to be on your bullshit, and we needed to make a commitment to making big swings - we were not confined to just locked doors or things within our mundane lives as players. The third, as an extension to the second, was establishing an expectation that we could workshop things as a table. If a player or the GM wanted to do something but wasn't entirely sure how to make it happen, they could pitch their idea and everyone could help brainstorm potential avenues, or clarify the situation. Thereby making it easier to get people over the hump from intent to execution, instead of getting stuck with an idea and letting it die.
The GM proposes that we rewind the game to just after the Lithobreakers agreed to let us into the ruin, and promises to have a revised batch of prep ready for next session, based on everything we talked about. We call it a night and move on, excited to give it another go.
Session 4 opens with a bang. We restart the game with the Crashers in the lobby, just after the Lithobreakers have left for the second floor. The GM asks the party who's paying the most attention in that moment - Marl, who's always got a high baseline level of situational awareness as the team's Aegis.
So it's the one who spots the ghost that materializes in the middle of the party.
The ghost is a holographic humanoid figure named Scrivener, haloed in a bunch of arms all busy with information gathering tasks - typing, taking handwritten notes, scrolling on a tablet, etc. It greets Yara, ignoring the rest of the crew and addressing her as "Prescient Athena", someone who is apparently here to inspect the facility. Yara tries to go along with this assumption, but Quentim accidentally catches Scrivener's attention when he asks it a question. It doesn't recognize him as someone authorized to be here, and Yara fails to convince it otherwise. We're given until "close of business" to be on the premises, putting a countdown clock on our mission before security gets activated again.
We proceed to the breakroom as the next point of interest. The GM asks us to pitch a name (Gulliver Noweigh), and then three different adjectives to describe the ghostly graduate student sitting at the table. We cobble together the list gullible, lanky, persistent [3] , and immediately face-cast him as Stephen Merchant, the VA for Wheatley from Portal 2. Group-brainstorming the character was both incredibly fun, and accidentally gave us the perfect patsy for our "inspection" cover story. Gullible made him easy to trick when Yara was probing him for information, and kept him from questioning things too hard when Gail accidentally revealed herself by asking him a question. (At least we've figured out that the ghosts can't see anyone who hasn't directly addressed them.)
We learn that the facility is an observatory and research lab for "solar anomalies". We talk Gulliver into giving us a tour of the facility, and he leads us to the security office where the chief of security, Yasmin Assad, is working. Byte also happens to be there, perched on the console for the security camera system. While Yara and Quentim speak with Yasmin, Momo goes to loudly mess with the door, in order to test the limit of the ghosts' perception. They don't notice or respond, but the ambient Static hum of transcendent forces that's been building with every ghost manifestation gets stronger, to the point that the rest of the crew can sense it too.
Yasmin asks for ID, because she's competent at her job. Gail hands over the ID card we stole from the IT office, while Quentim tries to project an illusion over it to make it look like Gail's. Unfortunately, our attempt fails and Gail receives a taser shock from Yasmin's hand once she takes the card and the security system realizes that something's up. We end the session with a swarm of spider drones peeling off from the walls, and the thundering footsteps of something Big approaching.
Session 5 is entirely about the boss fight. The horrible thing tromping down the hallway is an armored dino-bot, a human-scale tyrannosaurus rex ready to ruin our day, alongside the Many spider drones that are already in the security office with us.
Gail reaches for her toolkit and throws some Fuse Resin at the nearest drone, trying to stick it to the floor. She manages to disable it, but a second drone jumps onto her and shorts out her prosthetic leg. Momo sends her lizard familiar after the one attacking Gail, ordering it to find a gap in the casing and start tearing wires out. The familiar gets shorted out by a backwash of transcendent energy, which gets channeled back to Momo through their connection. She lightning-redirects it ATLA style, into the ground of the facility.
The dino-bot reaches the room and begins charging at us. Marl stances up with its sparkrifle and gets ready to shoot. We get another moment of fantastic group brainstorming when I'm furiously reviewing my character sheet trying to figure out a way to assist. The Charter core ability, Long Thought, lets you pay a resource to retroactively describe something you prepared to help face an obstacle, giving everyone who uses it +1 impact. I wanted something that could help increase the accuracy or power of Marl's sparkrifle, but couldn't quite figure out a specific Thing. The GM pointed out that the facility had been building up a charge of transcendent energy over the whole mission, to the point of active danger. That got us to the idea of something that could focus or amplify the bolt from the sparkrifle, perhaps using the ambient charge from the facility. I settled on a prism, which Quentim flings into the air for Marl to aim its sparkrifle beam through. The shot backfires slightly, the sparkrifle exploding as it's overloaded with energy, but the dino-bot is slammed to a halt, the force from the beam blowing its armor clean open and revealing an internal vacuum tube circulation system housing a spirit. The field of transcendent energy dissipates slightly, with the ghost holograms growing more transparent.
Yara hacks into the security desk to try to shut down the dino-bot. While the robot stalls to fight off the intrusion, Quentim pulls out a wrench and charges forward to smash the glass tubing. Once the glass shatters, the wispy aurora-like spirit escapes and flies down through the floor into the basement. We take our 30 min break at the end of the fight.
With the security measures dealt with, the ghosts resume operations, essentially backfilling their memories with whatever makes sense. Yasmin pockets the ID card, thanking us for returning it to her, and leaves us to continue with our "inspection." Quentim calls a team meeting to get everyone on the same page about what to do next.[4] Yara wants to preserve the building instead of demolishing it, Momo is concerned about Brother Preston spreading bad rumors about our crew, Gail is intrigued by what the facility was for, and Marl wants to finish the job and keep everyone safe. Quentim, for his part, is concerned about the laying the ghosts to rest, and especially alarmed by the spirit-powered robot. While magitech is a feature of the setting, enslaving a spirit to power machinery is an extremely unethical thing to do.
As soon as Gail hears us describe the wisp-spirit, it immediately makes a run for the basement to try to pursue the maybe-dragon. Marl grabs it by the scruff and insists that we travel together as a group, especially since Gail's leg is busted. Once we're all downstairs, Gail pulls out a scrap metal contraption for detecting dragon-related transcendent energy. She's pointed toward the storage room with the weirdly large locked door. It picks the lock, releasing a powerful wave of transcendent energy from the door once it opens.
A much larger vacuum tube apparatus dominates the back wall, containing a large twisting wispy spirit - definitely a fucking dragon. Analog computing equipment (reel-to-reel tapes, etc.) and machinery takes up the rest of the room. The dragon slams its tail against the wall of the tubing, releasing an EMP burst. The wave of energy nearly shuts Marl off, but they tank it using insulated armor plating. (We have a brief aside about how it has multiple types of armor plating for its body, which it can swap out between missions as needed. Fun with robot bodies!)
Momo interprets the dragon's reaction as "angry trapped animal that could hurt us," while Gail can discern there's a way to free the dragon without provoking it - the wisp that Quentim freed earlier is tapping against the glass, trying to get in, and the dragon is noticeably cautious not to slam itself against that section of glass. Momo uses her witch's talisman to attune to the dragon, with Gail assisting. She tries to tell the dragon that we're here to rescue it, but the dragon is suspicious, as it can "smell" the scent of its captors on us after we've been in the facility so long and interacted with the ghosts of the research team. Gail transmits the sincerity of its desire to free the dragon, and when it demands proof of her sincerity, she resolves to break open the glass right then and there, and asks the rest of the team to leave the room.
Momo opts to stay out of a sense of responsibility - New Haven has a mixed history with dragons, and she wants to do right by this one, who was essentially caged by her predecessors. Yara leaves the room but also leaves a camera drone behind to record footage. Quentim is conflicted, until Marl promises to stay behind and keep an eye out for the rest of the team.
With that, Gail begins to score the glass with her fine engineering tools and Momo's assistance. Scrivener notices and manifests in the room to confront her, startling Gail into stopping. When Momo tries to continue scoring the glass anyway, Scrivener forces the dragon to shoot lighting at them. Marl intercepts and grounds the bolt into the floor. While the dragon contorts in pain, it slams against the glass, shattering its cage. The entire facility dies all at once.
The dragon emerges from the tube, clearly drained and malnourished as hell from being used as a battery for so long. It looks briefly at everyone in the crew, its gaze piercing through the walls to the people outside, before shooting itself straight upward out of the facility, into the sky, and out of the atmosphere. The small remnant wisp remains, settling on Marl's head. Momo bottles it up to bring it back to New Haven. We leave the facility, lying to the Lithobreakers about why the power went out, because we don't trust them with knowledge about the dragon. Nobody buys the story, but Yara appeases them by promising to tell their techie the full story later.
Takeaways From the Mission
I've already spent 3,000 words talking about the sessions, so I'll try to keep this section brief. The main things are that
1) Taking care of player needs is a big deal. Even from just two sessions that incorporated the 30 min break, we were seeing a huge difference in how well people were able to interact and keep up with the game, and it's continued being a really helpful feature through downtime and into the second mission.
2) Being able to play more collaboratively and lock in to the principles of the game has been really helpful and rewarding. Two of my favorite moments from the back half of the mission came from collaborative brainstorming, and the players are all getting more comfortable with the shape of the Songs sandbox.
I'm really glad that even with the rough start, we were able to get the plane off the ground and seem to have found our groove.
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[1]: Think "One-One" from the show Infinity Train. [return]
[2]: Gail will proceed to establish herself as a very impulsive and slapstick-prone character. It's always fun when an early moment proceeds to anchor a character. And every campaign needs its silly little guys (gender neutral) [return]
[3]: As you may have noticed, every single NPC in the reference list now has a three-adjective list. It turned out to be such a useful characterization tool that we made it a permanent feature for all NPCs. [return]
[4]: I love playing the Charter for a lot of reasons, and one of them is how the fictional positioning of the class within a party lets me call a meeting to get both the characters and players on the same page. That shit's unparalleled. Of course the guy who wants to play a weird utility class also wants to help with table management. The whole point is helping my friends. [return]
First, player characters. We're running the "Magpies" crew type, a party based around engineering, salvage, and demolitions work. Songs for the Dusk features crew playbooks, so that any given party has a "class" of its own, with a missions specialty. Ours was demolitions, hence the party name of "Crashers" and our home base, which we dubbed "the Crashpad"
On the roster, we have:
- Marl, the Aegis (it/she) - the team bodyguard, an ex-military wilderness guide who ran escort and protection missions for people in remote locations. It is a quadrupedal crab-like robot with shield-shaped legs and armor plating that it can swap in and out for different missions
- Yara of Nowhere, the Scholar (she/her) - An owl-esque person with feathers and big eyes (enhanced by her glasses). Scholars are the general nerd and research class. Her player came up with the organization "Nowhere", a semi-secretive order which preserved the infrastructure of the internet and archived digital knowledge through the apocalypse and into the current times. All formally inducted members of Nowhere have access to a set of accounts and digital permissions that allow them to hack into systems from the Radiant Era
- Quentim Parable, the Charter (he/him) - my guy, bog standard human, a former traveling caravan merchant who stayed in town to help during a time of struggle and has failed to notice that he no longer intends to leave. The most concise way to describe Charters is the "logistics & support" class. All of the abilities are themed around Blades in the Dark-style flashbacks, planning ahead, and giving mechanical advantages to the rest of the crew. It's very "all according to keikaku" and I love it so much
- Gail, the Scrapper (it/she) - the team techie, a bat-like person with a prosthetic left leg, and a dragon therian. She came to New Haven in the hopes of learning how to become a dragon. Gail is the hardware person to Yara's software expertise, and she has a toolkit full of Fun Gadgets and a lil dragon buddy-bot named Byte
- Morena "Momo", the Witch (she/they) - a New Haven native, a human with green-tinted skin and gold-speckled eyes from a childhood case of dragonpox. She works at the town library, and was granted some small mobile DIONE nodes that can function as her familiars. They take the shape of animal-themed jewelry that can spring into action when needed
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NPCs:
Included mostly for reference; I'd recommend going to read the recap summary first
New Haven NPCs
- Imogen Constant (she/her) - distracted, forgetful, outgoing - 13yo forgetful messenger girl, Library apprentice; probably plural, doesn’t know what that is; one of like 4 kids and the only one in her age group
- Isaiah Constant (they/them) - overeager, prepared, homebody - Home base cartographer. Very pouch heavy and loads of gadgets and drafting tools
The Lithobreakers - rival Dragon's Rest squad
- Terrance (he/xym) - quiet, impractical, mercenary - The heavy, meant for protection and carrying a spark blunderbuss; native to Dragon’s Rest
- Brother Preston (he/him) - cop, traditionalist, devoted - The leader, somewhat arrogant and insistent that they should be allowed to scavenge (likes quoting laws like they matter); native to Dragon’s Rest
- Cat (they/them) - curious, shy, inventive - Techie (hired for this job, will stick around) who's eager to catalogue and protective of artifacts, nonverbal; immigrated to Dragon’s Rest recently
- Isabel (she/her) - sympathetic, superior, suspicious - A witch, happy to talk shop about magic and transcendental forces but disparaging of technology and not keen on the Radiant Era as a whole; member of Plant’s Breath and does not care about the community rivalry
Observatory Employees
- Scrivener - lonely, confused, protective - AI in charge of the Observatory Substation
- Gulliver Noweigh (he/him) - lanky, gullible, overeager - lab technician for the Observatory Substation
- Yasmin Assad (she/her) - anxious, dutiful, competent - security officer for the Observatory Substation, older sister of Julius
- Julius Assad (he/they) - younger sibling, cluttered, competent - IT technician for the Observatory substation, younger brother of Yasmin
- Nigel Tenpen (he/him) - crabby, meticulous, traditional - senior IT technician for the Observatory substation, kind of a jerk
- Unknown Technician (she/her) - dedicated, harried, expository - lab technician and grad student for the Observatory Substation
---
Mission 1: Stellar Nursery
Our mission starts with the team members scattered around town, before one of the teens in town comes bringing a message to meet her at the library later. Her parent, Isaiah Constant, is part of the planning committee for the annual Perihelion Festival to celebrate the town's history, and they want us to help clear out a Radiant-era ruin to hold the festival there.
This is unusual. Normally this festival is held within the boundaries of New Haven, and this ruin is out in the middle of the woods in a place none of the rest of us have been to. Quentim tries to press him for more information, and because I'm a fool who put all my stats into Command instead of Connect, I have to roll the talky skill that makes me sound like a demanding asshole. Isaiah confesses that they've been in contact with a group of people from the rival town, Dragon's Rest, and has been planning a joint Perihelion Festival to try and foster better relations between the communities. Hence, needing to pick a spot somewhere between the two, on neutral ground.
We take the job and travel to the ruin together, with Yara, Gail, and Momo using their various lil buddies and remote drones to survey the place first. Yara figures out the ruin is surrounded by an active forcefield. Gail flies its robot, Byte, up close to try and figure out a way in, but accidentally triggers a security measure. The ruin's PA system crackles to life and orders us to leave the premises, while three spider drones[1] emerge from the main doors to deter us. Gail throws some slipwater from its toolbelt to deflect two of the drones, sending them careening off into the woods, while Marl smashes the final one with an axe. The whole team works together to briefly disable the forcefield long enough for Marl to charge in and break the door down. Yara tries to hack into the system with Momo's help, and with the account permissions from Nowhere, successfully shuts off the forcefield. We all make our way inside, Gail accidentally stepping on her own slipwater patch and falling flat on her back.[2]
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Session 2 begins with us exploring the ruin, after a long battle with IRL technical difficulties. Yara's player can't use VC that night, so she's taking a remote mission control/sentry role with Yara stationed outside the facility and speaking over text. There are 3 levels still standing, per the map she acquired from her first hack - the basement, the main floor, and the second floor. The third floor no longer exists, having crumbled years before. We head to the basement first, trying to systematically search for salvage and clear out dangerous obstacles before we can begin demolitions. Isaiah and the rest of the festival planners have no payment to give us, so the only payment we'll get is whatever we can salvage from the facility itself.
The first point of interest is a server room, with a door and two keycard swipe points. We're able to scrounge up a forgotten keycard from an office where the IT people worked, but still need some way to deal with the other access card swipe. Before we can continue, Yara spots some new people approaching the ruin - a rival crew from Dragon's Rest.
We decide to split up, with Quentim and Momo heading upstairs to speak with the new crew, while Gail and Marl stay downstairs to continue trying to enter the server room. Gail tries to swipe the one keycard, but gets flustered when the solo keycard doesn't work and asks Marl to smash the door down. Up top, we speak with the Dragon's Rest crew. Once we establish that nobody wants to hurt anyone, Quentim starts to speak with their leader - the very didactic and patronizing Brother Preston, who insists that the Crashers have no legal right to be here. After all, according to the Dragon's Rest town charter, their town had legal claim to all Radiant ruins in the area.
Quentim objects to the legal argument, since the people of New Haven would have zero fucking idea of this law and Dragon's Rest has no right to lay exclusive legal claim to anything outside its borders when both towns exist in the area. Despite his best attempts, the most that Brother Preston will grant us is more time with which to leave the premises. As both Quentim and I the player start getting frustrated, Yara offers the Lithobreakers her map of the facility as a gesture of goodwill, while Momo entreats the rest of their crew - we're at the ruin to help hold a joint Perihelion festival to honor their town. Is this really the way they want to be acting toward us?
Thankfully, the rest of the Lithobreakers are much more reasonable than Brother Preston. They pull a team huddle amongst themselves, much to Brother Preston's chagrin, and the witch, Isabel, offers to talk him down and strongarm him into an arrangement where we both get to explore the ruin together.
At this point, due to a combination of player frustration from the stalled social encounter, and GM exhaustion from a long day, we called the session early and opted to continue next time.
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Session 3 picks up right where we left off, with the downstairs team finishing their search of the server room. Gail hacks into the servers and finds a load of dragon-related observations and other useful data for DIONE. Marl helps carry the server back out, while Gail sends its dragon Byte off into the facility to search for additional keycards to access other locked doors - namely, the storage room with an unusually thick door.
Upstairs, Quentim, Momo, and Yara watch the Lithobreakers have a Heated Discussion with Brother Preston, who "is unhappy and keeps quoting laws" at everyone around him. Isabel the Witch gets back to us and explains that, "You have been, quote, "hired". As, quote, "contractors."" We have free run of the ruin now, except for the second floor, which the Lithobreakers have reserved for themselves. It's a bummer to lose one of the floors, but we're mostly just happy that we no longer have to fistfight Brother Preston to look at anything anymore. With all that settled, we reunite with the downstairs team and elect to continue exploring on the ground floor.
However, play starts stalling partway through, as we encounter another locked door and have to figure out how to bypass it. Eventually, the GM calls for a pause and asks the players about whether or not we're actually engaged and having fun. What follows is another very good meta-conversation, not unlike the one that sparked this entire campaign premise in the first place.
There was a combination of factors making it tough for folks to interact with the game. Some of it is just lack of familiarity with the setting, or the playstyle that Songs asks for. If you don't remember what's within the fictional possibility space for a given game, it's hard to remember what levers or options you have to try on a given challenge, or what ideas might "make sense" within the world. Aside from that some of the players were also struggling with fatigue problems - maintaining focus for an uninterrupted 3.5 hour session was not on the cards for them, not without a longer mid-session break that gave them the opportunity for meaningful rest.
The GM also shared her own fears - the lack of engagement making it more difficult to run the game, because it came across as lack of interest and made it more difficult to build momentum in the session. She felt stuck herself, trying to find obstacles and problems that felt fun or interesting. Our crew playbook and specialty was not a premise that she entirely knew what to do with. It's very easy to tell a story about a crew of thieves, scholars, or rangers. There's loads of existing stories to draw inspiration from and build narrative intuition around. But a crew of demolitions workers seemed to lean heavy on people interacting with a location, and she was struggling to figure out what conflicts could emerge purely from an environment, and how to make a building feel reactive and alive.
We arrived on a handful of solutions. The first of which was to implement a 30 minute break in the middle of the session. This would give the fatigued players some time to recharge, and would help me and the GM (my wife) get dinner in the middle of a session without having to wait until like 8pm. The second was a general reminder to the table as a whole (GM and players) that Songs for the Dusk is a pulpy science fantasy game. There's magic, there's magitech, there's room for fantastical unlikely things to happen. This a game that encourages you to be on your bullshit, and we needed to make a commitment to making big swings - we were not confined to just locked doors or things within our mundane lives as players. The third, as an extension to the second, was establishing an expectation that we could workshop things as a table. If a player or the GM wanted to do something but wasn't entirely sure how to make it happen, they could pitch their idea and everyone could help brainstorm potential avenues, or clarify the situation. Thereby making it easier to get people over the hump from intent to execution, instead of getting stuck with an idea and letting it die.
The GM proposes that we rewind the game to just after the Lithobreakers agreed to let us into the ruin, and promises to have a revised batch of prep ready for next session, based on everything we talked about. We call it a night and move on, excited to give it another go.
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Session 4 opens with a bang. We restart the game with the Crashers in the lobby, just after the Lithobreakers have left for the second floor. The GM asks the party who's paying the most attention in that moment - Marl, who's always got a high baseline level of situational awareness as the team's Aegis.
So it's the one who spots the ghost that materializes in the middle of the party.
The ghost is a holographic humanoid figure named Scrivener, haloed in a bunch of arms all busy with information gathering tasks - typing, taking handwritten notes, scrolling on a tablet, etc. It greets Yara, ignoring the rest of the crew and addressing her as "Prescient Athena", someone who is apparently here to inspect the facility. Yara tries to go along with this assumption, but Quentim accidentally catches Scrivener's attention when he asks it a question. It doesn't recognize him as someone authorized to be here, and Yara fails to convince it otherwise. We're given until "close of business" to be on the premises, putting a countdown clock on our mission before security gets activated again.
We proceed to the breakroom as the next point of interest. The GM asks us to pitch a name (Gulliver Noweigh), and then three different adjectives to describe the ghostly graduate student sitting at the table. We cobble together the list gullible, lanky, persistent [3] , and immediately face-cast him as Stephen Merchant, the VA for Wheatley from Portal 2. Group-brainstorming the character was both incredibly fun, and accidentally gave us the perfect patsy for our "inspection" cover story. Gullible made him easy to trick when Yara was probing him for information, and kept him from questioning things too hard when Gail accidentally revealed herself by asking him a question. (At least we've figured out that the ghosts can't see anyone who hasn't directly addressed them.)
We learn that the facility is an observatory and research lab for "solar anomalies". We talk Gulliver into giving us a tour of the facility, and he leads us to the security office where the chief of security, Yasmin Assad, is working. Byte also happens to be there, perched on the console for the security camera system. While Yara and Quentim speak with Yasmin, Momo goes to loudly mess with the door, in order to test the limit of the ghosts' perception. They don't notice or respond, but the ambient Static hum of transcendent forces that's been building with every ghost manifestation gets stronger, to the point that the rest of the crew can sense it too.
Yasmin asks for ID, because she's competent at her job. Gail hands over the ID card we stole from the IT office, while Quentim tries to project an illusion over it to make it look like Gail's. Unfortunately, our attempt fails and Gail receives a taser shock from Yasmin's hand once she takes the card and the security system realizes that something's up. We end the session with a swarm of spider drones peeling off from the walls, and the thundering footsteps of something Big approaching.
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Session 5 is entirely about the boss fight. The horrible thing tromping down the hallway is an armored dino-bot, a human-scale tyrannosaurus rex ready to ruin our day, alongside the Many spider drones that are already in the security office with us.
Gail reaches for her toolkit and throws some Fuse Resin at the nearest drone, trying to stick it to the floor. She manages to disable it, but a second drone jumps onto her and shorts out her prosthetic leg. Momo sends her lizard familiar after the one attacking Gail, ordering it to find a gap in the casing and start tearing wires out. The familiar gets shorted out by a backwash of transcendent energy, which gets channeled back to Momo through their connection. She lightning-redirects it ATLA style, into the ground of the facility.
The dino-bot reaches the room and begins charging at us. Marl stances up with its sparkrifle and gets ready to shoot. We get another moment of fantastic group brainstorming when I'm furiously reviewing my character sheet trying to figure out a way to assist. The Charter core ability, Long Thought, lets you pay a resource to retroactively describe something you prepared to help face an obstacle, giving everyone who uses it +1 impact. I wanted something that could help increase the accuracy or power of Marl's sparkrifle, but couldn't quite figure out a specific Thing. The GM pointed out that the facility had been building up a charge of transcendent energy over the whole mission, to the point of active danger. That got us to the idea of something that could focus or amplify the bolt from the sparkrifle, perhaps using the ambient charge from the facility. I settled on a prism, which Quentim flings into the air for Marl to aim its sparkrifle beam through. The shot backfires slightly, the sparkrifle exploding as it's overloaded with energy, but the dino-bot is slammed to a halt, the force from the beam blowing its armor clean open and revealing an internal vacuum tube circulation system housing a spirit. The field of transcendent energy dissipates slightly, with the ghost holograms growing more transparent.
Yara hacks into the security desk to try to shut down the dino-bot. While the robot stalls to fight off the intrusion, Quentim pulls out a wrench and charges forward to smash the glass tubing. Once the glass shatters, the wispy aurora-like spirit escapes and flies down through the floor into the basement. We take our 30 min break at the end of the fight.
With the security measures dealt with, the ghosts resume operations, essentially backfilling their memories with whatever makes sense. Yasmin pockets the ID card, thanking us for returning it to her, and leaves us to continue with our "inspection." Quentim calls a team meeting to get everyone on the same page about what to do next.[4] Yara wants to preserve the building instead of demolishing it, Momo is concerned about Brother Preston spreading bad rumors about our crew, Gail is intrigued by what the facility was for, and Marl wants to finish the job and keep everyone safe. Quentim, for his part, is concerned about the laying the ghosts to rest, and especially alarmed by the spirit-powered robot. While magitech is a feature of the setting, enslaving a spirit to power machinery is an extremely unethical thing to do.
As soon as Gail hears us describe the wisp-spirit, it immediately makes a run for the basement to try to pursue the maybe-dragon. Marl grabs it by the scruff and insists that we travel together as a group, especially since Gail's leg is busted. Once we're all downstairs, Gail pulls out a scrap metal contraption for detecting dragon-related transcendent energy. She's pointed toward the storage room with the weirdly large locked door. It picks the lock, releasing a powerful wave of transcendent energy from the door once it opens.
A much larger vacuum tube apparatus dominates the back wall, containing a large twisting wispy spirit - definitely a fucking dragon. Analog computing equipment (reel-to-reel tapes, etc.) and machinery takes up the rest of the room. The dragon slams its tail against the wall of the tubing, releasing an EMP burst. The wave of energy nearly shuts Marl off, but they tank it using insulated armor plating. (We have a brief aside about how it has multiple types of armor plating for its body, which it can swap out between missions as needed. Fun with robot bodies!)
Momo interprets the dragon's reaction as "angry trapped animal that could hurt us," while Gail can discern there's a way to free the dragon without provoking it - the wisp that Quentim freed earlier is tapping against the glass, trying to get in, and the dragon is noticeably cautious not to slam itself against that section of glass. Momo uses her witch's talisman to attune to the dragon, with Gail assisting. She tries to tell the dragon that we're here to rescue it, but the dragon is suspicious, as it can "smell" the scent of its captors on us after we've been in the facility so long and interacted with the ghosts of the research team. Gail transmits the sincerity of its desire to free the dragon, and when it demands proof of her sincerity, she resolves to break open the glass right then and there, and asks the rest of the team to leave the room.
Momo opts to stay out of a sense of responsibility - New Haven has a mixed history with dragons, and she wants to do right by this one, who was essentially caged by her predecessors. Yara leaves the room but also leaves a camera drone behind to record footage. Quentim is conflicted, until Marl promises to stay behind and keep an eye out for the rest of the team.
With that, Gail begins to score the glass with her fine engineering tools and Momo's assistance. Scrivener notices and manifests in the room to confront her, startling Gail into stopping. When Momo tries to continue scoring the glass anyway, Scrivener forces the dragon to shoot lighting at them. Marl intercepts and grounds the bolt into the floor. While the dragon contorts in pain, it slams against the glass, shattering its cage. The entire facility dies all at once.
The dragon emerges from the tube, clearly drained and malnourished as hell from being used as a battery for so long. It looks briefly at everyone in the crew, its gaze piercing through the walls to the people outside, before shooting itself straight upward out of the facility, into the sky, and out of the atmosphere. The small remnant wisp remains, settling on Marl's head. Momo bottles it up to bring it back to New Haven. We leave the facility, lying to the Lithobreakers about why the power went out, because we don't trust them with knowledge about the dragon. Nobody buys the story, but Yara appeases them by promising to tell their techie the full story later.
---
Takeaways From the Mission
I've already spent 3,000 words talking about the sessions, so I'll try to keep this section brief. The main things are that
1) Taking care of player needs is a big deal. Even from just two sessions that incorporated the 30 min break, we were seeing a huge difference in how well people were able to interact and keep up with the game, and it's continued being a really helpful feature through downtime and into the second mission.
2) Being able to play more collaboratively and lock in to the principles of the game has been really helpful and rewarding. Two of my favorite moments from the back half of the mission came from collaborative brainstorming, and the players are all getting more comfortable with the shape of the Songs sandbox.
I'm really glad that even with the rough start, we were able to get the plane off the ground and seem to have found our groove.
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[1]: Think "One-One" from the show Infinity Train. [return]
[2]: Gail will proceed to establish herself as a very impulsive and slapstick-prone character. It's always fun when an early moment proceeds to anchor a character. And every campaign needs its silly little guys (gender neutral) [return]
[3]: As you may have noticed, every single NPC in the reference list now has a three-adjective list. It turned out to be such a useful characterization tool that we made it a permanent feature for all NPCs. [return]
[4]: I love playing the Charter for a lot of reasons, and one of them is how the fictional positioning of the class within a party lets me call a meeting to get both the characters and players on the same page. That shit's unparalleled. Of course the guy who wants to play a weird utility class also wants to help with table management. The whole point is helping my friends. [return]
