Hi guys!
I'm gonna break out of the usual pattern of updates that I've established because September 2025 was a bit of a flop in terms of forward progress. Three things led to this. In no particular order:
- The place that I was going to hold my in-person session at never got back to me.
- My wife really wanted the house cleaner and it got to me.
- I really thought I could do a better job of hosting than the gaming tavern we were going to play REKT at. (I was right, pretty sure)
So in short: I accomplished nothing of note on the corebook.
So how about a little bit about the session? It was fantastic, by the way.
My four players (including my wife) showed up around 5 PM last Friday night. Two of them had a good idea of what they were in for - one of them (Paul) had DM'd on and off for years, and another (Bekah) had done a D&D game club at her high school and been the DM for a bit until she got tired of the antics of highschoolers (from my understanding). My wife has played REKT a couple times, and Sydney had never played a TTRPG at all and had no idea what to expect.
Pretty sure none of them expected the full spread. (Please forgive the terrible quality of my cheap phone camera.)
Spoiler
Dice trays for each person, filled with the tokens they're allowed to have
Close up of one of the dice trays: A medic's sniper rifle ammo, medical supplies (red tokens), force field tokens (blue circles), and concrete barrier (bar) with the medkit itself at top left.
Each player got their own clipboard! After page 2, I gave them a quick overview of how to play their character best on page 3, and then more detailed rulings after that.
The full setup!
And of course, the govee lights can be turned green whenever SCAMPS speaks:
It was fun. Definitely ways to top it, though - next time I'm gluing the map's photo paper to poster boards.
So what happened?
After a quick overview of lines, veils, and table culture, we dove into it. SCAMPS gave them a briefing that had them in stitches (SCAMPS called Paul's character a manchild, which instantly endeared him to them), and their drop-pod crash-landed next to the mining facility.
After some shenanigans, they made some good choices about what to do up top (and almost murdered some innocents before dialing back the murder), and entered the mine, whereupon they met the Foreman, whose accent kept switching around because I kept trying out new ones. They enjoyed this very greatly. Bekah named her scout ball Doug, and then Ricky, and said that if anything happened to it she would cry. I did not expect anyone to become so quickly attached to a tiny scrap of photo paper, but here we are.
Sydney's character Kai decided she wanted to murder the Foreman, who they collectively called George, and wanted to get in a fight with Paul's stealth-ninja character. (What is it with swordsmen fighting PSI users? Is this just a thing that happens every campaign I run?)
George did not end up dying, but Paul goaded everybody into the final fight, taking the riskier option. The fight was tense but ultimately I tuned the enemies a little bit too gently, so I probably need to increase their firepower. Nevertheless, the players were terrified of the enemies and, after huddling in the entrance to the room for a bit, eventually became bolder and started executing some very well-laid-out plans, layering PSI fields and medkit defenses to make a nearly impenetrable bulwark.
One thing I possibly did that enabled a little bit of craziness and also resulted in the scenario feeling "too easy" was that I let the Foreman grant a single free action as an action. This offloaded a relatively useless action to someone who could best use it, or who needed it the most. They started using this as part of their plans as they problem-solved the scenario - to great effect.
Highlights:
Sydney got into her PSI character very quickly and was having a ton of fun with the PSI - especially throwing enemies into each other for extra damage. Kai's Chaos Gauntlet never got used. Not even once.
Jax never used his crossbow's smoke bolts. In fact, Jax did horribly at every roll right up until the end where he two-shot an enemy in a single turn with two wakizashi epics.
Seraphina never landed a solid shot with her sniper rifle, but did amazingly with her medkit and decently with her laspistol.
Nova did her thing as a hacker and everyone was cheering her on for her rolls, while she hacked enemies to shoot each other with Misfire.
All together there was an incredible level of cohesion - especially involving Kai. Kai was regularly featured in plans because of her ability to move enemies and allies short distances.
Results?
As soon as SCAMPS collected everybody with a personnel carrier, and the credits rolled, Sydney immediately said, "We need to do this again." This was followed by an unanimous vote for a full campaign.
Now we just have to figure out scheduling...
I will be uploading the entirety of the session to youtube - but I need to figure out how to de-noise the audio first.