Flyover Country: Cast & Crew

Sketch by Kunrong Yap

Continued from the Prologue.

I had a setting, a starting planet, and a rough idea of the first adventure I would send my plucky band of misfits on. I also had a whopping six players: four veterans of my previous several years of D&D 5e campaigns, including the two previous DMs, and two complete neophytes. They rolled up one warrior, one psychic, and four experts, bless their hearts. The crew:

Batias: A musclebound Protestant pastor with a silver tongue, a shaky commitment to New Testament values, chronic intestinal problems, and, we would eventually learn, a disastrous gambling habit. A native of Morrow, but not from anywhere near Freeport—he hails from New New Greenland, way down south. Jack-of-all-trades handyman and reliably intimidating presence.

BQ: A young barbarian from the planet Ayaz, a frozen hellhole stuck at a medieval level of technology, who shipped out with the crew of a visiting tramp freighter and never looked back. Has a remarkable knack for piloting, a deep devotion to a mysterious alien religion, and a stubborn insistence on wearing fur armor and carrying a spear and shield everywhere. Ace pilot and autodidact expert in ancient technology and alien cultures.

Krissa: Hailing from the far-off moons of the gas giant Juma, she grew up among the space pirates there during the tumultuous era when Valentina Gurov bound the pirate clans together, conquered the planet Munda, and declared it the seat of a New Terran Empire. Trained in biopsionics at the Empire's expense, she went AWOL and now makes her way in the criminal underworld as a medic. Extremely low-key psychic medic and clairvoyant.

Mustang: A child film star from the Commonwealth's primary world, Opis, she saw her career go down in flames before she even reached age 20 when a scandal about her ostentatious lifestyle saw her blacklisted by all the studios. She lit out for the territories, where she's made a living operating a traveling Wild West show and doing crimes for hire. Sharpshooter and entertainer.

Roman: Unable to keep up with the ritzy lifestyles of his upper-crusty university classmates, he took to cooking drugs in the chemistry lab. Caught and kicked out of school, he turned his talents to black-market purposes. Brilliant chemist and occasional pedantic know-it-all. Working toward a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Suspected by his comrades of being a secret android.

Sarai: Born into the Opisian elite, she enjoyed a gilded childhood as the daughter of high-ranking members of the Commonwealth's diplomatic corps. When her parents were implicated in a vast scheme of graft and influence peddling, she was disgraced and turned her back on the Commonwealth. The youngest member of the crew. Grifter extraordinaire and leader of (hench)men.

The mission? A spy exfiltration inspired by Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now. (Imagine all the bits in quotation marks in the next section delivered with a hearty, over-the-top French accent.)

* * *

We lay our scene in Freeport, in the Café Cosmopol on Avenue Saint-Odile, not far from the offworlders' Green Zone. The cavernous dining room is lit only indirectly, through louvers and skylights, and dozens of ceiling fans whirl away. Thanks to clever architecture and good ventilation, the temperature is bearable, if quite humid; out on the street it's a good 50 degrees centigrade.

Six freelancers have been gathered by Elias Bensaïd, an influential fixer with deep Milieu connections. He's an avuncular man in late middle age—in appearance one part Santa Claus, two parts Saddam Hussein.

Elias explains the mission: "It’s a simple job, in principle. But it needs to be done quickly and you have to follow your orders to a T, understood? No dicking around, no going off-script."

He pauses for emphasis, then goes on. "You are going to crew a ship from the Havre here, pick up one passenger near the Sylva–Konyr frontier, and take her off-world. She should be at the coordinates given—a forward base for Konyri rebels, just inside Sylva. She should be alive and cooperative."

He shows them her file; it's been hurriedly but thoroughly redacted of most of her personal history, the details of her career, and even her name; they get only the nom de guerre "Commander Vasia."and the basic facts. She's an attractive woman in her mid-forties—extremely tall, with an athletic build. She's highly intelligent, a trained pilot, skilled with electronics, proficient with firearms, fluent in multiple languages, trained in first aid, and more.

"Complications are possible, obviously," Elias allows. "If any arise, just keep things as simple as possible. You need to get her on the ship and off Morrow. That’s the whole job. If she’s unconscious, fine. If she’s dead…look, I don’t want you to kill her. I really don't want her dead, and I doubt you six could do the job anyway. No offense. Just don’t try. But if she winds up dead, we need the body. When you get her up to orbit, dead or alive, you'll be contacted with next steps." He hands over a thumb drive with a copy of her file and a set of encryption keys and handshake protocols for arranging the hand-off.

* * *

The Commonwealth's spy agency, IRIS, has long been working covertly to unify Morrow under an ostensibly democratic government. Some of their highly trained operatives have, for years, been helping lead the People's Front for a Free Konyr in its war to overturn the Konyri monarchy. Now the war is all but won and IRIS is pulling its people out in preparation for the peace, but one particular highly placed operative—Commander Vasia—is nowhere to be found. It'll be the player characters' job to find her; they represent deniable assets who can't be linked to IRIS if anything goes wrong and aren't associated with any one Milieu syndicate.

The concept was supposed to accomplish a whole lot at once:

1. Bring all the player characters together and give them a reason to work with each other.
2. Put a ship at their disposal without just handing them an asset worth the equivalent of millions of dollars (the ship is owned by some Milieu shell company, and the crew is expected to take on further work on the Milieu's behalf; it's also kind of a junker, way behind on maintenance).
3. Give them a pretty open-ended task, one that they could tackle in various different ways—combat is a distinct possibility, but not a necessity.
4. Get them involved in the setting's current events, both at a local level and at the interstellar level: the civil war in Konyr is a low-tech, low-intensity conflict that six crooks in a spaceship won't get completely swallowed up by, but it's also part of much grander factional machinations.

Did it work? Well, the first point was kind of a failure: The classes my players chose didn't fit neatly with the fiction; it made sense that Elias would recruit a sharpshooter, a medic, and a pilot for this mission, but why a chemist, a pastor, and a con artist? I did have a plan to keep them flying and working together after the job, but it was a surprise I aimed to spring on the players later, so there was also a moment of them wondering, "Why are we going to keep hanging out with these strangers?"

If I were to do it over, I'd spend more time building interconnected backstories for the player characters and have them already be a dedicated crew from the jump. (Watch this space for a link to the blog post I'll inevitably write trying to design Beyond the Wall–style playbooks for sci-fi characters.) But other than that, you know what? It worked like a charm

Next: Chapter 1.