The Gaming Den

Building.

You sprint away from Falcon's Wing as three ballistic missiles streak overhead. Two score direct hits on your Time Machine and the blast hurls you fifty feet across the gleaming steel roof of the refining plant. Lose 2 Endurance points. The third missile destroys the mining droid, sending a purple cloud of atomised rock into the atmosphere. When the dust settles all that remains of Falcon's Wing is a few small parts of one of the hydraulic legs. You are trapped in time, on Mechanon in 1986 AD with no way of leaving this soulless planet dedicated to the manufacture of hideous weaponry. You have no choice but to go on.

5
The edge of the refinery roof curves steeply down to the ground below, like the side of a bowl. You jump over the edge and slide down, skidding across the polished metal of another droid highway at the bottom. You run on across the featureless steel until part of the road seems to take off ahead of you. It is a flat-topped fortress droid which suddenly towers above you. Each of its sides boasts a formidable array of lasers and energy weapons, and hornlike sensors. Will you:

Open fire immediately?
Drop to the floor and turn the temperature control on your suit to freezing?

There is a picture here

The second choice is so specific that I'd go for that.

Agreed.

Second the agreement.

27
You drop to the steel floor and turn your suit temperature to freezing. The huge droid moves towards you and then stops. You can see its banks of infra-red sensors questing all around, but two of the horn-like devices turn slowly towards you. It must be homing in on your heartbeat. There is a closed doorway into a small domed building not far to your right. Will you:

Try for the doorway?
Try to blast the horns from the droid?

It's going to detect us whether we run or not (heartbeat if we run, heat signature of our laser if we fire) so we might as well go with the option that makes it harder for it to follow us (and might destroy it). Blast it.

Agreed - lasers.

You aim your blaster at the horns. Make an Attack Roll.

If you score 4-12
If you score 2-3...double 1.

The excess of adrenaline pumping through your body is causing your arm to shake. You have missed and the droid has relocated you. It criss-crosses the highway with laser beams and you cannot dodge them all. You are chopped into several pieces and your mission ends here

Roll again, or try something else?

You all saw that - we got train tracks, not snake eyes. Reroll

Reroll.

5 and 1 that time, so:

Your blaster melts the droid's sound sensor and it begins to move erratically, unable to locate you. After a time it simply drifts away. You run on towards the hangar-like opening of the large fluorescent building. As you run, three flying droids Atmospheric Interceptors, with swept-back wings and pulse laser cannons swoop on you, strafing you with pulses of deadly red light. You zig zag towards an abandoned worker droid hoping to shelter beneath it. Make an Evasion Roll as the Interceptors scream overhead.

If you score 5-12...6 and 6 (-1), so made that one easily.

194

You shelter under the broken machinery of the worker droid. Pieces clang as they are cut from it to fall to the steel floor by the pulse lasers of the interceptors. They loop the loop and fire again on the return run, before arcing away, their drive reactors emitting a harsh whine. You continue towards the hangar-like entrance of the fluorescent building. The rim of the hangar boasts twenty great space-artillery pieces like outward pointing teeth in the cavernous maw of a prehistoric monster. As you approach it, skirting a huge iron cooling tower, an incredible sight meets your gaze. A spaceship almost as large as one of the generation starships of the 24th Century is being dismantled on a huge brass landing field. As you fly over it you see a contraption which can only be an enlarged Variac Drive being hoisted out of its front end. It takes a few seconds for you to realise what has been happening. The factory droids must have manufactured this colossal Time Machine in hours! Hundreds of them hover about it. They must have planned to invade the EigerVault with this machine on Earth, 3033 AD. Now that you have destroyed the Polybdenum and the Timehole on Thrix has closed, Yelov must have altered his plans. As you streak onwards, a daunting vista opens up beneath you. It is Mechanon's space launch field, and it is packed with an interstellar warfleet the size of which defies belief. Row upon row of Interceptors, Ion-drive Battle Cruisers and Atmospheric fighter-carrying Mother-ships glow a burnished bronze be-neath the dull red sky. At the hangar mouth, worker droids are cutting part of the Time Machine apart in a blaze of heat and light. Will you:


Walk in past these?
Skirt them, entering the hangar in shadow?

Take the stealthy approach.

Sneaky sneaky.

Make like a girl and skirt.

As you steal towards the hangar you hear the sound of an alarm. You look to the source and see an infra-red scanner. Twenty gleaming barrels, the space-artillery, composed of a grill-like mesh of metal alloys, dip down ponderously towards you. You begin to sprint as bands of energy pulse ever more quickly from end to end of the barrels, which then spit out balls of plasma. Twenty plasma shells erupt around you, the explosion digs a crater a hundred metres deep, completely destroying the remnants of Yelov's Time Machine as well as you. You are just a memory.


Huh. Try not sneaking or go back further and try something else?

That's fucking ridiculous.

Try not sneaking, on a basis of wanting to rewind as little as possible.

245 [score an N]

You walk nonchalantly past the worker droids, bathed in the heat and light of several welding torches and lasers. The sensors which control the space-artillery cannot detect you, as you are masked by the heat and light. The inside of the building stretches into the distance, like a giant hovrail tunnel. To your left a much smaller access tunnel, perhaps thirty metres wide, stretches for a hundred metres, towards an illuminated display board. Will you:

Run down the access tunnel?
Continue on down the main tunnel?

Access tunnel because inevitably we'll need info from the display board.

Take the side passage before continuing down the main passage.

280
A large rail twenty metres above the floor runs the length of the Access tunnel and out into the main tunnel. As you move beneath it a massive wardroid which bears a convex shield whirs into sight at the far end travelling along the rail. It accelerates towards you. Will you:
Hug the tunnel wall and stay motionless?
Continue directly beneath the thick rail?

Directly beneath the rail because stealth has so far got us fucked.

Besides, putting ourselves to the side without cover actually makes us more visible as compared to passing underneath the cover of the rail.

20
The raildroid passes overhead with a whoosh of displaced You continue to the end of the tunnel, where it and the rail on which the droid appeared turn sharp left. Will you:

Wait to check that the raildroid is not coming back?
Duck quickly out of sight round the bend in the tunnel?

This mission seems to favor speed over stealth so don’t bother waiting for the droid.