The Anthropophage

In a previous post I added a one-page setting document for a far-future city in a world inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories. One of the hazards mentioned but not described thanks to space restrictions is the anthropophage. And that might be best, because I think with the one page setting concept, it's proper for a GM to interpret the beasties in a manner that suits their campaign. Michael Prescott often includes creatures as a name only in his Trilemma adventure locations, as a kernel for GMs to form ideas around.

But I've been thinking a little more about my Mad City hazards. At first I intended the anthropophages to be poetically-named human cannibals, decadent and morally bankrupt. Now though, I think I like the idea that they're a separate species entirely. Something out of antiquity, from a previous age of the Earth. Maybe even that age's human race, devolved into savagery. I always wondered how Vance's deodands originated. Irresponsible magical experimentation? Visually, I'm inspired by Doctor Who's Futurekind. 

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It's common wisdom that the Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction on at least three occasions. Since the last revival, the world has been plagued by man-eating anthropophages. It's possible that during the last age of man the human race degenerated into this predatory form and no longer met the Lighthouse's minimum standard for 'human', triggering the next revival.

The typical Thropo is human-looking, but with a spine curved slightly forward and bowed legs, as though frozen in in the moment of springing at a victim. They also have leopard-like spots on shoulders and neck, where they can be easily hidden by clothing. And carnivorous teeth. There's a noticeably musky smell about them, like a lion or other large predator. They like to attack at night, when the darkness hides their nature. A common tactic is for a female or cub to pretend to be wounded and call for help, drawing rescuers into a pack ambush. They've been known to join travelling caravans, stepping into the column one by one until they have the numbers to grab someone and drag them away, quietly incapacitating them in the process. They have a talent for mimicry and learn languages easily.

Thropos are cunning, but not clever. They don't plan long-term. They can use tools or technology if they see a human use them first, but don't retain the knowledge. Specimens in captivity have learned to read, but they show no interest in doing it without the threat of punishment. They're highly sensitive to human moods and quickly pick up on stress or fear. Thropos themselves don't react to fear like human beings. They'll retreat from a conflict if the odds are against them, but if cornered they fight without hesitation or holding back.

Packs usually number around 3D4 of all ages. When food is scarce, Thropos cope by eating their weakest. A pack which has had lean times will have no cubs or older specimens with them. When there's real risk of starvation, they turn on pregnant females as well. They can supplement their diet with animal meat, but a Thropo that doesn't get at least half its protein from human flesh will grow sickly and become a target for others.

Communities which catch or kill Thropos like to dismember the bodies (so they don't distress residents with their human appearance) and put the parts on high stakes at a distance around their settlements. Thropos can smell their own dead for miles, and are less likely to hunt where other Thropos have been killed. Even so, their numbers have been growing in recent years. Well-known settlements in the plains have been wiped out by Anthropophage predation. In these times of lost hope, only creatures that never think further than their next meal can thrive.

HD 2, AC 6 [13], Att 2 claws (1d4) 1 bite (1d6), MV (120') 40', SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (F2), ML 9, AL Chaotic

Specials:

• Howl. Once per combat a Thropo may spend an action to make a screech that triggers an atavistic dread in any living man. Human characters of level equal or less than the Thropo must save or freeze for a turn.
• Frenzy. A Thropo bloodied but still in positive HP gains 1D6 temporary HP that lasts until the end of the fight. It's quite possible for a Thropo to defeat all opponents and then keel over dead from their wounds.

If a player wants to play an anthropophage: why? Did their serial killer character get locked up? Create the character with -2 INT +1 WIS.  Each day they go hungry, make a saving throw vs paralysis.  On failure, immediately start hunting the nearest suitable prey.  -1 to the roll per extra day spent hungry. Each week they don't eat human meat, roll vs death or take -1 CON with no natural recovery until their next meal of long pig. Each turn, NPCs can make an opposed WIS roll to realise what it is they're standing next to.

Earth-at-the-end

A while back I posted my dying Earth one page setting, The Mad City.  I thought I was finished with it but it's been on my mind lately, because I'm not sure there isn't more to be done with it.  A single page doesn't have room for more than a sketch of the setting and in writing it I found myself putting aside ideas that interested me but needed more detail than I could go into without overflowing the page.  Some of them seemed like they were worth getting down in text.

This post is to serve as a kind of setting bible, so I can get my thoughts on tone, theme, etc. down in one spot.

The premise

Earth is old.  Unimaginably old.  Epochs have come and gone.  The sun has shrunk to a glowing coal.  The planet's core has cooled, mountains have worn down to hills.  There isn't a square inch of land that hasn't seen epic adventures of greed, altruism, lust, courage, tyranny, nobility, betrayal, redemption, rebellion and rebuilding play out a hundred times over.  The Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction at least three times.  There's no history any more because it's all history.  Where would you even begin?

Earth is tired.  All the ores and useful minerals have been dug up and used.  The ground is nothing but stone and dirt now.  The magnetic field flickered and died.  The oceans shrank.  The environment is maintained by ancient machinery, but most of the land is sterile desert.  The other planets are gone, mined away to nothing.  Siphoned away into hydrogen fuel to feed the sun for another eon.  Now there's nothing left.

Earth is dying. Everyone agrees that the sun is in its last decade of life.  It might explode and destroy the world in fire, it might gutter out like a cooling ember and freeze the world in darkness.  There are different schools of thought, but there doesn't seem much point in arguing about it.  Whoever's right won't have much time to gloat.  The skills to operate the machines that might have saved us vanished megayears ago.

People are handling this knowledge in different ways.  The majority carry on the way they have their whole lives.  If crops don't get harvested and replanted, they'll starve before the sun has a chance to kill them.  Perhaps they make more time for family and friends than previous generations have.  Others are giving in to despair and letting it degrade them.  Abandoning responsibilities, chasing grudges, surrendering to hedonistic urges they might have kept buried if there was going to be time to have regrets.  A few (and hopefully this is where the player characters would come in) aren't ready to give up easily and spend their remaining time doing what good they can and chasing rumours and folklore about forgotten technology that could save even just a few.

The style

People live fairly primitive lives for the most part.  The majority are subsistence farmers.  They might enjoy a few conveniences that need advanced science to develop but function just fine at a subsistence level - farmhouses are very commonly heated and lit by burning methane gas fermented in simple biogas plants under the building.  A village might be built around a single surviving machine from an earlier age that provides an important resource.

Cities tend to be where the most ancient technology can be found.  It's no longer under human control but it carries on working by itself, providing heat, light, food, etc.  Sometimes it's a threat as well -- robot cops run amok and killing indiscriminately, industrial processes poisoning the streets -- but people still hold on in the cities because the deterioration has been gradual and their cultures have developed rituals and taboos that keep them safe for the most part.

Technology is, and isn't, a mystery.  In most cases how it works is unknown, but what it's meant to do is obvious.  The methods of the people who built it half a million years may have been swallowed up by the dust of history, but in any age people are people, with reliably human motives.  Magic is technology.  Monsters are machines following orders from long-dead masters to walk a perimeter and kill intruders.  Building a golem is done by assembling parts stripped from defunct mechanical arbeiters.  A healing 'spell' might be a device produced to keep meat edible by reversing entropy.  (Knave seems like a good system for this, since it already treats spells as inventory items.)

The situation

As the end comes, forgotten devices all over the continent are starting to reactivate on their own.  Transport networks are coming back to life and automated vehicles have started moving - often with no regard for any structures that might have been built in the way since they last rolled or flew.  (One of my influences is pulp novels from the 1970s in which artificial intelligence could be maddeningly simple-minded.)  Many of them are in an indifferent state of repair and adventurers using them to access the isolated areas of the continent need to be both agile and prepared.

The reactivation has encouraged some people to hope for the world's survival, but for the most part they're working at cross purposes.  Lighthouse cults practice human sacrifice to give the giant orbital installation the power it needs to save us.  Scholarly cabals sabotage each other out of fear that if there are still-working spaceships, there will only be enough to carry a few.  Powerful nihilists want to ensure the world dies because their twisted philosophy tells them that to be the final generation is to be the most important of all generations.

The tone

What I'm going for here is bleak-but-with-hope.  Even with the player character efforts, things are probably going to end badly.  They're surrounded by examples of people who've lost hope and decided to forget about it and carouse their remaining time away.  But if there is salvation, even if only for a few, it'll be because PC action made it happen.

The Harry Clark project

Emmy Allen has proposed a community-sourced bestiary based on the artwork of Harry Clark.  Clark's artwork is perfect for this.  It's surreal and symbolic and in many cases you have to project your own meaning on it.

The image I chose is probably a bit more straightforward than that, it's a Madonna with child.  But she's black-robed and standing next to a black-flamed candle and there's an eye in the floor observing her.  I decided to write the image up as a dark reflection of religious iconography, sucking the light and the sanity out of the room.

Anti-Madonna

Armour Class: as unarmoured. Immune to non-magical attacks.
Hit Dice: 1
Move: as human unless new light is introduced (see specials)
Attacks: Impious aura
No. Appearing: 1
Morale: 9
Treasure: 1D6 shards of curse-glass
Alignment: Chaotic

Magicians are a perverse lot, always tampering with the natural order. A wizard's mirror which has held the reflection of a saint has a chance to produce an anti-Madonna, a profane likeness of a holy figure. The image moves as if alive and whispers a constant monologue of baffling blasphemy, but is immaterial and non-intelligent. More like an independent illusion. It desires worship in the form of sacrifice and can be temporarily appeased by destroying an item of personal value. It has the following powers:

Anti-light: When an anti-Madonna appears, all natural light sources become sources of darkness and change to suck light out of the surrounding area. Magical sources will be dimmed as though appearing through a thick gloom.

Speed of dark: If new light is introduced, the anti-Madonna can instantly jump to any space the light touches. It will become a dark source at the end of the round in which it is lit.

Litany of ignorance: Intelligent creatures close enough to hear its whispered words must save vs paralysis. Clerics who fail to save lose a prepared spell.

The creature can be dispelled like an illusion or destroyed with any kind of magical attack. It is immune to fear and mind-control effects and cannot be turned. Turn attempts at a high enough level to destroy it outright work as normal.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PDF version here.  There's a Reddit thread for the project here.

Magic variant for Knave

The star of the show.

It's starting to seem like the end is in sight for my group's current campaign.  We've just achieved one of the big goals and know exactly where the other one is and who we have to go through to get it.  It may all be settled at brunch with our enemies, provided we can make bail in time for it.  Our success has been thanks in no small part to a highly effective NPC.  That's him on the right.  The most capable member of the party doesn't even have opposable thumbs.  However, it's starting to look like he sold us out to the cops so I'm not ready to give him MVP status just yet.  I have questions, Johann.  Serious questions.  Your communication is limited to sarcastic eye-rolling but you're not eye-rolling your way out of this, rabbit.

This has all been in a house-ruled version of the Nemesis system, on the  planet of Harmony where the discovery of alien artifacts has triggered a gold rush and no-one is paying nearly enough attention to the local wildlife.  The next campaign is likely to be Shadowrun with James II as GM if we can find enough D6s.

After that, I've raised the idea of a short campaign to test out a fantasy module I'm writing: Elysium Bath House.  5e is the obvious choice of system, but we've talked about it before and there are elements of D&D that people find less appealing - classes, levels and dungeon-crawling.  I created Elysium with this group in mind, so it's not a traditional dungeon.  I think Ben Milton's Knave satisfies the other two points.  In place of classes, it uses an encumbrance system.  Want to be a fighter?  Fill your slots with weapons and armour.  Magic user?  Fill them with spellbooks.  Mix and match as you please.  It's level-based, but rather than adding feats, gaining a level just means adding a hit die and spending some points on improving stats.  Spells are level-less but increase in effectiveness and duration as a character levels.  That satisfies the group's objections.

The magic system doesn't quiiiiite match up with the game I want to run, though.  Spells can be found in spellbooks - one spellbook per slot, one spell per book.  Spellbooks cannot be created or copied.  Spells are cast by reading them from the book and work once per day.  I can see why Ben wrote it this way: he likes to encourage player creativity and thinks it can be best served by preventing spells from being overused or overshared.  Want more magic?  Get out there and quest for some.

I can see why, but it still seems a little contrived that spells by their nature can't be read more than once per 24 hours.  I'm looking to run a game where magic is more available.  I think my preferred solution is to say that spellbooks function exactly like the RAW, but it's also possible to learn spells and cast them at will.  Learning a spell is a normal Knave INT saving throw, with an added bonus equal to the learner's level and a penalty equal to the number of spells already known.  Failure means rolling on a magical mishap table like this one by the Hecatohedral Monk.  Check out some of those magical disasters - "Caster can no longer perceive sunlight."  "Caster is henceforth prone to being summoned by summon monster spells cast from other Material Planes."  Some of the entries are ready-packaged adventures waiting to happen.

Casting a learned spell consumes a slot of magical components.  Components themselves aren't hard to come by.  They can be as simple as a blade of grass twisted into a mystical sigil or a hair from the caster's own head tied in an associative knot around a stone from the last river he forded.  The point is to be something that has to be prepared, and then carried and protected in a slot of its own.

I have no doubt that characters with learned spells will venture forth every day with every spare inventory slot stuffed full of magic components, but that seems fine to me.  When you only have a hammer you might be inclined to look at every problem as a nail, but that's a space for creativity to occur in as well.

Boarding now for parts unknown

Skerples has had a remarkable idea.  A dungeon in the form of a train that never stops, driven by a mysterious Engineer, staffed by inhuman Conductors and composed of carriages picked up across the multiverse.  He'd like stocking it with carriages to be a community effort, and reached out via his blog for submissions.  One of the example carriages is a giant cannon designed to fire goblins in padded suits at other cars, currently on fire.  The fire is inching its way towards the magazine, but the goblins are too busy fighting among themselves to do anything about it.  The other is a mouldering library operated by a mocking sphinx who only collects unreliable reference books and bad fiction.

My submission is a brew car operated by undead-hunting monks.  Staking vampires is no job to be doing sober, now is it?

Skerples is the creator behind Tomb of the Serpent Kings, reckoned to be one of the best introductory dungeons for newcomers to OSR-style play.  I confess, I've wanted to be part of a community-driven dungeon design since I first started reading OSR blogs last year, but usually showed up at the wrong time.  This time I'm in at the start.  Creating that carriage was a fun use of an afternoon.

The Golden Sea AP (part 2)

Link to part 1.

It was late when the skiff approached the Drugtown docks and there weren't many people around.  There was a sign advising visitors not to leave the area without making arrangements with the dock master, so they went looking for him.  They found him in his office, high as balls and dead to the world.  One of the characters had an ability that allowed him to remove stress from another character, and we agreed that it could be used in this case to bring him down from his high and make him responsive.  The character did, and the master woke up, angry at the world because of his dissipated buzz and ready for an argument.

He told them he couldn't give them a permit without sampling their cargo for contraband.  "Contraband?  What's contraband in a town that manufactures drugs?"  "Trouble-maker, huh?  I'll keep an eye on you."  They briefly considered giving him the contaminated chocolate as a sample, but decided against.  He sampled an entire bar, then asked for more samples, to be checked over at a later time.  Instead, they showed him their dead bandit leader.  That changed his tone a little, and he agreed to let them proceed into town.

Sherlock made a roll to figure out where in town they were likely to get the best bounty for a dead bandit.  His roll was at +3 for Mental stat, +2 for an ability and +1 for the hometown advantage.  It was a good result, he remembered the details of the different gangs running the town from his childhood there, including one who particularly hated raiders.  He went by the name Dr Feelgood and his headquarters was up on the hill.

They headed up that way and managed to get in to see Dr Feelgood's secretary, who went by the name Butthead. He was a big guy in leather and a mohawk, so it wasn't immediately obvious what qualified him to be a secretary.  Maybe he was the only one in the gang who didn't eat the pencils.  Butthead told them the doctor wasn't seeing anyone today, and the smartest thing to do was leave the bandit with him and come back for their reward later.  The party immediately pegged that he was trying to cheat them out of the reward.  Yu Tuu tried to intimidate Butthead by opening his coat to show a brace of grenades underneath, but failed the roll.  The room was lined with ratty curtains and they immediately heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind one of them.  Sherlock talked to Butthead like a fellow Drugtown boy to tell him it was all just a stupid joke and the tension eased.  He negotiated a deal by which the party got to see Dr Feelgood immediately and Butthead got 10% of the bounty.

The doctor was brusque with them at first, but once again Sherlock used his hometown advantage to turn the interview into a performance, making him laugh with the story of the first bandit's failed attempt to climb their railing before getting smacked off his bike, and the sideswipe that killed the leader.  Some good rolling increased the bounty by 50%.  The reward turned out to be four bullets suitable for Sherlock's gun, some ancient army field rations (still in original foil packaging) and a set of matched Garfield-print coffee mugs.  They left the body with the doctor and left, paying off Butthead as they went.  He was happy to have something from ancient times to trade at the big market two days from now.

The party went back to the skiff to sleep.  Before turning in, Idonou fired up his ancestral heirloom laptop and created a spreadsheet to figure out profit percentages, putting together a plan to maximise their return at the market.  The crew went to sleep in the cargo hold, leaving Nameless on watch with a pair of night vision binoculars borrowed from Sherlock.  That was a good plan because near the end of his watch he spotted a couple of figures in black sneaking up to the boat.  He yelled for the others, waking them immediately, but also alerting the two skulkers.  They rushed him, pulling knives as they came.  He knocked one off the ramp with his pole, but the other reached him and dealt a minor wound with his knife.  After that, the others were on deck and Sherlock won initiative.  He made a difficult called shot and killed the raider with a single bullet in the forehead.  Nameless jumped down to the sand to threaten the second one with his pole.  That one considered the odds and surrendered, dropping his knife.  They tied him up.

Yu Tuu did a good job of intimidating him by pretending to pull a grenade's pin and dropping it in his lap.  He swore that they weren't working for anyone, a guy in the bar sold them the information that there was a skiff in dock with a valuable cargo and they just meant to steal.  Nothing more complicated than that.  It seemed like the truth, so Valium untied him and told him that since he wanted the chocolate so bad, he could have it.  He brought up the box of contaminated bars and informed the bandit it would cost him all the barter he had.  He went pale but reluctantly agreed to return home and fetch it all.  Yu Tuu and Idonou went with him to keep him honest.

It turned out that 'home' was a grotty flophouse where the town's poorest citizens sleep.  The bandit admitted that he didn't have any barter -- but he'd talk to his friends and they'd be sure to loan him some.  Yu Tuu and Idonou got his mark on an IOU, which meant that if they didn't see him again, they could sell the debt to one of the town's slavers.  They made sure he took the chocolate with him.

They returned to the skiff and all was quiet again until the third shift, when a rumble of approaching hoverbikes woke them all.  It was the three remaining bandits from earlier, coming at them from the desert side.  They didn't bother with stealth, they darted closer and threw molotovs, occupying the crew with putting out the flames.  They drove erratic circles around the skiff, ducking and weaving to make themselves harder targets for Sherlock's pistol.  Nameless smacked one off his bike with a pole.  Yu Tuu tossed a grenade and managed to take out the remaining two in a single explosion.  Idonou chased the downed bandit down to the sand, only to find he was wriggling underneath the skiff.  He called the information up to the deck and Valium took the skiff's controls, cutting the antigrav.  It settled to the ground, squishing the bandit under its prow.

The crew buried all the body parts they could find in shallow graves under the dock and claimed their hoverbikes.  One was in good shape, and the other two were repairable.  The session ended there, but the characters made a good profit off their chocolate and salvage at the Drugtown market and finished their trade run covered in glory.

The Golden Sea AP (part 1)

I'm part of a gaming club that uses rooms at a local university.  This is the time of year the university gets an influx of new students, so the club puts aside campaigns for three weeks while the students are on orientation and runs one-shots to let new gamers try out roleplaying.  This week just past I ran a one-off of The Golden Sea.

Golden Sea is a one-page microgame written by Grant Howitt.  Every month he writes a free 1PG and releases them via Patreon.  Grant is the name behind other games like Drunken Bear Fighter, Honey Heist and Pride And Extreme Prejudice.  Most of them lend themselves well to quick, light-hearted sessions.  Golden Sea is one of the more serious examples. (If you want to try it yourself, I really have to recommend J. Wagnaar's redesigned version.  Grant releases games as an angled photo of a collage document.  It's a unique look and I guess it's his signature style, but I personally find them difficult to read.)

Characters get three stats: Physical, Social and Mental.  Numbers are generated by rolling 5D6 and removing both the highest and the lowest.  The remaining numbers get assigned as the player prefers.  There are also eight Paths which each have three Abilities.  Each player selects two Paths for their character and chooses an Ability from each.  It's a very simple system, but the Paths and Abilities make it possible to differentiate characters well.  Task resolution is by rolling 1D20 +stat +any Ability that seems applicable vs a target number.

The setting is post-apocalyptic, but so far past its apocalypse that it's retreated into myth.  My big mistake of the evening was not communicating that aspect of it to the players.  When I described it as post-apocalyptic, they imagined a Mad Max-style chase across the desert.  There were five characters: Idonou, Yu Tuu, Sherlock Holmes, Valium and Nameless.  If you think the names reflect how serious the game was going to be, you would be right.  I went with it, although it would have been nice to explore the implied setting and I might suggest it to my regular group the next time our current GM is out of town.

As well as the Golden Sea rules, I had an oracle app for my phone to give me random ideas, and a copy of Joel Priddy's Knave Fancypants document which includes the Buildings Are People hex exploration rules.

I started the session by informing the players that they were a company of traders,with an antigravity skiff loaded up with chocolate bars from the last working factory in the area and their job was to travel through the characters' home towns swapping the chocolate for barter and returning with a load of water from the only river in the desert.  The players all marked the characters' towns on the map, and the logical choice for first stop was Sherlock's town.  I asked him what the settlement's major resource was:

"Drugs."

Well, okay then.  During the final discussion before starting the players introduced a couple of complications for the characters which I was happy to adopt.  First, they had to keep the chocolate from melting in the desert sun, and secondly they couldn't move diagonally across map squares, only horizontally or vertically.  That meant that drugtown was the only settlement within reach of the company's skiff with the provisions they had.  Valium suggested rationing their supplies to reach a second town (on the map its resource appears to be 'volcano') but the other characters vetoed that idea.

Before starting I consulted my oracle and informed Valium that one of the company owners took him aside on the final night before they were scheduled to leave and told him that one carton of chocolate (subtly marked on one corner) was from a production run that got contaminated in the machinery and it could potentially make people sick.  They still had to sell it, but it was his responsibility to make sure it went to a customer far away from the home town so they'd be less likely to make trouble.  Valium instantly told the other characters, because they were all in it together.  None of them objected to making the sale.  Margins were tight, they needed a profit.

I rolled for weather and got a result of 'worsening from yesterday'.  I ruled that meant clouds and wind, with the potential for a sandstorm to develop if it picked up further.  The characters were cheerful enough, clouds made it that much easier to keep the chocolate solid.  They left early in the morning, had no encounters, and enjoyed an uneventful day.  The weather steadily worsened over the next few days, but the threatened sand storm never arrived, and eventually there was a sudden change back to sunny skies.  That raised the prospect of the chocolate melting, so they rigged a cover out of white sailcloth to keep direct sunlight from hitting it.  That worked and they were able to proceed.

That same day the dice ruled for an encounter and they noticed a column of smoke in the distance.  Sherlock had picked a set of binoculars as his starting equipment.  He checked for the source, but found it was below the horizon.  If they wanted to know what it was, they'd have to turn aside from their route and maybe add an extra day to their trip.  They were on their last day of supplies, so voted to leave it and continue on to drugtown.

They never saw it, but the smoke was from another trading skiff that had been brought down by desert raiders on hoverbikes.  On the map, they were now on a direct line between the crash site and drugtown.  Sherlock had described it as a town run by opposing gangs.  That make it seem like a reasonable destination for the raiders to be headed to trade their plunder for a good time.  I asked the players if they altered their route at all.  No, they decided to stay on the most direct path to drugtown.

The skiff had nice big sails to catch the wind and attention from any observers nearby.  The approaching bandits easily noticed their vessel.  The characters spotted them on the approach and Idonou tried to sharpen a couple of poles into spears.  He rolled badly and failed to put a point on them, but handed them out anyway.  A pole is better than no weapon.  The bandits overtook and separated into two groups of two and three, approaching on opposite sides of the skiff.  Their leader made an obvious 'pull over' gesture.  Instead, Sherlock showed his pistol.  That group of raiders dropped back, and one of the two on the other side threw a burning molotov onto the skiff's deck.  The rag fuse went out before it hit and the petrol failed to burn (a bad roll by the GM).  It made a fairly good distraction though, and the bandit who threw it used the opportunity to try climbing onto the skiff.  The going was difficult (another bad GM roll) and Nameless kicked him off before he managed it.  He went tumbling into the sand.

The riderless hoverbike wobbled away and toppled over, kicking up a fountain of dirt.  The second got closer to throw another molotov, but Nameless fended him away with a pole. (Nameless had 6-5-4 for his stats, and would be the hero on more than one occasion during the evening.)  Sherlock made a difficult called shot and smashed his remaining bottles with a bullet to the saddlebag.

With one bandit dispatched and other disarmed, the party thought the fight was over.  That was when the bandit leader swooped up from his position directly behind the skiff and threw a molotov.  This one splashed burning fuel across the deck.  The characters scrambled to smother it with a tarp, while Yu Tuu swerved the skiff and knocked the leader off his hoverbike.  At the same time, Sherlock shot the other bandit in the head.

Yu Tuu saw two dismounted hoverbikes ahead and discovered that the last two bandits had stopped in order to throw molotovs in tandem as the skiff passed.  He swerved again, but at the speed involved he was only able to get out of one bandit's range as they passed.  A molotov smashed against the skiff's hull and they were on fire again. Yu Tuu brought the skiff low and turned it in a tight circle, scraping the burning fuel off against the sand.  They were scorched but undamaged and turned back to claim the dead bandits' hoverbikes as extra barter for drug town.

Link to part 2.