Play Report: Deadfleet Captain Rain

“The writing… it seems to be a song, sir?”

— Last recorded words of Dr. Sai

The past week I’ve had the pleasure of playing Welcome Aboard, Captain, a sci-fi solo RPG where you play both the Captain as well as your crew of Bridge Officers. The game itself features a super-fun 2×2 resolution system that I am absolutely going to borrow for other contexts, as well as a procedural mission generation engine to help design challenges. Today we’ll take a look at both!

In past play reports, I’ve been displaying every roll I’ve made through an entire game, across however-many scenes I encounter. Today, I’m focusing on a slice-of-play where I create several situations for a single objective, and I cover two of them.

This has been a real blast to play, and this story in particular has made me happy. But before we dive in, let me explain the story so far…

On a distant, toxic waste-world in the far reaches of explored space, an archaeological excavation sifted through ruins of a long-gone civilization. An entire subterranean civilization once lived near the surface — perhaps there could still be life down below?

The expedition went awry when they stumbled upon, and disturbed, a perfectly-preserved tomb beneath the uncovered city. When the dwarven xeno-archaeologist Dr. Sai scanned various engravings with the Arcano-Decyphery Analysis Machine, she was surprised to find that the writings appeared to be musical verses, written in an unknown language.

Little did the scientist know, these magicked lyrics were the key to awaking the bones of a terrible, ancient evil...

Oh, important detail! This play report is from the Bad Gals’ perspective.

Normally, Welcome Aboard, Captain focuses on the unequivocal Good Guys. The provided setting places the player’s crew as the bridge officers of the Alliance Warden Fleet, whose tasks are to Explore, Understand, and Unite. It’s a peace-keeping duty in a future-fantasy hi-fi where you meet aliens, prevent conflict, and bring Good Peaceful Vibes to the universe.

The story below the break is not that. I keep to the game’s rules and mechanics, but the setting and tone is completely different. Instead, it’s about elven rogues, dwarven scientists, security droids, lasers, zombies, halfling liches, and annoying chapels. (But, I did run a sequel one-shot afterwards, where the players DID play the good folks, cleaning up and rescuing survivors from this mess!)

Alright, there — you’ve been warned!