River Dredd Play Log

Setting

The Buyout

  • Leveraging the overwhelming advantage of money to drive legislation, Corporations become Persons according to the law. Individual personal rights have less meaning because individuals don’t band together to protect them and corporations can bring more resources to bear.

The Changeout

  • Most laws passed are in the favor of one or another corporation rather than the interests of the people. Citizen’s rights to privacy erode, not necessarily through amendments to the constitution but through lack of enforcement.

The Blackout

  • People, even Lo-teks have lost knowledge of the time this happened, but routes in/out of the US were dropped other than those controlled by government interests.
  • People still receive media, news and info, but it’s always filtered through the government.
  • It’s believed that this is when the lo-tek movement begun, although records are sparse at best. Word of mouth from people who were young at the time or rumor is all we know of the beginnings.

The Fallout

  • Corporations fighting and competing until there are only 2 major players in each category at most.
  • Social Media is noise to the point that (I stopped writing at this point and forget this part)

The Swap-Out

The government of the United States of America as a democratically representative republic has been subsumed into The United Corporations of America. Competing corporate interests, cutthroat business tactics motivated by personal gain and power determine the course of what laws there are, and the concept of citizenship falls by the wayside.

The Dropout

  • Due to a major raid on systems, the lo-tek history has been lost
  • Unauthorized information between 2020 and 2090 has been lost
  • Personal Identity and Privacy is the priority for the Lo-Tek group
  • We get info from a spy known as Pi, an in to AMEX’s databases which can cause an upset in the balance of power

Character Overviews

Reston “Rezzie” Storr

  • Awoke in a bunker in what appeared to be china, there was an explosion and no other living souls, more of a wasteland than what he remembers
  • Next thing he knows he’s arrived in a port in Seattle and got through customs?
  • Woke up to SYS_CORE_errorBEF-00 Critical Failure
  • Lapses in consciousness that have lasted for a shorter and shorter period but things like finding himself in major metro areas that he’s no longer familiar with.
  • Eventually he finds himself in the former party town of New Orleans where the corporate go on retreats, coming to realize that he wants to join up to fight with the lo-teks.
  • Raid on the lo-teks
  • “We’re securing the asset”
  • “We’ve almost eliminated the resistance”
  • His friend Jackson has died.

Billy

  • Corporate politics broke him, and he decided that he wanted to become a corporate imp. At first, he was just trying to get back by annoying people, but that escalated to the point that he got someone killed who was on the Lo-Tek radar.
  • Meeting River for the first time, we share a beer and have the Tyler Durden conversation (airplane friends). He notices my wound and asks if he can take me to a hospital. I say “No, no hospitals”, so he shares some of his drugs with me and helps me post up and rest a bit.

River Dredd

The Story So Far

  • There was a factory built near my Disconnected enclave outside Baton Rouge, which toxified farms&water. I reached out to my Lo-Tek contacts, and joined a team which gave the corporation a taste of its own medicine. I took an injury to my side, and one of my friends was killed on the run as a result.
  • I need to do more - I can’t just sit and watch.

Billy Comes Into the Picture

  • I ask to be dealt in the game, and am given a choice between HTX and NOLA. While I’m looking for a Disconnected medic to help me heal up, I run into Billy in a bar. He offers me a beer and tries to take me to a hospital. “Two pitchers in and you still can’t ask me for my help?
  • Reston gets an assignment to deliver some high-quality chems to a contact. When he comes into contact with Billy, Reston goes to hide, because he doesn’t know who the person is, and as he gets closer it’s obvious that it’s an unaltered human. I give Billy my assignment to pick up some high-quality chems, and we GTFO and split up.

Small Faction of Lo-Teks

  • 5 people - us and 2 others
  • First mission together

End!

Session 2: 20180322

Back to the past

Toor

  • “Ok, go on” when we talk about how to divert power from the manufacturing area vs destroying the power plant.
  • Rumors Toor isn’t connected.

Nikkon

  • Ahead and behind the spear.

The Mission

  • Bringing us in on a trial. Women who are maybe in their 40s
  • Jackson (Rez’s pal) had them take out the commander of the supply groups, can we do something similar?
  • Factory details: Just another electronics factory - chips, electronics, consumer manufacturing, heavy metals, silicon dust & pollutants - entire northern area of town. Has its own power facilities. Almost completely automated. All of the shipping routes supplying materials to the facility are through 2 major roads, one going through the east (incoming) and out through the south. Almost all product is moving by land, but they dump out wet & dry waste out the north side where the majority of town is located. South road does extend into town and is a primary thoroughfare. XLR58 auto-haulers are used for transport (Tesla automated trucks). XLR80s are latest version. XLR58s are definitely armored & weaponized.
  • Power Plant: nuclear and thermal. Power is transferred to the factory through ground cables
  • We have: 3 Land Runners (ATVs), 5 people, 3 mining laser cutters (chainsaw sized), 2 plasma rifles.
  • “Could we use a laser cutter to weld?” Toor drops a chainsaw-type device with 2 bar handles down and starts fiddling with it
    • At least 1 shutter type door on the waste side for bots to come out.
    • River practices with the cutter to weld the shutter door closed.
  • Automatrons that also do maintenance are the primary security. 3 large units have been seen, enough smaller units to perform maintenance and security (tens?)
  • There are 2 flying drones running security routes. If they’re unmonitored, and we take out the cable then take out the drones, the likely outcome is that the automated processes wouldn’t be particularly complicated.
  • Jose Malco is the man on the ground, maintenance done by hand is done by him.

The Plan

  • River will weld the rolling door shut.
  • Toor, Nikkon, and Billy will take care of cutting the cable.
  • When the response comes out for the cable cut, Rez and River will infiltrate the factory and try to wreck the control room.
  • Toor, Nikkon, and Billy will handle the responders when the cable is cut and Toor has a surprise planned that should keep them from easily reconnecting

Session 3: 20180405

We meet several meters out from the factory to the north

Nikkon asks how it went with Jose, and Rez pulls out a sketched out map of the interior and Jose’s badge. The folks going in side are going to have to make a turn and go up a ladder to get to the control room. Billy, Nikkon, and River have the cutters, and everyone seems to understand the plan.

Toor rasps “It’s Go Time!”, and everyone rushes to work.

Billy, Toor and Nikkon head out to start cutting the cable, and River rushes to the first door, easily welding it shut. He has a little more trouble with the second, and as he’s welding it shut Nikkon and Billy’s cuts set off a large arc of electricity, momentarily stunning the cutting crew. As River finishes the weld on the second door, both bay doors start taking some loud impacts, although he and Rez get to the access door without much incident.

Rez and River sneak through the door, check their surroundings, and sneak down the first hallway. Rez looks back, and barely notices River, who is stealthily covering the rear.

Toor takes the cutter from Billy, who is having some trouble after being stunned by the sparking, and starts cutting.

Billy gets confused, thinking that Rez and River need the explosives inside the factory, so he tries to grab Toor’s bag and run, but stumbles on his way from the cable and Toor.

Inside, Rez turns the first corner, running into a worker, who River notices just in time to slip back out of notice. Rezzie smoothly convinces the worker to badge into the control room and deactivate the robots, citing issues with the bay doors. Rez follows the worker, Marriott, into the control room.

River takes some time to peer about, and it appears that Marriott was the only worker - however, there are some maintenance robots above. There is some rattling in the robot cages, and no other people appear to be around. River determines that there’s nowhere to hide and remain able to notice if/when they come back down from the control room, so he lugs the laser cutter up the stairs. When he gets to the top, he notices Marriott working on a console and Rez supervising.

Back outside, Billy gets knocked to the ground and chewed out by Toor, who pushes him back to work cutting the cable. He cuts at an angle he had determined earlier which might help the sparking, and this cuts the cable entirely. Toor makes an adjustment to something in her bag, and yells for Billy and Nikkon to “Run with everything you got in ya!”

There’s a huge explosion.

Inside, the ground shakes, the lights go out, and the noise in the factory goes to almost nothing. Emergency lighting kicks in, and Rez reassures Marriott that everything’s going to be alright. River knocks on the door to the control room.

Session 4: 20180412