Disappearance at Orion's Hollow (June 12)
InSpectres
players: Caroline, Marc, Brian, and Ben GMing

We used the InSpectres InSpace­ variant, and played two missions in a row with the crew of the planetary survey ship, HMS Carbuncle:

1) On barely colonized Kinzi IV, an indigenous species of frogs ("cosmolis amphibious? you mean space frogs?") has abruptly started exhibiting organized behavior and perhaps far greater than animal intelligence...

2) At the remote jump point of Orion's Hollow, the last three ships that came out of hyperlight all arrived with their crews missing. The nav buoys relayed no signs of distress or damage from the ships, but not a soul on board either...

By the second mission everyone was really getting the hang of the InSpectres narrative power. It was really cool how the players took the seemingly unrelated details (the sabotaged hardware, the phantom on the video, the cryotubes, and the brain experiments) and wove it all together into murderous psychic projections of the sleeping subjects, dream-ghost monsters, killing people in hyperspace. Thanks Caroline for that really macabre twist to the mystery ("Oh, all those missing crew members? They're not gone. They're all crammed into one of the crates in the hold. All of them. In one crate." -- Veil! Veil!).

I really liked how the character interactions from the first mission set the stage for the real meltdown in the second mission. I suspect that the innocent "should the ship have a prefix, like HMS?" at the start of the game is what spun into our fairly ominous para-British empire, complete with Her Majesty's Secret Service (the Agency).

So many good bits! Smith and his mutual murder plan with the Agency goon ("no, that's okay, just the two of us will go" "Yeah that's good, just the two of us"); deposed acting Captain, Dr. Brigg, coming around to side with Smith after his star had fallen; Skyke the spy, completely throwing the colonists of Kinzi IV to the Agency wolves.

Every character had an awesome poetic end, even Smith surviving to tell the horrible tale but without a shred of proof. Really sweet.