Elective Surgery - Star Master Log: Bucking Bronco

Star Master Log

Mar 24

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Jeff breaks down the fifth episode of the Sibylen arc, where the crew battles surgical spider bots in an alien operating theater and gets their first look at whatever built this place through a pylon window. He talks about refereeing chaos on the fly, designing truly alien encounters, and what the gyroscope megastructure means for the rest of the season.

He covers:

(00:00) - Introduction: "Elective Surgery"
(00:36) - The Crew Logs: Encrypted reports from the players
(06:38) - Fog of War: Robert rides a spider bot like a bucking bronco, Felix weaponizes the ceiling, and the superhero landing tally grows
(10:39) - Engine Room: Designing the alien entity reveal; making something unfathomable instead of hostile
(14:03) - Deep Dive: The gyroscope megastructure, Prometheon Station's true scale, and what Virodyne has been hiding
(16:43) - Subspace Signals: How do you balance spotlight time between four players?
(21:48) - Star Master Spec: Event Horizon (1997) - Lovecraftian first contact and cosmic dread

New Star Master's Logs drop every other Tuesday, bridging the gap between our main adventure episodes.

[00:00:00] Star Master Jeff: Hey everyone, star Master Jeff here and welcome back to the Star Master Log. Today we're discussing the fifth part of the Sybil and ARC called Elective Surgery. In this episode, Robert Ross rides a robot. Hailey reloads her hands and the crew gets their first look at whatever built this place. We're gonna break down this episode in just a moment, but first, let's check in with the crew and hear their latest encrypted reports, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:00:36] Haleyy: I grew up wanting to get off my planet to explore the universe. But I always end up falling back on what's familiar. I rely on my instincts, my team, I seek signs of a home, be it a ship or an old recipe book, and I should have trusted my gut. About Sybil, how much I didn't want to ever come back [00:01:00] here, even if I couldn't exactly put words to it.
[00:01:04] I'm not scared of the unknown, and I'm not unfamiliar with my only escape route being to keep moving forward. I've gone out into deserts alone. Without water, food, and I've come back alive, but here I am scared, but I have my crew and we'll keep moving up and out. Whatever's going on here, we're gonna get through it.
[00:01:33] Gonna get back to the scapegoat and our mission's not over. I can rely on that.
[00:01:41] Felix: Everything that I've seen in this facility so far has been unique, new, exciting. But what I saw in that portal, what I felt connected in that brief moment was something altogether different and overwhelming. I'm gonna need some [00:02:00] serious time to process this because right now.
[00:02:02] I mean, it feels like I've been given this information download, but I don't have the language file to process it. My brain is practically itching, just trying to focus on it. I just, I need to take a step back for a minute. Focus here now. Ai. Hope she's gonna be okay. You know, she's become someone, well, someone I can count on and who's got my back, and I'd hate for anything to happen to her now.
[00:02:32] Now, when. We need her most as we're heading towards Promethean Station, but I don't think there's anything we can do with the tech we have down here. So we just gotta sit tight until we can get outta here and I guess pass the time with one of Robert's yarns. I mean, listen, the man is harmless. What? His stories are harmless, but I can honestly only take so much BSing from the guy.
[00:02:57] Well, I guess I'll pop a protein bill. [00:03:00] Try to get comfortable and keep an eye on Hailey
[00:03:05] Robert: Robert Ross's log. I knew those metal medics were bad news from the second I saw. Minimum blades have never qualified as good bedside matter in any hospital I've been to. The moment my bionic eyes tag movement, I saw the real problem.
[00:03:22] Squishies in the kill zone. Thorn Alexia, his heart move the cover like he's supposed to. Solid Felix Felix. Elbow deep in Jello again, had that wild look in his eyes, like he thought he could code his way outta being bisected. I'll admit, I considered letting him try it. What kind of hacker would he be with?
[00:03:44] No hands and, and he'd want robot hands. And then we'd all have to hear about the firmware dates. Oh, hell no. Mm-hmm. Nope. Not letting that be a thing. We went kinetic. Wild ride, just like I was, like [00:04:00] lots of sparks, but in the end, team was up, right? No permanent losses. Then Haley dropped. No warning, just down.
[00:04:11] I can blame that spending TA fork nightmare. But if I'm being honest, I, I know it's more than that. It might be time to tell the crew about Haley's secret and my reasons. I mean, first ordered from a CEO, then I Omnitech policy and after that I told myself it was for her protection. I keep telling myself or her funny how the excuses evolve.
[00:04:38] But silence stays the same. Now she's the one paying for it. Such a failure. Ruth, and courage. That's what I believe in. Truth and courage. Truth and courage. Time for me to step up and live bad. Rah.[00:05:00]
[00:05:02] Thorne: Boy, if it's not one thing trying to kill us. It's another, I can't say I've ever been a big fan of surgical stuff, but I'll tell you, this is the first time any of it has actively tried to kill me. I got a bit scratched up in there, but it's nothing serious. Thanks to Felix's, quick thinking and quick hands, those bots didn't post too much of a thread.
[00:05:21] After all, whenever all this Lightning Fork stuff is. I knew it was affecting Haley differently somehow. I still have no idea what's going on or what the hell is wrong with her though? Robert claims to have some answers. Oh boy. I can't wait to hear whatever ridiculous tale he's about to spin. I never know what things come out of his mouth are real and which ones are crazy hallucinations.
[00:05:44] Just outright nonsense. He does seem really serious about this, though. More suen than I think I've ever seen him. Even that time, we ran outta orange juice. He didn't look so grim. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up as [00:06:00] he started telling that story about Vento. What the hell is this place?
[00:06:04] What does all this alien stuff have to do with this crew? It seems like I still have a lot to learn about my fellowship mates.
[00:06:16] Star Master Jeff: Well, that was the crew's take on the episode, but let's take a step back and talk about what happened behind the screen. This is Star Master Jeff, and you are still listening to the Star Master log. Let's talk about how that session went for me. Your good old local star master. We'll talk about what was planned, what I found surprising, and how much I'm actually improvising what you hear.
[00:06:38] So if you're into GM ing world building, or just curious about how that story takes shape, this episode is for you. Okay, y'all. Let's talk about Robert Ross riding a surgical robots spider bought like a bucking bronco because I definitely did not have that in my notes. So when I designed the Spider [00:07:00] Bot combat, I imagined it to be a pretty straightforward fight.
[00:07:04] Two bots on the ceiling, surgical blades attached to their little robot bodies sliding along tracks along the ceiling to be able to reach the crew. I thought Thorn and Hailey shoot at them. Felix does something creative with the goo on the wall, and Robert lays down covering fire from Overwatch, which is what he loves to do.
[00:07:24] Clean and simple. Of course none of that is what actually happened. Robert took one look at the bot hanging from the ceiling and said, and I quote, I'm definitely gonna ride this thing like a bug and Bronco, and all I could really do is look at him and think, man, I love you. I don't know what to do about this, but I love you.
[00:07:49] I obviously had nothing prepared for that. I didn't think anyone was going to mount a surgical robot. So I sat there in the moment and said, okay, [00:08:00] what do I roll? What does this even look like mechanically? And I ended up going with a contested exert roll. Robert rolled a nine, the bot rolled a five, and so whoop up, he goes belly flopping onto a surgical spider bot with about 18 inches of clearance between himself and the ceiling, and just starts riding around on it like he's at the stockyards.
[00:08:25] It was at that point. I know it was a little weird in the pod. We took a three minute detour because do just told us about a time that he actually rode on a mechanical bull in real life. And normally I would cut those types of things from the podcast, but I really wanted everyone to hear about how we got bucked off in two seconds and bruised his entire thigh up.
[00:08:43] I never knew that those, those robot bulls were controlled by an actual person. Which as Brian put it, it's PVP, apparently. I did not know that. That is so cool. I actually want to really go try one now. Anyway, back to the game. So at that [00:09:00] point, it got really interesting for me because with Robert up on the spider bot, Felix had both hands jammed into the goo interface and decided that the best tactical play was to raise the ceiling as high as you could go to get the bots away from everyone.
[00:09:15] So Felix rolls a 13 and the ceiling rockets up 22 feet, taking both the spider bots and a very surprise Robert along for the ride Robert's a little afraid of fights. And so he fails his mental save and just starts freaking out up there. He can't attack, he can't do anything. Just holding on for dear life, 30 feet off the ground.
[00:09:35] Meanwhile, Haley's down below, picking off the other bot with her laser rifle, and thorn's in the back line holding his action because he missed a bunch of shots already and was really afraid of missing again and accidentally shooting Robert. Eventually Felix lowers the ceiling to 15 feet. Robert stabs the bot drops off, tries to land in a superhero pose just like Haley from the previous episode.
[00:09:57] Rolls a three on his perform check and [00:10:00] everyone on the team watches him wince through it and limp away. Still no one has successfully landed a superhero landing, but put a pin in that and we'll keep checking up on our superhero landing tally. We're currently at a two. I'm sure it'll keep going up because they're not gonna give up on that.
[00:10:18] Anyway, that's what I love about this game. I never could have actually ridden this sequence out. I thought it was gonna be a simple combat with two bots, and then there was a contested exert check on a ceiling robot, a real life bull riding tangent. Felix weaponizing the architecture with a passenger on top of the bot, and Robert failing to look as cool as he thought he would in the end.
[00:10:39] So moving on over to the engine room, which is the why in the Star master log. I wanted to talk about the last five minutes of last week's episode because I spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly I wanted to convey the weird freakiness of the pylon and how I could pull it off to explain it properly to both the crew [00:11:00] and the audience at home.
[00:11:01] The alien entity reveal at the end of the episode was, for me, one of the hardest things I've had to describe at the table. Because I wanted to make sure I was conveying enough information to everyone without it being too confusing, but also without hinting at too many spoilers. So here's the big problem.
[00:11:19] When you introduce something alien, in most fiction, the instinct is to make it threatening. I really didn't want to do that. The unknown is threatening just in general. But the second you have something unknown that also has teeth and claws or a motive that you can understand, such as it wants to eat you, it wants to conquer you, destroy your planet, et cetera, et cetera, then all of a sudden you don't have a weird, mysterious alien.
[00:11:45] You have a foe that directly needs to be killed or defended against. And that's fine for most stories, but it's not really right for this one. I wanna make sure that the corporation's fascism and, uh, capitalism stay as [00:12:00] villains to the story in the introduction of aliens or others. I don't want them to necessarily take on the mantle of a foe, at least not right away.
[00:12:09] So I was trying to strike this delicate balance there where I wanted something that felt genuinely incomprehensible, but not evil, not hostile, just so far beyond human experience that the act of perceiving the thing is the danger. Sort of love crafting in nature. So when the pylon activates and this window opens across space, I deliberately tried to slow the pacing way down.
[00:12:31] I let the crew just stand there watching it minute after minute, passes the window, hurdles across space. Nobody's being attacked, nothing physical is happening. They're just watching. And then the structure comes into view. And then the blue lights. Then the lights start to divide and resolve into black metal limbs, each one moving independently with its own will.
[00:12:54] That's where things get interesting. The key line for me to make sure I said was its intentions are [00:13:00] unfathomable. I chose that wording very carefully, not unknowable, not evil, not threatening, unfathomable. I wanted the players to understand that this isn't on a scale where hostility even applies. I mean, you wouldn't ask whether a hurricane is angry at you.
[00:13:19] The concept just doesn't make sense, and that's what I was going for here. And then Hailey screams and drops. And for me, that was the punctuation mark on the whole scene. I didn't have the entity reach through the window. I didn't have it attack. I didn't have it speak or communicate. Instead, the effect on Hailey is how everyone understands there is danger.
[00:13:42] Collapse tells you everything you need to know about what they just made contact with. Without the entity on the other side of the window needing to do a single threatening thing. If I'd gone the monster route, had it reached through the window and grabbed someone or speak in some booming voice, it would've just gotten a big reaction at the table, [00:14:00] but it would've been the wrong reaction in my opinion.
[00:14:03] I didn't want them scared of a monster. I wanted them unsettled by something they couldn't begin to categorize or comprehend. Okay, enough of the why. Let's do a bit of a deep dive and talk about what the crew actually saw through the window. Because the lower implications are significant when the pylon activates and the window opens, it travels across space for what feels like minutes before reaching a metal structure.
[00:14:30] Five interlocking rings arranged like a celestial gyroscope with a long rod piercing through its center. And orbiting nearby at about one 10th The size of this monstrosity is Promethean Station, one of the most advanced corporate research facilities in the sector, and it is absolutely tiny by comparison.
[00:14:52] So let that sink in for a second. Promethean station is a massive installation. It's the secret heart of [00:15:00] Verdi's operations, the destination the crew has been working towards all season. It is, but a speck compared to this alien structure. Now, whatever this gyroscope is, the aliens who built the Xeno site also built it, and they were building things at a scale that humanity can't even come close to, even with all their advanced tech in a sci-fi setting such as this.
[00:15:23] Now, what is it The crew doesn't know yet, and I'm not gonna spell it all out here because, well, that's what the rest of the season is for, but I will say this. The pylon in the Xeno site is connected to that structure. The forks, pylons, the whole nano fluid network, it all points back to that gyroscope. So I think it's safe to say that you can think of the pylons as terminals on a network and the gyroscope as the server.
[00:15:52] When Voss activated the pylon, she essentially dialed into the central hub of whatever system this alien civilization built, [00:16:00] and something that that hub noticed. The other important detail is Promethean Station's location. It's orbiting right next to this structure. That means the corporations, or at least raddy, have found this gyroscope.
[00:16:15] They built or moved their most secret facility within spitting distance of an alien mega structure that dwarves anything humanity has ever constructed. The question isn't just what is the gyroscope? The question is. What has Raddy been doing with it and for how long? That's where we're headed. Alright, so let's jump into this week's subspace signals.
[00:16:43] This week's signal comes from Marcus on Patreon, and Marcus asks, how do you balance spotlight time between four players? Some episodes feel very Felix or Haley forward. Is that intentional or does it just happen? Great question, Marcus, [00:17:00] and an honest one. So I'll give you an honest answer. It's both not really the answer you were looking for, I'm sure.
[00:17:06] So let me explain what I mean by that. As I've stated on previous star master logs, I create my game like a uh, TV show. It has ensemble episodes, focus episodes, change of pace episodes, plot episodes, so on and so forth. In ensemble episodes, the spotlight naturally follows the action. So if the crew is exploring alien tech and interfacing with a goo network, Felix is almost certainly gonna lead that scene because that's his skillset.
[00:17:34] If combat breaks out, alien and Robert are gonna take over because they're the fighters. When there's a negotiation or a business deal on the table, thorn steps up because that is his whole thing, his main identity. So in any given episode, depending on what the crew is doing, certain characters are gonna get more time that's organic, and I think it would feel forced if I tried to artificially balance it.
[00:17:55] I don't really go into any game with any preconceptions about who's going to be doing [00:18:00] what. For the most part, I just create the seen and the structures in the world and they go in and they interact with it, and it sort of naturally falls along certain character lines. This episode is a perfect example actually.
[00:18:14] So is running the room through the goo interface Tech. Haley is dropping bots with her laser rifle and fists combat. Robert is. Doing rodeo things, wacky wild card stuff. Everyone wants a wild card on their team, and Thorn is in the back making tactical calls and missing every single shot that he takes.
[00:18:37] And if someone were to get really hurt, like getting shot or cut, that would probably also be Thorn. He's usually the one that takes damage for some reason. Everyone has a role and everyone contributes, but the type of contribution varies. Felix and Hailey probably got more raw screen time this episode because the episode was built around tech manipulation and combat, which is in their wheelhouse.
[00:18:59] So [00:19:00] now the intentional part, the focus episode system exists specifically to address this. Every PC gets at least one full episode that belongs to them. We've done Felix's story, Thorn's story, and Robert's story is actually coming up next. Those episodes are deliberately structured so that one character gets the full spotlight and the others are in supporting roles, roles that are so supporting that they're not even playing their normal characters.
[00:19:25] They're playing guest stars in that focused episode. It's my way of guaranteeing that no one gets lost in the shuffle over the course of a full season. Everyone gets a whole episode that focuses on them in addition to all of the scenes that happen across the season that happen to coincide with their particular skill sets.
[00:19:44] So the real balancing happens at the table, not in the edit. When I'm running the session, I'm paying attention to who's had a chance to shine and who hasn't. If Robert's been quiet for a while, I'll try to steer the next beat towards him. If Thorn hasn't had a chance to do his thing, I'll try to create [00:20:00] an opening.
[00:20:01] That's the GM's job. I wanna make sure everyone is having fun. Honestly, these are some of my best friends. The podcast is secondary to them having fun. And it just so happens that when they're having fun, I think the podcast gets better. So it's a win-win. It's cyclical and it perfectly meshes in with the way that I like to run a table.
[00:20:22] I wanna make sure everyone has a chance to do a cool thing every single time. Once the session is over and I'm editing, that's all about the pacing. I'm trimming dead air, cutting tangents, tightening the story. I'm not sitting there when editing and thinking. While Felix has had too many lines, this episode or Robert's had over 15 minutes of chitchat over the course of the no, they're, they're driving the story and I'm just helping make sure that everyone contributes and is happy.
[00:20:51] The only thing I'm really thinking about in the edit is does this scene move and does it sound good? So if certain episodes feel like they lean more [00:21:00] towards one character or another, it's usually because the session leaned that way organically based on what was happening in the story. And that's fine by me.
[00:21:07] As long as every character has moments that matter over the course of the season, I'd rather let scenes breathe naturally than try to force some sort of perfect even split. That said, Marcus, I appreciate the observation and if you ever feel like someone's getting lost, lemme know. That's the kind of feedback that is genuinely useful, and that's the answer for this week.
[00:21:29] If you want to send in a signal for the next log, head on over to patreon.com/darkstar Adventure Cast. Our Patreons always have priority in the queue, but I do pay close attention to our socials too. So drop us a line and your question just might be the next one we intercept. So that's it for the Subspace signals for this week.
[00:21:48] But before we close the log, I wanna leave you with a star master spec. That's a book, movie, or other piece of media that helped to inspire this week's episode. This week is a movie that is [00:22:00] near and dear to my heart. It's Event Horizon, the 1997 film starring Lawrence Fishburne and Sam Neil, if you haven't seen it, here's the setup.
[00:22:09] A rescue crew is sent to investigate a ship called The Event Horizon, which vanished seven years ago and has suddenly reappeared near Neptune. That's a planet we don't hear of too often. The ship had an experimental gravity drive that folds space by creating an artificial black hole, and it works. The ship went somewhere, but where it went and what came back with it is the problem.
[00:22:34] Don't really wanna ruin too much of the movie for you, in case you haven't seen it. But the reason I'm recommending it for this episode should be pretty obvious to those that have seen it, a window open to somewhere it shouldn't have, and something on the other side noticed. That's the whole movie, and it's basically the last five minutes of this episode too.
[00:22:51] When I was writing the pylon sequence, I kept thinking about how Event Horizon handles the fear of first contact. There's actually a lot of great first [00:23:00] contact movies out there, but I specifically love Lovecraftian Style First Contact, and I think that Event Horizon does an excellent job with it and painted the mood perfectly that I wanted to sort of lift wholesale and somehow transport into my game because it's not about the monster jumping out at you.
[00:23:18] It's about the slow realization that you've reached across the threshold that you were never supposed to cross, and now something knows you're there. That's the exact feeling I wanted the crew and the listeners to have when those blue diamonds started multiplying and resolving into something with limbs.
[00:23:38] And there's a particular line in the film that really stuck with me where we're going, we won't need eyes to see. Oof. If that doesn't give you chills, I don't know what to tell you. If you like the atmosphere of the Pylon Reveal, owe it to yourself to check out Event Horizon. It pairs really nicely with what's coming in the next several episodes and in the rest of the [00:24:00] season.
[00:24:00] So check it out before you listen. Trust me on that one. On the next episode of the Dark Star Adventure Cast, the Go Tube slowly fills the oxygen, slowly drains. Haley's unconscious on the floor and the crew can do nothing but wait. And while they wait, Robert Ross starts to talk about a war, about a planet called Bentos, about a squad he once had, and about a woman named Haley.
[00:24:32] And now that's Haley with one y. What he knows is gonna change how you see everything that's happened and everything you know about Robert and Haley. All this and more on the next episode of the Dark Star Adventure Cast. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.