Pick Up the Box - Star Master Log: The World Doesn’t Pause

Star Master Log

Jun 2

START HERE·EPISODE·SWN RULES EXPLAINED

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Jeff breaks down Episode 23, "Pick Up the Box": the moment Haleyy commands an unhallowed for the first time, what the gap between untethered and unhallowed actually means in lore, and what the crew paid for by taking their eye off Strake.

He covers:

(00:26) - Introduction: "Pick Up the Box"
(02:59) - Engine Room: Building lore in sweeping strokes, letting emergent OSR play surface the details, and why pivotal moments land harder when the vocabulary was already seeded
(09:49) - Deep Dive: What unhallowed actually looks like up close: Froggy carrying boxes with tears on his face, and the capitalist logic of turning people into labor
(13:57) - Fog of War: Strake came back more dangerous than ever, and the crew only has themselves to blame
(17:55) - One Question: Who are these characters, 23 episodes in? A crew-by-crew rundown of who the players are and where they came from
(21:40) - Star Master Spec: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: suppressed consciousness, bodies used as tools, and why Jeff couldn't stop thinking about it during the recording

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[00:00:04] Star Master Jeff: Hey everyone, Star Master Jeff here, and welcome back to the Star Master Log. So the crew got into a ship-to-ship combat on the landing pad, and when one of the Void Cultists tried to escape his ship and run out across the surface of Sibylen, Haleyy fires the ship's weapons at him and absolutely destroys him. And then she just says, hey, there's a crater. When I was editing that part, I just laughed out loud. So I just wanted to share that as the opening to the Star Master Log because I think it perfectly encapsulates the insanity of this episode. Like what can you even say to that? That poor void cultist was just trying to escape with his life and just got absolutely destroyed by starship weaponry. And Stephanie's entire read on that situation is just so blasé. I love that.
Anyways, the crew spent most of this episode locked up in the Scapegoat, working through everything they had to do to get off of it. Felix's hack has failed, and the only other option they can come up with is to try to cut their way out through the hull. So, Robert gets to work on that, Haleyy has ship-to-ship combat on the landing pad, and finally the crew is able to escape onto the surface of Sibylen. But now, they're faced with the daunting problem of trying to save all of those people trapped inside the exosite. So this is the Star Master Log for episode 22, Good Job, You Monster, which is part two of the auction arc. If you haven't heard the main episode yet, go do that first. If you're into GMing, world building, or just curious about how the story takes shape, this episode is for you.
So this episode has two Haleyy moments, and they're both kind of funny, and they're both about the same sort of thing. At the weapon station, Haleyy looks at the fork device and starts thinking out loud, but what if, because I'm untethered, what if they, like, what if they listen to me? What if I can command them? What if I have the power? You know, that sort of line of reasoning where, you know, she's sort of right to ask it. She's had contact with the void three times now. Each one is pushing her further and further down this road outside of the normal channels, I guess you could call it, of what human beings have previously encountered. And Stephanie has been sitting on that and thinking about it and how it affects Haleyy.
Felix argues against Haleyy in that moment, shooting down her ideas, and Haleyy pushes back a little bit, seemingly giving us a glimpse at a more power-hungry version of herself. Like, I could be in charge, they will actually listen to me, and yes, you all may have trouble when we walk out of the ship, but I won't, and I can command everyone and figure this out. Then she snaps out of it, finally saying, yes, of course, sorry, I didn't know where I was going with that one.
I said it before, and I'll say it again. That is some real Haleyy with one Y energy. Because one Y Haleyy does that she's impulsive, and she's more likely to go all in on a crazy idea and much more comfortable with losing her footing in a chaotic situation. 2Y Haleyy is more nervous, more tentative and slow with her decision making. She's often reluctant to even make a big call or perform under pressure. 1Y shows up when 2Y is reaching for something that she can't quite get to anymore. 1Y in many ways is the backbone that 2Y has lost.
So then at the end of the ship fight, we have our second moment where Haleyy looks out over the sand thrower to the landscape and says, There's a crater. That's, of course, when she's absolutely obliterated this void cultist that was trying to escape.
So that's the other end of this same character. When I was editing that line in post, I genuinely couldn't actually tell if she was joking or if she was playing it like 2Y was trying to process the situation. And honestly, I think that ambiguity is really key. 1Y would have done something with that moment. She would have made a face, said something sharp, reacted in a powerful way, perhaps commanding the people around her to show strength in the situation that just happened. 2Y just noted the change in geography. She didn't really comment on the death of the man at all or how crazy it was that she just hit him with a ship's weapon. A person was there. Now there's a crater.
I've always thought of the Void's effect in this setting as a detachment, and we're starting to see that come out here as Haleyy, both 1Y and 2Y, grapples with how her brain is reforming under the pressure of the Void, just pushing her down, and the effects of the fork and her past traumas, especially on Ventos. So both moments she had, number one, dreaming of being in control of everyone, and two, how she processes combat brutality, are the same observation about the same character, but from opposite ends. In the first one, 1Y punches through and says something before 2Y catches herself. In the second, 1Y coldly notes the results of the battle, even while 2Y is trying to joke about it in an effort to minimize the trauma.
Now Stephanie is a student of character, and really works hard to figure out how Haleyy's journey has shaped her. And it's subtle moments like this where it shows just how well she has keyed into that process.
All right, enough about Haleyy. Let me get into the Felix hacking sequence, because there's a design question and decision there that I keep running into. And this episode is actually a very decent case study of it.
So Felix's hack fails. And the question I'm figuring out in the moment is what the failure does to the story. There's a principle I always come back to when I'm game mastering and something starts to go sideways. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park guys, they talk about it in terms of story structure. Every beat should connect to the next with therefore or but and then is not something that they would ever say. And then, and then, and then is just a list of things that happened. This happened. Therefore, they tried this. But that went wrong. So they came up with something else. That's an actual story.
When a roll fails at the table, that's the question I'm asking on the fly. Does this failure give the crew something to work with, or does it just stop them dead? Because when you're preventing the players from continuing the story, you're screeching everything to a halt, and then everything after that becomes a guess who or assignment says, and no one's having any fun during that.
For example if the crew is fighting some sort of an enemy and the enemy has very few vulnerabilities perhaps only one vulnerability and is otherwise fairly invulnerable if they keep trying things over and over and over again and I just keep saying no no no nothing is working then they will never learn what the vulnerability is. With each action they take I need to give them actionable information back about why it failed and a hint as to what could succeed, otherwise we're sitting there stagnant playing guess who and I'm waiting for them to figure out the mystery.
So Felix digs into the Scapegoat's code, finds Strake's backdoor cipher, can't untangle it fast enough to get the doors open, and the lockdown response to his attempts shows which systems Strake prioritized protecting. If you know what's most protected, you can infer what isn't. He doesn't get control of the ship, but the failure tells the crew something useful. And that's what leads Felix to getting weapon systems back online and calling Haleyy to the bridge. That's a no and instead of just no. So no and you get this positive effect out of it, even though you failed the roll.
So all of that was improv in the moment, because obviously, I don't know what these people are going to do when they're playing the game. So because it's done in the moment, it has to be just gut instinct. And does it always work? No. Did this time work perfectly well and cleanly? No. Mostly, the scene where the crew processes what the lockdown tells them does feel a little slow when I was in the editing booth. I narrated the implication too directly instead of letting them draw their own conclusions. I explained my conclusion to them instead of letting them find their own conclusions, which is something that I fall into more often than I'd like, honestly, and something that I'd like to improve about my own GMing and storytelling.
So having said that and thinking critically about that scene, what would I do differently? Well I would make that same information visible as a physical effect in the game world rather than just a system alert that Felix reads out or a knowledge roll that I then tell him what he knows and then he can reiterate it to everyone else. Instead of a lockdown notification I could have the coupling at the front of the ship light up when everything else is staying dark, or a panel at the weapon station clicks live while Felix is looking at a completely dead board otherwise. So it's the same sort of information letting Scott know what Felix is able to tinker with and do but not said so directly, and it carries a lot more weight of like discovery and exploration.
That really goes back to the same way I feel about puzzle design and exploration of culture. This should have been treated more like a little bit of a puzzle, instead of a standard, he rolls a die, I tell him what he finds. That's not narrative, nor is it particularly interesting. It's just a firehose of information where he rolls and I say, here you go. And sometimes that is appropriate, but it's important to remember that these games, these role-playing games are not board games. We're not rolling dice and then checking the rules to see what happens. We want to make sure that everything can be narratively explained because these aren't just figures on a board. These are fully fleshed out lives in real situations that we are trying to contrive and ground ourselves in.
So essentially, I'm looking for a way to give the same information, but have them observe it instead of being briefed on it. Because saying, wait a minute, the weapon system just came back online is a completely different energy than saying, okay, so you made your roll. And you know that you could get weapon systems back online if you wanted to. That's just two completely different energies. And I think it could be done a bit better.
Anyway, once they get the weapon systems online, they're able to shoot at the Void Cultist ship. And the Void Cultists have two very important concepts that tie into their religion, I guess you could call it. It is untethered and unhallowed.
[00:10:59] Star Master Jeff: And it's easy to hear those as just flavor words, but they actually are very specific in how they are used and what they mean in the broader scope of the lore behind the Void Cultists. So it is a little bit of a deep dive, but we have unhallowed and untethered, two terms that only have something to do with void cultists.
[00:11:23] Star Master Jeff: They're not the same thing at all. The difference matters hugely. So just as an example, untethered is what Haleyy is and what void cultists themselves are. Unhallowed is like the brainwashed servants of the void cultists, which is what's happened to Froggy and Vera. So when the cult exposes someone to void energy one of two things can happen. If the void hits you and nothing connects, if there's nothing inside of you that can reach back out to the void, you become unhallowed: a husk the cult can point things at and say do this task. It could be combat like attack or defense, or it could be moving boxes, or it could be anything that is just sort of mindless and simple. So as an unhallowed, you're still part of the operations of the void cultists, but you're not a person in their calculus anymore. You're just a resource.
Now, if the void reaches you and something in you connects, if you survive the contact and come out the other side with some kind of relationship to it, then you become untethered. You are quote unquote cut loose from this reality. The cult sees this as a higher state. They call what they're working towards the Great Ascension: some transcendence beyond galactic life as humans know it. And the untethered are the ones they believe are ready for it. That's their whole mission. Everything the cult does is pointed at ascension. They're actively preparing, and the untethered are central to this preparation.
Haleyy has had three void contacts, two of them with actual alien forks, and one with a void cultist-created fork. So three times has Haleyy been affected by the void. It's reached through, touched her, and she's responded. By the cult's read, that means that she is untethered. That's not nothing to them. An untethered person walking around outside the cult, depending on who's looking at her, is either something they want to bring in or something they really need to deal with. The question on their mind is which is it with Haleyy.
Back on Scrapjacks, when she was sort of outed as an untethered human, none of those cultists survived that situation to report back. But eventually, she's going to be found out and the cult is going to have to figure out what they want to do with her.
[00:14:02] Star Master Jeff: Or if it's even their option, because Haleyy is obviously very headstrong, she will have something to say about it. I don't think she's going to be joining their cult and that might turn ugly for her rather quickly. So when Haleyy then runs into a forked device, this is the fourth one that she's seen, and she asks, well, wait a minute.
[00:14:22] Star Master Jeff: I know that I'm tethered.
[00:14:24] Star Master Jeff: What if the unhallowed will listen to me? What if I can command them? She's not just reaching for something abstract. She's not saying, what if this is possible? She's sort of just stating the obvious. She knows that being untethered means that the fork, which is the cult's primary tool, reads her differently than it reads everyone else on the crew. When she says that everyone going outside might be in trouble, but she'd be fine, she's giving a nod to that fact. She's not a target. She's already sort of accepted into the cult, at least as far as the void energy of the fork is concerned.
[00:15:03] Star Master Jeff: Now, she's obviously a target of the cult,
[00:15:06] Star Master Jeff: But something about the fork and the void energy that she's already been affected with probably puts her in a position where she could potentially control the unhallowed, assuming it doesn't have anything to do with actually being in the cult, like if there isn't like an additional indoctrination ritual that has to happen. So I won't get totally into that right now, or talk about where that goes from here, because all of those gears are still in motion, especially leading into the next episode where the crew travels to the exosite to attempt to free the peoples that have been taken and that have become unhallowed. But this topic does reframe a lot of what the crew has been running into since Scrapjacks. So I thought it was worth bringing up and just sitting with it a moment and really explaining the distinction between unhallowed and untethered and their relationship with the Void Cultists as a whole.
[00:15:57] Star Master Jeff: Okay, so moving on. Instead of doing a mailbag this week, I wanted to instead pose a question that I've been wanting to answer.
[00:16:06] Star Master Jeff: So here it is. I've been thinking about this for a while. I've danced around it quite a bit. It hasn't totally come up as a question in the podcast, but in episode 22, it does start to become a glaring omission.
[00:16:18] Star Master Jeff: And that question is, how big is the Scapegoat, really?
[00:16:24] Star Master Jeff: I realized mid-session during episode 22 when we were recording it that I've been describing the ship's interior for 22 episodes without ever giving a clear sense of the overall scale. It's a large hauler, a cargo ship, a merchant ship, and that's pretty much it. Which turns out to be a completely useless frame of reference when you're trying to figure out how long it takes Haleyy to get from below decks to the bridge while everyone else is waiting on her.
If they are in combat, each turn is 10 minutes. So suffice to say, it takes one turn. Because if it takes one minute or 10 minutes, it's going to take her turn to move from the cargo bay to the bridge, get at her station, and prepare to fire the weapons. But when we're talking about overall time in a non-combat situation, how long does it take Haleyy to get from the lower cargo to the bridge or to anywhere else on the ship for that matter? And what other rooms are actually on the ship? How many different ways are there to egress from the ship became another important topic for this episode. Honestly, I really should have nailed this down before now. And I didn't because it just didn't matter. And I wanted to focus on the things that we were actually encountering in the podcast.
So anyway, here's what I've worked out. The Scapegoat is a merchant class hauler. It does civilian freight, mostly, sometimes corporate transport, but never military. It was built for capacity over speed. It's the kind of ship that moves cargo between systems that aren't close enough for regular courier runs and aren't important enough for dedicated corporate logistics. It used to run back and forth between Polyphn and Camiri 4, mostly just bringing scientific equipment, until that time passed on Camiri 4, and then it was simply a retired cargo ship trapped on Camiri 4 and unable to be fully pulled out due to all the gang activity. So it doesn't even have a very illustrious past at all.
So how large is it? The Scapegoat is about 100 yards long, maybe 30 to 40 yards wide at the broadest point. For context, that puts it in the same general range as something like the Millennium Falcon, maybe slightly larger, maybe boxier. Serenity from Firefly is shorter but wider, if you remember the scene with all of the cows packed into their cargo bay. The Scapegoat is definitely a little narrower than that, but longer. More like a spine with cargo bays hanging off it than a very wide body.
So the layout matters a little bit for how I've been running scenes on the ship, especially in episode 22. Cargo loads in the back. So a ramp goes down and you can drive like the Aurora right up onto it. And there are two main cargo bays back there. One has the Aurora and Froggy's nest in it. And he's really stunk up that place. And the other one is a mostly empty cargo bay. This is the one that is with the ramp. So the ramp comes down and then you drive up and then there's an entryway into the next cargo bay, plenty big enough for the Aurora to move into. But that front, well, I guess the back most cargo bay is totally open right now and can actually hold quite a bit. They could probably fit a small additional spaceship in there, like a small fighter if they really wanted to, or two or three, four more Auroras.
So moving up ship from cargo, there is a narrow central corridor that connects everything. This is where you can think of Serenity once again, when you think about all of their personal lodges with the ladders that lead down into them. That's like a central spine that leads up to the bridge. Something similar but wider exists on the Scapegoat as well. We have that central corridor that connects everything from cargo to bridge with a cockpit at the bow. Two cargo bays near the stern and getting from the bridge to the first cargo bay isn't exactly a short walk. So when Felix is at the weapon station and Haleyy is below decks cutting through the hull, they are not just in adjacent rooms. There's actual geography there that she has to walk through and walk along that hallway, which brings her past all of the lodging and the different empty rooms that they're not even using, like work benches, and there's additional extra cargo space that isn't accessible from the ramp but could be used for things like clothes and food and things for long space flight. And then actually moving through their kitchen and their rest area. And they have a workout room where they can practice their melee skills or just lift weights or stay in shape in the long trips between the systems.
So I don't always get that right at the table. I think that it's easy for GMs to run a ship like a video game with different levels, where everything important is just conveniently shoved super close together. So that way you don't have to walk very far. But the crew has been stuck on the Scapegoat long enough in these last few episodes that the geography should probably feel a lot more known to both them and to you, the listeners at home. So I didn't want you to continue to think that the cargo bay is right next to the bridge, that their lodging is all super close together, or that there isn't space for them to grow.
Honestly, if they wanted to grow, they really could. Like I said, the cargo bay has plenty of room. If they wanted to give Froggy his own bedroom, they easily could. There isn't actually another bedroom per se, but there are other rooms that could be converted into bedrooms at the loss of a workspace or a workout room. They're not even using all of their smaller cargo space right now. I think the reason they don't give Froggy that space is because they don't think Froggy deserves that space. But if they wanted to, they could. And they could probably recruit at least three or four more NPCs and a small fighter or several more grav cars to store in the cargo bay.
Not only that, but they do have additional slots on the ship as well for ship fittings. They just haven't had the money to get any of that. And when they do get the money, they debate about whether they need something like additional weapons or more cargo space. And then they end up spending the money on other stuff like repairs or fuel or personal equipment. So though they've been in a good spot to try to upgrade, they just haven't found the time or the need. But of course, they've just won that auction, and a good amount of cash will be coming in. I've heard some rumblings that they may be taking the hammer to the Scapegoat sooner rather than later. Once they get it completely fixed up with a new ownership module in it, I think they want to do a couple upgrades to it. So I'm kind of excited to see what that could look like.
So anyway, that's the Scapegoat. If you've been wondering what it looks like from the outside, think less like a sleek starfighter and more like a working truck from the Alien universe. This is a long range hauler. It's meant for work. It's not cool looking, it's not fancy, and no one is going to look twice at it. It's the kind of ship that nobody in a dockyard full of corporate transports really cares about. It gets bumped to the bottom of the list because the people that own it probably don't have any money, and the ship really isn't worth even maintaining. A lot of corporate entities would probably just trash it at this point. But for this crew, that's generally been a feature because it allows them to slip under the radar and live a bit more covertly as they try to make their way towards Prometheon Technologies.
Well, that's the Scapegoat. Let's move on to the Star Master Spec for this week.
Well, I've already mentioned Firefly once this episode, so I might as well just get it out of my system. This week's Star Master Spec is for an episode of Firefly, specifically an episode titled Out of Gas. Some of you may have been getting Out of Gas vibes during this episode, and although it's not as pressing as Out of Gas, and they weren't in any immediate danger like in Out of Gas, they were trapped on their ship and they needed to figure out how to get out.
So if somehow you don't know what Firefly is, it is a TV show from 2002 produced and directed by Joss Whedon. It's a space western. It only lasted one season before being cancelled much to everyone's dismay and it's been discussed endlessly online ever since. There's also a very good follow-up movie called Serenity that closes out a lot of the plot lines and makes it very obvious that they are never going to bring the TV show back ever again. However, a little off topic, they are bringing it back, just not in the way that we know. They are doing or attempting to do an animated series that is more in the past before the movie Serenity actually happens. That way we can have characters that didn't stick around to the end of the movie, may have passed away back in the cartoon, and we can have those same actors and actresses back on board. So I'm actually very excited for that.
If you haven't seen Firefly yet, I genuinely don't know what to tell you. You're listening to a sci-fi actual play podcast. You will love it. Go watch it. It's one of my favorites. And I've probably watched Out of Gas specifically six or seven times. It's one of the ones I keep going back to, even if I'm not going to rewatch the whole series. And it just holds up so well. It's such a beautiful episode.
So it's season one, episode eight. It's a bottle episode. And Serenity's life support breaks down in deep space and the crew takes the escape pods and Mal stays behind alone on a dying ship waiting for anyone who might respond to the distress beacon. So the episode is cutting between Mal, Captain Mal, alone on the ship and bleeding. And this is a framing device for flashbacks to show how every character arrived on the ship in the first place and became a member of the crew. I don't want to reveal too much about the episode, just in case you haven't seen Firefly somehow, but in this episode, the ship is a character, more so than many of the other episodes of the series. The Serenity isn't just a location where things are happening, it's the thing the crew has built their lives around, and the episode's emotional stakes rest entirely on what it means for Mal to stay with it.
Now I thought about that episode a lot during this Scapegoat sequence, because it's a little bit of the inverse, not when I was planning how they were going to get locked in and how they might escape or anything like that, because a lot of this is OSR and I'm really not planning that much. But in this particular episode, the ship turns on them like a betrayal and becomes an obstacle. So instead of trying to repair the ship, they must partially destroy it to then hopefully gain control and be able to repair it and give it back its status as a prominent member of the crew itself. So that's a little bit like Out of Gas here. Whereas Mal wants to repair, they need to destroy and then repair. People are fleeing the ship in Out of Gas just like they're trying to flee. If Thorne could stay behind and fix it, he would, but there are other lives in danger.
If you haven't seen Firefly, I highly suggest you go check it out. And if you have seen Firefly and you haven't seen this episode, what are you doing, man? Go check it out. And if you want to just leap into Firefly, I would not say start with this episode. Start with episode one, please. It's a fantastic series.
And that's our Star Master Log for today. On the next episode of the Dark Star Adventurecast, the crew has escaped the Scapegoat, and they're on foot in the red deserts of Sibylen moving towards Exosite 34B, and that's been the center of everything since the auction started. They just barely escaped Exosite 34B themselves, and now they're preparing to go back in to save Froggy, Vera, and everyone else from the auction. Next episode, they prep, and they dive in.
Well, thanks so much for listening. If you want to get these episodes two weeks before they drop publicly, the Dark Star Adventurecast Patreon is at patreon.com slash darkstaradventurecast. Check it out. We really appreciate each and every one of our patrons, and we hope to see you there. Well, it's our time for today. I hope everyone has an excellent week, and I'll catch you on the next one.