Welcome to Your Prison - Star Master Log: Villains with Soft Power

Star Master Log

May 5

START HERE·EPISODE·SWN RULES EXPLAINED

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Jeff breaks down "Welcome to Your Prison," the first episode of the auction arc, covering the table moment seven sessions in the making when Thorne cited corporate policy to get out of handcuffs, and why Strake's most effective weapon was never his soldiers.

He covers:

(00:00) - Introduction: "Welcome to Your Prison - Auction, Part 1"
(01:02) - The Crew Logs: Encrypted reports from the players
(04:34) - Fog of War: How Brian set up Policy 872.3 Section C seven sessions ago and waited for exactly the right moment
(08:50) - Engine Room: Why Strake's most dangerous tool is a Virodyne admin key, not a gun
(13:50) - Deep Dive: The Auctioneers Guild, the sector-wide neutral body no corporation can destroy because they all need it too much
(20:14) - Subspace Signals: How do you keep players invested in a long-running mystery over dozens of sessions?
(25:14) - Star Master Spec: Leverage (2008-2012), a heist show built around a misfit crew where every plan falls apart
(28:50) - Next Episode Preview

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

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[00:00:04] Star Master Jeff: Hey everyone, Star Master Jeff here and welcome back to the Star Master Log. Today we're talking about Welcome to Your Prison, the first part of the auction arc. The crew wakes up in handcuffs, Viktor Strake is standing over them, and Haleyy is unconscious on the floor. And what's worse, Strake has the orb that contains Dr. Voss in his possession. He's got five soldiers, he's smiling, and it seems like all is lost. But then Thorne opens his big ol' mouth and cites Interstellar Corporate Policy 872.3 Section C. And the room goes wild. But we'll get to that in a minute. We'll talk about Strake's real leverage, we'll talk about the end of episode 21 and how it blends into episode 22, especially a small explanation of what the Fork actually is. But first, let's go ahead and check in with the crew and their latest encrypted reports. I'll catch you on the other side.
[00:01:02] Thorne: Damn that Viktor Strake and his slagging loss prevention. I knew there was no way we had completely gotten Virodyne off our backs, but I was definitely not happy to see that guy again. It's fortunate I was able to engage in a contract with Dr. Corbin before we started all this, because otherwise I would have missed that killer auction. I'm still giddy from all the zeros, but we pretty quickly ran out of time to celebrate. Strake has us trapped in our own ship. We don't know what happened to Voss. And now those cultists are back? Did activating the exosites somehow call out to them? Haleyy was out of it throughout the whole auction. I don't blame her. But now we have even more wacky void shit to deal with. I managed to make contact with an executive called Rynn Kade at Nexus Trading. It was hilarious the way she misplayed that auction. But I still can't feel happy about it until that whole company burns and Draxus Goods is back under family ownership. Oh yeah, the sale document. I attended that auction undercover as an exec from a company that wasn't even there. But I'm not foolish enough to try to forge someone else's name on an official Auction Guild document. I signed that bad boy Thorndraxxus. I don't mind being recorded as the witness of the sale of this absolutely historic discovery. But if the corp that bought it uses that tech for anything unsavory, my name will be forever attached to it.
[00:02:34] Robert: Victor, Victor, Victor. He's just been pissing me off some fierce. Gets his tiny little hands all up in the goat. You know what? No. He seems like just the type who'd backdoor a goat. God, I hate clones. Well, then I was planning on going to the auction. Thorne seemed like he might need some help. I was so excited I was gonna break out one of my best disguises. Proper dandy, Chopper Charles. Good sir, how do you think the bean market is doing this season? It would have been glorious. But Felix, put the kibosh on that. Worked out, though. Thorn came back, happier than a piggy in slop. Says we got a windfall coming towards us. Ooh, I'ma buy so much meatloaf, my pockets are gonna be overflowing. Mightn't be able to replace the Lokipon Cards Froggy drooled all over. That is, if we ever get off this ship.
[00:03:40] Felix: Can't believe it. Everything has gone wrong today. And it's bad enough that Strake shows up out of nowhere, takes Dr. Voss, but now I'm locked out of the goat. It's not functioning. Nothing I'm trying is working. I have never been so frustrated in my life. Come on, Felix, get it together. This is not like you. All right, I just have to focus for Elara. I can't believe Strake would go against bureaucratic regulations like that. Like, if there's one thing I thought these corpos did was follow their rules that they set for each other, but no. Took Elara from us. Took it from me. We have to get the goat working. Find out where they're going to get her back. Focus up, Champlin. Time to go to work.
[00:04:34] Star Master Jeff: So 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're listening to the Star Master Log. Let's talk about how that session went for me, your good ol' local Star Master. We'll talk about what was planned, what I found surprising, and how much I'm improvising what you hear. If you're into GMing, worldbuilding, or just curious about how that story takes shape, this one is for you. So let's talk about that policy play. Section 872.3. Brian and I had actually talked beforehand a lot about Thorne's corporate background and what it actually means for how he operates within the Viridian Expanse. Because in a lot of ways, he is within that same interstellar corporate law space as Strake. What tools does that really give him compared to like what a hacker like Felix might have or a soldier like Robert? So this is sort of new territory for us. We haven't really gotten into the wheelings and dealings of inter-corporate policy and auctioning and backroom deals and all of that. But I knew that the territory was there and I've wanted to go towards it for a long time. So when I was building this piece out, I made sure I talked to Brian ahead of time about Thorne and what he might know. And immediately what he brought up was that he had taken great pains back in the first episode of the Exosite arc to draw up a contract for Vera to sign that makes the Scapegoat temporary employees of Laicar Research. So he wanted to come in from that angle and it seemed like a pretty good crack in the argument that Strake was making. So we worked through it together just a little bit beforehand. And then Brian took it from there himself. I didn't know exactly what was going to happen. All I knew is that he was going to come forward with some sort of contract negotiation or inter-corporate policy. And I was just going to play into it. And we'd have a role and we'd see what happens. So we opened the session in handcuffs. Strake has the crew cold. Several soldiers, Voss's orb in his possession, that whole setup that I described before, and he's doing that thing where the villain blabs on and on explaining how thoroughly the heroes have lost, how he's caught them, and now he's the best, he's cool, they drool, that sort of thing. Meer Prust is entering, and I think that's when Brian saw his opening. He cites Interstellar Corporate Policy 872.3 Section C, which is something that is totally of Brian's invention but is now canon. It's actually quite lengthy and he said it all word for word in character, and that argument was so weirdly ironclad that I couldn't really do much about it. So Brian went ahead and rolled, and it just sort of did something to Strake's position in the room. It's hard to describe the way that the energy flipped on its head there, because I was trying to position Strake as the end all be all. And honestly, the auction was going to happen with or without the characters. But it was going to be very different for them if Strake had them arrested, or if they had to get into a bare knuckle fight with him to try to escape. And if they're on the Scapegoat flying away, I didn't really know if they would be around for the auction, or if we would be going into the Scapegoat and having a space battle as Strake chases after them, or if they were going to somehow slaughter Strake and all of his soldiers and take his ship, the Acceptable Loss, for themselves. I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I knew if it turned to violence that the auction could possibly be put on hold to a later date because none of these dignitaries from these corporations would want to be here knowing that there's an active battle or skirmish that has just happened. So it's very cool that Brian came up with a non-violent way to proceed on this. Essentially, Strake went from holding every card to being briefly, however briefly, boxed in. Everyone's still in handcuffs. Thorne had to struggle to his feet because his hands and legs are bound. And he is still able to talk them out of this situation. It's one of the first times that we've seen Thorne really, really shine with a skill he doesn't get to use too often. And that's the wheeling and dealing talk skill, especially when it comes to being a corpo himself and having grown up in that world, unlike everyone else that is in the group. So Brian had been setting up that specific angle for a while. He came to the table prepared and waited for the correct opportunity. I was setting up the pins and he was ready to knock them down. I wasn't really sure what way it was going to go. But I trusted him to come out with something that was reasonable that we could then roll against. And that's the sort of collaboration I try to build with my players. Because really, GMing isn't just being in control of the world. It's about forming a cohesive narrative and helping construct the backbone of what that narrative could be, and then letting the players fill in everything else about it. So when I was building this backbone of this scene, I tried to make it as solid as I could for Strake because he's a very smart guy and he did everything in his power to make sure that it would work out for him. But the cracks were still there. And it's actually very cool for this one because I didn't have to build in any cracks. Brian built in the crack seven episodes ago when he forced the contract on Vera, making them temporary employees of Laicar Research. And he saw that opportunity and he took it. There's actually a really cool beat too, right after Policy 872.3 is read out, where Strake doesn't really want to let go, but Meer Prust tells him he has to. But still, Meer Prust is telling him, after the auction, they're all yours. It's a way for Meer Prust to tell Strake, I know who you are. I know that you're very important and very powerful, and you're not going to like this, but here's a way for you to save some face. So Strake takes it. He tries to sound like, oh, this is no big deal. I've already caught you twice before. I will catch you again. And he has to simply leave them behind. And as we know from the episode and something I'll discuss later on in this Star Master Log is he wasn't so easily deterred. He wasn't sitting idly by while they went and did their auction shenanigans. No, he was actively working towards catching them because in the world of risk assessment, he is the best. And there's a reason for that. But it really goes to show how good Thorne is at what he does. That is the way to play that type of character. Thorne wasn't punching his way out. He wasn't hacking his way out. He wasn't trying and failing to use a gun. He wasn't being a meat shield. He was calm and collected, quoting a clause from a contract that nobody had really heard of or thought to even use to a man that just told him he'd lost. Thorne has lost once big time in his life, and he has sworn to never lose again. So let me talk about what makes Strake actually dangerous now. It isn't that he has a few soldiers with him. It's not even the fact that he has the crew captured at the start of the episode, or that he has Voss's orb in his possession. It's none of that. It's that Strake has soft power, just like Thorne. Strake doesn't beat the crew in a fight. He doesn't out-shoot them. He doesn't out-maneuver them. He doesn't have a particularly powerful ship that can necessarily shoot the Scapegoat out of the sky. He's smart, and he has soft power. When they beat him, he simply walks away. He goes behind the goat. He pulls the rubber stopper off of a port on the hull, and he uses a Virodyne admin key to lock the ship down through the ownership module. He finds, much like Thorne or Felix when he's hacking, he finds the cracks in the systems, and he attacks those, and then he leaves. Of course, Felix catches him on the security camera. He goes to check it out, finds the port open, and at that point the crew knows what happened. But knowing doesn't actually help them. Because the Scapegoat has always been an Omnitek ship. And Omnitek is Virodyne. And Virodyne has the ability to do exactly this. Reclaim their property, no matter how much the crew would like to keep it. So by activating the admin key on the ownership module, the Scapegoat is locked down. Not only that, but it gives Strake or whoever else has the admin key control over the Scapegoat. I love that moment from a design standpoint, especially because Strake isn't actually doing anything that I invented on the fly to like, go against what Thorne had just done. This was always an alternative. He has had the admin key since that first time he showed up on Wafisa. In fact, he would have used the admin key on Wafisa if he thought that they were going to murder him and dump him out of the Scapegoat. But he thought he had already won. He didn't know that the flower fields were burning and everyone was getting high as hell. He didn't know that everything was compromised. He thought he had won and that there was nowhere else to go. He's wisened up a bit since then. He knows that the crew is a bit more dangerous and resourceful than he originally thought. So, when he captures them and they escape due to some technicalities of intercorporate law, he immediately makes his way over to the Scapegoat for plan B. Because of course Virodyne has an admin key. That's just how corporate asset recovery works. Strake is just the first person to use it. And I think that's the thing that's worth talking about. The most effective leverage a villain can have isn't necessarily combat power. I know we see it a lot in big set piece games like Dungeons and Dragons where you have a big bad and the big bad is leading up to a big fight. And a big fight is a giant battle map with 20 minions and a big guy and three generals and then the five characters standing off against the forces of evil as the world is crumbling around them. But villains in real life can be much more scary. I don't think of force. I don't think big bad in a way where there's going to be a giant fight. Because honestly, players can fight their way out of almost anything. And I also find that fights tend to resolve down to die rolls, which I don't find particularly compelling. But what they can't fight with their fists or with guns is corporate ownership law. There's an asymmetry there that makes Strake feel particularly dangerous in a different way than some guy with a gun, and much more difficult to go toe-to-toe with. Okay, so let's talk about Meer Prust. The moment he walks into the room, Strake is forced to back down. Not reluctantly. He backs down because Prust is standing there in his ceremonial robes, and Strake knows exactly who Prust is and what he represents. When Prust talks, his power is palpable. What he says is non-negotiable. Let me explain what the Auctioneers Guild actually is because, quote unquote, guild that runs auctions really, really undersells it considerably. They are much more powerful than that. So this guild is sector-wide, meaning it has power on Polyphn, Ventos, Sibylen, really anywhere and everywhere that they have official business. The guild doesn't belong to any corporation, and it isn't in itself a corporation. It doesn't answer to Virodyne or NovaCrypt or anyone else operating in the Viridian Expanse. Its mandate is to facilitate the transfer of contested assets. That's alien exosites, xeno-archaeology finds, research firms being liquidated, anything that without a neutral third party would just get stolen or spark some sort of war between competing bidders. Meer Prust himself, he is the second high auctioneer representative for Sibylen specifically. He has offices in the main city of Spigot on the other side of the planet. The guild's big enough to have a lot of infrastructure as well. We're talking regional offices, we're talking about many people with very important sounding titles, and of course, ceremonial robes. The type that, when you see them, you'd probably laugh at them if the person wearing them wasn't so damn powerful. The reason that the guild's unassailable is also the reason no corporation has ever successfully dismantled it. I mean, every major corp in the sector is a bidder at guild auctions. Virodyne bids, NovaCrypt bids, Nexus Trading bids, and everyone does it at an Auctioneers Guild approved auction. Plenty of corporations have tried to dismantle the Auctioneers Guild, but have always failed because it has so much power backing it up. If Virodyne wants to make a run at it, NovaCrypt will stop them. If Nexus Trading tries to manipulate them in some way, then another corp steps up to keep it neutral. Whenever one corporation tries to tug on the guild another one is on the other side tugging at the opposite direction. And this keeps everything safely neutral. The Auctioneers Guild doesn't even have a standing army. They have guards, but they don't have soldiers. It's more like the Peace Corps than anything else. But they do live quite comfortably because they take a cut of every auction that happens. Every subsidiary and every contractor with corporate backing runs its contested asset transactions through the guild. So it has a lot of work. Almost every single deal between two corporations runs through the Auctioneers Guild. And we're not talking just auctions. We're talking private purchases of spaceships, minor equity liquidation, anything that you can imagine that two corporations need to agree on. The Auctioneers Guild probably has some sort of hand in it. So if Virodyne tried to destroy the guild, they'd lose access to the system that lets them legally acquire exosites, alien research, and any other asset that requires a neutral third party to transfer cleanly. Really, the only way to destroy the Auctioneers Guild would be if you're the last corporation standing. Because all of that infrastructure collapses, and every corp would lose access to it simultaneously if it suddenly disappeared. That's why nobody does that. The guild is protected not by soldiers or treaty, but by the fact that everyone who could destroy it just needs it too damn much. So what does this mean for the guild? It means that they get a very specific kind of power. The type of power where Meer Prust can walk into a room with Viktor Strake and five soldiers and tell Strake he has to release them. And Strake does it with no argument. Not because Prust has guns. We're talking once again about soft power. Violating the guild neutrality at an active auction site is the kind of thing that gets a corporation banned from future auctions. And Virodyne can't afford that. Bidding rights are money. Strake knows this, even as a risk assessment officer who has no say in auctions and has probably never worked with them personally in his life knows you don't mess with the money. And then there's also the practical matter that the guild processes every single transaction, not only at auctions, but at all of these intercorporate dealings. They know who bid on what. They have a full audit log of everything. So they know who bought and who paid. They know what every corporation in the sector has been acquiring, at what price, and from whom. That is a lot of information to have about people who like to keep their acquisitions quiet. The guild doesn't use it as leverage, because they don't have to. Just having it is leverage. It's what maintains their security and their trust. So Prust floats into the room, makes his ruling on releasing everyone for 24 hours for the auction to move forward, and then he leaves. That's how the guild works. They show up, they quote the mandate, and then they go. So that's the Auctioneers Guild. Let's now get into this week's Subspace Signals. This week's question comes from Danny via email. This is our second question ever from email. Danny asks, how do you keep players engaged with a long running mystery over dozens of sessions? I'm running a campaign with a big reveal built into the backstory and I'm terrified players are going to feel cheated when it finally lands or that they'll lose the thread entirely before we get there. Wow. Well, Danny, this is actually a problem that I think about a lot because I am running a narrative game. And in the strictest of OSR type games, really, you don't plan anything. You just create an infrastructure and you let the players go wild and the narrative will come out in the wash and you'll get what you get. The thing that I feel that doesn't support very well is what the wider world is doing while the players are off on their adventures. So when you have all of these different factions, what are they doing at that time? And that's something that Stars Without Number actually does handle for you with faction turns. I take that a little bit further because I have individual people in the factions that are also moving and shaking and doing things. There's always reveals and things that are happening, especially when it's interconnected with a player's backstory. So to all the people that are now groaning and holding their heads because this doesn't sound like quote-unquote true OSR, trust me, sometimes having a narrative beat can be way more emotionally rewarding than simply letting things play out how they are. And a lot of narrative beats aren't even in a player's control. It's things that are happening in the wide universe, whether the players interact with it or not. So the short version is that a mystery can't just be an unanswered question sitting in a drawer. It has to produce consequences. It has to have something that the players can touch. If the only thing the mystery is doing is simply existing, then it'll go stale, people won't care about it. When you finally reveal what the answer to the mystery is, no one will even react. It needs to be something that's important, provides leverage, and is going to affect the game moving forward once it's revealed. So your players don't need to know what's in the box. But they do need to feel that the box is there pressing against things. They need to know its shape, they have to understand what it's affecting. And when the answer comes out, we need to make those lines sharper, so that it's revealed this mystery was affecting this, you realize that, but now you see why and how. It comes into sharp relief. So for example, in the Dark Star Adventurecast, there are things that the players have been circling for 20 plus sessions now. Robert's identity, what happened to Haleyy, what Dr. Voss actually is. And those threads stay alive not because I've been withholding the answer, but because every few sessions, something happens that's related to the answer and the players just file it away. It's a detail that doesn't quite fit, a reaction from an NPC that feels off, a piece of technology that shouldn't exist. The mystery is producing clues that are also just things that happen in the world, and that keeps it from feeling like a waiting room. I talked about this in a previous Star Master Log around puzzle design. A mystery is just another puzzle. We want the puzzle to fit organically into the world. So take Riven, for example. When you're in the world of Riven, you are not solving quote-unquote puzzles that were simply put there by the people who made the game. You are actually discovering pieces of culture. You're learning the language, you're learning how to count in their number system, you're learning what animals and symbols are significant to them. And these are things that any Rivenese child would be able to easily interact with and go about their day. But for you, a stranger in a strange land, it is a puzzle, simply because you don't know the culture. That's how a mystery should be provisioned as well. A mystery is something that exists in the world. It's not necessarily an intentional secret. It's just that you don't have the language or the knowledge to figure it out. And as those crumbs drop, usually very organically through normal play in the game, they will get closer and closer to formulating what they think the answer is. And then when you have that reveal, it will be very satisfying for them and feel like it's part of a cohesive whole because it slots in with their expectations and everything else that's been happening in the game. The other thing I'd say is this. Give the players something to be right about early. Don't give them the whole answer, but let them figure out a piece of it in a way that feels very accessible. Something small enough that when they do figure it out, it feels like progress and not like you're just handing them an answer. Because that fear that you have that they are going to feel cheated. I think that it's actually coming from having a reveal that comes out of nowhere. Because you need to build that runway first. You can't land the plane until you have somewhere to land it. Otherwise, it feels abrupt and isn't really going to work. They need to have some pieces to put together. They don't need to have fully assembled them. But the pieces do have to be there so that you can point to them and they can go of course and slap their forehead. Because you don't want the reveal to feel like a twist. You want it to feel like an active mystery they could have figured out. And you gave them the ability and the chance to figure out. And if they figure it out beforehand, they'll be extremely happy. And if they don't, but they have a couple of the pieces, they'll be able to logically see how one led to the other, thus preventing them from feeling cheated. The other thing I try to do is I give the players something to do with partial information. You don't know the whole answer yet, but you know enough to make a decision. I'm not looking to just feed them information and then they file it away and sit on it. That information needs to have an active place in the story. It's usually a little organic breadcrumb that has something to do with the current adventure, but you can see how it fits into the larger whole. Could be an access code or a little bit of information about how artificial intelligence works or something about an alien species. In the adventure, it makes sense and leads them to make some active decisions, but they file it away for the overarching mystery, and later on when they put all those pieces together, they'll understand the whole thing. And that's what helps keep a long-running mystery from becoming passive. The players are always acting on what they know. The mystery is the thing that recontextualizes those actions after the fact, when they fully understand what's going on. Anyway, Danny, great question. Thanks so much. And that's it for this week's Subspace Signals. If you're out there and you want to send us a question, head on over to Patreon at patreon.com/darkstaradventurecast. We always give our patrons first dibs on asking a question, but we also pay attention on Bluesky and Reddit. So before we wrap up, here's this week's Star Master Spec, which is a book, movie, or piece of media that connects to this episode. This week, I want to talk about a cool TV show that I was obsessed with for quite a while. I went back and watched a few episodes just a couple weeks ago because, man, I thought maybe it didn't age very well, but it actually is still phenomenal. And it is called Leverage. It's a TV series that ran from 2008 to 2012. And the premise is this. You have a team of specialists, a hacker, a grifter, a thief, a bruiser, and a mastermind. And they run cons against corporations and powerful people who've hurt ordinary folks. Every episode is a heist where the team builds a plan, then watches the plan fall apart, and then improvises their way through the wreckage. This is how I sort of felt going into this episode with Thorne especially. It wasn't something that I was trying to plan and make it feel like Leverage, but as we were playing it and then when I was editing this episode later, man, I just couldn't stop thinking about Leverage because Thorne is a character right out of that show. He is the mastermind. We have Thorne in handcuffs citing corporate policy to a man who has a bunch of soldiers around him and they're all hostages. That's a real Leverage move. Yeah. It's a really cool show. Go check it out. Because they never really have the power. They're always on the back foot, even when they are getting themselves into the situation, and they feel like they have complete power. Their plan never survives contact with the enemy. And it's not because they aren't awesome at their jobs. It's because what they're doing is very, very difficult and complicated. And there's always a weird catch. And in this case, Thorne with his intercorporate policy feels like it was ripped right out of an episode of Leverage, although I didn't think of Leverage when I was penning the scaffolding for this episode. It is a show that I think about quite often, not just when I'm running the Dark Star Adventurecast, but when I'm running my other games as well throughout the years. It's a really good example of how to take a crew of misfits that are each really, really good at one specific thing, which if you were to think about like a D&D party, you have your rogue, you have your fighter, you have your cleric, you have your wizard, and a lot of people are going to lean into one specific thing that they can do. They're going to lean into the fact that they can hack really well, or lean into being really good at talking or shooting or punching or acrobatics or whatever it might be. That's the Leverage crew. That's essentially every TTRPG crew. Everyone is distinct and special and has their one skill, and you need someone there to try to wrap it all together and be like, although we are very different, our skills are complementary, and this is how we can use them to achieve the objective. So Leverage is my pick for this Star Master Spec, not just because it's tied in with my game, but because it's a really good example of a televised TTRPG crew. Go ahead and start with Season 1. The pilot is very good, and it shows you exactly what the show is. You'll know by the end of the first episode whether it's for you or not, but just like with the anime rule of thumb, I recommend giving it three episodes. Next time on the Dark Star Adventurecast, the crew is locked in the Scapegoat. The auction is over. Voss is gone. The goat won't fly. And down in the exosite, Froggy and Vera are trapped. I don't want to give too much away, but I'll say this. The Fork reappears in the next episode, and something that we've been building towards since episode 8 finally happens. I'll leave it there. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.