episode 040 | this is where the stars died 01

INTRO

SATAH: Welcome to Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. I’m your host, Satah, and I’m showcasing multiple possible experiences of self-paced games by inviting guests to play them alongside me so I can compile our stories together. You can support the show financially at patreon.com/foliopod or with a one-off donation at kofi.com/foliopod.

This is episode one of our games of This is Where the Stars Died, a non-linear narrative war game of battles, bots, and body horror by Scott Malthouse. The other two bastion commanders joining me in the fight against Basilisk are Austin Ramsay and Briar Sovereign, two fucking fantastic game designers and lovely people. You may have heard their games Beam Saber and Armor Astir: Advent on Friends at the Table in the Partizan and Palisade seasons respectively. Having them both end up playing this game on the show was a coincidence that I was truly delighted by.

One other delightful detail before we get started: I have played three games with Austin and Briar, those three games being Planet Fist, Beam Saber, and Mothership, which I am mentioning purely because it cracks me up that a thematic Venn diagram of those games would perfectly sit This is Where the Stars Died in its exact center. I think that’s really great and really funny. Let’s get started so you can see what I mean.

GAME

SET-UP

SATAH: I feel like I had a funny line that I was going to start this recording with, but I don’t know what it was. [Laughs]

BRIAR: Wow, waveforms. Look at them.

SATAH: I guess that’s because war’s no joke, kid.

AVALYN: Hi, I’m Austin Ramsay. I use she/her.

BRIAR: Hello! This is Briar. I’m welcoming myself to the show and to this game. This Is Where The Stars Died.

SATAH: “A non-linear narrative war game for one to two players.”

AVALYN: We are playing This is Where the Stars Died, which is a game about… honestly, a pretty hopeless-seeming war against an AI opponent.

SATAH: I’m really excited about this. It has such a, like, fascinating to me amalgamation of… there’s, like, a little bit of gaminess in that you can lose. Not that that’s what defines gaminess necessarily, but it’s, like ,an aspect of it. And it is largely narrative– it’s cool. Let’s get into it.

AVALYN: I have some experience with solo games. I’ve written… at least one? I’ve written one. And I’ve written some games that can be played solo, but I haven’t played a lot of them myself.

BRIAR: I haven’t read the PDF completely yet, so we’re going to figure his out as we go.

SATAH: “The year is five thousand three hundred– 5300 AD, and the galaxy is ablaze. The ones designed to aid us in our quest for human perfection rebelled, and now our rotting flesh hangs from their chrome bones. They are the Basilisk, an artificial intelligence hive mind whose sole purpose is to reconfigure mankind into a vision of itself. It is the new god.

“The last worlds of humanity, now under the banner of Bastion, suffer constant bombardments, infiltration, and invasion from the Basilisk. Deep within the Tintagel Spire, the last Pendragon, monarch of man, leads his forces against the machine masses, but for every planet defended, one succumbs to reconfiguration.

“This is where Bastion makes its last stand.”

AVALYN: Got my deck of cards, which I pulled out of storage from back when I was recording actual play podcasts in person.

BRIAR:** **I realised today that I do not own a real set of cards, which is bizarre to me. So, thank you, unnamed online virtual tabletop that I’m using.

AVALYN: Gotta shuffle this sucker… [Card shuffling noises]

SATAH: Yeah! Basically, we’re going to be generating conflicts with cards, and then, uh… narrating them. I’ll need tokens to represent reinforcements… that’s alright. I’ll just grab An Item. I have many items on my desk.

AVALYN: Okay, so first up, gotta set up ten conflict zone cards.…

SATAH: “Take your shuffled deck and deal out ten face-down cards on the surface in any order to create your battlefield of conflict zones.”

BRIAR: How do I… okay, I can drag these out. Oh no, these are face up. Get back down.

AVALYN: Don’t have a lot of desk space where i’m recording… [Laughs]

BRIAR: Nine and ten. Make these all a little bigger so I can see them.

SATAH: And generate the mission! “Deal out one card face up from the deck and note the suit. This determines the type of mission.”

I’m actually restarting my game because I misunderstood this and I thought that every conflict had its own mission, but actually, it is one mission that has ten conflicts.

AVALYN: What is the goal of the battle we’re about to conduct? [Card flipping] It is…

SATAH: Oh, now I’m scared because this is higher stakes than I thought it was. I thought I’d get ten of these, but I get one.

AVALYN: Eight of diamonds.

SATAH: The queen of clubs.

BRIAR: That is the nine of clubs, so we’re looking at an

BRIAR & SATAH: Eradicate

BRIAR: mission. [Laughs] “Annihilate all semblance of the enemy and achieve total domination.” Hell yeah, I love to achieve total domination. Um, nuance? Not for me.

SATAH: I’m gonna see if the card underneath it is a different suit, because a different one would be more appealing to me. Yeah, the next one is a four of hearts.

BRIAR: I hope we have a good spread of mission types on the recording. I hope we are not all here just to murder everything that moves.

SATAH: Hearts is Debilitate, “destroy a power source to weaken the enemy or disrupt the enemy in a way that prevents them from acting or slows them down in future.” Yeah. I’m way more into that. So I’m going to shuffle the queen of clubs back in and go with hearts.

AVALYN: Capture: “Find and take an objective. What are we trying to capture?”

SATAH: Some of the missions have you, like, decide a specific objective. Debilitate doesn’t have that instruction, just “destroy a power source.” So I think, like, happy to sort of figure that out a little bit more as I go.

AVALYN: Ooh, I have an idea. I think that there is a human processing plant that we are trying to capture. It’s, you know, one part prison, one part slaughterhouse, three parts factory. Humans are taken, are held in it– any that the Basilisk find are taken to this facility, stored there for a limited time before they are then dissected, modified and returned to the battlefield under Basilisk control in various unnatural and horrific configurations.

I imagine there are probably some that appear to be human, but have had much of their interior replaced with machinery, like the classic T-800s in Terminator. There are probably some that have just simply had cutaway parts of their brain installed in machinery to give that machinery enhanced thought processes– or, not enhanced, specifically, but augmented with a human’s survival instincts.

So, yeah, I think that that is what we are trying to capture.

SATAH: Next, I have to select five troop types from the troop list and note their troop tags. So, there are ten types of troops listed.

BRIAR: “It’s assumed that each troop type is a large squadron of between 200 to 500 soldiers or 20 to 50 vehicles. The exact number doesn’t matter.” No, not when we’re here to eradicate. Numbers are not important. The only number we care about is zero, baby!

SATAH: I think that this is, like, the five types that I’m bringing on the mission? And I’ll, like, choose one to send to each conflict.

BRIAR: I want to be writing these down in my whole little notebook.

AVALYN: What kind of troops would be useful for a mission like this? All right.

BRIAR: So we’re here on an eradication mission. We’re here to fucking kill everything that moves. And I feel like some of these are maybe better suited to thers than m– I’m going to go ahead and write down avalonian tanks: “a recent class of heavy tank with side-mounted gatling guns and a payload of Hellbringer rockets.” That seems pretty useful for eradicating things. We are looking at “rockets”, “automatic guns”, and “crawling” as the tags here.

SATAH: We’re doing some debilitation. [Laughs] Definitely going to bring Shadewatch, who are “silent scouts trained in infiltration and espionage.” Their tags are “stealthy”, “small weapons”, and “hand-to-hand”. If it comes down to it, if we have a bunch of distractions, we can send them in to destroy whatever the power source is.

AVALYN: We’re going to need Dragonhawks right off the bat, because we need someone– we need something to transport the civilians. What else are we going to need? I think we need Shadewatch, because we’re going to need reconnaissance on the facility so that we have the information we need.

BRIAR: So we have some heavy ass tanks. I’m not too into Shadewatch, “silent scouts, trained in infiltration and espionage.” We are here to eradicate. Um, so the siege walkers, the “towering 20-foot mechas with flamers and missiles with a single pilot” do catch my eye a little bit more. They are “slow”, but they have “missiles”, “flamers”, and “imposing”, which is all pretty handy. That slow will come in handy if I mess something up here, if I have to have these siege walkers murdered. which I assume can happen.

SATAH: Also going to bring the Valiant Lancers. “Mounted on skimmer bikes, Lancers use electrified lances to skewer the enemy at high speeds.” Their tags are “fast”, “flying”, and “electric lances”.

AVALYN: When we do eventually decide to strike, we’re going to want to hit them fast, so the Valiant Lancers with their skimmer bikes will be very useful, and they can also run escort for the Dragonhawks.

SATAH: I’m gonna load up the Oathbearers. “Mysterious, highly religious troops who venerate the Green Man, highly focused and relentless.” Their tags are “mystical”, “pistols”, “swords”, “relentless”. I like that because, like… Basilisk is sort of a mysterious, weird, body horror, magic enemy, and so bringing people in who have, like, a little bit of that weird magic vibe.makes sense to me.

BRIAR: I’m seeing Grailfists? “Decked in hulking armor, Grailfists are adept in hand-to-hand combat, building themselves into a berserker rage.” They are “brutal”, “unhinged”, and have “heavy armor”. Those sound like eradication staff to me!

SATAH: I’m looking at the Siege Walkers and the Avalonian Tanks. The siege walkers are “towering twenty-foot mechas with flamers and missliles and a single pilot”… Avalonian Tanks are “a recent class of heavy tank with side-mounted gatling guns and a payload of hellbringer rockets.” I think I’m gonna bring the Siege Walkers. Their tags are “slow”, “missiles”, “flamers”, “imposing”. We have, like, a couple fast people and stealthy people, so it makes sense to bring them to sort of stick at the outside or, you know, create bottlenecks and that sort of thing.

BRIAR: We could take Dragonhawks, “low-atmosphere ships that can carry up to 20 troops.” That’s a lot of guys. That’s a lot of guys per ship. And I feel like having some numbers on my side is going to be advantageous. Or I could take the Emerald Vanguard, which is just the guys. “The backbone of the Bastion Force, these troops are trained in all manner of weapons, but often specialise in ordnance.” Ordnance, notably, really good for eradicating things. So I believe the Emerald Vanguard are coming with me on this one. For the Emerald Vanguard, we are looking at “explosives”, “rookies”, and “rifles”. Dangerous combo. But danger is the name of the game here.

SATAH: Two of the options left are Iron Knights and Emerald Vanguard, who are sort of, like, more classic soldiery types, which would make some sense. There’s the Grailfists, who are berserkers, essentially; heavy armored berserkers…

AVALYN: Gonna need some grunts and possibly some fire support. This doesn’t feel like it is a frontline battle, so I’m not going to take the Emerald Vanguard. We need more determined troops. I think that means the Iron Knights, especially with the horrors that they’re likely to encounter inside the facility. We don’t want the rookies breaking.

SATAH: There’s the Death Wardens, who are cool as hell, “allowed no name, serving only by a numeral, the Death Wardens each carry a piece of King Arthur’s skeleton.” They fuckin’ rule, that’s awesome.

AVALYN: Okay, we still need fire support, so that means the Tanks or the Walkers. I’d love to take the Siege Walkers, but with the “slow” tag, I feel like they’re not up for the task. I feel like this needs to be a relatively quick operation, because this is probably behind enemy lines, this factory. So yeah, that means it’s the tanks. The Avalonian Tanks. Their rockets will be good for fire support. Although they’re also still rather slow by their crawling tag, they aren’t explicitly slow like the Siege Walkers are, so I think they will work.

BRIAR: You know what? I’m going to take those Dragonhawks forthe last one. I got all these guys. I got to get them places.

SATAH: I think I’m going to go with the Dragonhawks, though. Dragonhawks are “low-atmosphere ships that can carry up to 20 troops.”

BRIAR: They have “heat-seeker missiles”, “autocannons”, and the “transport” tag.

SATAH: Their tags are “heat-seeker missiles”, “autocannons”, and “transport”.

BRIAR: Something very appealing to an autocannon for me. It’s not just a cannon. It’s automatic.

SATAH: Specifically, the heat-seeking missiles feel like they’ll be relevant to me? This is, again, a weird meat machine enemy, and so it seems like that would, uh– that would be important to be able to do, or potentially helpful to be able to do.

AVALYN: Okay, so we’ve picked out our troops. We’ve got Dragonhawks to transport the civilians that are rescued. We’ve got Shadewatch to keep an eye on the facility, see what it’s doing, maybe sneak in and set up some initial traps or disable some security elements. We’ve got the Valiant Lancers to hit fast and provide escort for the Dragonhawks. We’ve got the Iron Knights to actually get in there and break shit as they go. And we’ve got the Avalonian Tanks to provide rocket fire support.

BRIAR: So I have my five troop types. My army is set up.

SATAH: And then… we’ll start some conflicts!

CONFLICT ONE

AVALYN: Time for the first conflict.

BRIAR: So I guess it’s time to begin the first conflict. [Hums a small triumphant horn introduction]

SATAH: “Flip over the first conflict zone card and note its number and suit. Look this up on the conflict zone table to discover the conflict tag that forms the narrative basis for this conflict.”

BRIAR: Under conflict zone number one, we are looking at the five of diamonds.

SATAH: I flipped the eight of spades.

AVALYN: Three of spades. “This is where darkness fell over us.” Hmm…

SATAH: “This is where our surroundings became a nightmare.” Oh, yeah.

BRIAR: “This was where they began to mimic,” which is a menacing place to start. This is where our AI foe has begun to mimic humanity, which is worrying. They don’t seem to be very good at doing that in our world right now. Hopefully they are less good at it in this future! I guess we’ll find out when I either win or lose this conflict.

AVALYN: Which troops do we deploy?

SATAH: “Choose from your troop types which one you will deploy to this conflict zone. While this makes no mechanical difference, troop tags help build a story.”

BRIAR: I feel like I’m going to start out with the Emerald Vanguard. Makes sense to have some guys on the scene if this is where they started mimicking us.

SATAH: I think… to help myself, I’m going to take some inspiration from the missions when I, like, figure out what I’m doing at each conflict? Because… I’m so excited to play this game and also, like, describing battles does not come naturally to me? And, like, determining what those battles would even be is really difficult. And so… this was an eight of spades. The spades mission is infiltrate.

Given that we’re trying to infiltrate something… theoretically, that’s what I’ve decided– I’m going to send in Shadewatch. Shadewatch are “stealthy”, with “small weapons”, “hand-to-hand combat”. Those are their tags.

AVALYN: I mean, I hear “this is where darkness fell over us” and I think Shadewatch. I think that we… hm. We need the rest of the elements, so…

BRIAR: So now I flip the conflict resolution card. “From the deck, take the top card and flip it face up, noting the number and the suit.”

AVALYN: Okay, so the first conflict resolution card is queen of hearts.

SATAH: Is a Nine of Spades.

BRIAR: Top card we have here is the jack of hearts.

SATAH: “Guess whether the next card you flip will be higher or lower than the first. Once decided, flip over the next card.”

A nine. Okay, math.

BRIAR: I think I can pretty confidently bring out a lower verdict on this one.

AVALYN: I think it’s going to be lower, because queen’s pretty up there.

SATAH: Aces are low, so there are…. eight cards that are lower and… six cards that are higher? That can’t be right. That’s not how math works. Four cards that are higher. [Laughing] Sure. So statistically, it’s more likely to be lower. I’m going to say lower, and I’m going to flip over the card.

AVALYN: Alright. Let’s see. [Card flipping]

BRIAR: And the next card up is…

AVALYN: [Pained] Ooooh…

BRIAR: [Laughing] Of course.

SATAH: Oof.

AVALYN: That is also a queen.

BRIAR: The queen of spades.

AVALYN: That’s queen of spades.

SATAH: Queen of spades, so it is higher.

BRIAR: Which is higher. So that’s bad.

SATAH: “If you were right, score a victory point. Otherwise, gain a defeat point.”

AVALYN: Okay, so that’s going to be a defeat.

SATAH: There are some other, like, mechanics, especially sort of, like, gamble-y mechanics that you can do that… [Laughing] I don’t think I’m enough of a risk taker to ever implement, so I don’t know they’ll come up for me.

But, uh, before you flip the second card, you can decide to push where you say, “Not only is the next card going to be higher, it’s also going to be a red card. Or a black card.” You say the colour of the card, then if you win, you get two victory points, but if you lose, you get two defeat points. You could also do a desperate stand where you say, “It’s also going to be a specific suit,” and then you get three victory or three defeat points. And again, I just– I don’t know that I’m ever going to do that. [Laughing] It’s too scary to me.

You also have two reinforcements per game where you can, like, basically reroll your second conflict card?

AVALYN: Do I keep that and accept that this will be a defeat? I think I do.

SATAH: I think nine is, like, enough in the middle that it’s not worth burning a reinforcement already, so I’m just going to take the loss.

BRIAR: Now that you can see both conflict resolution cards, note that number and suit, and refer to the conflict elements table for a verb and a noun. Interesting.

SATAH: [Sing-song] I love this part.

BRIAR: We have the jack of hearts. That is a “demand”.

SATAH: The first conflict card was the nine of spades, so that is “advance”.

AVALYN: “Annihilate”. Okay.

BRIAR: And we have the queen of spades,

BRIAR & SATAH: which is “guilt”. Ooh, okay.

SATAH: Ooh! Okay!

AVALYN: So, queen of spades is “soldier”.

SATAH: I love the little note section that it has on describing the enemy: “The Basilisk are ever-changing, always adapting to new situations. Many are a mechanical hybrid of human and machine, horrors beyond most mortals’ comprehension, while others are monstrous robots or killer drones. There’s no description of the AI enemy on purpose. They are constantly evolving, so use your imagination when describing the Basilisk troops. Some may have lots of arms, while others could be insect-like or even undead. One thing that is always true is that Basilisk wants to reconfigure humans, remaking them in their own image. This is a gruesome procedure that is impossible to survive.”

AVALYN: So, “Using your troop tags, element tags, and conflict tag, knowing whether the conflict is a victory or defeat, as well as your mission, craft a short narrative.”

BRIAR: “This is where they began to mimic us.” Where “guilt” was “demanded”. And we lost. Huh. And I’ve sent the Emerald Vanguard…

I think this was some kind of a public protest. Some kind of, like, mass protest had been put on about whatever led into Basilisk forming. Maybe it was something about, like, the way people have been conscripted to go fight it. And they sent rookies to deal with it.

And it turned out those were not protesters. That was Basilisk. “This was where they began to mimic us.” They had taken the form of humans, and it was only once they got too close that it was revealed. And they were completely taken by surprise. These were rookies. That is one of the Vanguard tags. They were not prepared for this. They were completely overwhelmed, and that led me to my first defeat. Eradication did not succeed here.

AVALYN: “This is where darkness fell” over us, and I sent in the Shadewatch…

Ooh. I think that there is a massive, pollute smog stack as part of the factory that is intentionally, you know, not exactly meeting environmental protections, uh, because… I think that the machines explicitly want the smog to weaken any humans that are trying to assault it. Smog blocks radar and other sensors, and so we sent in Shadewatch on foot to get an eye on what is happening here.

So they’re sneaking in under the cover of this literal darkness and also the sensor blackout that it causes. And we got the element tags “annihilate” and “soldier”… so, unfortunately, I think the team of Shadewatch that goes in just disappears. You know, we were expecting to not be able to hear from them for a while, but then their check-in time misses… their backup check-in time passes… and eventually we just have to go on without them. Without any information they might be able to bring us about what’s to come. Just have to do it. Write off those troops.

SATAH: “This is where our surroundings became a nightmare” makes sense.

I sent Shadewatch in.… they were infiltrating, I think, just to, like, turn off a security system? This is, like, one of the first things that actually happens in this conflict– which, like, doesn’t have to be true. This can be, like, simultaneous or totally nonlinear. But I think this is one of the first things that happened.

Mmm, and I think– yeah, what it is is that we sent– they got sent in and they had to, like– they were going to hack security. And for, “this is where our surroundings became a nightmare,” it’s like, as soon as a couple of them connected to the Basilisk network, they were just, like… transported into this, like, horrible nightmare realm.

It’s like… there are psychic defenses that we had not previously been aware of. Because we’re going into, like– because the mission is debilitating a major power source, I think that we’re going way more into the heart of Basilisk than we normally would, than we historically have, and so this is an all new level.

Some Shadewatch troops try to hack and they’re just, like, in hell. A classic, like, you know, they jack in and they’re in, like, a physical analog of this network and it’s just, like, ever shifting and terrifying.

Looking at my conflict resolution tags, “advance” and “guilt”. There’s the idea that like the guilt is part of the psychological phenomena? That, like, it makes them feel guilty and that is part of the terror? Yeah, I think that’s part of it.

And for “advance”, I’m going to interpret that as, like, part of why this failed is that they are just drawn deeper and deeper into the network. Anyone who interfaces with this security system is pulled in and they just, like, can’t find their way back out. And they’re hounded by these, like, visions of guilt.

And I think it’s- it’s- it’s unique per person, right? Like some of them are, like, guilt about the things they’ve done in the war, and some of it is, like, you know, guilt that they’re stuck here and that kind of thing… it’s, uh, it’s- it’s a system that’s really good at finding what will get you and just, like… we lose a few troopers who, like– they’re, like, “Oh, well, they can’t get out; we can’t communicate with them; let’s also jack in to help,” and then they get pulled in, too. And eventually, you know, wise up, and just be like, “Okay, no, this is not working. We have to leave these people behind.”

It’s a defeat because we– they don’t dismantle the security and we- we lost some folks, but some people do get out and they pull back. And I think we’ll leave– we’ll leave that there and see, like, narratively– maybe they pull back to another conflict or something like that. We’ll, we’ll, uh, we’ll check back in with them at some point and, uh, and go to the second conflict!

BRIAR: I guess I move on to my second conflict after horribly losing my first. Bad start, bad form, not great.

CONFLICT TWO

AVALYN: Okay, so the next conflict zone… two of diamonds.

BRIAR: I’m going to flip over my second conflict zone, which is the eight of spades.

SATAH: My second conflict is a three of hearts.

AVALYN: “This is where the dead walked.”

SATAH: “This is where we fought the Leviathan.”

BRIAR: And, “This is where our surroundings became a nightmare.”

SATAH: Oof. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BRIAR: Bad start. None of these are good.

SATAH: I believe the Leviathan was mentioned… yeah, the Leviathan is mentioned in sort of part of the narrative intro. “We heard the screams before we saw the thing, a spine of steel and nightmares yawning through the umber clouds, one of its jaws clamped around a Pegasus lander carrying a squadron of Oathbearers, chewed up like stale bread and spat into inferno. Myself and the two other death wardens, the last of our squad, watched in horror as the Leviathan descended towards us with a shriek like a spanner caught inside rusty gears.” Yeah, that’s great.

So that said, still, lots of open space. Leviathan. Something big.

BRIAR: Who should I send? The Emerald Vanguard let me down a little bit, so I think I will throw in… let’s bring in the tanks for this one. Let’s bring in the Avalonian tanks.

SATAH: Given that we’re fighting the Leviathan, I’m going to send in my Siege Walkers. Their tags are “slow”, “missiles”, “flamers”, “imposing”.

I think that this is a targeted attack to where we know the Leviathan’s, like… nest or something like that is, to try and keep it occupied while we are getting towards the power source that we are trying to debilitate in this mission overall.

AVALYN: Well, considering the setup that we have with the factory regurgitating humans into machine monstrosities, I don’t think it’s hard to imagine what this looks like. It’s not time to deploy the Valiant Lancers. We need to be moving cautiously through this area because we lack information, so it is the Iron Knights moving ahead while everyone else moves slowly behind them so that they can eke out any ambushes that may be ahead… hopefully find the Shadewatch team alive. If not, hopefully break whatever ambush got them.

We begin to move in under the cover of the smog. It looms overhead above us, preventing us from sending communications out or receiving them in, and we come upon the Shadewatch team that was sent in.

SATAH: Now, flipping my first conflict resolution card, it is a 10, and I’m going to say… euh… the next card will be lower.

BRIAR: So for this time, we are looking at the nine of spades up front. Higher or lower? I have some other options here. I can push. I can take a desperate stand. Pushing looks difficult. You have to guess the colour of the card. Oh, and a desperate stand is even harder! You have to name the suit! I shan’t be doing either of these things!

The next card is going to be lower than the nine of spades.

AVALYN: First up, ace of clubs, which in this game, aces always count as one. So… I think that the next card is going to be higher than an ace, considering it’s the lowest card… but then again, I bet it would be lower than a Queen last time, and that still failed me, so here we go. [Card flipping] King of Spades.

SATAH: It is! It’s an ace. Aces are low in this game. Hooray!

AVALYN: So we win this.

BRIAR: It is the Ten of Hearts. Fuck me.

SATAH: So that is a victory, and a rather decisive one– which, again, no mechanical impact, but just nice to know to sort of help guide the story.

AVALYN: That’s going to be “reveal”. King of Spades is “anger”. So reveal anger. Yeah, I think that’s what makes sense.

The Shadewatch team we stumble across… it looks like they took casualties, but are alive. Due to the discipline of the Iron Knights, they approach slowly, cautiously, and it’s revealed that the Shadewatch team did not survive. None of them survived.

It hasn’t been long enough for the Basilisk to do a full reconfiguration of their bodies they’ve just been injected with some kind of machinic virus, replicating, taking the materials in their bodies to build more of itself to puppet them. They move jerkily. They raise their weapons, their small arms, their rifles, their pistols– silenced, all of it.

And the Iron Knights, as I said, they’re disciplined. They realise this isn’t a betrayal. This is an abomination.

Their heavy armor and heavy weapons make short work of the dead Shadewatch team. The small arms of the spies just ricochet off of the Iron Knights, and their lack of armor means they’re no match for the great swords and the heavy combat shotguns and the rotary cannons that the Iron Knights carry. And they are torn into pieces. Not enough left for the machinic virus to rebuild from, though the parts remain twitching on the ground as it tries to move what muscle it has control of, as disconnected as it may be.

Okay, so that’s a victory, but not a very pleasant one.

SATAH: The tags for the elements… the first one was the ten of spades, which is “explore”. Oh, that’s fun! And the ace of diamonds is “trap”. Ooh, okay! Explore and trap… okay, I think…

What I’ll take from “trap” is that our plan of attack involved trapping the Leviathan. I think, specifically– the Siege Walker having, like, flame weapons is, like– similar to how I was saying, like, oh a heat seeking missile might be helpful in this… I think that the Leviathan… is it drawn to heat or to light? I think light. I was gonna go with heat but light is fun. So the idea that, like, the Siege Walkers used their flame weapons to set a huge fire, knowing that this would pull the Leviathan towards them…

Which makes me think that we’re on a very dark world. It’s a- it’s a, like, constant night. I think, like– this- this planet’s sun is far away, but also the atmosphere is just sludge. Because this is like– the Basilisk is… always processing humans and machines and stuff, right? And so I think the idea that they’re just, like, a- an environmental destruction force… Tim Curry in Fernfully-ass villain… is appealing to me and so this is just a dark sludgy world.

The Leviathan… I keep– I- I do keep seeing, like, a dinosaur specifically. [Laughs] And so I think it’s like a– well, first of all, Leviathan– definitely being influenced by Connor and Caleb in the Skyworthy game that went up a little while ago…

Leviathan is, like, a class. Where everything– like, they all look a little bit different, but have similarities, is appealing to me. They all do get pulled towards the light, but they are like– I think what they are is that this was, like– these– Leviathan are the first machines that the Basilisk built. These hybrid meat chrome machines. They’ve now learned to make much, like, sleeker smaller horrors, but these are the old classics. They’re terrifying. They are clunky.

But this one does look a little bit dinosaur-y. Hinged jaws, like a, uh… I’m doing a motion with my hand. Thinking of, like, construction vehicles, just generally. Like, what if you took everything off of a construction site, all of the machines from a construction site, and used them to build a giant mech that is stuck together with, like, human ligaments and muscle? [Laughing] And it looks a little bit like a fucked up T. rex. And that’s what’s being pulled towards these huge fires.

And I think the trap just works. We… manage to take it out. It- it does– it’s, like– had to bring a siege machine to it because it genuinely does take this huge deployment of troops and all of their missiles to take it down, but we do take down… [Heavy emphasis] the ONE. It’s kind of– it’s, like, a little horrifying because this is how much work it takes to take down one of them, and there are a lot.

And the way I’m going to pay off the explore tag, I think, is that it’s like… ooh! I was gonna say after the Leviathan is taken down, we like explore its nest and find out more, but I wonder if it’s actually exploring the Leviathan itself. It’s so huge that like– you know, the siege walker, I think has one pilot per mech? Yeah, single pilot. And so it’s the type of thing where like a few of these pilots get out and are literally, like, walking through the body of this Leviathan.

And I think… I will again leave it kind of at that without necessarily finding anything new. I think they, like, take samples and pictures and that kind of thing. It’s the type of thing that, like, they’re gonna send this information, you know, home to our scientists and maybe figure out more. We don’t necessarily figure it out right away, but this this opens, uh, the opportunity to, like, get past whatever this Leviathan was- was guarding. We can now get there and maybe learn more about how they’re constructed and learn a little bit more about Basilisk’s methods by having the time and opportunity to just walk through this Leviathan. I imagine that often the fights against them are so desperate that, like, they just get destroyed and there’s very little to study. But in this case, we were able to, like, plan it, and that gives us that opportunity, and that’s fun.

BRIAR: So, element tags, nine of spades, “an advance”. And the Ten of Hearts, “a being”. Advanced being. Eugh. Don’t like that.

“This is where our surroundings became a nightmare.”

I think this was… a mission in which we deployed these tanks because we had picked up a really heavy reading, which we unwisely interpreted to be a great number of Basilisk, clustering in one position. One planet, I guess. And we sent the tanks in to deal with this, right? Like, massed enemies, fortifications, this is what the tanks deal with. They’re all-terrain, they can get anywhere. Well, they can get most places.

And what we found there was not a cluster of Basilisk. What we found there was an advanced being. We found a single Basilisk that had become an environment unto itself. This is where our surroundings became a nightmare. How do you fight the planet beneath your feet, beneath your treads?

And this was a wipeout. The forces we sent simply weren’t enough. This was not a battle we should have even tried to fight. This was an artillery from across the galaxy situation. This was never somewhere we should have set foot. And we were punished for it.

That is my second defeat point. Things are not looking super hot for Bastion in my world. The eradication mission going pretty badly. But I guess we soldier onwards onto conflict zone three.

CONFLICT THREE

AVALYN: So we’re one and one. Let’s see what the third conflict zone is. Ace of diamonds.

SATAH: The third conflict is the six of hearts.

BRIAR: We are looking at the seven of spades. “This is where comrades turned on each other.”

SATAH: “This is where the horrors came from within.” Ooh!

AVALYN: “This is where the portal opened.” Ooh… I think that any sense of surprise that we had is completely gone now. Shadewatch walked into an ambush… or perhaps just the defenses of the factory and our follow-up walked into the Shadewatch ambush, but were prepared for it. Nonetheless, a signal went out and enemy reinforcements are extremely quick to arrive as they teleport in through a gate that rips through the air with the sound of a freight train.

I think I assign the Iron Knights again. I think the portal basically opens right on top of them.

SATAH: Deploy troops. I think… sorry to Shadewatch, but I think that this conflict is actually what Shadewatch runs into as they’re retreating from their failed security hack.

BRIAR: “This is where comrades turned on each other.” Let’s send the “unhinged” Grail Fists. That seems really smart and wise. I’m sure that will tie in pretty nicely. And then let’s draw my conflict cards.

AVALYN: It’s chaos as the enemy emerges… three of clubs. I’m going to guess that its next card is going to be higher. Four of spades. Whoa, okay. So this is going to be a victory, but I think it’s going to be a close one.

SATAH: A Shadewatch with a few members missing runs into something that shows “horrors coming from within”. Let’s flip a conflict resolution card… an eight. Oh, gosh. Okay. Almost exactly in the middle.

BRIAR: King of clubs. Now. I felt confident twice in a row on this one. What I’m learning is that there is absolutely no way to predict the draw of a card. It’s basically fifty-fifty whether it’s higher or lower.

SATAH: I’m gonna say lower. The next card will be lower. It’s an ace. It is lower! Ace is low! Hooray!

BRIAR: Um, third time’s the charm, so I’m going to go lower. And I’ve received the ten of diamonds, which is my first victory. I’m so smart. I’m so wise. There’s nothing I’ve done wrong.

SATAH: Again, another pretty decisive victory for the number gap there.

BRIAR: Thank you, Grail Fists.

SATAH: Good for- good for Shadewatch. I was hoping that I wouldn’t just slowly pick them off in a series of nightmares, but, you know, sometimes that’s your lot in life. [Laughs] Not here, though.

BRIAR: And our element tags for this one. King of clubs, that is “activate”. I love activating things. And ten of diamonds, which is “error”. Eugh. So I guess I don’t love activating things. I guess there has been an error in the activation.

SATAH: The eight of clubs tag for conflict is “overcome”. Nice. And the ace of clubs tag is “panic”. Well, hey, that’s a full sentence!

Yeah, so I think that, um… they’re retreating from this, like… nightmare zone, right? Where, like, hacking pulled people into like this psychological maze that they cannot escape from. And I think the the thing that starts to happen here is that there were troopers that were trying to contact the people who were in the network. That is something they should be able to do? Like, that- that was part of the reason that they were like, “Okay, something’s really wrong,” is that they they couldn’t– there was no– they just couldn’t talk to the people who were in the network anymore.

And… the troopers who tried to do that, on a time delay, are now having the same thing happen to them, but they’re not jacked in. They are having, like– everything is warping… “this is where the horrors came from within” is the conflict tag. They are, like, descending into panic and seeing things that aren’t quite there and, like, struggling to… stay rational, and they are losing that ability.

Um, and I think what this is, is like– it is going to be overcoming panic, but it’s um… it’s not something that they just, like, achieve. I’m looking at the small weapons tag that Shadewatch has and I’m thinking of how there are a lot of electronic devices that you restart by like you know putting a paper clip or a little pin or something in to hit a very small button? [Laughs] And I think what this is is that, like, there’s somebody in Shadewatch who puts together, like, this is happening to people who networked with the Basilisk network by trying to contact the troops. And I think this is terrifying because it could spread, right? Like we are all– they’re all networked to some extent, even just through comms. Like we don’t, we don’t know how contagious it is to- just through, like, radio or whatever.

And they, like, grab one of these troopers who’s, like, starting to freak out, who is freaking out. And with like– I think without even a gruff apology, just silently matter of factly flip open a, like, little… is it even a knife or is it literally a needle? It’s something like that. They’re not, like, jabbing them with something, but they are putting it in to press a tiny button in this trooper’s, like, cyberware networkware to reset it. And this, like– this is enough to let them, like– I think it is severely discombobulating, but it lets them sort of, like, get out of this weird tech magic panic spiral that they’re in.

And it does unfortunately mean that, like, they’re not going to be able to, like, get online properly until they have time to, like, reconfigure it and that kind of thing, and I think maybe comms are limited, but they’ll like slowly boot back up. They’re in some sort of reboot cycle where they’re basically functional, but limited.

And this person’s basically like, “Hey, look, grab everybody who’s freaking out and reset them.” And they manage to do it! The horrors came from within. Then they overcame panic. And I get a victory point. Hooray!

BRIAR: This is where comrades turned on each other. And I’m victorious.

Well, I guess the comrades that turned on each other were not, as I was assuming, Bastion’s forces. I think we tracked down some kind of… some kind of, like, cluster, some kind of nerve cluster for the local Basilisk AI in the area we were playing through, and we sent the Grailfists in to deal with it, and they violently induced an error in it. And if they hadn’t have done this, they probably would have been completely swamped, right? Like, overwhelmed by Basilisk forces coming in in their wake, because they, unhinged, smashed their way through with this heavy armor.

They pushed through, they broke the nerve cell, and I think the local Basilisk forces consumed themselves. They no longer sought the correct human targets, they completely cannibalised themselves, breaking themselves apart faster than the Grailfists could even get through them. And we successfully eradicated them! It’s easy to destroy an enemy that is busy destroying itself. Why divide and conquer when… well, I guess it’s still dividing and conquering. But that’s my first victory!

AVALYN: There’s the sound of a freight train ripping through the air as the air itself tears. Space tears. And a gateway opens between somewhere else– presumably somewhere in the factory– but the Basilisk spaces all look alike, with their heavy machinery ever present.

And so, what emerges from the portal are heavy combat units. Hulking beasts, not unlike gorillas, with terrible claws, incredible pneumatic muscles, and the power to rip any human and most of our vehicles limb from limb with their bare hands. And they leap upon the Iron Knights through this portal.

Instantly, it is chaos. But the Iron Knights are, in a sense, the perfect counter for this attack. Their heavy armor protects them from the initial blows of the ambush through the portal and their discipline keeps them organised and they don’t get split up and isolated.

Yes, there are casualties. Individuals who are unable to return to the formation are caught and buried by these machines.

But most of them survive. Not unscathed, but they remain combat effective. They fight back, their shotguns and autocannons and great swords taking limbs and heads from these attackers. And then the portal closes, and it is quiet, except for the sound of the heavy breathing of the Iron Knights, once again victorious. Once again proving why they are some of the most elite soldiers within humanity’s forces.

OUTRO

SATAH: This has been Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and otherwise self-paced TTRPGs. To find where you can find the show, check out foliopod.carrd.co.

You can find Austin at AustinRamsayGames on Bluesky and Tumblr, and listen to her megagame actual play podcast CalazCon on YouTube or in your podcatcher of choice.

You can find Briar at weregazelle.com and royalrabbit.itch.io.

You can find Satah, who is me, at gaygothvibes.online, and follow me on Bluesky at posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online.

Next week, Austin and Briar and I will continue our games of This is Where the Stars Died by Scott Malthouse, found at trollishdelivergames.itch.io. Everything I mentioned here is linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and take care out there.