Our mutants were resting in their lair in the Titan when they heard a commotion from without. Emerging from the Titan, they were confronted by angry and confused mutants from a village 3 days away. They soon learned that the mutants' village was attacked by a giant steel robot a few days ago, during which eight of the villagers were captured and taken away. The rest of the villagers decided to come to our mutants' lair to see if they (and their Titan) were responsible for the attack. After seeing for themselves that our mutants' Titan was not the robot responsible, they villagers asked for our mutants' help in finding and returning their friends.
Batte, Ranggup, Rex, and Vik (see PC profiles here) followed the villagers back to their home, and from there they followed the giant round footprints of the robot, which led up and over a ridge. From the top of the ridge, our mutants could see a giant structure at the floor of the valley below. At first they thought that it was a building, but they soon noticed the tracks on the ground behind one end of the structure, realised that it was in fact a giant vehicle with tracks, consisting of a tractor at the front, hauling two trailers behind it. All told, the vehicle measured 60 metres long, 20 metres wide, and 40 metres tall at its highest point. At the bottom of the side of the front trailer was a door, and midway up the wall they saw an opening, from which plants grew out of. They also saw the giant robot described by the villagers patrolling around the vehicle.
Our mutants watched and waited, until at last a ramp lowered from the rear trailer, and the robot walked up into it. Batte decided to fly up to the opening on the side to see if it could provide a way for the party to enter the trailer, but when he came near the opening a plant tendril lashed out and grabbed him by the foot and pulled him inside. Below, the other mutants could hear Batte screaming telepathically for help. Rex and Vik decided to throw Ranggup up towards the opening, and sure enough the plant grabbed ahold of Ranggup and pulled him in too. Once inside, Rangup lowered a rope to Rex and Vik below, who quickly climbed up. Together, the mutants struck at the plant until it released Ranggup, and then reduced it to a pulp.
Our mutants then left the room they were in by the only door out, and were quickly confronted by man-sized security robots. They were able to overcome the robots, but could not open any of the other doors they found at the corridor they were in, until they realised that they could use the head of one of the droids (which they had knocked off during the fight) to unlock the doors. After some exploration, they learned that they were in the living quarters of the humans who must once have crewed the vehicle. They eventually found the door to lift, which they took to the lowest level. When the door to the lift opened, they were once again attacked by robots, which they once more overcame. They then found the door that opened to the outside of the vehicle (which they saw from the outside) and tried to wedge it open with the inactivated robots, but flying drones soon came to begin to repair the robots. Our mutants realised that time was of the essence, and decided to find the missing villagers and leave the vehicle before the robots were repaired.
At level 2 of the trailer, they found a large room with screens that showed the different parts of the trailer, and realised that the villagers were being kept in cryogenic stasis tubes at level 5, along with dozens of other mutants. Venturing to level 5, they exited the lift only to be attacked by a large yellow ooze creature, which caught Vik with a barbed tentacle. In a panic Vik used his molecular disruption power on the ooze, which turned it into a puddle of liquid, but also rendered him unconscious.
The other mutants brought Vik's unconscious body to what appeared to be a laboratory. Here they realised that the cryogenic storage room was at level 6, which was not accessible by the lift, but via hatches in the ceiling of the lab. Our mutants manipulated the control panels of the lab in random fashions, until at last one of the hatches opened, and a mechanical arm holding a cryogenic stasis tube descended from the opening to deposit it. Batte seized the moment to fly through the opening, while Ranggup leapt onto the mechanical arm, and was taken up to level 6 too.
Once the hatch closed, Batte and Ranggup found themselves in a cold chamber filled with close to a hundred cryogenic stasis tubes, each holding a mutant. They were unable to find a way to activate the mechanical arms in the chamber, or otherwise cause the hatch to open again. Cold-blooded Ranggup soon became to fall into a stupor, while Batte once more began to scream telepathically to Rex below to find a way to open the hatch.
Just then Vik woke up, and together he and Rex tried to work he control panels again, to no avail. In a panic Rex smashed opened one of the panels and peed onto it, which caused some sort of alarm to go off and a voice to announce that a fault had caused the cryogenic system to go into failure and that all the specimens held in stasis would die if not released from stasis in 15 minutes!
Vik proposed to Rex that they searched somewhere else for a solution, and the two took the lift to level 4, where they found the infirmary of the trailer, and found a robot doctor. The robot doctor was initially confused by the presence of our mutants, but once it had learned of the situation from our duo, its programming kicked in and it offered to help reverse the cryogenic process. However, there was not enough time left - only 66 out of the 99 mutants held in stasis could be saved before the time ran out; our mutants were able to save 6 of the 8 mutants recently seized. Our heroes herded the survivors out of the trailer, and they quickly put as much distance between themselves and the vehicle as they could.
When questioned, the other revived mutants all told the same story: they were going about their own business when they were attacked and seized by the giant robot. None of them could tell how long ago they were taken, and how far away they must be from their homes. Some of the mutants decided to follow our heroes, while others decided to strike out on their own to try to find their homes, and so they parted ways.
Prepping and Running the Game
This session was based on the Mutant Crawl Classics module "The Apocalypse Ark", which features a vehicle of “the ancients” with a mission to find and collect different species. The original story had a villain (who had taken over control of the vehicle and its AI), but I removed that character and plotline and instead just used the vehicle and its attached robots as a basis for this session.
The set-up was pretty standard, with the PCs exploring the “dungeon” and overcoming its various denizens. The players did do rather poorly towards the end of the session, which was probably due to a combination of boredom and frustration from lack of clear direction. I will have to manage this better in the future.
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