Sparks from the Past - Traveller RPG Live Play

Leaving their Transstar jobs behind, the crew answers a distress call with a daring bluff before slipping into a secret research facility beneath Free Arden’s moon. Stolen identities and a robot disguise carry them past the first barriers, but the laboratories conceal disposable copies, engineered psychics, and a scientist who knows how the conspiracy alters its victims. She offers the evidence they need in exchange for escape and amnesty, forcing the Travellers to bargain with someone deeply involved in the crimes they hope to expose. When containment opens and the facility erupts into violence, getting their witness home becomes a race against bullets, dwindling air, and something that can walk through walls.

With three days of leave and a battered ship-boat, the crew heads to Providence in search of the truth behind Mercier’s murder. A tense meeting with a threatened SolSec director exposes a psychic conspiracy within the government and offers a dangerous path to clearing their names, until a targeting beam turns breakfast into an assassination attempt. Escaping with a million credits, military credentials, and a key to a heavily guarded vault, the Travellers bluff their way into North Meridian’s secrets. But when the chance comes to take more information than they were sent for, the crew discovers that agreeing on how much truth they want may be harder than getting past the guards.

Back aboard the TSS Profondeur, the crew must prove their worth to Transstar by hunting suspected terrorists in the Crushed Trench. A perilous descent and a near-fatal pressure emergency lead them to a hidden community of clones, where familiar faces reveal unsettling truths about the price of a second life. As they uncover dwindling resources and a conspiracy to exploit stolen memories, the Travellers must decide whom to protect and whom to deceive. With explosives in hand and corporate scrutiny looming, they gamble on a cover story that could preserve both the settlement and their own freedom.

In Session 6 of Sparks of the Past, the crew starts with a prize that barely deserves the word: the newly raised shipboat, the Volante, dragged up from more than a century underwater and now technically breathable, mostly functional, and absolutely disgusting. After selling salvage to make it orbit-worthy, they catalogue its many quirks: damaged thrusters, unreliable startup power, a hacked ghost transponder, mismatched repairs, and a smell that may outlive them all. The crew then unlocks Senator Mercer’s datapad and uncovers the larger conspiracy behind his assassination. Mercer had discovered that key political families were being genetically altered over time, likely as blackmail or control. His research points toward a faction within Social Solidarity using psychic clone research to manipulate bloodlines and eventually compromise the highest levels of Jardin society. Following the trail to Mercer’s penthouse, part of the crew finds Home Guard officers already searching the place. A brutal firefight erupts in the elevator and apartment, leaving Victor badly wounded before emergency first aid keeps him alive. Saichi and the team put the attackers down, uncover Mercer’s hidden cache of genetic samples, research notes, suspect photos, a hidden communicator, a laser pistol, and 200,000 credits. By the end, the crew has the proof Mercer died trying to protect, a fragile dead-man switch plan involving trusted contacts and a crusading journalist, and a dangerous choice ahead: keep using Transtar’s protection as cover, hide Mercer from whoever still wants him dead, and prepare for the next lead on Providence.

Alan Mercer is alive, sort of. The crew learns that the man they were accused of murdering has returned through a pre-grown clone, and Mercer offers them access to his old evidence if they can get him safely off Jardin. With political violence spreading on the surface, the group turns to a forty-year-old wreck on the ocean floor, salvaging a smuggler ship packed with secrets, contraband, and some very useful surprises.