Escape to the Tangents: Part II

Alright, it turns out that they are following us. We’ve learned a lot of tricks and rules to help us escape, and thought we would write them down on this repaired probe before we sent it on it’s way– might land at an outpost and help someone else. At the very worst it will act as a decoy and buy us a little time.

1. The ‘further’ you jump the easier you are to track. Jumping from a historical world to a fantastic world lights you up like a christmas tree, jumping from a historic to a historic is easy. However, if you jump further then you can sometimes lose yourself in all the possible worlds that you could have jumped two.

2. Jump often: The more you jump the more links they have to trace.

3. Don’t leave anything behind. It will resonate with the frequency of the world you’ve passed, letting anyone with the right gear know you’ve been there. Traces are unavoidable, from the air you breath to the dirt on your boots. However take some precautions: Police your brass, don’t throw anything out, and so on. If you have to leave stuff behind try and burn or destroy it to make it harder to get a fix on. We are still arguing about if it’s better to do a big dump all at once or spread it out.

4. Don’t sit around. It takes a while for your engines to recharge before you can jump again. During that time move around, gather supplies, meet the locals. It keeps your mind off being hunted, and if you help the locals out then they will sometimes help you against whatever is following you, or at least help you stock up supplies. Keeping ahead of your pursuers doesn’t help is you run out of food.

4b: Don’t help the locals out with problems less scary that what is chasing you: That could just get them into trouble they don’t need.

5: Don’t backtrack: they usually leave a watcher.

6: Never blind jump: Chances are you’ll wind up in an antimatter tangent or one without air. Even if you have to break rule 5, never blind jump.

7. Don’t tell people where you came from and they won’t ask. This shouldn’t work but it does. We call this the Dr. Who principle.

8. Cremate the bodies. Rest in Peace Sean.

9. Don’t be scared to take on replacements, sometimes being perused through the tangents by an unknown opponent is better than the alternative.

10. Don’t try hiding within a tangent, they can lock onto your signal as alien really quickly.

10b. It works by triangulation. It is easy to figure out where you are in general, but if you keep moving it will take a while to pin you down. Also it gets less accurate as they get closer.

Well, those are all we have so far, we’ll let this little guy go. We are way farther out then when we picked him up so his jump should create a nice bright signal, allowing us to make our small hop before they catch on. Little guy should also be able to jump faster then we can, hopefully keep ahead of them, let someone know we are alive with no way home.

–Rookie Team 314

Escape to the Tangents

I’ve been reading the Alternity supplement Tangents and I’m really caught by the idea. I’ll probably never run a game in it, since I’d have to write all the adventures myself, but I have thought up a really cool campaign opening. This would also work for GURPS infinite worlds, which I suspect Tangents is copied off of, and the d20 Modern Dimension Hopping setting, stolen from Tangents.

“We were just rookies, about to do our first solo mission. A probe had crashed in an unoccupied world and we were to go retrieve it. We were sitting in a conference room, planning things out, exited as hell, when suddenly the alarms all start going off, their wailing punctuated by the distant thunder of explosions. As we headed for the door the sharp staccato of machine guy fire began, and the emergency evacuation siren began to scream. We ran for the transport bay, but had to detour around a sealed section, so most of the transports were gone. We were shoved into one of the smallest d-hoppers, an outdated and barely functional little model with just enough room for us. We set the only coordinates that we could think of, those of the crashed probe. As we shifted out we watched soldiers in unknown uniforms burst in. We know that we can’t go home, but we don’t know where else to go. Our only hope of getting off this empty world was to find the probe and pull the coordinates of it’s last jumps out of memory. Hopefully by backtracking along it’s route we will be able to find an outpost that is still safe. If we are really lucky the attacks will not be following us across the dimensions…but we aren’t taken any chances….”