The Story So Far…

Three comrades, a long way from home, facing monsters and madness at every turn…

It began on Earth, when three members of Gauntlet Squad – Military Specialist Lieutenant Alexander North, Full Conversion Soldier Xavier Ellis and Dog Pack Tracker 375GQ (AKA Patch) – quit the Coalition after it became clear that Captain Edom was less interested in combating the d-bee insurgents of the Grey Scourge, and more interested in the ethnic cleansing of the Indiana territories.

Heading north to the settlement of Kalamity Zoo, the party tried to pick up work from local fixer Saul Goodman, but ended up embroiled in a conflict between the d-bee ‘Chain Gang’ and the human supremacists of the Skelters, a situation which plunged the party deep into the Wisp, a forest in which space-time had become splintered due to the presence of a malevolent nexus point. They had to deal with an equally fractured group of mages, and with a little help from some other prisoners of the Wisp, the Ratz, the party took on the deranged shifter known simply as The First, and his army of mutant bristle flies.

Although The First was killed, in the battle a rift opened up, carrying the party to Copernicus Station, source of the bristle flies and other mutant insects – the creations of mad genius Doctor Matthew Walters, senior scientist for the CAN’s New Eden Research Group (NERG). Before the coming of the rifts, Copernicus Station had been a fledgling Mars colony, but now it existed in a pocket dimension, overrun by the bugs. With some assistance from the slightly unhinged AI Marvin, the party uncovered the secret at the heart of the Copernicus Station – an entity called Enlil that proclaimed itself a god, and had taken up residence in the caverns beneath the facility.

To prevent Enlil from bringing his insect armies to Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, the party overloaded the station’s fusion reactor and made a hasty exit through the dimensional veil, where they found themselves on a Mars ravaged by dimensional anomalies – the Splinterzone. They were thanked by Lilian, an agent for some unknown group that wanted Enlil dealt with, and who gave them some basic orientation to their new environment.

The party set off for Galle crater, supposedly a site where the CAN had been producing dogboys, and encountered creatures and ruins along the way. They rescued the Epping Clan from an attack by raiders from the Black Hill Army and escorted them to the settlement of Noden, only to find that the place had been burnt to the ground by Souther mercs looking for the Mouldstone casket that Wayne Epping had recovered from the Clark Hills region.

Turning around and heading for Newtown to offload both the mouldstone and the Epping Clan, the party ran into trouble with the soldiers of Plisken, one of the leaders of the Black Hill Army. They fought through them and reached Newtown, delivering Wayne Epping and the mouldstone to Riffkin for a large reward, which they used to re-equip and repair their vehicles and gear, making several contacts in the city. However, someone was out to get them, as evidenced by attacks from both The Locks and the Waydon Crew, which led to the party confronting Thrassa, leader of the Locks – he revealed he had been hired by Acher, who was after the casket they were carrying – just moments before strange Sirens and reptillians armed with Sil’ess weapons attacked.

Looking for a lead on these reptillians, the party followed Charlie‘s advice and staked out Zooropa, where Rex put them on the trail of reptillian supremacist Ferox. The party raided the headquarters of Ferox’s group, The Black Band, and learnt that Ferox was recruiting reptillians for Acher, who Ferox believed to be one of The Returned, a living Sil’ess.

The party followed up some more leads – given that the Sirens had MOM neural implants, they ran surveillance of the MOM conversion clinic of The Shopkeeper, and also spoke to Steig, a former dealer in Sil’ess artifacts who had been put out of business by Riffkin, and who told them that Sil’ess civilisation apparently ended when they developed mouldstone weapons. The party began formulating a plan to take out both Acher and Riffkin, and recover the mouldstone.

And this was when The Woman delivered an ultimatum to the party – they have one day to recover the mouldstone and deliver it to Acher, or civilians will start paying the price.

The clock is ticking…

(This is the site for our campaign that uses a homebrew fusion of the Rifts rules with DnD3.5, pinching ideas from the Grim Tales book Slavelords of Cydonia, and ripping off just about every story set on Mars…)