Favorite CM13 Memories

Howdy, folks! Hardly a new idea, here, but I’m curious since I haven’t seen a thread while lurking on it— what are your favorite memories from CM13? Doesn’t have to be recent or even particularly notable, but I’ll start.

I spawned in as I/O one round after a lot of really good, coordinated Charlie rounds under Lisa A.W. Quarterstaff, who was all too happy to have me as a Fireteam Leader and for three rounds in a row would give me a team with my own choice picks and some randoms that has been my only true experience in Fireteam-Squad coordination so far. It was beautiful, with flanks and camaraderie at an all time high, but it’s not the focal point of our story.

Instead, that’s Aldrik Wynters, who played the Corpsman for those rounds in a row and whom I chose for my team in the latter half of the rounds because he was dependable and chatty. Something I value highly in anyone in my Fireteam, and overall a really cool guy.

This round in particular, he was a Quartermaster. I’d gotten all I needed from a CT earlier, but he put out the call for a crate of MRE’s in exchange for a no-questions-asked priority in the Reqline. Nobody else stepped up, so while the line churned along, I gathered scattered empty weapon cases to turn into a plastic crate. After a mad dash for ten of the damn things to make the crate happen, I triumphantly pulled up and called across the Reqline.

He was grateful, asking me to take the crate in via the northern door- and thus, I learned about the fact that I/O has Req access. Good to know for the future, but didn’t mean much here. When I got inside, he handed me some sort of fucked up Access Tuner and told me to fiddle with his ASRS console in the corner. My TG knowledge saved me here, as the steps to deconstruct and hack the board were thankfully exactly the same as they are there. Bingo.

A little circuit on the board itself, tucked between a few other unassuming golden lines, was a plate labelled in pen or permanent marker “B.M.” I figured out the meaning almost instantly, but my character, Mary, took a minute longer— fiddling with the board until a green light turned an ominous red, and slotting it back in. I asked Aldrik about the board after asking he close the shutters on the empty Reqline. It was time to make business happen.

He explained with charming ease about the Black Market, and Mary’s eyes light up. The roleplayer inside of me was loving just about ALL of this, and I was excited to finally get to show off a character quirk that not many people really see a lot of.

You see, Mary has issues. Nothing that’d get her taken off-duty, and certainly nothing that’d show on a psych eval if she was prepped for it, but she had a highly addictive personality. From her first shot of Oxycodone during an Operation far before CM13 takes place, she was irrevocably hooked.

Once before, I’d shown up at the Reqline with 10,000cr I’d scrounged ground side and shuffled onto the counter. I’d expected one of two things, maybe three— the Techie across from me might chide me for what was so obviously ill-gotten gains and a foolish request so put in the open. They might take the money and smugly send me on my way— what are you gonna do, Strauss? Report me to the MP’s? Third, and what I hoped would happen, would be that there’d be a money-grubbing Techie like back home on TG that’d salivate at the prospect of that much cash, and do whatever the hell they needed to to get it.

In this case, Oxycodone. Something that’s untraceable if it’s Req asking for it, ostensibly for a frontline drop, and then somehow gets “lost” along the way. A solid front to roleplay out, right? A tale as old as time, of corruption in the logistics departments in pursuit of someone’s big bucks. The guy simply told me “go to Medical for that, we don’t really have stuff like that here.” In my opinion, LAME!!!

Aldrik wasn’t like that. He Got it. His eyes lit up like mine when I mentioned the favors that I’d done, and implied more favors down the line. I never got the Oxycodone that round, since I asked him to “have it delivered to the Charlie bunks in a nondescript crate,” but to my loving surprise, when I came to him the next round, I said something that he rolled with.

I said, “same place, same time, same stuff? I’ve already wired the creds.” Flowery roleplay bullshit. All of it nothing that’d approached happening ingame, but the type of hook people of our ilk really enjoy. And enjoy it he did— responding in affirmative, saying it’d come “like last time.” That shit gets my mind racing on what else can transpire in CM and despite my fragger’s Grindset, is the real high that I’ve been chasing since.

I love it when people play along. It makes it feel more real, more “like the movies!” It makes me feel grounded, and accentuates the wonderful care and character folks put into these collections of sprites on the screen. I hope I see more like it, even if it’s a rather boring shipside interaction that nobody but me is fangirling super hard about.

What about you?

2 Likes

Two of my favourite times playing this game.

3 Likes

I love the vending machine story and the ambience with it. Stuff like that always makes me wonder— how much was ingame, and how much was exaggeration? Sounds like lots of adminbus, but then again, what sort of story doesn’t have a darling admin spinning objects around to the delight of the crowd inside?

Maybe the magic is better kept with but the story alone?

Regardless, love it. Thanks for sharing!

1 Like

One of my personal favorite moments (being selfish and centering it on myself of course) was being the last surviving member of the crew. I was the CMP and had stayed in the brig because the last thing I wanted was to be running through the halls on my own when the xenos get onboard and I’d hoped to be able to keep calling for help from there aided by the officers over in the CIC. I’d ordered the other MPs to take the prisoners, leave me and go help the others evacuate (mind you, they had been quite firmly against leaving me there). So, it was just me left to hold down the fort.
Ultimately everyone else got slaughtered trying to hold out at the other end of the ship. So there was me. Sitting in my locked-down office in the dark with a tactical shotgun in one hand and a Walkman in the other, pleading on the radio for anyone to still be alive, praying that there was one last ERT yet to arrive, and just listening to the music I had as I heard the stomping of xenos outside. I don’t think I’ll ever surpass that as a scene that felt distinctly, you know, Alien. That moment of sitting there, realizing no help is coming, that I’ve got nowhere near enough shells to take them on even if I had the guts to try, hearing the sizzling as the shutters were melted and the shattering of the windows, it was cinema. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to find as an environmental story, a boarded up office with the corpse of a lone officer who died still at his post, shotgun by his side and a cassette player smashed to pieces.

Funnily, one of my best memories was just having a marine hanging around with me as an MST telling me how to cook a meal they wanted and then bonding over a fondness of cooking and disdain for family back home. There can be a lot of simple pleasure in everyday mundane interactions like that, and it makes me feel so satisfied when people actually interact with those RP centric roles like CC, MST, CL and, you know, sometimes even the MPs. I always remember the people who make things interesting like that. I wish some people would do a bit more RP as roles like Cargo/Maintenance Technician, Nurse, DCC, doing those kind of shady deals or chatting about interests, making it feel like people who are actually doing their jobs rather than robots that exist solely to automatically do the few things their role is made for and never take a break or do anything shady (like I get not wanting to go to the brig but also that’s why you don’t get caught). DCCs signing up to go steal equipment for the Liaison in exchange for booze, Nurses loitering around the mess hall talking about their worst patients or doing funerals for fallen soldiers, Cargo Techs lecturing folks shipside on the nuances between 10x24mm vs 10x20mm and providing weapons demos at the firing range, MTs actually building something instead of just breaking into the brig unprompted for the millionth time, there’s things that these roles can do instead of just being props.

I know I’ve got some other stories in me, I’m just perhaps a bit too tired to bring them to mind now. They’re in there, I got em. Like the time the CO 1v1’d the Queen with an SG during hijack, or the greenshift where I was an MP and got kidnapped by a bunch of deserting marines and had to trek my way back to base with barely any equipment left on me after they left me alone long enough to break free of the zip cuffs. But yeah, CM13, like any SS13 server, is a story generator in my eyes, and almost every round has a story to tell if you look in the right places.

2 Likes

Queen Elizabeth pirate event went hard.

1 Like

It was when I was playing my first few rounds.
I was wandering lost as fuck in the Almayer until I arrived to the medbay and I saw Malcolm chatting with a doctor. Some context before I continue: Back then I used to see RP as this thing that sweaty, morbidly obese dudes did in their mother’s basement.
So eventually Malcolm said “It’s not magic. It’s Malcolm!”, so I just stared at my screen thinking to myself “dude, there is deadass someone writing that shit. At least I now know that I was only in the tip of the iceberg” (I came to cm after playing a little bit of LC13, which I tried after playing goon for some 6 months).
Either way he kept saying that line as people chatted with him (he used to say it a lot more back then), and as the round progressed and I kept seeing him say the line it began growing on me. And after about an hour I was internally like “FUCK YEAH HE SAID IT!!!” Every time I saw him say the line.
Then after having the usual horrible and painful death as a PVT I found myself drooling like a lobotomite, staring at my monitor as I wandered around as a ghost waiting for some visual stimuli until I saw it…
"Ancient warrrior (WOY-246): ‘What a woy!’ "
And more or less this was my reaction:

To this day I still smile every time I see a dumb, gimmicky line like “What a woy!”, “It’s not magic, it’s Malcolm!” Or “You always know a Working Joe.”.
Deadass it’s among the things that made me understand back then that I just had gotten myself into a game that was unlike anything I’ve ever played before.

You are a youngling.

2 Likes

Quality of life changes, they are like core memories for me. I only point a few so it’s not a wall of text.

-The round i experienced for the first time vendor as marine and not a locker. No need to wait for armor equip delay or boots missing.

-The round they added that once you are hit by a explotions while dead you are sendt flying around.

-Live tacmap for ghost/xeno

-Fix chat and not reopen cm every round.

-Lag fixes! I get twitches when i think back on tetris rounds

-dark mode and so much other things

If anyone who read, added any of this to cm. You are the true ones, cheers

1 Like

Man, you are old.

1 Like